Rebecca on "Embodiment"

            The transitive verb “embody” originated in the mid sixteenth century, with rather ghostly connotations. Per the OED’s earlier definitions: “To put into a body; to invest or clothe (a spirit) with a body,” or “To impart a material, corporeal, or sensual character to.” To embody is never a beginning, or an act of creation, but the joining of some physical or corporeal form to something – or, as in the invocation of spirits, someone – already there. That is, it is not a birth, but perhaps a kind of reincarnation, a granting of new form. Daniel Defoe evokes the act, as cited by the OED, in his “Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions”: “Whether are there any Spirits inhabiting the visible World, which have never yet been embodied” (sic). Embodiment gives us access to what, and especially to who, was once invisible.

It is not until the mid eighteenth century that “embody” takes on a more abstract form. The OED’s third definition states: “To give a concrete form to (what is abstract or ideal); to express (principles, thoughts, intentions) in an institution, work of art, action, definite form of words, etc,” of which the first example cites Samuel Johnson in 1750 describing poetry as “that force… which embodies sentiment.” As in Johnson’s suggestion, embodiment is caught up not only in the giving form to something wanting, but in the very act, and process of artistic representation (I will return to this shortly). Following this more figurative turn, the noun “embodiment” emerges in the nineteenth century, as in the OED’s earliest example, from Carlyle in 1828: “The most striking embodyment of a highly remarkable belief” (sic). “Embodiment” the noun refers either to: “The corporeal ‘vesture’ or ‘habitation’ of (a soul),” or “That in which (a principle, an abstract idea, etc.) is embodied, actualized, or concretely expressed.” The OED suggestively lists these seemingly very different meanings under the same numbered definition, and indeed, “embodiment” seems caught up in the intersections of ghostliness and representation. The embodiment of a spirit thus remains perhaps surprisingly close to the embodiment of an idea.

The process of adapting a text to a screen or a stage is intimately and necessarily engaged in the relationship of representation to physical bodies. As Marvin Carlson points out in the opening of his chapter “The Haunted Body” in The Haunted Stage: “text does not in fact become theater until it is embodied by an actor and presented to an audience” (52). Whereas the printed text of a play or a novel finds expression in ink and pages, the crucial medium of the theater is the living human body. Performance, moreover, involves three distinct sets of bodies: it is created by the bodies of writers, through the bodies of actors, and for the bodies of the audience. And as Carlson demonstrates, the bodies onstage inevitably come with various sources of their own baggage, from the reputation and previous roles of the actor in question, to the “ghosts” of previous performances of the same role, as any actor playing Hamlet is haunted by the ghosts of countless former Danish princes. A role we see performed in the theater is shaped by both the artistic skill and interpretation of the actor, and by the independent life that comes with the body onstage (however skillfully that actor may hide it). In the act of embodiment, a character from a text is fundamentally and irrevocably transformed. For while interpretations and understandings of a role can shift from one representation to another, once a literary character has been complicated by living bodies, we can never quite return to an untainted original; that is, we can no longer imagine a purely textual Hamlet.

I am reminded of a conversation I had in an undergraduate Dickens seminar about the BBC adaptation of Bleak House. After class one day, a number of students spoke positively about the production, praising the artistic decisions of its writers and directors, as well as the performances of its actors. And yet, when we asked my professor what she thought of the series, she told us she had no desire to see it. We were perplexed, and after a moment’s pause, moved to reassure her that it was actually quite good, having concluded that she might doubt the BBC’s ability to do justice to the original, or something of the sort. This did not turn out to be, however, a matter of quality. My professor explained that, as a rule, she didn’t watch film or television adaptations of the novels she loved because she wanted to preserve her ideas of the characters. Thus, while the lead actress in the BBC Bleak House might have indeed done a perfectly good job, she was not her Esther Summerson. She was resolved not to contaminate the Esther she imagined with someone – or somebody – else’s.

In the process of adapting a text to other mediums, embodiment is the attempt to bridge the gap between imagination and representation. It is the link between the readerly task of imagining how a literary character might look, speak, and act off the page, and the theatrical task of marrying one’s idea of Hamlet to an independent, preexisting body. In this way, embodiment gives rise to the uniquely personal and subjective encounter that takes place when the Esther Summerson of the imagination meets the Esther Summerson of the BBC. Such encounters are fraught not only with the baggage of characters and actors, but also with our own.