Putting Xmas Carol to Bed

I wanted to take a few minutes as we lay Xmas Carol to bed to think about some of the ideas that circulated.  Digest them a bit.  Ah, more figurative food language with Dickens. 

First, I came to Xmas Carol with a reading offered up by Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.  It’s a text I encountered in grad school and serves as a stark, dark lens that mediates my vision of the text.  Edelman’s No Future wants to make the argument that queer people too easily submit to assimilationist elements of heteronormative culture.  And, that reproductive futurism (our investment in kids and the future) police queer people and discipline society in direct and indirect ways. The title No Future takes on several meanings – (1) that we should reject the social lessons that are directed toward us that suggest we should shirk the present by chasing the future, (2) the teleology of the future discredits queers as anti-productive social members, and (3) along similar lines, reproductive futurism “imbues straight sex with its meaning as the agent of historical continuity” (“Ever After” 470).   Crucial to this thinking is Edelman’s notion that children are easy symbolic political tools and there are many larger narratives at work in American culture that support the notion of parents yielding their time and identity to their children.  But what Edelman argues is that in a culture that attaches supreme value to the symbolic child, the biologically non-reproductive queer will also occupy the shadow space. 

Edelman uses Xmas Carol as an application to some of his ideas. The setting, Christmas, provides the ultimate backdrop, being that it is the birth of the embodiment of the sacred, symbolic child.  This frames our worship of family, children, and the social engine.  Edelman even tugs at the solid footing that has propped up Tiny Tim, suggesting his sympathies set up the destructive alterity of Mr. Scrooge.  Edelman laments the turn the novel takes – that Mr. Scrooge must give up his hard-earned money, anti-communitarian angst, and homosexual relations in order to be absorbed into the happy heteronormative ending.  Edelman marks Scrooge as a queer figure with references to screwing, looks at Scrooge’s close relations with Marley and concludes by reading the ending in which Scrooge had "no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards" (Dickens 134),  suggesting that Scrooge's decision here is "accepting this peter-less principle," – that Scrooge must lose his queerness in order to be socially accepted in the end of the novel. We might call his writing analysis; we might call it adaptation; we might call it nonsense or a bad, forced argument.  I’m not sure.  But it’s interesting.

I’d be interested to hear some thoughts on this reading.  My take is that the evidence isn’t strong enough to claim him queer in terms of sexuality, but queer readers have often needed to forge imaginary spaces in text that afford no queer characterization. So, that’s tricky and I’m more in the camp of reader-response than fidelity.  But I think it does help us think about an anti-communitarian and normative ethic and the binaries that exist – we must either be singular and sad or happily swimming in sugarplums with family and community.  That the text folds on this theme makes it a durable tension and ultimately queries the very easy divide that this is making.  

A Quick Word on Illustrations

This is in some ways an aside/ footnote to my last post about bibliographical studies. It was just getting too long (an odd thing for a Victorianist to be hesitant about).

As a visual minded student and teacher, thinking about how images translate, adapt, live on, and resonate is crucial to my understanding of and engagement in Adaptation Studies. How artists imagined the text is so influential... in the same way that I can't look at Ralph Fiennes and not imagine him hissing "Harrryyy Pottttter" (for better or worse. Probably for worse). Since I'm partial to the Ghost of Christmas Present, here is how he was portrayed in the two editions I talked about in my last post:

 

The later edition has him in color, of course. And there's probably much to be said about the minute differences... but the two illustrations are pretty similar. Here's how he looks in the graphic novel I read yesterday:

Thinking about him as a larger, more foreboding figure (the lines are deeper, he looms over Scrooge brandishing his horn like a saber) asks us as readers how we see this Ghost, how Scrooge sees this Ghost, perhaps even how Dickens wanted his audience to receive this Ghost. And this is just one small example... how we see Scrooge, the other ghosts, even Tiny Tim (who was far from Tiny in the 50s version and looked like he'd never missed a meal in his life), is both determined by our imaginations and by our experience with illustrations and adaptations. I'm excited to see how our minds and our conceptions of characters and moments will change as we continue to explore adaptations this month. 

Editing A Christmas Carol

One of my highlights of the first week was visiting UCSC's Special Collections. The librarians were awesome (though librarians are always awesome), the Dickens paraphernalia they put out was exciting:

They also have this punch ladle, allegedly used by Dickens. I am suspicious as to whether it was or not, but at the very least, it is a cool-looking old spoon 

Thinking about "old books"/bibliographic studies led me towards some new questions about Dickens and adaptation. How can we consider editions as a kind of adaptation in their own right? This is perhaps stretching the term adaptation since most editions will contain Dickens' story unaltered (we had a brief dispute about online versions, but I'm hesitant to wade into those murky waters and distract myself from my bibliographic point), but what the text is literally surrounded by, or covered in, impacts our consumption of it... not exactly in the same way that having Redford or Di Caprio play Gatsby affects our experience of that character, but not in a way that can so easily written off, either.

I looked (briefly) at an 1869 edition (left), and a 1905 edition (right).

Here are just a few questions that these editions raised for me. 

1) What is the significance of how an edition treats the "Preface"? In the Oxford World's Classic edition, both prefaces are laid a few pages before the text. In the 1905 edition, the "Preface" is right next to the first page. How could this impact our reading of the story? 

2) What else could fit into the literal book that could impact our reading? Advertisements, notices about other Dickens novels... I'd be interested in learning more about Victorian books and how they were usually laid out, to see how Dickens fits into that schema. 

I worked with the University of Virginia's Rare Book School for a year as a Fellow, and took one of their summer courses. I had similar questions about Wuthering Heights, and concluded that how an edition treated "The Bronte Myth" could easily impact whether a reader experiences Emily's story unaltered, or experiences it surrounded by excerpts from Jane Eyre, or Charlotte Bronte's "Biographical Notice." Consider the example below, where we are encounter Currer Bell's ideas (and apologies) before we even delve into Ellis Bell's (fantastic) novel. 

These questions require a lot more bibliographic knowledge and time in Special Collections, but they serve to shape and nuance our thoughts about adaptation even without said knowledge and time. 

Is everything an adaptation? (Dum dum DUMMM)

Visual Metaphor for Adaptation?

from Kornbluth's adapted Christmas Carol illustrated by Paige Peterson (2011)

John Leech's engraving that accompanied Dickens' 1843 release of A Christmas Carol

Dead Text Walking

This post is partly inspired by I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas, and partly inspired by my debilitating need to stop reading I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas, and do almost anything else.

This zombie story breathes life into Jacob Marley (or breathes in death-life... zombie biology is gravely unclear), who rips apart the people around him, and starts to make for Scrooge. The text immediately shows some wit, pointing out that Marley had been dead "for about three minutes,that is" (3). That's not dissimilar to how long his soul rests in Dickens' novel. It then becomes tiresome, unfunny, and graphically violent. So I'll readily admit to not finishing it, which is convenient since my title actually refers to the original text and not this bloody, "braaaaaaaaaaains"-less tripe.

My question is whether the classic novels like A Christmas Carol, the works that span decades through their spawn, are in a sense, dead. Does A Christmas Carol exist at all outside of its hideous/beautiful progenies? If the "culture-text," intriguingly introduced by Paul Davis, is the one that we "collectively remember," "the Carol as it has been intriguingly recreated in the last century and a half" (4), what space is there for the original text? Can it exist on its own shaky legs, or is this text only bolstered by its afterlife? 

I don't believe that the classics that have permeated our culture are dead, I think they are uniquely newly alive in how they can be devoured in so many different forms by so many. But I do think that recognizing and appreciation this new life that adaptation has breathed into these works is a crucial step towards (finally) moving away from fidelity complaints, from purist wringing, and from snobby eye-rolling at a text that may forcefully engage with pop culture as much as it engages with Dickens.

Keeping all that in mind... I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas is still awful. Please don't read it. And greeting from Dickens Camp in Santa Cruz!

- Lingerr Senghor

Not So Great Adaptations

We've been reading about a number of adaptations of A Christmas Carol, have seen one and now read one. Are the ones we are reading great? I think they're pretty good. And their stand-alone merit gives us a lot to talk about in terms of the idea of adaptation and fidelity.

But I always find it extremely entertaining to examine terrible adaptations and think about what made them come into existence. For instance, the newest Romeo and Juliet with Douglas Booth is pretty bad, but my students loved to hate it (and some of them just loved it––Paul Giamatti as Friar Laurence "was throwin' more shade than a gazebo" according to one student). 

Brown talks about directors who long for "pageantry and place setting and hoopskirts" (85). Why? How does our nostalgia for a fabricated past manifest itself today? I want to look at some not great adaptations, just briefly enough to entertain myself and question their origins.

So what not-so-great adaptations have you seen? What are your thoughts on them?

Last night, I watched a snippet of the Kelsey Grammer Christmas Carol. I couldn't have said it better myself, TheSoulMan8 (or is it TheSoleMan8?!):

TheSoulMan8

6 months ago

wow, this film is awful, but in a very enjoyable sort of way

Adaptation as Interpretation

We used to judge adaptations qualitatively, passing judgment on them on the basis of their “faithfulness” to the “original” (the movie almost inevitably losing out to the book, which was always deemed to be “better”). But this approach has become tired and uninteresting. Scholars also now see this “fidelity model” as naïve and critically unfair. Current approaches to adaptation studies might be described more broadly as intertextual investigation. Today’s scholars are becoming more attentive to the complex network of linguistic, generic, historic, and cultural exchanges that shape and inform any literary text and that determine how and why we read it. In challenging the idea that literary texts are stable, authoritative, and able to make meaning utterly independent of other texts or cultural contexts, scholars have destabilized the very concept of “originary text.” One result of this paradigm shift has been the rejection of traditional notions that direct fidelity to an original text is desirable or even possible. We can, for example, recognize Clueless as a recasting of Austen’s Emma and appreciate the ways in which the novel and film speak to one another. If we understand that You’ve Got Mail and Bridget Jones’s Diary reimagine, update, and variously make use of Pride and Prejudice, we get more than the simple pleasure of intertextual recognition (the delight that comes from smugly proclaiming the intertextual connection to our slower, less critically sophisticated friends); we obtain entrance to new interpretive avenues into both book and film and, moreover, are prompted to consider not only why Austen’s early nineteenth-century novel continues to speak to us in such compelling ways but also how her novel remains available for reinterpretation.  

Every critical reading of a text is an act of adaptation, as readers intervene to render the text coherent or to reshape it using theoretical tools. It is by adapting the novels that we read, refitting them to suit our modern perspectives and cultural needs, that we keep them alive and meaningful. In my own research, I adopt an approach that considers the act of reading as a complex negotiation among reader, text, and the cultural imagination. By focusing on the adaptations, I argue, we see a literary text in its fullest, as we consider how it adapts earlier texts to its own purposes and how imaginative reinvention keeps texts relevant to new audiences over time.