Abstract:

As an activist, a playwright and a poet, Edward Bond (1934-) avails himself of literature’s power for practical purposes in order to raise awareness of a chain structure which entraps and subjugates the individuals by transforming them into mere subjects. Bond’s focus on society and its arrangement by certain power structures in his poems reflects the current state of the social mechanisms that he is exposed to every day. In the Dark Forest, in this respect, is an epitome of Bond’s ideas consistently verbalized through various mediums of expression on the subjection process or ‘interpellation’ of individuals in Althusser’ words. As the title of the poetry collection implicates, Bond depicts different levels of tension in a bleak atmosphere created by corporeal and psychological variations of violence through his poems. This study tries to evaluate Althusser’s argument of ideology and the apparatuses through which ideology sustains its ascendancy over the subjects by analyzing Bond’s selected poems. The study also concentrates on the duality of in/visibility of the state apparatuses in the poems by means of multilayered imagery and metaphorical language employed by Bond. Since the poems merge the private realm into the public sphere, their political stance also denotes a personal yearning for unity and peace. Thus, the poems vacillate between optimism and pessimism, but in the end, a dark atmosphere prevails since the subjection process is inevitable and subject can only achieve his resistance or Althusserian ‘bad citizenship’ only through a consciousness which keeps him in the system but with the knowledge of how it operates.

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