Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Tobider-Uluslararası Toplumsal Bilimler Dergisi , sa.9, ss.134-154, 2025 (Hakemli Dergi)
In Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1958), Stanley’s explicit exposure to violence by the agents of the System, Goldberg and McCann, establishes him as if he were only the traumatized of the traumatizing ruling ideology in the play. This study argues that not only Stanley but also all the other characters in the play blindly suffer from the epistemic tyranny of ideology, interpellating them as subjects, regardless of the diverse contexts in which they are situated on the surface level. The study further contends that the blindness of the characters towards this ideological epidemy is related to the most inherent need residing in the human subject—that is, the need for acknowledgment and attaining a sense of imaginary-like complementarity, no matter how illusionary it is. Of the play’s characters who do not receive as much attention as Stanley as if they were exempt from subjection to ideology, while Meg, framed in a seemingly-ordinary context as the wife of Petey, portrays how familial ISA instills in the subject the habits that will make him/her useful for the system by acting as a surrogate mother for Stanley, Goldberg and McCann, who devote all their lives to the smooth operation of the ideology with their blind submission to the commandments of the ruling System as the agents of ideologization and repression, are similarly wasted in vain in this weird universe where no rational explanation holds or no Truth is applicable. In this vein, the study focuses on Stanley, Meg, Goldberg, and McCann and draws on such Althusserian concepts as interpellation, good/bad subject, (Repressive) State Apparatus, and Ideological State Apparatuses to reflect that similar to Stanley, even the characters who openly represent the Repressive State Apparatus, Goldberg and McCann, and an ordinary-looking housewife like Meg are reduced to the position of a subject subjected to the totalitarian practices of ideology and contaminated by ideological fabulations.