The Practice of Rewriting in Miriam Díaz’s La Magdalena, su pasión

Abstract

The T’Nazas group presented Magdalena, su pasión at the Tenth Provincial Theatre Festival, Salta, 2004, in which nineteen other companies also participated. In the statement declaring the winners who would take part in the Regional Theatre Festival, Northwestern Argentina Zone, the jury justified its decision not to select the production, despite its merits, by stating that the entire segment of the dramatic text corresponding to the biblical character Mary Magdalene “is a textual copy” of Fuegos by Marguerite Yourcenar, Alfaguara edition, May 1995, pages 73, 74, 75, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, and 85, from the chapter titled “Magdalena o la salvación”.

The purpose of this paper is not to argue about the jury’s decision, but to contribute to clarifying the particular type of writing that can be recognized in Miriam Díaz’s text. This text forms part of what we call “the new Salta dramaturgy”, in which certain features recur: collage composition, marked intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and poeticity. All of them are clearly perceptible in Magdalena, su pasión, but our attention focuses on the specific form of intertextuality that we identify as rewriting.

Magdalena o la salvación, the poetic prose included in Fuegos by Marguerite Yourcenar, is neither the only nor the most important hypotext of Magdalena, su pasión. Through the technique of subtle “threading” and “suturing”, carefully selected fragments from La última tentación by Nikos Kazantzakis and El evangelio según Jesucristo by José Saramago are also interwoven. The examination of this triple textual warp shows that the rewriter has carried out an integral and “networked” reading of the three hypotexts, which, in their scenic concretization, permeate the non-verbal sign systems of the stage text, and not only through words. Therefore, the rewriting process becomes evident not only on the textual surface, but also at deeper levels of meaning.