Author: kd2133

A painting has re-emerged, from the opening pages of Johnson’s The Ghost Map into Kushner’s Angels. Klee’s “Angelus Novus”, which Walter Benjamin described in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” as:

A Klee painting [showing] an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin

The link between Angels and “Angelus” is listed in this October 2016 post by Bryan, covering Kushner’s many sources.

In The Theater of Tony Kushner, James Fisher writes, “Kushner turned to … Benjamin’s image of the Angel of History as the guiding metaphor for his ambitious, sweeping epic…” (54). But he also sees hope emerge from the turbulent waters of the past and present in the play.

I find what Fisher calls “Benjamin’s conception of the ruins of history as the price of progress” (54), especially interesting because this is the second time it has come up in our readings. Why is history thought of in this way in multiple readings we have encountered on contagion? Is this a model we can apply to other texts discussed in over the semester? What theoretical tools does it offer us as a means to examine the passage of time? Are these useful? Is the image adequate?

(Here’s an essay that sounds interesting, in this regard.)

We encountered Richard Eyre’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts in a clip we watched in class to start our discussion of the play. It also came up in a post from earlier this week, “Can you see my ghosts?”, which draws from an interview with Eyre. Thinking about this 2013 version, being screened over a century after the original (written in 1881, first staged in 1882), I was struck by how stories are passed inter-generationally. Eyre’s Ghosts is an adaptation, not a line for line performance of Ibsen’s text. Even the short clip we watched differs significantly from the language used in the 19^th century English translation of the original. This made me think about contagion in regard to how certain stories get transmitted over time, in the form of a cultural inheritance. Ghosts was a groundbreaking play, better appreciated in retrospect. It went on to become a great work for many. It has literally lingered in the theatrical imagination. In a sense, it has infected this imagination, becoming part of a large corpus of celebrated stories told on stage.

However, what interests me is Eyre’s choice to change around the language of the piece (a full version of which is available at https://www.digitaltheatreplus.com/education/collections/digital-theatre/ghosts) to better suit modern audiences. He edited and rewrote Ibsen to convey the idea at the center of the work more accessibly. Even though the core elements and themes of the play stayed fixed, and remain relevant in today’s world, the way these are expressed needed modification, in Eyre’s eyes. The argument is that the 21^st century now has a version of Ghosts that appeals to it more naturally, and this is a good thing.

This raises questions and concerns. Firstly, if Ghosts is a great play, why does it need modern adaptation, especially in the same medium it was originally meant to be seen in. Classics are considered great in their particularity, isn’t changing things a disservice to the writer who created it?

Secondly, the idea of a contagious piece of literature seems like one way to understand the spread of ideas in texts over time and space, but what about the differing expectations from and responses to literary works in new settings? Eyre’s version of Ghosts is still Ibsen’s play – which is in itself complicated, given the differences in language leading us to wonder whether dialogue or story beats find prominence here – but it is also not. What happens when something spreads, such as a disease, but manifests itself differently in specific contexts? Also, since the 21^st century Ghosts is different from the 19^th century one, in content and response, why should they be the same play if so much has changed in between?  This is similar to the question of inheritance between Oswald and his father, where similarities exist, but questions remain to how alike they are in their ways, and who we is more redeemable, or at least more worthy of empathy?