Posted by eugene williams on April 12, 192003 at 15:38:29:
Paternity
In this play Eduardo Pavlovsky represents people whose organic life force and human relations have been stymied by highly orchestrated and deterministic gestures that mask the vacuum of silence between them. The silence and its ‘high class’ aestheicised veneer are presented as debilitating tools of violence, indoctrination and fear of state terrorism.
Instead of dialogue and relationships, Pavlovsky presents a monologue of fragmented phrases and sentences in which the Man/Doctor outlines the dilemma of his love-strangled marriage and the absence/abduction of his daughter. The wife in his story is occupied with an alien activity- learning English, with headphones, while seeming unaware of his presence. Significantly she is also not present to witness the retelling. Hearing no evil, seeing no evil, speaking no evil becomes a safe space of silence but also a space of personal and institutional erasure.
While for husband, it is the pain of losing the affection of his wife and the abduction of his daughter that really matters, that kernel of his story is superseded by the sophisticated and precisioned choreography of the tale. He is even moved to express affection for the ‘classiness’ of the abductors who are in fact the master artists, the agents of the state who like Gambaro’s Usher and Functionary in The Walls, fill that oppressive vacuum of silence with their manipulative theatricality. As agents of surveillance they also read right through the relational positioning of the family and carry out the abduction like a pre-arranged ballet. I think that Pavlovsky is suggesting that therein lays the tragedy, when human contact and relationships become anesthetized and aesthetizised in accordance with the social engineering of the state.
The chronic embeddedness of the tragedy of the situation is represented in the fact that the daughter Adriane whose expressions of affection appear to be repetitive and mechanical phrases has also experienced the traumatic loss of her biological parents about which there appears to be no trace in her upbringing. Instead what distinguishes her memory is her discipline and ability to ‘wait quietly’. For the man and his wife, their youthful attraction was built on the artifice of the competitive sport of rugby and the exhilaration and power of macho success. That too is a memory that no longer has any organic substance. Even then it was ‘almost an orgasm.’ Real human contact, true paternity needs a legitimate substance of feeling which this family await but are unable to talk or do anything about.
The man’s anguished desire to revolt is trapped, worn down by an ebbing of time, an ironic refrain, not of change approaching but rather drifting like circles into the distance: ‘ Soon…Soon…Soon…Soon…
Pavlovshy therefore provides no solutions to actively dismantling this absurd entrapment, however, in the eventual presence of Tita and the silent phone call which appears to come from Adriane he points to an emerging solidarity that wants to know, to understand, as precursor to breaking the boundaries that have been created by the heritage of violence and the vacuum of aestheticised silence.