Betsy Sullivan

Dr. Emily Hodgson Anderson

ENG 660

26 March 2015


Surrogation

The increase in fertility clinics and new ethical and technological approaches to family planning charges the word “surrogation” with images of expectant parents, test tube embryos, and wombs for rent.  Although this association between an “unnatural” or “technologically aided” birth with “surrogation” has only been linked since the late 1970s when embryo implantation was finally realized, I think this fluid notion of a familial structure serves us well when considering the occurrence of surrogates and surrogations on stage.   One of OED’s contextual examples listed for “the practice of surrogate motherhood” borrows a quote from a 1990 edition of the New Scientist: “the meaning of ‘mother,’ ‘father,’ and ‘family’ are ambiguous in the context of surrogacy” (OED).  While this sentence is laden with scare quotes and logical knots, this notion of ambiguity and fluidity within the structure of familial surrogacy echoes Joseph Roach’s definition of surrogation in Cities of the Dead.  Specifically, Roach notes that “in the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric” (Cities of the Dead 2).    When considering the etymology of surrogation alongside Roach’s definition, surrogacy is laced with the idea that bodies are interchangeable and are merely deployed to complete these binding contracts.  Once used, or written upon, the bodies that have served as proxy to reach a means to an end are rendered inconsequential. In the words of Roach, “surrogation rarely if ever succeeds” (2).

However, fraught with the notion of bodies as stepping in for one another, the trajectory of the words surrogation and surrogate have grown increasingly tied to human emotions.   The etymology of “surrogation” is fairly straight forward, defined as either an official proxy, as in the “appointment of a person to some office in place of another,” or a substitution or “subrogation” (OED). However, by turning our attention to the root word  “surrogate,” we gain more traction to pull apart the word’s evolution from a legally binding contract to an emotionally binding one.  The meanings of “surrogate” soar over time from “a person appointed by authority to act in place of another deputy,” to “one who grants licenses to marry without banns”; from “a judge having jurisdiction over the probate of wills and settlement of estates of deceased persons” to a “surrogate partner in sex therapy” (which is a concept, I’d like to note, that seems to have both emerged and fizzled out in the 1970s); from “a woman whose pregnancy arises from the implantation in her womb of a fertilized egg or embryo from another woman” to a “substitute intended to fulfill the emotional needs of a person” (OED). Marriage, inheritance, sexual intercourse, pregnancy… all of these are relational agreements that depend on at least two bodies being present, oftentimes (and hopefully) brought together both consensually and under the auspice of love.  Yet even without love or consent (and using the definitions as a guide, these terms do not include violent or forcible acts, such as rape), I would argue that each of these examples implies a contractual obligation that is written on the body performing the act.   Additionally, barring the last entry describing an emotional proxy (which I’ll return to later), each of these entries for “surrogate” imply an objective distance from the relational interactions inherent in each of these acts, much like Leontes’ inspection of the “statue” of Hermoine at the close of A Winter’s Tale.  Or perhaps, as Kenneth Gross asserts in “Resisting Pygmalion,” what is emphasized is  “how much is weirdly reduced or strangely literalized in Shakespeare’s initial emphasis on the mimetic magic of the statue” (101).  Likewise, a “mimetic magic” seems to be entangled in the varied meanings of surrogate and surrogation, as the overall concept of the term connotes a fleeting proxy to bind others.

But what of the mimetic magic that incites our emotional centers?  The final entry listed for “surrogate” defines the term as one who “fulfill[s] the emotional needs of a person” (OED).   Is that, too, in the realm of objective distance when we speak of surrogations?  Or, in the example given by Herbert Blau in his Proustian essay of memory, is emotional surrogation like his mother’s affinity for garish makeup, the effect of which points to the substitutive nature of the makeup itself?  In other words, is it even possible to provide emotional proxy for another human?   Returning again to Roach’s definition of surrogation in Cities of the Dead, the inclusion of emotional proxies in the definition of surrogate resonates with Roach’s nod to the uncanny nature of surrogation, which, I quote, “tends to disturb the complacency of all thoughtful incumbents, [and] may provoke many unbidden emotions, ranging from mildly incontinent sentimentalism to raging paranoia ” (2).   Like the evolution of the word “surrogate,” Roach’s definition of surrogation considers the emotional reverberations that might arise when one attempts to serve as proxy, to fill the vacancies, to step into a place of mimetic magic.  As Roach asserts in his article, ‘“Unpath’d waters, undream’d shores,’” it is precisely this threat of mimetic magic that inspires such rage and jealousy in Leontes at the onset of A Winter’s Tale:  “what is enacted here, in the astonishing compression of Shakespearean stagecraft, is a fundamental tension present in any explicit or implicit surrogation: not the fear of difference, per se, but the fear that difference will stop being itself and become sameness — identity” (123).  Roach here points to the anxiety that worries the edges of surrogation: what happens when proxy and original collapse into one?  What should be the resolution in the case of surrogate parenthoods that go awry?  Who is the rightful mother?  Is it the woman who carries the child?  Who provides the egg?  Or is it the woman who promises to give the most love to the child?  While it’s perhaps a pessimistic viewpoint, Roach’s notion that “surrogation rarely if ever succeeds” seems a realistic one, not only for matters taking place on-stage, but also in the legal contracts that bind surrogate families.  Surrogation, while at most basic is a term for the fluid nature of proxies, is ultimately fraught with the threat of what happens when separate entities become one, and when what has been written on the body in a legal contract cannot be erased. 

Works Cited

Blau, Herbert.  “The Makeup of Memory in the Winter of Our Discontent.” The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern.  Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press, 1987. 135-159. Press.
 

Gross, Kenneth.  “Resisting Pygmalion.”  The Dream of the Moving Statue.  University Park,    

            PA:  The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. 99-109. Print.

Roach, Joseph.  Cities of the Dead.  New York:  Columbia University Press, 1996. 2-3. Print. 

Roach, Joseph.  “’Unpath’d waters, undream’d shores’: Herbert Blau, Performing Doubles,

and the Makeup of Memory in The Winter’s Tale.”  Modern Language Quarterly (70:1) 2009, 117-31. Print.

“surrogate, n and adj.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, 2015.  Web. 18 March 2015.

“surrogation, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, 2015.  Web. 18 March 2015.

     

LARP Hamlet...

http://www.insidehamlet.com

want to play…?

City of the Dead

An interesting plan for a 19th century city of the dead that never was: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/03/now-more-than-ever-london-needs-a-death-pyramid/387130/

INFOGRAPHIC: A Map of the Literary Genres

From Amy –– this cool infographic of the plotting of fiction genres:

The Improvised Shakespeare Company

Re: our conversation on improvised comedy and Shakespeare, here's the link to the Improvised Shakespeare Company website.

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.

more bibliography suggestions

Kate Eichhorn, "Past Performance, Present Dilemma: A Poetics of Archiving Sound"Mosaic 42/1 (March 2009)


http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_12/eichhorn/eichhorn.pdf