The “Bundle” in Edward Bond’s Plays, an Avatar of the Unspeakable “Thing”

• Main Author: Claude Gourg
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2009-03-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/5990

As suggested by Stéphane Lojkine, works of art chiefly operate through the scopic impressions they make on spectators’ minds. While opening out on to the mimesis, such artefacts as the “screen” and the “scene” actually unveil what they are designed to conceal, i.e. the haunting, unspeakable, lost “thing”. From the outset, Edward Bond has submitted all stage props to a radical process of semioticization. One example was the “bundle” that gradually acquired depth and complexity from Lear to The War Plays; the “Monster” itself, featuring as just a speaking version of the “bundle”. Unrelentingly reprocessed, the “bundle” now ranks as a classic stage “topos”, even echoed by Pinter. Thanks to such artefacts, Bond has hit upon the core of the act of representation for, beyond and in spite of his overtly political discourse, he has managed to project a haunting stage image of the “thing”, the agonizing pain of the unspeakable loss.