Literature is just a Rorschach test

We’re wrapping up my thoughts on Felipe this week. Last time I left off by hinting at the idea that audiences reactions are subject to viewer discretion. To put it more concretely, Patrice Pavis describes translated theatre as a series of four “concretizations.”[1] (I genuinely did not intend this pun, but I will not apologize). According to Pavis, the text passes through each concretization on its journey from source-language text to target-language performance. His final concretization is the “receptive,” which comes into existence when the audience actually sees the translated, performed work.[2] While Pavis is writing about translated theatre specifically, monolingual performances – and indeed any kind of literature – will also pass through some kind of receptive concretization, and thereby gain a new context. This is also the basis of ideas like reader-response, most notably explored in Louise Rosenblatt’s work on literary transactional theory,[3] which states that meaning is created by individual reader response and is therefore necessarily shaped by a reader’s own previous knowledge (which may include the adapted text in the case of a knowing audience, so I’m really tying it all together here). This allows for a multitude of meanings to exist simultaneously within different readers’ minds, which is really cool. It’s also part of why I can love something while my best friend hates it and why my view of a book, film, play, etc. may be altered on subsequent readings/viewings/attendances. So then, if the receptive concretization helps determine a text’s meaning and each individual creates their own, unique receptive concretization, it also means that any subsequent translation or staging of a work (which is, in its own way, a new reading) will inherently result in the creation of new meanings and these meanings will differ depending on whether the work is viewed as an adaptation. Add to that the fact that Felipe’s adaptation is also an interlingual translation, which, as I have pointed out previously, means that audiences are less likely to be knowing, and you’ve now got a plethora of possible receptive concretizations for this play. Like I pointed out last entry, Felipe uses structural changes to somewhat overcome this by creating dramatic irony even for unknowing audiences. Because this was something that he emphasized for all audience types, I think Felipe therefore establishes dramatic irony as an integral motif of his play regardless of audience type. This is where where looking at translation as adaptation can help us speculate as to the author’s priorities in translating a text. Such structural changes also exemplify how adapters who are also interlingual translators, and therefore cannot necessarily rely on a knowing audience, might instead make concessions to their unknowing audiences if there is a particular receptive concretization that they hope to create.

                But there’s another facet of prior knowledge that can condition reader response in addition to knowledge of the adapted text, and it bears relevance here: historical context. Anne Ubersfeld, in her work on theatre semiotics, observes that, “Each moment in history, each new performance reconstructs P as a new referent for T, as a new referential reality… with a second and different referent r, to the extent that this referent r is of the moment.”[4] As you can tell, not really a casual read for a beach day, but she’s basically saying that each time a performance is staged, it will refer both to the time period in which it was created as well as the time period in which it is received (what Ubersfeld calls its “hic et nunc moment,”[5] Latin for here and now). So these referents contribute to the receptive concretization. Hutcheon also makes sure to address the importance of a text’s moment: “the context in which we experience the adaptations – cultural, social, historical – is another important factor in the meaning and significance we grant this ubiquitous palimpsestic form.”^[6] Context, source text, and target text therefore exist in an intertextual relationship that shapes individual meaning. The degree of knowledge that a spectator possesses in any one of these areas will affect the meaning that they create in their individual receptive concretization, and therefore change the way in which they understand a performance. To demonstrate this, I will conclude this section by examining some historical referents relevant to Felipe’s translation of Macbeth.

Unsurprisingly Macbeth, with its themes of tyranny and revolt, lends itself to political readings and has been used by various Spanish-language translators to espouse different political viewpoints throughout its history.[7] How, then, does Felipe’s text interact with its specific historical context? Felipe, though living in exile in Mexico at the time, translated Macbeth during Francisco Franco’s fascist regime in Spain. Already a well-known Spanish poet and supporter of the defeated Spanish Republican forces, Felipe fled Spain after the Spanish Civil War that resulted in Franco’s rise to power.^[8] Despite his political leanings, more fully explored in his poetry, Felipe mostly avoids any overarching, thematic condemnation of Francoism in the play, and Juan Jesús Zaro points out that his Macbeth was banned in Spain not because of anything objectionable in the play itself, but because of its author’s reputation.[9] In fact a different translation of Macbeth had been produced by the state’s Teatro Español – in a heavily self-censored translation by Nicolás González Ruiz – a decade earlier.[10] Despite Felipe’s ostensible depoliticization of the play, I believe that he does hint at a connection between Macbeth’s opponents and Franco’s enemies, the Spanish Republican forces. This is based on a small textual distinction between his and Shakespeare’s play. In Shakespeare, Malcolm flees to England and Donalbain to Ireland after their father’s murder, but in Felipe’s version Malcolm decides, “Yo no salgo de Escocia…/ Me esconderé en la sierra [I won’t leave Scotland…/ I’ll hide myself in the mountains].”^[11] Later Seyton tells Macbeth that “Está en Escocia el príncipe heredero./ Dicen que se le junta facciones y mesnadas, pastores y pecheros./ Todo el reino lo busca y va hacia él como las hormigas van hacia el hormiguero [The Crown Prince is in Scotland./ They say that he gathers factions and troops, shepherds and commoners./ The whole kingdom looks for him and flocks to him like ants to an anthill].”^[12] I suspect that Felipe drew inspiration for this choice from the anti-fascist guerrilla fighters of post-war Spain, who hid in the Spanish mountains from which they launched attacks after Franco came to power.^[13] Once again, I direct you towards Guillermo del Toro’s Laberinto del Fauno (Pany’s Labyrinth). The parallels between a defeated force waiting in the mountains and gathering strength to overthrow a despotic military leader and the guerrilla forces in Spain would be particularly obvious to a Spanish republican poet and exile.

Once again, however, the change in Malcolm’s destination is only noticeable to a knowing audience. Conversely, any significance in his choice to remain in Scotland’s mountains may still be unavailable to them if they are aware of Shakespeare’s play, but not familiar with Spanish history. In order to get the added meaning, the text requires a different kind of knowing audience; this audience is knowing not because of familiarity with the source text, but rather because of familiarity with the sociopolitical world in which the adaptation came into existence. Taking this even further, if an audience member is knowing in both senses (like yours truly (after much effort and research)), the gossiping effect can exist on two levels: those of both literary antecedent and historical context. The receptive concretization of such an audience would contain even more palimpsestic layers. Only this doubly knowing audience will be aware that the guerrilla forces in Spain failed to depose Franco where Malcolm’s army succeeds; Felipe’s fictional rebellion therefore diverges from the Spanish history it imitates. By deliberately altering the plot to keep Malcolm in the Scottish mountains and gathering forces to fight Macbeth, Felipe artistically reclaims the history of his own country and hints at a better fictional ending than reality provided him. Why then is it significant that Felipe chooses to display Macbeth in his damnation rather than Malcolm in his triumph at play’s end? Again, perhaps there is something to be gleaned from knowledge of Felipe’s life. He was living as an exile from a Spain that had fallen to his enemies. For Felipe, any allegorical connection between Malcom’s victory and Spanish freedom is therefore, like Macbeth’s mañana, not a temporal certainty, but rather an indeterminate future; there is no way of knowing how or when it will come about. In Felipe’s case, sun never did that ‘morrow see; he did not return to Spain after his self-imposed exile in 1938 and died seven years before Franco’s own death ended his rule.

So that’s my examination of Macbeth o el asesino del sueño through the lens of palimpsestic doubleness and the gossiping effect. I hope I’ve begun to prove that approaching translated works as adaptations can contribute to their meaning beyond linguistic transfer. Hutcheon holds that, “Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change.”^[14] But this change can only be recognized if we know what it is being changed from, thus her distinction between knowing and unknowing audiences. I have pointed out how this distinction is complicated by linguistic barriers, and how Felipe has, in one aspect, overcome this obstacle with his manipulation of dramatic irony. I have also posited that a further distinction can be drawn between audiences that are knowing because of familiarity with either the literary source text, the historical context, or both. Hutcheon reminds us, however, that a reading unencumbered by such knowledge is not invalid; unknowing audiences:

simply experience the work without the palimpsestic doubleness that comes with knowing. From one perspective, this is a loss. From another, it is simply experiencing the work for itself, and all agree that even adaptations must stand on their own.^[15]

Genette feels similarly, citing one of literature’s most famous adaptations, James Joyce’s Ulysses, to make his point: “It is perfectly possible to read Ulysses as a self-enclosed work; such a reading would nevertheless be incomplete.”[16] For those in the know, examining translations as adaptations can help us to comprehend not only the linguistic shifts that occur, but also the ways in which a translator creatively intervenes to set their work apart from the source beyond those changes explained away by a bilingual dictionary. We can enjoy the palimpsestic doubleness of adaptation and observe how translations enact “something different” as championed by Genette.[17] If not, we can hope that the work can stand well on its own. After all, the unknowing audience literally does not know what they’re missing and can still enjoy their personal receptive concretizations as the play interacts with their individual, inimitable knowledge and experience.

           Next week I’ll actually talk about a different text. It’s called Scotland, PA, it’s an updated take on Macbeth if the throne is Scotland is a burger restaurant, and it is a joy. Read it now.

[17] Ibid., 217.