West-Pavlov Heterotropic Theatres

Shakespeare and After
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-381-13323-9
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 8, 396 Seiten

Reihe: Herausforderungen für die Geisteswissenschaften - Challenges for the Humanities

This book seeks to elaborate a theory of 'troping' that expands thepurview of linguistic work and agency, parsing its transformative work beyond the limits usually set by theories of language. It registers a sea-change in the theorization of theatrical art from representation to intervention. The book thereby seeks to lay bare the activity of language as a heterotropology. It focuses on early modern theatre from Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida) and other theatrical forms of the same era (the Court Masque, dramas by Ford or Johnson) through to the Restoration; it also reads a number of contemporary avatars of Shakespearean texts from Stoppard to Jones, and of early modern and postmodern performance spaces such as the New Globe Theatre. In a dozen readings of early modern theatre it asks how the remarkable energy and social purchase ascribed to theatrical language by contemporary commentators can be reconceptualized, mobilized anew and thus harnessed for our own turbulent times.

Prof. Dr. Dr. Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of Anglophone LIteratures and Cultures at the University of Tübingen.

Autoren/Hrsg.

West-Pavlov, Russell

Leseproben

PREFACE
‘How goes the world, sir, now?’

The cover of the book you have just opened features a photograph of a streetside wall in inner-city Johannesburg. The shot was taken by Lutho Mtongana in the district of Yeoville, on one of the ridges that rib the cityscape of the gold-reef conurbation on the highveld. That brick-and-concrete slab wall is emblazoned with a two-metre-high painted slogan: ‘How goes the world, sir, now?’ The message is boldly enunciated by an anonymous speaker – by whom, we cannot say – to an equally anonymous addressee: for the street is apparently deserted, save for the invisible photographer who has pressed the shutter release.

This apparent anonymity notwithstanding, the well-informed passer-by might realize that this line has been snipped from the script of Shakespeare’s (2.4.21) – and then pasted (or painted) onto a rough-cast wall at the urban heart of this erstwhile settler-colony. Cutting and pasting is an ambivalent operation at the best of times (Compagnon 1979). It tears an inscription out of its context, cutting it loose from its original organic context, leaving torn edges and loose threads dangling in the air – but glues it into a new textile fabric where the stray tendrils may soon interweave with the warp and weft of the new tissue, however rebarbative or bland its fibres may appear. And in that process of violent displacement and grafting-back-on, surprising synergies emerge, turning the original meaning on its head and releasing hidden semiotic potentials as it undergoes an almost alchemical transmutation in the new environment (see for example Anzieu 1985: 64-5).

Just such a process can be seen at work in the apparently immobile scene that decorates the cover of this book. And in describing that process in these prefatory pages, I will summarize, in brief, the argument of the chapters that subsequently follow.

At first glance, the image on the cover appears to evince a structuralist object lesson, laying out the rudiments of semiotic structuralism on an urban whiteboard (see for instance Gadet 1990: 92-6; Hawkes 1977: 26-8; Rey-Debove 1979: 109, 143; Saussure 1981: 122-31). That lesson consists of two main precepts. First, as a speaker utters a sentence, each word must be chosen from a list of mutually substitutable possibilities: ‘I’ or ‘She’ or ‘You’, say, to start with. Second, each selection must then be successively connected in a sequence of grammatically coherent stepping-stones: ‘see’ or ‘hit’ or ‘love’, for example; then, perhaps, ‘you’ or ‘him’ or ‘the child’.

This hybrid operation of making a series of choices, and then incrementally linking them to one other as one speaks, is the double operation out of which meaningful speech is constituted. The intersection of the successive choices made on the ‘paradigmatic axis’ (the ‘axis of selection’) with the step-by-step joining-up of those elements on the ‘syntagmatic axis’ (the ‘axis of combination’) is regarded by semiotics as the fundamental process by which linguistic meaning is created in communicative contexts. Other meaningful socio-semiotic statements also work in this way: for example, sartorial expressions of selfhood are constituted by a set of choices along the paradigmatic axes of ‘headwear’ (hat, headscarf, baseball cap…), ‘neckwear’ (scarf, tie…), ‘tops’ (t-shirt, jumper, jacket…), ‘legwear’ (jeans, tights, shorts…), and ‘footwear’ (shoes, boots, sandals…) respectively, which are then assembled into fitting combinations along the syntagmatic axis of the body from head to toe (for cognate approaches see Barthes 1957b, 1967: 159-62, 182-8). Famously, Freud claimed that the language of dreams worked with a similar process of condensation (based on equivalence on the paradicmatic axis) and displacement (based on association on the syntagmatic axis) (Freud 1989 [1917]: 277-310; [1917]: 209-26).

Just such a double, intersecting process can be seen at work in this ridge-top location in Johannesburg. Two principal elements in the photo bear out this claim.

First, the line from is isomorphic with the course of the wall, running parallel to the wind-swept, dusty street. The wall, with its segmented construction, appears to mimic the syntactic chain that constitutes the sentence. The quintessential ‘subject-verb-object’ structure of English is the ur-form of the additive construction (s+v+o) on the syntagmatic axis of the utterance – the axis of combination. On this photo, though, the syntax displays the archaic order of Early Modern English, with the subject (‘the world’) following the verb (‘goes’); there is no object, but the sentence begins with an interrogative qualifier (‘How?’), and ends with a temporal deictic (‘now’) and a marker of apostrophic address (‘sir’). Fittingly, nevertheless the respective words are assigned to successive segments of the post-and-slab wall. The segmentation of the wall gives concrete form to the segmentation of the sentence.

Second, further away in the background is the arrow-like Joburg Telkom Tower in the inner-city precinct of Hillbrow. Situated a kilometre-and-a-half away, its distance intimates the work done by the paradigmatic axis in the semiotic business of sentence-making. The paradigmatic axis is the axis of selection, the operation of choice that determines which word, of all the possible options that could be used at any given juncture of the syntagmatic chain, will be used by the speaker. This ‘vertical’ list might be thought to be figured by the respective sections of the tower, topped by the six storeys of the upper sections, including an erstwhile revolving panorama restaurant (now closed to the public). But the paradigmatic axis is a virtual list, visible only as the ghostly trace of everything the enunciator has said. All of its elements except one are manifest exclusively . While the syntagmatic axis is directly tangible in the chain of words on the page, the paradigmatic axis consists of possibilities that have been rejected, virtualities not actualized (etymologically, the word comes from the Greek pa??, ‘beside, beyond’, and de????µ?, ‘to show or point’: the one visible manifestation of the paradigmatic axis points beyond itself to all that remains latent and unrealized). The Telkom Tower’s verticality, banished to the background of the photo, at the point where it vanishes into the line of the horizon, can be said to stand for this invisible list. The manner in which it recedes into the shadowy periphery of the image is a visual translation of the absence of the options potentially available but not employed, the spectral non-presence of all the possibilities excluded from the frame of what is.

The cover image from Yeoville thus offers a visual analogy for the semiotic crossing of the axes of selection and combination out of which ‘phrastic’ or ‘phrasal’ meaning emerges. Its question about the way of the world, the progress of events, can thus also be read as a self-reflexive query about the manner in which those events are represented. Via its performative instantiation of the step-by-step creation of a meaningful utterance, a played-out enunciation of the query ‘How goes the sentence?’, the inscription asks question about the way we articulate the way of the world. But the interrogative form and the honorific address also imply that such meaning-making never takes place in a vacuum. The creation of meaning is always dialogical, caught between a sender and a receiver, not to mention all the other collective actants that may be at work in such public situations of communication.

It is at precisely this juncture, however, that one might notice that the ideal semiotic crossing that appears to be manifest in the photograph is a chimera. The semiotic intersection as I’ve described it above is in fact a mirage. It radically falsifies the way the two features in the photograph really function in relation to one another.

In the context of post-apartheid urban South Africa, in fact, the wall is only superficially a ‘horizontal’ axis. In reality it’s a vertical structure that serves to keep intruders out, in a social context of extremes of poverty and wealth where violent crime is rife (Harrison, Gotz, Todes and Chris Wray, eds. 2015; Kruger 2014; Murray 2011). The wall’s primary function is to select and exclude. (This defensive function is exemplified by a part of the wall that is made of brick rather than concrete slabs, signalling a rupture and subsequent repair. Indeed, a photo of the wall taken by a Johannesburg colleague in 2021 (see page 280 below) showed that the wall had been broken through yet again by that time. The section had been refilled this time with orange bricks. The script was now interrupted: ‘How goes the …. now’). Combination is disrupted along this axis, because combination is precisely what the wall is there to do. On the contrary, the barrier works as a negating ‘paradigm’ that vitiates potential trajectories before they have even been chosen. It says: don’t even think of stealing what you do not have, don’t even try to enter where you do not belong.

The same inversion can be seen to be at work in the vertical axis of the Telkom Tower. Why does it soar 270 metres into the sky? Precisely in order to overcome the hindrances to communication fostered by the ridges and valleys of the Johannesburg high plateau and the high-rise buildings of the CBD. Despite its verticality its role is properly syntagmatic: it relays messages, combines words and images from across the city, and indeed across the...