This paper has arisen from a recognition that storytelling in Old Times is used to foreground the process of reality construction. By telling a story, the shared past is changed and reproduced according to the three characters’ wishes. With narrative there is a radical change of the character’s fate as can be seen in the death of Anna and Deeley in Kate’s story. In this way, the self-reflexive space of the narrative performance is theatricalized in Old Times. It is Kate who dramatizes her desire to be the self by fictionalizing Anna as to represent her repressed desire to be a writer, and by positioning Deeley as the stage audience. While the narrative continues, the competitive relationships between the teller and the hearer are concentrated into those between the lovers. Like the sexual relationship, the narrative relationship between Anna and Deeley is built in the way in which a teller seduces audience to control audience reaction by creating erotic narrative. Maclean’s erotic narrative model helps in giving account of the essentially dynamic and sexual nature of narrative performance. Kate’s self-theatricalization allows Anna and Deeley to project their own desires for the narrative subjects by seducing the other. As being characteristic in performance, Kate is simultaneously producer and observer. Kate is the producer, who dramatizes the narrative of desire through which the narrator tries to communicate his or her own text of creation. She is audience who watches the narrative performance in which her own desire for the authorship is reflected. Kate’s self-dramatization shows that the performance of desire is actually itself a narrative of lack, revealing a deep unconscious lack which underlies desire. The three characters’ ongoing efforts to reconstruct the past can be seen as the traces of the unconscious drives which are the source of desire.

This paper has arisen from a recognition that storytelling in Old Times is used to foreground the process of reality construction. By telling a story, the shared past is changed and reproduced according to the three characters’ wishes. With narrative there is a radical change of the character’s fate as can be seen in the death of Anna and Deeley in Kate’s story. In this way, the self-reflexive space of the narrative performance is theatricalized in Old Times. It is Kate who dramatizes her desire to be the self by fictionalizing Anna as to represent her repressed desire to be a writer, and by positioning Deeley as the stage audience. While the narrative continues, the competitive relationships between the teller and the hearer are concentrated into those between the lovers. Like the sexual relationship, the narrative relationship between Anna and Deeley is built in the way in which a teller seduces audience to control audience reaction by creating erotic narrative. Maclean’s erotic narrative model helps in giving account of the essentially dynamic and sexual nature of narrative performance. Kate’s self-theatricalization allows Anna and Deeley to project their own desires for the narrative subjects by seducing the other. As being characteristic in performance, Kate is simultaneously producer and observer. Kate is the producer, who dramatizes the narrative of desire through which the narrator tries to communicate his or her own text of creation. She is audience who watches the narrative performance in which her own desire for the authorship is reflected. Kate’s self-dramatization shows that the performance of desire is actually itself a narrative of lack, revealing a deep unconscious lack which underlies desire. The three characters’ ongoing efforts to reconstruct the past can be seen as the traces of the unconscious drives which are the source of desire.