Assignment: interpretive creation. Was the text the resource and the drama was just a copy?
For the department of English and Media studies. By
Prof DR Sohail Ansari Dead line: 29th April (The assignments are in compliance
to instruction from higher authorities so that learning remains uninterrupted
despite the closure of university) (This assignment is 9th of the series of
assignments calculated to initiate students into the art of reading)
“Movie, unlike theatrical works, depends more
on pictures. According to actors, acting aims at analyzing life experiences. It
depicts faults as something to be avoided and highly praises virtue and calls
people to adhere to it. It exposes lessons and experiences in a way that makes
the message presented indirectly, through inspiration. As long as acting,
either cinematic or theatrical, achieves this aim, presents morality and good
taste, does not reveal private parts or provokes sexual instincts , it is
deemed lawful as religion does not prohibit this kind of acting. Sheikh Ahmad Ash-Sharabaasi,
Creative
Reading, or the New Life of Literary Works: American Instances
Claire Bruyère
(Claire
Bruyère has taught American literature and civilisation at the University of
Lille, then at University Paris VII-Denis Diderot. She is the author of Sherwood Anderson L’impuissance créatrice (Paris:
Klincksieck, 1985) and Sherwood Anderson Le grotesque tendre (Paris:
Belin, 2001) and edited a selection of Anderson’s stories, Les Chevaux de l’adolescence (Paris:
Éditions du Rocher, 2006). She has developed an interest in US reading and
publishing (editing Revue française d’études américaines (RFEA), no.
78, 1998), in book history and its relationship to creativity (“The Author:
Alive or Dead?” Critical Studies 3,
no. 1, 1991), the role of translation (“La traduction au carrefour des
cultures,” with M. F. Cachin, in Les Mutations du livre et de l’édition dans le monde du
XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000,
Laval/Paris: 2001), and in freedom of expression, censorship, and surveillance
(“De la censure à l’autocensure,” co-edited with Henriette Touillier, special
issue, Ethnologie française 36
[2006]). She also edited “The Shifting Sands of Secrecy: Private Communication
at Stake,”)
Abstract
The “creative reading” referred
to here is an extension of the reading of literature. To be inspired by a previous text is as old as literature itself; what we wish to understand is
why the (re)reading of a number of works of imagination published in the United
States between 1915 and 1940 leads contemporary writers, stage or film
directors, composers, illustrators, and multi-media artists to adapt or
transpose them. Why these works, in particular?
Some “creative readers” reveal, in their productions,
scripts, projects, and interviews, the ways in which they interpret works by
“classic authors” such as Theodore Dreiser, Edgar
Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Francis Scott Fitzgerald.
They also reveal how they hope to bring their
spectators or readers, especially the younger ones, to share their enthusiasm
and read the source texts. The role of new technology cannot be overestimated, both in artistic creation and in the circulation of information.
Creative reading” alludes in the first place to a relatively
recent call to “challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries” in academia.
Starting with the history of the book in mid-twentieth
century France, creative reading has progressively given birth to a number of interdisciplinary fields of study, including media studies,
film studies, drama studies, and adaptation studies. This last is now
frequently taught and is recognized as “a formal entity, a process of creation,
a process of reception,” reflecting “the adapter’s creative
interpretation or interpretive creation,” so that one now speaks of “adaptation theory” as being
applied to “the adaptation industry.” Scholarly debates and studies are
lively, yet are not at the centre of this article, which is a form of
field study. Concerned with the fate, in present-day American cultural life, of
certain canonical pre-Second-World-War American literary texts, and struck by a
series of contrasting analyses of the subject, I set out to explore adaptations
of several comparable authors for different media. They are particular works of
poetry or fiction published to great acclaim (including a Nobel prize) by five
white male writers, mostly from mid-America, between 1915 and 1940, namely
Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950), Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), Theodore Dreiser
(1871–1945), Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951), and Francis Scott Fitzgerald
(1896–1940).
The adapters have taken up selected texts by each of them and
decided how to adapt them to another medium today. Although this survey cannot be complete, I have been able to
read a number of the scripts, to view and hear some of the new productions
(live or on CD), and to interview several of these creative readers; it must be
added that this paper would not be the same without the vast amount of data
available on the Web, which is itself part of the subject.
One of the adaptations could serve as a paradigm for what I mean
by creative reading and new life. When browsing the Web, it is possible to come
across a very brief online video called “The Dumb Man.” You hear a Sherwood
Anderson poem (from The Triumph of the Egg, 1921) read aloud by the actor, Alex Wilson, while you watch—on You Tube or Vimeo—a
beautiful surrealistic interpretation of that poem by the artist, Lainy Voom (alias Trace Sanderson, from Great Britain), who
uses a technique called machinima, animated filmmaking with a virtual 3-D
environment. This powerful poem on a classic
theme—the poet’s lack of words for wonderful, puzzling visions—is thus made
accessible to a large audience and enriched by interpretation. How did this
come to be? Wilson originally responded to a textual stimulus: “the poem was
such a short, simple piece, but at the same time so elusive” that he felt like
seeing “what kind of challenge it might be.” When Voom heard Wilson’s
recording via Creative Commons, “‘it stopped me in my tracks … it was about
death and desire, and it refused easy understanding.’” This oral reading
led her to Telltale Weekly, his website, which is a free audio-book library.
The images it evoked stayed in her mind for months as a “huge challenge” and
the result was her video, done on Second Life, the
3-D virtual world. It was first shown in 2008 and
is still readily available. Both artists used the word “challenge.” On a small
scale, it illustrates a process I wish to underline: thanks to various techniques
and to the technical support of a few Internet companies, two individuals can
meet and create a new work which, in this case, includes both original text and
audiovisual experiment. This multimedia rendering
of a poem unknown to most viewers was created
spontaneously on a non-profit, free-access website, and was enthusiastically received by those who posted a
comment. Readers already familiar with the poem are free to react to this
hybrid.
This points to the digital revolution, which may modify the perception of the presence of particular
authors given by more traditional channels, public or private, like the four
following. “Sinclair Lewis seems to have dropped out of what remains of world
literature,” wrote Gore Vidal in 1992. “F. Scott Fitzgerald Gets a Second Act
After All” was a headline in the New York Times in 2005.
“Mention Sherwood Anderson these days, as I did recently at a dinner for a
writer visiting my University, it’s as though you’ve mentioned something quaint
and nostalgic.” “Masters’ verse was once recited in schoolrooms across the
country, he too has fallen into obscurity, as our interest in poetry has faded
to near-nothingness,” wrote the Washington Times in
2006. It can indeed be argued that some of these writers are receiving less
scholarly attention, that school and college reading lists have made room for
more recent or formerly undervalued fiction. Nonetheless, genuine interest is
shown by various types of readers, who can be active in reading groups or on
the Web, or become creative readers by re-reading a text to adapt it for one or more other
media, or else just read the original text after hearing or seeing an
adaptation. That is what prompted this
article.
A number of groundbreaking
studies in English and in French on the subject of modern literary adaptations,
as such or in relation to particular media like cinema or theatre, have already
been mentioned. Let it be clear that, once we admit that adapters
can become creators, we no longer look at adaptations
exclusively from the point of view of fidelity. Who are the adapters? What motivates their choices? Which texts have been
chosen? What are the economic and legal restrictions and constraints? Can the
source text be brought as such to new audiences? When deliberate alterations
are made, what is their nature and their range? Are they needed in order to
interest the next generation in writings of the past and pass them on without
being tedious? The article first examines
general aspects like the accessibility of the texts, the range of recent
adaptations, and the processes they entail, and then proceeds with close-ups on
a few significant productions. Its purpose is to understand why and how, beyond
pious reprints or revivals, or an occasional financial gambit, these particular classics,
which are not (unlike Shakespeare’s plays) in a class of their own, can be made exciting enough for the younger generation to re-enter present-day
cultural life. They can survive as texts that
may be enjoyed by “common readers” who, even if they do not become visibly
creative, should not be considered with the haughtiness of Edith Wharton. In
her brief 1903 essay, “The Vice of Reading,” Wharton opposed “born readers,”
the only worthy ones, to “mechanical readers,” “poor readers” whose passive way
of reading “becomes a menace to literature.” (Her text is available to all on
our computers or Kindles thanks to an electronic version.)
Access
The notion of access is to be understood in two ways. First, the question of
the new life of an old novel or poem cannot even be raised if it cannot easily be found and read by the
general public. For example, in the period examined here, an American writer
who was fully recognized during her life and for some years after her early
death, whose remarkable writings are unfortunately inaccessible today except
for a single reprinted volume, is Margery Latimer (1899–1931). None of her work
is online. Less disadvantaged writers, like those under focus, can be read
in reprints or new editions, in libraries, and now digitally, thanks to
commercial e-books and free online libraries. Secondly, reprints and adaptations depend on permissions
as long as the work is under copyright. Contrary to what many readers might
think, most of the works discussed here are still under copyright in the United
States (although not necessarily in Canada or Europe), which means that
permission for each project has to be granted by the estate or the trust
through the agency that handles the rights. Once in the public domain, they are
available without restriction. Winesburg, Ohio (1919), by
Sherwood Anderson, fell into the public domain at the end of 1975 in the United
States and on December 31, 2011, in France. The same would be true of E. L.
Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915),
because both works were published before 1923, unlike the other works examined
here.
Material access is a prerequisite, but serendipity alone will not ensure the discovery of older texts by new
readers. Works by these writers used to be taught in high school, but now the
only one to appear on most reading lists or their equivalents is The
Great Gatsby (1925). How, then, can they find readers,
aside from students in American literature or older fans? There are books that
recommend fiction for young people, like 500 Great Books for Teens by
Anita Silvey. She includes Winesburg, Ohio, which has now
“found a new home in cyberspace.” Much more important nowadays are blogs,
which spread the word about books that have pleased or displeased individual
readers or spectators of adaptations. In August 2011, the website GoodReads was displaying hundreds of “community reviews” of Spoon
River Anthology, a small sample of the “ratings” received.
These comments reveal much about readers’ sensitivities: there are no references
to naturalism or modernism, but, when not repelled by the dark literal content,
the readers frequently exhibit a poetic sense and make connections with other
texts, either through memories or through the desire to read another poet,
Whitman for example, after Spoon River. The young bloggers
have sometimes read Edgar Lee Masters’s book at school or even acted in a
dramatization there, since it is one of the classics drama teachers like to
use. Besides, a number of them came into contact thanks to The Hill (2000), a CD
recording by Richard Buckner, a country singer / songwriter, well-known without being
mainstream, who created his version of some of the poems with music and vocals.
Range
Recent creations/adaptations vary from the above-mentioned five-minute
video to operas at the New York Metropolitan, that is, from one extreme to the
other as regards production costs, number of participants, and position of the
spectators. An American Tragedy, the 1925
Dreiser novel (850 pages, 101 chapters), became an opera first performed in
December 2005. Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, its music
was composed by Tobias Picker. The same novel has since been the subject of
several operas or musicals created and performed in smaller theatres, usually
attached to arts colleges, many of them in Pennsylvania, such as Muhlenberg
College near Allentown (March 2010, music by Robert Strouse) and Hedgerow
Theatre (October 2010, adapted by Louis Lippa). Also in Pennsylvania, the
People’s Light and Theatre Company presented Dreiser’s Sister
Carrie (1900) adapted by Louis Lippa in 1991. Before going into specifics, let us
note the difference between an opera at the Metropolitan, with its huge cost
and commercial responsibilities, and the non-profit theatre productions. These
are not cheap to produce, since they all include live music, a designer, and
often a choreographer—Sister Carrie had a cast of
nineteen and was eight years in the making—but they are supported by public
grants, sponsors, and sometimes the colleges, whose students participate and
whose productions run only a short time unless they are invited to tour. An
intermediate case was provided in 2008, in Nashville, Tennessee, by Elmer
Gantry, an opera after the 1927 Sinclair Lewis novel, commissioned
by the Nashville Opera and Montclair State University, New Jersey. It was a
creation of composer Robert Aldridge and librettist Herschel Garfein. The New York
Times called it “an operatic miracle”
(January 20, 2008). What turned out to be a huge
success had taken seventeen years to polish and be produced, partly for reasons
of cost. This same opera, directed by John Hoomes, with slight changes,
premiered in Milwaukee’s huge Florentine Opera (general director W. Fiorescu)
in July 2010. It is now a set of six Naxos CDs, for which Robert Aldridge and
Herschel Garfein won two Grammy awards in February 2012. Several works by our
authors, like Dodsworth (1929) and Main
Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis, Spoon
River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, and Winesburg,
Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, have been turned into musicals
on the stages of regional theatres in the last
twenty years.
Where films are concerned, there is also a gap between Hollywood
productions and personal or local initiatives. Older Hollywood versions
of An
American Tragedy—one in 1931 directed at first by Sergei Eisenstein
but then rejected by Paramount in favour of von Sternberg, the other in 1951
called “A Place in the Sun” and directed by George Stevens with Elizabeth
Taylor and Montgomery Clift—were so revealing of the politics of the Hollywood
system and of Dreiser himself that they deserved a study of their own in that
light. Much later, in 2011, Warner Studios released an adaptation of
Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (from Tales of
the Jazz Age, 1922), filmed by David Fincher, while a
remake of Tender is the Night (1934) was
in preparation. Three previous film ventures into the world of Fitzgerald had
been weak, especially Jack Clayton’s version of The
Great Gatsby, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in 1974.
Bruce Jackson gives the basic reasons in a nutshell: everything alluded to
in the text is shown or explained in a flashback, and so these films are unable
to deal with the narrative voice or point of view of the novel. This is true of many other film adaptations. However, there is
no necessary disaster attached to Hollywood. In 1960, Lewis’s Elmer
Gantry was a valuable adaptation, thanks to director Richard
Brooks and to actor Burt Lancaster. The latest version, directed by Baz
Luhrmann, with Leonardo DiCaprio, ready to be released at the end of 2012, will
at least end a suspense.
Nothing could be further from a Hollywood production than the
feature film entitled Chicago Heights, filmed in black and white, directed by Daniel Nearing. This is a transposition
of Winesburg,
Ohio set in a present-day, mostly black
southern suburb of Chicago named Chicago Heights, with an Afro-American cast.
The screenplay is by “Sherwood Anderson, Rudy Thauberger and Daniel Nearing,”
and the filming was done by Sanghoon Lee. Nearing and his team worked on this
adaptation/transposition with a budget of a thousand
dollars, filming in various locations, including Nearing’s apartment. The film
was shown in 2010 at several festivals, had a weeklong run at the Chicago Film
Centre, and was highly praised by influential movie critics like Roger Ebert,
who called it “one of the best art films of 2010.”
We shall conclude this glance at the range of adaptations born of
these texts with two ventures in other
forms. The first is a graphic novel created by a single person, Nicki Greenberg, an Australian artist who published her highly imaginative adaptation
of The
Great Gatsby in 2007 after six years of
work. The characters are no longer human beings—they are replaced by
fantastic animals—and the original text is integrated into the drawings. In
Greenberg’words:
To me, Fitzgerald’s
characters are so incisively rendered, their personalities, movements and
voices so immediate and true, that an ordinary human representation does not
capture the essence of the written characters. In imagining the physical form
of each creature—Nick’s shy antennae and soft body, the lift of Daisy’s
dandelion head on her slender neck […] my aim was to illuminate that ‘series of
successful gestures’ so sharply drawn by
Fitzgerald.
The other is a resurrection of Spoon River Anthology inspired
by the setting of the original monologues. In the expanded version of their
1963 adaptation for the stage, at the Parkland College Theatre (Champaign,
Illinois, 2006–7), Charles Aidman and Randi Collins Hard included students
dressed as “living statues” who gave a mime performance in the lobby of the
theatre before the play, then went onstage and became part of the set as
statues. A little later, Tom Andolora launched his Spoon
River Project. This adaptation has been performed at night, in real
cemeteries, first in his hometown, Jamestown, New York, in 2008, and then, in
the summer of 2011, in Brooklyn’s famous Green-Wood cemetery. The spectators
are seated and the actors move around, holding lanterns. “There’s no fourth
wall, which is fantastic,” said Andolora.
Process
The creative reading involved goes somewhat like this. The
director is a reader of the original or source work (sometimes its author) and
then becomes an intermediary who rereads it in an imaginative way, which implies a degree
of personal projection and collective work. Eventually,
the spectator has the chance to view the work, adding another level of
reading, which may or may not include
the pleasure of recognizing the original. There are also more and more
re-adaptations. These stages do not commit the adapter(s) as to how to
regard the original text or how to bridge the gap between
the time in which it was written and the cultural climate and the attitudes of audiences when the new work is presented,
but usually “an adaptation is not vampiric.” As to a supercilious attitude
towards adapters, as early as 1919, T. S. Eliot questioned “why originality was
valued over ‘repetition’. No poet, no artist, of any art, has his complete
meaning alone.” Another instance is of
particular relevance here: Sinclair Lewis’s novel, Dodsworth was dramatized by
Sidney Howard in 1933. To the first published
edition of the script, Howard added a postscript on dramatization (vii–xvii)
and Lewis himself an essay, “The Art of Dramatization” (xviii–lxvi), worth
quoting. After mocking the “earnest Intellectual” who told him he had “sold
out” by approving a film based on Arrowsmith (1931), Lewis
asserted: “Actually, portions, and sometimes all, of a dramatization are
valuable precisely as they depart from the detail of the original fiction” (italics in the original).
He took pains to demonstrate literally how Howard had improved on his own story
at one point by compressing thirty-eight pages into one short scene.
Anticipating many theorists, Lewis claimed, “Dramatization is quite
as much an act of creation as any play based entirely upon the dramatist’s own design, and
an acute study of the tale to be dramatized is less important than
the process of imaginative reflection which recasts the original elements for
the stage.” Dodsworth, in Howard’s stage
version, was performed again at New York’s Metropolitan Playhouse for three
weeks in 2010.
Usually, the rereading of a work of fiction in view of a change in medium is partly
conditioned by its length and style, so it was daring of playright Louis Lippa to conceive an adaptation
of Sister
Carrie for the stage in two parts,
of three acts each, which lasted six to seven hours and could be seen in one
sitting (with a dinner break) or on two consecutive nights. The 450-page
Dreiser novel lacks stylistic grace and would be unfamiliar to most spectators. Audience reactions were sharply positive or negative, but the
play ran for two months at the People’s Light and Theatre Company, where Lippa
is playwright-in-residence, and won international acclaim. Richard Lingeman,
Dreiser’s biographer, praised its grappling with the novel. It “did not attempt
to condense the book or to narrow its focus to the relationships among the three main characters” (The Nation, May 27, 1991). Since
2005, the New York collective Elevator Repair Service (ERS), founded and
directed by John Collins, has been challenging spectators in a different way in
its treatment of The Great Gatsby, a short,
beautifully written novel. The title, Gatz, is the only change made in
what turns out to be a complete,
eight-hour reading aloud, with two intermissions and a meal. But there is more:
in this version, Nick Carraway, the narrator, is a present-day office worker
who is bored, finds a copy of the novel on his computer-filled desk, and begins
to read it out loud from line one; soon, his twelve colleagues are
impersonating the various characters and moving around as Nick reads on.
Critics and spectators have either been irritated by the chosen context
or utterly enthralled by the sound of Fitzgerald’s prose, the inventiveness in the acting, and the quality of
Scott Shepherd’s reading. The critic Ben Brantley gave Gatz a
prize for incitation to creative reading: “Mr. Collins’s production endows
[Nick] with the godlike power conferred on a reader by a great novelist. We the audience are
the vicarious creators of Nick, and Daisy and
Gatsby.”
A remarkable feature of these productions is that, however
disconcerting, their intention is without exception to pay homage to the
original works. They acknowledge their source without ambiguity, even in a
transposition; there is no hidden appropriation or plagiarism. Striking
examples of dynamic homage paid to earlier texts were offered by the New York
Public Library: for its hundredth anniversary (2009–10) and the 250th of
Voltaire’s Candide, the library presented an
exhibition called “Candide” at 250: Scandal and Success.
Along with this very rich show tracing the many readings and reinterpretations
of Voltaire’s tale since 1759, an experiment “in public reading and communal
annotation” took place in the blog series All Possible Worlds, “taking this
history of readings and turning it toward the future, plugging Candide into the
intellectual networks of the new millennium: a kind of Enlightenment 2.0.”
Lasting two months, placed under the sign, “Let us cultivate our garden,” it
offered a digital journey, inviting as many types of readers as possible to
participate. The library’s website shows traces of the exchanges in addition to
the images of rare editions of Voltaire’s work. Even more experimental was
a new performance of Elevator Repair Service for the same centennial: readers
in the periodical room were suddenly interrupted by individuals among them who
started reciting short fragments from three well-known novels, The Great Gatsby, The
Sun Also Rises (1926), and The Sound and the Fury (1929),
in a strange, chaotic way, speaking at the same time. Called Shuffle, this
hybrid, which included projected
images, used changing software algorithms to draw lines from the three
books, the whole performance lasting twenty-two minutes. The “mash-up” or “remix” (not done completely at random) aimed at creating literary
reminiscence or curiosity beyond the disturbing fragments. Enjoying it was
certainly made easier by close familiarity with the three modern classics.
Close-Ups
Genesis
I shall now focus mainly on five of the adaptations mentioned above,
four performed live and one on film, in an attempt to discern first what
motivated the adapters, composers, and directors to work on these particular
projects. Charles Richter, the director of theatre at Muhlenberg College, was
drawn to An American Tragedy through
his admiration for the composer, Charles Strouse. Strouse, who had written the
score for three successful Broadway musicals, conceived the idea of
a musical adaptation of Dreiser’s novel, but abandoned a first attempt in 1995. Richter, upon
hearing that first version in an early “reading” session done to interest
potential backers, was “struck by Strouse’s haunting score for the dark
morality tale.” Several years later, after what Richter is not alone in calling
the “disaster” of the opera at the Metropolitan, he initiated, with Strouse’s
approval, a revision of Strouse’s draft with a team of specialists and a large
production staff, and only then, he says, did he read the novel for the first
time, “an odd, foreign experience, ultimately compelling.” After one year, they
obtained the rights from the Metropolitan Opera, which had been given them by
the Dreiser Estate. Only then could the team really get to work on the
production, which was financed by the college, a grant, and a foundation, in the
total amount of $50,000.
Richter co-directed with Strouse’s wife, Barbara Siman, who also
choreographed. Charles Strouse had an additional personal motive, as he had
been involved in a boating accident with a woman. The lake scene, the climax of
the story, difficult to stage, became the focus of the musical and “the best
writing” in the rewriting of the libretto by Mark Saint-Germain, according to
Charles Richter. When did the other directors under consideration read the
books they would adapt? Eric Rosen, who turned Winesburg, Ohio into a
musical, had not previously read the book, whereas Tom Andolora, Daniel
Nearing, and John Collins had first read the books by Masters, Anderson, or
Fitzgerald in school or college. Andolora adds
that Spoon
River Anthology is often used by teachers of acting like himself with their
students. The idea was with him for many years. Nearing and Collins also worked
on their respective projects on Winesburg, Ohio and The
Great Gatsby for several years.
Yet to say that these productions were on their creators’ minds
for a long time is not enough. Each is also the result of an intense
collaboration. The two musicals, An American Tragedy and Winesburg,
Ohio, were conceived by large teams, revised, and rewritten many
times. All include music, several need a choreographer, all require a large
production staff, and then there are the actors. The resulting musical, one
notes, was performed six times only, which is not unusual. For Gatz, John
Collins said, “Scott [Scott Shepherd, who plays the narrator, Nick Carraway]
has been as much of a dramaturge, co-director and co-author of this piece.”
Elevator Repair Service (ERS) is a company and its director insists on the
necessary complicity between the actors. For his film, Daniel Nearing, in
exchange for being trusted by his African-American cast as a white director,
agreed to accept some of their suggestions for the screenplay.
Text to
performance
What has become of each original text? It has gone without
saying so far that none of them was converted into a comedy. Indeed, all deal with
the contradictions of the American dream as exemplified largely through figures of tragedy or
pathos. We have seen what a challenge it is to adapt An
American Tragedy; all its adapters, however, have been sustained by the mythical
dimension acquired by the Gillette murder
case of 1906, the fait divers which inspired
Dreiser. The trial and execution of Chester Gillette, considered guilty of the
drowning of his pregnant girl friend, Grace Brown, a co-worker, when boating on
Big Moose Lake one night, was a case that thrilled readers of the press and
aroused debates because of the doubts about Chester’s guilt, because of the
death penalty, and because of its class aspect. Many versions of the story, in
content and form, circulated before and after Dreiser’s novel. The presence of
Grace’s ghost, perceived several times, has kept it alive. In such a rich
novel, the textual reduction cannot be neutral, especially as its interpretation has varied sharply, from
emphasis on the young male victim of the American dream to pity for the tragic
female victim. In the musical presented at Muhlenberg, which lasts two hours, the long novel has
been turned into a dialogue in two acts of about fifteen scenes each. The skeleton of the story is there, with
the names changed, except for Roberta’s. The haughtiness of the upper class,
the class-consciousness of the female factory workers, the naïveté of Roberta
and Charlie/Clyde, Charlie’s ambivalent relationship to religious faith, and the
role of the press are all underlined. The abortion theme, still shocking to
some, is present, though very briefly. Roberta tells Charlie/Clyde that she is
probably pregnant in act 2, scene 2. Then comes Charlie/Clyde’s moral
dilemma—will he kill his pregnant working-class girlfriend who bars his way to
the upper class? Dreiser’s text leaves Clyde’s act—purposeful or accidental?—in
doubt, and that ambiguity is preserved, after which his trial and execution are
raced through.
But a musical is not
just a text. In this case, most of the
dialogue (about 80 percent) is sung, often by several of the characters forming
a chorus. There is emotional power in some lyrics like Charlie/Clyde’s “Lost in
the Dark,” in which he implores God, feeling like a helpless child, “Comfort
me, so one day I may be a man! Who am I, I want to be a man,” or Roberta’s
repeated “Don’t leave me now” in the lake scene. The orchestra underlines
moments of irony or pathos. There is much dancing and partying in the
representation of the carefree upper class, and the play ends on that note. The
production (a DVD was made by Muhlenberg College) is efficient as a musical
melodrama, but while the focus is naturally on the three major characters, much
of the nuanced reflection on the forces that drive them (on Clyde’s being trapped by his dream, or on guilt and
innocence) is lost. Nevertheless, when one changes the focus from textual comparison to
the adapters’ goals, one feels that the composer and the directors tried to bring the basic
questions raised by Dreiser’s tale to spectators of another age, few of whom
would ever read the novel. Charles Richter says, “it’s a real downer” and “its
darkness limited its appeal,” but I observe that they retained the title,
unlike Hollywood in A Place in the Sun. In fact, the
reception at Muhlenberg Theatre, from several eye-witness accounts, was
sometimes unexpected: older spectators came out smiling, nostalgic memories
having been awakened, while younger ones were frustrated by the sketchy
treatment of serious issues. A generation gap?
Most present-day spectators do not suspect that An
American Tragedy was banned in Boston in 1929, its publisher
being found guilty of obscenity, whereupon Dreiser and his attorneys fought the
courts of Massachusetts to the last appeal; nor do they generally know that, in
1931, he ran away from “Hooeyland” and sued Paramount—the Hollywood studio that
had bought the rights—or what was happening to the same book at the hands of
Joseph von Sternberg. Dreiser provides us with a lasting caveat by a living author: “Even though they buy the right of reproduction, they don’t buy the right to
change it into anything they please.” He was particularly incensed at the suppression of nearly a
third of the novel, the description of Clyde’s youth, which he considered
essential to an understanding of what “would cause the boy to want something he
never had.” He attributed the studios’ unfortunate choices not to their own
timidity, but to their catering to “the lowest common
denominator” in their audiences—the
same words Dos Passos would apply to the press five years later, in his
novel, The Big Money. Dreiser could not
use non-existing moral rights to protest or forbid the cuts. In 1951, the
Cold-War climate in Hollywood affected the next version, but Dreiser was no
longer alive.
Whereas Dreiser’s novel follows one major plot, Spoon
River Anthology tells 246 stories, each poem an epitaph, the
voice of a deceased inhabitant of the town of Spoon River. Winesburg,
Ohio, subtitled “A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life,” deals
with “adventures” or epiphanies in the lives of twenty-five characters, a
“cavalcade of lost souls.” Tom Andolora, adapter, director, and producer
of TheSpoon
River Project, calls his work “a theatre piece with music,” as
distinguished from a musical. Guided by his innovative idea of performing it
outdoors at night in its literary setting, he chose forty-six poems to be
spoken by the eleven actors whom he selected from two hundred applicants. He made it clear to me
that no poem was abridged or modified, his only additions being “one paragraph
at the end to give it an ending that makes sense theatrically” and the songs he chose, all from the era between 1880 and 1930.
The costumes are of the same period, because “it suits the flavour
of the poetry,” he said. Like the volume, the
play opens on “The Hill”:
Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the
fighter?
All, all are sleeping on the hill.
One passed in a fever…
Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith…?
Then the first single voice
selected, Archibald Higbie’s, cries out, “ I loathed you, Spoon River.” These
men and women are free at last, free of social hypocrisy and mendacity. Deacon
Taylor declares:
I belonged to the church,
And to the party of prohibition;
And the villagers thought I died of eating watermelon,
In truth I had cirrhosis of the liver,
For every noon for thirty years,
I slipped behind the prescription partition
In Trainor’s drug store
And poured a generous drink
From the bottle marked
“Spiritus frumenti.”
Other denizens are subtler, more
poetic, like Robert Davidson:
I grew spiritually fat living off the souls of men.
If I saw a soul that was strong
I wounded its pride and devoured its strength.
The shelters of friendship knew my cunning,
For where I could steal a friend I did so…
Devouring souls, I should have lived forever.
But their undigested remains bred in me a deadly nephritis…
I collapsed at last with a shriek.
Remember the acorn;
It does not devour other acorns.
The choice is even-handed, but with proportionately more women
than in the printed volume. All the human passions are represented, each
character’s language reflecting background and personality. Lucinda Matlock,
who died at ninety-six after raising twelve children and doing all the chores,
ends with a peaceful statement: “It takes life to love
Life”. Rosie Roberts shot a rich client
and later, “mad at the crooked game of life,” told the police herself. Men are
not spared in the recital of women’s victimization, all this within a small
community. In the outdoor production, perhaps because Andolora is a voice-coach, he made sure the spoken epitaphs would come across clearly. As
the actors move in and out of view among trees and tombstones with their
lanterns, we perceive how the director, following E. L. Masters, suggests the
contradictions of life, its mysteries, and the ambivalence of many towards
their home town. As for the audience, according to Andolora, more than half do
not know, when they come, what the play is about and are surprised at the
substance; high school students, he thinks, do not really understand it. A
reviewer wrote: “We may live in a very different world than that of Spoon River, but
Masters’ truths about the human condition are eternal. The Spoon River Project delivers
them with love, care, and a rich, enveloping atmosphere.” Most spectators
can subscribe to that.
Dylan Thomas read Masters while writing his drama, Under
Milk Wood, A Play for Voices (1954), a
radio play about people in a Welsh village much like Spoon River (or the Gopher
Prairie of Main Street, the Zenith
of Babbitt,
or Winesburg, Ohio) in a comparable mood. Under Milk Wood, the work of a
poet, is a closer heir to Masters than Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938),
although it too focuses on a small community in which the dead are present and,
in act 3, talk to the living from their graves. Wilder’s goals were somewhat
different, however. Let us not forget that the most creative
readers often become authors. Not all become famous, but the process is fascinatingly
repetitive. Here is an instance of a chain reaction, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg,
Ohio being the subject. On an open media site called
AllVoices, a young blogger (“Mathitak,” June 13, 2008) reports his reaction to
a book in the series, Field-Tested Books, made available
by a Chicago company, in which authors write about titles they enjoyed reading in
particular places. One such author is Joe Meno, the Chicago novelist (born
1974), who discovered Anderson through an assignment in art school, liked a
short story, and so read Winesburg, Ohio. Several years
later, Meno wrote,
That book became my
Bible, not just as a student trying to learn to write (my first two novels are
direct rip-offs of Winesburg)… It was one of those rare moments where a book intersects
exactly with the reader’s life… The people on the Red Line could be pretty
grotesque. Not ugly, not disgusting, but a little too real, a little too human.
Mathitak reacts: “He [Meno] wound up writing about two things
that have had a strong influence on me growing up—Chicago’s Red Line and
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.”
A few years before that supposedly “unfilmable” book
became a film called Chicago Heights, a collective led
by Eric Rosen (book and lyrics), Andre Pluess,
Ben Sussman (music and additional lyrics), and Terence J. Nolen (director)
gradually developed a one-act musical called Winesburg, Ohio (Chicago,
Steppenwolf Theatre, 2002) into a longer one (Chicago, Steppenwolf and About
Face Theatre, 2004) and then into a more inclusive one presented in 2005 at the
Arden Theatre, Philadelphia, and then at the Kansas City Repertory. The reason
for the extension was the unexpected success of the first version, “the kind of
revelation that happens very rarely in creative life.” What first
motivated Eric Rosen, the co-founder of About Face Theatre? He had not read the
book before it was recommended to him by Jessica Thebus, and then he wished to
work on it, but what he needed to start imagining was a powerful image. He
found it in Alice Hindman, the young woman so tortured by unfulfilled desire,
so miserable, that one evening she has what Anderson calls “an adventure.” She
runs naked along the street in the rain: “She thought that the rain would have
some creative and wonderful effect on her body.” Then, once back in her bed,
trembling, “she began trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that
many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg” (“Adventure”). The team
ended up selecting thirteen of the stories. The music is rooted in
nineteenth-century folk music, and the costumes are in keeping. One reviewer
wrote that it would be “a hit with audiences who believe in theatre music as a
means of heightening dramatic emotion.” He was right.
Text to Film
Judging from the script of Chicago Heights, Daniel Nearing’s
reading of that same book in cinematic form also reflects a form of empathy, “celebrating the universal
power of the source while playing on its anachronisms,” to use his words. He and his team, Rudy Thauberger and
Sanghoon Lee in particular, did not hesitate to change the medium, the period, the location, the
title, and the origins of the characters. Among these one finds that, as in the musical, emphasis is
laid on the mother, the ex-rebel whose marriage was a disaster, whose literal
dying hope is to convince her beloved only son to get away and become somebody.
At the end, going away and becoming a writer is exactly what he sets out to do
as she dies. Nathan Walker (George Willard in the book) is the observer,
often the confidante of the townsfolk who will eventually be the substance of
his writings. This adaptation, like Gatz, is structured by a narrator
who becomes the central character. But, in Chicago Heights, the original text
has been rewritten, and the screenplay, while including many passages verbatim, takes a number of liberties. Some aim at adjusting it to the
new time and place; others, at helping today’s spectators grasp the timeless meanings. Older Nathan duplicates the teenager whenever he makes
comments, so that we see two Nathans. We may be surprised to see and hear a
pastor singing gospel at the beginning, since religion in the book is limited
to a maniacal old farmer who wants to sacrifice his grandson, little David, and
to a minister’s sexual obsessions, but an insert shown at the outset indicates
how close to the spirit of the book the film will attempt to be:
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored. (screenplay, scene 1)
The poet who wrote these lines, Philip Larkin (“The Old Fools,”
in High
Windows, 1973), is credited as the film’s editor since his
poem helped Nearing restructure his film. The old writer of the prologue,
“The Book of the Grotesque,” gets due emphasis, and an interesting shift makes Older Nathan take the
place of the anonymous old writer in his bed. As his fancies file by, he even becomes Sherwood Anderson
himself, the writer, reminiscing. An echo of the grotesques is artfully
suggested by some beautiful odd-shaped reflections on Anish Kapoor’s recent
sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, nicknamed “the Bean.” Then, the famous
sentences that define Anderson’s understanding of the grotesque are shouted by
a preacher (Rev. Hartman) addressing his congregation, made up of all the
characters: “The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself,
called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque
and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.” This “declarative moment” in the
form of a sermon is, to me, a debatable decision, although culturally rooted in
its new environment.
Other choices in the film eliminate or blend characters, place
or displace emphasis according to the team’s technical needs and to their own
feelings, which could differ and result in compromises. The image of the
twisted apples, for instance—“only the few know the sweetness of the twisted
apples” (Dr. Reefy, “Paper Pills”)—is so telling, since it also counterbalances
the bitter insights, that it could have provided more than a passing reference.
On the other hand, the African-American cast, in the way they act and are
filmed by Sanghoon Lee, offer such a natural-looking equivalent to the white
Ohio villagers of over a century ago that one need not have known the source.
The widest distancing is in the dialogue, the actors considering that they had
to modernize speech and atmosphere, which meant
including some crude words and fleeting expletives absent from the original, along with the insistent presence of
gospel music and hymns. If this transposition amounts
to a form of appropriation, it is equivalent to what Julie
Sanders calls “an embedded text.” It could stand on its own but offers
intertextual play at the same time.
Sight and
Sound
The unique conjunction awaiting the spectator of Gatz—hearing
the full text and watching the characters come to life in a strange setting—has
proved risky, like any bold piece of work, with the long hours spent by the
spectators listening to a story of the 1920s and watching the same characters
interacting inside a room of the twenty-first century. The intention is crystal
clear. In the words of John Collins, “We bring the text, the beauty of the
writing, to them […] it is all about reading and writing […] about the act of
reading […] we want to make it mysterious.” The added role of the accidental,
from one six-hour performance to another, is there mostly for the sake of the
actors, to spare them possible monotony. The reception has been divided. Some
viewers are enthusiastic, finding the production “transporting,” largely
because of the quality of Scott Shepard’s reading of the whole novel, or
because of the transformation of the office workers into the characters. Others
are critical of the staging, which they find tedious or ill-suited. Keeping
Nick Carraway at the centre, having us follow everything through his eyes and
his words, including his own evolution, is a great achievement; however, critic
Diana Simmonds brought up an important point when she regretted the devaluation
of Jay Gatsby, who is treated contemptuously or comically as a fake, whereas to
her he remains a tragic figure: “The line between clever and too clever by
half, distanciation and disrespect, is so fine as to be invisible.” Yet, the performance is so successful that ERS keeps being
asked to perform Gatz, inside and outside the United
States.
Continuity and Change
Even if no reader can outdo Pierre Ménard who, as Jorge Luis
Borges explains, was able to improve on Cervantes—without identifying with him
or plagiarizing or playing with anachronism—by writing the same words as those in Don
Quixote, as a kind of palimpsest, we now witness, in Europe as in
America, a rather surprising amount of creative activity
applied to adapting written fiction or poetry to other media. And yet, especially in the cases I
have highlighted here, adapting a modern classic is far from being a lazy or
sure-fire choice. With verbal elements removed or added, or both, plus the visual and sound
dimensions, the metaphor of grafting comes to mind, but this does not include the crucial historico-social
factor, to be understood both as the time of writing
and that of reading. All the textual sources we have
dealt with expressed strong criticism of American society, in combination with
a sense of the tragic. Dreiser’s case is of particular interest because his
manner of writing has obscured its power for later generations. How is it,
then, that there are currently so many Dreiser adaptations? Thomas Riggio, an
eminent specialist of his works, gives a concise answer: “Dreiser always reads
better in hard times,” implying that the dark overtones do come across.
In none of our examples do the creative readers as
intermediaries intend to attack the work of the past (there is no hostile parody, for example); on the contrary, they wish to capture the
interest of contemporary spectators, possibly bringing them to read the
original, and since most of the adapters and their teams are young, their own
interpretation is both personal and a product of their culture. The frequent
recourse to operatic and other types of music and song, rather surprising to a
French person, seems as natural to them as to their elders; it also signals an
entrance or re-entrance of these classics into mainstream or even popular
culture. Several times, as in the Elmer Gantry opera, the
subject has lent itself to a compendium of popular American folk and religious
music. I have already mentioned the economic strictures of large productions,
but Elmer
Gantry is also a test of ideological reading. Lewis’s vibrant
satire of evangelical religion through a pseudo-minister faking it for gullible
believers has been toned down here, so that one wonders if it is a personal
choice or the result of a compromise. It is difficult to tell. In several other
instances involving each of these texts, the crudely realistic
or subversive content is also weakened, either because it is drowned in pleasant music, within
the tradition of the musical, or because it is made entertaining by the staging
and the acting. Or is it that the topics are less shocking or controversial
today? This is partly true for sexual matters (except for abortion), so that
there are very sexy scenes (especially in the American Tragedy opera), but
not for evangelical religion, which is flourishing at present, or for class
difference and greed. It may be relatively easier not to try to adjust to
standard genres. The dreaming rather than the tragic potential of the American
dream certainly lends itself best not only to lyricism, but also to a shared
vision—and most of these printed works rest on characters dreaming of some
great individual destiny or collective future. These works afford great
opportunities to contemporary dramatists’ creative reading, unless their
inventiveness, bearing on passages where the writing is particularly poetic and
suggestive, as in parts of Winesburg, Ohio or The
Great Gatsby (the last paragraphs), detracts from it.
At the same time as Dreiser was having trouble with An
American Tragedy being mutilated in Hollywood, in
December 1930, Sinclair Lewis was giving his Nobel Prize speech in Stockholm,
and he did not mince his words. Before an international audience, he voiced
biting accusations against the American public: “The writer is oppressed […] by
the feeling that what he creates does not matter, that he is expected by his
readers to be only a decorator or a clown.” Why are his great “colleagues,”
like Dreiser, the pioneer, and Masters, Anderson, and even himself, so
viciously attacked? The answer lies in the American fear of literature (the
title of his address): “In America most of us—not readers alone but even
writers—are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of
everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues […].
To be really beloved, a novelist must assert that all American men are tall,
handsome, rich, honest.” He also charged the academy with rejecting anything
close in time or real, that is, with respecting only past masters: “Our
American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very
dead.”[52] Now of course the authors around Lewis belong to the canon
(or rather to one of the canons, since definitions and inclusions keep changing
fast in the United States),[53] but
the accusation holds. The cultural context evinces more continuity than change,
at least as regards regions away from the big cities: we recognize the same
complaints in the 1980s by Garrison Keillor, in his descriptions of the
expectations of citizens in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, one more imaginary small
Midwestern town (Lake Wobegon Days, New York: Viking,
1985). In that unusual case, the adaptation was from very popular radio
chronicles to book, by the author himself, and in print the satire was more
acute than on the airwaves. Is it that the human voice, let alone the other
components of dramatization, tends to soften the critical content?[54] Thus, even though Nick Carraway says, near the end
of The
Great Gatsby, “I see now that this has been
a story of the West, after all,” the new readers of these books perceive that a
cultural critique is raised that transcends provincialism.
Culture is inseparable
from the socio-political whole. In the middle of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Sinclair
Lewis worried enough over the popularity of demagogues like Huey Long to write It Can’t
Happen Here (1935), a novel imagining the election of a fascist president of
the United States. The following year it became Impossible
ici in France thanks to a translation by Raymond Queneau; a
Northwestern University junior called Saul Bellow published “The Hell It
Can’t,” his first short story, to express his own fears in the form of fiction;
and then Lewis himself adapted his novel for the stage with John L. Moffit. The
Federal Theatre Project, a great but short-lived creation of the New Deal’s
Works Progress Administration, commissioned it and mounted twenty-two
simultaneous nationwide productions of the adaptation. The reason why this
is brought up here is that on October 24, 2011 (on its seventy-fifth
anniversary), the same adaptation was read in twenty-two local American
theatres at the same time, at the instigation of actor, writer, and comedian
Daniel Henriques. The after-performance discussions all reflected the same
feeling, which is that such a revival “had everything to do with what’s going
on in America today,” many admiring “Lewis’ prescience in foreseeing society’s
present day problems,” so that, in the words of Richard Lingeman, that play
“resonates” today. The involvement in this event of academics as well as people
in the media and in the arts also confirms that some things have changed in
academia since Lewis attacked it.
A few months later, in February 2012, a lively email exchange
began among the members of the Sinclair Lewis Society after a public theatre in
New York City showed the 1931 film, Arrowsmith. They discussed the old
Hollywood film and seemed to agree that a remake would be an excellent idea,
not just to honour the novel, but because “a remake of Arrowsmith would
be appealing today. The conflict between money and science is as compelling if
not more than it was in Lewis’ time. Arrowsmith could even be cast as an AGW
(Anti-Global Warming) sceptic torn between following his own research and
falsifying his data in order to retain funding by the socio-political science
establishment. Interesting idea?” (Michael Goodell). Several of his colleagues
responded positively. One wrote, “I was reminded of your email yesterday when our
local hospital announced across-the-board cuts. It has long been known that
this hospital follows a business model of service […]. Certainly the issues
presented in Arrowsmith completely cross to
contemporary research” (Susan O’Brien). The novel, it seems, is taught in
medical schools (Sally Parry)—a kind of preventive medicine?
Conclusion
One is tempted to distinguish two major types of interest
aroused today by these old novels or poems, interest strong enough to lead to creative
readings, and also to instill sufficient energy to motivate others and get the adaptations produced or
published. One is the topicality of many subjects, here found especially in
several works by Theodore Dreiser and by Sinclair Lewis. The two writers’ main
characters are social types described not sentimentally, but objectively,
satirically, or critically, in whom the desire for riches and power dominates.
The frequent choice of Sister Carrie or An
American Tragedy by adapters rather than The
Financier or Jennie Gerhardt perhaps makes
it easier to create emotion. In any case, what Marianne Debouzy wrote about Dreiser applies
also to Sinclair Lewis: they “tear off masks,” the masks of fatality, religion,
and morality that society uses in order to function. Lewis’s protagonists—the doctor who eventually cheats on
his research (Arrowsmith), the lyrical preacher
who is an impostor (Elmer Gantry), the fascist who wins
the presidency (It Can’t Happen Here)—are not
old-fashioned or foreign to twenty-first century concerns, as witness the
exchanges quoted above. The other type of interest, which is more
characteristic of Masters, Anderson, and Fitzgerald, comes from a blending of poetry
of language and timeless human moods and emotions, plus the coincidence of
individual and national projections, under the sign of dream and disillusion, embodied mostly in characters who lead common, ordinary lives.
In three cases described above, the adapters
significantly chose to give spectators the original text to hear, even if
abridged, without giving up an imaginative staging.
With new technology, reading itself has changed in many ways. Among the positive
effects of the phenomenon is the lowering of barriers between printed and
digital texts, and between different artistic expressions including the virtual
(hence the resulting hybrids). Transmission remains
important but need not be literal. At the heart of it is the appeal to the imagination: without
it, there is no emotion or reflection, so the self-appointed transmitters as
artists try to interest the newer generations in literature of the past that
has stirred their own imaginations and possibly pass it on, or, in the words of
Alex Wilson, “repurpose it.” The vitality of this artistic scene is
remarkable and tempers a bitter remark on the writers of short stories “who
give their life blood to make it easy for uncreative dolts to pass the time
away.” Henry Miller wrote this in his last tribute to Sherwood Anderson.
This same Anderson today presents a case rife with
contradictions or paradoxes. In schools, his presence has dwindled; on the
academic side, there have been a few recent studies in book form, but, after
the deaths of most long-time American Andersonians and the absence of younger
ones, there is no longer a Society or circle to inform, organize, keep up a website,
or publish a bulletin (such as the late Winesburg Eagle). Even though The
Library of America is finally about to publish a volume of his works, planned
for 2013 and long overdue, it will not replace the interaction we have seen
between academics and various new or confirmed artists apropos Dreiser,
Masters, Lewis, and Fitzgerald. So what follows is unexpected:
Winesburg, OH—In a move retail-industry insiders are calling
“thematically fitting”, Wal-Mart opened its newest store Monday in Winesburg, a
town of 25,000 in Northern Ohio […] “We chose Winesburg due to its convenient
location […] and the darkly powerful inner lives of its residents,” said Thomas
Coughlin, president and CEO of Wal-Mart Stores […] Doc Reefy, 72, works at the
new Wal-Mart as a greeter and stockperson. A physician for nearly 50 years,
Reefy grew bored with the quiet routine of retirement and now uses his large,
gnarled hands—which resemble clusters of unpainted wooden balls fastened
together by steel rods—for rolling back prices […] If the Winesburg store
proves successful, Wal-Mart next plans to open stores in Spoon River, IL, and
Gopher Prairie, MN.
This is excerpted from a much longer article entitled “Wal-Mart
Opens Store in Winesburg, Ohio” which appeared (with a photograph of the “new
building”) on May 30, 2001, in the news section of The
Onion, a weekly that defines itself as satirical and has been
appearing in print and online since 1988. This brilliant piece assumes reader
complicity in an extensive joke that includes many passages from the 1919 book
by Sherwood Anderson, as if written by the reporter. Does this mean that The
Onion’s readers possess the necessary cultural capital? It is taken
for granted that some have read the book or seen one or another of the
adaptations, or perhaps will become curious enough to read it. And then, in his
novel Indignation (2008),
Philip Roth had his New Jersey protagonist, young Marcus Messner, flee his
father by enrolling in college in Winesburg, Ohio. Several names, especially
place names inside the town, are borrowed from the book. Philip Roth,
questioned, replied that he thought that if there had been a college in
Winesburg, “it would have been the college I wrote about”; all he did was “to
respectfully borrow Anderson’s place.” Depending on their familiarity with Anderson’s book,
Roth’s readers are free to associate with the first Winesburg to varying
degrees. Intertextuality is another form of afterlife for literature.
Exercise:
You just read:
‘(re)reading of a number of works
of imagination… leads contemporary writers, stage or film directors, composers,
illustrators, and multi-media artists to adapt or
transpose them’.
‘The role of new technology cannot be overestimated, both in artistic creation and in the circulation of information’.
‘Creative reading has progressively given birth to
a …. adaptation studies….. is now frequently
taught and is recognized as “a formal entity, a
process of creation, a process of reception,” reflecting
“the adapter’s creative interpretation
or interpretive creation,”
Now read below:
Film and Literature: the process of
transposition
Alaa L. Alnajm University of Kufa
The relationship between literature
and film are interrelated. Adaptation literary works such as film is controlled
by the fidelity of that source. It has been believed that adaptation is the
interpretation of the original text as mirror, derivative or secondary
production. Critics have concerned the problems related with visuality of the
film. Each act of the visualization narrows down the role of characters,
landscapes or objects, which have created by the book and will be reconstructed
again the imagination of the reader. Therefore, visualization has deleted some
of the details in which book finds them useful to be mentioned. Film and
literature has a strong relationship about many years during the history of
cinema. Commentators are interesting in quoting Joseph Conrad's statement of
his novelistic intention:
"My task which I am trying to
achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you
feel- it is, before all, to make you see".
This shows that Conrad had tried to
tell his reader that word is written to be seen. Adaptation always tries to
emphasize on the memory of narrative especially novel, that memory which has
been driven from the realistic situations of reading. On the other hand,
adaptation expends that memory striving to obliterate it with the presence of
its new images. Therefore, adaptation reworks to consume the memory of
narrative.
Question:
How do you see adaptation and transposition?
Read further Claire Bruyère and Alaa L. Alnajm or some other writer if you wish
to give your informed and academic opinions
(An academic
opinion is the conclusion you come to when you have evaluated all the
evidence you were given in a lecture or read about or researched. ... You
reason and support your conclusion by evidence)
.
(An informed
opinion is based on knowledge of the facts and carefully considered
principles. It relies on evidence instead of limited personal experience. When
you choose sources for your papers, you will generally want an informed
opinion from a professional source).
Exercise:
Read below
Dramas based on foreign novels
October
10, 2014
Nowadays almost every other drama is based on a novel or short
story mostly written by a female fiction writer. Adapting novels for films and
dramas is a popular trend worldwide, being the first television channel
definitely state run Pakistan Television is the pioneer in Pakistan when it
comes to adapting novels for dramas. PTV produced many dramas based on Urdu and
regional (Punjabi, Sindhi) novels which I had already covered in a series of
articles. Following on the trend of PTV, now novel based drama is a routine.
But PTV clearly carries another distinction in this aspect which
is adapting foreign language novels for dramas. Adapting a foreign novel
requires a lot of effort as it requires localization of main character and
situation of novel. The main theme remains the same, but the character and
environment of novel is customized as per the local taste and censor
requirements.
Since 1970’s PTV produced few dramas based on novels, which
received mixed response. Interestingly most of such dramas by PTV have Rahat
Kazmi in the cast. Speaking of contemporary drama making, only Hum Tv has
adapted few foreign novels as dramas though they never mentioned the name of
the novel.
This article is a compilation of drama serials of PTV and Hum Tv
which were based on foreign novels.
Qurbatain
aur Faaslay
Qurbatain aur Faaslay aired in 1974 was based on Russian novel ‘Fathers and
sons,’ by Ivan Turgenev. Starring Rahat Kazmi and Sahira Kazmi, the play was
very popular when aired from PTV Rawalpindi centre. It was a black and white
play and perhaps its recording is no more available. The play provided
nationwide recognition to both Rahat and Sahira.
Parchayian
Parchayian in late 1970’s is another play from PTV Rawalpindi centre
based on English novel ‘Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James. Haseena Moin dramatized
the novel whereas Rahat Kazmi, Sahira Kazmi, Talat Hussain, Shakeel and Javaid
Sheikh were in prominent roles. The play was successful and it is available
online as well.
Novels which
could be turned into dramas
Pakistani dramas especially on
PTV always relied on notable Urdu writers like Dr.Enver Sajjad, Bano Qudisa,
Ashfaq Ahmed, Fatima Suraiya Bajia, Haseena moin to write new dramas for them.
However with the passage of times many of these writers passed away or old age
sapped their energy. Also our channels started the unhealthy trend of choosing
sub par scripts written by digest writers as well as immature writers who
concentrate on themes like Cousin marriage, the accused woman. second
marriages, extra-marital affairs, The evil westernized woman and the pious
suffering wife who over looks all of her Husband’s misdeeds ( affairs, verbal
and psychical abuse)etc. If our industry has to survive it must start adapting
the works of our classic Urdu writers.
Here are
some of my selections:
1) Des
huay pardes: Written by Mustansar Husain Tarar
it is a tale of a Pakistani immigrant who unintentionally leaves for England
and rises to success all the while longing for his native village. Brilliantly
written it also deals with a subject like racism.
2) Dakia
aur Jolaha: Another novel by Mustansar Husain
Tarar it has multiple story lines but the main story is the unseen romance of a
girl from a Feudal environment and a writer twice her age through their letters
written to one and another. There is a strong theme of Sufism running through
it. It needs a talented cast and director to be aired on Television.
3) Naya Ghar: Written by Intezar Husain it describes
the rootlessness of the people who immigrated to Pakistan. It also contains
many sly hints to the political turmoil. One fascinating part of the novel is
the old family documents in which the protagonist relives his family history.
4) The works of
manto: Many of Manto’s stories can be
turned into thought-provoking telefilms. I especially liked his short story ‘
Anjam bilkhair’ which describes how a former courtesan is unable to lead a
clean life because of the hypocrisy of our society.
5) Works of Qurutulain Hyder: I can’t pinpoint any of them they are all my favorites.
Not only can they be serialized but many can be turned into telefilms. I
especially recommend ‘ Kohar ke peeche’ and ‘ Agle janam mohe bitya na kijio’
6) Foreign novels: A large number of early PTV serials were adapted from
foreign novels. Why not continue this trend. Recently a ‘ God of small things’
was adapted as Talkhiyan. Not only these novels are for adults we can adapt
Children’s classics like ‘ A secret garden’. Wouldn’t it be nice to see
children once again watching Television at 5-6 PM time slot. Infact why doesn’t
PTV take the initiative? We can also adapt the works of Sydney Sheldon,
Danielle Steele and many other authors who enjoy a mass popularity and appeal.
There is a whole world of possibility. Romantic. mystery, horror, detective,
adventure, fantasy so many genres to choose from.
7) The works of Ibn-e-Safi: One of Urdu’s most celebrated authors who ever wrote
detective stories his stories are excellent and deserve to appear on small
screen.
Any additions to this list would
be appreciated. Also please comment and express your views on this subject.
Talha Rizvi
Exercise:
Read below
Fidelity in Adaptation:
Fidelity is
an issue that should be highly employed when studying the adaptation. It has
been the measurement for analyzing the interpretation of adaptation. John
Desmond and Peter Hawkes believe that fidelity seems no longer a mandatory norm
in studying adaptation. They believe that also there is no need to compare
between text and film and no stander measure, fidelity is a matter of
overvaluing. While other critics like Lind Hutcheon believes that fidelity is
an aspect which has been considered in adaptation studies, but it should be
aside while other norms are forefront. Fidelity may tell us the element of
cinema and the screenplay. The language of fidelity in literature and film is
different, text is never judged in comparison to other forms of art
particularly films. Furthermore, the language of fidelity signifies hierarchy
in which the text is the resource and the film is just a copy. Hutcheon in her book
A theory of Adaptation, she attempts to get answers to several pragmatic issues
relating to adaptation, starting with Film and Literature: the process of
transposition the
reasons for using this process when making film. Hutcheon argues that
adaptations can be seen as secondary creations they are everywhere in our
culture. There are some reasons that literature is superior to film.
Questions:
Choose
any drama of PTV and answer the following questions.
Comments
Post a Comment