Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

 
Margaret Atwood comments on Bengt Ohlsson's retelling of Hjalmar Söderberg's Dr Glas:

"Novels that snitch characters from other novels or stories and retell events from their point of view can give a reader the uneasy feeling that a previous author's work has been violated. None the less, such books now constitute almost a separate genre. The earliest attempts - such as Shamela, in which Fielding took the stuffing out of Richardson's pious Pamela - were often satiric, but the 20th and 21st centuries, with their interest in the scorned, the marginalised and the voiceless, have approached this task with more seriousness. Jean Rhys looked at Jane Eyre through the eyes of Mr Rochester's mad wife in the brilliant Wide Sargasso Sea; John Gardner has Grendel the Monster give a capering, blood-swilling, tragic rendition of Beowulf in the equally brilliant Grendel. Classics such as Rebecca, Gone with the Wind, and - endlessly - Dracula, have had their shadow versions, as have many other books. The mere doing of such a thing is no longer a novelty, and thus the doing of it well has become a considerable challenge."


If you were to believe someone like Harold Bloom, all writing is in essence a means of rewriting or reintperpreting what preceded it, as with the likes of Keats and Blake rewriting Milton and Spenser. As Atwood suggests this is something that seems to have become a genre in its own right in recent years with novels like Will Self's Dorian (rewriting The Picture of Dorian Gray as a modern gay novel), Great Apes (a Ballardian rewrite of Gulliver's Travels and Boulle's Planet of the Apes), Carter's The Bloody Chamber (a feminist reinterpretation of fairy tale - one might also mention Atwood's own Penelopiad in that context), Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (almost any Victorian novel you might care to designate, but especially Anna Karenin and Madame Bovary) Updike's Gertrude and Claudius or Cunningham's The Hours (more unusually rewriting a modern text, namely Mrs Dalloway). A variant on this adopts authors as characters, like Coetzee's The Master of Saint Petersburg, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes or Tsypkin's Summer in Baden Baden. With all that said, as Atwood suggests, this is something that seems to have a particular force in genre fiction, as with the innumerable reinterpretations of Dracula (itself rewriting the likes of LeFanu) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Martin's Mary Reilly, for example), the legions of Sherlock Holmes stories (the stories themselves, being in many ways a rewrite of Poe's detective novels, with the reinterpretation of Holmes having arguably begun as early as Hornung's Raffles and then continued with the likes of August Derleth, himself perhaps best known for having rewritten much of Lovecraft).

I agree with Atwood that this is something that has grown in prominence over recent decades; this is a post-romantic age (notwithstanding romantic rewriting of medieval mythologies) and the idea of the author as a solitary genius was always likely to give way to a conception of writers as more firmly embedded in a shared set of culture and myths. This is after all how the likes of Euripides and Sophocles approached figures like Medea and Electra, or how Shakespeare and Marlowe approached Caesar and Edward the Second. However, I also tend to suspect that a lot of this writing reflects a post-traditional nostalgia for periods where literature had more of a hegemonic cultural status; hence the particular interest in rewriting Victorian literature, that being probably the last period where forms of elite literature could conceivably also carry popular appeal. I recently came across this interesting analysis of the state of modern art:

"It has become excruciatingly difficult and even impossible to write a history of contemporary art -- a history that will do justice to all the art that is considered contemporary: that is the lesson of postmodernism. If writing history is something like putting the pieces of a puzzle together, as psychoanalyst Donald Spence suggests, then contemporary art is a puzzle whose pieces do not come together. There is no narrative fit between them, to use Spence's term, suggesting just how puzzling contemporary art is, however much its individual pieces can be understood...

In Postmodernism what André Malraux called the global "museum without walls" has been realized, resulting in the unlimited expansion of the contemporary. The radical pluralism that prevails in the museum without walls has made a mockery of the belief that there is one art that is more "historical" than any other. Thus history has become as absurd and idiosyncratic as the contemporary... Even if one was a Gibbon one could not fit all the pieces of contemporary art together in a unified narrative. In postmodernity that is no longer any such thing as the judgment of history, only an incomplete record of the contemporary...

History is no longer possible in postmodernism because of modernism itself: at its most vital, it is a history of self-questioning and self-doubt, leading artists to look far a field for their identity... At the same time, the indiscriminate adulation of creativity -- virtually any kind of creativity, leading to the labeling of any kind of activity as creative if it is performed "differently" -- is responsible for the overcrowding of contemporary art. It is paradoxically the loss of standards of creative excellence that makes art vulnerable to market and populist forces. They alone can make an art "historical" and "meaningful" when it is no longer clear what the value of art is."


It's not difficult to see how this might also easily apply to modern literature, which ranges from traditional realism, postmodernism (Eco) to magical realism (Carter) or hysterical realism (Pynchon), as well as writers that seem to have analogues in disciplines like art (Ballard) rather than any currently dominant literary trends. Rewriting may be one of the few ways writers can overcome Vattimo's ideas of The Death or Decline of Art, where art, by way of resisting tradition and engaging in continual forms of experimentation, loses is cultural niche. With that said, Vattimo saw this as having less to do with resistance and more to do with self-referential dissidence, allusion and pastiche, a point that can be left open for other times.

Updates: a new addition to this genre in the form of Castorp, a sequel to Mann's The Magic Mountain:

"The situation of Huelle’s Castorp reminds one of Jean Rhys and her celebrated Wide Sargasso Sea. In that novel the canonical narrative of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is challenged through the switching of perspectives. By giving voice to Antoinette Cosway, the actual name of the animal-like and repulsive Bertha Rochester in Bronte’s work, Rhys invites her audience to a contrapuntal rereading of Bertha’s traumatic life story as told from her own non-British perspective. This is how Rhys "writes back" to Bronte and to the colonial discourse encapsulated in Jane Eyre. In Wide Sargasso Sea we see the polemic response by the former British colony to the dominating image of the periphery as solidified in the master narratives of the metropolitan center...

I argue that Pawel Huelle's novel should be viewed from a similar position. The Gdansk-based episode of Castorp attracts readers’ attention by the unique postcolonial perspective from which the novel personae and events are narrated... Gdansk in Castorp is, in fact, more than just a provincial melting pot bearing some marks of a splendid Hanseatic past. Viewed through the protagonist’s eyes, the town seems to comply perfectly with the criteria of literary representation of colonized space defined by Fanon. Dominated by the Germans, it has Prussian barracks with Prussian soldiers and a newly established German university with German and Prussian students. Every street and building is filled with things German. However, the town constitutes a space that is heterogeneous, with an array of impervious zones. Viewed by Castorp the biker, the indigenous Polish and Kashubian people constitute an enclave driven to the margin of the world and its spatial representation. "


Dracula has also proved fertile ground for rewriting and revision; most obviously through the many films made of the novel, but more recently through other forms of writing, such as Robert Forrest's The Voyage of the Demeter, which dwells on the events onboard the ship that brought the vampire to Whitby and are entirely elided from the novel. This is also the premise behind The Dracula Innocence Project, which questions the reliability of Stoker's narrators in order to rewrite the novel.

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posted by Richard 9:02 am