Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað

[steepholm]

I’ve been musing on calimac’s recent post, in which he blasts Shaun F.D. Hughes for his assertion that "There is no return to a pre-Peter-Jackson understanding of Tolkien" and his advice that scholars should "[take] advantage of this new reality.” As you will see if you follow the link, calimac disagrees strongly. And I’m fairly sure that Tolkien would have concurred with calimac. The philological/archaeological enterprise to which Tolkien devoted his scholarly life, and with which his fiction is shot through is, after all, one of painstaking restoration, and it's hard to imagine anyone less willing to be carried along on the crest of the Zeitgeist. To those not in sympathy with it this may smack at best of futile scholarly fussiness. To others it is an act of keeping faith, of telling the truth by being true oneself. The knowledge that it is doomed to failure – that there are pieces of the puzzle forever missing, snatched from the world by death, fire and moth – takes nothing from the worth of the effort, but rather lends it a tragic grandeur. What could be more Tolkienian – or more Anglo-Saxon – than the idea of courage in the face of insurmountable odds? That’s what makes the Battle of Maldon more than just an undignified scrap on an Essex mudflat.

(Digression: compare, if you will, the boastful grief of Y Gododdin with the steadfastness of The Battle of Maldon. Both sets of warriors are doomed and know it; both are courageous; but one exults recklessly, while the other stands grimly fast. And they echo down the centuries, these styles of defeat, issuing at last in the salty beer of a London Welshman on St David’s Day, or the bee-like hum of ‘Mustn’t grumbles’ from an English Post Office queue. I see all this clearly from my panopticon on Steepholm island, with my feet planted in the Severn, and dragons both white and red on my escutcheon.)

calimac has my sympathy. But I do wonder. Sometimes associations colour a book for ever, and we’d have it no other way. The voice of a parent reading a story aloud, for example, becomes part of that story for us. When I first read The Mabinogion I did it with the sound of Fairport Live Convention in the background – an album I’d bought the same day - and the two are indissolubly linked, along with the room where I read it, and even the age I was at the time. 1977 was a very good year for books and music.

Now, maybe films are a bit different from that happenstantial kind of association – but are they totally different? Does it matter, for example, that I now tend to think of Mr Darcy as looking like Colin Firth? Is that a taint on Austen’s text? Not much of one, perhaps. On the other hand, I feel it would matter quite a lot if I secretly believed that Mr D really had gone for a dip in his carp pond before fetching up in front of young Elizabeth Bennett. But that’s so wrong that it’s easier to edit out, somehow. I suspect that the most stubborn and insidious variations on the original are those that are almost right, or that might actually be right, but that confine the possibilities of the text to a narrow range of meaning and make what had been a polysemous rainforest of potential an impoverished monoculture. (But, but – well, isn’t that kind of narrowing what all adaptations necessarily do, to an extent? Or even all productions of a play?)

As you'll have gathered, I'm in several minds about all this. Anyone out there willing to put me straight?

Comments

[altariel.livejournal.com]

The Jackson films spurred me to tremendous Tolkien-based creativity, partly as a result of some of the terrific visuals in the first film, but very little of wot I wrote ended up 'inspired' by his films.

But any reading I do of The Lord of the Rings is almost entirely filtered through the BBC radio adaptation, which I heard on broadcast, at around the same time as reading the book for the first time. The two are very closely linked in my imagination.

I rewatched films, relistened to radio version, and reread the book recently - and it's the radio actors who speak the lines for me (with the possible exception of Ian McKellen). The images are a pleasing combination of Alan Lee, Victor Ambrus, and several other artists working both before and after the films (and not necessarily in their 'shadow', even in portraits of characters).

I personally don't see Jackson's films as 'taint' - I think there's a great deal to be liked and admired, particularly in the first one - but his version has had surprisingly little effect on my experience of the book, other than sparking a tremendously rich and productive re-encounter with Tolkien (and an extraordinary fandom experience).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

But any reading I do of The Lord of the Rings is almost entirely filtered through the BBC radio adaptation, which I heard on broadcast, at around the same time as reading the book for the first time. The two are very closely linked in my imagination.

Ah yes, I recorded them onto cassettes as they were broadcast! But then, to my shame, when I went away to university and wanted some tapes of my favourite albums, I couldn't afford to buy new cassettes, so recorded over LOTR instead. The result was that throughout my undergraduate career, if ever I let a tape run on past the end of the music, I'd catch the last few minutes of whichever of the 26 episodes happened to be on it. I got to know those last few minuteses (my precious) very well.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Like you, I believe that the more intense a first experience of a work, the more the other sensory input, including the form of the work, lingers, no matter how many other ways one encounters the work. It could be that various people then adjust to degrees, depending on how they process text/media/whatever.

So, yeah, forever and ever I will think of Gone with the Wind while crossing the English channel, and listening to St. Paul's Suite . . . though I do see Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable and Olivia de Haviland as the characters. (I saw the film at an art house some five years later, when the film had been recently retooled.)

LOTR--for me, the story comes with my fourteen year old memories, though I do see Orlando Bloom now as Legolas, and some of Viggo's body language for Aragorn. Oh yes, and the hobbit hole . . . except that that filmic hobbit hole matched my original depiction. the rest? No, I've gone back to my original images, though I, unlike Calimac, enjoyed the films.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed them too, though I felt the lack of the Scouring of the Shire keenly, and winced at some of the dwarf-lobbing. But I thought there was a lot to admire, too, especially in the visuals and the battles. I watch the DVD extras more often than the film itself now, mind!

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

The unmoored three or four endings before the ships go west was really painful--it was obvious the Scouring, even truncated, ought to have been fit in there. Yes indeed.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Well, I can't see why it would matter that you think of Mr Darcy as looking like Colin Firth at all, as you haven't taken on the wet-shirt look approach. (Fun scene when he meets her anyway though!) Not to mention the cutting of some of the best dialogue between Elizabeth and Darcy at the end of the book for a totally forgettable visual of a double-wedding. But do you think your understanding of Pride and Prejudice is forever post-1996 BBC television production? (It's such a ludicrous question, even!) Similarly, you might well think of Marianne as looking like Kate Winslet, but you're not going to forget that Willoughby's hugely important explanation of his actions to Eleanor actually happened, just because it was cut from the film, right?

And yes, that is essentially what an adaptation of a play or novel does - and a film or TV version does it more so, as the director also focuses your vision on the character(s) he or she wants front and centre in a way the director of a play can't. But again - I seem to have caught your habit of reductio ad absurdum! - an 'important' new adaptation of Hamlet isn't very likely to change Shakespearean studies forevermore, is it?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Now you mention it, my visual memory of Sense and Sensibility seems to hover more around the old BBC production, which had a Colonel Brandon whose preference for flannel one could really believe in.

I wonder whether Hamlet hasn't acquired some immunity by being produced just so many times that it's impossible to imagine any one vision gaining the kind of dominance that Jackson's LOTR arguably has (and is likely to keep for the foreseeable future)? The other way of looking at it is to say that Shakespeare's play is infinitely adaptable and re-visionable because of WS's infinitely subtle mind, etc, and I wouldn't argue with that - but I think the sheer proliferation of productions may also be a factor.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Plays are always more likely to have multiple productions than novels anyway, though. The Pride and Prejudice analogy is more useful, I guess - and possibly in a couple of hundred years there will have been as many film/TV versions of LOTR as there have now of P&P. The point is still that it would be (is) daft to insist that any one of those adaptations has changed how the book is to be seen forever after.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree with that, especially if you mean changed for ever in the sense of "LOTR will always be read the way Peter Jackson filmed it" or "P&P will always be read the way Andrew Davies adapted it". That's clearly not going to happen, but you could perhaps make a weaker case on the lines that all these adaptations - especially the ones that acquire a kind of permanence through being on film - contribute to our evolving sense of the books' meanings and possibilities. I think that's where I'd part company with calimac - if I understand him correctly - in that I think the whole reception history of the book is not only interesting in itself but does do something to change what the book can mean for us.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

I'd agree with that company parting, if it is such, although the degree of dilution from the original can possibly be seen in one word: Troy. (Which did, on the other hand, give us some fantastic spork!) Oh, and possibly that's another indication of the new Steepholmic theory's limits? In that a film version insufficiently close to our pre-existing mental vision, will be dismissed out of hand or just enjoyed for its cheesiness. As, frex, the Kiera Knightly P&P with the 'You have bewitched me, body and soul' rubbish? Although there is that handy 'can' in your final sentence.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Well, I did make provision for that in my post, I think, when I said that variants that were too far from the original were easier to edit out (as with Darcy's dip). I haven't seen Troy (yet) - but when I was writing my digression about the different ways small companies of Welsh and English soldiers set about the task of being Doomed, my mind naturally skipped to Thermopylae, and those Spartans combing each other's hair and putting it in lovely braids. (Clearly more Welsh than English, but really not quite either.) What's the gen on 300 from this point of view? Does it spoil Herodotus for ever after? Or had The English Patient already done that? Do YD or Becca have a view? I really must see some more films, I guess: my points of reference are far too limited...

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Well, I did make provision for that in my post, I think, when I said that variants that were too far from the original were easier to edit out (as with Darcy's dip).

You did, true. Sorry for letting that drop out of mind. I think the problem (aside from *my* problem, of writing while undercaffeinated and overheadached) with this provision is that it's got such a large inbuilt escape clause. Adaptations, you say, confine the possibilities of the text to a narrow range of meaning and make what had been a polysemous rainforest of potential an impoverished monoculture and later that they do something to change what the book can mean for us -- except when they don't, because they're too far from the original (which surely HAS to mean our interpretation of the original) for us not to just toss them.

I haven't seen Troy either, and don't think I need include the 'yet', as Bec actually rented it and I couldn't bear it enough to watch more than 10 minutes, even to snark.

Re 300, they said it was based on a graphic novel rather than Herodotus or other such source, so that one won't do much for the discussion, especially as neither of us knows anything about it! Bec said The English Patient didn't do anything to her feelings about Herodotus but I can't quite manage to paraphrase all she said about the book atm. She did however, express the opinion that film versions of novels change 'only visual aesthetics', as noted by many people of seeing some characters as similar to the actors playing them and do little or nothing to the verbal aesthetics. (I may have mangled the last bit slightly, but the first is okay!)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether we could put it thusly. An adaptation that attempts to graft something alien onto a text is likely to leave our sense of the text relatively unaltered, because it will be recognized as not belonging, and so discounted. Conversely, an adapation that "takes" is likely to do so by fixing on something that really is in the text, but exaggerating, selecting or distorting it in some way. So, in the case of LOTR (where the visuals were far more faithful than the verbals, I think), while I take B's point about verbal aesthetics, I still suspect that Gimli and Pippin, for instance, are far more "comic" characters in many people's minds after seeing Jackson's film than they were before. Nevertheless even in the text there were comic moments available for Jackson to build upon, and on re-reading people may be more attuned to them in the light of watching Jackson's film. By contrast, had he attempted to make Elrond the butt of a string of elf jokes it just wouldn't have taken.