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

Carl Lavery

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.