Hauntology and the history of Australian theatre

Conjuring history and the undead future
Profile picture for user Julianmeyrick

Julian Meyrick is a Professor of Creative Arts at Griffith University and Literary Adviser for the Queensland Theatre. He is also a member of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research and Griffith's Creative Arts Research Institute.

A startling truth about history is the more you study it, the stranger it seems. Once you stop seeing the past as a given, the reality hits home that what we take as fixed and immutable was once fluid and contingent. A choice among choices. A possibility among possibilities. We might dispute the interpretation of historical facts, but most people believe a) that historical facts of some kind exist, and b) it is the job of historians to discover them.

But what about things we once thought could happen but didn’t? The aims we pursued that turned out differently than we assumed, the hopes that never came to pass? It was to capture this feeling of spectral loss that the French philosopher Jacques Derrida coined the term ‘hauntology’, a state of mind where we are 'haunted… by those things which [are] not, by pasts that can never quite cease to be past even under erasure, and those futures that we prophesied but never occurred'.

I am a historian of Australian theatre and drama. This article is an attempt to investigate a part of the past that is not usually the object of attention: its beliefs about the future. I call that conjunction­­ ‘retrospective prospection’. Trove is an outstanding resource for doing this because newspapers far more than books bear witness to rapid changes in our daily thinking. By the time the historical record gets written, the possible futures we once prophesised have faded away. We forget what we thought might happen. We remember only what did.

Hauntology

The article is in two halves. The first half explores the term hauntology and the discourse around it. It’s a weird idea and takes a bit of unpacking. The trick is to see that our awareness of past, present and future exist simultaneously even though we live exclusively in ‘the now’. Our memory is wired such that we can travel back in time and draw a line between any two historical points. So I go back to the 1930s and 1940s and ask how Australian theatre artists imagined the 1950s––a future that is the past for us, and so treated as factual, but was then uncertain and contingent.

Newspaper article titled Australian Elizabethan Theatre from The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.), 1956
The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.), 16 October 1956, nla.news-article​​​​84391861

I am not a sophisticated digital scholar, but even basic digital tools allow a historical big picture to be quickly sketched. I track mentions of the phrases ‘Australian theatre’, ‘Australian drama’ and ‘the future’, to see what appeal these had for theatre artists at the time. This is a distant reading approach.

I then do a deep dive into one newspaper article to show the riches a close reading approach can unearth. Language is profoundly sensitive to shifts in our sense of time. English has sixteen different tenses, indicating five different temporal states. The two of most interest for my article are the future conditional (what might happen in the future if we make certain decisions now) and the conditional perfect (what would have happened in the past if we had made certain decisions then). My selected newspaper article is very revealing in its use of different tenses.

Back to the future

By bringing distant and close readings together I can discover more about the hopes of theatre artists in the 1930s and 1940s, even if these never came to pass. The second half of my article maps the results of my readings onto a network analysis of the different artists’ groups that existed at the time i.e. who knew who, when, and how. Two stand-out insights come from this that show the benefit of looking at the past’s vision of the future, not just the factual record.

The first insight is that the premiere of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in October 1955, which is often taken as a point of origin for our national drama, looks more like an end point. Theatre artists of the 1930s and 1940s were busily discussing and working towards a national drama well before Ray Lawler’s play appeared to nab the spotlight and embody their aspirations.

Newspaper article titled Prize play to open here from The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.), 1955
The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.), 24 November 1955, nla.news-article71782009

The second insight is more far-reaching. It relates to the national theatre movement of the post-war years. This was a policy-focused collaboration in the late 1940s between different artists and arts organisations that tried to persuade the Curtin (later Chifley) government to establish a federal arts agency and a national touring theatre company. The government rejected their proposal, and an examination of the attempt indicates the future that was forgone by doing so.

As it was, Australia had to wait until 1968 for the Australian Council for the Arts to appear, and we still have no national theatre company. The history of Australian theatre would be different now had we made different policy decisions then, and in this sense we are haunted by a possible future we failed to realise. In my article Looking forwards to the 1950s: Utilising the concept of hauntology to investigate Australian theatre history, I conclude,

Hauntologically inflected [research] methods are time-binding, sensitive to the fugal blend of the actual and the virtual that comprise all historical moments, gone, now or yet to come. They know that there are always alternatives, and we should always be imagining them. Being haunted by the ghosts of the past and the future is not a reason for dread, a subtraction from ‘the now’. It is a meaningful part of the present, the shadow at the edge of the light throwing into relief the events that never happened, the dark matter of history, which should be as much a concern for historians as the events that actually occurred. Of these unrealised possibility states, the [historical] record is, by definition, silent. But our hearts long for them still, and this longing is our haunting.