The kaleidoscope effect. Rewriting in Alfred Farag's plays as a multifunctional strategy for a multi-layered creation

Several of Alfred Faraǧ’s plays rewrite preexistent texts. As each play presents distinctive features depending on the genre of its hypotext, rewriting is a variable strategy. A comparison between the literary genres, the plots, the characters, the style and the contents of the hypertexts and their hypotexts reveals that plays rewriting History focus on private aspects of the events and make the past reflects issues relevant in the present; the rewriting of the Qiṣṣat al-Zīr Sālim subverts its original values adapting them to the contemporary audience’s taste; and plays based on the Arabian Nights frame political issues in cheerful atmospheres. All the plays derived from the rewriting reinvest the Arab heritage and most of them are written in Classical Arabic, and so they contribute to foster the pan-arabist ideology. In the meantime, they contain political ideas which could be expressed because they were encoded through the rewriting. Alfred Faraǧ’s rewritings also reshape the socio-cultural Arab heritage providing History with new, positive interpretations of the events, substituting the values of the legend and erasing the effective power of magic and the comic based on racial or religious prejudices from the tales of the Nights. Similarly, characters taken from History or legend are reinterpreted and delivered to the audience as heroes. Besides being multifunctional, rewriting also produces a multilayered creation. Affected by a double reception (of the hypotext and of the hypertext in its whole), its perception complexly variates. Like a kaleidoscope, the rewriting resettles elements to compose ever-changing viewed patterns shaping the aesthetic of such works.

Esame critico dell'opera dello scrittore egiziano Alfred Faraǧ (1929-2005)