Chapter 1 Introduction: The Pillowman and Storytelling
1.3 Plot Summary of The Pillowman
pag.). Richard Rankin Russell also perceives in McDonagh’s works an essence of the art of storytelling, and connects it to the convention of the earlier Irish dramatists, such as W. B. Yeats, John Synge, and Lady Gregory (Russell 2). However, for McDonagh, storytelling is just the way to see the world, which is mostly influenced by American films and South American novelist, Jorge Luis Borges (O’Toole,
“Martin McDonagh” N. pag). McDonagh once disclosed in the 2006 interview with Fintan O’Toole that he likes Borges so much that he read lots of works written by Borges and that led him into storytelling and imagination (O’Toole, “A Mind” N.
pag.).
1.3 Plot Summary of The Pillowman
The locale of the play is set in an interrogation room in an unidentified dictatorship8 where two police detectives, Tupolski and Ariel, are questioning Katurian Katrurian Katrurian,9 who is a tale writer, for serial child murders because not only the murder patterns are similar to the plots of his horrible tales, but the fingers of one of the victimized children are found in Katurian’s house. At the same time, Katurian’s retarded brother, Michal, is also captivated by the detectives to extort the confession of the murders. Realizing that his brother is imprisoned in the
elitism of theater: “[i]t's strange to be working in an art form that costs $100 to participate in”
(McKinley N.pag.).
8 Eamonn Jordan in his essay associates The Pillowman with indications of nationality and Irishness.
For example, Kamenice, the town where the Katurian brothers live, has no specific direction, though,
“towns by that name can be found in Northern Albania and in the Czech Republic.” Moreover, “The Little Green Pig” connotes Irishness in two senses. First, the color green has “a fundamental
association with Irishness.” Second, “classical British stereotypes have long associated the Irish with pigs.” For further discussion on the Irishness in the play, please see Jordan’s “War on Narrative: The Pillowman,” page 191.
9 In The Pillowman, the full name of the protagonist Katurian is “Katurian Katurian Katurian,” with the same word for his first, middle, and last name. The political or historical signification of this name is neither explained nor referred to in the play. But José Lanters discusses the concept of simulacrum with the association of Katurian’s full name and the initials “KKK” with the empty reference. Lanters raises the following questions which are not answered because the text does not provide clear connection: “Do the initials evoke the Ku Klux Klan and therefore suggest Katurian’s sinister intentions? Or do they merely signify mindless repetition, and therefore evoke postmodern concepts like simulacrum and endless production? ” (Lanters 13).
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neighboring cell, Katurian sneaks into the cell, attempting to ease Michal’s anxiety. In talking with Michal, Katurian realizes that it is Michal who butchered the children to death in order to experiment if the plots in Katurian’s stories were too far-fetched to be carried out. To protect his brother from the torture of the detectives, to redeem his own guilt of the parricide, and to save his own works from being destroyed by the police, Katurian smothers Michal and confesses to the police to have committed all the murders, including his parents’ and Michal’s deaths. Katurian makes concession with the police: he confesses the truth on condition that his tales will not be burned even though he will be executed on the account of the murders. At last, whereas Katurian is shot by Tupolski, his tales are preserved and sealed by Ariel.
1.4 Theatre Review and Literature Review
The Pillowman has aroused many theatrical and academic discussions since it was premiered in 2003. These discussions mainly revolve around storytelling, the presentation of allegories, as well as the odd twists and turns throughout the play. In the theatrical manner, theatre critics mention storytelling as a motif and storytelling as story-within-the-story as a frame to concern how the content and the form of this play are enchantingly intertwined to present the process and the effect of storytelling. In the academic manner, other than storytelling, some critics offer interpretations of the bizarre convolutions of the plots from positive and negative angles to argue the worth of this play.
Many theatre reviews provide observations on the association between the structural frame of the story-within-the-story and the discussion of storytelling and art in The Pillowman. Among the critics, Caryn James, Hilton Als, and Elyse Sommer focus on the enthralling structural design that enables the play to display a
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realistic atmosphere and perform a wonder like what McDonagh’s precursors did.
Caryn James (2005) acclaims that the story-within-the-story device blurs reality and fantasy and helps to arouse more “emotional resonance” than most naturalistic plays (James N. pag.). Hilton Als (2005) compares McDonagh with the playwright Luigi Pirandello who is famous for his play Six Characters in Search of an Author and think that both plays deal with the “intellectual components of fiction” by displaying the metatheatrical effect (Als N. pag.). Elyse Sommer (2005) parallels McDonagh with Kafka to state that, aside from the parental abuse and the concern of the obligation of writers, the structural essence of this play is like a “Kafkaesque police investigation”
(Sommer N. pag.). On the other hand, Charles McGrath and Ben Brantley notice that the essence of the play is to present the spirit of storytelling. Charles McGrath (2005) mentions that this play is partly about “the nature of storytelling” full of touches of slapstick and farce, “of Kafka, Mamet and Beckett, of the Grimm Brothers” (McGrath N. pag.). Ben Brantley (2005) asserts that McDonagh aims not to preach the power of stories but to “redeem or cleanse or to find a core of solid truth hidden among life’s illusions.” (Brantley N. pag.) He also observes that every character in this play is in a sense a storyteller; the relationship between narrator and listener “has its sadomasochistic aspects” (Brantley N. pag.). These theatre critics pay attention not only to the similarities between The Pillowman and its predecessors, but also to the significance this play carries.
Compared to the theatre reviews, literature reviews scrutinize more perspectives in addition to storytelling. Some of the critics explore the multiple twists in the play which are more significant than merely being treated as pastiche and parody. Lisa Fitzpatrick (2006) looks into this issue from the linguistic perspective, dissecting Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman and A Skull in Connemara from the mixture of
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Hibernia and Londoner English. She argues that the characteristic of McDonagh’s theatrically linguistic tactic of “the repetition of ‘stichomythic sequence’” is not to parody the Irish identity nor to engage the audience into an emotional identification, but to alienate the audience to realize the “human condition” (148-149). Eamonn Jordan (2006) examines the twist from the dialogical relation from the play and other texts by appropriating Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque to detail the transgressive twist in The Pillowman, such as the violation of innocence and reversal of roles. Jordan retorts some critics who label McDonagh as pasticheur; he reads his works as “palimpsest,”
on which the old texts and the new ones can be intertextual and dialogical. He also points out that this play reverses the stereotypical conception about parables and fairytales, which are treated as an access for children to social values and common emotions. In this sense, this play is actually a “comment on the process of representation” of literature, parables and fairy tales (Jordan 184).
Unlike the previous two positive critics, Ondřej Pilný (2006) criticizes the inconsequentially nebulous themes and the shallow characterization of The Pillowman. He regards this play as a “grotesque entertainment” which is, for one thing, composed of the blending of different genres and switching of themes, with the uncanny as a device. For another, the characters lacking profoundly psychological depiction are just like assortment of puppies, “swung around by their manipulative creator, while the ultimate aim seems to be to shunt the audience to and fro in a similar way without losing a firm grip over it” (“Grotesque Entertainment” 219).
Hana Worthen and W. B. Worthen (2006) and Brian Cliff (2007) study the storytelling and allegorical aspect of The Pillowman. Hana Worthen and W. B.
Worthen appropriate the dialectic of allegory from Walter Benjamin to study the allegories in the play and the dialectical relation between the author and the reader/the
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audience. The allegories thus become a contentious site which “blur[s] the distinction between allegory and allegoresis” (Worthen and Worthen 165, italic in the original).
Brian Cliff analyzes the redemption function of storytelling in The Pillowman by disclosing two themes of The Pillowman: one is the connection between art and suffering, and the other is that art works (or tales, in the sense of this play) satisfy the desire of redemption, “not through art itself, but through his [Katurian’s] commitment to the idea of being an artist” (Cliff 136). However, in terms of redemption, Cliff claims that in this play filled with violent and comic elements, the preservation of Katurian’s manuscripts by Ariel is a finishing stroke that brings to light the gravity, redemption, and potential grace, and this potential grace proves Katurian’s art to be
“transformative” because of its “redemptive impulse” (143).
1.5 Thesis Argument
The abovementioned critics provide multiple perspectives to approach The Pillowman, assisting the reader and the audience to understand and interpret the profound meanings of this play. Some of them notice the exchanges of life stories within the four characters and the importance of storytelling as a recurrent gesture throughout the play, and others point out that the metatheatrical scaffolding creates an illusionary ambience for the play, which makes this play stand out. However, while most of the critics dissect storytelling and the metatheatrical frame into separate parts to discuss, none of the critics study the motif of storytelling and the metatheatrical form as a whole. Also, few of the critics examine the correlation between storytelling and trauma which is another motif of this play. Storytelling makes a great impact on the characters in the confrontation with their traumas, but previous criticisms do not analyze the effect of storytelling on the characters.
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Storytelling and trauma are two significant and correlated themes in The Pillowman, a play full of storytelling, narrations, and life stories. In the play, because the modus operandi of the murders are very identical to the plots portrayed in Katurian’s tales, along with the confession of the murders from Michal, the detectives, Tupolski and Ariel, keep inducing Katurian to narrate his tales and manage to discuss his stories to dig out the associations between the tales and the murders.
The examination and the debate over Katurian’s tales not only gradually expose Katurian’s traumatic past, but also motivate the other three characters—Michal, Ariel, and Tupolski—to retrieve their distressing life stories and to find self-consoling explanations for their traumas. Yet, although storytelling stimulates the characters to encounter their past again, they never really face up to their traumas and tackle them.
Storytelling merely serves them as a painless way to comfort themselves. It becomes a self-deceptive means to resist the confrontation with their traumas.
My argument of this thesis is that storytelling provides the characters in The Pillowman with self-deceptive ways of dealing with their traumas and evading their reality10. The characters always stay in their self-deception and self-evasion, failing to face up to their traumas or heal their scars, but through self-deception and evasion, they seem to obtain certain conciliation with their traumatic past. The four main characters are all trapped in their violent and traumatic memories, including child abuse (Katurian, Michal, Ariel, and Tupolski), parricide (Katurian, Michal, and Ariel) and child loss (Tupolski). During the reciprocal storytelling within the four characters, they transform themselves from readers/listeners into storytellers who narrate their life stories; all of them are listeners and tellers. The process of storytelling enables the
10 “Reality” mentioned in this thesis is objective and tangible reality comparable to fiction and imagination, rather than “psychical reality,” which is defined by Laplanche and Pontalis as a term
“used by Freud to designate whatever in the subject’s psyche” regarding “unconscious desire” and
“phantasies” (363). The ontological, philosophical and psychological definitions of reality are too complicated to be covered and coped with in this thesis.
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characters to reconstruct and interpret their past by offering an imaginary space and transferential space where imagination can step in to influence their interpretation of reality. Hereby they attain a sparkle of self-consolation, as well as tenderness and empathy toward each other. However, the conciliation with the past maybe self-deceptive consolation for the characters, because they still avoid themselves from facing up to the traumatic memories. To a large degree, storytelling reinforces self-deception and self-evasion of the characters that prevent them from mentioning and looking directly at their past and reality. Without obtaining real solution to traumas, the characters are just trapped into an endless cycle of storytelling and traumatic memories.
The chief concern in the development of my argument is self-deception. Firstly I will scrutinize the issue with a thorough analysis of Katurian who is the main storyteller employing his tales to create an imaginary space where he transforms himself into a new identity and lives through a new revision of the traumatic past. As to the other three characters who are the story-listeners, I will explore how they are affected by the narrations of Katurian and become storytellers, how they render a self-consoling account for their traumatic past through storytelling, and how they resist the past and dodge reality. Self-deception blocks the characters from clearly seeing through their traumas. Although storytelling grants them opportunities to find consolation for their disturbing past, they do not really walk out of their traumatic memories.
To expand on the main concern, I will particularly interpret metatheatrical enactment and the dynamics in the narrative relations in The Pillowman. The enactment of Katurian’s tales is distinctive of this play. It is the embodiment of self-deception of Katurian. In Act One Scene Two, Katurian narrates and enacts his tale
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“The Writer and the Writer’s Brother” in an abstract and imaginary space where Katurian is simultaneously the narrator and the character. At the end of this tale, Katurian blurs the boundary between the imaginary tale and his life stories by suturing his traumatic past with the tales. With this transition and sudden shift, the enactment of the story becomes the enactment of his life; the imaginary space of the tale is thus woven with the space of memory, becoming the mixture of imagination and reality. The case is the same with the ending of The Pillowman. At long last Katurian is executed by Tupolski, but then “[t]he dead Katurian slowly gets to his feet […], and speaks” (McDonagh 102),11 and he starts to narrate the finale of his life as similarly as he narrates his tale in Act One Scene Two. This master-stroke ending displays the mind-space of Katurian who devises his final story and acts it out in his mind. It not only obfuscates the boundary between the real and the fictional to create an illusion for the whole play, but also reveals the confusion of self-identification of Katurian between the narrator and the character. Such confusion forces him to fall into self-deception to soothe away his trauma and mental suffering, as well as to make compensation for his sense of guilt of parricide and fratricide. The enactment of the tales transform Katurian into the fictional roles created by himself and provides him an identity that undertakes the atonement and the responsibility for his murders.
The dynamics in the narrative relations is another peculiarity in The Pillowman.
Here I emphasize the process of transmission, reception, and the potential of transformation in the narrative relations. In the process of storytelling, listeners will be influenced by the storytellers and their stories will be elicited. At that moment, the listeners turn out to be storytellers as well. The other three characters, Michal, Ariel, and Tupolski, undergo such transformation in the play. Originally, Tupolski and Ariel
11 Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2003) p. 102. All subsequent references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text.
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are two detectives who desperately try to find out the evidence to convict Katurian of his crime from his tales. During the investigation, attempting to detect the associations between the tales and the life experiences, they are also two listeners who keep heeding Katurian telling his dark tales as well as his devastatingly traumatic childhood experiences. Nevertheless, in Act Three, the roles as the listener and storyteller are reversed: the two detectives transform themselves into the storytellers narrating their life experiences and tales to Katurian.
Michal, Katurian’s retarded brother, is another instance as a listener who changes into a “storywriter” by demonstrating his “writing” with hands-on experiment on the plots based on the tales of Katurian. As a victim suffering from the parental maltreatment for seven straight years, Michal seems to be afflicted with brain damage and becomes indifferent to right and wrong. However, he is not unaware of killing children as a wrongdoing and crime. He also knows that his traumatic suffering can excuse himself from punishment. Through acting out Katurian’s tales, Michal buries himself into self-deception of becoming the characters of the tales and lives through the plots he likes.
Storytelling provides these characters a chance to reconstruct their distressing past and to see their life as stories. In their life stories, they are both the roles and the narrators at the same time. As the roles, they associate themselves with tales and enact the plot in the tales; as the narrator, they create the desired plot structures they want.
They keep avoiding themselves from dealing with their traumas and facing with reality. The reinterpretation of their life solely helps them to ease their anxiety and dodge sense of guilt. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that they gain solace from reinterpretation and from disavowal and avowal of their life stories. Self-deception
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may be necessarily a self-consoling means for them to put aside their past and in order to live at their present.
1.6 Theoretical Approach
In this thesis I primarily employ the self-deception theory of Herbert Fingarette to analyze the aspects of self-deception in the four principal characters in The Pillowman. In Chapter Two, I adopt the discussion of “I-ME relations” in self-narratives to approach the metatheatrical enactment of tales. As for the narrative dynamics within the characters in the discussion of Chapter Three, I appropriate the
In this thesis I primarily employ the self-deception theory of Herbert Fingarette to analyze the aspects of self-deception in the four principal characters in The Pillowman. In Chapter Two, I adopt the discussion of “I-ME relations” in self-narratives to approach the metatheatrical enactment of tales. As for the narrative dynamics within the characters in the discussion of Chapter Three, I appropriate the