On Faithfulness

I found Pavis’s paper “On Faithfulness” to be very interesting. I have seen far fewer plays performed than I have read, so I haven’t considered the play to be anything less than a fully formed work, while Pavis and the scholars she quotes seem to take that for granted. On page 120, she asks “can a classic be read in an immanent way, and without projecting all that we know today thanks to philosophy, psychology, sociology and so on?” This made me think of the literature courses I've taken, where we are constantly superimposing modern lenses of psychology and theory to classic works. Is this really an effective way to engage with them, if we are considering angles the authors couldn’t possibly have been writing from? With theory I’m not always sure: it seems we are more often shoehorning works to fit theories that are more or less unrelated, but I think psychology can have a place in helping us understand a text. I thought the parallel between translating a text to the stage and from one language to the other offered a new view of fidelity as something that may be good to strive for but is impossible to achieve.

Emerson Archer