INTERTEKSTUALNO ČITANjE DRAME „ŽUDNjA“ SARE KEJN

Abstract

According to Aleks Sierz (2001: 118), Sarah Kane’s Crave needs four different reading strat- egies to fully uncover its meanings. This paper takes one of those strategies – an intertextual reading – to examine the play’s echoes of R. W. Fassbinder, Martin Crimp, and T. S. Eliot. Fassbinder’s play Pre-Paradise Sorry Now, Crimp’s play Attempts on Her Life, and Eliot’s poem The Waste Land enable Sarah Kane to combine materials – forms, sources, messages, sounds, dialogues and solos – into a complex dramatic structure that unsettles the plot-and-character conventions of realism. De-individualized characters, marked only by the letters A, B, C, and M, reveal the presence of Pre-Paradise Sorry Now and Attempts on Her Life – they allow Kane to use fragmentary lines of action to explore how power is organized and shared within a social group. The analysis shows that Eliot’s narrative poem The Waste Land is the principal influence that ‘guides Crave in both form and content’ (Saunders 2002: 102). In addition to the wasteland motif, Kane employs Eliot’s rhapsodic impulse to combine disparate patches of text and dramatic, epic and lyrical elements into a never-ending flow of voices.