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

[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.