A Little History of Literature (31 page)

This tricksy type of fiction is very clever and it requires a cleverness on the part of the reader. If we look at the fiction-reading public over the last 300 years, we can see how it has entered into the spirit of the game. There are many pleasures offered by the novel, and trickery is not the least. Laurence Sterne was right.

CHAPTER
32

Off the Page

L
ITERATURE ON
F
ILM
, TV
AND THE
S
TAGE

‘Literature’, as you will know, literally means something that comes to us in the form of letters. That is, something written or printed and taken in through the eye to be interpreted by the brain. But often enough, particularly nowadays, literature comes to us ‘mediated’, in different forms and through different channels and different sense organs.

Let's play another mind game. If you borrowed H.G. Wells's time machine and brought Homer to the present day, what would he make of the all-action, Brad Pitt-starring 2004 film
Troy
– an epic movie ‘based’ (as the title and credits affirm) on his epic, the
Iliad
? What would Homer see in that movie as being in any sense ‘his’? And could he agree what elements in the film were ‘Homeric’?

If you also stopped off in the nineteenth century and picked up Jane Austen (this is getting a bit like
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
, but let's carry on with it), what would the author of
Pride and Prejudice
make of the many TV and film adaptations of her novels? Would she rejoice that, selling only a few hundred copies during
her life, she had, two centuries after her death, reached an audience of tens of millions? Or would she see it as a violation and crossly respond: ‘Leave my novels alone, Sirs!’ And what would the owner of the time machine, H.G. Wells, think of the three films (and in-numerable spin-offs) inspired by his 1890s short tale about time travel? Would he say, ‘The future has arrived’, or ‘That is not what I meant at all’?

‘Adaptation’ is, simply, what happens when literature is recycled in a technology other than that in which it was originated (which is usually print). The word often preferred nowadays is ‘versioning’. One sees many such fruitful versionings in literary history. Looking back at earlier chapters, we could argue that the Bible was ‘adapted’ by the horse-and-cart transport system in the street theatre of the mystery plays. It drove Dickens crazy that there were a dozen stage adaptations of
Oliver Twist
running in competition with his printed novel, from whose producers he received not a penny. ‘We are merely “adapting” you, Mr Dickens’, the theatrical pirates might have responded. Grand opera adapted (‘versioned’) classic literary texts for wholly non-literary consumption – for example, Donizetti's
Lucia di Lammermoor
(based on Sir Walter Scott's
The Bride of Lammermoor
) and Verdi's
Otello
(based on Shakespeare's
Othello
).

One could go on. Adaptation as big business began at the turn of the twentieth century, which saw the arrival of the most effective adaptational machine of all: the moving picture. The ‘dream that kicks’, as it's been called. From the first, cinema swallowed down and spat out vast amounts of literary source-material for the millions of movie-goers it catered for. To take one example of many, in 1897, Bram Stoker, the stage manager of the great actor Henry Irving, decided to write a Gothic romance about blood-sucking vampires and Transylvania. He had never visited the place but he had read some interesting books about it. The vampire was common enough in folklore and there had been some down-market Gothic romances. Stoker's novel
Dracula
did not do all that well until it was adapted as a film,
Nosferatu
, in 1930. Since then over a hundred Dracula films have been made (the actors Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee are the most famous to have played
the blood-sucking count). Dracula has become a ‘brand’ and the vampire romance a whole genre. Without Stoker's novel, Stephenie Meyer's
Twilight
saga or the similarly blockbusting TV series
The Vampire Diaries
would never have come into being. Adaptation, one concludes, can sometimes dwarf the literary text which gave it birth (not that Stoker's novel sells poorly today – far from it). A single work of fiction like
Dracula
can found a multinational industry.

As a general rule, adaptations of literature are driven by three motives. The first is to exploit ‘a good thing’ – to make money by jumping on a bandwagon. It is the profit motive, not artistic aspiration, which is often the driving force behind many TV series or, going back a century, the piratical dramatists who adapted Dickens's fiction. The second motive is to find and exploit new media markets or new readerships. Anthony Trollope thought he was doing well if he sold 10,000 copies of his novels. As adapted for television his fiction reaches, in the UK alone, audiences of 5 million and more. Only in a very few cases can printed literature claim such figures. J.K. Rowling sells in the millions.
Harry Potter
films are seen by the hundreds of million. Adaptation creates the-sky's-the-limit opportunities for literature.

The third motive is to explore, or develop, what is buried or missing in the original text. James Fenimore Cooper's
The Last of the Mohicans
has been an American classic ever since it was first published in 1826. But the 1992 film (it was the tenth adaptation for the screen), starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye, is infinitely more sensitive to what the extermination of a Native American ‘nation’ actually meant. The novel is both complicated and enriched by its adaptation and the added dimension that the film (an excellent one in this case) brings. One goes back to read Cooper more thoughtfully.

Another example from Jane Austen, the most widely adapted ‘classic’ novelist of modern times, is instructive. Her novel,
Mansfield Park
, centres on a large country house and its aristocratic owners. The house itself is a symbol of England and its lastingness over generations. But where does the money which supports the estate come from? Austen does not say, but we see the owner, Sir
Thomas Bertram, going off to put things right in the family's sugar plantations in the West Indies. The 1999 film version of Austen's novel, directed by Patricia Rozema, highlighted the likelihood that Mansfield Park's prosperity came from slave labour and exploitation. ‘Behind every great fortune’, said the French novelist Balzac, ‘lies a crime’. Behind elegant, refined, quintessentially ‘English’ Mansfield Park lay a crime against humanity, it could be argued, and Rozema's film did just that. It was controversial thesis, but again, the film complicated our response to the original novel, and in an illuminating way. (What is that noise we hear? Miss Austen spinning in her grave in Winchester Cathedral.)

Let's look at another couple of Austen fantasias. In the 2008 TV series,
Lost in Austen
, the young heroine, Amanda Price, finds herself transported back in time to the world of
Pride and Prejudice
and gets tangled, romantically and hilariously, in the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy. It was done with a light touch (which, one suspects, might have charmed Austen), confident that everyone watching knows the novel.

Lost in Austen
's literary game-playing drew on the fanfic vogue on the internet. The website ‘The Republic of Pemberley’, for example, invites ‘Janeites’ (as lovers of Austen are called) to come up with alternative and supplementary narratives for their beloved novels (such as, what will the Darcy marriage be like?). But underlying
Lost in Austen
is a more serious question: How relevant, across the centuries, are the novels to the lives (specifically lovelives) we nowadays live? The same question underlies that most farfetched, and utterly delightful, transposition of Emma Woodhouse to the dilemmas of the Southern Californian ‘valley girl’ in the 1995 film,
Clueless
. What, this comedy asks, is ‘universal and timeless’ in Austen?

A central question in the process of literary adaptation is whether it is a service (as I think the above examples are) or a disservice to the text in question. In 1939 the Samuel Goldwyn company produced an immensely popular Hollywood film version of
Wuthering Heights
. It starred, as Heathcliff, the greatest stage actor of the time, Laurence Olivier, whose performance is regarded as a
classic. But the film cut out great swathes of the original narrative and pasted a happy ending on to Brontë's story. Unquestionably the film inspired many to return to the original text to discover the real thing but, for the greater number who had not read and never would read the novel, was this not a cheapening of great literature? A disservice? ‘Fidelity’, one concludes, is as tricky in art as it is in our love-lives.

In the same year, 1939, MGM brought out, with huge fanfare, the film
Gone with the Wind
(GWTW to its millions of fans). It's often voted the greatest film of all time. In commercial terms it was, and still is, one of the biggest ever money-spinners. It was based on a novel by Margaret Mitchell which had been published three years earlier – the only novel this very private woman ever published. There is a romantic story behind it. Mitchell was born in 1900 and brought up in Atlanta, Georgia, in a family who had lived there for generations. There were old citizens in the town who could remember the Civil War, which the South had lost calamitously. There were even more Atlantans who could remember the grim aftermath of ‘Reconstruction’, as it was called.

Margaret was a young journalist. She broke her ankle at work, and while laid up in bed began writing a ‘Civil War novel’. Her husband brought her the necessary research materials, and she polished off the work in a few months before she got back on her feet. Once recovered, she left the manuscript in a cupboard for six years. There it might have remained had Mitchell not been assigned to show a publisher round her town in 1935. He was scouting for new material and, when she mentioned her novel in passing, persuaded her to let him see the dilapidated manuscript.
Gone with the Wind
was accepted instantly and rushed out, with mammoth publicity. It was a runaway bestseller under the slogan ‘One million Americans can't be wrong. Read
Gone with the Wind
!’ The novel stayed at the top of the bestseller list for two years and won a Pulitzer Prize. Mitchell sold the film rights to MGM for $50,000 and
Gone with the Wind
was adapted, using the new process of Technicolor, by David O. Selznick. It starred Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable.

Even though it remains a very popular work of fiction, for every
reader of Mitchell's novel there must be a hundred who only know
Gone with the Wind
as a film. Is the film ‘true’ to the book? No, it isn't. MGM kept the main outlines of Mitchell's plot but softened the favourable references to the Ku Klux Klan, and omitted the hero Rhett Butler's murder of a freed black man who dared to affront the virtue of a white woman. They took the ‘edge’ off a very edgy novel. To those who respect the remarkable book, it matters.

There is another objection that we can legitimately bring against adaptation. Unlike many novelists, Jane Austen (to draw on her again) never gives a clear pictorial image of her heroines or heroes. All we know about Emma Woodhouse, for instance, is that she has hazel eyes. This is an artistic decision on Austen's part. It enables the reader to construct their own image. If, however, one watches the 1996 film of
Emma
, Gwyneth Paltrow's face will probably impose itself on every subsequent re-reading of the novel. It's a very nice face – but it's not what Austen wanted.

Translation, it is said, echoing an Italian proverb, is ‘betrayal’ (
Traduttore, traditore
). Is adaptation, more even than translation, inevitably something of a travesty? Or is it an enhancement? Or an interpretation that supplements our own understanding of the text? Or an invitation to go back and read the original? It can, of course, be any or all of those things. What is fascinating, though, is the question of where adaptation, with its partnering technologies, is going. What will happen, as it will in the not-too-distant future, when thanks to new technology we can enter a virtual world of the literature that interests us – with our sense organs (nose, eyes, ears, hands) activated? When we can literally get ‘lost in Austen’, not just as spectators, but as players? It will be exciting. But still, one doubts it would entirely please Miss Austen.

CHAPTER
33