Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 4 Number 2, July 2003
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Forsyth, Alison, Gadamer, History and the Classics: Fugard, Marowitz, Berkoff and Harrison Rewrite the Classics (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002), ISBN: 0-8204-5265-3
Reviewed by
Unlike
Steven T. Brown, Alison Forsyth’s
Gadamer, History and the Classics: Fugard, Marowitz, Berkoff and Harrison
Rewrite the Classics approaches history from a hermeneutic, rather than
‘new historicist’, perspective. This allows her to confront an issue that
has perplexed literary theorists from Marx onwards: namely, why classical or
canonical texts continue to speak to modern audiences, despite originating in a
distant time and place.
Using
Hans Georg Gadamer’s concept of hermeneutics as a theoretical framework,
Forsyth argues for a new approach to the classic text that avoids both the
canonical imperialism of Matthew Arnold and Harold Bloom, as well as the
‘canon-busting’ agendas of cultural sociologists and post-colonial critics
like Pierre Bourdieu and Henry Louis Gates Jr. According to Forsyth, classic
texts are sites of historical conflict and contestation. Their political and
creative potential becomes apparent, Forsyth claims, when they are subjected to
a process of Dramatic Rewriting:
As
opposed to foregrounding the concerns of the past through reconstruction and
recontextualisation or highlighting present issues through allegorical
appropriation it is argued that the Dramatic Rewrite creatively mediates with
the past and present, with knowledge gathered the force of tradition (Erfahrung)
and the immediacy of the moment (Erlebnis),
to performatively, and thus transiently, produce a different and new
understanding or what Gadamer refers to as ‘transformation into structure’
(p. xiii).
Rewriting,
for Forsyth, engages the classic text in a dialogue with the present (Erlebnis)
by examining how its canonical status for past generations (Erfahrung)
has influenced and shaped today’s reality:
In
this respect, the classic is more than a text, it is the textual manifestation
of a tradition which, whether we read the text or not, has shaped and formed our
cultural situation and thus represents an inescapably strong link which exerts
an irresistible pull on our cultural consciousness in the present. In other
words the classic is a timeless present that is contemporaneous with every other
present. (pp. 26-7)
Forsyth’s
argument for the Rewrite is based on Gadamer’s belief that human consciousness
is both historically situated and produced through the transmission of
‘cultural memory’. This means that literary texts are not divorced from
reality, aesthetic commodities without use value; on the contrary, they are
inextricably bound up with how we construct and experience the real. They make
us what we are. Accordingly, then, to abandon the classic is to abandon history,
to miss an opportunity to interrogate the processes and discourses informing
contemporary reality.
As
an alternative to aestheticized and cultural materialist readings of classic
texts, Forsyth adopts Gadamer’s notion of ‘hermeneutic responsibility’.
According to Gadamer, ‘hermeneutic responsibility’ is provoked by the
obligation to explode ‘interpretative stasis’ and thus produce a
‘transformation in the structure’ of knowledge and truth:
Gadamer’s
hermeneutic approach is not therefore concerned with trying to rediscover and
decipher the lost meaning of a text which historical change has obscured, for to
do so is to indulge in reconstruction not understanding. Rather Gadamer draws
attention to our own historicity, to emphasize how an historically effected
consciousness as a bridge to mediation between past and present, text and
interpreter, fills out the temporal gulf between us and the object of our
interest. (p. 61)
Gadamer’s
hermeneutic project supplies Forsyth with a conceptual map for understanding and
theorizing the function of the Rewrite. In Forsyth’s opinion, the Rewrite
engages the classic source text in a dialogue with its own historicity in the
hope of disclosing occulted meanings whose impact continues to be felt in the
present. Its aim, then, is not to replace the classic or use it for allegorical
purposes; on the contrary, the Rewrite respects the historical contingency (its
difference) of the classic, while at the same time investigating its
intratextual afterlife. It fuses, without collapsing, Erfahrung
and Erlebnis, past and present:
The
Rewrite does not replace the classic in accordance with imposed or extratextual
socio-political agendas in the present, rather it holds a self-consciously
temporal bound conversation with a text that has become and has remained a
‘classic’ as a result of the extratextual, and the often socio-politically
motivated, conferral of status and value. By going back to the text that
is a classic the Rewrite enables its textual precursor to speak through and not
in spite of its and, by extension, our
continuing and changing ‘cultural’ formation. (p. 239)
Forsyth
illustrates the socio-political potential of the Rewrite in Gadamer,
History and The Classics in four
fascinating case studies. In chapter three, ‘The Merchant of Venice After the
Holocaust’, she shows how Charles Marowitz’s play Variations on the Merchant of Venice (1976), as a result of its
post-Holocaust setting (amongst other things), highlights the anti-Semitism that
Shakespeare’s text simultaneously reflects and produces. Unlike Arnold Wesker
whose modern version of the Merchant of
Venice simply replaces a ‘bad’ Shylock with a ‘good’ one and thus
fails to engage with the historicity of the original, Marowitz’s Rewrite,
Forsyth claims, unveils the way in which Shakespeare’s text is, to adapt
Walter Benjamin’s famous phrase, both a document of culture and of barbarism:
The
Rewrite dramaturgically asserts that The
Merchant of Venice […] has been and continues to be implicated in
subsequent historical realities like Auschwitz and by extension our
post-Holocaust consciousness. […] Marowitz revisits Shylock so that the
character might give voice to his opinions about the intervening centuries as
well as the present, so that he might step out from the ruin of his fictional
ghetto and from the archetypal victimhood which he simultaneously fought against
and contributed to. (p. 113)
Forsyth
utilizes the same method of historical and textual hermeneutics in her readings
of Fugard’s meta-theatrical version of Sophocle’s Antigone
in the Island (1973), Berkoff’s deconstruction of Oedipus Rex in Greek
(1980, revised 1988), and Harrison’s Rewrite of the Sophoclean Satyr play in The
Trackers of Oxyrynchus (1988). In each of these chapters, Forsyth is
concerned to how the Rewrite interrogates and unveils the discursive power play
at work in the institutionalisation of source text. In her view, Fugard’s The
Island discloses how the liberal humanist response to Antigone colludes with the logic of Apartheid; Berkoff’s Greek deconstructs
the disciplinary politics involved in the Freudian appropriation of Sophocle’s
tragedy; and Harrison’s The Trackers of
Oxyrynchus draws attention to the way in which cultural discourses and
institutions pacify and domestic polyphonic anarchy and intra-generic
subversiveness.
Forsyth’s
argument is coherent, cogent and persuasive: it offers an original and highly
plausible account of the Dramatic Rewrite by combining post-structuralist
insights with historical consciousness, or what she terms hap.
Additionally, it provides a good explanation for why classic texts continue to
retain their relevance for today’s audience. If there are criticisms to be
made of Gadamer, History and the Classics,
they are relatively minor and principally stylistic. The sentences are, for
instance, too long and complex, and she has a tendency to use jargon when a more
direct terminology would have facilitated understanding, especially for a non-specialised
readership. These criticisms should not, however, prejudice an important
contribution to dramatic theory, literary criticism and philosophical
aesthetics.