Grasping
at straws? Non-spontaneous interpretation of live performance
Anne Furlong University of Prince Edward Island
For some time I’ve been exploring the notion of “literary”
interpretation from a relevance-theoretic perspective, developing the notion of
non-spontaneous interpretation aimed at producing a particular kind of
interpretation of a text. Typically, people interested in literary interpretation
are interested in literary works – novels, poems, short stories and the
like. Starting a few years ago, I became interested in plays. What, I wondered,
is the difference between the interpretation of a written text and that of a
performed one? Is a non-spontaneous interpretation of a play text
(necessarily) superior to that of the text in performance? Does
authorial intention count – that is, does it matter that, in presenting her
work as a play, the writer manifestly intended the work to be performed? And if
authorial intent has weight, how much, and to what effect? Is there something
uniquely gained (or lost) in performance? Which is, ultimately, closer to what
the playwright (is likely to have) envisioned: the interpretation based solely
on reading the text, or the interpretation based solely on attending a
performance?
These are not new questions in theatre studies. But they are
new to relevance theory. And relevance theory can, I will argue, clarify some
of the knottiest difficulties over which literary and drama and theatre
critics, writers and theorists stumble and clash. By the same token,
approaching issues arising in performance theory from a relevance-theoretic
perspective offers the opportunity to clarify, extend, and test the notion of
“the audience” in this framework.
In this paper, I’ll discuss whether we can construct a
non-spontaneous, literary interpretation –one that is exhaustive, unified, and
plausible – of a play in performance, and if so, whether and how it differs
from the process of interpreting “stable” texts. Non-spontaneous interpretation
usually demands repeated reading (or viewing or listening); performance by its
nature is unilinear, temporally constrained, and non-repeatable. This means
that the evidence the audience has to work with is severely curtailed,
certainly in comparison with that provided by novels and poems, which can be
reread at leisure. At the same time, the cognitive effort required in
constructing a literary interpretation is significantly higher than doing so
for a written text, because the evidence is ephemeral. And, since
non-spontaneous interpretation must necessarily continue for some time after
the performance has ended, at least some of the evidence is supplied from
memory. The notorious unreliability of human memory might seem to fatally
compromise literary interpretation of performance, but I would argue it is
accommodated in relevance theory; the Second Principle of Relevance and the
extent conditions of relevance allow for, even predict failures in
communication, including those resulting from faulty memory. The best the
writer (and director, performers, crew and others) can do in performance – as
in any communicative situation – is to provide an optimally relevance stimulus:
ie, “the most relevant one compatible with communicator’s abilities and
preferences” (Wilson and Sperber 2002).
I will argue that the conditions of performance reveal some
of the limits of literary interpretation, but do not render non-spontaneous
interpretation of performance either impossible or even improbable under these
circumstances. I’ll be drawing on a range of sources, from theatre reviews
published in daily or weekly media, to academic articles written long after the
original performance, to blogs from viewers and others.
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