Encastleing England: Evental History and Histor(y)iography in Barker’s Work

Abstract

The primary aim here is to explore how “the evental” model informs Barker’s epistemological-aesthetic stance towards history. We will see how Barker’s drama, in its treatment and conception of history, diverges from various modes/trends of historical representation by developing an “evental”—rather than a linear-progressive or dialectical-teleological—model. This evental model is driven by the aporetic logic of arrivant (Anti-History) and actualization of the immanent virtual. Second, this chapter demonstrates the uncanny contemporaneity of The Castle and, more generally, Barker’s oeuvre particularly in the post-Brexit context where a binary/dichotomy-based discourse of nationalist ideology and national sovereignty (described here as “wall or encastling ideology”) has emerged not only in the UK but, more broadly, across the globe. Finally, this chapter intends to re-cast the established reading of The Castle—where Skinner is depicted as the main tragic protagonist—and posits Ann as the central character. Ann is here argued to embody an alternative (to the matriarchal or patriarchal) economy and ethics (of desire, gender, and subjectivity) thereby instigating the three pivotal events of the play: the re-writing of the Bible, the construction of the castle, and Krak’s symbolic conversion.