Keywords: Re-enactment

Brianna Beehler

ENGL 660: Studies in Genre

Prof. Emily Anderson

Keyword Presentation

Re-enactment

Re-enacting Kursat’s methodology from last week, I, too, turned to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to find a way into my selected keyword. However, unlike “ghosts” with its eerily appropriate 13 entries, “re-enactment,” I found, had relatively few––in fact, just two. The first entry, surprisingly, does not directly relate to theatrical performance at all, but rather points to the legal use of the word, which it gives as “a further enactment of a previous law, regulation, etc.; a law or regulation which is brought into effect again.” While this definition may not seem immediately relevant to our class’s use of the term “re-enactment,” it does, in fact, point to two important elements of the word. One is the relative power of re-enactment––that is, that it enacts, or signifies the bringing of something into effect, as opposed to the sometimes futile gestures of repetition. The other is re-enactment’s relationship to time––in other words, it does not just bring something into effect, but rather brings it into effect “again.” In this way, re-enactment collapses the distance between the “then” and the “now,” which, as Rebecca Schneider argues, “punctuate each other” in the “syncopated time of reenactment” (2). For Schneider, re-enactment is about disrupting linear, ephemeral, and immaterial notions of time, in bringing “prior moments” to the “very fingertips of the present” (2).

Turning to the second OED definition brings us to the more predictable definition of re-enactment as “the action or process of reproducing, recreating, performing again; the action or process of acting out a past event.” This entry also apparently brings us back to ghosts, who––as Kursat outlined for us last week––are defined by a Freudian urge to repeat. More specifically drawing the connection to ghosts and ghosting is one of the instances that the OED lists under this entry. This instance, from Thomas Hardy’s 1895 novel, Jude the Obscure, describes two characters as “ghosts” who find themselves repeating motions that they performed once before: “It was like a re-enactment by the ghosts of their former selves of the similar scene which had taken place… years before.” This line refers to Sue’s re-marriage to Phillotson, a sober affair after many years of suffering by both. Unlike Kursat’s translucent and bodiless ghosts, however, these “ghosts” are the physical, older bodies of Sue and Phillotson, re-enacting past motions. The material bodies present in, and, I think, necessary to re-enactment––no matter how ghostly––distinguish re-enactment from other forms of return or haunting. Returning to Schneider’s description of prior moments being brought to the “fingertips” of the present, we find that here past fingertips literally touch once again as Sue and Phillotson’s hands are joined in marriage.

Additionally, this instance from Hardy’s novel also usefully demonstrates that the OED’s two definitions of re-enactment are actually not so separate, since the re-marriage and re-signing of a contract subjects the two characters once again to previously held legal duties and responsibilities (as well as re-establishes their social standing). Re-enactment appears closely linked to shifts within a social order, suggesting an awareness of the law and rules of governance, whether within a domestic arrangement or a public one.

But this understanding of re-enactment is not sufficiently different from repetition, which, while enfolded within the meaning of re-enactment, does not pick up on its additional implications of change. For, as Emily points out in her article “Theatrical Tristram,” re-enactments “revise even as they replicate their source” (emphasis added 12). Sue and Phillotson’s remarriage, then, is not just a repetition of the same vows that they previously made, but an attempt to alter a decision now perceived as a mistake (that is, Sue’s decision to leave Phillotson––with his permission––for Jude). In this way, the relationship between the then and the now are, arguably, even more complex in re-enactment then in moments of repetition.

This anxiety underlying the urge for re-enactment leads Schneider––quoting Roach––to describe re-enactment as a form of rather “‘desperate’ repetition and revision” (96). While desperate, however, re-enactment’s possibilities for revision are empowering, allowing re-enactors a certain capacity to enact change and movement that is withheld from those repetitive, translucent, immaterial ghosts, helplessly fixed to a certain spot. Rather than fading and reappearing in one place, re-enactment and those who do the re-enacting, are marked by a freeing mobility that is able to “move,” “step,” “shift,” and “jump across bodies, objects [and] continents” (Schneider 96). This ability for re-enactment to carry performance across large distances and periods of time liberates it from the various forms of enclosure that limit the movement and efficacy of ghosts and ghosting. In this way, re-enactment is more capable of transmitting or (as Hamlet finds) testing knowledge than ghosts, who so often fail to successfully communicate their messages.

Re-enactment, then, is a powerful word, motion, or gesture that carries so much more meaning than simply “doing something again.” In its unique puncturing of the then and the now, its possibilities for revision, mobility, and the transmission of knowledge, and, finally, its destabilization––as Emily points out––of the permanent and the ephemeral, re-enactment offers a new way of understanding time, history, and the archival of both.

Works Cited

Anderson, Emily. "Theatrical Tristram: Sterne and Hamlet Reconsidered." N.d. MS. University of Southern California, n.p.

"re-enactment, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 26 February 2015.

Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.