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TRANSLITERARY DIALOGUES IN

GREAT BRITAIN AND BEYOND

Laura Monrós Gaspar

Universitat de València

The comedy period film Love and Friendship, directed by Whit Stillman and based on Jane Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan (ca.1794) was released in 2016, only a few months before the publication of this book. Stillman’s revisiting of Austen is but one of the latest contributions to what has been recently termed ‘Austenmania’. Together with the myriad adaptations, rewritings, sequels and prequels of the works by Jane Austen, the ‘Austenmania’ industry includes numberless cross-marketing products which range from organized tours on Jane Austen across England, to regency balls, and even dolls of the most famous characters of her novels. In the nature of these cultural products, Pucci and Thompson argue, there is an ‘attempt to promote a sense of unbroken tradition that confirms national identity and ostensibly works to repeat, to remake the past in film or through other objects’ (2003: 2). Indeed, adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels have been variously used to debate national identity and Englishness at various times throughout the history of Great Britain. For example, in the aftermath of World War I, adaptations of Austen’s works spearheaded the nostalgia of the inter-war period and between the 1940s and 1950s they served to define Englishness both in the UK and abroad (Cano 2017: 41-58). Yet for modern audiences, the pleasure in the process of adaptation does not come from the mere repetition of an idealized past alone but also from the Deleuzian ‘repetition with différence’, ‘the repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’ (Hutcheon 2006: 4).

The coexistence of the past with the present also underlies Ricoeur’s notion of the creative power of repetition which he claims to be contained ‘entirely in this power of opening up the past again to the future’ (2004: 380). In looking at the future, the constant migration of stories to new media and cultural forms with new characters, plots and scenarios, is inevitably linked with the proliferation of new channels of mass diffusion. Whether as victims, consumers or producers of such massive re-creation of cultural artefacts, it seems as though we are reproducing the patterns of cultural consumerism reigning in the nineteenth century. The Victorians, Hutcheon contends, ‘had a habit of adapting just about everything—and in just about every possible direction; the stories of poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs and dances, tableaux vivants were constantly being adapted from one medium to another and then back again’ (2006: xiii) Therefore, Hutcheon’s own analysis of the presence of adaptations in the miniseries and TV movies which won Emmy Awards back in 2006 is easily outdated if one considers the numberless appropriations of the works by Jane Austen on websites, blogs and other new media which have proliferated in the past decade.

This brief account of the widespread phenomenon of Austenmania exemplifies the perlocutionary power of certain canonical writers and literary figures from the Anglophone tradition to create a community of readers which, more often than not, becomes transnational. The chapters gathered in this book reflect on the power of such writers, characters and myths to speak to present-day audiences about the creation of modern identities. Yet the process, as Chapters 4 and 5 of this volume demonstrate, also works inversely, and real-life stories, literary figures and cultural images such as Don Quixote and Don Juan, from the Spanish tradition, or Caspar Hauser from the German, provide as well fruitful ground for cultural products in the Anglophone speaking world.

Julie Sanders manifests that ‘any exploration of intertextuality, and its specific manifestation in the forms of adaptation and appropriation, is inevitably interested in how art creates art, or how literature is made by literature’ (1). Yet adaptation and appropriation, as Emig and others have argued, ‘never happens inside an aesthetic vacuum, but inside ideologies and power structures’ (2012: 16). With these considerations in mind, the aim of this volume is to reflect upon the processes of (re) creation of art and literature within and against the backdrop of the shifting paradigms of Great Britain and Europe. Within this context, the book examines the (de)construction of modern identities through the (de)codification of classical and contemporary mythologies.

Under such premises, and in order to reflect on some of the countless literary interactions which occur between Great Britain and the world, the present book is divided into four sections which delve into the following main topics. First, issues concerning the relation between politics and poetics are raised by Teruel, Harrop and Gaviña in the contexts of contemporary Gaelic poetry in translation, the Scottish border and the social role of the Northern Irish writer. Translation is a key concept when dealing with languages and cultures in contact. On some occasions, global circulation of texts depends on translation, which inevitably constructs a qualitative distinction between languages which mostly responds to publishing and translation markets. Teruel’s approach, rather than focusing on the traditional conflict between a ‘usurper’ major language and a resilient minority one, is aimed at the ‘healthy tension between continuity and innovation’ which springs up between cultures in contact. The result, Teruel contends, is an aesthetic object which effaces political and national boundaries of all kinds for the sake of ‘poetical justice’. Following in the line of the literary interactions between the nations in Great Britain, the socio-cultural and political relationships between England and Scotland are scrutinized by Harrop under the umbrella of theatre and traditional practices of popular songs. At an ebullient historical moment—with Great Britain about to leave the European Union and Scotland demanding a second referendum for independence—Harrop borrows the changing mythic figure of the ballad-hero Tamlane to explore pressing contemporary issues of nation, identity and belonging. When a heated debate on new political realities is currently setting the European political agenda, Harrop turns to convivial and participatory performance to reflect on how contemporary appropriations of traditional songs might help to re-shape the concept of community and nation in a twenty-first century global context. Finally, two other popular myths, the shaman and the trickster, lie behind Gaviña’s approach to Northern Irish identity, which she sees as a central topic in Brian Friel’s drama. As one of the exponents of the Ulster intellectuals who from the 1970s began to be engaged with the problems of the community, Friel makes use of the archetypical figure of the trickster to voice his own political views on Northern Ireland. At the other end is the shaman, Friel’s own objective correlative which speaks for the inner self of the artist, his tribulations and torments when he engages, or not, with the problems of society.

The same principle lies behind the cultural interactions addressed in the ensuing section of the volume. The three chapters in the ‘Politics and Poetics’ section concur with the Bakhtinian premise that the literary process cannot be torn away from the cultural and socio-economic process (Bakhtin 1986: 140). With the title ‘From Spain to Great Britain and back’, the authors of section II in this book focus on the particular phenomenology of two major literary figures of world literature: Don Quixote and Don Juan. For Damrosch, it is only when a certain text moves, ‘when it is translated, when it is read at a remove, that the term “world literature” becomes a relevant descriptor’ (2003: 7). And indeed this is the case with Don Quixote and Don Juan who, as Borham and Sumillera argue in their corresponding chapters, have survived in Great Britain due to the debates on women’s access to knowledge which emerged in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the negative exemplarity of Don Juan in the 1600s. Sumillera recalls in Chapter 4 Salvador de Madariaga’s claim that Faust, Hamlet, Don Quixote and Don Juan are ‘the four greatest characters of European literature’. And indeed, even if Don Quixote and Don Juan were two eminently Spanish characters at the time of their literary birth, the works discussed by Borham and Sumillera provide ample evidence of how the two figures were informed with new cultural networks which in turn transformed them into British literary identities: the Hobbesian rake and the female Quixote.

With the turn of the twenty-first century, an increase in the globalization of the humanities and social sciences has encouraged new cultural negotiations between national particularism and cosmopolitan universalism. As a consequence, literature has become, more than ever, a space for cultural encounters. Streams of migration, artistic exchanges and political movements, for example, determine the export of culture or cultures in this globalized world. Such export of cultures inevitably entails the export of identities which are hunted both by the original and the ‘adapted’ cultures. The term identity, therefore, becomes more polysemic than ever as it is constructed by the tensions and polarities which stem from a globalized world. The chapters by Rubik and Fernández-Caparros in Part III of this volume provide substantial evidence of the literary interactions which emerge in this context of reflection and social performance of the self. The various voices of Eurydice which come together in Sarah Rhul’s homonymous play perform the different ways of overcoming the sense of loss in modern cultures. The death of Eurydice spreads beyond the borders of the Ovidian transformation which serves as its hypotext and transforms the stage into a Foucauldian heterotopia where the Ovidian landscape becomes Ruhl’s own prison of the mind. The process of maturity of the inner selves of both Orpheus and Eurydice is even more dramatic in the case of Emma Donoghue’s ‘Jack’, the feral child in Room (2010).

Jack epitomizes Rubik’s list of feral children who illustrate the embarrassing topicality of the literary lives of Caspar Hauser in the modern world. From Atalanta to Pecos Bill, from Emma Donoghue’s ‘Jack’ to the Fritzl case in Austria, the story of wild children both in Europe and across the Atlantic is endless and heterogeneous. Yet a single common feature dominates in these narratives: the construction and performance of identity of the feral child outside society. And this is what has quite been recently foregrounded with the homonymous film adaptation of Donohue’s novel directed by Lenny Abrahamson in 2015. In 2016, the film was nominated for the Best Screenplay for the Golden Globes, Best Adapted Screenplay for the BAFTA Awards and won, among others, the Canadian Screen Award for the best Adapted screenplay. In their promotional interviews, both Abrahamson and Donohue, who adapted the novel for the screen, remark that the film adaptation relied on the development of the identity of the individuals rather than on the crimes of the Fritzl case which inspired the book.

The focus on the psychological development of the individual is not incidental, as from the early modern period there has been a shift in interest from the ‘sacred to the psychological’ in the mapping of feral children and the delimitation of what a human being is (Newton n.d.: 14). Questions on race and the external definition of individuals which reached their highest peak with the Darwinian controversy gave way in the twentieth century to a psychological turn focused on an internal definition of feral children and identity; two topics which are the main focus of Rubik in her chapter.

Nineteenth-century social constructions of identity are discussed in the last section of this book, which is entitled ‘Interrogating canonical identities’. Post-Darwinian theories on evolution and the representation of the other meet in Pettersson’s account of the performance of freak identities in neo-Victorian narratives. Pettersson takes the case study of the life of Lavinia Warren, a short-statured performer who was exhibited as a ‘dwarf’ in P.T. Barnum’s shows, to explore neo-Victorian adaptations of the freak show. Drawing on Deleuze, Michel Foucault and feminist theoretical approaches, Pettersson revisits two contemporary texts,—Jane Sullivan’s Little People: A Novel (2009) and Jessica Benjamin’s The Autobiography of Mrs Tom Thumb (2012),—to rediscover the freakish body as a site of empowerment, desire and significance. Yet if, with the advent of new disciplines such as neo-Victorianism, both peripheral and canonical identities of the British past are being interrogated, the literature published throughout the nineteenth century itself also provides a wealth of examples which question the prevailing mindset. The chapters by Cantillo and Puchal delve into two figures from the Greek and Roman tradition—Pan and Odysseus—to contest canonical identities in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Arthur Machen’s well-known story The Great God Pan, published in 1890, is the starting point for Cantillo’s analysis on the (de)construction of the identities of the ‘inimical Other’ which haunted the conservative imagination of the fin-de-siècle bourgeoisie. As Cantillo contends, Machen transforms the myth of Pan into a locus horridus where the Apollonian models of divinity are rejected and the peripheral identities of fin-de-siècle London are put into the foreground. Puchal also focuses on non-mainstream culture when she places Odysseus at the centre of the popular entertainment of the mid-nineteenth century. Her analysis focuses on the figures of the Imperial traveller and castaway understood as a commodification of the Greek hero through burlesque appropriations of Robinson Crusoe. As Puchal argues, following in the line of the circuses and minor theatres which billed Victorian dramatizations of epic deeds and battles, the social stereotypes revisited in H. J. Byron’s Robinson Crusoe; or, Harlequin Friday (1860) are perpetuated to test and contest the prevailing identity of the modern hero.

The chapters gathered in this volume substantiate that literature is indeed a space for cultural encounters. As Walter Benjamin manifested, ‘storytelling is always the art of repeating stories’ (1968: 91) yet the ubiquity of adaptation complicates the process as the new cultural products are not only haunted by the adapted texts but also by the adapted cultures. Such constant and even compulsory fluidity of literary frontiers at present is perhaps yet another example of the widespread cultural cannibalism of postmodern cultures. Yet at a time when the political frontiers of the so-called Western world are being persistently contested, Ricoeur’s often cited approach to modern cultural change is more pertinent than ever:

When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with destruction by our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an ‘other’ among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins. The whole of mankind becomes an imaginary museum […].

(1965: 278)

When political frontiers are being constantly challenged, as in present times, adaptation and reception studies enhance the possibilities of Ricoeur’s imaginary museum as a site where intellectual exchange between disciplines and literary traditions emerges. This offers a fruitful forum for cognate areas of scholarship to debate on different types of cultural interactions and literary identities. The present volume intends to present a fresh contribution to such a debate from a European academic context at a time when the political relations between Great Britain, Europe and the rest of the world are being redefined.