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Abstract

The theme of memory in the newest drama is related to the reorientation of modern literature which accentuates the meaning of an individual, subjective experience renouncing the communal and traditionally approached image of experience. Thus, what is actually renounced is its fundamental way of experiencing the real world as well as its function of its main object in a stage performance. In my article, traumatic events filtered through memory are considered on the one hand from the perspective of representation, presencing and repetition, and on the other psychoanalytic approach. The dramas taken into consideration in the article, Savannah Bay by M. Duras, Suita I by P. Minyany, and A Summer’s Day by J. Fosse, project the future either in a narrative way as a fragmentary, gapped and blurred story, or with the use of techniques and means of expression typical to drama. Even though narration and dramatization do not introduce major discrepancies in characteristic mechanism of memory functioning, still they vary considerably as to the way in which memories are reconstructed. As long as those mechanisms can be articulated, the medium of memory allows for creation of an image of a fleeting experience, which in fact renders attempts at capturing it in its prime shape impossible, especially in plays by Duras and Minyany. Thus, uncertainty concerns memories that are impossible to verify; however, it still reveals a dimension of experience whose imprints have greatly influenced the subject. Therefore, an attempt to comprehend and objectify, added to the inability to make primal experience part of the present, comes to be the individual experience of memory.