Reworking the comedia: A Prolegomenon to a Study of the refundición

Abstract

The past is a country; they do things differently there. This quotation, the first line in a narrative voice-over firom Joseph Losey' s 1971 filmThe Go-Between, is the narrator's recollection of one summer from his pre-pubescent youth in which he became the postman between two star-crossed lovers from opposite social strata in pre-World War I England. His incursion into foreign territory as he steps back to heal a long open wound brings past and present together in a bridge-building effort to recognize and then to close gaps between his youth and premature old age. Losey's film character reconstructs one distant summer from within his horizons of experience and understanding.' He must recall painful events that circumstances force him to relive in order to deliver one more message; his task, then, is not all so different from that of a reworker of literary texts who attempts to transform a literary experience of the past to create an appeal to the tastes of the present. Such is the undertaking, too, of the adapterof theatrical works who wishes to evoke specific expectafions in new generations of a theatre-going public. At every moment arists carry with them the baggage of life and experience, and at the moment of creafion fight to be original while recognizing, consciously or unconsciously, many debts to the past. Though that past may be foreign and undoubtedly different, its elements struggle to allow horizons of past and present to open up to each other in a double operation of decodification and recodification en donde se conecta o enchufadialecticamenteel 'alli' yel 'aqui,' el significado pasado y el sentido presente del texto clasico (Ruiz Ram6nl 1). Thus the battle to be fought is often pugilisfic in nature. In the one corner, origin and originality; in the other, imitations, reworkings, plagiarism and forgeries. The separation into two overlapping camps of creation and recreation in the final analysis must be artificial, for almost any workof art is in one sense a forgery. David Quint explains the disemic nature of that word: fake as well as something made or wrought by men (4).2 The Renaissance, almost always with a model in mind, of course exalted the notion of imitatio; and imitation to an extent continues to be an operative concept. Kenneth Reckford, writing on Tom Stoppard's sources, states that Shakespeare for Stoppard, is ... a touchstone of art, and of meaning, in a shifting universe (149). Just as audience response and reader response are matters of reception of an old or modified work in a new time often distant from the moment of riginal execution, so reworking itself is a matter of reception of the work by specific individuals with an aim toward updating and attracting an audience (not to mention maravedis, reales and, eventually, pesetas). But a larger concept looms with reception and its attendant horizons of expectation and experience. To what extent are reworkings plagiarism? Where does originality enter? demons, if any, do the reworkers fight when taking on the stature and fame of Caideron or Tirso or Moreto? Are they attempting to come out of the shadow of the father and thus fight off those now welldocumented burdens and anxieties? Is areworking actually a strong misreading, as Harold Bloom asks, of an original? We must ask, again with Blo m, What is the quality of the stolen (Plagiarism 413) if indeed arefundicion is stolen material. Or is it more conducive to think along the lines of Ian McEwan, who believes that received material for many reasons finds its way into a new work of art: If writers appear to resemble each other for reasons of history, geography, class, sex or Spirit of the Age, they ameliorate these similarities with their own