After
the publication of Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko
in 1688, dramatists from the eighteenth century to today who have adapted the
story for the stage have wrestled with what I think is the central dilemma that
Behn’s text raises: how do we ethically represent the torture that Oroonoko
endures at the hands of the white plantation community in Surinam? The larger
question, perhaps, is what constitutes an ethical representation of torture in
general, a question that we can begin to answer by examining the role that reenactment
and adaptation play in this act of representation.
Behn was likely aware of
this problem: most of her career as a writer was spent writing plays, and yet
at the end of her life she turned to the novel to relay Oroonoko’s tragic life
and death. Behn, it seems, could not stand to see the dismemberment of her tragic
hero dramatized on stage. Perhaps she felt that a change in narrative form
would allow her to adequately describe her narrator’s interior experience as
she witnessed Oroonoko’s horrific mutilation.
Regardless of Behn’s intentions, the confessional mode of the novella,
as well as the fact that the female narrator does not bear witness to the
hero’s execution, necessarily reproduces a problematic relationship between
torture and truth.
Truth, in this case, is an elusive concept, one that comes and goes through various forms in an attempt to elicit a confession and ultimately the interiority
that a confession produces. Indeed, truth, in the myriad of ways that the text
defines it, is excavated through confession, and the narrative itself mirrors
the process of torture in the sense that the narrator is confessing to having
not witnessed Oroonoko’s mutilation, and therefore could not shoulder sociopolitical
responsibility. Behn may have sympathized with her hero, and she may have
created his character in such a way as to evoke sympathy from readers, but the
narrative never pushes us to consider how we are implicated in Oroonoko’s
tragic end. Indeed, the novel forecloses any opportunity for us to bear witness
to Oroonoko’s life and death, and therefore does not and cannot create an ethical
reader.
In
a broad sense, I want to think about how literary and dramatic repetition serves
as a response to trauma. As Dominic LaCapra has suggested, we cannot register
trauma at the time of its occurrence; instead, it emerges through reenactment,
even if it cannot be represented in its original form. Griselda Pollock concurs
when she writes that trauma is a “perpetual present, resilient in its
persistence and timeless occupation of a subject who does not and cannot know
it. It happened but I do not know it—that it happened or what it was that
happened. Yet this happening is not past since it knows no release from its
present because it is not yet known: never known, never forgotten, not yet
remembered.” This is why repetition, in various forms, serves as an appropriate
response to traumatic events: it blasts these events out of a historical
continuum and makes them immanent in literary and dramatic representation. It
facilitates the process by which we can come to remember, or re-remember,
trauma.
Taking a closer look at this process, we consider what can and should be
preserved and recreated through repetition and reenactment. Oroonoko is one example: Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko (1688) and two play adaptations of this novella by Thomas Southerne (1695) and Biyi Bandele (1999). Oroonoko’s story is inherently
traumatic: in each of these versions he is kidnapped from his homeland and
tortured on a slave plantation. Although each of these reenactments aims to
represent his trauma sympathetically, they inevitably reinforce the
relationship between torture and truth, between interrogation and confession.
Page duBois writes, “that truth is unitary, that truth may finally be extracted
by torture, is a part of our legacy from the Greeks and, therefore, part of our
idea of truth.” What are the ethical implications of turning to reenactment to
portray this relationship—to portray the trauma that results from torture?
It
seems that the novel and the stage both reinforce and destabilize the
relationship between torture and truth—but in different ways. The form of
Behn’s early novel imitates the process of torture. Oroonoko’s trauma emerges
through the female narrator’s confession, even if Behn undermines this
confession on the level of character. Indeed, in the two torture scenes,
Oroonoko mimics his interrogators but remains silent, forcing them to
acknowledge their own hypocrisy. Southerne, to a greater extent than Behn,
questions the excessive violence of slavery; however, unlike Behn, he has
Oroonoko confess his crimes—and slavery’s “truth”—on stage. Oroonoko is forced
to embody and confess guilt at the play’s close, and Blanford, the figure of
white hope with whom we are encouraged to identity, as well as the Captain who
captures Oroonoko, assume no responsibility for the play’s events. Bandele’s
adaptation of Behn’s novel and Southern’s play is totally different. He
consciously works to destabilize the relationship between torture and truth by
not having any of the torture scenes dramatized on stage. Instead, he turns to
reenactment to represent the nothingness that trauma leaves behind—he shows us
that to enact the truth of trauma we need to make room in this repetitive
reenactment for the void. His claim, it seems, is that we must not witness
trauma—we must bear witness to trauma by coming face-to-face with the
nothingness that it leaves us to reckon with, thus embodying the role of
ethical subjects.
In
novels, language mediates spectacle; on the stage, spectacle is mediated by
scenery. Further, the subjectivity of the narrator is paramount to
understanding a novel’s meaning, especially at a time when subjectivity is
beginning to be constituted on the page in the form of the emerging genre of
the novel proper. However, the act of reading and the act of watching a play
became, at least by the end of the century, a continuous experience, and by the
mid-seventeenth century theatergoers expected plays to appear in print. Indeed,
there was a textual discourse surrounding seeing, implying a distinction
between text and performance and reading and seeing. How does the novel, which
both reflects and produces modern forms of individualism, both reify and
problematize relationships among torture, truth, and fiction, and where can the
stage pick up where the page leaves off? How and to what degree can the
literary more broadly disrupt this relationship, and what are the ethical
implications of this interruption?
Despite
Oroonoko’s moments of resistance while undergoing torture, Behn’s novel assumes—creates,
even—a logical relationship between torture and truth in relaying Oroonoko’s
story. In fact, the very narrating reproduces this logic insofar as we are led
to believe that the “truth” of Oroonoko’s experience emerges from the female
narrator’s story. In other words, the text itself stands in for a truth, one to
which the narrator testifies. Southerne, while clearly trying to critique the
excessive violence of slavery, not only reinforces this logic, but also places
Oroonoko in the position of the confessor. The hero is forced to embody and confess
guilt at the play’s close, and Blanford, the figure of white hope with whom we
are asked to identify, as well as the Captain who captures Oroonoko, assume no
responsibility for the play’s turns of plot. We see this logic reinforced again
in Bandele’s modern adaptation of the Oroonoko tale, but Bandele consciously
works to destabilize the relationship between torture and truth by not having
any of the torture scenes take place on stage. Further, through the figure of
Trefry (Southerne’s Blanford), Bandele implicates his viewers and readers and
pushes us to consider how and to what effect we are responsible for Oroonoko’s ruin,
thus creating a space of possibility from which an ethical reader can emerge.
