Chapter 2 The Fold of the Theatre
2.1 The Love of the Nightingale and Translation Theory
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theatre and the fold brings out a new perspective against the simplified readings and labels on The Love of the Nightingale.
2.1 The Love of the Nightingale and Translation Theory
Many of Wertenbaker’s plays are generally recognised by critics as
translation plays due to her displacement of various materials that traverse across cultures, nations, identities, times, and spaces. In this way, the original text has been transplanted to fit the reader’s contemporary reading. Based on these characteristics, Wertenbaker’s playwriting can be regarded as
“translational theatre” in Maya E. Roth’s definition (“Introduction” 12).8
Especially her plays, such as The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985), Our Country’s Good (1988), The Love of the Nightingale (1989), The Ash Girl (2000), are
interwoven with multiple layers of literary and cultural works so as to complicate the conversations between the original and the translation. When discussing The Love of the Nightingale, Roth particularly points out that this play as one of Wertenbaker’s second wave of works represents “the translation ethic”
built on a much freer and interwoven way so as to generate intertextual
dialogues across times, spaces, and cultures (“Introduction” 14). Coincidentally in an interview, Wertenbaker states that “when you write a historical play, your
8 In fact, Maya E. Roth asserts that all of Wertenbaker’s plays can be seen as translations to some degree which are “infused by her rigorous engagement with diverse source
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first concern is to ask what its contemporary resonance is” (qtd. in Milling 237).
In this sense, Wertenbaker’s ideas toward historical play concur with Roth’s analysis of the translational materials in The Love of the Nightingale. Both of them seem to agree that the function of translation or the play is to open up the space for conversations among various materials and seek for interactive construction of meaning as a result.
In addition, Wertenbaker also points out that translation not only “changes”
but also “moves” and “displaces” something (“First Thought on Transforming a Text” 35). In this sense, what matters to the playwright is how to correlate different materials across historical time and create significant meanings for the contemporary world. Most importantly, the playwright’s translation does not mean to radically erase or deconstruct the original; instead, translation
“collaborates” with the original by displacing the text to some places where different types of materials could meet one another.
Now that the role of translation in Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale can be fairly identified, I would like to take a further step to explore how
translation works in terms of the relation between the original and the translation based on Benjamin’s translation theory. Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” can primarily provide us with insightful ideas to tackle the issues condensed in The Love of the Nightingale. First of all, Benjamin’s ideas of
translation theory are anything but the same old pursuit of fidelity of translation.
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Instead, his bold proposition vividly demonstrates the overall relation between the content and the language: “[w]hereas content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds” (“Task” 258). By describing the relation of the content and the language as “a fruit and its skin,” Benjamin reveals the tensional relation between the content and the language, also aiming to develop a broader understanding of the use of translation with “folds.” In other words, the fixed relation of the content and the language can be “enveloped”
through translations because “even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process” (“Task” 256).
The comparative images of tightness and looseness indicate the innovative function of translation. Language itself may have fixed association between any signified and signifier. Nonetheless, the real use of translation, in Benjamin’s sense, is to challenge, unsettle, or liberate from the fixed chain of meaning and the sign system by “turn[ing] the symbolizing into the symbolized itself” (“Task 261) and “a royal robe with ample folds.” That is to say, intertexturalising
different languages together is just like covering the original with a robe with folds, placing a layer after another. Translation does not eradicate the original but multiplies the complexity of different materials. In this sense, the fixed bond of the language is endowed with new possibilities after undergoing the process of translation.
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system can the translation and the translator endeavor to undertake “the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own” (“Task” 256). In light of this, translation is no longer about expressing messages but about being expressionless9, creative, and gradual transformation among different languages and their “afterlife” (“Task”254). This way, the translation can be placed onto a higher status through this topological approach of tracing the “maturing process” of words and languages.
The process of change is as crucial as what is changed.
In order to understand the “suprahistorical kinship” between different languages, Benjamin further looks into this special phenomenon of translation:
“in every one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant. Yet this one thing is achievable not by any single language but only by the totality of their intentions supplementing one another: pure language” (“Task” 257). To put it differently, every different language as a part of “the one” can supplement one another (through folds of kinship despite the alienation of languages) in order to achieve the totality of language which entails limitless potentials and possibilities of the afterlife of the language. Pure language refers to the state of transparency when one language can shine upon each other without degrading one another
9 To be more specific, translation does not serve the presumed and obliged function of expressing information. The functions of translation in this sense go beyond the universal acknowledgement of expressing information; instead, translation points to a more creative and artistic function. This is what Benjamin means by “expressionless.”
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(“Task” 260). By doing so, the real translation can “perpetually renew life of language” and elevate the original “into a higher and purer linguistic air” (“Task”
257). In light of this, Benjamin quotes Rudolf Panniwitz to contest the general idea of translation: “Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a
mistaken premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English” (“Task” 261). For Benjamin, it is the translator’s task to uncover unfamiliar materials within one’s own language so as to unfold the kinship and alienation of one another at the same time and affirm the “afterlife” of the translated languages.
Even so, Walter Benjamin’s idea of pure language still sounds utopian to some extent, for if each translation only produces more fragments by combining different fragments, how can this process point to achieve totality at the same time? To be more specific, the process of defragmentation works along with fragmentation simultaneously without being closer to the wholeness. In a rigid sense, the whole process of pure language and translation is paradoxical and the pursuit of the totality of language is unreachable, impractical, and even
tantalizing.
Be that as it may, Benjamin’s idea still evokes another aspect of discussion about translation as “aesthetic resistance” (Baltrusch 124). Burghard Baltrusch foregrounds the message hidden in the original German title of “The Task of the Translator”—“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” According to Baltrusch, the
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German word Aufgabe has double meanings: in addition to “the never-ending task” of ensuring the continuous life of the original, Aufgabe also means the
“abandonment” or “resignation” to the faith of the wholeness of translation. In this sense, the double movement of translation is in fact an act of refusal to any grand narrative which is dominated by a certain power. Therefore, even though pure language and translation might seem to represent only “utopia,” it can also be seen as “a form of resistance against the loss of meaning and truth that is ubiquitous in the ongoing process of cultural globalization,” and in the end this double movement of translation can ensure the coming of more possible meanings and subvert the totalitarian practice (Baltrusch 124).
The relation of the original and translation, in Benjamin’s example, is just like “a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point” which goes along toward infinity (“Task” 261). This very example suggests the significant moment when the freedom of languages has been achieved to activate the transformation among different languages. In light of this, to pursue the point or the moment of the transformation becomes a translator’s major task. Of course, it is also the main job for a playwright if one attempts to make all the transformations possible among different texts.
Taking the translation theory proposed by Benjamin as above into
consideration, the thesis intends to raise two essential questions in justification of my argument—can Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale work with this
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theoretical framework? How can we locate Wertenbaker’s identity as a translator, a playwright, or both? In my primary answer to these questions, I would suggest the playwright’s double identity as a translator and a playwright at the same time. Due to the diverse source materials consisting of her plays, Maya E. Roth, the editor of International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformation in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker, also analyses that “Wertenbaker mines the
cross-cultural ethics of translation in her dramaturgy” (“Introduction” 13). In this way, it seems that the playwright’s identity as a translator has been widely
accepted by academia.
Furthermore, if we pay attention to The Love of the Nightingale, it is natural to recognize the playwright’s creative translation of diverse materials. For example, the arrangement of the stories of Hippolytus and Philomele is just the obvious juxtaposition between two heterogeneous cultural and historical contexts. Moreover, Procne’s life in Athens and that in Thrace, cultural
encounters between Procne and the female chorus, the adaptation of the Bacchae festival for examples, all can be seen to be Wertenbaker’s creative translations of diverse materials, which broadens the plurality of the materials (languages). In other words, if historical materials are just like “a text to be translated” (Gipson-King 223), then Wertenbaker reveals and uncovers the manipulative inscription behind the bonding of the sign system. All of these multiple translations are
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essentially detached from the univocality of meaning reference and enable the reciprocal dialogues to circulate in the whole play.
By creating gaps within the sign system, Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale loosens the fruit-and-the-skin relationship of the sign system and
opens up an opportune space for audiences to have reflexive thinking toward these cultural and historical materials. In this way, the arrangement of the original materials of the play can be regarded as the royal robe with ample folds placed by the playwright. Within these folds, a layer after another, different texts interact with one another beyond the traditional sense of time and space, and newer meaning and reading of these texts can be retained as a result.
Again, however, we can by no means jump to the simple conclusion that the playwright creates something totally new. Instead, as Benjamin points out,
translation by a translator only unleashes the fact that “a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability” (“Task” 254).
Translator’s task is to find “the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original” (“Task” 258) and fulfill the potential of the languages by making the texts translatable. As for the newer meanings after translation, as mentioned, they are all potentials which have already existed even before translation.
2.2 Gilles Deleuze’s Baroque Fold
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The space created by Wertenbaker, in my opinion, is what Delueze and
Guattari call in their A Thousand Plateaus, the force of becoming or the
movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The force of becoming between the wasp and the orchid allows two different things to become
indiscernible simultaneously at a certain moment (A Thousand Plateaus 9). By adopting the idea of becoming, Deleuze is no longer concerned about the essence but the universal variation among two or more different states.
As a result, Deleuze further develops this idea as “mannerism” which is
fluid and circumscribes “the essentiality” of classicism (The Fold 56). Yet, the rise of mannerism does not indicate the replacement of classicism. Quite on the contrary, mannerism’s appearance aims to defy the crisis of classicism due to its inevitable rigidity. Therefore, this may not come as a surprise that the playwright chooses to dramatise the ancient texts by reassembling the forms so as to make them flexible enough to engender new meanings to come. This way, the
proximity of the different texts beyond time and space opens up the traverse of further possible meanings. Hence, critics are able to decipher the themes such as the fluid identity, displacement of memories, and so on in this play, all of which continue to generate questions either through the playwright’s elaborate
reassemblage of actions or speeches (I will further discuss this in detail later in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3). It is also intelligible how the spectators are influenced by those remote myths because Wertenbaker’s translation theatre embodies the
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idea of constantly traversing across boundaries of languages, places, and histories. The playwright builds up a bridge manifested in difference where people can find their contemporary resonance.
In brief, Wertenbaker’s translation theatre correlates now and then, here
and there, the original and the translation, and any dualistic concepts, all of which fit Deleuze’s idea that “the simultaneous double movement in opposite directions” (Spariosu 148). In this way, The Love of the Nightingale thus does not offer any absolute answers to the spectators but more questions and labyrinths generated through the combination and proximity of the extremities.
Translation, like Wertenbaker’s theatre, is full of transformations and
dynamic reciprocal dialogues. Namely, all the materials and relationships are undergoing an incessant form-changing. The significance of artistic creation is to escape from the unidirectional perspective of history and present more
possibilities inherent in the texts so that the playwright can unfold something new within the folds of thinking interwoven by different historical and cultural materials. Hence, to define The Love of the Nightingale as simply a feminist play (Farrell 173; Wilson 158; Wandor 218) is to ignore the essence and the possibility of this play.
Then we might have to proceed with our interrogation. What is the essence of The Love of the Nightingale? Or, more broadly, what is the essence of the theatre? If we do not need to focus only on feminism in Wertenbaker’s
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Nightingale, then what? I would argue that The Love of the Nightingale is a play
without essence at all. Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque might help us further investigate the issue of the essence.
In the beginning of his The Fold, Deleuze borrows Leibniz’s idea to highlight
the law of curvature. As Deleuze quote from Leibniz, “there can never be a straight line without curves intermingled, nor any curve of a certain finite nature unmixed with some other” (The Fold 14). This idea helps Deleuze to build up his own philosophical concept, the fold. The fold refers to an irregular non-linear state which is ubiquitous in the world. Every line, be it linear or curved, is
influenced and formed by other forces. Deleuze illustrates his unique view of the universe by connecting the idea of the fold to the trait of the Baroque:
The Baroque refers not to an essence but to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things: there are all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical folds…. Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its fold, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity. (The Fold 3)
What kind of thing does not have an essence? Or, we might ask, what kind of thing is without an essence? In Deleuze’s sense, something without an essence means a continuous variation along with different times and spaces. Something is always changing and lacks a fixed state.
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To understand the definition of the Baroque in terms of lack of essence, mannerism provides a proper starting point. As far as we are concerned,
mannerism is a cultural turning point as well as a transitional period between the Renaissance and the Baroque period. Mannerism appears in the late
Renaissance, and the Baroque inherits mannerism to continue to respond to the issues of the Renaissance.
During the Renaissance, the rebirth of Greek classic culture was desperately pursued by then people. In addition, the emphasis on the idea that the human beings as the centre of the world also brings about humanism. As a consequence, it is reasonable to put an equation among the Renaissance, humanism, and
classicism. Especially classicism entails two ideal vectors which the
contemporaries of the Renaissance endeavour to achieve. The first one is the pursuit of the ideal “Form” which indicates universal “Idea” or “Essence” in Platonic philosophy. For the second, the pursuit of the ideal Form can be realised only by imitating and duplicating classical Greek classics. For example, ancient Greek tragedies, sculptures, and classical Greek philosophy are all considered to be the representation of the ideal Form. Therefore, the pursuit of the ideal Form suggests the mimesis of classics which points to metaphysical eternity and immortality.
Under such a circumstance, mannerism arises as a counter-force to defy classicism. As classicism develops, the sheer duplication of the classics turns out
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to be rigid, restrained, and clichéd. Due to the lack of flexibility, the spirit of classicism gradually becomes a type of “formalism” or “essentialism” (The Fold 56). To respond to the problems of classicism, mannerism does not adhere to the blind worship for the “Form.” Instead, the form is simply seen as a way, a
method, or a manner to represent the essence. In this sense, the rise of
mannerism seeks to counter the crisis of classicism, which brings rigidity and clichés to the culture, through flexibly dramatising and stylising the materials.
Instead of mere mimesis of the past classicism, mannerism engenders endless interplays among different combinations of the texts and materials.
However, this also leads mannerism to the problem of superficiality which often makes mannerism criticised and thought to be over-exaggerated,
ornamental, and unrealistic. In this sense, Deleuze states that “[m]annerism as a composite of the Baroque is inherited from a Stoic mannerism that is now
ornamental, and unrealistic. In this sense, Deleuze states that “[m]annerism as a composite of the Baroque is inherited from a Stoic mannerism that is now