Adaptation and Appropriation: Exploring Literary and Cultural Connections

Julie Sanders From the apparently simple adaptation of a text into film theatre or a new literary work to the more complex appropriation of style or meaning it is arguable that all texts are somehow connected to a network of existing texts and art forms Adaptation and Appropriation explores multiple definitions and practices of adaptation and appropriation the cultural and aesthetic politics behind the impulse to adapt diverse ways in which contemporary literature and film adapt revise and reimagine other works of art the impact on adaptation and appropriation of theoretical movements including structuralism poststructuralism postcolonialism postmodernism feminism and gender studies the appropriation across time and across cultures of specific canonical texts but also of literary archetypes such as myth or fairy tale Ranging across genres and harnessing concepts from fields as diverse as musicology and the natural sciences this volume brings clarity to the complex debates around adaptation and appropriation offering a muchneeded resource for those studying literature film or culture Julie Sanders is Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham the NEW CRITICAL IDIOM SERIES EDITOR JOHN DRAKAKIS Literary StudiesCultural Studies wwwroutledgecom Printed in Great Britain Cover design Leigh Hurlock C M Y K the NEW CRITICAL IDIOM ADAPTATION AND APPROPRIATION Julie Sanders ADAPTATION AND APPROPRIATION From the apparently simple adaptation of a text into film theatre or a new literary work to the more complex appropriation of style or mean ing it is arguable that all texts are somehow connected to a network of existing texts and art forms Adaptation and Appropriation explores multiple definitions and practices of adaptation and appropriation the cultural and aesthetic politics behind the impulse to adapt diverse ways in which contemporary literature and film adapt revise and reimagine other works of art the impact on adaptation and appropriation of theoretical move ments including structuralism poststructuralism postcolonial ism postmodernism feminism and gender studies the appropriation across time and across cultures of specific canoni cal texts but also of literary archetypes such as myth or fairy tale Ranging across genres and harnessing concepts from fields as diverse as musicology and the natural sciences this volume brings clarity to the complex debates around adaptation and appropriation offering a much needed resource for those studying literature film or culture Julie Sanders is Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham ADAPTATION AND APPROPRIATION THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM SERIES EDITOR JOHN DRAKAKIS UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides to todays critical terminology Each book provides a handy explanatory guide to the use and abuse of the term offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary and cultural critic relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation With a strong emphasis on clarity lively debate and the widest possible breadth of examples The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable approach to key topics in literary studies Also available in this series The Author by Andrew Bennett Autobiography by Linda Anderson Class by Gary Day ColonialismPostcolonialism Second edition by Ania Loomba Comedy by Andrew Stott Crime Fiction by John Scaggs CultureMetaculture by Francis Mulhern Difference by Mark Currie Discourse by Sara Mills Drama Theatre Performance by Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis Dramatic Monologue by Glennis Byron Ecocriticism by Greg Garrard Genders by David Glover and Cora Kaplan Genre by John Frow Gothic by Fred Botting Historicism by Paul Hamilton Humanism by Tony Davies Ideology by David Hawkes Interdisciplinarity by Joe Moran Intertextuality by Graham Allen Irony by Claire Colebrook Literature by Peter Widdowson Magical Realism by Maggie Ann Bowers Metre Rhythm and Verse Form by Philip Hobsbaum Modernism by Peter Childs Myth by Laurence Coupe Narrative by Paul Cobley Parody by Simon Dentith Pastoral by Terry Gifford The Postmodern by Simon Malpas Realism by Pam Morris Romance by Barbara Fuchs Romanticism by Aidan Day Science Fiction by Adam Roberts Sexuality by Joseph Bristow Stylistics by Richard Bradford Subjectivity by Donald E Hall The Unconscious by Antony Easthope ADAPTATION AND APPROPRIATION Julie Sanders First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave New York 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor Francis Group 2006 Julie Sanders Typeset in Garamond and ScalaSans by Taylor Francis Books Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd Padstow Cornwall All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sanders Julie Adaptation and appropriation Julie Sanders p cm The new critical idiom Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 0415311713 hardback alk paper ISBN 0415311721 pbk alk paper 1 LiteratureAdaptations I Title II Series PN171A33S26 2005 801dc22 2005008610 ISBN10 0415311713 hbk ISBN13 9780415311717hbk ISBN10 0415311721 pbk ISBN13 9780415311724pbk Taylor Francis Group is the Academic Division of TF Informa plc For Gaynor Macfarlane One who really loves texts must wish from time to time to love at least two together Gérard Genette Palimpsests There were as in all crooked businesses two sets of books Peter Carey Jack Maggs COONNTTEENNTTSS SERIES EDITORS PREFACE x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi Introduction 1 PART 1 DEFINING TERMS 15 1 What is adaptation 17 2 What is appropriation 26 PART 2 LITERARY ARCHETYPES 43 3 Heres a strange alteration Shakespearean appropriations 45 4 Its a very old story myth and metamorphosis 63 5 Other versions of fairy tale and folklore 82 PART 3 ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES 95 6 Constructing alternative points of view 97 7 We Other Victorians or rethinking the nineteenth century 120 8 Stretching history or appropriating the facts 138 9 Appropriating the arts and sciences 147 Afterword 156 GLOSSARY 161 BIBLIOGRAPHY 165 INDEX 179 SERIES EDITORS PREFACE The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks to extend the lexicon of literary terms in order to address the radical changes which have taken place in the study of literature during the last decades of the twentieth century The aim is to provide clear wellillus trated accounts of the full range of terminology currently in use and to evolve histories of its changing usage The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one where there is considerable debate concerning basic questions of terminology This involves among other things the boundaries which distinguish the literary from the nonliterary the position of literature within the larger sphere of culture the relationship between literatures of different cultures and questions concerning the relation of literary to other cul tural forms within the context of interdisciplinary studies It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a dynamic and heterogeneous one The present need is for individual volumes on terms which combine clarity of exposition with an adventurousness of perspective and a breadth of application Each volume will contain as part of its apparatus some indication of the direction in which the defi nition of particular terms is likely to move as well as expanding the dis ciplinary boundaries within which some of these terms have been traditionally contained This will involve some resituation of terms within the larger field of cultural representation and will introduce examples from the area of film and the modern media in addition to examples from a variety of literary texts ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As this volume evidences few stories or books ever stand alone and with that in mind I would like to acknowledge those who have contributed to this book Fred Botting read and commented on the original proposal with great insight and made the final outline much stronger Many oth ers have offered ideas and help along the way special thanks to Kate Chedgzoy Davina Cooper Mark Dooley Finn Fordham Daniel Grimley Dominic Head Barbara Kelly Máire ní Fhlathúin Mark Robson Kiernan Ryan Michael Sanders Lauren Shohet and Tory Young as well as all the students at Keele and Nottingham who have offered their various perspectives and enthusiasms on this topic The University of Teesside provided a valuable audience for some of this work in its early stages and I am grateful to all who attended and con tributed on that occasion I underwent my own process of professional adaptation while writing this volume and I thank my new colleagues at the University of Nottingham for making me feel so very welcome Though they will probably never know it the Quadriga Consort and the virtuoso musicianship of Andrew Manze were my joint inspiration for the baroque musical theories deployed in these pages and I am end lessly indebted both to the intellect of their sleevenotes and the beauty of their playing Richard Powerss remarkable novel first gifted me by my father The Gold Bug Variations and Glenn Goulds remarkable 1955 and 1981 interpretations of Bachs Goldberg Variations provided the liter ary and musical soundtrack to much of the thinking laid out here My series editor John Drakakis has been a model of sound advice good readership and great wit and Liz Thompson at Routledge shaped the volume in several crucial ways I only hope the final book does them both justice John Higham has been my other and better half through out the enterprise during that time he has performed for real the acts of grafting that I can only invoke as metaphor bringing things to fruition with a very tangible beauty and as ever I thank him The book is dedicated to Gaynor my best pal with love and thanks for sharing the journey over many years art never improves but the material of art is never quite the same T S Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent This book is concerned with the literariness of literature Any explo ration of intertextuality and its specific manifestation in the forms of adaptation and appropriation is inevitably interested in how art creates art or how literature is made by literature There is a danger however that this activity of investigating or reading adaptations proves rather selfserving merely stimulating the afterlife of texts and therefore of lit erary criticism as a scholarly pursuit The literary academic or student reads many texts throughout their learning career and the more texts they read the more echoes parallels and points of comparison they identify in the texts that they encounter The notion that the tracing of intertextual reference and allusion is a selfconfirming exercise is reason able enough Robert Weimann writes persuasively of the reproductive dimension of appropriation 1983 14 suggesting the manifold ways in which texts feed off and create other texts but as readers and crit ics we also need to recognize that adaptation and appropriation are fun damental to the practice and indeed to the enjoyment of literature The late twentieth century made a particular virtue out of querying the ability or even necessity of being original not least in the arts Edward Said suggested in On Originality that the writer thinks less of INTRODUCTION writing originally and more of rewriting 1983 135 Jacques Derrida noted that the desire to write is the desire to launch things that come back to you as much as possible 1985 157 The rewriting impulse which is much more than simple imitation is often articulated in theo retical terms such as intertextuality and many prominent theorists of this practice emerge from the structuralist and poststructuralist move ments of the 1960s especially in France In the field of anthropology Claude LéviStrauss conducted many of his researches in terms of identi fying repeating structures across cultures 2001 1978 In the literary sphere Roland Barthes declared that any text is an intertext 1981 39 suggesting that the works of previous and surrounding cultures were always present in literature Barthes also highlighted the ways in which texts were not solely dependent on their authors for the production of meaning indicating how they benefited from readers who created their own intertextual networks Julia Kristeva herself a product of scientific and anthropological training under LéviStrauss formulated the term intertextualité in her essay The Bounded Text to describe the process by which any text was a permutation of texts an intertextuality 1980 36 Kristevas focus was driven by semiotics she was interested in how texts were permeated by the signs signifiers and utterances of the cul ture in which they participated or from which they derived Intertextuality as a term has however come to refer to a far more textual as opposed to utterancedriven notion of how texts encompass and respond to other texts both during the process of their creation and com position and in terms of the individual readers or spectators response Adaptations and appropriations can vary in how explicitly they state their intertextual purpose Many of the film television or theatre adap tations of canonical works of literature that we look at in this volume openly declare themselves as an interpretation or rereading of a canoni cal precursor Sometimes this will involve a directors personal vision and it may or may not involve cultural relocation or updating of some form sometimes this reinterpretative act will also involve the move ment into a new generic mode or context In appropriations the inter textual relationship may be less explicit more embedded but what is often inescapable is the fact that a political or ethical commitment shapes a writers directors or performers decision to reinterpret a source text In this respect in any study of adaptation and appropriation introduction 2 the creative import of the author cannot be as easily dismissed as Roland Barthess or Michel Foucaults influential theories of the death of the author might suggest Barthes 1988 Foucault 1979 Nevertheless the ability of these theories to destabilize the authority of the original text does enable multiple and sometimes conflicting production of meaning a fact that will prove important for our analyses The inherent intertex tuality of literature encourages the ongoing evolving production of meaning and an everexpanding network of textual relations Literary texts are built from systems codes and traditions established by previous works of literature Allen 2000 1 But they are also built from systems codes and traditions derived from companion art forms If Kristeva is credited with formulating the theory of intertextuality hers was a theory that was far from exclusive in its application to literature She saw art music drama dance and literature in terms of a living mosaic a dynamic intersection of textual surfaces We might wish to add film to this list but following the Kristevan model much of the termi nology adopted by this study to describe literary adaptation and appro priation is harnessed from the parallel disciplines of fine art and musicology The vocabulary of adaptation is highly labile Adrian Poole has offered an extensive list of terms to represent the Victorian eras inter est in reworking the artistic past in no particular order borrowing stealing appropriating inheriting assimilating being influenced inspired dependent indebted haunted possessed homage mimicry travesty echo allusion and intertextuality 2004 2 We could continue the linguistic riff adding into the mix variation version interpretation imitation proximation supplement increment improvisation prequel sequel continuation addition paratext hypertext palimpsest graft rewriting reworking refashioning revision reevaluation The glossary at the back of this volume grapples with a small selection of these terms but embedded within the pages of the book the reader will encounter many more I make no apologies for the profusion rather than fixity of terms offered the idiom in which adaptation and appropriation functions is rich and various that is part of its essence and importance and any study of the same should surely reflect this fact J Hillis Miller has explored various permutations of the paratextual the peritextual and the hypertextual in his critical writings delineating the multifarious ways in which a literary text can be inhabited by a introduction 3 long chain of parasitical presences echoes allusions guests ghosts of previous texts Gilbert and Gubar 2000 1979 46 This volume con cerns itself at various turns with these textual ghosts and hauntings both literal and metaphorical In turn questions of dependency and derivation are broached Studies of adaptation and appropriation invari ably conjure up questions of ownership and the attendant legal dis courses of copyright and property law Following on from Barthess destabilization of fixed textual meaning however as both procedure and process adaptation and appropriation are celebratory of the cooperative and collaborative model Certain distinctions remain nevertheless crucial to understanding the operations of adaptation and appropriation There is a need for example to distinguish between direct quotation and acts of citation Quotation can be deferential or critical supportive or questioning it depends on the context in which the quotation takes place Citation however presumes a more deferential relationship it is frequently self authenticating even reverential in its reference to the canon of authori tative culturally validated texts Many nineteenthcentury novels those of Thomas Hardy the Brontë sisters and George Eliot for exam ple deployed Shakespearean citation in this manner But citation is dif ferent again to adaptation which constitutes a more sustained engagement with a single text or source than the more glancing act of allusion or quotation even citation allows Beyond that appropriation carries out the same sustained engagement as adaptation but frequently adopts a posture of critique even assault Adaptation and appropriation are inevitably involved in the perfor mance of textual echo and allusion but this does not usually equate to the fragmentary bricolage of quotation more commonly understood as the operative mode of intertextuality In French bricolage is the term for Doityourself DIY which helps to explain its application in a liter ary context to those texts that assemble a range of quotations allusions and citations from existent works of art A parallel form in art is the cre ation of collage by assembling found items to create a new aesthetic object or in music the creative act of sampling This purposeful reassembly of fragments to form a new whole is undoubtedly an active element in many of the postmodernist texts explored in the course of this study introduction 4 There are also important ways in which the act of bricolage shades into the literary practice of pastiche Pastiche is another term of French derivation which in the musical sphere refers to a medley of references a composition made up of fragments pieced together Dentith 2000 194 In the domains of art and literature however pastiche has under gone a further shift or extension of reference being applied most often to those works which carry out an extended imitation of the style of a single artist or writer There are undoubtedly some current novelists who are exponents of the medley style of pastiche Jonathan Coe for example in his richly allusive What a Carve Up 1994 which mimics everything from journalism to James Joyce in the course of its narrative but frequently it is the more sustained act of artistic imitation which is accorded the label of pastiche in contemporary literature Pastiche is often assumed to have a satiric undertow or a parodic intention although there are exceptions to this rule In some respects there is often a complicated blend of admiration and satire at play in pastiches of par ticular authors or literary styles J M Coetzees Foe discussed in detail in Chapter 6 reworks with both celebratory and satiric intent the aes thetics of eighteenthcentury prose and the writings of Daniel Defoe in particular in its version of novels written in the epistolary or journalis tic style Peter Carey effects something similar in his selfconscious revisiting of the tropes and idioms of nineteenthcentury fiction and in particular Dickensian narrative in Jack Maggs explored in Chapter 7 There are also in both these novels moments when bricolage and pastiche are jointly in play but on the whole when assigning a politi cal or ethical commitment to acts of literary appropriation such as these postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts Robinson Crusoe and Great Expectations respectively we acknowledge that stylistic imitation is nei ther the essence nor sole purpose of the approach to the source text even though it may be a defining feature James Joyces 1922 novel Ulysses could be viewed as the archetype of the adaptive text The title alone indicates a structuring relationship with Homers Ancient Greek epic of the wandering and journeying Ulysses also known as Odysseus The Odyssey That relationship was even more apparent in the prepublication instalments of Joyces novel where each chapter heading signified a specific relationship with an event or character in the Homeric narrative Telemachus Lotus introduction 5 Eaters Scylla and Charybdis Sirens Circe Penelope Joyces deci sion to suppress these referential chapter headings in the final published version of the novel raises the question as to whether we require knowl edge of The Odyssey to understand in any comprehensive sense his Dublin narrative What this question highlights however is the funda mental contradictory impulse towards dependence and liberation implicit in the majority of the adaptations and appropriations that will be invoked in the course of this volume Gérard Genette has categorized Ulysses as the very type of the selfproclaimed hypertext and yet as an extreme case of emancipation from the hypotext 1997 309 with hypertext here equating to the adaptation and hypotext to the source Joyces novel can undoubtedly be read alone and appreciated as a narra tive as a remarkable vignette of a day in the life of an ensemble of Dublin inhabitants in the 1920s this is by no means a failed or insuffi cient reading And yet a reading of that narrative alongside an inform ing awareness of the events of Homers epic clearly enriches the potential for the production of meaning so that we see as Jennifer Levine has noted the quasifatherson relationship that emerges between Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom in the novel as sugges tive in its own right and yet register how it sharpens our sense of the potentially filial relationship between them to see them also as Telemachus and Odysseus 1990 32 Of course the intertextuality of Joyces characters does not rest with the Homeric comparisons alone since Stephen and Leopolds relationship also suggests that of Hamlet and Old Hamlet and Ulysses resonates with Shakespearean echoes and refrains Elsewhere the narrative indulges in numerous virtuoso perfor mances of literary pastiche If Leopolds wife Molly who speaks the infamous closing monologue of Ulysses is a version of Odysseuss wife Penelope patiently awaiting her wandering husbands return from his epic adventures there is also a selfconscious rewriting of the informing sourcetext in the fact that Molly proves a distinctly adulterous version of the archetypal loyal wife Joyce expands the frame of reference further by evoking Shakespeares wife Ann Hathaway as another Penelope since she was left behind in StratforduponAvon when the playwright went to London to make his name We begin to be interested in Mrs S Joyce 1986 1922 165 There is often humour as well as intellectual richness at work in the par introduction 6 allels and consonances Joyce evokes This Irish epic compresses the decades and continents of the Homeric text into a single Dublin day punctuated by pub gatherings and cooking on the stove Cyclops becomes an obstructive drinker in Barney Kiernans bar Circe a brothel owner There is undoubtedly an element of parody or the mockepic implicit in this approach comparable to Alexander Popes reduction of the epic form to a story of a vain woman at her dressing table in his long eighteenthcentury poem The Rape of the Lock In this respect Ulysses embodies the reduction and compression that Genette has identified as a common impulse in some hypertextual literature and yet in its verbal complexity and twisting weblike narrative Ulysses also deserves recog nition for its art of amplification making the quotidian lives of its Dublin community epic in scope An intertextual reading of Ulysses draws readers imaginations into the realms of Homer Dante and Shakespeare stretching far beyond its selfproclaimed horizons and cul tural geography The signifying field appears vast as a result Ulysses is a potent reminder of the rich possibilities of the adaptive technique and of readings alert to the politics of appropriation but it is also a fine example of the sense of play that many theorists have stressed as central to the adaptive instinct Paul Ricoeur describes appropriation as the playful transposition of the text and play itself as the modal ity appropriate to the reader potentialis that is to anyone who can read 1991 87 As this volume will stress there is frequently heartfelt polit ical commitment standing behind acts of literary appropriation or re vision Adrienne Richs coining of this phrase with its crucial inserted hyphen was a product of her personal feminist and lesbian politics 1992 1971 But the political aspect of revisionary writing should never occlude the simultaneously pleasurable aspects of reading into such texts their intertextual and allusive relationship with other texts tracing and activating the networks of association that we have been describing As Genette observes one who really loves texts must wish from time to time to love at least two together 1997 1982 399 Such statements encourage us to categorize and define adaptation and appropriation and their cultural histories while at the same time taking care to ensure that these elements of pleasure are neither lost nor underestimated T S Eliots 1919 essay Tradition and the Individual Talent has been described as perhaps the single most formative work in twentieth introduction 7 century AngloAmerican criticism Widdowson 1999 49 Eliots essay is certainly essential reading for students of adaptation and appropria tion Eliot sought to rethink notions of originality and value querying the tendency to insist when we praise a poet upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else Eliot 1984 1919 37 The unapologetically masculinist emphasis aside Eliots comments are pertinent to this project Suggesting an alternative literary valuesystem in which the reworking and response to the texts of the past would take centrestage Eliot questioned why originality was valued over repeti tion No poet no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone 38 He was not advocating blind adherence to precursor texts or ages an action that would after all be little more than literary plagiarism his notion of the individual talent was that it created new material upon the surface and foundation of the literary past Peter Widdowson is correct to acknowledge that Eliots case for an historical awareness of literary tradition served to justify his own inter textual discursive style and the aims of the Modernist movement 1999 49 Modernist poetry not least Eliots own practised intertextu ality in the form of quotation allusion collage bricolage and fragment As already stressed in this study we are looking at something rather different a more sustained engagement between texts and their creators We are seeking to theorize an interrelation between texts which is fun damental to their existence and which at times seems to get to the heart of the literary and especially the reading experience Eliots delineation of the historical sense 1984 1919 38 is helpful he suggests that meaning stems from the relationships between texts relationships which encourage contrast and comparison As the close readings con ducted here underline this is exactly what an aesthetic and historicized critical study of adaptation is concerned with Eliots essay has sometimes been attacked on the grounds that it implicitly assumes a literary canon a series of valued texts that are returned to and consulted by subsequent ages Eagleton 1994 1981 54 The debate that has raged around canon formation in literary stud ies in recent decades is inescapable in this context Adaptation both appears to require and to perpetuate the existence of a canon although it may in turn contribute to its ongoing reformulation and expansion As Derek Attridge has astutely observed The perpetuation of any introduction 8 canon is dependent in part on the references made to its earlier members by its later members or wouldbe members 1996 169 The required reading alongside of source and adaptation the signifiers respectively of tradition and individual talent in Eliots terminology demands a knowledge on the part of the reader or spectator of the source when encountering the derivative or responsive text In this respect adaptation becomes a veritable marker of canonical status cita tion infers authority To this end adaptation could be defined as an inherently conserva tive genre As Attridge continues through their frequently overt allusiveness novels offer themselves not as challenges to the canon but as canonic as already canonized one might say They appear to locate themselves within an established literary culture rather than presenting themselves as an assault on that culture 1996 169 Yet as the notion of hostile takeover present in a term such as appropriation implies adaptation can also be oppositional even subversive There are as many opportunities for divergence as adherence for assault as well as homage Another influential essay for studies of appropriation then is Adrienne Richs When We Dead Awaken Writing as Revision first published in 1971 In that essay she made the muchcited observation that for women writers it was essential to take on the writing of the past in order to move beyond it into a free liberated creative space of their own Revision the act of looking back of seeing with fresh eyes of entering an old text from a new critical direction We need to know the writing of the past and know it differently than we have ever known it not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us Rich 1992 1971 369 The suggestion is similar to Eliots in that it invokes the literary past and insists on an historical understanding to foster creativity both in the present and in the future but it is also entirely antithetical to Eliots mindset in that it simultaneously advocates a radical break with that tradition a dissonant and dissident rupturing of its valuesystems and hierarchies This critical perspective on the relationship between tra dition and the individual talent is one shared by writers producing work from feminist gay and lesbian and postcolonial subjectpositions Another theorist of literatures relationship to its own past whose work is both acknowledged and challenged by these subjectpositions is Harold Bloom His seminal book The Anxiety of Influence first published introduction 9 in 1973 considered the fraught relationship between writers and their literary inheritance constructing it in selfconsciously Freudian terms as an Oedipal struggle between young sons and their literary forefathers Several flaws in this argument have subsequently been exposed not least that Bloom writes from an exclusively masculinist position He also constructs a very particular literary history one with an emphasis on the individual creator or literary genius and therefore one that unduly privileges the Romantic era when a special stress on the individual cre ative mind and the unique personal contribution of the poet emerged Several critics have since traced alternative teleologies of literary influ ence indicating for example the impact of the classics on early modern writers such as Shakespeare Bate 1993 and acknowledging a strong female presence within the communities of influence as well as those influenced Gilbert and Gubar 2000 1979 Nevertheless Blooms central thesis of misprision the often happenstance or inevitable rein terpretation of texts during the process of adoption translation and reworking them into new contexts remains a highly suggestive one for appropriation studies and one which has influenced the vocabulary with which many scholars operate in this field The central problem with any tradition is the ability to recognize not only those who constitute that tradition but those who are at various times excluded from it or at the very least consigned to its margins Henry Louis Gates Jr has examined this phenomenon in relation to AfricanAmerican writing a literary domain that in its desire to assert its own methodologies and ways of operating nevertheless found a need to confront the white literary tradition within its pages this is what Graham Allen has described as the struggle of black subjects to enter into Western literary culture 2000 168 For Allen The core of Gatess argument is that AfricanAmerican writing is doublevoiced and selfconsciously intertextual in its relation to both standard English and a black vernacular discourse 2000 168 Gatess most expansive discussion of these ideas takes place in The Signifying Monkey 1988 and invokes the crucial analogue of jazz music and the improvisational yet allusive techniques it deploys In the jazz tradition compositions by Count Basie signify and Oscar Peterson signifyin are structured around the idea of formal revision and implication Gates 1988 123 This discussion of adaptation and appropriation will invoke the example introduction 10 of jazz on several occasions and of musicology on several more But the specific relevance to AfricanAmerican writing of signifying and its relationship to jazz deserves notice As James Andreas Sr acknowledges To signify in African and AfricanAmerican cultures is to improvise upon a given topos narrative or joke the way a jazz musician improvises on a progression of chords melodic structure or spontaneous riff in the previous musicians solo 1999 107 Andreas Srs specific example of this in action is the work of Gloria Naylor Her novels have been much studied due to their intertextuality with Shakespeare Faulkner Dante Chaucer and the Bible among others Erickson 1996 In Baileys Cafe this signifying practice is played out through a complex series of layers allusions and shaping influences The café of the title is a literal space in the novel but one that appears able to cross geographical and tempo ral borders The characters who visit the café each have a tale to tell and their tales are reworkings of biblical ones including those of Eve and Mariam The intertextuality does not stop there for the name of the café as well as the characters taletelling invokes a seminal work of English medieval literature in Chaucers The Canterbury Tales the host of the Tabard Inn where the pilgrims gathered before their journey to Canterbury and who proposed that they tell their individual stories en route was called Harry Bailey Shakespeare a familiar hypotext throughout Naylors oeuvre is present in the novels evocations of The Tempest among other texts Sanders 2001 17090 but it is the manner in which the narrative structure is shaped by movements more familiar from the musical domains of blues and jazz that seems most overtly to acknowledge Gatess theories Sections enti tled Mood Indigo and Miss Maples Blues explicitly acknowledge the literary riffs and improvisations being effected by Naylor on a diverse range of influences and sources Naylor is a writer steeped in other writ ers and yet her voice remains distinctly her own Gates suggests this is a typical feature of AfricanAmerican writing which consciously positions itself in relation to canonical white Western culture and the companion productions of fellow African and AfricanAmerican writers As Andreas Sr notes in his discussion of Naylors Tempestsoaked appropriation Mama Day her work embodies the familiar AfricanAmerican practice of play ful but wilful manipulation of the signifier that alters perception of the signified 1999 107 introduction 11 In all of the instances discussed in this introduction and elsewhere in this volume the rewrite be it in the form of novel play poem or film invariably transcends mere imitation serving instead in the capac ity of incremental literature Zabus 2002 4 adding supplementing improvising innovating The aim is not replication as such but rather complication expansion rather than contraction Andreas 1999 107 In scientific terms we might speak about the crucial difference between a clone and a genetic adaptation And if musicology offers us one highly applicable and suggestive set of metaphors and idioms for conducting a discussion of literary adaptation and appropriation within these pages it will also be registered that the scientific domain of genetics stretching from the nineteenthcentury horticultural experiments of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwins controversial theory of natural selection and environmental adaptation through to the research into DNA in the twentieth century provides a further set of productive correspondences Using a separate field of terminology derived from the world of horti culture Genette has written at length about the palimpsestuous nature of texts observing that Any text is a hypertext grafting itself onto a hypotext an earlier text that it imitates or transforms 1997 1982 ix Grafting is just one of several creative metaphors for the adaptive process that this volume will favour As Chapter 2 explores further there is a need to establish a more diverse vocabulary for discussing and describing the relationship between texts and hypertext source and appropriation than these labels at present enable In these phrases the relationship is often viewed as linear and reductive the appropriation is always in the secondary belated position and the discussion will therefore always be to a certain extent about difference lack or loss Travel can change for the better though so the metaphor of the journey may still be helpful even though it implies a linear movement from point A to point B By eschewing a linear epistemology altogether however phrases such as grafting or models derived from musicology which allow for greater dynamic impetus in the new composition or variation serve us well To quote Genette In music the range of transformational possi bilities is probably broader than in painting broader than in literature certainly given the complexity of musical discourse which unlike the literary text is unhampered by the strict linearity of the verbal signi fier 1997 1982 386 Chapter 2 explores further the potential for introduction 12 phrases appropriated from the discipline of music and musicology terms such as variation and sampling for example to revivify our understandings of the kinetic processes of adaptation As this endless ruminating over terminology suggests this is a study sympathetic to pluralism rather than fixity To this end the volume is divided into three parts The first section Defining Terms offers a series of definitions for and ways of thinking about adaptation and appropria tion as practice and process The aim is to open out and widen the range of terms and their applications rather than fixing or ossifying specific concepts of adaptation and appropriation The second section on Literary Archetypes examines the recurring interest of adaptation and appropriation in many of the central texts of Western culture myth fairy tale and folklore and Shakespeare The latter playwright of course reworks in his texts many of the structures and storylines of myth and fairy tale indicating the cultural osmosis that regularly occurs between adaptive writers and texts It will be witnessed in this study how fre quently adaptations adapt other adaptations There is a filtration effect taking place a crosspollination we are observing mediations through culture practice and history that cannot be underestimated The final section widens the parameters yet further considering the Alternative Perspectives offered by adaptations and appropriations As well as exploring specific revisions of canonical texts by William Shakespeare Daniel Defoe Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf this section con siders the ongoing interest in recreating and critiquing the Victorian era in various acts of reworking and pastiche not least in the field of prose fiction From a detailed focus on appropriations of fictional writing the latter chapters of the volume consider the appropriation of historical fact and the adaptation of alternative art forms in the domain of the literary and the cinematic What becomes clear as these sections progress is how frequently adaptations and appropriations are impacted upon by movements in and readings produced by the theoretical and intellectual arena as much as by their socalled sources Many of the texts and films studied here are produced as much by the tenets of feminism poststructuralism postcolonialism queer theory and postmodernism as by the literary canon per se As the critical anxieties and the Robert Weimann quotation at the beginning of this introduction indicated the reproductive capacity introduction 13 of appropriation and the study of appropriation cannot be underesti mated Texts feed off each other and create other texts and other critical studies literature creates other literature Part of the sheer pleasure of the reading experience must be the tension between the familiar and the new and the recognition both of similarity and difference between our selves and between texts The pleasure exists and persists then in the act of reading in around and on and on introduction 14 PART 1 DEFINING TERMS All matter is transformed into other matter Kate Atkinson Not the End of the World The processes of adaptation and appropriation that are the concern of this book are in many respects a subsection of the overarching practice of intertextuality As mentioned in the introduction the notion of inter textuality is most readily associated with Julia Kristeva who invoking examples from literature art and music made the case in essays such as The Bounded Text 1980 and Word Dialogue Novel 1986 that all texts invoke and rework other texts in a rich and everevolving cultural mosaic The impulse towards intertextuality and the narrative and archi tectural bricolage that can result from that impulse is regarded by many as a central tenet of postmodernism Allen 2000 The interleaving of different texts and textual traditions which is manifest in the intertextual impulse has also been linked to the post colonial notion of hybridity Homi Bhabhas account of hybridity sug gests how things and ideas are repeated relocated and translated in the name of tradition 1995 207 but also how this process of relocation can stimulate new utterances and creativity For Bhabha however only hybridity that respects essential difference enables innovation whereas the cultural synthesis or homogenization of multiculturalism proves sti fling 208 Scienceled notions of hybridization regard cultural artefacts 1 WHAT IS ADAPTATION as irrevocably changed by the process of interaction In the case of post colonial cultures this is particularly problematic since if the scientific notion of dominant and recessive factors or genes holds true for cul tures then the colonial or imperial tradition dominates over the indige nous in any hybridized form This notion of the dominant and the recessive was an idea first posited by the scientific experimenter in pat terns of heredity Gregor Mendel in the midnineteenth century Tudge 2002 but in the literary field it has been adopted to articulate a debate about dominance and suppression that is crucial for any consideration of intertextual relationships Studies of adaptation and appropriation intersect in this way not only with the scientific idiom which T S Eliot deployed in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent when he wrote of the chemical reaction between literary inheritance and the artist that created a wholly new compound Eliot 1984 41 but also with the critical and cultural movements of postmodernism and postcolonialism indeed the effort to write a history of adaptation necessarily transmutes at various points into a history of critical theory As well as throwing up potent theoreti cal intertexts of their own adaptation studies mobilize a wide vocabu lary of active terms version variation interpretation continuation transformation imitation pastiche parody forgery travesty transposi tion revaluation revision rewriting echo As this list of terms sug gests adaptations and appropriations can possess starkly different even opposing aims and intentions as a result adaptation studies often favour a kind of open structuralism along the lines proposed by Gérard Genette in Palimpsests 1997 ix readings which are invested not in proving a texts closure to alternatives but in celebrating its ongoing interaction with other texts and artistic productions To this end sequels prequels compression and amplification all have a role to play at different times in the adaptive mode Adaptation can be a transpositional practice casting a specific genre into another generic mode an act of revision in itself It can parallel editorial practice in some respects indulging in the exercise of trim ming and pruning yet it can also be an amplificatory procedure engaged in addition expansion accretion and interpolation compare for example Deppman et al 2004 on genetic criticism Adaptation is frequently involved in offering commentary on a sourcetext This is defining terms 18 achieved most often by offering a revised point of view from the origi nal adding hypothetical motivation or voicing the silenced and marginalized Yet adaptation can also constitute a simpler attempt to make texts relevant or easily comprehensible to new audiences and readerships via the processes of proximation and updating This can be seen as an artistic drive in many adaptations of socalled classic novels or drama for television and cinema Shakespeare has been a particular focus a beneficiary even of these proximations or updatings The relevance of particular terms to a specific text and the moment in time when they become active can provide some very specific clues to a texts possible meanings and its cultural impact intended or otherwise As Robert Weimann stresses appropriation as an activity is not closed to the forces of social struggle and political power or to acts of historical consciousness 1988 433 The intention here is to examine in detail the specific impulses and ideologies personal and historical that are at play in various acts of adaptation and appropriation It seems useful therefore to start by unpacking in some detail what we might mean by such umbrella terms and considering the different modes and methodologies of adaptation as well as its varying disciplinary manifestations In his richly informative study of hypertextuality Genette described the act of writing a text in whatever genre with other texts in mind as a transgeneric practice As any reading of this book will make clear a vast range of genres and subgenres are regularly involved in the kind of hypertextual activities Genette interrogates Adaptation is however frequently a specific process involving the transition from one genre to another novels into film drama into musical the dramati zation of prose narrative and prose fiction or the inverse movement of making drama into prose narrative We have already established that when we discuss adaptation in these pages we are often working with reinterpretations of established texts in new generic contexts or perhaps with relocations of an origi nal or sourcetexts cultural andor temporal setting which may or may not involve a generic shift Modules on higher education programmes which examine the transition of literature into film are fairly common place these days and any student engaged in such work is implicitly if not explicitly studying adaptation thinking critically about what it means to adapt or appropriate Intellectual or scholarly examinations of what is adaptation 19 this kind are not aimed at identifying good or bad adaptations On what grounds after all could such a judgement be made Fidelity to the original As I hope this volume indicates it is usually at the very point of infidelity that the most creative acts of adaptation and appro priation take place The sheer possibility of testing fidelity in any tan gible way is surely also in question when we are dealing with such labile texts as Shakespeares plays Adaptation studies are then not about making polarized value judgements but about analysing process ideology and methodology Establishing some useful templates for studying cinematic interpre tations of wellknown novels Deborah Cartmell argues for three broad categories of adaptation i transposition ii commentary iii analogue Cartmell and Whelehan 1999 24 On the surface all screen versions of novels are transpositions in the sense that they take a text from one genre and deliver it to new audi ences by means of the aesthetic conventions of an entirely different generic process here novel into film But many adaptations of novels and other generic forms contain further layers of transposition relocat ing their source texts not just generically but in cultural geographical and temporal terms Baz Luhrmanns 1996 William Shakespeares Romeo Juliet is a useful example updating Shakespeares early modern Veronese tragedy to a contemporary North American setting Luhrmann retains the playtexts sense of urban gang feuding but accords it a troublingly immediate and topical resonance Famously the muchmentioned swords and rapiers of Shakespeares playscript become in Luhrmanns vividly realized Verona Beach the engraved monikers for the modern eras weapon of choice the handgun Genette would describe this as a movement of proximation 1997 304 and it is extremely common in screen adaptations of classic novels As mentioned Shakespeares oeuvre has proven to be a particularly rich seam to mine for such proximations in 1999 Kenneth Branagh remade Loves Labours Lost as a 1930s Hollywood film musical embed defining terms 20 ding Shakespeares competition of courtly wit and sonneteering within a fauxOxbridge context The events of the film unfurled on the eve of the Second World War providing its audiences with a more recent histori cal context of conflict than the Shakespearean plays interaction with the late sixteenthcentury French Wars of Religion and Branagh added a deliberately nostalgic soundtrack of songs by George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter to appeal to those members of the audience who shared that cultural memory Michael Almereydas millennial Hamlet reenvi sioned Elsinore as a Manhattan financial corporation with Claudius as a corrupt CEO 2000 In an interesting twist the disaffected young prince in this version was an antiestablishment art student who cre ated his play within a play as a video montage to be submitted as a course assignment The motive behind updating is fairly obvious the movement of proximation brings it closer to the audiences frame of reference in temporal geographic or social terms Not all transposi tional adaptations that make temporal shifts move forward to a date nearer the present Franco Zeffirellis 1990 film Hamlet for example opted for a Gothic medieval setting but it is certainly the most com mon approach In the example of Zeffirellis Hamlet it could be argued that his casting was an implicit updating since it brought to bear a self conscious act of intertextuality with the world of film action heroes in particular the specific brand represented by his Hamlet Mel Gibson Shakespeare is not the sole focus of transpositional adaptation although as we will witness in Chapter 3 his works do provide a cul tural barometer for the historically contingent process of adaptation In 1998 director Alfonso Cuarón effected a similar shift of setting and context with Charles Dickenss Bildungsroman Great Expectations relo cating it to contemporary New York with his Pip Finn Bell as a struggling artist Comparable transpositions can be found of the work of Henrik Ibsen Jane Austen and Anton Chekhov among others There is a case to be made that in some instances the process of adap tation starts to move away from simple proximation towards something more culturally loaded This constitutes Cartmells second category commentary or adaptations that comment on the politics of the source text or those of the new miseenscène or both usually by means of alter ation or addition Film versions of Shakespeares The Tempest for exam ple which bring the Algerian witch Sycorax visibly onscreen comment what is adaptation 21 by means of this action on her absence from the play In Shakespeares text she is constructed solely by means of Prosperos negative wordpor traits Derek Jarmans 1979 film The Tempest and Peter Greenaways lush epic Prosperos Books 1991 both featured an onscreen Sycorax One film version of Jane Austens Mansfield Park dir Patricia Rozema 2000 made explicit that novels context in the history of British colonialism and the practice of slavery on Antiguan plantations Rozema made visi ble facts that the novel represses In both these instances the absence or gap in the original narrative being remarked upon in the transpositional film was one that had been identified by postcolonial criticism It could be argued that in all these examples the full impact of the film adaptation depends upon the audiences awareness of an explicit relationship to a source text In expectation of this most formal adapta tions carry the same title as their source text The desire to make the relationship with the source explicit links to the manner in which the responses to adaptations depend upon a complex invocation of ideas of similarity and difference These ideas can only be mobilized by a reader or spectator alert to the intertextual relationship and this in turn requires the deployment of wellknown texts or sources Philip Cox has suggested as much in relation to the huge popularity of stage adapta tions of Charles Dickenss novels in the nineteenth century These pro ductions consciously staged tableaux images reenacting famous moments from the novels The use of the illustrationtableau would suggest the expectation of audience familiarity with the serial instal ments of the novels themselves the pleasure to be gained through such acts of mimicry could only be brought about by an instant recognition of the similarities 2000 434 It is of course in this way that adapta tions and appropriations prove complicit in activating and reactivating the canonical status of certain texts and writers even when the more politicized appropriation may be seeking to challenge that very status In Cartmells third and final category of adaptation analogue the case is rather different While it may enrich and deepen our understand ing of the new cultural product to be aware of its shaping intertext it may not be entirely necessary to enjoy the work independently recent examples of standalone works that nevertheless deepen when their sta tus as analogue is revealed might include Amy Heckerlings Clueless a ValleyGirl variation on Jane Austens Emma 1995 Francis Ford defining terms 22 Coppolas Vietnam film Apocalypse Now 1979 and its recontextualiza tion of Joseph Conrads dark nineteenthcentury exploration of the colo nial enterprise in the Congo Heart of Darkness and Michael Winterbottoms The Claim 2001 in which Thomas Hardys The Mayor of Casterbridge is reenvisioned as a subtle variation on the Hollywood genre of the Western relocating the action to goldrush America in the 1860s Another example which actually exhibits a twostage process of adaptation and absorption is William Reillys Men of Respect 1990 a late twentiethcentury US film about the Mafia which reworks both a 1955 film about the British gangland scene Joe Macbeth dir Ken Hughes and that films own Shakespearean dramatic precursor Macbeth The complex question provoked by these examples as to whether or not knowledge of a source text is required or merely enriching will recur throughout the readings proffered in this volume It would of course be misleading to apply adaptation studies solely to cinematic versions of canonical plays and novels although that is per haps its most common and easily understood manifestation Another genre that is engaged in selfconscious adaptation on a regular basis is the stage and film musical Intriguingly Shakespeare once again appears as a facilitating presence as well as The Boys from Syracuse which made The Comedy of Errors into a musical there is Jerome Robbinss and Robert Wises West Side Story with music by Leonard Bernstein which reenvisioned Romeo and Juliet as a 1950s tale of gang violence in the streets and concrete playgrounds of New York This in turn influenced Luhrmanns 1996 film adaptation of Shakespeares romantic tragedy Kiss Me Kate famously riffs on The Taming of the Shrew by means of the songs of Cole Porter Porters involvement in this earlier Shakespearean adaptation was clearly an informing influence for Branagh when updat ing Loves Labours Lost in 1999 The musical finds much of its source material in the literary canon from Victor Hugos epic novel Les Misérables to T S Eliots Old Possums Book of Practical Cats One musical which has achieved its own canonical status is My Fair Lady a version of George Bernard Shaws play Pygmalion which in its title glances even further back into the literary past for its influences to the shapeshifting stories of Ovids Metamorphoses where Pygmalion creates a statue with which he falls in love We will explore other Ovidian adaptations in Chapter 4 but what what is adaptation 23 already begins to emerge is the more kinetic account of adaptation and appropriation that we were arguing for in the Introduction these texts rework texts that often themselves reworked texts The process of adap tation is constant and ongoing It is not entirely unconnected that the disciplinary domains in which the term adaptation has proved most resonant are biology and ecology Following Charles Darwins presentation of his controversial theories of evolution in the nineteenth century the scientific community has been endlessly fascinated with the complex processes of environmental and genetic adaptation from Darwins famous finches on the Galapagos islands whose variations in bill and beak type were an indicator of the different foodstuffs they had adapted to eat in competition with one another to the peppered moth in British industrial cities a melanism or darker variation on the traditional species thought to have developed to blend in with the blackened surfaces caused by heavy industry in those areas Adaptation proves in these examples to be a far from neutral indeed highly active mode of being far removed from the unimagina tive act of imitation copying or repetition that it is sometimes pre sented as being by literature and film critics obsessed with claims to originality Adaptation and appropriation also provide their own inter texts so that adaptations perform in dialogue with other adaptations as well as their informing source Perhaps it serves us better to think in terms of complex processes of filtration and in terms of intertextual webs or signifying fields rather than simplistic oneway lines of influ ence from source to adaptation In all of these categorizations and definitions of adaptation it remains crucial that we keep in sight the pleasure principle In a very suggestive account of films impact upon our experience of canonical lit erature John Ellis argues that adaptation enables a prolonging or exten sion of pleasure connected to memory Adaptation into another medium becomes a means of prolonging the pleasure of the original presentation and repeating the production of a memory 1982 45 Elliss thesis is of course equally resonant in its application to the recent vogue for television adaptations of classic texts best exemplified by the genre of the BBC period drama in the UK examples include adaptations of Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Gaskells North and South and George Eliots Daniel Deronda although the prac defining terms 24 tice also extends beyond the realms of the nineteenthcentury novel and into the domain of contemporary fiction with the recent threepart adaptation of Jonathan Coes The Rotters Club which proved as much a loving reconstruction of a particular historical era or period in this case the decade of the 1970s as any of the previous examples By prolonging the pleasure of the initial act of reading or the initial encounter with a text Ellis suggests that adaptation trades upon the memory of the novel a memory that can derive from actual reading or as is more likely with a classic of literature a generally circulated mem ory 3 He continues This adaptation consumes this memory attempting to efface it with the presence of its own images 3 It is at this point that I part company with his otherwise persuasive argument For consumption need not always be the intended endpoint of adapta tion the adapting text does not necessarily seek to consume or efface the informing source Indeed as I will suggest in these pages it is the very endurance and survival of the source text that enables the ongoing pro cess of juxtaposed readings that are crucial to the cultural operations of adaptation and the ongoing experiences of pleasure for the reader or spectator in tracing the intertextual relationships It is this inherent sense of play produced in part by the activation of our informed sense of similarity and difference between the texts being invoked and the con nected interplay of expectation and surprise that for me lies at the heart of the experience of adaptation and appropriation what is adaptation 25 There are many ways in which both the practice and the effects of adaptation and appropriation intersect and interrelate yet it is equally important to maintain some clear distinctions between them as cre ative activities An adaptation signals a relationship with an inform ing sourcetext or original a cinematic version of Shakespeares Hamlet for example although clearly reinterpreted by the collaborative efforts of director scriptwriter actors and the generic demands of the move ment from stage drama to film remains ostensibly Hamlet a specific version albeit achieved in alternative temporal and generic modes of that seminal cultural text On the other hand appropriation fre quently affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain This may or may not involve a generic shift and it may still require the intellec tual juxtaposition of at least one text against another that we have suggested is central to the reading and spectating experience of adap tations But the appropriated text or texts are not always as clearly signalled or acknowledged as in the adaptive process They may occur in a far less straightforward context than is evident in making a film version of a canonical play This chapter aims to unpack some of the diverse modes and operations of appropriation To ease discussion the examples have been divided into two broad categories embedded texts and sustained appropriations 2 WHAT IS APPROPRIATION EMBEDDED TEXTS AND INTERPLAY The stage and film musical has already been cited as an inherently adap tational form often reworking canonical plays poems and novels into a mode that deploys song and dance to deliver its narrative West Side Story and Kiss Me Kate two previously mentioned Shakespeareinformed musicals are interesting examples of the practice since they go one stage further than the generic adaptation involved in making Victor Hugos Les Misérables or George Bernard Shaws Pygmalion into a musically based performance West Side Story would not exist without Romeo and Juliet Tony and Maria are clearly modern reworkings of Shakespeares starcrossed protagonists in a 1950s New York context Their story of a love denied by feuding urban communities and in particular the two gangs the Jets and the Sharks clearly has its origins in the Montague Capulet rivalry the ancient grudge that drives the prejudice and vio lence of Shakespeares stage Verona This carefully realized miseenscène highlighted what was a topical issue of race conflict in New York at the time when the musical was first written and performed resentment of and violence towards the immigrant Puerto Rican community There is much pleasure to be had in tracing the relationships and overlaps between the two texts The iconic fire escapes of the West Side provide a brilliant counterpart to the balcony scene of Shakespeares playtext Romeos quasipatriarch and confidante the Friar first seen in the play collecting herbs is transformed into gentle Doc owner of the local drugstore where many of the Jets meet In a production working in a teenage idiom and context the late 1950s being the moment when teenage culture was formalized in both cultural and commercial terms Doc is the sole parental figure we see on stage or screen the musical was made into a film in 1961 Marias parents are heard but only as voices off authority is effectively evacuated from the stage There are other supposed figures of authority present onstage in the shape of Officer Krupke and his colleagues from the NYPD but they are laughably corrupt and ineffectual in their handling of the tense situ ation on the streets they police In Shakespeares play Juliet has a coun terpart confidante to Romeos in the comic body of the Nurse In West Side Story the comic aspect of this relationship is downplayed in favour of the sisterly attentions of Anita fiancée to Marias gangleader brother Bernardo One sequence depicts an unforgettable choreographed gang what is appropriation 27 rape we witness Anita enduring this at the hands of the Jets when she tries and fails to deliver Marias message to Tony This is another sug gestive reading and reworking of the play both of Mercutios bawdy misogynistic banter with the Nurse and the misdelivered letter that Jacques Derrida and others have identified as the crucial turning point of Romeo and Juliet Derrida 1992 419 This is adaptation then but it is adaptation in another mode West Side Story can and does stand alone as a musical in its own right without need of the Romeo and Juliet connection although I would still maintain that for audiences of the musical an intertextual awareness deepens and enriches the range of possible responses Lyrics such as Theres a place for us undoubtedly return us to issues of spatial confinement in the original play and the Jets much reiterated gang tag Womb to Tomb evokes the tragic confinement of possibility for the plays young protag onists whose love is consummated only in the face of death and ulti mately literally in the encasement of the Capulet family tomb This is a fine example of the more sustained reworking of the source text which we have identified as intrinsic to appropriation rather than the move ments of proximation or crossgeneric interpretation that we identified as central to adaptation here we have a wholesale rethinking of the terms of the original Kiss Me Kate has Shakespeares misogynistic comedy The Taming of the Shrew quite literally at its core in a classic metatheatrical move the musical filmed in 1953 is about a group of performers staging a musi cal version of The Taming of the Shrew Audiences register two levels of adaptation and appropriation The embedded The Shrew musical is a more straightforward adaptation along the lines we were establishing in Chapter 1 reworking the characters and events of Shakespeares play in a song and dance format As a result many of the central songs includ ing I Hate Men derive from the musicalwithinthemusical That for mat is itself quasiShakespearean recalling the playswithinaplay of among others Hamlet Loves Labours Lost and A Midsummer Nights Dream but of course most appositely recalling the metatheatrical framework of The Taming of the Shrew itself Shrew opens with the Induction which establishes that the whole play of Katherina and Petruchios embattled relationship is a performance by a troupe of trav elling actors who have tricked the inebriated Christopher Sly into defining terms 28 thinking he is a lord watching household theatricals on his aristocratic estate Kiss Me Kate frames its Shrew musical with a plotline of embat tled theatre stars once married but now divorced There are obvious hilarious ways in which their offstage temperaments mirror their onstage performances Lilli Vanessi for example is outspoken and hot headed in a manner akin to her character Katherina While the musicals untroubled manifestations of early twentiethcentury US sexual politics including the beatings and confinements visited upon the forceful Lilli may no longer seem so amusing in an era alert to domestic violence the point remains that Kiss Me Kate is both adaptation and appropriation at the same time If the pure adaptation rests in the embedded musical then the appropriative aspect is found in the wider framework story of the US theatre performers and in the related subplot of the Mafia hench men seeking debt repayment from the productions Hortensio Bill Calhoun The gangsters deliver one of the shows most famous songs whose title has itself almost reached the status of comic byline for the act of Shakespearean appropriation Brush up Your Shakespeare When Angela Carter chose this as one of three epigraphs to her late novel on theatre Shakespeare and musical Wise Children 1992 she was antici pating a readership with a vivid cultural memory of Kiss Me Kate Kiss Me Kate can obviously be viewed and understood in the context of Shakespearean appropriation more generally which as we will see in Chapter 3 is a veritable cultural field in its own right but it also relates to a tradition of what can best be described as backstage dramas These are texts interested in going behind the scenes of performances of partic ular plays or shows This can be achieved in a selfreflexive way on the stage as in Kiss Me Kate or Michael Frayns play about English repertory theatre Noises Off Shakespeare in Love dir John Madden 1998 also exploits this motif exploring an offstage relationship between Will Shakespeare and his star performer Thomas Kent a disguised Viola de Lesseps via suggestive cinematic crosscutting between their real life and their onstage performance in Romeo and Juliet Backstage drama of this kind has also been developed in a prose fic tion context Australian author Thomas Keneallys 1987 novel The Playmaker recounts the rehearsals and performance of a production of George Farquhars 1706 play The Recruiting Officer The play is per formed by a group of convict actors who have been assembled for the what is appropriation 29 purpose by Lieutenant Ralph Clark a British military officer involved in overseeing the penal colony established in Sydney Australia in the late eighteenth century In a funny and touching account of the rehearsal period Keneally draws on resonant echoes between the events of Farquhars play which depicts the sexual shenanigans of a group of recruiting officers in the provincial shire town of Shrewsbury and daily life in the penal colony where sitespecific hierarchies prevail and where many of the women convicts are the sexual property of the military offi cers and overseers Lieutenant Clark falls in love with his lead actor Mary Brenham a convicted clothes thief who performs the part of the crossdressing Silvia in Farquhars comedy but we are always aware of the geographical and temporal parameters to this lovestory In the epi logue to the novel Keneally structures his narrative in the form of five chapters and an epilogue selfconsciously recalling dramatic structure we learn of Ralphs return to his English fiancée Mary Brenham as with the majority of the convicts whose lives we have followed simply slips from the historical record Keneallys purpose in writing this novel has relevance far beyond the 1789 setting of the events it purports to recall shadowing the world of the penal community represented in the novel stand the lives of the displaced aboriginal communities of Australia For all the playwithinthenovels claims to be the first the atre production in this new land the reader is made all too aware that the Sydney penal colony is far from being the original existence on the island Behind his surface appropriation of Farquhars play to explore the penal colony Keneally also worked extensively with historical records of the same the author is concerned with another more hostile and imperialist act of cultural appropriation the seizure of the land rights and cultural claims of the aboriginal peoples The novel is dedi cated to Arabanoo and his brethren still dispossessed and Keneally has continued to be a prominent campaigner against Australias current restrictive immigration laws Appropriation then as with adaptation shades in important ways into the discursive domains of other disci plines in particular here the legal discourse surrounding the controver sial areas of land and property rights Intriguingly Keneallys novel underwent a further process of adapta tion when playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker recreated it as a stage drama Our Countrys Good in 1988 Following the practice of adaptation defining terms 30 outlined in the previous chapter Wertenbaker altered condensed and redirected the focus of Keneallys novel She chose to commence the play with a scene on board the convict ship transporting the prisoners to Australia whereas in the novel this is only ever recalled in flashback and by means of shared memories Adding the specific character and in some sense mouthpiece of the GovernorinChief of New South Wales Arthur Phillip Wertenbaker embeds in her play several extended justi fications for the rehabilitative and socially constructive power of the arts in general and of theatre in particular She had her own political motives for doing so in the late 1980s The debates conducted in the play about the social and cultural importance of the arts had a highly topical resonance in an era of UK Arts Council funding cuts In an interesting twist Our Countrys Good has in turn proved an extremely popular play for staging and performance by prison drama groups These acting companies find personal resonance in the playscript Reading the available accounts of several prison actors of the inspira tional effect of the artistic experience of staging Our Countrys Good there exists a sense in which the events described in Keneallys novel have travelled full circle Wertenbaker 1991 1988 vixvi Wertenbakers play was first staged by the Royal Court Theatre Company in London playing in repertory alongside The Recruiting Officer To emphasize the connections further both productions involved the same company of actors On one night audiences could see a particu lar actor playing Justice Balance in The Recruiting Officer and then the next day that same actor playing Ketch Freeman in Our Countrys Good the public hangman who assumes the role of Balance in the Australian convict production Those spectators who saw both plays in quick suc cession were being invited to make their content and material play off against one another just as they do in Keneallys founding novel Another doublehander frequently staged by theatre companies for related reasons and with similar effects is Alan Ayckbourns A Chorus of Disapproval This play is also about a theatre company rehearsing a pro duction this time a provincial British theatre company The company is staging an amateur operatic production of John Gays eighteenthcentury musical The Beggars Opera Gays text has been subject to numerous cul tural adaptations and acts of filtration famously providing the template for Bertolt Brechts Threepenny Opera Ayckbourn ensures that his audiences what is appropriation 31 are alert to the particular connection between his play and Gays by com mencing A Chorus of Disapproval at the end as it were as the curtain falls on the successful performance and the actors take their bows As a conse quence of this when the play launches back in time to the start of the audition and rehearsal process the audience knows it is tracing Guy Joness ascent from theatre hopeful into leading man Of course the humour resides in the fact that Guy becomes too identified with his part as Gays womanizing criminal protagonist Macheath upsetting various female members of the company in the process Much of the comedy of A Chorus of Disapproval derives from an audiences active engagement with the embedded text of The Beggars Opera playing on similarity and differ ence yet again Ayckbourn highlights the continuity of actor and part but also the discontinuities between his privileged provincial setting and the eighteenthcentury underworld of Gays comic opera When Gays musical drama plays in repertory with Ayckbourns play these connec tions and contrasts become even more pertinent for audiences Encouraged interplay between appropriations and their sources begins to emerge then as a fundamental even vital aspect of the read ing or spectating experience one productive of new meanings applica tions and resonance But as already stressed appropriation does not always make its founding relationships and interrelationships as clear as these plays with named embedded texts The gesture towards the source texts can be wholly more shadowy than in these explicit situa tions and this brings into play sometimes in controversial ways ques tions of intellectual property proper acknowledgement and at its worse the charge of plagiarism SUSTAINED APPROPRIATION HOMAGE OR PLAGIARISM When Graham Swift won the Booker Prize in 1996 for his novel Last Orders a controversy over the award soon emerged As Pamela Cooper has recorded connections were identified between Swifts novel and William Faulkners 1930 American classic As I Lay Dying In a letter to the book review supplement of the newspaper The Australian John Flow of the University of Queensland underlined defining terms 32 some very close similarities in structure and subjectmatter including a monologue given to the dead person a monologue consisting of numbered points and a monologue made up of a single sentence Cooper 2002 17 Flows accusation was that this provable line of influence from Faulkner rendered Swifts book a substandard derivation of As I Lay Dying and therefore unworthy of a prize for which the judges commendation had drawn attention to the books originality Charges and countercharges flew in the British press with several Booker judges including Jonathan Coe admitting that they had never read the Faulkner book Cooper 2002 60 and Julian Barnes defending Swift on the grounds that bor rowing and appropriation were a standard feature of the artistic process Swift himself called Last Orders an homage to Faulkner and it should be stressed that earlier work by him had been compared to Faulkners writing not least Waterland 1983 in the way that it approached land as character As Flows critique of Last Orders made explicit there are notable structural overlaps between Faulkners tale of a Mississippi fam ily group transporting the corpse of their dead wifemother to the town of Jefferson for burial and Swifts story of four male friends transporting the ashes of their late friend the butcher Jack Dodds to scatter off the end of Margate Pier Faulkners novel is shaped by means of a series of juxtaposed mono logues both from family members including the highly poetic but increasingly mentally estranged Darl who in some sense provides the novels central narrative consciousness and who is ironically incarcer ated in an asylum by the close and onlookers to the grotesque comedy of the strongly smelling coffin being carried through floods and town ships en route to its final resting place At one point we have a single sentence monologue from one character in the Faulkner novel the child Vardaman and by comparison Swift has Vinces exclamation of Old buggers while at the Chatham naval war memorial Swift 1996 130 Faulkners corpse Addie Bundren speaks a single monologue delivered as it were from beyond the grave as does Swifts Jack Dodds 285 In both novels readers are party to the monologues of women left behind Cora Tull in As I Lay Dying and Amy Jacks widow in Last Orders In one remarkable sequence in the Faulkner narrative Cash the what is appropriation 33 eldest Bundren son recounts the almost obsessive care with which he fashioned the coffin in which his mothers rotting corpse is now being transported the nailing together of the coffin is the action and sound that promulgates and defines the opening of the novel In Last Orders this section has been transformed into Ray Johnsons rules for betting on horses In both novels these lists have a metaphorical application to life In a manner similar to Faulkners Darl and Cash whose two very distinct voices and worldviews Darls poetic and sensitive but vulner able to complete fragmentation and collapse Cashs pragmatic and pro saic although highly perceptive provide the central juxtaposed narratives of As I Lay Dying Rays monologues in Last Orders present him as the central consciousness in Swifts text Between the gaps or lines of Rays narrative we learn of his love for Jacks wife Amy and his estrangement from his own wife and daughter as well as the past his tory of this complicated set of friends and associates many of the rela tionships date from 1940s wartime experiences What is both interesting and troubling in the case of Last Orders and the homage to Faulkner is that what in studies of Shakespeare might be termed an examination of sources or creative borrowings citing allusions to or redeployments of Ovid Plutarch Thomas Lodge the Roman come dies and so on becomes in the case of a modern novel a reductive discus sion of plagiarism and inauthenticity Robert Weimann gestures at this point in his observation that In precapitalist societies the distance between the poets act of appropriating a given text or theme and his or her own intellectual product and property is much smaller the extent to which his matière is given the extent to which source genre plot pat terns topoi and so on are preordained is much greater 1988 434 This is a Marxistinflected questioning of property and ownership at its heart but it is worth adding that in his volume on Literature in this series Peter Widdowson asserted that revisionary writing is a funda mental subset of what we might categorize as the literary 1999 The consonances between the two works Faulkners and Swifts are inescapable but what is of particular interest in the context of this vol ume is the specific charge of indebtedness that was being made by Flow and others Flow seemed to suggest that Swifts novel was devalued because it was not original an unsustainable argument in the context of a postmodern culture of borrowings and bricolage But what also con defining terms 34 cerned many of the critics and readers who responded to Flows charge was the idea that Swift had somehow been intellectually dishonest by reworking Faulkners remarkable novel into a late twentiethcentury and vernacular English idiom without paying due acknowledgement Would Last Orders have regained cultural status if in a prefatory note Swift had explicitly recorded his debt or openly declared his intentional homage Should his novels title have indicated its intertextual relationship in the way that Joyces Ulysses does its interaction with Homeric epic Yet Joyces novel is also linked to Shakespeares Hamlet but the 1922 novel bears no trace of that relationship in its title Does that make it somehow dishonest less worthy in literary terms less original Surely not The response to Last Orders raises the important question as to whether a nov elist needs to adequately acknowledge intertextuality and allusiveness If we adhere to some of Genettes theories of palimpsestuous writing dis cussed in the previous chapter surely part of the pleasure of response for the reader consists in tracing those relationships for themselves Without wishing to reduce the act of reading to a game of spot the appropriation it is surely important to acknowledge that to tie an adaptive and appro priative text to one sole intertext may in fact close down the opportunity to read it in relationship with others This is certainly true of Last Orders Swifts novel is in many respects all about the search for family and a sense of home and like so many novels of travel its ultimate focus is on the starting point rather than any notional destination Swift is appro priating several literary archetypes in this respect The device of the journey is ancient and archetypal in Western and other literatures as is the topic of death As Swift has registered The story about the pressure of the dead on the living in the wake of death is as old as Homer Cited in Cooper 2002 17 Swift has always been a deeply allusive writer Waterland opens with a suggestive epigraph from Dickenss Great Expectations Ours was the marsh country Ever After 1992 carries resonances of Hamlet as discussed in Chapter 3 and as invoked in Chapter 4 The Light of Day 2003 rewrites the genre of detective fic tion alluding in the process both to Graham Greenes The End of the Affair and the classical myth of Orpheus Pamela Cooper has identified further links between Last Orders and the poetry of T S Eliot in partic ular The Waste Land with its London public house refrain of Time gentlemen please Of course Eliots poem has several rich intertexts of what is appropriation 35 its own but one which strikes the reader early on is that of Geoffrey Chaucers seminal medieval work The Canterbury Tales whose positive hopeful opening in spring Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote Chaucer 1986 General Prologue ll 116 Eliot inverts to April is the cruellest month This invocation in turn alerts us to a parallel set of allusions in Swifts novel to Chaucers story of pilgrimage The narrative appears to enjoy alerting the reader to the intertextual game Look out for signs to Canterbury 181 There is even a significant detour into Canterbury Cathedral By appropriating Chaucers Canterbury Tales Swift adopts and adapts the ancient literary strategy of paralleling actual journey or placepil grimage with inner journey or spiritual travel These themes and the Chaucerian intertext are all glancingly alluded to in the opening pages of Last Orders Ray is sitting in a Bermondsey public house the jok ingly named Coach and Horses since as the characters keep reflecting it aint never gone nowhere 6 which of course parallels the Southwark inn the Tabard in which Chaucers twentynine pilgrims first encounter one another and decide to travel together passing the time by telling stories at the suggestion and behest of Harry Bailey the Host Ray is awaiting his companions for the Margate Pier trip to scat ter Jacks ashes As in Faulkners As I Lay Dying there is a grimly comic element to this gathering and the journey a fact emphasized by the con tainer for Jacks ashes which instead of being a holy grail prosaically resembles an instant coffee jar yet at its heart the pilgrimage to Margate proves to be a deeply epiphanic experience for the four men involved As already noted Last Orders resembles As I Lay Dying in that it is structured around a series of monologues concerning themselves with events both past and present but this structure also echoes the polyphonic quality of Chaucers poem with its inset stories and narra tives Phillips 2000 2 Interestingly Chaucers own structure of a group of storytellers from diverse origins sondry folk 1986 General Prologue l 25 gathered together in a place and for a purpose has numerous literary counterparts across the centuries and across cultures from Boccaccios fifteenthcentury Florentine taletellers in the Decameron brought together in a country house by an outbreak of plague to Rana Dasguptas global community stranded in an airport terminal by bad weather in his novel Tokyo Cancelled 2005 defining terms 36 Chaucers pilgrims travelled on horseback Faulkners grotesque funeral procession moved forward by a combination of horse and wagon Swifts protagonists travel in a royal blue Mercedes or Merc provided by Vince a usedcar salesman The car thus becomes in Last Orders an emblem of the new mobility of south Londoners an ease of movement social and geographical that pulls figures like Vince away from the fam ily trade of butchery and renders trips to Kent simple and almost insignificant compared to the muchremembered and recounted hop picking trips in the 1930s Last Orders like As I Lay Dying but also like the organized pilgrim ages of the Middle Ages is mapped out by means of various named spe cific places waystations and markers which carry meanings both for the past and present The four men compelled by a common errand travel together across a small part of England making discoveries about themselves each other their world time and history Cooper 2002 23 Part of considering that historical process for Swift involves an engagement with Englands past One crucial cinematic intertext is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburgers wartime rumination on English identity A Canterbury Tale 1944 in which four poeple make a journey to Canterbury that is clearly suggestive of pilgrimage Critics have also identified allusions to the Old English poems Wanderer and Seafarer Cooper 2002 32 in the novels interest in different landscapes land terra firma sea Most obviously we have a version of lands end on Margate pier at the close as well as desert and sea settings in the remem bered war experiences of several of the men Dee Dyas 2001 23 has indicated how Wanderer and Seafarer themselves used biblical parallels and Cooper has rightly traced elements of the Edenic storyline in Last Orders in the Cain and Abel struggle between Lenny and Vince Swifts extended funeral procession both is and is not then a secular version of the medieval pilgrimage just as Chaucers pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales are a mix of the mercantilist the selfserving and the pious The four men in Swifts novel start their journey in April when there are daffs out on the verges 30 and with a sense of promise just as Chaucers poem so famously begins But this is also an elegiac poem in prose The novel is a journey through postimperial England the narra tive refrain reflects on how things have changed for the British male For this journey is undoubtedly a male enterprise The wife of this what is appropriation 37 novel Amy is no travelling Wife of Bath she chooses to stay behind resisting the grim irony of going to Margate with Jacks ashes which was a journey she had planned to make with him in life in their retire ment Amys abiding sense of a journey in the novel is the far smaller repetitive No 44 bus route she makes to see hers and Jacks mentally impaired daughter in hospital In Swifts novel we are offered social topicality and topography as with Chaucer but we also receive a version of the literary England that Chaucers text forms a part of The England of Last Orders also invoked in that multiply referential title is both changing and oddly timeless on its last legs and yet enduring And that in a way begins to unpack an answer to the charges of plagiarism levelled at this novel in relation to Faulkners As I Lay Dying Of course the Faulknerian intertext is crucial revealing moving even in highlighting the South London analogue that Swift provides to the Mississippi regional literature of the 1930s But as Cooper has noted before me we are not dealing with a single frame of appropriation or intertextuality but rather a symphony of intertexts It is in how these intertexts play off against each other that the full story of Last Orders emerges 2002 37 The musical metaphor of the symphony of texts or polyphony of voices in Last Orders is helpful since it is one of the major contentions of this volume that in searching for ways of articulating the processes of adaptation and appropriation we need a more active vocabulary A kinetic vocabulary as I have termed it is one that would be dynamic moving forward rather than conducting the purely backwardlooking search for source or origin Swifts own favoured metaphor of the journey is certainly a useful point of reference in studying the various interpreta tions and reinterpretations of canonical or established texts we are on a journey of sorts that takes us through various historical and geographical staging points But there is also a danger in deploying the motif of the journey As a term that seems to insist on a beginning and an endpoint an origin and a destination the idea of a journey can reduce the adaptive process to a linear teleology In truth Swifts narrative technique is far more antilinear than this implies in its evocation of Old English and Middle English literature alone his narrative processes prove circular and intertwining rather than a direct movement from A to B the circuitous narratives of Faulkners As I Lay Dying perform a similar function defining terms 38 The four mens journey to Margate also returns them to the past Swift has deployed this antilinear understanding of the textuality of history before most notably in Waterland and it is a psychic and nar rative movement that informs his intertextual style But it is perhaps in music and musicology that some of the most enabling metaphors for the kinetic process of adaptation might be sought Much European baroque music in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries derived its creational and performative impetus from improvising on dance music and patternings working with such forms as the bergamasca the folia and the passamezzo Improvisation or variation on a firm foundation or intertextual base is therefore fundamental to its composition and structure Musical creations by Diego Ortiz Marco Uccellini and Henry Purcell in Spain Italy and England respectively were com monly structured in terms of grounds or repeated harmonic base instrumental patterns often played by lute harpsichord or cello or a combination of both on the surface of which the more improvisational lines of instrumentation are performed by flute recorder bass viol or violin We have in this a rather beautiful model for the way in which intertexts in a novel such as Last Orders might operate as the base or ground for the reader informing the top note or improvisation that is the new creative act or cultural production Eliots notion of Tradition and the Individual Talent seems to find new aesthetic life in this context Perhaps one of the best known musical contexts in which this ongo ing yet circular process of innovation upon a base ground takes place is Johann Sebastian Bachs Aria mit verscheidenen Veraenderungen Aria with Different Variations better known as The Goldberg Variations There are thirty variations framed by an opening and closing performance of the base aria As Richard Powers so eloquently describes in his remarkable novel The Gold Bug Variations discussed further in Chapter 9 The set is built around a scheme of infinitely supple proliferating relations Each of the thirty is a complete ontogeny unfolding until it denies that it differs at its conception from all siblings by only the smallest mutation an imperceptibly vast chaconne an evolutionary passacaglia built on the repetition and recycling of this Base 1991 578 what is appropriation 39 Powerss own metaphorical point of reference here is the genetic pat terning revealed by research into DNA in the 1940s and 1950s and the identification of the intertwined double helix by Crick and Watson But what his prose gives us is an invaluable set of terms for rethinking the process of adaptation moving away from a static or purely linear stand point Unfoldings recyclings mutations repetitions evolutions varia tions the possibilities are endless and exciting A modern musical counterpart to baroque musics deployment of grounds can be found in the improvisational qualities of jazz Jazz riffs themselves models of repetition with variation frequently make refer ence or pay homage to base canonical works see also McClary 2001 One potent example of this is Duke Ellingtons suite Such Sweet Thunder based on several Shakespearean plays and sonnets 1999 1957 Ellingtons virtuoso interpretations of the Shakespearean base texts per fectly exemplifies Henry Louis Gates Jrs theory of signifying in AfricanAmerican culture as invoked in the introduction which Gates adopted from the practice and example of prominent jazz musicians In the jazz tradition compositions by Count Basie signify and Oscar Peterson signifying are structured around the ideas of formal revi sion and implication 1988 123 Even more recently we have the working example of sampling in musical genres such as rap and hiphop David Hesmondhalgh has provocatively described this as plagiarism as a cultural tactic or inter ventionist act indicating ways in which debates about plagiarism and intellectual and literary property rights need to be remobilized in more positive socially productive and empowering ways Exploring what he describes as the tangled sounds of rap Hesmondhalgh queries the extent to which raps interest in appropriation intertextuality and recontextualization can be subjected to conventional copyright law To what extent does the act of recontextualization the placing of the sam ple next to other sounds mean that authorship and the resultant finan cial rewards should be attributed to those sampling rather than those sampled 2000 280 As with the furore over Swifts Last Orders we are dealing with a complex ethics of indebtedness although with the added complication pointed out by David Sanjek that musical language does not carry quotation marks 1994 349 Perhaps as with some of these more celebratory recognitions of the potential of rap or sampling to fos defining terms 40 ter a new aesthetic we need to view literary adaptation and appropria tion from this more positive vantage point seeing it as creating new cultural and aesthetic possibilities that stand alongside the texts which have inspired them enriching rather than robbing them This would provide grounds perhaps for exonerating Graham Swift and establish ing a more vibrant method of exploring the appropriative process what is appropriation 41 PART 2 LITERARY ARCHETYPES Adaptation and appropriation are dependent on the literary canon for the provision of a shared body of storylines themes characters and ideas upon which their creative variations can be made The spectator or reader must be able to participate in the play of similarity and difference perceived between the original source or inspiration to appreciate fully the reshaping or rewriting undertaken by the adaptive text There are particular bodies of texts and source material such as myth fairy tale and folklore which by their very nature depend on a communality of understanding These forms and genres have crosscultural often cross historical readerships they are stories and tales which appear across the boundaries of cultural difference and which are handed on albeit in transmuted and translated forms through the generations In this sense they participate in a very active way in a shared community of knowl edge and they have therefore proved particularly rich sources for adap tation and appropriation The following two chapters will consider myth and fairy tale in greater detail but before turning to them it seems crucial for any historicized study of the adaptive process to touch base with the playwright whose oeuvre functions in a remarkably similar way to the communal shared transcultural and transhistorical art forms of myth and fairy tale William Shakespeare It is no coincidence that the Shakespearean canon has provided a cru cial touchstone for the scholarship of appropriation as a literary practice 3 HERES A STRANGE ALTERATION SHAKESPEAREAN APPROPRIATIONS and form Several booklength studies have considered appropriation from a Shakespearean perspective see for example Marsden 1991 Chedgzoy 1995 Novy 1999 Desmet and Sawyer 1999 Fischlin and Fortier 2000 Sanders 2001 Zabus 2002 To cite Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier in the valuable overview essay that accompanies their recent anthology of dramatic adaptations of Shakespearean plays As long as there have been plays by Shakespeare there have been adapta tions of those plays 2000 1 Dramatic adaptation of Shakespearean playtexts had become routine as early as the Restoration in England from 1660 onwards playwrights such as Nahum Tate and William Davenant changed plotlines added characters and set to music Shakespearean scripts for performance Clark 1997 And it does not stop at plays poetry novels films animations television advertise ments have all engaged with Shakespeare as both icon and author As Fischlin and Fortier point out the Latin etymological root of the word adapt adaptare means to make fit 2000 3 The adaptation of Shakespeare invariably makes him fit for new cultural contexts and dif ferent political ideologies to those of his own age As a result a historio graphical approach to Shakespearean appropriation becomes in many respects a study of theoretical movements many theories which had their intellectual foundation in recent decades such as feminism post modernism structuralism gay and lesbian studies or queer theory and postcolonialism have had a profound effect on the modes and method ologies of adapting Shakespeare The ongoing adaptation of central figures of Western culture such as Shakespeare raises all kinds of questions about originality authorship and intellectual property rights Some authors are accused of seeking to authenticate their own work by attaching the Shakespearean aura and reputation to their writing Such writers are assumed to have a celebra tory or honorific approach to their source Others are seen to be more iconoclastic in intention rewriting or talking back to Shakespeare as an embodiment of the conservative politics imperialism and patriar chalism of a previous age Whatever the ideological stances of his adaptors one inescapable fact is that Shakespeare was himself an active adaptor and imitator an appropriator of myth fairy tale and folklore as well as of the works of specific writers as varied as Ovid Plutarch and Holinshed The early twentieth century witnessed a veritable industry 46 literary archetypes in Shakespearean sourcespotting Geoffrey Bulloughs influential eight volume series Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare was and still is a standard presence in any university library The organization of Bulloughs volumes proves instructive Fischlin and Fortier 2000 9 He divides his chapters in accordance with the following categories direct source analogue translation possible source and probable source The direct sources include Cinthios prose text on a jealous Moor reworked as Othello the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovids Metamorphoses which is performed by the mechanicals in A Midsummer Nights Dreams playwithinaplay and Thomas Lodges Rosalynd incor porated into As You Like It In many of these instances whole plotlines are lifted assimilated and recontextualized by Shakespeare Elsewhere sustained allusions and analogues figure such as Prosperos delivery of a speech in The Tempest translated from Ovid and spoken in the Metamorphoses by the sorceress Medea 513356 That Prospero speaks in this way links his magic to rather darker arts than might be pre sumed from his heroic stance and twins him in fascinating ways with the unseen but constantly invoked witch of the play Calibans mother Sycorax Any study of Shakespeares adaptation of sources indicates the rich intertextual readings such incorporation makes possible although in an effort to stress Shakespeares creativity as well as dependency crit ics have been anxious to identify those moments where the dramatist supplements or amplifies his sources One fine example of this is his addition of the commentator figure of Enobarbus to the tragic love story of Antony and Cleopatra which he derived from Plutarch All of the diverse methods of adaptation that we have been exploring in this volume apply to Shakespeares varied personal practice of appro priation Recent critical studies of the early modern period have tried to stress the collaborative writing environment in which Shakespeare worked For example he coauthored plays such as The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII or All is True with John Fletcher Perhaps a use ful way of beginning to think about adaptation is as a form of collabora tion across time and sometimes across culture or language Shakespeares age had a far more open approach to literary borrowing and imitation than the modern era of copyright and property law encourages or even allows Imitation was learned and practised in schools and continued into adult writing careers Shakespeare would perhaps have expected to shakespearean appropriations 47 be adapted by future writers and future ages Jean Marsden has sug gested that Ben Jonsons famous observation that Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time need not be taken to endorse the hoary old claims to his universality but rather as an indication that he remain available to subsequent ages to adapt and adopt as they wish His cul tural value lies in his availability as Marsden notes each new genera tion attempts to redefine Shakespeares genius in contemporary terms projecting its desires and anxieties onto his work 1991 1 Returning to issues of the canon already raised by efforts to define terms in this study Shakespeare is so frequently adapted in part because he is a major author Fischlin and Fortier 2000 6 There are also eco nomic and legal factors Shakespeare is helpfully outside copyright law making him safe as well as interesting to adapt The response though is varied adaptors of Shakespeare undertake a number of responses to Shakespeares canonical status some seek to supplant or overthrow oth ers borrow from Shakespeares status to give resonance to their own efforts Fischlin and Fortier 2000 6 Shakespeare is constantly being made new remade by this process if adaptations of Shakespeare some how reinforce Shakespeares position in the canon it is a different Shakespeare that is at work Fischlin and Fortier 2000 6 The dra matic form encourages persistent reworking and imagining Performance is an inherently adaptive art each staging is a collaborative interpretation one which often reworks a playscript to acknowledge contemporary concerns or issues In the twentieth century for example Henry V has been reenvisioned as a play about the Second World War Vietnam the Falklands crisis and more recently the two Gulf wars If drama embodies within its generic conventions an invitation to reinterpretation so the movement into a different generic mode can encourage a reading of the Shakespearean text from a new or revised point of view Stage plays famously offer broader perspectives on scenes and events than the single point of view of a film camera or a first per son narrator in a novel Admittedly there will be moments in a play when the individual fills the frame during soliloquy for example but this is not usually sustained across a whole performance A novel written from a specific point of view can therefore adopt a radical slant on a play simply by choosing to focus in on a single character and their reaction to events 48 literary archetypes The transfocalization involved in seeing things from this different point of view is a driving force in many nonShakespearean appropria tions as well as we will see in the third section of this volume not least in novels such as Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea or Peter Careys Jack Maggs These narratives are voiced wholly or in part by marginalized characters from canonical fiction Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre and Charles Dickenss Great Expectations J M Coetzees Foe reenvisions Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe from a female perspective entirely absent from the original text In each of these instances an informed knowledge of the hypotext or source is crucial to appreciate the twists and turns of the adaptive text The hypertext invites us to engage in a relational reading Genette 1997 1982 399 In the cited examples from Rhys and Coetzee those twists and turns are also achieved via the introduction of the specific perspective and bias of first person narrative Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer make the intriguing point in respect of Shakespearean appropriation that this interest in entering the text from the perspective of a particular character and therefore from a new angle can at times seems a very outmoded form of character criticism 1999 10 But there is also a wilful misreading of the parent text implicit in these rewritings that suggests a more politicized stance on the part of the literary offspring than mere character criticism would imply Novels and poems which have sought to reshape Shakespeare have certainly exhibited a strong interest in first person narrative or the poetic persona Jane Smileys A Thousand Acres for example not only relocates the family struggle for control of land and emotions in King Lear to the American midwest of the 1980s but chooses to view events from the perspective of Ginny the eldest daughter of Larry Cook the farmerpatriarch whose division of his land promotes the internal jeal ousies and ruptures in the family that promulgate the events of the novel If Larry is an analogue for Lear the kings madness mirrored here in an encroaching form of dementia then Ginny stands for Goneril By allowing Ginny a developed voice and personal history one which even tually exposes incest at the heart of this closeknit family Smiley is able to flesh out Gonerils violent actions against her father in the play It is an example of the process of revaluation outlined by Genette in Palimpsests The revaluation of a character consists in investing him or her by way of pragmatic or psychological transformation with a shakespearean appropriations 49 more significant andor more attractive role in the value system of the hypertext than was the case in the hypotext 1997 1982 343 If in King Lear Gonerils limited stage time and lines reduce her actions to a tragicomic grotesque version of villainy such as when she poisons her sister Regan in a fight for the sexual attentions of Edmund Smiley accords Ginny considerable motivation psychological and physi cal for her actions The poisoning plotline resurfaces in the novel but constitutes a failed attempt by Ginny to wreak revenge on her sister Rose Regan for a shared relationship with neighbour Jess Cook The Cook family storyline provides the narratives analogue to the subplot in King Lear the rivalry between the Duke of Gloucesters two sons and Gloucesters eventual blinding It is a mark of the detailed relocation of the events of the play that the blinding in A Thousand Acres occurs as a result of an agricultural accident rather than the vicious torture wit nessed onstage in Shakespeares drama Smileys motivations in this rewriting of King Lear are multiple She clearly felt a need to write back to Shakespeares demonization of female characters such as Goneril and Regan to consider what might have motivated or caused such behaviour indulging in the retrieval of female experience from a male authored masternarrative Zabus 2002 6 She also writes from a late twentiethcentury ecofeminist standpoint in terms of the novels supple mentary political and ecological concerns with the pollution of the land by socalled conventional farming techniques and the materialistic aims of modern capitalism and business practice Mathieson 1999 12744 Sanders 2001 191216 Marina Warners novel Indigo or Mapping the Waters exhibits a similar interest in retrieving the womans story from a malecentred text This time the focus is Shakespeares The Tempest Warners narrative which will also be examined in Chapter 5 in terms of its appropriation of fairy tale offers an extended voice to two of that plays marginalized female characters Miranda and Sycorax If Miranda is subject to her fathers controlling presence throughout the play Sycorax is reduced to the accounts provided by others she is only talked of never seen Warners novel in a tactic familiar to several of the novel appropriations consid ered here interweaves a double timescheme to depict Miranda in the twentieth century and Sycorax in the early modern period Warner resists however the simplistic linearity of historical account Indigo literary archetypes 50 challenges the stability of such accounts subjecting history to the pat terns of storytelling and multiple textualities the theoretical underpin ning of these ideas of the textuality of history or history as narrative are explored in more detail in Chapter 8 of this volume This enables a feminist viewpoint to be articulated Framing the entire narrative is the storytelling of Serafine Killabree a figure who connects both with Sycorax and Miranda thereby drawing the novel into a more circular mode of being than the teleology of History allows In turn a critical postfeminist and postcolonial read ing of The Tempest is incorporated into this revisionist text Chedgzoy 1995 94134 It is an example of what Steven Connor has called fidelityinbetrayal more of an improvisation upon its original than an attempt to translate it 1996 186 If rewriting of this kind compromises the cultural authority of the original text then this never amounts to a simple denial of it in its attention to its rewritten original its fidelityinbetrayal the rewritten text must always submit to the authority of an imperative that is at once ethical and historical Connor 1996 167 No simple denial or rejection of Shakespeares play is made in Indigo since it is by no means as straightforward a rewriting as this would require but its tenets and themes are reviewed through a postcolonial lens As Warners acknowledgements to scholars such as Peter Hulme in the foreword indicate this novel is a further instance of appropriation informed by critical history Few of the approaches or techniques identified in this chapter are exclusive to Shakespearean appropriation but it seems fair to claim that the Shakespearean canon has served as a test bed over many centuries for the processes of adaptation The history of Shakespearean revisions pro vides a cultural barometer for the practice and politics of adaptation and appropriation Much of the reworking impulse has engaged with the figure biography and cultural commodity of Shakespeare himself Cinematic and dramatic texts that adapt and adopt the figure of Shakespeare include John Maddens Shakespeare in Love 1998 and Edward Bonds play Bingo 1983 The engagements with the myth of shakespearean appropriations 51 Shakespeare these represent have been considered elsewhere see for example Holderness 1988 but what is of particular interest here is the way in which specific Shakespearean plays have proved especially reso nant for adaptors in the twentieth century providing what James Andreas Sr calls aesthetic challenges 1999 107 A statistical analysis of those texts by Shakespeare which are adapted most regularly and again it is necessary to stress that we are thinking about prolonged engagement rather than passing allusion would reveal three plays at the top of the list The Tempest Othello and Hamlet In the case of The Tempest and Othello we need to look to the British colonial legacy and to Shakespeares function within the multiculturalism of the twentiethcentury literary enterprise for some answers Shakespeare was undoubtedly deployed as a tool of empire taught in schools across the world as a means of promoting the English language and the British imperial agenda As a result postcolonial texts that talk back to the colo nizing culture frequently deploy Shakespeare as a means of achieving this There are complex reasons at stake as products of imperial and imperialist educational structures many of these writers share knowledge of Shakespeare with the dominant culture they seek to critique If adaptation requires foreknowledge of the source for the system of analogue and juxta position to succeed as we have argued elsewhere then Shakespeare is a reliable cultural touchstone a language we all understand Certain texts however also carry a particular freightage of meaning where postcolonial politics are concerned The Tempest became canonical in postcolonial studies in the late twentieth century harnessed as it was in performance and revisionary writing to think about both the discov ery of the New World of the Americas and the British imperial project in Africa and elsewhere Zabus 2002 Othello is a text that deals with racism within its dialogue and action and it has therefore also proved a rich source for texts seeking to examine the tensions of multicultural societies in the modern era In a 2001 film appropriation of the play O director Tim Blake Nelson relocated the storyline to a US college Odin James Othello is a top flight basketball player on the college team engaged in a passionate relationship with a fellow student Dessie The envious Hugo is the team coachs son In the hothouse atmosphere and competitive world of college sports Blake Nelson finds a perfect ana logue for the complicated military friendships and rivalries of the play literary archetypes 52 It is no coincidence that Odins initials O J recall another African American US sports star accused of murdering his white wife O J Simpson By exploring contemporary issues in the US via the filtering lens of the Shakespearean tragedy Blake Nelson in turn exposes the class rivalries and racism implicit in the US education system The film suffered a lengthy delay before its public release due to retrospective parallels found in its scenes of college shootings with the Columbine High School massacre of 1999 The trial of O J Simpson is also recalled in another modern variation upon the Othello theme which offers an AfricanAmerican perspective on the Shakespearean source With each scene framed by audio recordings of significant black events and speeches such as Martin Luther Kings Washington address Malcolm X Louis Farakhan and the Million Man March O J Simpsons trial and the sexual harassment hearings involv ing Anita Hill and Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas Djanet Searss Harlem Duet is a play with a triple interwoven timescheme Juxtaposed scenes depict Harlem in the 1850s and the 1860s that is to say during the years leading up to the American Civil War and in the 1920s and the 1990s that were contemporary to the plays first produc tion Its events serve as a prequel to the events of Shakespeares play in the sense that the modern Othello in this text is a Columbia University Literature professor who has left his partner for a white colleague Mona Audiences are being invited to read in the future for these characters using the Shakespearean tragedy as a template Mona is Desdemona Chris Yago the jealous colleague is Iago and the summerschool posi tion Othello accepts in Cyprus bodes ill The play is a complex rumina tion on the history of black representation in the theatre as well as a clever appropriation of Othello it is telling for example that the white character of Mona is only seen by means of a disembodied voice and arm in performance There are numerous inversions of the Shakespearean original as well as recognizable motifs and signifiers such as the handker chief For Fischlin and Fortier who include it in their anthology of Shakespearean adaptations Shakespeares text remains a barely visible but nonetheless significant backdrop 2000 287 Searss produc tion is evocatively devised around musical rhythms and signifiers It has an aesthetic structure derived in part from blues and jazz music The duet of the title is performed not only by the various allusive partnerships shakespearean appropriations 53 in the play but by the instruments of cello and double bass This musical frame serves to emphasize a black contribution to the arts in the Americas but also underscores Searss own improvisational approach to the Shakespearean playtext Henry Louis Gates Jrs notions of signifying are again relevant 1988 Andreas Sr 1999 107 The Tempest and Othello are traditional paradigms for any postcolonial scholar or writer their presence operates as a musical refrain in itself although one rewritten and reconceptualized at every turn Hamlet also has canonical standing in any study of Shakespearean reception and appropriation This is not because of specifically postcolo nial or feminist appropriations although Ophelias tragic trajectory has been of considerable interest to female adaptors not least Angela Carter whose novels and short stories are haunted by the image of Ophelia in her madness Sage 1994 33 What places Hamlet at the centre of the twentiethcentury literary canon is the influence of Freud and theories of psychoanalysis As the exploration of a mind in crisis the play has proved attractive to many commentators not least T S Eliot whose essays and interests in the earlier part of that century proved influential in the shaping of the discipline and concerns of English Literature One factor that has amplified or extended the canonicity of Hamlet is that the Prince of Denmark has come to be regarded as the culminating role for any aspiring young actor It serves then as a career touchstone as well as a literary one In a related vein film adaptations of the play have burgeoned ranging from Laurence Oliviers Freudimbued 1948 black andwhite rendition which carried the voiceover declaration that this was the tragedy of a man who cannot make up his mind Rothwell 1999 59 through Franco Zeffirellis Gothic rendition of the 1990s taste for the action movie to Kenneth Branaghs socalled full text version in 1996 As mentioned in Chapter 1 in 2000 Michael Almereyda produced his Hamlet set in a millennial Manhattan The corporate values of the late twentieth century substituted for the early modern plays plotlines of dynastic rivalry and crossborder battles The Castle of Elsinore was replaced by the Denmark Corporation with Claudius as a manipulative CEO In this version both Hamlet and Ophelia were art students enabling some suggestive postmodern substitutions for the plays cen tral moments Ophelias distribution of symbolic flowers in her madness was represented by the giving of photographic representations of the literary archetypes 54 same The Mousetrap Hamlets playwithinaplay became a film col lage shot on 16 mm by Ethan Hawkes media studies prince Once again the filtration effect of adaptations influencing further adaptations cannot be ignored A chronological study of Shakespearean adaptation uncovers all manner of crossfertilization in this case Almereydas acknowledged influence in creating a corporate miseenscène for Hamlet is Akira Kurosawas 1960 film The Bad Sleep Well which relocated the play to the Tokyo Stock Exchange Similar interactions can be explored between William Reillys previously cited Men of Respect 1990 and Ken Hughess Joe Macbeth 1955 both gangland ruminations on Macbeth and Gus Van Sants remarkable transposition of the HalFalstaff relationship of the Henriad in My Own Private Idaho 1991 and Orson Welless film version of those plays Chimes at Midnight 1966 Film adaptation is one important subset of adaptation and appropri ation that invariably signals its relationship to the Shakespearean play texts in a straightforward manner usually by means of the title But there are further subgroups which deploy a sourcetext as a creative springboard for another often wholly different text a movement also signalled frequently by title This creative move is sometimes achieved by extrapolating a particular storyline or characters trajectory from the original and reimagining it in a new context historical andor cultural The relationship to the original remains present and relevant but it is as if a grafting has taken place of a segment or rootstock of the original text The rootstock is conjoined to a new textual form or scion to cre ate a wholly new literary artefact I am deploying these metaphors of grafting quite selfconsciously Not only did Shakespeare deploy the metaphor in The Winters Tale 448797 but Gérard Genette uses this exact phrase to describe the adaptive relationship between hypotext original and hypertext recreation 1997 1982 ix In this notion of rootstock and scion being brought together by the grafting process to create a new plant pear trees for example are always grown on quince rooting stocks literature has long found a rich source of metaphor for its own creative practices Shakespeares sonnets abound with the imagery of grafting and Eliots notion of tradition and the individual talent finds an intriguing analogue in this horticultural practice Perhaps one of the most influential grafts of Shakespearean drama is Tom Stoppards 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead This shakespearean appropriations 55 play melds an appropriative reading of Shakespeares Hamlet one which tries to imagine a back story for two minor characters who are Hamlets former friends and attendant lords with a quasiparodic approach to the absurdist theatrical practices which were in the ascendant when Stoppard created his play The other clear intertext for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is Samuel Becketts 1952 play Waiting for Godot Stoppard creates his attendant lords in the image of Becketts endlessly philosophizing tramps Vladimir and Estragon who for the majority of their play wait on a largely bare stage for something to happen The opening stage direction makes this connection clear Two Elizabethans passing the time in a place without any visible character Stoppard 1990 1967 9 The joke is that the audience unlike Rosencrantz and Guildenstern knows what will happen because they know the script and therefore the outcome of Hamlet Hence Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are already dead even before they have started their play we know only too well the plotline of the sea journey and the exchanged letters and their disappearance from the stage of Shakespeares drama The playtext exploits the idea of every exit being an entrance some where else 22 we see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their down time or offstage moments the irony being that their Hamlet offstage is this plays onstage Stoppard does not simply impose his themes on a Shakespearean framework In many instances he finds precedent for his dramaturgical decisions in the Shakespearean precursor For example Elizabethan and Jacobean plays often began with attendant lords in dis cussion see for example Antony and Cleopatra or King Lear and Hamlet like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is interested in themes of broken ceremony maimèd rites Shakespeare 1998 51214 and metatheatricality Sale 1978 83 Stoppards play is however hugely influential in that it chooses to review Hamlet from the theatrical sidelines from the margins and through the eyes of minor characters This serves to render Hamlet and in particular the figure of the prince absurd Aspects events and char acters from Shakespeares play are visible onstage during the course of Stoppards drama but these have often been creatively decentred reduced to dumbshow or nonsensical fragment The plays hero is reduced to a slightly risible and histrionic character as a result Many critics have described this as an exercise in postmodernism fragment literary archetypes 56 ing defamiliarizing and displacing as it does one of the most canonical texts of English literature and Western culture Roger Sale also regards it as an act of depoliticization 1978 83 Seeing things from marginal or even offstage characters points of view is a common drive in many adaptations and appropriations When the dramatic genre is reworked into prose fiction form an intriguing equivalent is found for dramatic soliloquy in the form of first person nar ration Postmodernist fiction with its investment in highlighting the modes of unreliable narration draws attention to the bias implicit in this vantage point but what this biased perspective also allows in the rewrit ing of Shakespearean drama is the ability to see things from a particular characters point of view Novelists are invariably drawn to the idea of seeing things from the perspective of a character who is marginalized or disenfranchised by the original play be this for reasons of social status gender or race An ideological purpose to the revised perspective is almost inevitable as a result and as already argued many Shakespearean appropriations are motivated not only by the desire to ascribe motiva tion as exemplified in the unreliable first person narration of Smileys A Thousand Acres but also by political commitment The theoretical con cerns of postcolonialism feminism and queer theory or a vibrant fusion of all these figure in many adaptations of Shakespeare Contemporary American novelist John Updike indicates in an after word to Gertrude and Claudius 2000 that a renewed awareness of off stage characters in Hamlet derived from seeing Branaghs 1996 film version of the play was the spur to creating his novel He does not choose to write from a first person perspective but his text is sympa thetic to the situation of Hamlets mother Gertrude who marries the brotherinlaw who murdered her husband Updike achieves this sym pathetic approach by means of the timeframe which functions for the first two sections of his novel as a prequel to Shakespeares play We see how the young Gertrude or Gerutha as she is called in Part 1 of the novel a point to which we will return was subject to the dynastic ambitions of her father when choosing a husband And I am to be the plunder in exchange Updike 2000 5 Her husband Horwendil the Jute proves a committed warrior but a rough lover In this way Updike imputes a motive to Gertrudes adultery which is not present in the Shakespearean precursor This ascription of motive in turn manipulates shakespearean appropriations 57 or encourages the reader to respond with sympathy and understanding to Gertrudes predicament when she is seduced by the tender attentions of Horwendils brother Feng The variant and variable nomenclature of Updikes novel makes sev eral important points in its own right The novel has a tripartite struc ture and although the events portrayed in each section are continuous in chronological terms the main players names alter in each section The protagonists names in Part 1 derive from the ancient Hamlet leg end as detailed in Saxo Grammaticuss Historia Danica 1514 Gerutha Horwendil the Jute Feng his brother Corambus and Amleth In Part 2 they derive from François de Belleforests Histoires tragiques Paris 1576 Geruthe Horvendile Fengon Corambis and Hamblet It is not until the third and final part that we get the more familiar Shakespearean nomenclature Gertrude King Hamlet Claudius Polonius Hamlet Updike adds a further textual layer in that Polonius is called Corambis in the quarto edition of Shakespeares plays This slippage between the names is an indication that Hamlet has many tex tual origins and provenances and that Shakespeares play comes quite late in the line of adaptation and interpretation That Shakespeares drama is a variation on a much older theme is emphasized by Updikes decision to open each section with the same sentence The King was irate Like Bachs Goldberg Variations as discussed in Chapter 2 we are given the central aria or in this instance plotline on which many adap tors have ruminated and offered their own textual variants Any fixed or stable reading of the canonical Shakespearean playtext is effectively challenged by Updike the rich textual provenance justifies his speculation with regard to motivation for the events of the play Part 2 of Gertrude and Claudius ends with a brothers murder of a brother while he sleeps in an orchard an event recalled in flashback by the Ghost in Hamlet 155979 In Part 3 events as well as names offer more familiar signification to readers we get direct quotation from the playtext as well as recognizable events not least the court celebrations for Gertrude and Claudiuss oerhasty marriage and Hamlets mut tered puns 208 in response to his uncles elaborate performance of duty of care in front of the Elsinore courtiers But as the alert reader will register this is only the first act of Hamlet that we are seeing in the final part of this novel much lies ahead The tragic impetus is what literary archetypes 58 feeds the readers imagination and expectation in contradistinction to Claudiuss The era of Claudius had dawned it would shine in Denmarks annals He might with moderation of his carousals last another decade on the throne Hamlet would be the perfect age of forty when the crown descended He and Ophelia would have the royal heirs lined up like ducklings He had gotten away with it All would be well 210 The last phrase is an allusion to Claudiuss prayer scene at 34 of Hamlet All may be well 3472 although the alert reader will note the shift from the subjunctive mode to one of misplaced certainty The further juxtaposition of the Shakespearean frame of reference with contemporary US idiom gotten away with it points up the playful ness of Updikes approach to his multiple sources The film adaptations of Hamlet and the appropriations of Stoppard and Updike discussed here have an explicit relationship to their Shakespearean precursor but appropriation as we saw in Chapter 2 need not always sig nal its intertextual relations in this explicit way Appropriations can repre sent or suggest a range of relations ranging from direct contact to indirect absorption Miola 1992 7 There are therefore those appropria tions which derive a certain amount of comic or parodic impetus from their relationship with Hamlet A useful working example of the latter would be Charlotte Joness Humble Boy 2001 This is a play about a Cambridge astrophysicist Felix Humble who is traumatized by the death of his father and troubled by his mothers relationship with another man Felixs late fathers hobby of beekeeping enables lots of puns on those central lines from Hamlet To be or not to be and Let be the latter words form the closing line of Joness play There are also appropriations where the playtext features as what Robert Miola has usefully termed a deep source Miola 1992 7 Graham Swifts Ever After and Alan Islers The Prince of West End Avenue both appear to fit this category Swifts novel has a deeply introspective first person narrator who is both haunted by the suicides of his supposed father and wife and who has sui cidal thoughts of his own this in itself offers a parallel with Shakespeares introspective protagonist for a large part of my life I have imagined myself surreptitiously presumptuously appropriately perversely as Hamlet And you all know one of his tendencies Swift 1992 4 The nar rative style offers a further analogue to Hamlets multiple selfanalytical soliloquies in the play as well as pointing up the thin line between fact and shakespearean appropriations 59 invention The narrator Bill Unwin whose name we only learn halfway through the novel an indication of the extent to which his life and person ality are determined by those around him is an academic researcher Despite his crippling selfdoubt compounded by the fact that his research fellowship is dependent upon the patronage of his stepfather Unwin is researching a set of family notebooks dating from the 1850s These manuscripts record the crisis in faith experienced by his ancestor Matthew Pearce who in the wake of evolutionary theory and the doubts it cast on a religious understanding of the world sacrificed his marriage and family life to this growing state of unbelief In Chapter 7 we will investigate a series of novels that find their source material in the 1850s and 1860s and what might be termed the Darwinian moment Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859 Darwins text is directly cited in Ever After In working with this material as well as Shakespearean intertexts as well as Hamlet the narrative of Ever After alludes to Loves Labours Lost and Antony and Cleopatra at crucial moments Swift is paying homage to late twenti ethcentury fictions interest in the impact of Darwin One particular focus of Swifts intertextuality is John Fowless postmodern recreation of the Victorian novel The French Lieutenants Woman which like Ever After fea tured an 1850s geologist working in Lyme Regis Fowless novel is dis cussed in Chapter 7 Swift as discussed in Chapter 2 is a writer deeply aware of his literary foundations and one whose narratives are steeped in a subtle and pervasive form of allusion and adaptation He seems to encour age this account of his narrative technique via Bill Unwins analysis of aca demic research as a complicated blend of fact and hypothesis and the supplementation of the available material Lets read between the lines 211 Appropriation is frequently involved in a process of reading between the lines offering analogues or supplements to what is available in a source text and drawing attention to its gaps and absences Swifts title is one that we inevitably supplement with an additional absent word and con cept happy ever after Gaps in the narrative also help to define the complex textual opera tions of Alan Islers The Prince of West End Avenue a novel which ironi cally acknowledges its indebtedness to Hamlet in that deliberately bathetic or disjunctive title It is set in a New York Jewish nursing home and narrated by another of our bynowfamiliar unreliable first person narrators Otto Korner The narrative is couched as a memoir or 60 literary archetypes confessional although in a manner somewhat akin to Unwins circuitous narrative in Ever After many of the revelations are withheld until near the very end Despite his claim I want to set the historical record straight Isler 1996 2 Korners narrative is full of suppression and evasion Like Unwin and Hamlet he is haunted by ghosts from the past not least memories of the Holocaust but there is both a horror and an egotism in his seeming determination to place himself at the centre of twentiethcentury historical events We learn that he met Lenin and Joyce that he is the forgotten founder albeit by accident of the Dada movement and he even takes upon himself responsibility for Jewish deaths in the Nazi internment camps This is because he failed to see the gravity of the situation in the 1930s and therefore persuaded his family to remain in Berlin Undoubtedly their refusal to leave led to their internment and the subsequent deaths of Korners wife and child and the later suicide of his sister Lola but the reader questions to what extent he can take on responsibility for all German Jews who chose to remain in their homeland in the face of emergent fascism The readers response to Korner is a strange blend of sympathy and yet awareness of his deep egotism That egotism the desire to place himself at the centre of things is comprehensible largely through the novels intertextual relationship with Hamlet In one of the novels ironic gestures the octogenarians in the residential home are staging their own version of Hamlet a playwithinthenovel as it were This encour ages a whole series of comic comparisons and oddly dissonant juxtaposi tions elderly Ophelias for example and not least several ironic linguistic echoes In one instance Hamlets sea of troubles from the To be or not to be soliloquy 315890 61 is reduced to Ottos constipa tion a further example of the bathos central to this novels technique My troubles it seems may be solved by a valium a muscle relaxant and inevitably stewed fruit 216 Yet for all the comic irony there is a deeply serious subtext to this Jewish appropriation of Hamlet one where the ghosts of public history are all too chilling and real Our questioning as readers of Ottos insistence on placing himself at the centre of this public history is in part negotiated by his attitude to and our understanding of Shakespeares tragedy Otto wants to play Hamlet in the nursing homes production in the Prince of Denmark I see much of myself 44 Initially he is to his chagrin cast as the shakespearean appropriations 61 Ghost fitting perhaps for someone so haunted by his own remem brances Then due to the deaths of other cast members he is promoted to First Gravedigger His response is to make the gravediggers role equal to that of the prince the Gravemaker and the Prince are the two faces of a single coin 98 May we not say therefore that it is the Gravemaker who leads Hamlet to his identity 99 Korners reading of Hamlet and understanding of his own position in history and society real or otherwise has a further intertextual referent one which he directly cites As Prufrock puts it I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be 22 The allusion is to T S Eliots poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock in which the ageing speaker of Eliots dramatic monologue considers his own marginal role on the social stage by means of a comparison with the dramatis personae in Hamlet and other Shakespearean drama No I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be Am an attendant lord 1969 16 On the surface as with Korners declaration there is a resignation here to a marginal role And yet the reader who is in full command of Eliots poem and Shakespearean drama can read on and reach a very different outcome about Prufrocks surface humility For the role he eventually assigns himself Almost at times the Fool could be seen from a Shakespearean perspective as piv otal Eliots choice of the upper case initial F is crucial Prufrock assigns himself the role of wise commentator What a reading of The Prince of West End Avenue as an appropriation of Hamlet releases then is not only the comicironic material in the narrative achieved as stated by a process of bathos and puncturing juxtapositions but new depths to the twists and complexities of Korners narration and selfperception Studies of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation become a com plex means of measuring and recording multiple acts of mediation and fil tration As with the body of postcolonial texts responding to The Tempest and Othello appropriations are often as much in dialogue with other adap tations as with the Shakespearean sourcetext This perhaps is the essence of literary archetypes their availability for rewriting means that they are texts constantly in flux constantly metamorphosing in the process of adaptation and retelling They persistently enact and reenact the activity of storytelling and Shakespeare has provided some of the most familiar stories of Western culture This is also the case with the two literary forms considered over the next two chapters myth and fairy tale 62 literary archetypes A cultures mythology is its body of traditional narratives Mythical lit erature depends upon incites even perpetual acts of reinterpretation in new contexts a process that embodies the very idea of appropriation In the introduction to this volume Joyces exploitation of mythic struc tures in Ulysses to evoke ageold even universal themes alongside time and placespecific issues of politics and language was examined Myth it seems lends itself to this dual plane of exploitation As Roland Barthes asserts in Mythologies the fundamental character of the mythical con cept is to be appropriated 1993 1972 119 Barthes views this pro cess in terms of a metalanguage communicated across generations and cultures Mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication 110 but which is persistently relocated in a new social and cultural geography at each occasion of adaptation and appropriation He invokes the specific example of a tree Mentioned in a text this undoubtedly stands for a tree in the literary context a crosscultural and crosshistorical object but it also becomes loaded with localized and particularized meaning according to its social geography as Barthes call it the tree is adapted to a certain type of consumption 109 as indeed are myths This form of adaptation relocation and recontextualization proves an expansive rather than reductive mode for Barthes he argues that myths ripen as they spread 149 Genette articulates the related concept of amplification 4 ITS A VERY OLD STORY MYTH AND METAMORPHOSIS deploying the specific example of classical drama 1997 1983 262 Tragic drama he stresses had its origins in the reworking of a few sta ple myths Each new generation of storymakers adopted familiar mythic tem plates and outlines for their storytelling purposes Even writers such as Ovid Aeschylus and Euripides who we might consider to be the source of much contemporary literary and cinematic appropriation of myth were themselves refashioning previous mythical traditions But a myth is never transported wholesale into its new context it undergoes its own metamorphoses in the process Myth is continuously evoked altered and reworked across cultures and across generations To cite Barthes again there is no fixity in mythical concepts they can come into being alter disintegrate disappear completely 120 All of these descriptions and critical formulations gesture at the metamorphic and transformative process of adaptation the term functions literally as well as metaphorically It is perhaps therefore no surprise that Ovid the prime author of narratives of metamorphosis and transformation has proved a particularly rich source for contemporary novelists poets playwrights and directors As this chapter will demonstrate his com plex generically hybrid texts such as the Metamorphoses and the Heroides which selfconsciously blend the comic and tragic appeal to the experimental and metafictional aspects of much modern and post modern writing As examples from authors such as Salman Rushdie and Kate Atkinson will indicate Ovids stories of metamorphosis offer a template for the artistic and ideological act of adaptation and revision furthermore specific stories from the Ovidian oeuvre such as that of the poetmusician Orpheus and his doomed lover Eurydice will prove to have offered a potent repository for revisionary artists attract ing as diverse a community as the director Baz Luhrmann and the nov elist Graham Swift MODERN METAMORPHOSES Postmodern writing we are constantly reminded is a form in which the reader is asked to be aware of the constructing author of the artifice of the piece There is nothing new in this as any reading of Ovid indi cates In the Metamorphoses Ovid persistently draws attention to the role 64 literary archetypes of the storyteller many of his best known accounts of metamorphosis and transformation such as Pygmalion Venus and Adonis Leda and the Swan and Danae and the golden shower are inset narratives contained within the storytelling singing or webweaving of Orpheus Arachne and others What mythical appropriations facilitate therefore is a means for contemporary authors to carry out selfconscious investigations into the artistic process But Ovids tales of shapeshifting and change narra tives that frequently occur under the pressure of particular events such as attempted rape or extreme grief also find resonant parallels in many of the themes and concerns of those same writers Myth extracts events from an everyday context into the world of gods and the supernatural the extraordinary in the fullest sense of that term and for this reason it has proved an especially attractive source for magic realist writers such as Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez who seek to lift the quotidian event into a space of greater possibility Magic realism or mythical appropriation is not a denial of real social issues Alison Sharrock sug gests that despite its themes of gods and goddesses and worlds other than our own myth allows space for the examination of family mat ters Hardie 2002 105 As well as enabling the flights of fantasy associated with magic realism then myth is deployed to discuss the most familiar of subjects families love fathers and daughters This potent blend of the extraordinary and the everyday has proved part of the appeal for a cluster of Ovidian appropriations in recent decades Poets including Seamus Heaney Simon Armitage Carol Ann Duffy and Ted Hughes who went on to write his full length Tales from Ovid in 1997 contributed work to the anthology After Ovid in 1994 prose writers ranging from A S Byatt and Joyce Carol Oates to the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom wrote short stories for Ovid Metamorphosed in 2000 Many of these texts bring the mythical frame of reference quite literally down to earth Oatess retelling of the death of Actaeon in The Sons of Angus MacElster for example recounts the demise of a violent Cape Breton patriarch in her version the hunting hounds that tear Actaeon to pieces in the shape of a stag are MacElsters sons hacking at their fathers drunken body in the barn after he has assaulted their mother Terry 2000 727 Carol Ann Duffys Mrs Midas is a contemporary housewife distraught to see the objects in her household rapidly turning to gold Hofman and Lasdun 1994 262 myth and metamorphosis 65 The double drive apparent in the mythical appropriation process which is a simultaneous invocation of the wondrous and the quotidian is nowhere more evident than in the writings of Kate Atkinson Atkinsons 1997 novel Human Croquet a deeply intertextual creation that has been discussed elsewhere in terms of its Shakespearean allusions Sanders 2001 6683 weaves its complex web of material ranging from science fiction to the writings for young people of E Nesbit and Enid Blyton within a selfconsciously Ovidian frame As with the Metamorphoses Human Croquet opens at the point of creation from chaos Within its pages the specific tales of Daphne being turned into a laurel to escape Apollos unwanted sexual attentions and of Phaetons sisters transformed into trees by their excessive grief are alluded to The novels first person narrator the excitable adolescent Isobel Fairfax is studying Ovid and Shakespeare at school so it does not surprise us that these writers form the shaping frames of reference for her thoughts But Isobel is also overwhelmed by grief like Hamlet or Phaetons sisters Their mothers violent death haunts Isobel and her brother Charles who in a grim reworking of fairytale discovered her corpse in the woods Absence of Eliza has shaped our lives Atkinson 1997 28 When Isobel is set the task by a schoolteacher of translating the pas sage on Phaetons sisters from Ovid she produces a highly emotional version of this tale of excessive uncontainable grief 163 It is equally apposite that at various points in the narrative Isobel imagines her brother is metamorphosing into a dog the Ovidian parallel is the story of Hecuba another template of extreme grief which in turn informed the lines of Hamlet Hecuba was transformed into a canine state by her visceral mourning for her murdered husband King Priam His illstarred wife Lost after all besides her human shape Her weird new barking terrified the breeze Ovid 1987 306 Atkinson returns to Ovid in her recent collection of short stories Not the End of the World 2002 Here we encounter metamorphoses and trans formations of various kinds all based in recognizable modern contexts a 66 literary archetypes fact emphasized by Atkinsons easy allusions to brand names and popu lar television programmes We meet for example Eddie the product of a transgressive sexual liaison between his mother and Neptune on one memorable Cretan summer holiday her story recalls those of Pasiphae and the bull Leda and the swan and numerous other tales of Jovean transformation into the shape of fish and fowl in order to seduce women that are recounted in the Metamorphoses Enhancing our notion of Atkinson herself as a kind of Arachne weaving her web of tales together each of the stories finds resonance and echo in each other char acters recur family connections are uncovered and in one story a car crash is witnessed by a passerby who in the previous tale had revealed to us a gruesome encounter with death in the shape of Hades on the M9 motorway The entire collection is framed by the tragicomic story of Charlene and Trudi who find the reliable luxuries of modern life and shopping malls dessicating before their eyes following what appears to be a nuclear attack Atkinsons stories as the collections title both indicates and teas ingly denies via the deployment of cliché provide an apocalyptic image of millennial British society Another writer who has deployed Ovid to a quasiapocalyptic end is Salman Rushdie in his controversial novel The Satanic Verses 1988 For Rushdie however metamorphosis becomes the means not just of imagining fantastical transformation although his novel features many such examples but the specific condition of the late twentiethcentury migrant The epigraph to his novel taken from Daniel Defoes The History of the Devil provides a clue It describes Satan as a vagabond recalling in turn the wandering exile of John Miltons Paradise Lost but the parallel with the modern migrant becomes clearest in the description of the devil as a person of unsettled condition without any certain abode In the implicitly conservative value assigned by the Defoe quotation to being placed to being of a fixed abode and society Rushdie identifies a partial cause of the misplaced fear of immi grant communities Rushdies magic realism is central to his appropria tion of Ovid and specifically the text of the Metamorphoses He invokes Ovid to create a fantastic world of hybrid shapes and mythical creatures but then uses those creations to discuss social reality We start the novel with a fall That phrase has resonance in a Christian religious context evoking the descent of the bad angels from myth and metamorphosis 67 heaven to hell Paradise Lost is an intertext once again as well as Eves temptation of Adam with the apple of sexual knowledge Rushdie is not afraid to play with these ideas of the fall as both a downfall and a creative act or birth of sorts In this sense the fall is symbolic and yet the novels opening is the literal albeit fantastical fall of two Bollywood actors from an Air India plane that has been exploded by hijackers Describing this Rushdie evokes mythic parallels by referring to the fall of Icarus Just two brown men falling hard nothing so new about that you may think climbed too high got above themselves flew too close to the sun is that it Rushdie 1998 1988 5 Significantly our protagonists are actors their trade is one of representation in a novel that suggests modern life has become a simulacrum of reality The influence of Jean Baudrillards theories on Rushdies writing cannot be underestimated In Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard suggested that it was the postmodern condition that artificial constructed worlds such as Disneyland or the cinema would come to appear more real than reality 1981 That Rushdies actors originate from Bombay and Bollywood film making emphasizes this hyperreal Baudrillardian world of simulacra and representation Bollywood has fashioned a reputation based on the appropriation of mythic templates and stock storylines to great acclaim even its nickname is an allusion to the supposed US precursor of Hollywood and Rushdie finds humour in this Bombay was a cul ture of remakes Its architecture mimicked the skyscraper its cinema endlessly reinvented The Magnificent Seven 64 But he is equally troubled by the implication that all Indian artistic creations have a Western original or source This corresponds to the concern in much postcolonial writing about the need to challenge or oppose these sup posed originating sources as we saw in the discussion of signifying in the work of Henry Louis Gates Jr earlier In the Rushdie quotation the joke is on any reader who fails to notice that The Magnificent Seven is itself an intercultural cinematic appropriation of a Japanese original Akira Kurosawas The Seven Samurai As Gibreel and Saladin fall through what Rushdie describes as the ultimate twentiethcentury site of airspace 5 what they witness is Ovidian in the extreme pushing their way out of the white came a suc cession of cloud forms ceaselessly metamorphosing gods into bulls women into spiders men into wolves 6 The men land in 1980s 68 literary archetypes London a place that both is and is not London because it so tangibly fails to live up to any of their expectations In The Satanic Verses London and Bombay provide parallel metamorphic unstable cities For Saladin Chamcha formerly Salahuddin Chamchawala whose father was signifi cantly called Changez Chamchawala and who was schooled in England the pain of disappointed expectation is particularly deep To assimilate into English society Saladin attempts to alter his personality and appearance only succeeding in estrangement from his Indian family and background In the face of this failed metamorphosis his body seems unable to halt the process of change This results in the comic grotesque episode in the Black Maria or police van when Saladin now in the shape of a satyr halfman halfgoat is arrested and brutally beaten by British police officers What Rushdie finds in this Ovidian image is a means of suggesting the reduction of men like Chamcha into beasts by the prejudiced minds of the white police officers and others who engaged in racial attacks in 1980s Britain Rushdie captures in his mythical appropriation the dehumanized behaviour of those who perpetrate racial violence Ovids world of hybrid beasts such as minotaurs satyrs and centaurs is evoked not as an abstract world elsewhere but as a means of addressing the brutalities and injustices of contemporary England Only in the magical night time escape from the hospital of Saladin and hundreds of fellow beasts who represent similarly brutalized asylum seekers and detainees does Rushdie allow himself and the reader a moment of fantastic optimism This is a memorable example of the amplification and ripening of myth argued for by Genette and Barthes The Ovidian myth of metamorpho sis is not lost in the process of adaptation into Atkinsons magic realist exploration of grief or in Rushdies painful examination of the fate of the refugee but much is added or gained The metalanguage of myth is deployed in these examples as an acces sible code to discuss and communicate complex and often troubling ideas Its additional deployment for political purposes particularly in Rushdie should also be registered In turn the persistently adaptable and malleable myth is given a newly relevant social and cultural geogra phy Metamorphosis would seem a particularly apposite concept to appropriate in this respect but other Ovidian narratives have offered comparable potential for reworking in particular that of Orpheus the myth and metamorphosis 69 artist whose song continues beyond his narrative ending beyond death To an era interested in selfconscious accounts of the artistic process his story has proved one of special interest and specific value ORPHIC NARRATIVES Once and for all its Orpheus whenever there is song Rainer Maria Rilke Sonette an Orpheus 1928 Orpheus a musician of great skill marries the beautiful nymph Eurydice but she is killed by a fatal snakebite on their wedding day Stricken with grief Orpheus descends into the underworld to beg his wifes return to the living Because his music proves so moving he is granted his wish but only on condition that when leading Eurydice out of the underworld he does not once look back Whether through love fear or anxiety Orpheus breaks this condition and Eurydice dies a sec ond time Barred from further reentry into the underworld Orpheus retires to woodland mad with grief shunning the company of women A group of jealous females dismember him in a moment of pure Bacchic frenzy In some versions of the tale Orpheuss decapitated head continues to sing until he is eventually reunited with Eurydice in the underworld Ovid was not the first to relate the story of Orpheus in this form Virgil had included it in Book 4 of the Georgics Nevertheless the significance of its placement in the narrative of the Metamorphoses has meant that Orpheuss story is inextricably linked with Ovids work The narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice occurs in Book 10 and his death is recounted in Book 11 Perhaps most significantly Ovids Orpheus is both a sub ject and a teller of stories When he retires to the wilderness he finds solace in singing tales which are warnings to resist destructive passion Bate 1993 54 These tales include those of Ganymede Hyacinth Pygmalion Myrrha Venus and Adonis and Atalanta Orpheuss func tion as an embedded storyteller within the Ovidian narrative in part explains his availability to adapters and appropriators of subsequent centuries and generations He is a prototype of the artist be it musician storyteller painter or poet This aspect of his story propels allusions to him in the work of Milton Shelley and Browning among others see Miles 1999 61195 70 literary archetypes What we are dealing with in much mythic appropriation is an inter est in archetypes If Orpheus is viewed as the prototype of the artist so his relationship with Eurydice is deployed as literary shorthand for extreme and enduring love As with Romeo and Juliet Orpheus and Eurydice have become archetypes of passionate love their story reap pearing in diverse cultural contexts from opera to contemporary film from Brazil to South London This availability for reworking gestures at the dual potential in myth identified both by Barthess transcultural notion of a metalanguage but also by his articulation of the potential for culturallyspecific contexts for the consumption of myth The process of universalization remains then for Barthes a deeply political and politi cized activity 1993 19721425 Myth as archetype undoubtedly concerns itself with themes that endure across cultural and historical boundaries love death family revenge These themes might in some contexts be deemed universal and yet the essence of adaptation and appropriation renders the mythical archetype specific localized and particular to the moment of the creation The 1950s Brazilian film Orfeu Negro or Black Orpheus dir Marcel Camus 1959 retains character names and the essential plotline of Orpheus and Eurydices doomed passion but chooses to relocate the Ovidian narrative to the very contemporary setting of the Rio de Janeiro carnival a movement of proximation in Gérard Genettes terms 1997 304 The Orpheus of this film is a musician of considerable skill as well as being a ticket conductor on the Rio tram network Early on we see him repurchasing his guitar from the pawnshop one of the films numerous allusions to the poverty in which this modern mythical hero resides he lives in a shanty town or favela on the hillside overlooking the Brazilian capital At one point he persuades two young boys whose gaze in some sense provides the audiences point of view in this film that his guitar which is the equivalent to Orpheuss lyre has the power to make the sun rise and set The sartorial association of Orpheus with the sun in this film draws on the suggestion in many versions of the myth that Orpheus was the son of Apollo At the end when Orpheus has been murdered by a jealous horde of women as myth dictates the sun becomes a symbol of regeneration One of the boys picks up the guitar plays the refrain associated with Orpheus and the sun starts to rise At this very moment a young girl dressed in white joins him and myth and metamorphosis 71 begins to dance instructing the young guitarist that he is now Orpheus Eurydice was dressed in white when we first saw her so the suggestion is that Orpheus and Eurydice live on beyond death through transmission of their love down the generations not least via the numerous retellings of their story There is a selfconsciousness through out Black Orpheus that theirs is a preexistent narrative an old story A marriage registrar jokingly tells Orpheus persuaded by his fiancée Mira to obtain a marriage licence that his bridetobes name should be Eurydice and when Orpheus first meets Eurydice at her cousins place he laughs Wonderful I have loved you for a thousand years its a very old story There is a sense in which their names predestine their tragic fate This Orpheus and Eurydice cannot escape the fate of their forebears Their story is doomed to repeat itself This act of artistic repetition is however highly specific in cultural temporal and geographical terms The miseenscène of Black Orpheus pro vides a striking version of the mythic underworld The entire film revolves around the passion and frenzy of the Rio carnival as did the Brazilian play by Vinicius de Moraes Orfeu da Conceição 1956 which was the films source As well as invoking the familiar associations in the wake of the influential theories of Mikhail Bakhtin see Bakhtin 1984 1968 Dentith 1995 on the temporary release of carnival from the harsh povertystricken realities of everyday Rio the days revelries provide an obvious parallel to the Bacchic intoxication of the women in the myth of Orpheus The audience becomes as swept up in the passion and excitement of the moment as the participants the soundscape of the film ensuring that from the opening credits the penetrating drumbeat of the carnival procession pervades ears and minds Eurydice is pursued through the crowds and revellers of carnival by a figure in the skeletal costume of Death to the tram terminus where Orpheus usually works and where she first met him at the start of the film Playing on the word terminus part of the films texture of verbal puns the tram depot pro vides the dark space in which she meets her fate the ominous red light ing and threatening buzzing of the electric cables adding to the sense of doom Next we witness an ambulance speeding through the city streets with Death riding post It enters a road tunnel a modern evocation of Charon the ferryman taking people across the River Styx into the under world the point of no return as the Orpheus myth makes doubly clear literary archetypes 72 On the hillsides and slopes we see the sprawledout bodies of drunken revellers the fallout of carnivals excess and it is no coincidence that they resemble corpses the lost souls of the underworld Carnival is over as one police officer informs them Black Orpheus is simultaneously strikingly original and referential this urban vision of the underworld owes much for example to Jean Cocteaus cinematic reimagining of the Orpheus myth in postwar Paris in the renowned Orphée 1950 It is the aptly named Hermes the blind man who earlier gave Eurydice directions to the city on her arrival in Rio who informs Orpheus of his new loves demise Hermes is in mythological terms a messenger but also the god of transport hence his association with the space of the tram depot He is by tradition the spiritual guide to the underworld and it is he who takes Orpheus to find Eurydice at the local mortuary Section 12 of the mortuary proves quite literally the site of lost souls There are no bodies to be found only a janitor drowning in stacks of paperwork In this way there is a quiet but disturbing analogy with the anonymous world of modern bureaucracy and the sad fate of missing persons in South America throughout much of the twentieth century Travelling down stairwells lit by a reddish hue Orpheus passes a barking guard dog this is Cerberus the manyheaded canine who guards the gates of the underworld Eventually Orpheus finds himself in a room of whiterobed singers and dancers in a state of trance or intoxication a version of a voodoo ritual an underworld of druginduced states Orpheuss song is invited to conjure Eurydice and he does hear her voice but on the fatal turn he sees only an old woman acting as a medium for her words Orpheuss abject sense of loss is articulated in the sociological terms alluded to elsewhere I am poorer than the poor est negro is the translation in the 1950s subtitles Emphasizing the end of carnival we observe Orpheus carrying Eurydices corpse through streets being cleaned by refuse trucks the debris of the night visible all around him Only music seems to provide a means of endurance at the films close surviving seemingly beyond the temporary timeframe of carnival and in some ways outlasting even the fixing stone sculptures of the lovers which return in the closing credits The story of Orpheus and Eurydice has undoubtedly continued through the ages and across cul tures perhaps endorsing earlier claims to the universality of myth Any myth and metamorphosis 73 claim to universality however runs the concomitant risk of dehistori cizing the particular choices of the individual work of art The music of Black Orpheus is after all as located and specific as the Brazilian carnival that provides its central spectacle and the roots of both these practices in the complex legacy of Portuguese colonialism deserve acknowledge ment There is certainly a case to be made then for the structural adaptability of certain archetypal stories this is the essence of struc turalist readings in both literature and anthropology after all but we must as readers and spectators remain alert to the specific contexts political cultural and aesthetic of each new version Black Orpheus has itself been reworked in recent years by the Brazilian director Carlos Diegues as Orfeu 1999 In this version the carnival and favela settings are retained as is Jobims music for the original film but in the cru cial movement of proximation to specific contemporary concerns Death in millennial Brazil is a local drugdealer The lovestory of Orpheus and Eurydice is universal then and yet the threats to this particular Orpheus and Eurydice on the Rio streets are deliberately and shock ingly recontextualized The mythic paradigm provided in Black Orpheus and Dieguess Orfeu is that in the midst of the everyday art can albeit temporarily be tran scendent It is a view shared by Baz Luhrmanns 2001 film Moulin Rouge In his magic realist evocation of 1890s Paris and Montmartres infamous Moulin Rouge nightclub Luhrmann produces a tourdeforce of filmmaking Moulin Rouge is a fullblown musical which signals its origins in the great Hollywood musical films by means of visual allu sions to Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire as well as to more avantgarde musicals such as Bob Fosses Cabaret But Moulin Rouge is also a post modern reinvention of the genre Postmodernism as well as evincing an interest in intertextuality has displayed a penchant for pastiche and quotation as simultaneous acts of recreation and fragmentation Hoesterey 2001 Sim 2001 Luhrmann carefully researched his finde siècle Parisian miseenscène and the history of the Moulin Rouge but deliberately ruptured the historical recreation of the same by selecting a soundtrack from the 1970s1990s In a similarly disjunctive mode cos tumes in the film are painstakingly copied from the contemporaneous paintings and sketches of La Goulue and Jane Avril by Henri de ToulouseLautrec made at the Moulin Rouge and yet are worn by literary archetypes 74 singers and dancers performing the works of David Bowie TRex Nirvana Elton John and Madonna There is a deliberate clash of peri ods and contexts drawing instructive parallels between the excesses of the late twentieth century and the previous findesiècle A further diachronic parallel is implicit in Luhrmanns aesthetic the Bohemian artistes of Montmartre are described as the children of the revo lution Not only does this enable Luhrmann to play Marc Bolans song of the same name but it evokes the 1960s peace movement The Indian and exotic aspects of the playwithinthe film created by the English writer Christian evoke 1890s Paris and its interest in the exotic the 1960s flirta tion with eastern religion and the 1990s explosion of Bollywood film aes thetics into the Hollywood mainstream Bollywood as noted earlier is a genre partly determined by its processes of appropriation Bollywood aes thetics are then ideally suited to Luhrmanns postmodern directorial style but they carry more than purely artistic resonance in this film reaching as they do to the films investment at its heart in the adaptation of myth and musical for the modern era and its specific interest in the timeless and timely story of Orpheus and Eurydice When we first enter the modelworld of Paris in the film Toulouse Lautrec is singing at the window of the fake windmill that provided the façade to the real Moulin Rouge The camera then zooms across the cityscape to the entrance to the village of Montmartre which is marked by a hellmouth gateway resonant of those used on the medieval stages and scaffolds of mystery plays and in turn conjuring images from the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch Luhrmanns reference is again a literal one the hellmouth entrance to the Cabaret denfer Cabaret of Hell that stood opposite the Moulin Rouge on the Place Blanche with its infa mous façade of falling figures of damned souls Milner 1988 140 The hellish associations of the nightclub are implied by this image a read ing further strengthened by the words of Christians father who warns him against entering this dangerous world Turn away from this village of sin this Sodom and Gomorrah Christians overlaid first person nar rative confirms the connection Moulin Rouge A nightclub a dance hall and a bordello ruled over by Harold Zidler the kingdom of nighttime pleasure where the rich and powerful come to play with the young and beautiful creatures of the underworld If Christian is our Orpheus descending into the seductive underworld of Zidlers club myth and metamorphosis 75 the real owner of the Moulin Rouge was Charles Zidler Hanson and Hanson 1956 128 where the dominant colour palette is fiery oranges and reds and where momentarily the lit oars of the windmill resemble red pitchforks in the sky then his Eurydice is the courtesan and per former Satine Christian and Satines great passion is expressed musically throughout the film and is encapsulated in their duet Come what may with its central lyric I will love you till my dying day Their love is however doomed as fated and temporary in the material world of the nightclub as that of their mythic forebears Satine unbeknownst either to Christian or herself is dying The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is only one of several informing subtexts for Moulin Rouge Giacomo Puccinis opera La Bohème set in the Paris wintertime of the 1830s is another crucial focus of allusion In that opera which Luhrmann went on to direct in New York following the filming of Moulin Rouge a group of students artists musicians singers and writers struggle to survive in a Paris garret Rodolfo an author falls in love with Mimi This couple forms the focus of several duets in the opera in a manner akin to the ChristianSatine union in Moulin Rouge Mimi is suffering from tuberculosis and her death provides the operas poignant finale The parallels with Moulin Rouge which signals its indebtedness to opera as well as musical in the structures and references of its soundtrack are selfevident La Bohème shares the nineteenthcen tury Parisian locale of Luhrmanns film in a way that Orpheuss mythic landscape never can But it is in the culminating performance of Christians playwithinafilm about the penniless sitarplayer that the Orpheus and Eurydice narrative resurfaces with full force Informed by Zidler that she is dying of consumption and that her suitor the duke intends to kill Christian Satine casts her lover off in a selfsacrificing effort to save his life Subsequently we witness his painful efforts to gain reentry to the underworld of the nightclub only to be cast in the gutter by the dukes henchmen Finally he obtains access and breaking the frame of the performance walks onstage to reject Satine who he believes has betrayed him for financial gain As he walks away down the theatres central aisle Satine begins to sing their song In a vital twist on Orpheuss persuasion of the underworld through the power of his song Christian is brought back to Satine by the power of emotion implicit in her voice literary archetypes 76 Black Orpheus and Moulin Rouge appear to embody the truth of Rilkes claim in the epigraph to this section that its Orpheus whenever there is song What then is a reader to make of a novel that features neither music nor song nor signals its Orphic connections in the ways that Camus and Luhrmann do Graham Swifts The Light of Day is I suggest an Orpheus appropriation by way of critical proxy as Chantal Zabus terms it 2002 121 It is not something the creator has signalled to us in any explicit fashion As earlier discussions of Swifts intertextual style have indicated his refusal to cite sources explicitly has troubled critics see Chapter 2 Swifts work is not dependent on his sources to the extent that it fails to make sense without knowledge of the appropria tion in operation Lack of foreknowledge of the resonance of the Orpheus story will not collapse any reading of The Light of Day or its intricately related themes of exile detection and love Nevertheless the reader who approaches the novel with a sense of the subtextual under tow provided by the Orpheus myth releases the opportunity for addi tional interpretations which can only enrich understanding of the novel Swifts decision for example to mention a few chapters from the close the cave network that exists under Chislehurst is reasonable enough in its own right But if the reader is aware that in both Virgils and Ovids versions of the myth Orpheus descends to the underworld by means of a cave then this simple connection of caves with underworlds and by extension with the Orpheus and Eurydice story brings myth into the everyday world of this novel in exciting ways What we are doing by recognizing the mythic undertow to Swifts novel is expanding the potential network of meanings available to the active and interactive reader It is a classic example of the way in which this form of embedded intertextuality one that does not signal or demand an intertextual inter pretative framework for any reading as certain explicit adaptations nec essarily do depends crucially upon the readers recognition of the subtexts and intertexts involved It is a working example of Wolfgang Isers theory of readerreception manipulation and control is certainly exerted by the text upon the reader but the reading process remains reliant upon different and differing modes of collaboration between reader and narrative in the production of meanings Iser 2001 17984 What Swifts novel ultimately proves is that it is often in the mun dane quotidian world of supermarkets crematoria and suburban myth and metamorphosis 77 kitchens that the deepest darkest emotions are at work Swifts title The Light of Day a phrase that contributes the closing words of the novel has multiple connotations The first person narrator is George Webb a failed policeman turned private detective regularly charged by suspicious wives with the task of proving their husbands adultery by bringing to the light of day firm evidence frequently in the form of photographs Photography is a medium whose ability both to see clearly and to occlude has troubled Swift in a previous novel Out of this World about a photo warjournalist Here the photographic images bring the fact of adultery to the light of day while being unable to tell the full story of relationships This in turn becomes a metaphor for Georges narrative which is fragmentary and incomplete in many respects He acknowledges that there are some things that simply cannot be said or revealed If George puns openly on his forename stressing that his sordid pro fession means he is no saint George it is his surname that carries the active intertextual and collaborational reader into the mythic realms I am proposing Webbs and weaving carry potent meaning in classical texts from Homers Odyssey with Penelope weaving and unweaving her fatherinlaws shroud in an effort to fend off suitors during her hus bands nineteenyears absence to Ovids Metamorphoses where Arachnes tapestry provides the space of several inset stories in a manner akin to Orpheuss song Henry Jamess Washington Square offers a striking and disturbing version of this in the nineteenth century when at the end of the novel Catherine takes up her morsel of fancywork for life as it were James 1984 1880 220 The webs of connection that Swifts novel encourages carry us as readers across a line from the everyday into the underworlds and recesses of myth In the same way that the novel imbues clichés and commonplace phrases such as crossing a line missing persons safeashouses and time to kill with new rele vance so the mythic subtexts to the narrative encourage us to reassess the surfaces of what we are reading For George the underworld in which his Eurydice is trapped is the British prison system The focus of his loyal even obsessive affection is Sarah a former client She as we learn only gradually from Georges digressive narrative employed the private detective to ensure that her husband really was finishing a relationship with their Croatian au pair literary archetypes 78 But Sarah murdered her husband at the very moment when he seemed to have returned to the folds of their married life This is an act for which a full explanation is never provided and yet about which there is endless speculation within the pages of the text The narrative is retrospective looking back over a period of two years Georges troubled recollections and halfrecollections are just one example of many gestures of looking back in this novel As it was for Orpheus this is an action fraught with danger and loss revealing painful truths as well as suppressions of the truth This is a text in which everything is not brought into the clear light of day motives and actions remain shrouded in darkness emotions unspoken issues unresolved Bob Sarahs husband enacts several poignant gestures real and imagined of looking back in the course of the narrative Leaving the flat in which he had installed his mistress he looks back as if remembering the previous passionate encounters the space had contained He walked round to his drivers door and before getting in and with an odd quick wrench of the head looked up looked round looked back Swift 2003 126 Later driving behind the car in which Bob is transporting his mistress to the airport George wonders if Bob looks back at his hospital workplace 141 Following the airport lounge separation Bob returns to the flat one last time As with Orpheus this could be interpreted as his fatal mistake The gesture of looking back makes him late returning to the house he shares with Sarah This in turn seems to plant in her mind a sense of doubt as to how the future will be between them possibly provoking the fatal stabbing though the narrative never clarifies any of these points What is clear from this reading is that the appropriation of Orpheuss story is mediated through at least two characters Both Bob and George function as Orpheus both descend into underworlds both are engaged in the perilous action of looking back In a similar vein Swifts recreation of the underworld is present in several of the care fully mapped spaces of this novel If the topography of London is all too tangible in Swifts deliberately prosaic narrative the shadowworld of myth provides an alternative psychic map It is as if Swifts narrator resides in the same limbo as Bendrix the first person narrator of Graham Greenes The End of the Affair 1951 and another retrospective narrator suffering from an obsessive lost love If this book of mine fails to take a straight course it is because I am lost in a strange region I have no myth and metamorphosis 79 map Greene 2001 50 Swifts sparing dialogue has often been com pared to Greenes Intriguingly Hermione Lee has suggested Greenes novel as another possible intertext for The Light of Day In both texts the female protagonist obsessed over by the first person narrator is called Sarah both are retrospective narratives of love and loss and yet it is as if states Lee Greenes comic marginal character of Parkis the detective has in Swifts novel been given centre stage 2003 9 It might be added that in Greenes and Swifts novels the figure of Sarah remains distanced from both reader and narrator an enigma at the heart of the text The same can be said of Eurydices participation in versions of her myth often silenced completely in the underworld sequences she has been sidelined in many subsequent reworkings of the story placed back in the shadows by artistic selfinterest in the figure of Orpheus Revisiting the Orpheus myth however several feminist writers and critics have striven to give Eurydice a voice including HD in her eponymous poem of 1917 where her heroine castigates Orpheuss arro gance Eurydice l 6 Cited in Miles 1999 15962 in looking back and thus assigning her to the darkness of Hades a second time when as Virgil so poignantly points out she was on the lip of Daylight Virgil 1983 125 This is an example of what Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes as the poetics of rupture and critique that myth is constantly subjected to by women writers 1985 32 There are recurring images of darkness in The Light of Day George is constantly positioned in the shadows or in spaces only partly penetrated by light from his office to his car to various police interview rooms to the prison waiting room where he visits his Eurydice these latter encounters providing the rhythm and ritual of his otherwise oddly empty existence Leaving the crematorium where he has taken flowers to mark the anniversary of Bobs death he describes reentering the road system as launching himself back into the world later the queue of prison visitors are to all intents and purposes souls in limbo The under world is everywhere and everyday in this novel What the mention of the caves beneath Chislehurst brings to bear in the closing chapters is a mythic world of intense emotion and irreversible actions The echoes the maze of tunnels the stories of ghosts The feeling that you might never get back into the light Swift 2003 237 The narrative ends with George hoping for the day when Sarah will be released into his 80 literary archetypes arms into the clear light of day This can be read optimistically but any reader aware of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth cannot help but be afraid for the way this story might unfold The familiar paradigms of myth allow Swift to leave much unsaid Ovidian metamorphoses and Orphic narratives have serviced a very diverse range of cultural appropriations In some though not all of these reworkings that interrelationship is explicit in others the inter textuality operates in a subterranean mode occurring beneath the sur face narrative In all instances an awareness of the informing myths alters our responses as readers to the adaptive and appropriative texts Mythic paradigms provide the reader or spectator with a series of famil iar reference points and a set of expectations which the novelist artist director playwright composer or poet can rely upon as an instructive shorthand while simultaneously exploiting twisting and relocating them in newly creative ways and in newly resonant contexts Frequently political commitment informs and influences these acts of recreation for as DuPlessis notes To change a story signals a dissent from social norms as well as narrative forms 1985 20 We are enter ing therefore the tricky domain of authorial intention a world which in some respects Barthess notion of the reader as an active creator of meanings sought to eschew and yet it seems inescapable in any genuine study of the motives involved in adaptational art Patterson 1987 13546 In such works of adaptation or appropriation political aware ness and even complicity is frequently required on the part of the reader or spectator receiving the recreated text or performance although there are also important distinctions between responses to adaptations in different generic modes to film song or literature for example There are then crucial issues raised by all of this to do with the rela tionship and interaction between writer reader or spectator and genre that the multiple reoccurrences of myth throw into relief Each moment of reception is individual and distinct albeit governed by manifold con ventions and traditions by prior knowledges and previous texts the old story becomes in this respect a very new one told and read for the first time myth and metamorphosis 81 The overlap between the genres of myth legend folklore and fairy tales has exercised many scholars Sale 1978 23 The wellknown story of Robin Hood for example moves at various times from exhibiting the conventions of legend to serving as local folklore while also invoking the witches and fairies from fairy tale Knight 2003 Fairy tales with their interest in dysfunctional family structures and personal and civic rites of passage have much in common with their mythological coun terparts All these forms have also been interpreted from the varying standpoints of anthropology social history cultural studies structural ism feminism psychoanalysis and psychology What they offer are archetypal stories available for reuse and recycling by different ages and cultures Fairy tale and folklore do however possess a very specific set of signifiers and symbolic systems that are worth examining in their own right Shakespeare a prime example as we have already seen of a cultural repository of archetypal characters and plotlines dipped into the folk genre of fairy tale as a stimulus for his drama King Lear and Cymbeline for example both have roots in this form Cymbeline reconsti tutes the figure of the wicked stepmother while Lear reworks a folklore storyline of a father and his three daughters two malign or ugly sis ters and one good and virtuous child One of the reasons fairy tale and folklore serve as cultural treasuries to which we endlessly return is that their stories and characters seem to 5 OTHER VERSIONS OF FAIRY TALE AND FOLKLORE transgress established social cultural geographical and temporal boundaries They are eminently adaptable into new circumstances and contexts making themselves available for other versions Atkinson 1997 348 Writers artists and directors as diverse as Salman Rushdie Angela Carter Paula Rego Kate Atkinson Walt Disney and Jean Cocteau have all turned to the potent form of the folk story or fairy tale as inspiration for their reimaginings postmodernist or otherwise Recent comic even parodic versions of the fairy tale include the hugely popular animated Shrek films 2001 2004 and Stephen Sondheims 1987 musical Into the Woods Both of these are like the dark suggestive paintings of artist Paula Rego an attempt to resist the socalled Disneyfication of the form Walt Disneys animated film versions of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves Cinderella Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast among others with their explicit stress on happy endings usually consisting for their female protagonists in marriage and the finding of their personal Prince Charming have had a profound influ ence on modern understandings of the form Nevertheless these rich repositories of stories have also become a focus for scholarly interroga tion Marina Warner to cite just one prominent example is a veritable historian of the form see for example Warner 1994 a fact which has influenced her fictional as well as nonfictional output Fairy tales are stories that are essentially variations on particular nar rative types This suggestion brings into the frame the disciplinary con cerns of anthropology and the related approaches of structuralist thought and analysis Structuralism finds much value in analysing the myths and tales of specific cultures but also in identifying the common existence of certain tales types and paradigmatic structures across cul tures The work of Claude LéviStrauss and Tzvetan Todorov among others has had considerable influence on those critics who study the presence of mythical and folkloric types in literature ranging from the plays of Shakespeare to magic realism see LéviStrauss 2001 1978 Todorov 1990 1978 In terms of the ongoing adaptation of fairy tales the recurrence of particular narrative types and structures in new cul turally embedded contexts raises the same dichotomy between univer sality and a politicized subject position that Roland Barthess Mythologies was seen to grapple with in the previous chapters examina tions of myth 1993 1972 In turn as we shall see in this chapter other versions of fairy tale and folklore 83 structuralism has been inflected by the findings of psychoanalysis In Sigmund Freuds theory of unheimlich or the uncanny for example it is possible to identify a version of the compulsion to repetition the desire to return to or recreate a text story or paradigm as both a refusal and rehearsal of loss and as an effort to contain anxiety Freud 1963 1919 Garber 1987 The darker subtexts of many fairy stories as with myths raise spectres of incest familial violence and monstrousness that might elsewhere be seen as the stuff of dreams and nightmares If fairy tale and folklore make themselves particularly available for continuous recreation and rewriting it is partly because of their essen tial abstraction from a specific context Although the content of the fairy tale may record the real lives of the anonymous poor with some times uncomfortable fidelity the form of the fairy tale is not usually constructed so as to invite the audience to share a sense of lived experi ence Carter 1990 xi The castles towers villages forests monsters beasts ogres and princesses of fairy tale exist seemingly nowhere and yet everywhere in terms of applicability and relevance But a detectable countermovement in twentiethcentury reworkings of the form can be located in the desire to tie the stories back into a social even sociohis torical context constituting in some respects an attempt to rationalize their magic Christopher Wallaces novel The Pied Pipers Poison 1998 reconsiders the familiar childrens tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin who helps to rid a Northern European village of an infestation of rats harbingers of lifethreatening plague by means of his seductive music but who when his payment is revoked by the town returns to entice away the children and therefore the symbolic economic future of the community Deploying the narrative structure of an academic research paper cited within a retirement speech by a doctor Wallaces novel self consciously asserts and queries the value and reliability of expert testi mony The academic article is a reconsideration of the Hamelin story Rejecting the fantasy element of the folk tale as handed down through the generations its author finds a disturbingly material explanation for the events suggested in the story of the Pied Piper Retrieving the socio historical context of the Thirty Years War in Europe in the 1630s and 1640s the essay suggests that Hamelin was not besieged by rats although in a graingrowing community they were an omnipresent fea ture Instead it speculates and the speculative nature the unreliability literary archetypes 84 of the historical archive is stressed at various points that the town was under siege from a band of Spanish soldiers It is these rats that the Pied Piper offers to rid Hamelin of The description of the Piper himself extends the mode of social realism that Wallace applies to the tale as he considers the possible reasons behind the name Pied could conceivably be a corruption of the French à pied mean ing on foot indicating that this man was by nature a traveller It could also imply the style of clothing he wore pied meaning mottled or spotted with the kind of bright and bold colour associated with a jester or clown Finally the word could be a corruption of his real name particularly if this was Arabic in origin and therefore difficult for an uneducated German speaker to pronounce Wallace 1998 160 The narrative here emulates the discursive style of the rational scientific age offering definitions and explanations The latter explanation also gestures towards a cultural awareness of the social and class structures that provide the shaping forces to the supposedly abstract forms of fairy tale folk tale and the related genre of nursery rhyme The Pied Piper is in Wallaces analysis or at least the analysis of the academic in his fic tion an outsider possibly an Eastern migrant worker in seventeenth century Europe This gesture is towards the fact that many fairy tales exhibit a deep rooted anxiety about the figure of the incomer the out sider the person or creature from elsewhere Marxist interpretations of tales such as Rumplestiltskin for example suggest that it tries to work through a threat to the common means of production through spinning in many Northern European villages in the Middle Ages It does not take much of a leap of the imagination to see how this tale could be redeployed in an analysis of the twentyfirst century European paranoia surrounding migrant workers and asylum seekers Jack Zipes has talked of the universal community implied by fairy tale 1994 5 but his Marxist analyses of the tales also stress their specific historical and social contexts For Zipes Rumplestiltskin is about the merchant capitalist intensification of linen manufacture and the appro priation of the means of production through which the heroine would normally establish her quality and win her man 1994 68 other versions of fairy tale and folklore 85 Similarly Wallaces cultural materialist analysis of the Pied Pipers mythology serves to shed light on the second focus time period in his novel the Second World War when other forms of social hardship and threat were being faced by European communities akin to those of Hamelin As well as paralleling the two conflicts via his double time scheme Wallace again via his subject academic Arthur Lee finds a troubling parallel to the folk tale in the twentiethcentury wartime practice of torture In this version of the Pied Piper legend the children are not seduced by the melodies played by a travelling minstrel to leave the village they are eaten by hallucinating townsfolk in an extreme state of famine people reduced quite literally to the condition of rats by their situation Any metamorphosis in this tale proves chillingly expli cable in terms of hunger and insanity In turn the cruelties inflicted upon neighbouring communities during the Second World War are brought into disturbing focus In the end our need to weave stories around terrible events is seen to be a remarkably stable need in human society we displace reality in order to survive and to evade the awful truth that the capacity for cruelty is within us all Except in our imagi nations there is no Pied Piper to scapegoat The language of scapegoating reintroduces the anthropological roots and concerns of structuralist theory In a manner akin to Shakespeare and myth then the impulse towards revisioning fairy tales can be linked to specific theoretical movements but as well as charting the rise of anthropology as a discipline in the twentieth century the fairy tale carries the weight of significance ascribed to it by the emergent modes of psychology and psychoanalysis A seminal work in this respect is Bruno Bettelheims The Uses of Enchantment The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales first published in 1975 Influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung Bettelheim explored the psychologi cal significance of the folk fairy tale 1975 5 In a manner that shares much of its method with Wallaces rationalization of the Pied Piper story Bettelheim suggested that many such tales were a means of work ing through traumatic experiences caused by the social visitations of plague famine and warfare or by the sexual and social pressures created by puberty and adolescence It is notable how many of the protagonists of fairy tales find themselves on a threshold between childhood and adulthood between innocence and experience in sexual terms Snow literary archetypes 86 White Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty all conform to this archetype As Bettelheim observes fairy tales depict in imaginary and symbolic form the essential steps in growing up and achieving an inde pendent existence 1975 73 Feminist writers have found a particu larly rich source of material in fairy tale for this reason Kate Atkinsons selfaware narrator in Human Croquet instructs her readers early on that it is her birthday and a significant one at that Its the first day of April and its my birthday my sixteenth the mythic one the legendary one the traditional age for spindles to start pricking and suitors to come calling and a host of other symbolic sexual imagery to suddenly mani fest itself Atkinson 1997 23 The date of April Fools Day must give readers pause in that Isobel with her postmodern awareness of the available readings of fairy tale is also likely to be an unreliable narrator Nevertheless this statement alerts readers to the manifold ways in which Atkinsons text as already indicated in the previous chapter will engage in a rich intertextual relationship with Shakespeare Ovidian mythology and fairy tales ranging from Sleeping Beauty through Cinderella to Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel Atkinson is especially interested in the fairy tales invocation of the fam ily both as an ideal and as an entity capable of horrific dysfunctionality She also finds Shakespearean plays a rich source in this respect The interplay of sibling rivalry and dependency that features in tales such as Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel figures in Isobel and Charless relationship in the face of the loss of their mother and the temporary absence of their father This is also a common motif in fairy tale one that allows the orphan a free space for experience Human Croquet is a narrative awash with stepmothers not all of them archetypally wicked parental failures and absences dysfunc tional familial relationships and sexual threat Although in the early stages of the novel Isobel and Charles appear to nurse the hope that their mother Eliza might still be alive partly signified by the Cinderellaesque shoe which they hope will one day be filled by the foot of their returned mother we later realize that they have repressed the fact of finding their mothers bloody corpse in a woodland during an illfated family picnic Eliza was in fact murdered with the missing shoe from the pair The deployment of the fairy tale and quasiShakespearean setting of the forest is another important thread in Atkinsons complex narrative Isobel and Charles become in this moment the babes in the wood of other versions of fairy tale and folklore 87 Hansel and Gretel She was so hungry that she would have eaten a ginger bread tile or a piece of striped candy windowframe even though she knew the consequences 1997 1301 The telling point in this quota tion is that Isobel knew the consequences it is this knowing attitude adopted by the narrative towards its intertextual source that causes us persistently to question any possibility of the traditional fairy tale happy ending for these characters Isobel recognizes as much in her analysis of the masculine presences in her adolescent life It seems men fall into one of several categories there are the weak fathers the ugly brothers the evil villains the heroic woodcutters and of course the handsome princes none of which seems entirely satisfactory somehow 1997 75 The sexual subtext of many fairy tales indicated by Bettelheims contextual ization in terms of pubescence and sexual awakening recurs in Human Croquet finding its most troubling manifestation in the Baxter family On the surface this is a textbook happy family with a mother constantly baking cakes and attending to her husbands needs but a postmodern postfeminist reader will never be satisfied with this version of events In fact at the heart of the Baxter family is domestic violence and incest making all too real the novels favourite cliché Appearances can be deceptive Atkinson has pursued these interests in another novel Case Histories 2004 which combines the generic and topographic conven tions of contemporary detective fiction with fairy tale tropes and motifs Atkinsons Human Croquet with its parallel worlds and timetravel ling motifs owes much to the genres of fantasy and science fiction as well as Shakespeare Ovid and fairy tale Her narrative technique has therefore much in common with the mode of magic realism which rose to prominence in the latter decades of the twentieth century enjoy ing plural manifestations in the writings of South and Central American authors in Eastern European art and in feminist and postcolonial texts The preceding chapter discussed the treatment of myth in Salman Rushdies novels in this context and a prime influence on Rushdie and on Atkinsons version of magic realism is Angela Carter It is undoubt edly to the genre of the fairy tale that Carter looked for her source mate rial for the magic realist impulse in her writing It is through her use of fairytale components that Carter disrupts the realism that her writing otherwise cultivates Carter recognizes the literary archetypes 88 misogyny of the conventional fairytale as well as the amenability of fairytales to being rewritten and disseminated in ways which enshrine particular especially patriarchal social codes but it is through this realization that Carter reclaims the fairytale as a medium for the feminist writer Head 2002 92 Sarah Gamble suggests that for Carter appropriation and adaptation is really what the fairy tale is all about 1997 67 citing Carters personal definition of the form The chances are the story was put together in the form we have it more or less out of all sorts of bits of other stories long ago and far away and has been tinkered with had bits added to it lost other bits got mixed up with other stories until our informant herself has tailored the story personally to suit an audience or simply to suit herself Carter 1990 x This is a brilliant summary of the operations of bricolage Suiting herself and her audience Carters revisionary fairy tales exhibit a deepseated interest in the sexual subtexts identified by Bettelheim The collection of short stories that make up her 1979 col lection The Bloody Chamber and which rewrite Beauty and the Beast Puss in Boots Little Red Riding Hood and the story of Bluebeards castle in the title story are awash with descriptions of the human body and the sexual act as well as female menstruation which for Carter is the epit ome of the sexual threshold on which the female protagonists of fairy tale stand In The Company of Wolves for example the unnamed Red Riding Hoods metonymic scarlet shawl signifies not only her tradi tional literary identity to the reader but becomes further emblematic of the sexual limen on which she is poised it is the colour of poppies the colour of sacrifices the colour of her menses 1995 1979 117 The Company of Wolves takes place on the calendrical limen or thresh old of the winter solstice Carter loved to use these hinge moments of the year as the space for possibility in her revisionary writings This particular version of Little Red Riding Hood revels in the hero ines wilful sexual coupling with the wolf rather than the violent devouring other versions of fairy tale and folklore 89 that her grandmother is subjected to Carter finds in the fairy tale wide potential for realizing the liberation as well as constraint of women free ing several of her heroines from the restrictive trajectory of marriage in the process As Lorna Sage eloquently described it in Carters hands The monsters and the princesses lose their places in the old script 1994 39 But Carters feminocentric tales do not substitute some naïve version of the female hero for the contained heroines of her sources In many of the tales the female protagonists prove complicit in their entrapment travelling seemingly without question into the unguessable country of marriage 7 In The Bloody Chamber for example part of the heroine narrators steep learning curve is a recognition that she was seduced by the wealth of her mysterious husband who the reader soon comes to rec ognize as the murderous Bluebeard from the clues provided by the pornographic literature in his personal library and those alltoosignifi cant keys This story of suppressed violence against women has of course haunted much feminist fiction in the twentieth century inspir ing for example Margaret Atwoods Bluebeards Egg and other short stories and Alice Hoffmans Blue Diary and in the nineteenth century hovering just beneath the surface of Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre In Carters vivid reimagining the marquiss gold bathroom taps and the fine fabrics he fills his brides wardrobe with seem to muffle her ability to question his poor track record in previous marriages It is in the figure of the indomitable mother who rescues her daughter at the close that Carter allows herself a dramatic feminist interpolation into the heart of the Bluebeard myth actively regendering Charles Perraults saviour brothers from the seventeenthcentury French version of the tale During her career Carter edited two collections of fairy tales for the Virago publishing house 1990 and 1992 In 1977 she also translated Perraults influential collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé 1697 She was a scholar as well as an adaptor of the form fairy tale was clearly a paradigmatic genre throughout her oeuvre appearing in various shapes and forms in novels including The Magic Toyshop 1967 in which according to Dominic Head the challenge to the fairytale is conducted in an ambivalent spirit Where the fairytales of the brothers Grimm or Perrault suppress their subtext of sexuality Carter makes the emerging sexuality of her fifteenyearold protagonist Melanie the narratives driv ing force 2002 923 Postfeminist versions of fairy tales also figure in 90 literary archetypes her short story collections including Fireworks 1988 and the posthu mously published American Ghosts and Old World Wonders 1994 The latter includes not one but three alternative versions of the Cinderella myth as if to emphasize Carters awareness of the revisionary potential of these texts The engaged and intrusive narrator of Ashputtle or The Mothers Ghost Three Versions of One Story discusses the possibility of adopt ing a new perspective on the Cinderella myth you could easily take the story away from Ashputtle and centre it on the mutilated sisters 1994 110 Carter is deliberately restoring the violence of earlier ver sions of the story scenes in which the stepmother of this tale mutilates her own daughters feet in an effort to force them to fit the princes shoe In context the image is a disturbing one suggesting the desperation surrounding the marriage potential of daughters in earlier societies but Carter suggests an equally troubling modern parallel in rituals of foot binding and female circumcision 1994 110 The narrator also ponders the fathers failure to act in the face of the violence performed by his sec ond wife on his daughter in the family home speculating that if you made all three daughters in the story his biological daughters that would alter things But it would also transform the story into some thing else because it would provide motivation and so on it would mean Id have to provide a past for all these people that I would have to equip them with three dimensions 110 Carter is being deliber ately playful here since it is this provision of prehistory and motivation the restoration of three dimensions that we have seen as central to the reworkings of Shakespeare myth and fairy tale studied in this section and which is undoubtedly central to her own revisionary impulse Fairy tale and folklore have a complicated relationship to print his tory While the names of Perrault the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen have become virtually synonymous with fairy tales these authors were issuing in print personalized versions of stories that had long circulated in an oral popular cultural context As Marina Warner has shown oral culture was also a far more feminocentric com munity although both Warner and Carter are equally aware of a female precedent in print for their modern fairy tales Mme dAulnoys Les Contes des Fées 16978 disseminated in printed form a number of the stories that had been shared and circulated within French salon culture other versions of fairy tale and folklore 91 a largely female enterprise Zipes 1994 20 Her tales of animal bride grooms in particular paved the way for the story of La belle et la bête which has proved a recurrent interest to Carter In The Bloody Chamber as well as wolfbridegrooms there are two specific variations on the Beauty and the Beast tale The Courtship of Mr Lyon which has a self consciously trite resolution in the marriage of its protagonists and the far darker and more sexualized The Tigers Bride where in a typical act of inversion through appropriation Carters Beauty does not trans form the beast into the normative vision of a prince but rather once the tigerbridegroom licks off her layers of skin becomes furred herself In keeping with the cinematic intertextuality of so much of her prose Carters Gothic revisions of this story are also indebted to Jean Cocteaus memorable film version 1945 It is striking to note that several of the authors invoked in this analy sis of the appropriation of fairy tale plotlines and paradigms also engage at length with Shakespeare in their writing Atkinson with the Shakespearean comedies in Human Croquet Carter with the entire Shakespearean canon in her tourdeforce novel Wise Children Marina Warners novel Indigo already mentioned in Chapter 3 in relation to its improvisational approach to The Tempest is also a text steeped in Ovidian mythology and fairy tale The novel is framed by the storytelling of its quasimagical character Serafine Killabree who is linked at various points in the narrative to the subShakespearean witch Sycorax The first story she tells of a king his beautiful daughter goldenhaired as in all the best fairy tales and a fat suitor who eats oysters both invokes the Ovidian metamorphic myth of Midas who turned objects to gold and offers a template for understanding the relationship in the novel between the characters of Sir Anthony Everard and his spoiled daughter Xanthe and her future husband Sy Nebris who founds an oyster farm on the familys Caribbean landholdings Xanthes name means gilded one in Latin and she is also nicknamed Goldie in the novel evoking several fairy tale paradigms including the selfish and greedy Goldilocks and endless tales of sibling rivalry between sisters marked alternately good and bad often through the troubling epithets of light and dark hair Xanthes mixedrace halfsister Miranda is clearly troubled by the narra tive implications of such literary traditions Through her intertextual weaving of the mermaids and seachanges of Shakespeares The Tempest literary archetypes 92 with those of fairy tales Warner constructs a distinctly feminocentric narrative It seems fitting that the novel closes with Serafine still telling and retelling stories in the style of Mother Goose and the ancient spin ners of the verbal cloths of fairy tale Mirroring the postcolonial and fem inist concerns of Warners novel the myths and tales told by Serafine contain stories of devouring of death and consumption sexual or other wise but they are being constantly revised rewritten and retold in new contexts But this savage story isnt seemly for the little English girls so Serafine has adapted it as storytellers do 1992 224 This is the self conscious appropriative art of Warner Carter Atkinson and many oth ers They are deliberately breaking down and deconstructing the conventions of fairy tale viewing things from a new angle As Jack Zipes reminds us they do this in order to alter our readings of the privileged narratives that have formed a type of canon in Western culture 1994 157 But as Zipes also notes their postmodern revisions do not reassemble the fairytales that they break down into fragments into a new whole Instead they expose the artifice of the fairytale and make us aware that there are different ways to shape and view the stories 1994 157 In the end it is the happy ending of fairy tale that is most vociferously denied or at least selfconsciously framed by these revisionary versions Proving once again that stasis is an unreliable model for the operations of canonical texts across cultures and time these other versions open up rather than close down possibility offering not recuperation but differ entiation not the establishment of a new norm but the questioning of all norms Zipes 1994 1578 see also Zipes 1979 177 other versions of fairy tale and folklore 93 PART 3 ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES It has become abundantly clear in the discussion of adaptation and appropriation in this volume that these processes are frequently if not inevitably political acts While the action of reinterpretation in a new context was viewed by T S Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent as a necessary indeed highly valuable aspect of literary creation he was ostensibly discussing a form of relationship between intertexts that mirrored his own cultural bricolage of quotation and allusion in poems such as The Waste Land That 1922 poem refers among copi ous other texts and influences to John Websters The White Devil William Shakespeares Antony and Cleopatra Ovids Metamorphoses Henry James and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire The relationship between intertexts and the referential process alters in significance when the appropriation extends beyond fragmentary allusion to a more sustained reworking and revision If readers are to be alert to the comparative and contrastive relationships that Eliot regarded as crucial to the aesthetic process it goes almost without saying that the texts cited or reworked need to be well known They need to serve as part of a shared community of knowledge both for the interrelationships and interplay to be identifiable and for these in turn to have the required impact on their readership This is why as we discussed in the introduction adaptation and appropriation tend on the whole to operate within the parameters of an established canon serving indeed at times to reinforce that canon by 6 CONSTRUCTING ALTERNATIVE POINTS OF VIEW ensuring a continued interest in the original or source text albeit in revised circumstances of understanding To repeat Derek Attridges for mulation which was cited in the introductory discussion The perpetua tion of any canon is dependent in part on the references made to its earlier members by its later members 1996 169 These necessary opera tions within the parameters of the canon however need not mean that appropriations merely accept or cite their precursor text without question or critique Indeed the study of appropriations in an academic context has in part been spurred on by the recognized ability of adaptation to respond or write back to an informing original from a new or revised political and cultural position and by the capacity of appropriations to highlight trou bling gaps absences and silences within the canonical texts to which they refer Many appropriations have a joint political and literary investment in giving voice to those characters or subjectpositions they perceive to have been oppressed or repressed in the original Attridge has usefully drawn attention to the double bind by which these subversive or counterdiscursive appropriations end up by rein forcing the canonical status of the text they are taking issue with but the important point to recall is the fact that as readers or audience we may never view that novel or poem or play in the same light once we have had access to the critique implicit in their appropriations In the same way that it might be said that Charlotte Brontës 1847 novel Jane Eyre cannot now be read from a twentyfirst century perspective without the informing insights of postcolonialism or feminism then perhaps Jane Eyre is also read differently in the light of Jean Rhyss hugely influ ential appropriation Wide Sargasso Sea 1966 Parallels to this can be found in the domain of theatrical perfor mance particularly when charting the influence of the theories and practice of Bertolt Brecht In his Epic theatre Brecht sought to engage the rational powers of audience response Willett 1992 1964 3342 He wanted to break down the empathetic link between spectator and performer partly by means of processes and strategies of defamiliariza tion or vefremdungseffekt most often translated as alienation effect Counsell 1996 1023 Willett 1992 919 Defamiliarization can be practised as much on a canonical text as on performance practice Indeed Brechts reinterpretations of plays ranging from Shakespeares Hamlet to John Gays The Beggars Opera are best understood in this con alternative perspectives 98 text In The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui 1941 for example Brecht appropriated Shakespeares history play Richard III to make a very spe cific point about the rise of fascism in the 1930s Many appropriations proceed by a similar mechanism of defamiliarization inviting us as readers or spectators to look anew at a canonical text that we might oth erwise have felt we had understood or interpreted to our own satisfac tion In many instances the process of defamiliarization serves to reveal what is repressed or suppressed in an original A further theatrical practice that can be examined from the stand point of appropriation is intercultural performance According to Patrice Pavis In the strictest sense intercultural theatre creates hybrid forms drawing upon a more or less conscious and voluntary mixing of perfor mance traditions traceable to distinct cultural areas Pavis 1996 8 This can mean Western performances which are inflected by the performance techniques and traditions of other cultures such as British director Peter Brooks Kathakaliinfluenced version of Indian epic theatre in The Mahabharata or French director Ariane Mnouchkines Japanese Noh and Kabuki inspired versions of Shakespeares history plays Kennedy 1993 27988 it might also mean Kathakali or Kabuki versions of texts from the Western canon The problem always in cultural encounters of this kind is that the appropriation can seem hostile or presumptive depend ing on the direction from which it stems the question always has to be posed who is appropriating who and on what terms Intercultural performance theorists rightly worry over the politics of the transaction taking place since there is always the danger of an imperialist approach although some like Marvin Carlson would also defend the practice Certain cultural transfers preserve the source culture the point of view of the other while it is being absorbed by the receiving culture Although transformation or reelaboration of the source material may take place these are in fact the marks of a truly intercultural represen tation A borrowing from another culture is neither a pure and simple citation nor an absolute duplication Pavis 1996 12 A whole new set of terms to consider when we are studying adaptation and appropriation not least in an intercultural context are mobilized constructing alternative points of view 99 by these reflections preservation absorption reelaboration citation duplication reception Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has argued that postcolonialism is inher ently appropriative in its gestures and its political positiontaking in postcoloniality every metropolitan definition is dislodged The general mode for the postcolonial is citation reinscription rerouting the his torical 1990 41 In a parallel move Sylvie Maurel suggests that fem inist discourse is to be found in the margins of any construct of any discursive practice 1998 50 Peter Widdowson regards revisionary writing as a crucial component of the literary arguing for it as repre sentative of a contemporary counterculture of the imagination which in writing back to historical texts and to the historical con junctures which shaped them rewrites Authorised History by way of revising its masternarratives 1999 166 This chapter seeks to examine a crosssection of these masternarratives ranging from Shakespeares plays already highlighted in Chapter 3 as central to the history of appropriative art and writing to seminal novels of the eigh teenth nineteenth and twentieth centuries In particular it is interested in the ways in which their appropriations rewrite them from the informing standpoint of some of the most dominant and influential the oretical movements of recent times feminism postcolonialism and queer theory JEAN RHYSS WIDE SARGASSO SEA JUST ANOTHER ADAPTATION During an early period of her life when she is housed and schooled in the Dominican Convent of Saint Innocenzia the protagonist of Jean Rhyss 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea Antoinette Mason reads the lives of the saints She notices that Innocenzia herself has no story in these compendious volumes We do not know her story she is not in the book Rhys 1987 1966 45 This phrase could serve as epigraph to the entire novel For what Rhyss novel famously achieves is to provide a marginal character from a canonical work of English literature with a complicated history and a voice Indeed Patricia Waugh has suggested that by this action Rhys almost prophetically called into being post modernisms recurring interest in voicing the silenced or absent charac 100 alternative perspectives ters of the canon prophetically and proleptically she caught what would come to be the dominant literary concerns of the next twenty five years the feminist theme of the suppressed madwoman in the attic the structuralist rediscovery of intertextuality 1995 203 Waughs own intertextual reference here is Sandra Gilberts and Susan Gubars seminal work of feminist criticism The Madwoman in the Attic 2000 1979 This text as Waugh suggests postdates Rhyss novel but encapsulates and extends her interest in the silenced female charac ter of Jane Eyre The literal and literary madwoman in the attic in Rhyss novel is Bertha Rochester formerly Bertha Antoinette Mason from Jamaica the first wife of Jane Eyres complicated subByronic hero Mr Rochester In Brontës novel Bertha is reduced to a mad cackle heard emanating from the upper echelons of Thornfield Hall Rochesters family estate and the negative and paranoid constructions of others Suffering from a heredi tary form of insanity she has been incarcerated by Rochester in an attic room watched over by the servant Grace Poole and concealed from the world Bertha is marginalized in the text both socially and spatially Rochester is even prepared to undergo a bigamous marriage to Jane Eyre although it is during the wedding ceremony itself that the truth of his past is uncovered in public Rhyss letters in which she deals with the composition of Wide Sargasso Sea make it clear that she was anxious to address this marginalization of the partCreole character of Bertha The Creole in Charlotte Brontes novel is a lay figure repulsive which does not matter and not once alive which does Shes neces sary to the plot but always she shrieks howls and laughs horribly attacks all and sundry off stage For me and for you I hope she must be right on stage Rhys 1985 156 Rhys had a personal investment in this approach being white West Indian and conscious always of being an outsider in the societies in which she lived In a movement akin to those we have already explored in revisions of Shakespearean texts Rhys transports a marginal charac ter from the periphery to the centre her onstage offstage evocations in the quoted letter are highly suggestive in this respect constructing alternative points of view 101 In a method comparable to other literary appropriations that seek to voice silenced or oppressed characters Rhys achieves her aim of recuper ating Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea by means of first person narration But instead of according Antoinette the sole perspective in the novel Rhys interleaves her sections with others articulated by additional voices in particular that of the novels Rochester figure the sanity of whose narrative is ironically unmoored almost unhinged by his para noid response to his situation both geographical and personal Shell loosen her black hair and laugh and coax and flatter a mad girl Shell not care who shes loving Rhys 1987 1966 1356 In the crucial final section of the novel when we are finally transported to England and quite literally to the terrain of Brontës text there is a further unidentified narrative voice which reports an exchange with the servant Grace Poole The mention of that specific character from Brontës novel locates the familiar reader for the first time without doubt in the world of Jane Eyre which until this point has been suggested allusively but never firmly identified In Jane Eyre of course Bertha is accorded no voice except animalis tic lunatic howls quite literally noises off and little respect in Rochesters damaging and delimited description which reduces her quite literally to a monster Brontë 1985 1847 336 Bertha Mason is mad and she came of a mad family idiots and maniacs through three generations Her mother the Creole was both a madwoman and a drunkard 320 Her entire lifestory is reduced to a single chapter Chapter 27 in Jane Eyre From this minor or marginal plotline this single chapter Rhys envisions a whole novel As Nancy Harrison describes it Rhys structures her novel to show us how a muted text can be revealed to dominate a formerly dominant text 1988 252 What Rhys also reveals in the rich cultural experience and poetic even musi cal voice she accords Antoinette is the latent racism and prejudice of Brontës novel and culture The issue of nomenclature is significant Bertha is a name imposed on Antoinette by the unnamed male figure who stands for Rochester in the novel Rochesters supplement in Derridean terminology Derrida 1976 14152 This renaming consti tutes an attempt to occlude her genetic links with her mother and by extension with the familys supposed hereditary insanity It also re enacts what Edward Kamau Brathwaite has described as the process of 102 alternative perspectives Creolization in nineteenthcentury Jamaica Creolization began with seasoning a period of one to three years when slaves were branded given a new name and put under apprenticeship to creolized slaves Ashcroft et al 1995 203 Helen Carr has described Wide Sargasso Sea as a ground breaking analysis of the imperialism at the heart of British culture 1996 20 Rhyss motivations are simultaneously driven by ethnic and gender implications She is giving voice to the suppressed stories of the English literary canon and in this way her novel has become canonical in its own right a standard bearer for the revisionary impulse in literature the counterdiscourse or counterculture that Widdowson regards as central to its practice Wide Sargasso Sea represents a central example of both the feminist and the postcolonial novel It is intriguing of course that Rhys writes back to a canonical text by another woman revealing in the process that for all the liberatory potential Brontë represents in her identity as a published female author she was in her political atti tudes a product of an imperial culture Spivak 1997 1989 148 It is only in the very latter stages of Rhyss novel that Wide Sargasso Sea quite literally shares space with its literary progenitor It is in the final section of the novel which opens with the voice of the unnamed narrator that a distressed and confused Antoinette is trapped in her attic room in Thornfield Hall It is as if the novel has been moving towards this moment all along in the readers imagination at least that reader who maintains a sense of Jane Eyre as an undertow or backstory to Wide Sargasso Sea For it is an inescapable fact that if we read Antoinettes story in the context of Bertha Rochesters we will anticipate her incarceration in the attic and will expect her eventual death after seeking to burn down Thornfield Hall Rhys encourages even nurtures this expectation by appropriating Brontës symbolic use of fire through out Jane Eyre Early on in Jane Eyre the young Jane is unjustly locked into a room as punishment by the family with which she is living Dramatically she falls unconscious in a state of trauma awaking to a fire in the room and has to be rescued By means of this passage Brontë establishes a number of the central motifs of her novel not least incar ceration and fire Rhys repeats that gesture in Wide Sargasso Sea when Antoinettes family home is burned down When in the closing sen tences of Rhyss text Antoinette refers to the candle she is holding the constructing alternative points of view 103 alert reader is surely already foreseeing the end of Berthas life in Jane Eyre Bruce Woodcock suggests that Rhys leaves the ending open to alternatives Rhyss adoption of the present tense and the artistic choice to end the novel at this moment of undefined intent also allow us to imagine Antoinette escaping the predetermined chain of events into the blank page of the future 2003 131 But if the shaping force for interpretation for the majority of Wide Sargasso Seas readers is Jane Eyre as Rhys surely intended this seems too utopian in its hopes In many readers minds Antoinette is doomed to repeat the tragic end Brontë envisioned for her Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel that is structured around various kinds of repetitions as well as revisions Sylvie Maurel describing the novel as an echochamber 1998 129 writes insightfully of the suggestive title of the text The Sargasso Sea is famous as a becalmed area amid eddying currents which as result becomes choked up with a particular species of seaweed Yet this stagnant locale is also the place to which eels return annually to breed It encompasses therefore for Maurel both the possibil ity of stagnant repetition and yet the potential for remarkable creation In its dormant waters repetition has a creative function both lethal and fecund the Sargasso Sea is the seat of cyclical renewal of creation within repetition 1998 129 That same contradictory presence of stifling rep etition and the possibility for creating something new drives any work of appropriation and drives Wide Sargasso Sea with a particularly com pelling force It seems an inescapable fact that if as mentioned Rhyss novel is structured around repetition and recurring patterns it is unlikely that either Antoinette or the reader can escape the pre determined fate of her character When in the novel Rochester makes his drawing of a house it is in the readers mind at least Thornfield Hall and Antoinette is already trapped in her attic confine I drew a house sur rounded by trees A large house I divided the third floor into rooms and in one room I drew a standing woman Rhys 1987 1966 134 Deep in Antoinettes subconscious she too seems to foresee this end For I know that house where I will be cold and not belonging the bed I shall lie in has red curtains and I have slept there many times before long ago 92 This is surely the point of characters stories and events that are appropriated their end is predetermined in our imagination via prior knowledge of the precursor text Antoinette for all Rhyss investment in 104 alternative perspectives according her a voice and history cannot escape the confines either of her room or her preascribed plot trajectory Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do 1556 Rhys herself seems to have worried about the extent to which her novelistic creation was dependent on Jane Eyre for its existence She gen uinely feared that her novel would be regarded as just another adapta tion Rhys 1985 159 and at one point in her letters she ponders unhitching the novel from its precursor although she rapidly talks herself out of doing this It might be possible to unhitch the whole thing from Charlotte Brontës novel but I dont want to do that It is that particular Creole I want to write about not any of the other mad Creoles Rhys 1985 153 Emancipation is a shaping theme in Wide Sargasso Sea the act which promulgated the abolition of slavery in the British colonies is mentioned on the opening page Yet in tying Antoinettes story so closely to that of Bertha Rochester Rhys is equally aware that it restricts possibility for her character preordaining her des tiny Maurel 1998 1334 She can liberate Bertha from the attic in the sense that she can award her a voice and a prehistory but she can never entirely emancipate her from the readers expectations deriving from an awareness of Jane Eyre Perhaps in the end that is the only fate we can expect of an appro priative text just as postcolonialism by its very designation of being post relies on an understanding of the operations of colonialism to derive its full force as a movement so Wide Sargasso Sea is eternally tied to the text it seeks so determinedly to rewrite Savory 1998 203 Counterdiscourses in seeking to challenge the values on which a canon is established cannot help but reinscribe the canon but they do so in new and newly critical ways If Walter Benjamins claim is correct in On the Concept of History 2003a also known as Theses on the Philosophy of History that There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism And just as such a document is never free of barbarism so barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one hand to another Benjamin 2003b 4392 then appropriative or revisionary texts such as Wide Sargasso Sea are able to reveal or demonstrate what Jane Eyre and by extension nineteenth century society suppressed As Michel Foucaults study of the repressive Victorian discourse on sexuality indicated the process of revisiting can constructing alternative points of view 105 be a potentially liberatory movement as well as merely recursive 1984 1978 92102 This is certainly true of the novel we will now move on to discuss J M Coetzees Foe which like Wide Sargasso Sea has become canonical in its own right an exemplar of the counterdiscursive move of cultural appropriation J M COETZEES FOE AND THE MASTERTEXT The origins of parody are ancient It is a form of imitation usually undertaken for satirical effect or purpose Dentith 2000 Pastiche is often regarded as a related literary form since like parody it involves imitation often at the level of style In its strictest usage however in the domains of fine art and music a pastiche refers more specifically to a medley of references to different styles texts or authors This in turn relates to the previously explored term bricolage If postmodernism is as we have argued a complex combination of recreation and fragmenta tion then bricolage and pastiche would seem to constitute its natural modes of discourse The question raised by any act of imitation is whether the impersonation is carried out in a mode of celebration or cri tique In many cases however the truth is a rather more complex hybrid of the two stances The recourse to the literary canon in the making of adaptations and appropriations has come to seem almost inevitable in this study in respect that one of the fundamental effects of adaptation is to mobilize a readers or audiences sense of similarity and difference It is equally inevitable then that the prose narrative that has often been regarded as the foundational text the originating moment if you like of the English novel Daniel Defoes 1719 Robinson Crusoe should have been the focus of a series of adaptations and reworkings Watt 1957 66103 As well as flattering parallel texts about castaways on desert islands including The Swiss Family Robinson a number of these rework ings offer a conscious critique of the ideologies and politics of the origi nal In 1921 Jean Giraudoux published his Suzanne et le Pacifique which with its female desert island protagonist immediately took to task the patriarchal and imperialist values of Robinson Crusoe Genette describes this text as a refutation rather than a reworking of Defoes novel 1997 1982 303 Giraudouxs concern is to expose in a parallel 106 alternative perspectives move to Rhyss treatment of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea the problem atic politics of the original His novel celebrates the natural fecundity of the island in opposition to the mechanistic impositions of imperial ambition There are of course debates to be had with Giraudouxs unproblematic identification of the female with the natural and the privileging of the islands naturalness above all else but it is an approach that was repeated in Michel Tourniers 1967 novel Vendredi ou Les Limbes du Pacifique which was translated into English in 1984 as Friday or The Other Island the subtitle is a reference to the novels French epigraph il y a toujours une autre île As well as indicating the primal instincts that life on the island brings out in Crusoe he returned to the swamp where he had come so near to losing his reason and stripping off his clothes let his body sink into the tepid slime 1984 1967 4 Tourniers subFreudian reworking of the novel addresses the sexual needs of his protagonist which were almost entirely absent from Defoes text The island becomes Crusoes sexual partner the product of this union being mandrakelike growths across the island which serve as Tourniers symbol for the transformative effect and impact of colonial activity This is a third person narrative but one concerned by Crusoes appropriation of Fridays mind and person in sup port of his subjection of the island and its flora and fauna to his mastery and control Fridays point of view is a driving concern in many twenti ethcentury postcolonial reworkings of Defoes text and it is further worth noting that Tourniers text inflected at all turns as it is by the conventions and discourse of psychoanalysis is another example of a revisionary work shaped by the theoretical and intellectual interests of its moment of composition Gérard Genettes concept of the hypertext which this study has invoked on several occasions might appear to wrest the term away from its more familiar contemporary usage in the idiom of computing where it refers to interconnected texts and graphics on a screen that enable a reader to read across and crossrefer documents but that idea of con nection and crossreferral between texts and images remains a potent one in the context of adaptation One common pattern that emerges from all the texts discussed in this volume is that hypertexts often become hyperhypertexts allusive not only to some founding original text or source but also to other known rewritings of that source Both constructing alternative points of view 107 Giraudouxs and Tourniers texts seem relevant to one revision of the Robinson Crusoe narrative that has become canonical in its own right Attridge 1996 169 J M Coetzees Foe 1986 Foe like Suzanne et le Pacifique is a feminization of Robinson Crusoe indeed its central charac ter and for much of the narrative its first person narrator is called Susan The intertextual resonance of this is further complicated when we become aware that Susan Barton is the central character in another Defoe novel Roxana about an eighteenthcentury courtesan These lay ers of fictional citation and reference are deliberate strategies in this novel which has been usefully described as a textual decolonization by Dominic Head 1997 14 H Porter Abbot uses the term mastertexts to describe those stories that we tell over and over in myriad forms 2002 42 A large number of the hypotexts under consideration here are definitive examples of mastertexts especially Robinson Crusoe which by being crowned the founding father and I use the phrase advisedly of the English novel has both erased an earlier tradition of womens prose fiction with a romance strain including the work of Aphra Behn and enshrined at the head of the English novel tradition a narrative that completely suppresses any role for women Coetzees aim is clearly to undermine the mastertext of Robinson Crusoe Its author is known here as Foe playing not only on the sense of enemy or antagonist implicit in that term but drawing our attention to Defoes adoption of a writing pseudonym to obscure the class realities of his position this is a novel concerned at every turn with forgery fakery and appropriation in the fictional process In addition there may be a sub tle literary reference to gender in that in early modern literature women were often referred to as foemenine see for example Edmund Spensers sixteenthcentury epic poem The Faerie Queene Since gender is essential to Coetzees revisioning of Defoes text this seems highly feasible This is a novel that constantly offers alternative viewpoints outcomes and inter pretations and the plural possibilities of its title are no exception In all kinds of ways literary truth and authenticity are challenged by this metafictional text The novel opens with a first person perspec tive that the reader immersed in readings of Robinson Crusoe might expect to be that of Crusoe himself At last I could row no further Coetzee 1987 5 The narrative voice turns out however to belong to Susan Barton who has been shipwrecked on the hot sands of this partic 108 alternative perspectives ular desert island The crucial signifier is the petticoat which is all she has escaped with 5 This is then a narrative conscious from the start about readerly expectation For readers reared on travellers tales the words desert isle may conjure up a place of soft sands and shady trees where brooks run to quench the castaways thirst But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place 7 That allsignifying But signals the narratives decisive turn away from its source text We do encounter Cruso in Coetzees text although his name is spelt differently on the page that all important slipped e and he proves a somewhat different beast compared to the figure in Defoes text here he is an old man with a rambling mind and a contradictory memory Crusos unreliability as a source of truth is not entirely incompatible with Defoes text which is famously full of inconsistencies such as ink running out and Crusoe continuing his journalwriting only moments later Coetzees Cruso however writes no journal that act belongs to Susan Barton in another crucial reimagining of the original And it is a journal that she keeps once she has escaped the island and returned to London In the course of recreating this journal and the often unsent letters that Susan addresses to Foe when she believes he has departed London for Bristol Coetzee indulges in a virtuoso literary performance a conscious pastiche or ventriloquism of many of the dominant prose styles of eighteenthcen tury literature ranging from the pseudoauthentic journals and autobi ographies of Defoe himself to the epistolary ventures of Samuel Richardson Henry Fieldings fondness for the picaresque roadnovel in texts such as Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews is also evoked in that section of the novel where Susan sets out for Bristol to find Foe selling his books en route as a very pertinent proof of the material value of literature What Coetzee eruditely problematizes here is the vexed question of the ownership of stories In any feminist argument it would be reason able to claim that the island story is Susans given up to Foe purely to write and publish although in that act there is an an implicit relin quishing of rights that cannot be ignored And yet was it ever her story to own The island experience was a shared one after all and one which she herself suggests is Crusos and which she is merely telling in his absence in this version Cruso dies on the ship journey homeward The additional question of Fridays rights in the story we will return to Susan clearly feels a loyalty to the dead Cruso with whom she had a constructing alternative points of view 109 relationship on the island but if it is Susans story or even Crusos it is not one she is equipped to tell in the masculine context of the eigh teenthcentury publishing world for that she relies on Foes established reputation There is then a sense in which handing over her story results in a concurrent loss of identity on her part with no tangible record of her time on the island she becomes a being without sub stance a ghost Coetzee 1987 51 unless Foe tells her tale The authen ticating and authorizing processes of literature are clearly being evoked but so too is the suggestion of DeFoe as a thief of other peoples sto ries a plagiarist by any other word His main profession as a journalist further complicates our understanding of his relationship to the source material for his fiction In this subtle and complex way Coetzee reanimates a centuriesold debate about legal copyright and the ownership of intellectual material He does so even in the careful punctuation of his novel in printed form Susans narratorial statements are encased throughout in quotation marks This fact emphasizes that the words belong to her but also problematizes them rendering the reader painfully aware at all times of the words retrospective literary and therefore constructed nature The quotation marks are simultaneously a claim to originality and a recogni tion of artifice Writing about the legal operation of quotation marks Margreta de Grazia observes that Quotation marks punctuate a page with sanctions enclosing private materials from public use 1994 290 and yet Susans intention throughout appears to be to make public her experiences on the island This reading of Susans claim to her history herstory as a property or commodity in the public domain is doubly complicated by the layers of internal intertextual reference in Coetzees text For as Dominic Head has acknowledged Susan is herself a fictional construct a character from another Defoe novel One implication is that Foe steals Susans life story from her to form the base material of another profitable socalled origi nal work of fiction the 1724 novel Roxana Another is however that he steals from that fictional narrative to give her a false understanding of her own history Susan seems unable to distinguish truth from fiction by the end She assumes that the young woman who claims to be her daughter is a fictional creation of Foes which of course she is if we as readers choose to invoke the specific intertext of Roxana since in that 110 alternative perspectives novel Susan Bartons longlost daughter returns only to be murdered in a hideously misjudged act of loyalty by Amy the maidservant But this reading in turn reduces the Susan of Foe to purely fictional status Coetzees novel appears to toy further with these deconstructive possi bilities when at the close Susans first person narration having been replaced by that of an unidentified narrator destabilizing the narrative further both in temporal and fictional terms the opening action of slip ping overboard is repeated Narrator and reader travel to the island once more only to discover in the ultimate example of narrative slippage that Susan Bartons corpse is still on the ship This suggests that the narrative we have just been following was entirely fictitious and without tangible basis which when we consider we are reading fiction is entirely plausible Amid all these concerns with Susan Bartons rights or otherwise to the narrative of the island experience there is another character who shared that experience whose voice is entirely silenced Friday As a South African writing in the late twentieth century Coetzee was all too aware when composing his version of the castaways story that history is often an imperial narrative in which the voices of those oppressed or vanquished by colonialism are all too frequently silenced In every story there is a silence some sight concealed some words unspoken 1987 141 As Attridge has observed In so far as the oppressed are heard in canonical literature it is as a marginalised dialect within the dominant language 1996 184 The silencing of Friday in this narra tive is literal as well as psychological his tongue has been cut out pos sibly the text intuits by slavers possibly by the colonizing Cruso himself In a reverse move to Jean Rhyss desire to give Bertha Rochester a voice in Antoinettes narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea Coetzee maintains Fridays silence until the close of his novel As Dominic Head notes this is both a resistance to yet also the product of the dominant discourse 1997 121 In the strange end section of Foe however the previously mentioned unnamed and unidentified narrator enters a London property and finds Susan and Foe presumably dead in a bed and Friday in a chilling variation on the trope of the madwoman in the attic bricked up alive in an alcove Pressing his ear close to the door the narrator hears an inexplicable set of noises emanating from behind it From his mouth without a breath issue the sounds of the island constructing alternative points of view 111 Coetzee 1987 154 Friday still literally silent in vocal terms becomes or is rendered in his silence a semantic signifier of the island and all that was suppressed oppressed or repressed in Defoes mastertext CARYL PHILLIPSS THE NATURE OF BLOOD INTERWOVEN NARRATIVE AND CIRCULATORY SYSTEMS We witnessed in Chapter 3 the numerous ways in which adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare have demonstrated an interest and investment in giving motivation to voicing or bringing onstage the victimized marginalized or silenced characters of his plays from Gertrude in Hamlet to the entirely unseen Sycorax of The Tempest In turn texts such as Jane Smileys A Thousand Acres have chosen to accord complex psychological motivation to cardboard cutout villains such as Goneril and Regan in King Lear in the process transposing Shakespeares play to the 1970s American Midwest Caryl Phillipss poetic novel The Nature of Blood 1997 does something rather different in that it voices an already central Shakespearean character Othello but subjects his narrative and tragic trajectory to reexamination This is achieved both by means of the multiperspectival context of juxtaposed first person and third person narratives in the novel and within the shaping context of analogous stories of diaspora and exile The novel is structured around the experiences of a sequence of social outsiders interweaving and therefore connecting their tales of persecution on the grounds of ethnicity and religion Othellos story is just one of several interleaved narratives in the novel which range across historical and geographical boundaries Indeed although the appropriation of Shakespeares 1604 play can be seen as a guiding creative force in Phillipss text what we come to rec ognize as Othellos story does not appear until some one hundred pages in and the majority of the events in his life that are dealt with in the narrative occur either prior to or during the opening act of Shakespeares play Tellingly in this nameobsessed novel Othello is never directly named in the text although the last words of the passages in his narra tive voice are my name 1997 174 If many appropriations actively give voice to certain characters Phillips seems equally compelled in his 112 alternative perspectives narrative to silence the character usually charged with defining and manipulating Othellos actions in the play Iago the Ancient is men tioned only once in The Nature of Blood and then only as the Ancient entrusted with the care of the African generals Venetian wife during the seajourney to Cyprus The reader is of course once again compelled to fill in the gaps with a sense of tragic foreboding and inevitability we know the future story of this Cypriot encampment and that it will real ize something far from the happy conclusion Othello foresees 174 What we also recognize only too well in the narrative are the lexical signifiers of the twentiethcentury Holocaust such as trains showers camps gas In his careful interleaving of the early modern Venetian ele ments of his novel with those scenes set in the concentration camps Phillips is most concerned with a need to revisit Othellos story in the context of the story of other migrants outsiders and refugees To that end he insists on juxtaposing Othellos story with those of Jewish vic tims of the twentieth century He achieves this through strategies of echo and parallel Stephan Stern for example whose narrative begins the novel midtwentieth century in a Cyprus refugee camp prior to the establishment of the state of Israel has like Othello deserted his wife and child to make a life in a new homeland Eva Sterns suffering in the Nazi concentration camps is directly paralleled to the execution of Jews in fifteenthcentury Venice the fire and ashes of execution and genocide provide haunting continuities across the centuries The Nature of Blood is then another veritable echochamber of a text its full emotional and poetic impact is achieved by means of the paral lels and analogues found between its variant constituent parts and his torical timeframes We move in a deliberately unguided if not unstructured way between fifteenthcentury Venice where members of the Jewish community are wrongly burned at the stake for the supposed murder of a Christian child the late sixteenthcentury Venice which Othello inhabits and in which we see him visiting the Jewish ghetto of Canareggio by night the internment camps of Nazi Europe the post war refugee camps established in Cyprus the second Cyprus of the novel echoing in turn the two Venices and the modern state of Israel And in the process of all these movements Shakespeares Othello is not the sole informing intertext The Venetian episodes of the novel suggest and echo the bards other Venetian play about ethnic prejudice The constructing alternative points of view 113 Merchant of Venice and in the traumatized first person narrative of Eva Stephans niece that canonical text of Holocaust literature Ann Franks Diary is clearly evoked Phillips is offering a troubling version of the old adage that History repeats One of the most unsettling aspects of the novel is that having evoked empathy with the persecuted Jews of previous centuries the narrative closes with a rumination on the inverse prejudice of modernday Israel in the disenfranchised figure of the Ethopian Jew Malka who is not even allowed to give blood in her new homeland for fear of polluting pure bloodlines The Nature of Blood is intricately structured via a series of repeating images and phrases blood fire smoke ashes rivers food These words and ideas serve as leitmotifs refrains in the text and the musicality of this technique has been noted by Bénédicte Ledent 2002 160 Interestingly the most obvious sources of echo or musical refrain the lines of Shakespeares tragic drama are held at bay for the majority of the novel Although the events of the Othello passages have obvious connection to those described at the start of Shakespeares play Her father loved me oft invited me 13127 These things to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline 131445 only some of Othellos sentences actively recall famous lines from Phillipss source I possessed only a rudimentary grasp of the language that was being spo ken all about me 1997 108 for example clearly suggests Othellos claim at 1381 Rude am I in my speech although these words are not directly used until page 181 of the novel and only then in the mouth of a very different character And so you shadow her every move attend her every whim like the black Uncle Tom that you are Fighting the white mans war for him Wide receiver in the Venetian army The republics grinning Satchmo hoisting his sword like a trumpet You tuck your black skin away beneath their epauletted uniform appropriate their words Rude am I in speech 1997 181 This is one of several moments in the narrative when voices and dis courses other than those of the central protagonists are heard The signi fiers here clearly indicate a late twentiethcentury voice deriving from 114 alternative perspectives the USA wide receiver Satchmo and the verse layout both recalls the dramatic verse of Shakespeares play and evokes the rhythms of con temporary rap an inherently appropriative form as was suggested in Chapter 2 That the word appropriate figures in this passage also draws attention to Phillipss own fictional methods as does his inclusion else where of encyclopaedic and dictionary entries on some of his central themes Venice ghetto suicide These include an entry on Othello which emphasizes Shakespeares own appropriation of an Italian source a short story by Cinthio when manufacturing his remarkable play In The Nature of Blood an individuals narrative often commences at a supposed endpoint or terminus of their story Evas liberation from the camp for example only to then move backwards in time The interlocking and repeating circular movements of the narrative leave the question open as to whether Phillipss vision is hopeful or despair ing at the end Malkas story would seem to imply that history is sim ply a repeating series of tragedies and cruelties The novel closes after all with the image of an impossible embrace In the end however per haps the real answer lies in the image of circularity There can be no easy answers and no closure on such complicated themes In this subtle examination of memory and forgetting the reader cannot shut out knowledge of certain facts Just as Evas story cannot and does not end at the point of liberation from the camp we as readers are forced to witness her painful efforts to survive after the war resulting in her failed trip to England and her eventual suicide so we know that Othellos story does not cease at that moment of happy arrival on the shores of Cyprus Phillipss allusive frames force us to read on further beyond these pages and the tragic impetus of his novel proves inescapable as a result MICHAEL CUNNINGHAMS THE HOURS RIFFING ON MRS DALLOWAY Michael Cunningham has described his 1998 novel The Hours a novel told via a triptych of female voices stretching from early twentiethcen tury England through 1940s Los Angeles to 1990s New York as a riff on Virginia Woolfs Mrs Dalloway Young 2003 31 Woolfs 1925 novel tells the story of a group of Londoners on a single day in June constructing alternative points of view 115 1923 Cunningham never directly retells or rewrites these events and yet their presence is everywhere felt in The Hours Indeed The Hours was Woolfs working title for her effort to develop and extend her short story Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street into novellength form her diary entry for 30 August 1923 is used as an epigraph to The Hours Woolf 1981 263 At various stages in Cunninghams narrative we witness Virginia Woolf thinking her experimental novel into being we also see a 1949 US housewife Laura Brown escaping from the quotidian ennui of her life by reading the novel and in the 1990s sections the implicit connection between Clarissa Vaughan and her novelistic counterpart is made explicit Richard Clarissas friend and a writer jokingly calls her Mrs Dalloway forcing Clarissa to reflect There was the matter of her existing first name a sign too obvious to ignore Cunningham 1998 1011 Cunningham enjoys the postmodern joke here his inter textual pastiche is full of signs and signifiers some of which are too obvious to ignore of its relationship to its literary precursor Other names are equally telling Laura Browns deliberately invokes the char acter in Woolfs influential essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown which constituted in part a manifesto for a new approach to fiction and which differentiated her own writing from that of Arnold Bennett H G Wells and John Galsworthy among others 1988 1923 Cunninghams musical analogy of the riff one we have already invoked in this volume on frequent occasions as an informing analogue to the process of adaptation and appropriation is insightful As Tory Young notes In its suggestion of a known melody reverberating throughout a new score this musical definition is more compelling than some of the literary terminology imitation homage that critics have used to describe it 2003 33 The specific analogy of riff with the approaches to adaptation adopted by jazz music riff in the Oxford English Dictionary definition is a short repeated phrase in jazz is worth pausing to reflect on Throughout his career Terence Hawkes has drawn a suggestive parallel between persistent interpretations and rein terpretations of Shakespeare in Western culture and the improvisational techniques of jazz see for example Hawkes 1992 Cunningham here riffs not solely on a single sourcetext although Mrs Dalloway is clearly the crucial intertext for his novel but creates a work that exists in sym biotic interplay with Woolfs fiction and nonfiction letters essays 116 alternative perspectives diaries and her personal biography Cunningham has frequently acknowledged his debt to Hermione Lees 1996 biography of Woolf That symbiotic interplay occurs at the level of form as well as plot The prose style of The Hours consciously imitates Woolfs streamofcon sciousness technique echoing resonant words and phrases from Mrs Dalloway such as plunge Woolf 1992 1925 3 Cunningham 1998 9 The echoes are not restricted to Mrs Dalloway but extend to other works in Woolfs oeuvre as Cunningham lovingly pastiches her writing style and aesthetic Events in The Hours are however persistently shaded and shadowed by those in Mrs Dalloway Septimus Smiths suicide in a leap on to the London railings as he is pursued by doctors whom he regards as unsym pathetic to his shellshock or posttraumatic stress disorder is reworked in Richards suicidal leap from his New York apartment Richard chooses to end his life because he is in the late stages of the AIDs virus Cunninghams personal sexual politics as well as his obvi ous feminist sympathies inform his particular appropriation of Mrs Dalloway This is an appropriation informed as much by late twentieth century queer politics and theory as it is by its feminist and postmodern counterparts Cunninghams particular movement of proximation finds a late twentiethcentury equivalent to the warfare which shaped its first half to be virulent pandemics such as AIDs In this respect his rework ing of the themes of Mrs Dalloway in a modern context might be felt to be wholly tragic in tone But there is also a liberatory treatment of gay rights and politics at the heart of this novel Cunningham achieves for his characters a freedom of relationships beyond the heterosexually pre scribed norm which was well beyond the reach of Woolfs own circum scribed community for all Bloomsburys sexual experimentation In Cunninghams version Clarissa does not marry Richard who is openly gay but is instead coupled in a rich and rewarding relationship with Sally Seton this relationship was only hinted at on a subterranean level in Mrs Dalloway although it of course in turn reworked the intimate friendship between Woolf and Vita SackvilleWest The triple timeline of Cunninghams novel helps the reader to register the seismic social shifts that have taken place since Woolf was writing the tense and contained kitchen kiss between Laura Brown and her neighbour Kitty serves as an indication of the containment of female sexual constructing alternative points of view 117 and social possibility in 1949 but in the 1990s sections of the novel the full potential for diverse relationships and friendships is realized Cunningham updates Woolfs novel in successive movements through his triptych of characters in the temporal geographical and cultural manner which we have already identified as a common factor to these movements of proximation Genette 1997 1982 304 London in the 1920s is replaced in succession by 1949 Los Angeles and 1990s New York Mrs Dalloways spatial location of Westminster is substituted and supplemented by NYs West Village itself a famous historical locale in gay consciousness as the site of the 1960s Stonewall Riots This is a novel that builds into its music and movements the translocations and transpo sitions that are a factor of appropriative literature It should however be stressed that no one place completely replaces another each element of the triptych contains within it links and connections to the rest This is made most obvious in the closing moments of the novel when following Richards suicide his estranged mother arrives at Clarissas apartment Belatedly readers realize that this Toronto librarian whose absence from his life obsessed Richard and coloured his own authorial productions is actually Laura Brown from the LA segments of the novel Similarly a novel that starts with Woolfs own 1940 suicide by drowning comes full circle by the close with Richards leap to his death in emulation of one of her literary creations Circular and repeating movements are a vital aspect of this novels aesthetic structure This is a mode we have already seen in operation in other appropriations in this chapter from Rhyss repetitionsoaked Wide Sargasso Sea the repeating events in revised circumstances of Phillipss The Nature of Blood and the narratorial slippage in Coetzees Foe As well as these weblike connections between the three voices and settings of The Hours there are numerous linking and repeated symbols of the cir cular and the spherical which form a verbal leitmotif in the narrative cups bowls cakes Young 2003 31 In Stephen Daldrys 2002 film version this imagery was repeated once again this time in a visual con text and medium but the true connective tissue was provided by Philip Glasss remarkable riverlike undulating pianobased soundtrack Part of the novels music is temporal as well as spatial Linear sequence is deliberately denied in The Hours We begin with Woolfs ending as it were her river suicide but then we revert to a time in her 118 alternative perspectives life before Mrs Dalloway has even been written These movements back wards as well as forwards are crucial to the antilinear structure of Phillipss historydriven The Nature of Blood as well It has become some thing of a commonplace to associate the circular and antilinear narrative with womens writing Sanders 2001 142 Cunningham once again associates his personal perspective as a gay writer here with a methodol ogy that has been socially and critically gendered as female but which he here reclaims for another readership and community The repetition and circular sweeps are also perhaps inevitable in a novel that looks back to a canonical source and embeds within its own pages the textual traces of Woolfs remarkable and musical creation As Clarissa Vaughan observes stepping out into the streetscape of 1990s New York on her own urban walking experience at seventy years remove from her British namesake who commenced Woolfs novel with this action in 1920s London There are still the flowers to buy Cunningham 1998 9 constructing alternative points of view 119 What becomes evident from any historicized consideration of appropria tion is that interest invariably clusters around certain authors and texts Shakespeare mythology and fairy tale have all been advanced in this vol ume as archetypal texts ripe for appropriation and revision The interest in specific texts such as Defoes Robinson Crusoe or Brontës Jane Eyre has also in part been explained in terms of the canon As Chantal Zabus elo quently observes Each century has its own interpellative dreamtext The Tempest for the seventeenth century Robinson Crusoe for the eighteenth cen tury Jane Eyre for the nineteenth century Heart of Darkness for the turn of the twentieth century Such texts serve as pretexts to others and under write them 2002 1 Defoes novel carries the specific burden of significa tion as an early experiment in the form Jane Eyre is a signifying text for feminism as well as an intriguing dalliance with popular subgenres such as the Gothic romance Canonicity it has been posited is almost a required feature of the raw material for adaptation and appropriation If the implied pleasure involved in the action of assessing the similarities and differences between texts between source and imitation which we have elsewhere argued for as fundamental to the reading and spectating experience of adaptation is to be possible it requires prior knowledge of the texts being assimilated absorbed reworked and refashioned by the adaptive process What however also emerges from any historical exploration of appropriation is that it is not only specific texts or authors who elicit 7 WE OTHER VICTORIANS OR RETHINKING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY the kind of ongoing evolving interest that stimulates the adaptive pro cess but in certain respects it is specific genres or even specific genres as they emerge during a particular timeperiod which become the focus of a shared recreative impulse A particular and sustained example of this is undoubtedly the Victorian era 18371901 As this chapter will indicate appropriations return again and again to the scene of the mid nineteenth century for characters plotlines generic conventions and narrative idiom and style What we need to examine therefore are the motives behind this interest It is fair to say that the Victorian era had its own investment in adaptation Adrian Poole has written of the pre dominance of Shakespeare in the artistic productions of the Victorian era from plays to poetry to painting to fiction 2004 George Eliot Thomas Hardy Charles Dickens and the PreRaphaelite painters all alluded to the Bard And it was not only the writers of previous eras who were subject to the recreative impulses of the Victorians Dickenss novels and characters as well as those of Sir Walter Scott enjoyed a vivid afterlife on the public stages of the day Dickens even satirized this fact in Nicholas Nickleby where Nicholas encounters a literary gentle man who had dramatized in his time twohundredandfortyseven novels as fast as they had come out and some of them faster than they had come out cited in Cox 2000 136 John Fowles makes similar comic capital in his own postmodern recreation of the Victorian novel The French Lieutenants Woman when the servant Sam Farrow is com pared to Sam Weller from Pickwick Papers a character who we learn he knows not from Dickenss novel but rather from its populist stage adap tation Fowles 1996 1969 46 Dickenss objections to the quality of some of the dramatic adaptations of his work are a further indication of marked distinctions between the productions of socalled high and low culture in the period High art was invested with the values of authorship and originality popular culture with the belatedness of adaptation In the twentieth century with the advent of the newly inau gurated discipline of Cultural Studies scholars such as Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams saw rather more cause for celebrating the adaptive tendencies of popular cultural forms Hall 1972 96 It is worth adding that the Victorian era appealed as a subject to the revisionary era of cul tural studies partly because of the lively interaction and crossfertilization between the high and low arts in this period we other victorians 121 The genre which most obviously bridged the threshold between high and low élite and popular in the nineteenth century was the novel see Wheeler 1994 Many novels were published in instalments encourag ing readerly addiction to plotlines and characters and honing the authorial skills of creating suspense by means of the cliffhanger ending that still influences contemporary soap opera on radio and television It is therefore no coincidence that the generic mode in the Victorian era most constantly looked to by adaptors and appropriators is prose fiction But it is not simply the genre of the novel per se that proves a rich seam for contemporary adaptation to mine The nineteenth century also wit nessed a proliferation of subgenres within the novel form there were early experiments with suspense fiction encouraged by the tendency to publish in instalments sensation literature which found its own prove nance in a contemporary predilection for scandalous legal trials and which had a markedly feminocentric character reached its peak in the 1860s detective fiction began to emerge as a genuine subgenre in its own right related as it was to a wider interest in crime criminology and forensic science in the Victorian novel and there were developments such as the industrial and the provincial novel as pioneered by Elizabeth Gaskell Thomas Hardy and George Eliot among others In the late twentieth century as the postmodernist movement devel oped its own interest in metafiction and writing which acknowledged its sources in a more explicit and deconstructive mode than previously the Victorian era offered a diverse range of genres and methodologies to examine and appropriate Dominic Head identifies this impulse in Graham Swifts Waterland for example Part of Swifts selfconscious ness is to make use of a number of fictional genres identified with English fiction in the nineteenth century the dynastic saga the gothic novel the detective story and most important the provincial novel in which character is closely linked with environment Head 2002 205 Head stresses that the result of Swifts reworkings is not parody per se but rather a process of reinvigoration achieved via modern and postmod ern inflection 205 The impulse is towards quotation and recreation but less with the deconstructive purpose of satire in mind than the post modern effect of innovation through fragmentation A similar case has already been made for Baz Luhrmanns consciously postmodern approach to cultural intertexts in films such as Moulin Rouge see 122 alternative perspectives Chapter 4 and J M Coetzees approach to eighteenthcentury literary style in his novel Foe see Chapter 6 Many of the bestknown modern recreations of the Victorian novel selfconsciously position themselves in relation to the populist subgen res of the nineteenth century It is an act of recreation however that entails critique and reevaluation as much as it does stylistic mimicry or pastiche John Fowless The French Lieutenants Woman is a romance that also carries traces of the mystery novel and the scientific tract within its pages A S Byatts Possession a selfconscious reworking of the act of literary criticism as a form of detective fiction Literary critics make natural detectives 1991 237 signals in its subtitle A Romance a link to the romance genre so evident in the paintings of the PreRaphaelites These novels may not appropriate a specific writer or text but they constitute an appropriation in the terms established here since they seek to recreate and refashion a particular literary genre period and style To quote Graham Allen on this form of transtextual ity Novels may signpost their architextual relation to certain genres subgenres or conventions by including a subtitle as in Ann Radcliffes Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho A Romance 2000 102 Byatts subtitle may even be a direct echo of Radcliffes Certainly both Fowless and Byatts texts are laid out on the page in a manner reminis cent of much nineteenthcentury fiction not least the novels of Eliot and Hardy with copious literary quotations providing the shaping epigraphs to individual chapters In this respect they materially as well as aesthetically recreate the mode of the Victorian novel with all its paratextual material In the case of The French Lieutenants Woman these quotations derive from actual and identified nineteenthcentury sources but also from his torical recreations such as the work of Asa Briggs and G M Young There is an interesting recognition implicit in this of the textuality of history and of historys status as text or narrativeIn Metahistory Hayden White famously argued that any work of history was as much a piece of rhetorical construction as any work of fiction and that the play of rhetorical surfaces across historical narrative influenced the reader as much as the events or facts being recounted 1973 3 History in this account is a matter of perspective it is influenced and shaped by the agenda or subjectposition of the historian Several of the adaptations we are considering here that we other victorians 123 revisit the nineteenth century or seek to voice marginalized or repressed groups suggest something similar in their search to reveal hidden histo ries the stories between the lines of the published works of fact and fiction Metafiction and metahistory collide in interesting and provocative ways in the course of this selfconsciousness about the constructed nature of texts In A S Byatts Possession the chapter epigraphs she provides stand at one stage further removed from the period she is appropriating since they are authorial creations that merely resemble real literature from the nineteenth century In recreating the verse of her Victorian poets Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte the subjects of the academic research of her modern counterpart characters Roland Michell and Maud Bailey Byatt alludes to the work of actual nineteenthcentury poets such as Robert Browning Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson Ashs work offers a particular parallel with Browning who was admired for a kind of poetic ventriloquism in his work his ability to create and recreate individual voices real and fictional in his dramatic mono logues Indeed the biography of Ash written by one of the novels char acters Mortimer Cropper is entitled The Great Ventriloquist as if to draw attention to this mode within Byatts own writing Hulbert 1993 56 which in the course of this novel pastiches letters journals and poetry from the Victorian era as well as the tone and idiom of feminist and postmodern literary criticism A similar method is on display in John Fowless 1977 novel A Maggot which recounts the events leading up to the birth of Ann Lee founder of the Shaker movement Although in many respects the narrative of A Maggot is a meticulous reconstruction of a historical moment and idiom the novels title alerts us to the fact that this is not pure unadulterated historical reconstruction In eigh teenthcentury terminology a maggot was a whim or a caprice the caprice is entirely Fowless own since he interrupts the course of the narrative at various stages to remind the reader that despite appearances to the contrary the novel is an artfully constructed version of events Connor 1996 146 These recreational fictions are never pure ventriloquism then They rely on their readers awareness that they are reading from the vantage point of the modern era Byatt ensures this deliberate disjuncture by interweaving dual storylines and parallel romances in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Fowles goes even further by building into his 124 alternative perspectives postmodern narratives a metafictional awareness of the modern idiom and understanding inflecting his and our responses to his historical characters and themes Phrases in The French Lieutenants Woman such as We meet here once again this bone of contention between the two centuries 1996 1969 52 draw attention to the encounter between the mindsets of the two periods as does the encounter between the author and his character in a railway carriage in one notorious chap ter of the novel Fowless mode of recreation is one that resists wholesale ventriloquism of the Victorian narrative style depending instead on the telling role of juxtaposition comparison and contrast that we have already seen as a driving force of the appropriative mode He asserts for example that he is not the omniscient narrator so memorable from the majority of nineteenthcentury fiction If I have pretended until now to know my characters minds and innermost thoughts it is because I am writing in just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and voice of a convention universally accepted at the time of my story that the nov elist stands next to God 97 His is by contrast the era of the 1960s and poststructuralism I live in the age of Alain RobbeGrillet and Roland Barthes 97 In Chapter 13 of The French Lieutenants Woman Fowless God proves to be an existentialist creation This represents not so much a deconstruction of authorship as an overt refusal of it and as such offers an intriguing echo of Barthess arguments for the freedom of the reader in his theoretical writings although in Fowles that free dom is reimagined as a freedom of the novelistic character James Wilsons The Dark Clue while less explicit about the metafic tional aspect of its appropriation of the Victorian mode of fiction writ ing nevertheless achieves something very similar to Fowless and Byatts fictions by pastiching the style of nineteenthcentury sensation fiction a mode which reached its peak in the 1860s Pykett 1994 1 Wilson recreates sensation fictions meticulous reconstructions of quasilegalis tic eyewitness statements in its first person narratives while also allud ing to a specific canonical text Wilkie Collinss 1860 novel The Woman in White The Woman in White is famous not only as the progenitor of this mode of sensation fiction but also as the precursor of crime fiction as a genre and the specific mode of the detective novel which Collins would realize in a fuller incarnation in his later text The Moonstone 1868 Again Wilson signals his interest in the revisiting of the we other victorians 125 Victorian subgenres of the mystery and the crime novel in his subtitle to The Dark Clue A novel of suspense and in his expert pastiching of Collinss own predilection for a narrative constructed via a combination of letters journal entries and legal testimonies Lyn Pykett has indi cated just how much Collinss novel owed to the popular stage melodra mas of his day 1994 4 and Wilson seems to acknowledge this via his inclusion of a pastiche of a play at one point in the narrative Such was The Woman in Whites significance in its own era that there were multiple stage adaptations and even tiein merchandise Collins 1999 1860 vii this cultural potency continues into the present era when it is the subject of musical and television adaptation once again acknowledging the novels creative proximity to melodrama as a form Wilsons novel meanwhile reanimates and revoices two of the protago nists from The Woman in White Walter Hartright the painter and his sisterinlaw Marian Halcombe Between them this incongruous pair solved the original mystery of Collinss novel which is concerned with the feigned demise of Marions sister Laura who has in truth been placed in an asylum under a false identity by her villainous husband Sir Percival Glyde Here Walter and Marion serve once again as amateur sleuths This time however their assigned task is to research the life of the late painter J M W Turner about whom Hartright has been com missioned to write a biography In a parallel mode to that of Byatt and Fowles in their recreations Wilson here merges fictional and real fig ures from the Victorian era What he is also able to do in the process is to make explicit many of the sexual tensions which are only implicit in Collinss text but which have been recognized and discussed by genera tions of readers and critics John Sutherland has located the sexual undertow of The Woman in White in the faceoff between Marian and Count Fosco the melodramatic Italian villain of the piece but there is surely also sexual chemistry between Walter and Marian despite his surface passion for and indeed ultimate marriage to her more conven tionally beautiful halfsister Wilson seems almost to satisfy readerly expectation in this respect when a troubled sexual encounter takes place between his protagonists late in the novel This sexually aggressive element in the text of The Dark Clue is part of the novels wider investment in exploring the sexual undercurrents and repressions of the Victorian era This constitutes much of the hid 126 alternative perspectives den mystery of Turners life that Walter uncovers in the course of his biographical research in a move parallel to that of Byatts Possession the art of the biographer is here paralleled with that of the detective or the forensic scientist and which he has to confront as a darker element of his own personality in the course of the narrative In this respect it should be stressed that Wilson seems keen to darken and complicate Collinss rather perfect and good hero the aptly named Hartright One of the aspects of Turners painterly technique that begins to fascinate and obsess Hartright and again as in Byatts novel the researcher becomes at several turns possessed and haunted by his subject is his deployment of chiaroscuro in his work The Oxford English Dictionary offers a triple definition of this term In painting terminology it is the treatment of light and shade in drawing and painting This is a recog nizable element of Turners technique and one that Hartright seeks to emulate the novel encourages an awareness of Turners paintings throughout in order to understand how and why events unfold as they do But chiaroscuro can also mean the use of contrast in literature a driving force as we have seen of appropriation And additional it refers via its Italian etymology to the halfrevealed chiaro clear oscuro darkobscured Wilsons title The Dark Clue is a transliteration of chiaroscuro in some respects but it highlights the investment of detec tive fiction in revealing the initially obscured in bringing things to light that were in shade the same idea that Graham Swifts novel The Light of Day was seen to pun so vibrantly on in Chapter 2 Possibly a parallel to the biographers art is being suggested in the phrase although it also draws attention to the novels uncomfortable revelation of the dark secrets of Victorian society a world of prostitution and pornography that drags Walter quite literally into its back alleys This is the same undercurrent to Victorian society that troubles and concerns Fowles in The French Lieutenants Woman The dual perspective high lighted as a dominant mode in Fowless novel instructs us as readers to see the discrepancies and contradictions inherent in our understanding of Victorian society What are we faced with in the nineteenth century An age where woman was sacred and where you could buy a thirteen yearold girl for a few pounds Where more churches were built than in the whole previous history of the country and where one in sixty houses in London was a brothel 1996 1969 258 The reader is we other victorians 127 acting as a detective of sorts when encountering this fiction recognizing the parallels but also the significant differences between the rendition of the nineteenth century achieved in the novels and their current context and deciphering a whole set of codes and clues into the process The Victorian era and its active underworld would seem to offer a very specific example of these kinds of social and cultural contradictions and this may in part explain the ongoing fascination with appropriating the modes of nineteenthcentury fiction more generally in contemporary writ ing There are also parallels with our own largely urban era that should not be underestimated In the novels of Dickens and Collins among many others London functions as a virtual character The Victorian era throws into relief some of our own more contemporary concerns with class and social hierarchy and with questions of empire and imperialism As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has noted It should not be possible to read nine teenthcentury British literature without remembering that imperialism understood as Englands social mission was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English 1997 1989 148 All of these are reasons for the ongoing interest in offering knowing renditions and reworkings of the concerns of Victorian fiction But it is worth homing in even further on this interest For as well as the Victorian era in its totality a particular interest in the decade of the 1860s has emerged This was the decade as we have already seen of sensation fiction and the emergence of related subgenres such as the detective novel and the murder mystery Possession The Dark Clue and The French Lieutenants Woman are all partly set in the 1860s As well as Collinss The Woman in White and The Moonstone Charles Dickenss Great Expectations though its action was set some years earlier was published in the 1860s We will consider this novel in further detail later but suf fice to say here that it bears marked traces of the contemporary interest in crime and the modes and techniques of suspense fiction Wemmicks library of studies of criminology and convict literature is just one obvi ous marker of this fact in the novel But as that novels acknowledged and highly developed interest in theories of nature and nurture suggests Dickens 1994 1861 xiv the 1860s represent a decisive turn in terms of postmodern rethinkings of the Victorian novel and its deeper context of Victorian social and cultural values For this was the era that witnessed one of the greatest ever challenges to religious understandings 128 alternative perspectives of the world and of identity in the shape of Charles Darwins theory of evolution The Origin of the Species was first published in 1859 It is no coincidence that John Fowles furnishes many of the chapter epigraphs in The French Lieutenants Woman from Darwins influential ideas of adapta tion and environment or that his central male character is a geologist a scientist open to the Darwinian approach to understanding the world around him Great Expectations was first published in instalment form between December 1860 and August 1861 in the periodical All the Year Round In 1860 this periodical had also published two significant extrapola tions in essayform of Darwins theory of adaptation variation and sur vival Species published in June and Natural Selection published in July The influence of this on Dickenss novel which argues via the plot trajectories of both Pip and Estella that biological origins are only ever one part of our complex social and environmental makeup cannot be underestimated In Darwins Plots Gillian Beer has argued that Darwins prose was informed by his reading across several disciplines and that he found the literary figure of analogy especially helpful for articulating his scientific ideas 1983 80 It seems equally apposite that novels engaged in the process of literary adaptation in creating analogues and variants of their own according to cultural geographical and historical context should be drawn to Darwinian theories So the Victorian era proves in the end ripe for appropriation because it throws into sharp relief many of the overriding concerns of the post modern era questions of identity of environmental and genetic condi tioning repressed and oppressed modes of sexuality criminality and violence the urban phenomenon the operations of law and authority science and religion the postcolonial legacies of the empire In the rewriting of the omniscient narrator of nineteenthcentury fiction often substituting for himher the unreliable narrator we have recognized as common to appropriative fiction postmodern authors find a useful metafictional method for reflecting on their own creative authorial impulses This chapter will conclude therefore with a close reading of one particular contemporary novel that embodies all of these impulses in its remarkable appropriation and adaptation of Charles Dickenss Great Expectations and which therefore serves as a valuable test case for the claims made above Peter Careys Jack Maggs 1997 we other victorians 129 COMING OUT OF THE SHADOWS PETER CAREYS JACK MAGGS Like so many of the writers explored and invoked in these pages Australian novelist Peter Careys interest in appropriation is not limited to a single work in his oeuvre In a manner akin to J M Coetzee or John Fowles he has long been recognized as a deeply intertextual writer Novels such as Illywhacker 1985 and Oscar and Lucinda 1988 have been linked to nineteenthcentury writing in particular the work of Charles Dickens South American texts of magic realism and the films of Werner Herzog to name a few Woodcock 2003 82 The remarkable opening sequence of Oscar and Lucinda which depicts Oscars upbringing among the Plymouth brethren and its episode of the forbidden plum pudding owes much to Edmund Gosses work of retrospective Victorian autobiog raphy Father and Son 1907 Possibly in an act of deliberate disingenu ousness Carey denied at the time of Oscar and Lucinda that he was wellread in Dickens Woodcock 2003 58 but there could be no doubt of his immersion in the works of the Victorian novelist by the time of his 1997 novel Jack Maggs which is a direct appropriation of Great Expectations The Jack Maggs of Careys title is his postcolonial rework ing of Dickenss convict Abel Magwitch the man whose New South Wales fortune is deployed in fashioning Pip Pirrip as a gentleman of great expectations in that novel If Dickenss novel is as Kate Flint has described it a text imbued with the motif of return or at least of trying to return Dickens 1994 1861 vii then Careys fiction is doubly so He returns to the story of Magwitch and the return of Magwitch to London to meet with his adopted son Pip here transformed into the rather more reprehensible figure of Henry Phipps imposing on it a dis tinctly postcolonial set of political values and concerns As with Jean Rhyss exposure of the implicit imperialism of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea Bruce Woodcock suggests that Carey exposes the repressions and prejudices at the base of Dickenss text and Victorian culture Jack Maggs juxtaposes the hidden and the visible to reveal a terrible social violence beneath the surface of the imperial ideal It is Peter Careys Wide Sargasso Sea an act of postcolonial retaliation against a parent culture Like Jean Rhyss novel it rewrites elements of a canonical text from the heart of the English literary tradition to 130 alternative perspectives reveal the hidden alternative history that cultural hegemony has effaced or suppressed 2003 120 If Dickenss novel views Abel Magwitch almost entirely through Pips eyes and layered first person narration Carey inverts the perspective so that we see events very much from Maggss point of view We start the novel at the point of Maggss return from the penal colony of New South Wales Carey quite literally effects for him a conditional pardon within the context of his novel As well as the obvious Dickensian hypo text Carey is reworking the genre of Australian convict literature a prime example of which would be Marcus Clarkes His Natural Life 1885 Thomas Keneallys The Playmaker discussed in Chapter 2 works within a similar textual framework Both Carey and Keneally write from a selfconsciously postcolonial vantage point writing back to the question of convict transportation and the creation of the British penal settlement in Australia For Keneally this has the further resonance of the damage it wrought on the indigenous aboriginal communities Influential on Careys response to issues of empire in Australian cul ture was Robert Hughess book The Fatal Shore published in 1988 which directly discusses Great Expectations in the postcolonial context In turn and in a passage that cites Carey as a postcolonial author Edward Said picked up on this study in the Introduction to Culture and Imperialism 1993 xvixvii further evidence were it needed of the influence of theory on appropriations Said suggested that in Great Expectations the transported convict Magwitch serves as a metaphor for the relationship between England and its colonial offspring The prohi bition placed on Magwitchs return is not only penal but imperial sub jects can be taken to places like Australia but they cannot be allowed a return to metropolitan space which as all Dickenss fiction testifies is meticulously charted spoken for xvii Carey allows Magwitch that return in the context of a novel which like so many of the adapta tions of nineteenthcentury fiction discussed in this chapter evinces a deep fascination with the metropolitan space of London In Jack Maggs Carey rewrites the conventional convicts ending as well as Magwitchs specific fate in Dickenss novel where he dies in Pips arms Carey allows Maggs an additional return to his Australian we other victorians 131 home and family This proves a more complex rewriting than first appearances might suggest since throughout the narrative Maggs per sistently denies his Australian identity rejecting his family there in favour of an obsessive interest with the aborted child in his criminal past and the adopted Phipps Máire ní Fhlathúin indicates the ways in which the novel imitating the generic conventions of 1860s sensation fiction repeats tropes of failed parentage not least via the figure of the dying William IV the novel opens in 1837 with an ailing king and the accession of Queen Victoria imminent She argues that Carey does not entirely escape the paradigms he seeks to expose since he merely replaces an idealized Australian patriarchy for the imperial version the novel critiques The final image that readers are given of Magwitch on his return to New South Wales is one of imperial recreation both within the family and at the local cricket club 1999 90 The limits to Careys postcolonial perspective are perhaps revealed by this as well as by the ostensible absence of the aboriginal voice from this text although in the extended debates about property and ownership in the novel many of the legal discourses of the Australian land rights debate are selfconsciously recalled Careys approach to Maggss ending deserves further analysis Many critics at the time of Jack Maggss publication declared themselves dis satisfied with the novels happy ending But we need to register that Carey like Fowles before him is deeply selfaware about this imposi tional sense of narrative closure In The French Lieutenants Woman Fowles offered alternative endings while acknowledging that the conventions of Victorian fiction allow allowed no place for the open the inconclu sive ending 1996 1969 38 Great Expectations is invariably pub lished in modern editions with its own alternative endings however first the quasihappy ending imposed by Dickenss editor Bulwer Lytton in which a strong hint is given that Pip and Estella might live happily ever after and the darker ending Dickens initially preferred There is then a Dickensian precedent for the false consciousness that surrounds Careys happy ending for Maggs in which he and Mercy Larkin make a new life back in Australia Porter 1997 16 cited in ní Fhlathúin 1999 91 As Woodcock observes there is a fairy tale delib erately unreal air to this section 2003 137 with its idyllic depiction of happy families none of what precedes this in the novel would seem to 132 alternative perspectives predict this outcome and the atmosphere of unreality is compounded by the overall ending which refers to Mercys collection of first editions of the novel about Maggs The Death of Maggs In an act of narrative cir cularity the first time we see Mercy in this novel she is handling books in Percy Buckles personal library There is a fictional a literary aspect then to this ending which seems inescapable Even the printed dedica tion to Buckle in The Death of Maggs appears false in view of what we have read previously Texts can lie and mislead and Careys fiction toys with this possibility throughout its narrative and retains its sceptical awareness of unstable textualities to its close Careys appropriation of Great Expectations not only rewrites events in Dickenss canonical novel it goes one step further by bringing a version of the author himself into the heart of the fiction Tobias Oates a jour nalist in the early stages of a career in novel writing anxious for patron age and success is a thinly concealed variation on what we know of Dickenss biography Kate Flint has noted that Dickens wrote Great Expectations during a vexed moment in his personal life On 11 March 1861 he wrote to a friend W H Wills that he felt quite weighed down and loaded and chained in life cited in Dickens 1994 x Dickens 1938 212 He had separated from his wife in 1858 and was the subject of considerable popular scandal surrounding his rumoured relationship with the actress Ellen Tiernan Kaplan 1988 41617 The year 1861 was also an unsettled time on the world stage witnessing as it did the outbreak of the American Civil War Careys fiction is interested in Dickenss troubled family life but less with the relationship with Nelly Tiernan than in the hints earlier in Dickenss life of an affection verging on the obsessive for his wifes sister Mary Hogarth Mary died a tragic early death aged seventeen and although Dickens was undeniably distraught at her death the vanity of his account of it is inescapable Thank God she died in my arms and the very last words she whis pered were of me Ackroyd 1990 226 In Jack Maggs Tobias Oates proves a vain fairly reprehensible charac ter one who not only uses those around him as fodder for his fiction with little sense of ethical responsibility but whose personal life renders his wife Mary the slippage of Mary Hogarths name into that of Oatess wife in Jack Maggs is surely deliberate on Careys part and her sister Lizzie Warrinder the victims of his egotism Careys fictional recreation we other victorians 133 of Dickens appears to owe much in this to the vain if brilliant individ ual depicted by Peter Ackroyds monumental biography of the writer 1990 As well as these obvious parallels between Oatess life and what is known of Dickenss Jack Maggs is structured around a series of paral lels and echoes both external and internal There are several textual par allels with Great Expectations internal echoes as it were but also with other works in the Dickens oeuvre The thieving community in which Maggs finds himself placed as a child is a version of Fagins factory of childthieves in Oliver Twist for example And Oates we learn uses the figure of Maggs in several of his future novels Finally they slept and Tobias Oates crept out This scene or rather the specifics of its setting reappears not only in The Death of Maggs and Michael Adams but in almost everything Tobias Oates ever wrote Carey 1997 197 Great Expectations is a narrative founded on the connections between things Pip tries increasingly to keep the constituent parts of his life separate embarrassed as he is when Joe Gargery visits him in London feeling the world of the Kent marshes to be far behind him and irrele vant compromising even to his new existence as a gentleman What Pip fails to realize is how intimately his new life is connected to his experiences in th meshes Dickens 1994 1861 222 enabled as it is by Magwitchs wealth and patronage Other threads eventually connect in the novel when we learn that Maggss archrival in crime Compeyson is the bridegroom who deserted Miss Havisham on her wedding day and that Estella is really Magwitchs child The connectiv ity of Careys novel is achieved both through the relationship between hypotext and hypertext and the parallels identified with Dickenss own life There are also multiple parallels within the narrative Oates in many respects becomes Maggss shadow and counterpart itself Careys variation on the popular figure in nineteenthcentury fiction of the doppelganger or double Events in Maggss and Oatess lives mirror each other with disturbing regularity The harrowing abortion of Maggss child with Sophia in Ma Brittens house told in flashback within the narrative itself a textual echo of Dickenss narrative structure in Great Expectations with its stories within stories is mirrored by the fatal abor tion induced by drugs administered to Lizzie without each others knowledge by both Tobias and Mary In turn the manuscript of Oatess projected novel loosely based on Maggss life which burns in the fire at 134 alternative perspectives Maggss behest prefigures the burning of Lizzies bedsheets following her painful death thereby also burning the aborted foetus and effecting a disturbing connection between Oatess creative offspring Oates is also rendered a thief by the narrative as much as Maggs him self Labels such as the convict or the writer become treacherously unstable in the course of Jack Maggs where increasingly they have the potential to apply to either Maggs or Oates several of the inset narra tives in the text for example are products of Maggss impulse to write his life story for Henry Phipps In a related slippage of textual certainty Maggs eschews the label of Australian that both Oates and in some respects Carey seem anxious to pin on him Carey 1997 31213 Instead of the hallmarked silver that Maggs is trained as a child to steal however it is real Careys narrative is equally hesitant about the labels of real and fictional lives that Oates plunders for the raw material of his fiction Maggs describes his feeling of having been burgled after the first episode of somnambulism during which Oates makes careful notes of Maggss outbursts about his life as an Australian convict to incorporate in his novel He was burgled plundered and he would not tolerate it 32 Oates in a further direct parallel with Dickenss active fascination throughout his career with workings of the criminal mind is a proponent of the nineteenthcentury pseudoscience of mesmerism Ackroyd 1990 44851 This has been viewed by some as a precursor of modern psychotherapy and in this way Carey parallels not only his modern method of psychologizing Dickenss convict but also the acts of burglary and appropriation inherent to the imperialist ideology The metafictional strategies of the novel are integral to the exposure of colonial delusions They call attention to the process of fictional invention as appropriation theft Just as England stole Maggss birthright by making him a thief so Tobias Oates colonizes Maggs for his own imaginative purposes stealing Maggss life for his fiction Woodcock 2003 129 There is an overriding anxiety for the reader of Jack Maggs as there is for the reader of Wide Sargasso Sea that the protagonists may prove unable to escape the plot trajectories determined for them by their names and literary counterparts The sense Pip has in Great Expectations that we other victorians 135 Magwitch cannot escape his initial identification as a convict has obvi ous implications for the formers attempts to escape his life with Joe at the forge The more I dressed him and the better I dressed him the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on the marshes This effect on my anxious fancy was partly referable no doubt to his old face and man ner growing more familiar to me but I believed too that he dragged one of his legs as if there were still a weight of iron on it and that from head to foot there was Convict in the very grain of the man Dickens 1994 1861 333 Carey enjoys considering his characters ability to rewrite his destiny In one central encounter in a moving carriage and one that selfcon sciously echoes Fowless encounter with his protagonist in a train com partment in The French Lieutenants Woman Carey has Maggs confront Oates over the novel he is writing and challenge the vindictive end he has in mind for the character based on his life As we have already seen Carey also rewrites Maggss end his Australian deathbed scene in old age acting as a counterpart for that envisaged for him by Oates The title of Oatess novel is determined by this fate The Death of Maggs the death by fire is of course a reworking in turn of Miss Havishams demise in the Dickensian source The fantasy element of that ending however leaves us in some considerable doubt as to how free Maggs can get from his textual shackles What Carey does achieve for his character is to make him centre stage in the way he could never be in Great Expectations since that narra tive was voiced through the first person observation and perspective of Pip Careys novel about MaggsMagwitch is deliberately eponymous The image Carey deploys on regular occasion in the narrative to signify this centralizing move is the bringing of Maggs out of the shadows As in much nineteenthcentury fiction and many of the appropriations we have been looking at in this chapter not least Fowless The French Lieutenants Woman and Wilsons The Dark Clue London is a vibrant but doublesided entity in this novel a metropolis of gaslights and side streets a place of fine houses but also alleyways and back passages the lit and the unlit It is the latter spaces that Maggs is frequently seen 136 alternative perspectives skulking in or emerging from Carey quite literally brings his charac ters experiences out of the shadows and into the light And elsewhere this is a novel concerned with subtexts and subterranean truths Henry Phipps Pips dark counterpart or doppelganger in Jack Maggs is guilty of violently sodomizing the footman Edward Constable and causing the suicide of Constables partner In other ways Oates violates Maggss life and thoughts in a gothic representation of the novelists art Carey is in this way making explicit what can often only exist as the subtextual or implied in Victorian fiction be it colonialism sexual repression or vio lence In this way Careys narrative brilliantly vents the world of the Victorian novel and the Dickensian idiom but the light he brings to bear on his subject is inescapably modern we other victorians 137 The author willingly admits to having once or twice stretched history to suit his own fictional ends Peter Careys Authors Note to Jack Maggs Up until this point we have been discussing adaptation and appropria tion within the intertextual framework of texts adopting and adapting other texts In the next and final chapter following Kristevas lead in her writing on intertextuality in Desire in Language 1980 we expand the parameters of that debate to include the companion art forms of painting and music But there is a further parallel mode of appropria tion that uses as its raw material not literary or artistic matter but the real matter of facts of historical events and personalities What hap pens then to the appropriation process when what is being taken over for fictional purpose really exists or existed The kinds of literature we are examining under this heading are often grouped together by means of the generic title of historical fic tion But historical fiction is a wide umbrella term It can for example include novels or plays which choose to locate themselves in the past known or otherwise providing contextual details of that past as an authenticating strategy we believe in or yield to the events of such novels or plays partly because the background detail is so accurately drawn There are separate studies to be made of the larger impulse 8 STRETCHING HISTORY OR APPROPRIATING THE FACTS towards the writing of historical fiction but of more obvious and press ing concern to this study are those texts where the author is consciously appropriating the known facts of a particular event or of a particular life in order to shape their fiction Their motives in doing so can vary In some instances a historical event is depicted and deployed both for its own rich literary and imaginative content and for the parallels and com parisons it evokes with more contemporary or topical concerns One of the bestknown examples of this from the theatrical canon is Arthur Millers 1953 play The Crucible That play represents the events sur rounding the witchhunts conducted in 1692 among the New England Puritan colony of Salem It is an empathetic study of the personal rival ries and psychological disorders that contributed to the rampant accusa tions of witchcraft against the women and eventually men of that community and which led to several gruesome public executions But Millers purpose in selecting this particular moment in history for his drama was twofold While he was clearly interested in the group hyste ria and religious ardour that contributed to the Salem executions he also sought to promote in his audiences imaginations a direct compari son with the contemporary witchhunts being conducted in his native USA in the 1950s by Senator Joe McCarthy and his supporters Via the mechanism of the House of Representatives House UnAmerican Activities Committee HUAC this group was hellbent on exposing communism within US society Those in the performing arts actors directors and playwrights among them were a particular focus of surveillance and public showtrials in which they were encouraged to inform on their colleagues Miller was himself sentenced to prison in 1957 for his failure to act as an informant for HUAC although the sen tence was later quashed Bigsby 1997 3 Nowhere in the play script does The Crucible make this modern analogue explicit Miller simply trusts his audience to draw their own conclusions Of course audiences today come to the play with prior knowledge of the historical and polit ical analogue but The Crucible remains an impressive example of a his torical past being evoked in a literary context as a means of critiquing albeit obliquely the present political regime What Miller was doing was of course nothing new William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson achieved something remarkably similar in England in the early seven teenth century when they deployed the setting and stories of Ancient stretching history 139 Rome as a means of escaping the censor and yet critiquing present gov ernmental policies Ronan Bennett has also recently evoked seventeenthcentury society and its atmosphere of religious fervour and fundamentalism in his novel Havoc in its Third Year 2003 Set in Northern England in the 1630s the decade preceding the outbreak of the civil wars Bennett depicts a town where the restrictive Puritan leadership has created a world of paranoia and surveillance where neighbour is turned against neighbour often with fatal consequences The parallels between the world depicted in the novel and the rise of religious fundamentalism that took place in both Muslim and Christian communities in the early twentyfirst cen tury not least in the wake of the events and political aftermaths of 911 proved inescapable for readers and reviewers alike History can often be evoked then for the purposes of comparison or contrast But as Peter Widdowson has stressed there are many ways in which the literary uses history and many ends to which it is put 1999 154 At various points in this book we have had cause to evoke postmodernisms questioning of the past and of socalled historical facts Jean Rhys appropriates Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea in order to reveal the embedded racism of the British impe rial age and its literature Peter Carey rewrites Dickenss Great Expectations in Jack Maggs in order to highlight gaps and absences in Dickenss and by extension the Victorian eras concerns the life of those transported to the penal colony of Australia History literary or otherwise is being redeployed in these instances in order to indicate those communities and individuals whose histories have not been told before the marginalized and the disenfranchised as represented by Rhyss Antoinette or Careys Maggs Don DeLillo achieves the related effect in Libra 1988 of seeing an iconic historical event the assassina tion of President John F Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 not just from the perspective of the identified assassin Lee Harvey Oswald but via the interior voices and mindset of others in his life What is revealed in the process is a world of poverty and disenfranchisement that is often miss ing from the conspiracyled historical accounts of that shooting The retrieval of lost or repressed voices is a motif we have identified as being common to many of the appropriations we have considered thus far In prose fiction revisions of Shakespearean plays such as The 140 alternative perspectives Tempest in Marina Warners Indigo or King Lear in Jane Smileys A Thousand Acres which both deploy first person narration a conscious effort is made to give a voice and in turn a set of comprehensible motives to characters either marginalized on or completely absent from the Shakespearean stage A shared purpose can in this respect be identified in much postmodern historical fiction or historiographic metafiction as it is sometimes called that deploys the technique of first person narration Peter Careys True History of the Kelly Gang 2000 for example has been praised as a remarkable achievement of ventrilo quism Certainly Carey vividly supplies the idiom slang and idiosyn cratic punctuation that suggest we are receiving Ned Kellys voice direct The novel is structured as a series of letters written by Kelly to his daughter in order to ensure that she hears the story from him as well as others For this reason parcels of letters substitute for chapters in this selfaware novel Carey confidently plays with the methods of recording archival detail in the framing authorial introduction to each parcel 59 octavo pages all of high woodpulp content and turning brown Folds foxing staining and minor tears 2000 73 This fram ing material achieves two conflicting ends within the narrative It serves as an authenticating presence as readers we are trained to trust the historical evidence of archival material catalogued in this way Yet these frames also serve as a reminder of historical voices and inter preters other than Kelly himself we are by this method reminded that postmodernisms favoured strategy of unreliable narration may be relevant in Neds case As much as he is mythologized in Australian his tory books as that nations version of the Robin Hood legend a poor man of Irish provenance who suffered intense racism and who took on the authorities in several daring raids and sieges Kelly may also be rewriting his own history censoring certain truths or embellishing others in view of his intended audience of his daughter The title of Careys novel performs a similar sleight of hand True History of the Kelly Gang would seem at first sight to emphasize the veracity of this version of the story told as it is from the gangs point of view Yet Carey has selfconsciously avoided the use of a definite article here it is not the true history This identifiable absence sug gests that we need to question the phrase true history An alert reader may even suspect an oxymoronic quality to the term since as stretching history 141 much late twentiethcentury scholarship was at pains to point out his tory itself is often simply one persons assessment and interpretation of events from the available or extant documents and evidential traces left behind What happens to those such as Ned Kellys immediate family for example whose illiteracy reduced their capacity to leave behind tex tual traces of their existence how does history speak for or about them Carey as in his earlier Jack Maggs is concerned in this novel with offer ing a voice to these lost voices as Bruce Woodcock notes Careys fictions are inhabited by hybrid characters living in inbetween spaces or on the margins 2003 1 adding that They retell the stories of marginalized characters outsiders and outlaws in reinvented voices 138 Woodcock has memorably described this less as ventriloquism than a performative act of habitation occupation 2003 138 By appropriat ing Kellys lifestory Carey enacts appropriations semantic meaning by carrying out an occupation or takeover but this is not a hostile act he is anxious to give a voice to the lives of the poor whom he sees as having been marginalized in and by the historical record His model for this is undoubtedly the American author William Faulkner who also provides the epigram to this novel The past is not dead It is not even past It is important to grasp that Carey is reinventing history as well as retrieving voices he deems to have been suppressed by history as a for mal discipline The phrase true history not only connects his project to the practice of historical research and interpretation but also to the art of fiction In the seventeenth century many prose novellas and romances declared themselves to be true histories in this manner while simulta neously connecting themselves as much to the conventions of romantic writing as to actual historical event or personages cf Woodcock 2003 142 Aphra Behns Oroonoko or The Royal Slave 1688 and The Unfortunate Happy Lady A True History 1698 are facilitating examples Behn plays on the etymological connection between the word history and the French term for a story or fiction histoire in a manner that pre figures and preempts much of postmodernisms playful encounters with the discipline By devising a novel constructed from letters Carey simultaneously evokes the modes of truth and fiction His inspiration for the novel came from witnessing a genuine Kellyauthored document of this kind which in turn evokes the parallel genre of biography and yet further 142 alternative perspectives informing models are clearly those of the eighteenthcentury fictional forms of epistolary and picaresque novels History is not being undone by means of these appropriations and adaptations but its stability is being questioned As Linda Hutcheon observes Postmodernism does not deny history it merely questions how we can know past real events today except through their traces their texts the facts we con struct and to which we grant meaning 1988 225 Carey seems acutely aware of these traces and the complex and questioning ways in which we must handle them in the construction of his novel It is through the framing device of the third person narration of events following Kellys execution and the voicing of the reaction of the man entrusted with Kellys manuscripts that Carey seems to hint at one of his own motives when appropriating history for this novel Curnow asks enviously What is it about we Australians eh What is wrong with us Do we not have a Jefferson A Disraeli Might we not find someone better to admire than a horsethief and a murderer Must we always make such an embarrassing spectacle of ourselves 2000 419 Kellys iconic fame in Australia in large part deriving from the mode and manner of his death seems to confirm Jean Baudrillards claim that history has transmuted into myth in the modern era and that early death accrues a particularly mythic dimension Baudrillard cites the spe cific examples of Marilyn Monroe James Dean and JFK 1981 24 declaring History is our lost referential that is to say our myth 43 Carey is certainly questioning the mythologizing process and yet he is not on Curnows side in the novel either In the same way that his post colonial revision of Great Expectations found empathy for the convict community of New South Wales so here he seeks motive and reason and the understanding of the reader for Kellys life and actions Just as the appropriation of a canonical novel relies upon the readers foreknowledge of the precursor text for a full appreciation of its ques tions and potential for critique its revisionary achievement as it were so the appropriation of Kellys life in True History of the Kelly Gang relies upon a readers awareness albeit in outline of his life and the mythol ogy surrounding it Carey uses this to create a sense of predestination in the novel akin to the awareness of the plot trajectory of a canonical drama or novel in a sense both we as readers and Kelly writing his per sonal history know how it will end Carey ensures this even for the stretching history 143 uninitiated by opening the novel with the shootout that led to Kellys arrest and eventual execution The iconic signifier of his handcrafted armour and his assumed persona of the Monitor the name derives from the goanna or monitor lizard an inhabitant of Australias rain forests immediately locate the reader in terms of the historical record Like Jean Rhyss Antoinette Neds life is shaped by our awareness of his end as Woodcock observes Ned is dogged by a sense of fatalism and destiny Unlike Jack Maggs Careys Ned Kelly seems trapped by the script history has written for him and despite his hope that he will be able to read his account in the future with his daughter in America he is all too aware of his coming doom 2003 150 Another novel that both appropriates a historical life and a mythology and begins with the tragic end of its protagonist is Joyce Carol Oatess Blonde her fantasy biography the phrase is Hilary Mantels quoted in the paperback edition of the novel of cinema icon Norma Jeane Baker better known by her film name of Marilyn Monroe Monroes life and death as mentioned above are singled out for mythical status by Baudrillards Simulacra and Simulation 1981 and Oates is clearly relying on her readerships shared perception of Monroes iconographic status in the construction of her novel In her authorial preface Oates asserts that Blonde is a radically distilled life in the form of fiction and synec doche is the principle of appropriation 2000 ix The cover of the first paperback edition of the novel in the UK seemed to emphasize Oatess point it depicted a fragment of an iconic photograph of Monroe one actually described in the novel a still taken as a publicity shot for the film Bus Stop The chapter in question is entitled The American Goddess of Love on the Subway Grating New York City 1954 A lushbodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty In an ivory geor gette crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric Shes standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating Her blond hair is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full flaring skirt Oates 2000 601 The fragment we are given as consumers of the novel however is just a glimpse of Monroes platinum blonde hair from that photographic 144 alternative perspectives image The blonde of the title is enough to connote Marilyn with the added irony of course that her blonde was itself an act of fakery and selffashioning in the context of Hollywoods creation of her image Oates captures a crucial point about appropriation here synecdoche is the principle of the form in respect that it relies on simple signifiers to tell larger stories a wisp of peroxide blonde is enough to suggest the myth and iconicity of Marilyn Monroe and the attendant tragedies of her personal life in the same way that for Peter Carey Ned Kellys homemade Monitor armour conjures up a comparable mythology In Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea an English stately home and a candle is enough to suggest the fire at Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre In Blonde Oatess selfconscious nomenclature relies on the readers knowledge of the facts of Monroes biography we are introduced to several unnamed but nevertheless recognizable players in her life the ExAthlete is Joe Di Maggio the sexually tyrannical President is John F Kennedy although there were also important topical parallels with the Bill ClintonMonica Lewinsky affair when Oatess novel was published O is Laurence Olivier the Playwright is Arthur Miller The postmodern reader is alert to these signifiers to the semantic interplay between the source they conjure up and the rewriting that surrounds these fragmen tary evocations of a reallife precursor of the events described Like Careys True History of the Kelly Gang Oatess Blonde starts at the end with Monroes death around which conspiracy theories have swirled Once again a readers foreknowledge and expectation is a crucial element in the construction of the narrative dynamic We are partici pants in the act of appropriation persistently reading between the lines A parallel effect is achieved by another Joyce Carol Oates novel that appropriates an actual historical event Black Water 1993 That texts factual hypotext is the socalled Chappaquiddick tragedy another story line involving a member of the Kennedy dynasty Senator Edward Kennedy In the actual event which occurred in 1969 MaryJo Kopechne drowned in a car driven by Kennedy He was later found guilty of having left the scene of an accident though many questions remain as to exactly how Kopechne died What remains clear is that Kennedys hopes of securing his partys presidential nomination which had seemed high until this incident also drowned in the marsh water of Cape Cod that July night In Oatess novel events are transposed to stretching history 145 Maine in the 1990s This historical setting is carefully signified by dis cussion of Michel Dukakiss failed presidential campaign against George Bush Sr in 1988 Nevertheless the narratives account of the power and sexhungry Senator the drowning of Kelly Kelleher and the resultant coverup to protect his presidential hopes unmistakeably calls to mind the events in Chappaquiddick As with Millers The Crucible Oates relies on the alert readers recognition of the storys reallife counterparts The jacket of the paperback edition of the book emphasizes this inten tion with its reference to a shocking story that has become an American myth without ever specifically naming Chappaquiddick The narrative of Black Water is brilliantly structured in the form of an interior monologue taking place inside Kellys head during the min utes or hours in which she drowns The novel is deliberately ambiva lent about time we know that Kelly has found an airpocket in the submerged vehicle but there remains the possibility that she is seeing her life flash before her eyes in the seconds before she dies The sections which occur in a rush of words with minimal or no punctuation under lines this terrifying possibility The verbal refrains also serve to empha size that for all the rewriting of Oatess project the end is inescapable Just before the car flew off the road As the black water filled her lungs and she died Oatess project can be compared to Careys True History of the Kelly Gang in the sense that she appropriates the story of the Chappaquiddick incident forging history into fiction in an effort to give back a voice to the silenced MaryJo Kopechne There is a conscious effort to retrieve a lost history here too to see Kopechnes life with its own value and not just as an appendix to the Kennedy family myth In the narrative Kelly even reflects on the fact that you never doubt you will be able to tell your own story In this way Oates allows the novel to speak for her in a way the historical record cannot The discipline of history as we have seen on countless occasions in this study is in truth a history of textuali ties of stories told by particular tellers according to particular ideolo gies and contexts see for example White 1987 In this sense history proves a ripe source and intertext for fiction for histoire to appropriate 146 alternative perspectives Literature has found endless inspiration in canonical works of art as well as literature Tracy Chevaliers Girl with a Pearl Earring 1999 creates a history for the enigmatic woman represented in Johannes Vermeers remarkable painting of the same name and that same author has recently carried out a similar exercise in fiction with the famous medieval tapestries of the Musée National du Moyen Age Cluny Museum in her The Lady and the Unicorn 2003 Julian Barnes uses as his inspirational springboard in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters 1989 Géricaults The Raft of Medusa as well as the biblical parable of Noahs ark In The Dark Clue 2001 the novel is discussed in Chapter 7 James Wilson embeds several allusions to Turners paintings within the action of the novel This is an extension of the impulse to read between the lines or fill in the gaps that we have seen in practice in much of the literature that appropriates canonical writing In each instance the author relies on the readers foreknowledge of the work of art that is being alluded to and appropriated for the purposes of the narrative Michael Frayns Headlong 1999 achieves something similar if even more embedded with its deployment of Pieter Breughels remarkable painting of the Fall of Icarus in which Icaruss demise is famously off centre marginalized to the corner of the frame Combining a researchers knowledge of Breughel with the conventions of a mystery novel or detective fiction Frayn has his artdealer protagonist wrongly 9 APPROPRIATING THE ARTS AND SCIENCES believe he has discovered a lost painting that will make his fortune En route Frayn has great fun paralleling the pride of his overweening narrator with the fate of Icarus This is of course far from the first time that Breughels painting has been the subject of literary atten tion W H Audens poem Musée des Beaux Arts captures beautifully the paintings decentring of the myth of overreaching ambition in its account of the works depiction of the everyday events onland carrying on heedless of Icaruss demise out at sea Appropriation clearly extends far beyond the adaptation of other texts into new literary creations assimilating both historical lives and events as viewed in the preceding chapter and companion art forms as mentioned above into the process Painting portraiture photography film and musical composition all become part of the rich treasury of texts available to the adaptor This is nothing new as such it is a pro cess that has been underway for centuries and which has manifested itself across many cultures Nevertheless it has gained a particular cadence and significance in the wake of the late twentiethcentury post modernist theory which has made us constantly aware of the processes of intervention and interpretation involved in any relationship or engagement with existent art forms Postmodernism has troubled over the replacement of the real by exact reproductions or imitations In our evermore skilful capacity to reproduce or clone objects and art forms in the age of mass production and reproduction these imitations take on a hyperreal quality Jean Baudrillard offers one of the more expansive ruminations on this theme in his account of simulation and simulacra in the modern era 1981 but perhaps the seminal account remains Walter Benjamins hugely influential essay The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility Benjamin 2003b 1935 4252 This essay previ ously better known by the title The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction suggested a loss of aura in the modern age of reproduction and cloning Benjamin did not necessarily regard this as a negative outcome Indeed in a formulation relevant for our accounts of the adaptive process he suggested that the attendant deconstruction of aura freed texts in their afterlives from the stranglehold of the origi nal Eagleton 1994 1981 40 Ferris 2004 47 His productive resolu tion of the dichotomous relationship between originality and repetition 148 alternative perspectives which has troubled T S Eliot Harold Bloom and legal theorists alike see Gaines 1991 64 is important for the discussions that both precede and follow in this volume Returning in the light of Benjamins theory to Eliots notion of tra dition and the individual talent we need perhaps to effect a paramount shift away from the idea of authorial originality towards a more collabo rative and societal understanding of the production of art and the pro duction of meaning Richard Powers suggests as much in his response to new technology in the wake of Benjamins theories in his novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Dissecting photography and films abil ity to enable a collective democratized form of history by according the masses the power to select and record the moment he observes a new technology already on us extends this ability well beyond still photography Every home is about to be transformed into an editing studio with books prints films and tapes serving the newage viewer as little more than rough cuts to be assembled and expanded into customized narratives Reproduction will make the creation and appreciation of works truly interactive Powers 2001 1985 260 It is certainly the interactive quality of appropriative art that emerges with most force from the studies conducted here this serves in turn to question any bland account of meaning being evacuated from postmodernist art and literature purely by dint of its imitative or recursive qualities Andy Warhols artistic output has often served as a crucial touchstone in debates about the evacuation of meaning in postmodern derivative art His multiples repeated screenprinted images of twentiethcentury icons ranging from Elvis Presley to Mao TseTung to Marilyn Monroe are an interesting case study What the reproductive adaptive element in Warhols artworks achieves is to underscore the iconicity and therefore duplicability of such images brands in the age of mechanical reproduc tion but that does not mean that his work is simply evacuated of mean ing in the process His multiples comment on the power and glamour of celebrity and fame in the modern era by extension they subject Monroes image to the kind of synecdochal appropriation explored in detail by Joyce Carol Oates in her novel Blonde discussed in the previous chapter appropriating the arts and sciences 149 Monroes image is an interesting case since it raises the concomitant issues of copyright and ownership that have provided a backdrop to many of the discussions of adaptation in this volume Legal theorist Rosemary Coombes has examined attempts made by the pop singer Madonna to copyright her image in the lawcourts The difficulty comes with the allusive and referential quality of Madonnas own image which has invoked Monroes film career and physical appearance on numerous occasions in the video for her recording of Material Girl for example Madonna consciously imitates Monroes performance of the song Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 1951 If Madonna trademarks her appearance which is recognizably derivative of Monroes what are the legal implications Coombes contests If the Madonna image appropriates the likenesses of earlier screen god desses religious symbolism feminist rhetoric and sadomasochistic fantasy to speak to contemporary sexual aspirations and anxieties then the value of the image derives as much perhaps from the col lective cultural heritage on which she draws as from her individual efforts But if we grant Madonna exclusive property rights in her image we simultaneously make it difficult for others to appropriate those same resources for new ends and we freeze the Madonna con stellation itself 1994 1078 From the standpoint of contract law Coombes argues for greater flexi bility in our approach to the artistic form proposing a strategy whereby we would move away from the assignment of specific individual copy rights towards acceptance of the fact that a fundamental part of the artistic process is adaptation and reinterpretation Without this flexi bility artistic access to the public domain will become choked by the need for consent Jane Gaines makes a parallel argument about iconic similarity in her book Contested Images 1991 xvi The artist Cindy Sherman has deliberately provoked similar debates about originality and authenticity in her photographic reworkings of iconic Renaissance paintings Cruz et al 1997 There is both fidelity and infidelity simultaneously at work in her photograph of herself in the position of a Caravaggio subject see for example her reworking of 150 alternative perspectives Boy bitten by a lizard She has shifted genre from fine art to photog raphy so on no level can this be straightforward copying and she raises issues of gender and representation by means of the substitution of her self for Caravaggios boy model The work is hers then in so far as it raises questions and applications that depend entirely on her interven tion into the original artwork to which the photograph refers and upon which further meanings will be layered by the gaze of the observer of the photograph in new cultural conditions and contexts There is in some sense a historical return taking place here a return to the freedom of imitation borrowing assimilation and bricolage witnessed in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the early modern period and a move away from the legal definitions of plagiarism and copyright infringement which dominate the modern era It is a contro versial and contested opinion but one which raises central ideas about creative freedom that we would do well to ponder Discussing the function of the author Michel Foucault suggested that the value placed on authorship in the creative process tended to end up by denying intertextuality 1979 20 What is sought in any artistic argument against individual rights in or ownership of a particular image or pose is a more collaborative societal understanding or defini tion of both production and reproduction The very concept of author ship overrides the generic and conventional indebtedness that would mark works as the product not so much of individuals as societies Gaines 1991 77 It is this collaborative production of cultural mean ing not least in the practice of history that Richard Powers interrogates in Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance That novel commences with not one but two suggestive artworks Diego Riveras Henry Fordcommis sioned murals in Detroit both an homage to and a terrifying portrayal of as Powers reads it the age of the machine and August Sanders evoca tive and yet enigmatic photograph of three young farmers on their way to a village dance taken in 1914 when Europe stood poised on the brink of change in the face of the terrible collective trauma of the Great War Powerss novel and narrator are anxious to imagine a history for these three unnamed men who would have been conscripted into the Prussian army within months of the photograph being taken In a creative move akin to those authors we have looked at who have sought to retrieve the lost voices of literature and history Powers is writing a story into the appropriating the arts and sciences 151 historical gaps and lacunae offered up by the few known facts about this photograph By further interweaving in his narrative the narrators reflec tion on the perceivers and by extension the historians and the biogra phers interventionist role in reading meaning into this image with a third plotline of an American IT worker who finds a personal connection to this photograph Powers makes a powerful case for the collaborative production of artistic effect and historical knowledge for as he terms it the impossibility of knowing where knowledge leaves off and involve ment begins 2001 1985 206 Reflecting that describing and alter ing are two inseparable parts of the same process 206 Powers asserts that there can be no interpretation without participating 207 It is this crucial notion of participation cultural social and ethi cal that I wish to suggest and hope to have indicated in the examples cited in this volume adaptation and appropriation represent and perform as artistic and aesthetic processes It would be dangerous of course to imply that the line of influence is entirely onedirectional painting and photography have enjoyed an allusive intertextual relationship with literature as well The paintings of the PreRaphaelites in the nineteenth century endlessly reworked scenes and images from Shakespearean drama often realizing visually events that only occur offstage in the plays themselves such as Ophelias florally bedecked drowning as described by Gertrude in 4713855 of Hamlet and depicted so memorably by John Everett Millais Angela Carters revisitation of Ophelias death in several of her novels and short stories it has been argued is as much influenced by Millaiss evocative painting as by the Shakespearean verse description Sage 1994 33 Jonathan Bate has also registered Laurence Oliviers selfconscious remake of this image in a cinematic generic context when he filmed the play in 1948 Bate 1997 266 PreRaphaelite art in turn influenced the theatricalized photographic tableaux of Julia Margaret Cameron whose work also influenced the forays into fiction of Virginia Woolf in particular her 1941 novel Between the Acts which sees a group of actors producing historical tableaux on a provincial village stage As connections and interconnections of these kinds proliferate in our argument we need perhaps to think less in terms of lines of influ ence and more in terms of webs or networks of allusion and mutual influence 152 alternative perspectives Music has also found an important reference point in canonical liter ature Opera ballet and musical as mentioned in Chapter 1 have looked to the Shakespearean canon and to fairy tale and mythology among many other sources for the plotlines and raw material for their own creative outputs Musicology has had a longstanding interest in the practice of adaptation and appropriation and much of the terminol ogy that we have deployed when discussing literary adaptation resur faces in this context version interpretation replication imitation variation But there are some subtle differences in the semantics that deserve mention In the musical context words that might in a strictly literary sphere be taken to suggest direct copying without alteration undergo a shift of register implying instead the kind of simultaneous acts of interpretation that Richard Powers suggests are the true mode of the readers or spectators response to art In musicology for example replication refers not to a simple cloning of a precursor tune or tonal pattern but a repetition played at one or more octaves above or below the precursor tone a musical version is a recognized variant on a pre viously existent form musical or otherwise and imitation means not unproblematic mimesis a copy or counterfeit without alteration addi tion or interpolation as it is sometimes taken to mean in the literary context but the repetition of a musical phrase in a different pitch I have argued elsewhere in this volume for the possibilities opened up by deploying the terms of musicology when discussing the processes of adaptation and appropriation and once again these kinetic definitions of phrases which in literary study have tended to become stultified or overly static in their application are hugely helpful Music has fed into the pages of fiction in an equally rich and infor mative way E M Forsters evocation of Beethovens Fifth Symphony at the heart of his novel Howards End is a case in point The music is liter ally experienced in the narrative in the form of the concert jointly attended by the Schlegel sisters and impoverished clerk Leonard Bast but it also serves as a central metaphor and shaping movement in Forsters text Helen Schlegel warns us early on both as readers and interpreters of the symphony to look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back 1985 1910 46 and Forster makes determined space for the goblin footfalls of the musical composition within his own narrative appropriating the arts and sciences 153 Richard Powerss The Gold Bug Variations makes comparable use of Bachs Goldberg Variations a musical sequence evoked elsewhere in this volume as an example of the process of adaptation made into art form Powerss novel does not appropriate Bach alone his title puns on the popular name for Bachs composition and on Edgar Allan Poes short story The GoldBug That story has at its heart a cracked cipher or decoded mystery This connects with Powerss scientific concerns in his novel which looks at the race to crack the genetic code of DNA in the earlier part of the twentieth century His novel takes variation then as its central theme On the surface an interweaving of two love stories the narrative structure deliberately imitates the intertwined patterns of the double helix structure of DNA Powerss writing persistently inter weaves and connects scientific and artistic models The actual cracking of the cipher of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson and its pub lication in essay form is described with great poetic beauty in The Gold Bug Variations The piece breaks his heart with poignancy It is a beauti ful late twentiethcentury pilgrims narrative exegesis pressing out wards Powers 1991 481 The theory of DNA is all about correspondences and consonances but perhaps even more importantly Powers finds correspondences between the patterns of variation in Bachs Goldberg compositions and the pat terns of genetic adaptation that are in many respects the story told by the double helix In Chapter 7 we argued for the Darwinian model of envi ronmental adaptation as an important analogue to the literary practice of adaptation and in the double helix Powers finds a twentiethcentury sci entific equivalent In the process he argues for an enlarged understand ing of a term like translation and by extension our understanding of adaptation and reworking The aim is not to extend the source but to widen the target to embrace more than was possible before variation grows rich in a new tongue 1991 491 In Powerss account art like science for all its intertextuality proves to be less about echoes repeti tions or rephrasings however fundamental these are in practice than about the identification of shared codes and possibilities The discovery of these codes enables acts of endless recreativity in new contexts Part of the journey or pilgrimage of this book has been to find a means of discussing and interpreting adaptation and appropriation as literary and artistic processes that transcend the rather static or 154 alternative perspectives immobilizing discussion of source or influence that has sometimes hampered the study of texts produced in this domain Current audi ences for film and popular music are highly adept at invoking the processes and effects of intertextuality Quotation allusion parody and pastiche are all dominant modes in popular cultural programmes such as The Simpsons and South Park With readerships and audiences already well honed in the art of searching for wider referential frame works and contexts for the material they are receiving we need in turn to develop a more dynamic theoretical vocabulary to describe and mobilize these processes of response In searching for more kinetic models and terminology to provide the new critical idiom for studying these forms musicology has proved a particularly helpful discipline offering us templates and paradigms as diverse and suggestive as baroque variation on grounds and the riffs and improvisational qualities of jazz Science too in particular the theories of adaptation expounded by Mendel by Darwin and by those who have deployed the theories of Crick and Watson has provided an equally potent reference point It seems fitting therefore to move towards our conclusion with these recurring yet innovative patterns of Bach and DNA uppermost in our minds appropriating the arts and sciences 155 This exploration of literary adaptation and appropriation has had recourse at several points to companion art forms such as film and music and to the scientific domain especially to those theories of genetic inheritance and environmental adaptation that began with Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century and whose tendrils reach well into the twentyfirst with the ongoing debates about DNA and genetic modification Tudge 2002 Contemporary science talks about the modern synthesis of Mendels theories of inheritance and Darwins notions of diversity and variation in neoDarwinism and this synthesis of ideas has had very genuine outcomes in the field of molecular biology and research into DNA While acknowledging that a volume on the literary processes of adaptation and appropriation can only ever deploy such complex think ing at the level of metaphor and suggestion nevertheless the MendelDarwin synthesis offers a useful way of thinking about the happy combination of influence and creativity of tradition and the individual talent and of parental influence and offspring in appropriative literature perhaps in all literature In his autobiography Darwin reflected on the endless beautiful adaptations that we everyday meet with cited in Beer 1983 39 It can only be hoped that the aesthetic picture painted here has been one of comparable beauty richness and potential This is a Conclusion or an Afterword as I have preferred to term it albeit one which is deeply conscious that its discussion cannot aim AFTERWORD towards closure or summing up but only gesture outwards towards future possibilities and ongoing adaptational processes By opting for the phrase Afterword I am conscious of how many appropriations have positioned themselves in relation to precursors via this notion of coming after behind in the shadows or in the wake of something else John Gross has recently edited an anthology of Shakespearean appropriations entitled After Shakespeare 2000 Patrick Marbers English relocation and updating of Strindbergs influential 1888 naturalist tragedy Miss Julie which elected for a 1945 setting in the wake of the British Labour partys landslide election victory following the war was entitled After Miss Julie 1996 Polly Teales recent play for the Shared Experience theatre company which considered the life of novelist Jean Rhys alluded to her seminal work of appropriation Wide Sargasso Sea and its revision of Jane Eyre in its title After Mrs Rochester 2003 Teale had herself previously adapted Jane Eyre for the stage The term after might seem then to endorse postmodernisms beloved idea of belatedness After can be a purely temporal epithet a work that is later in date chronologically necessarily comes after But after can also mean allusive to or referential as in the above examples from Gross Marber and Teale in imitation of in the style of alluding to Yet could we not also riff on the word further and suggest that to go after something would be to pursue it or chase it The drive of many of the appropriations studied here to go after certain canonical works and question their basis in patriarchal or imperial cultural contexts is an important act of question ing as well as imitative in its modes and gestures The theoretical and ideological forces that can be seen at play in many of our focus texts can not be underestimated in this respect Postcolonialism feminism and gender studies queer theory and postmodernism have all wrought important influences on these texts often equal to and sometimes in excess of the canonical texts or events to which they explicitly refer All creative work in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst cen turies would however in postmodernist accounts necessarily come afterwards because nothing new nothing original be it in the domain of art music film or literature is possible any more We come too late to do anything unique After in this context becomes a signifier of reduced or debased value that is the best book on the subject after mine Those who attack the referential qualities of hiphop music or afterword 157 digital sampling bemoan song covers in the popular music charts or criticize literatures inbuilt intertextualities on the grounds that it sti fles individualism find themselves expounding postmodernism Those who attacked Graham Swifts novel Last Orders suggesting that it did not deserve literary prizes because it was allusive by nature because it came after Faulkner and indeed after Chaucer and after Powell and Pressburger as Chapter 2 demonstrates were voicing comparable views After need not though mean belated in a purely negative sense Coming after can mean finding new angles and new routes into some thing new perspectives on the familiar and these new angles routes and perspectives in turn identify entirely novel possibilities So we need to find a way of discussing adaptation and appropriation that will regis ter influence but not assume it is a stranglehold that will see possibility not prescription authored by what comes before authored by our inheri tance both literary and genetic The art of adaptation and appropriation has a potent influence and shaping effect in its own right Recently the very processes and pitfalls of the art of adaptation have served as the raw material for an innovative artistic production Charlie Kaufmans metafictional metacinematic screenplay for Adaptation dir Spike Jonze 2002 wrestles openly and with grim irony with his repeated failure as a screenwriter to adapt on to film in any satisfying way a popular work of nonfiction Susan Orleanss The Orchid Thief Kaufmans plot actively explores the issues of interpolation alteration and imagining that form an inevitable part of the process of adaptation No appropriation can be achieved without impacting upon and altering in some way the text which inspired the adaptation So influential indeed have some appro priations become that in many instances they now define our first expe riences or encounters with their precursor work of art This observation is often made in regard to Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea Few contempo rary readers now approach Jane Eyre without an awareness of Rhyss appropriation or at least of the significance feminist postcolonial and postmodern of the marginalized character of the madwoman in the attic As Worton and Still note every literary imitation is a supplement which seeks to complete and supplant the original and which functions at times for later readers as the pretext of the original 1990 7 Supplement here once again functions in the subDerridean sense of a virtual substitute or replacement for the original Derrida 1976 158 afterword 14157 The filtering and mediation of many of the appropriations studied here through other works of adaptation is further proof of this web of intertextuality that once again resists the easy linear structures of straightforward readings of influence that seem to presume a greater value in whatever comes first A limited or foreclosed sense of the belatedness of adaptive literature would restrict the capacity of the appropriation to function as a textual force in its own right A more positive approach is signalled by J Hillis Miller in his study of multiple versions of the Pygmalion myth Acknowledging the perpetual belatedness of these versions Miller nev ertheless stresses that they are affirmative productive inaugural they enter the cultural and historical world to change it and keep it going for ward 1990 243 A potent example of this affirmative movement for ward the dynamic aspect of adaptation argued for throughout this study is Philip Pullmans recent collection of novels for younger readers His Dark Materials This trilogy acknowledges its indebtedness to John Miltons seventeenthcentury epic poem Paradise Lost in its title which is a direct quotation from the Miltonic narrative Pullmans secularizing narratives of parallel worlds daemons and dust also owe much to Miltons eighteenthcentury reader and commentator William Blake who in his poetry collection The Marriage of Heaven and Hell declared that Milton was unknowingly of Satans party Squires 2002 Few would wish how ever to ascribe to either Blake or Pullman the condition of belatedness or a negative label of derivativeness and yet it is clear that they both come willingly and deliberately after Milton in their writings Another work that has recently come after Milton but which enacts numerous filtering effects of its own is Geoffrey Hills remarkable poetic sequence Scenes from Comus Ostensibly a contemporary rumina tion on Miltons 1634 occasional masque for the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of the Council of the Marches Ive not pieced out the story 2005 21 Hill stresses the poem is also a deep reflection on masquing music ephemera and ageing So let there be nothing where it stood Ludlows brief mirage 62 Dedicated to the composer Hugh Wood on his seventieth birthday the poem both in its title and dedication calls into focus Woods own allusive symphony Scenes from Comus first performed in 1965 and also based on Miltons masque Once again the process of adaptation proves multilayered and afterword 159 endlessly plural in its gestures and effects a version dare we suggest of Louis MacNeices sense in his poem Snow of the drunkenness of things being various 1966 30 We need then to restore to the subgenres or practices of adaptation and appropriation a genuinely celebratory comprehension of their capac ity for creativity and for comment and critique The pleasurable aspect of recognizing the intertextual relationships between appropriations and their sources has been identified throughout this study The discipline of English Literature while it cannot easily be reduced to a detective like mode of cracking ciphers and recognizing allusions nevertheless thrives on the practices of reading alongside of comparison and con trast and of identifying intertexts and analogues that are central to the studies undertaken here Adaptation and appropriation need to be brought out of the shadows in this respect They are not merely belated practices and processes they are creative and influential in their own right And they acknowledge something fundamental about literature that its impulse is to spark related thoughts responses and readings To return to the quote from Derrida used earlier Perhaps the desire to write is the desire to launch things that come back to you as much as possible in as many forms as possible 1985 1578 Derrida seems here to respond to observations made on the natural world by Darwin a century before But the environment is not monolithic and stable it is a matrix of possibilities the outcome of multiple interactions between organisms and within matter cited in Beer 1983 23 Adaptation and appropriation we might add supplementing complementing coming after Derrida and Darwin as it were are all about multiple interactions and a matrix of possibilities They are endlessly and wonderfully about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible 160 afterword allusion an indirect or passing reference analogue an analogous or parallel text analogy a correspondence or partial similarity between text motif or thing archetype an original a model or prototype In literature this also refers to a recurrent symbol or motif bricolage in a literary context a collage or collection of different allu sions quotations and references in the context of a new creative work Often associated with the work of structural anthropologists such as Claude LéviStrauss who studied the transformations of myth 2001 1978 and with postmodernism Barry 1995 83The term derives from the French for DoitYourself DIY citation a passage cited or quoted with the embedded legal sense of reference to works of authority defamiliarization A term frequently deployed in Structuralist and Russian Formalist theory to describe the process of rendering something unfamiliar especially in literature Often used to describe the theatrical operations of Bertolt Brechts theory of verfremdungseffekt or alienation effect Counsell 1996 103 Also links to Sigmund Freuds notion of unheimlich or the uncanny or the strangely familiar 1963 1919 hybridity In literature a term deployed to describe a blend fusion or compound of influences at the level of both language and form Often GLOSSARY used by critical theorists to refer to intercultural encounters with both a positive and negative slant see Bhabha 1995 2069 hypertext Gérard Genettes term 1997 1982 ix for the appropria tive or adaptive text see also hypotext hypotext Genettes term 1997 1982 ix for the source text of any appropriation or rewriting see also hypertext imitation a copy a counterfeit In music this term carries the wider sense of the repetition of a phrase in a different pitch In classical and early modern culture the term was used in a nonpejorative sense although in postmodern theory it can refer to the purely derivative improvisation a composition or performance of music or verse without a script in appropriation the term is extended to a work that adapts in a freeform way a precursor or source text On improvisation in a social and dramatic context see Greenblatt 1980 2278 intercultural term used to describe texts and performances that seek to deploy strategies references andor techniques from cultures other than that of the originating artist interpolation the insertion of words phrases characters or plotlines into a text intertextuality Julia Kristevas term for the permutation of texts by utterances and semiotic signifiers deriving from other texts 1980 Now the term is used more widely to refer to the relationship between literary texts and other texts or cultural references for a full discussion see Allen 2000 metonymy specifically the act of substituting a word denoting an object or action for one denoting a property associated with it but in its extended use a word or thing used as a substitute or symbol for another Often opposed to metaphor 162 glossary mimesis imitation or representation The phrase is most commonly associated with Aristotelian theories of imitation and representation See also René Girards anthropologyinflected study of mimesis 1988 montage in film the process or technique of selecting editing or piecing together separate sections of film to form a continuous whole particularly associated with the work of Sergei Eisenstein in the twenti eth century but in its more extended use a mixture blend or medley of various elements a pastiche The term is also used to describe the appropriation of existent songs and music in hiphop and djing by means of cutnmix and sampling parody a humorous often exaggerated imitation of author work or style for a full discussion see Dentith 2000 pastiche a term deriving from French which in the musical sphere refers to a medley of references a composition made up of fragments pieced together Dentith 2000 194 Central to accounts of postmod ernist theory and practice see Barry 1995 83 in the wider domains of art and literature pastiche has undergone a further shift of reference being applied most often to those works that carry out an extended imi tation of the style of a single artist or writer proximation Genettes phrase 1997 1982 304 for an updating or the cultural relocation of a text to bring it into greater proximity to the cultural and temporal context of readers or audiences replication the act of copying In music this means repeating a phrase one or more octaves above or below the given tone revision the action or instance of revising or revisiting although the phrase is given a specifically feminist politics by Adrienne Rich as revision 1992 1971 riff a short or repeated phrase in jazz music often as a basis for improvisation glossary 163 sampling in musicology the modification or reuse of part of one musi cal recording in the context of another Particularly prevalent in the genre of hiphop supplement a thing or part added to a book In Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida debates the notion of supplementarity since supple ment in French can also mean replacement or substitute 1976 14157 synecdoche a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole transformation the act or instance of transforming metamorphosis change travesty a grotesque misrepresentation or imitation of something variation the act or instance of varying a departure from a former or normal condition In music this refers to the repetition of a theme in a changed or elaborated form version an account of a matter from a particular point of view a form or variant of a thing as performed or adapted 164 glossary BOOKS AND ARTICLES Abbott H Porter 2002 The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative Cambridge Cambridge University Press Ackroyd Peter 1990 Dickens London Sinclair and Stevenson Allen Graham 2000 Intertextuality London Routledge Andreas James R 1999 Signifyin on The Tempest in Gloria Naylors Mama Day in Christy Desmet and Robert 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Politics of PostModernism Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press Mullan John 2003a Elements of Fiction Clichés The Guardian 12 April Review 32 2003b Elements of Fiction Dialogue The Guardian 5 April Review 32 2003c Elements of Fiction Interior Monologue The Guardian 19 April Review 32 Naylor Gloria 1992 Baileys Cafe New York Vintage 1993 1988 Mama Day New York Vintage ní Fhlathúin Máire 1999 The Location of Childhood Great Expectations in Postcolonial London Kunapipi 21 8692 Novy Marianne ed 1999 Transforming Shakespeare Contemporary Womens ReVisions in Literature and Performance Basingstoke Macmillan Oates Joyce Carol 1993 Black Water New York PlumoPenguin 2000 Blonde London Fourth Estate Orleans Susan 2000 The Orchid Thief London Vintage Ovid 1987 Metamorphoses trans A D Melville Oxford Oxford University Press Patterson Annabel 1987 Intention in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin eds Critical Terms for Literary Study Chicago University of Chicago Press pp 13546 Pavis Patrice ed 1996 The Intercultural Performance Reader London Routledge Phillips Caryl 1997 The Nature of Blood London Faber Phillips Helen 2000 An Introduction to The Canterbury Tales Reading Fiction Context Basingstoke Macmillan Poe Edgar Allen 1998 1843 The GoldBug in David Van Leer ed Selected Tales Oxford Oxford University Press Worlds Classics Poole Adrian 2004 Shakespeare and the Victorians London Thomson LearningArden Shakespeare Porter Peter 1997 Jack Maggs The Guardian 18 September Powers Richard 1991 The Gold Bug Variations New York HarperCollins bibliography 173 2001 1985 Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance New York Perennial Price Monroe E and Pollack Malla 1994 The Author in Copyright Notes for the Literary Critic in Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi eds The Construction of Authorship Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature Durham NC Duke University Press Pullman Philip 2001 His Dark Materials 3 vols London Scholastic Pykett Lyn 1994 The Sensation Novel from The Woman in White to The Moonstone Plymouth Northcote House ed 1998 Wilkie Collins New Casebook Basingstoke Macmillan Rhys Jean 1985 Letters 19311966 Harmondsworth Penguin 1987 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea Harmondsworth Penguin Rich Adrienne 1992 1971 When We Dead Awaken in Maggie Humm ed Feminisms A Reader Hemel Hempstead Harvester Wheatsheaf Ricoeur Paul 1991 Appropriation in Mario Valdés ed A Ricoeur Reader London Harvester Wheatsheaf Roe Sue 1982 Estella Her Expectations Hemel Hempstead Harvester Wheatsheaf Roemer Danielle M and Bacchilega Cristina eds 2001 Angela Carter and the Fairytale Detroit Wayne State University Press Rothwell Kenneth 1999 A History of Shakespeare on Screen Cambridge Cambridge University Press Rushdie Salman 1991 Imaginary Homelands Essays and Criticism 19811991 New York and London Granta Rushdie Salman 1998 1988 The Satanic Verses London Vintage Sage Lorna 1994 Angela Carter Plymouth Northcote House Said Edward 1983 On Originality in The World The Text and The Critic Cambridge MA Harvard University Press 1993 Culture and Imperialism London Vintage Sale Roger 1978 Fairy Tale and After From Snow White to E B White Cambridge MA Harvard University Press Sanders Julie 2001 Novel Shakespeares TwentiethCentury Women Novelists and Appropriation Manchester Manchester University Press Sanjek David 1994 Dont have to dj no more Sampling and the Autonomous Career in Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi eds The Construction of Authorship Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature Durham NC Duke University Press Savory Elaine 1998 Jean Rhys Cambridge Cambridge University Press Schumacher Thomas G 1995 This is a Sampling Sport Digital 174 bibliography Sampling Rap Music and the Law in Cultural Production Media Culture and Society 17 25373 Sears Djanet 2000 1997 Harlem Duet in Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier eds Adaptations of Shakespeare A critical anthology London Routledge Sellars Susan 2001 Myth and Fairytale in Contemporary Womens Fiction Basingstoke Palgrave Shakespeare William 1998 The Complete Works gen eds Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor Oxford Oxford University Press Showalter Elaine 1991 Sisters Choice Tradition and Change in American Womens Writing Oxford Oxford University Press Sim Stuart ed 2001 The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism London Routledge Smiley Jane 1992 A Thousand Acres London Flamingo Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty 1990 Reading The Satanic Verses Third Text 11 4160 1991 Theory in the Margin Coetzees Foe Reading Defoes CrusoeRoxana in Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson eds Consequences of Theory Baltimore MD and London Johns Hopkins University Press 1997 1989 Three Womens Texts and a Critique of Imperialism in Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore eds The Feminist Reader Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism 2nd edn Basingstoke Macmillan Squires Claire 2002 Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials Trilogy New York and London Continuum Stoppard Tom 1990 1967 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead London Faber Swift Graham 1983 Waterland London Picador 1992 Ever After London Picador 1996 Last Orders London Picador 2003 The Light of Day London Hamish Hamilton Teale Polly 2003 After Mrs Rochester London Nick Hern Terry Philip ed 2000 Ovid Metamorphosed London Chatto and Windus Thieme John 2001 Postcolonial ConTexts Writing Back to the Canon New York Continuum Thorpe Michael 1990 The Other Side Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre Ariel 8 99110 Tiffin Helen 1987 Postcolonial Literatures and CounterDiscourse Kunapipi 9 1734 bibliography 175 Todorov Tzvetan 1990 Genres of Discourse trans Catherine Porter Cambridge Cambridge University Press Tournier Michel 1984 1967 Friday Or the Other Island Harmondsworth Penguin Tudge Colin 2002 In Mendels Footnotes London Vintage Updike John 2000 Gertrude and Claudius New York Alfred Knopf Virgil 1983 The Eclogues and The Georgics trans Cecil DayLewis Oxford Oxford University Press Wallace Christopher 1998 The Pied Pipers Poison Woodstock and New York Overlook Press Warner Marina 1992 Indigo or Mapping the Waters London Vintage 1994 From the Beast to the Blonde On Fairy Tales and their Tellers London Chatto and Windus Watt Ian 1957 The Rise of the Novel Studies in Defoe Richardson and Fielding Harmondsworth Peregrine Waugh Patricia 1995 The Harvest of the Sixties English Literature and its Background 19601990 Oxford Oxford University Press Webb Diana 2000 Pilgrimage in Medieval England London and NY Hambleden and London 2002 Medieval European Pilgrimage c 7001500 London Palgrave Weimann Robert 1983 Appropriation and Modern History in Renaissance Prose Narrative New Literary History 14 45995 1988 Text AuthorFunction and Appropriation in Modern Narrative Toward a Sociology of Representation Critical Inquiry 14 43147 Wertenbaker Timberlake 1991 1988 Our Countrys Good London Methuen Wheeler Michael 1994 English Fiction of the Victorian Period 18301890 2nd edn London Longmans White Hayden 1973 Metahistory The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 1987 The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins University Press Widdowson Peter 1999 Literature London Routledge Willett John ed and trans 1992 1964 Brecht on Theatre The Development of an Aesthetic NY Hill and Wang Wilson James 2001 The Dark Clue A novel of suspense London Faber Woodcock Bruce 2003 Peter Carey 2nd edn Manchester Manchester University Press 176 bibliography Woodmansee Martha and Jaszi Peter eds 1994 The Construction of Authorship Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature Durham NC Duke University Press Woolf Virginia 1981 The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume 2 192024 ed Anne Olivier Bell Harmondsworth Penguin 1988 1923 Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown in Andrew McNeillie ed The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 3 19191924 London Hogarth Press 1992 1925 Mrs Dalloway Claire Tomalin ed Oxford Oxford University Press Worlds Classics 1998 1941 Between the Acts Frank Kermode ed Oxford Oxford University Press Worlds Classics Worton Michael and Still Judith eds 1990 Intertextuality Theories and practices Manchester Manchester University Press Young Tory 2003 Michael Cunninghams The Hours London and New York Continuum Zabus Chantal 2002 Tempests after Shakespeare Basingstoke Palgrave Zipes Jack 1979 Breaking the Magic Spell Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales London Heinemann 1983 Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization London Heinemann 1994 Fairy Tale as Myth Myth as Fairy Tale Lexington University of Kentucky Press FILMS Almereyda Michael dir 2000 Hamlet BlakeNelson Tim dir 2001 O Branagh Kenneth dir 1996 Hamlet dir 1999 Loves Labours Lost Camus Marcel dir 1959 Black Orpheus Orfeo Negro Cocteau Jean dir 1950 Orphée dir 1945 La belle et la bête Coppola Francis Ford dir 1979 Apocalypse Now Cuarón Alfonso dir 1998 Great Expectations Daldry Stephen dir 2002 The Hours Diegues Carlo dir 1999 Orfeu Greenaway Peter dir 1991 Prosperos Books Heckerling Amy dir 1995 Clueless bibliography 177 Hughes Ken dir Joe Macbeth Jarman Derek dir 1979 The Tempest Jonze Spike dir 2002 Adaptation Kurosawa Akira dir 1960 The Bad Sleep Well Luhrmann Baz dir 1996 William Shakespeares Romeo Juliet dir 2001 Moulin Rouge Madden John dir 1998 Shakespeare in Love Olivier Laurence dir 1948 Hamlet Powell Michael adn Pressburger Emeric dirs 1944 A Canterbury Tale Reilly William dir 1990 Men of Respect Robbins Jerome and Wise Robert dirs 1961 West Side Story Rozema Patricia dir 2000 Mansfield Park Schepisi Fred dir 2001 Last Orders Sidney George dir 1953 Kiss Me Kate Van Sant Gus dir 1991 My Own Private Idaho Welles Orson dir 1966 Chimes at Midnight Winterbottom Michael dir 2001 The Claim Zeffirelli Franco dir 1990 Hamlet MUSIC LArpeggiata and Christina Pluhar AllImprovviso Ciaccone Bergamasche un po di Follie Alpha 512 Ellington Duke 1999 1957 Such Sweet Thunder SonyColumbia Legacy CD CK 65568 Gould Glenn 2002 A State of Wonder The Complete Goldberg Variations 1955 1981 Sony Classical CD SM3K 87703 sleeve notes by Tim Page Quadriga Consort 2003 Ground Ostinate Variationen HARPrecords CD LA73002 sleeve notes by Elisabeth Kurz Wood Hugh and BBC Symphony Orchestra 2001 Symphony and Scenes from Comus NMC DO70 178 bibliography Ackroyd Peter 134 Aeschylus 64 Allen Graham 3 10 123 Almereyda Michael 21 545 Andersen Hans Christian 91 anthropology 2 82 83 86 Armitage Simon 65 Astaire Fred 74 Atkinson Kate 64 66 69 83 93 Case Histories 88 Human Croquet 66 878 92 Not the End of the World 667 Attridge Derek 89 98 111 Atwood Margaret 90 Auden W H 148 Austen Jane 21 22 24 Ayckbourn Alan A Chorus of Disapproval 312 Bach Johann Sebastian The Goldberg Variations 39 58 154 Bakhtin Mikhail 72 ballet 153 Barnes Julian 147 baroque music 39 40 155 Barthes Roland 2 3 4 63 69 71 81 83 125 Basie Count 10 40 Bate Jonathan 10 152 Baudelaire Charles 97 Baudrillard Jean 68 143 144 148 BBC British Broadcasting Corporation 24 Beckett Samuel 56 Beer Gillian 129 Beethoven Ludwig van 153 Behn Aphra 142 Benjamin Walter 105 1489 Bennett Arnold 116 Bennett Ronan 140 Berkeley Busby 74 Bettleheim Bruno 86 89 Bhabha Homi 17 1612 biology 24 Blake William 159 Blake Nelson Tim O 523 Bloom Harold 910 149 blues 11 53 Blyton Enid 66 Boccaccio Giovanni 36 Bolan Marc 75 Bollywood 68 75 Bond Edward 51 Booker Prize 323 INDEX Bosch Hieronymous 75 Bowie David 75 Branagh Kenneth 2021 23 54 Brathwaite Edward Kamau 102 Brecht Bertolt 31 989 161 Breughel Pieter 1478 bricolage 4 5 8 17 34 97 10 151 161 Briggs Asa 123 Brontë Charlotte 13 49 157 Jane Eyre 49 98 10006 107 120 130 140 145 158 Brontë sisters 4 Brook Peter 99 Browning Robert 70 124 Bullough Geoffrey 47 Bush Sr George President 146 Byatt A S 65 Possession 123 1248 Cameron Julia Margaret 152 Camus Marcel Black Orpheus 713 77 canon 89 13 24 45 48 93 978 99 100 106 153 Caravaggio 1501 Carey Peter 5 Illywhacker 130 Jack Maggs 5 49 129 1307 140 142 Oscar and Lucinda 130 True History of the Kelly Gang 1414 145 146 Carlson Marvin 99 Carr Helen 103 Carter Angela 54 83 93 152 American Ghosts and Old World Wonders 91 The Bloody Chamber 8990 92 Fireworks 91 The Magic Toyshop 90 Wise Children 29 889 Cartmell Deborah 20 21 Chappaquiddick tragedy 1456 Chaucer Geoffrey 11 158 The Canterbury Tales 11 368 Chekhov Anton 21 Chevalier Tracy 147 Cinthio Giraldi 47 115 Clarke Marcus 131 Clinton Bill President 145 Cocteau Jean 73 83 92 Coe Jonathan 5 25 33 Coetzee J M 5 130 Foe 5 49 106112 118 123 collage 4 8 Collins Wilkie The Moonstone 125 128 The Woman in White 1256 128 Columbine High School tragedy 53 Connor Steven 51 Conrad Joseph 23 120 Coombes Rosemary 150 Cooper Pamela 32 33 35 Coppola Francis Ford 223 copyright 4 40 47 48 Cox Philip 22 121 Crick Francis 40 154 155 Cuarón Alfonso 21 Cunningham Michael The Hours 11519 cultural studies 82 121 Daldry Stephen 118 Dante Aligheri 7 11 Darwin Charles 12 24 60 154 155 156 160 The Origin of the Species 60 129 Dasgupta Rana 36 dAulnoy Mme 912 Davenant William 46 Dean James 143 de Belleforest François 58 Defoe Daniel 5 13 The History of the Devil 67 Robinson Crusoe 5 49 10612 120 Roxana 108 11011 de Grazia Margreta 110 DeLillo Don 140 de Moraes Vinicius 72 Dentith Simon 5 72 106 Derrida Jacques 2 28 102 1589 160 164 Desmet Christy and Robert Sawyer 46 49 Dickens Charles 5 22 121 128 130 Great Expectations 5 21 49 128 129 1307 140 143 Nicholas Nickleby 121 Oliver Twist 134 Pickwick Papers 121 180 INDEX Dickinson Emily 124 Diegues Carlos 74 DiMaggio Joe 145 Disney Walt 83 DNA 12 40 154 155 156 Duffy Carol Ann 65 Dukakis Michael 145 DuPlessis Rachel Blau 80 81 ecofeminism 50 ecology 24 Eisenstein Sergei 163 Eliot George 24 122 123 Eliot TS 78 9 18 23 54 149 The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock 62 Old Possums Book of Practical Cats 23 Traditional and the Individual Talent 78 18 39 55 97 The Waste Land 356 97 Ellington Duke 40 Ellis John 24 25 Euripides 64 fairy tale 13 45 8293 Farakhan Louis 53 Farquhar George The Recruiting Officer 2931 Faulkner William 11 328 142 158 As I Lay Dying 328 feminism 13 46 82 101 157 Fielding Henry 109 fine art 3 149 Fischlin Daniel and Mark Fortier 46 48 53 Fletcher John 47 Flint Kate 133 Flow John 32 33 34 35 folklore 13 45 8293 Forster E M 153 Fosse Bob 74 Foucault Michel 3 1056 151 Fowles John 130 The French Lieutenants Woman 60 121 123 1245 127 128 129 132 136 A Maggot 124 Frank Ann 114 Frayn Michael 29 147 Freud Sigmund 54 84 107 161 Galsworthy John 116 Gamble Sarah 89 Gaskell Elizabeth 24 122 Gates Jr Henry Louis 10 40 68 Gay John 312 98 genetic criticism 18 genetics 12 156 Genette Gérard 6 7 12 18 19 20 35 49 55 63 69 71 106 107 162 163 Géricault Theodore 147 Gershwin George 21 Gershwin Ira 21 Gibson Mel 21 Gilbert Sandra and Susan Gubar 4 10 101 Girard René 1623 Giraudoux Jean 106 108 Glass Philip 118 Gosse Edmund 130 Gothic literature 120 123 grafting 12 55 Greenaway Peter 22 Greene Graham 35 7980 Grimm Brothers 91 Gross John 157 Hall Stuart 121 Hardy Thomas 4 23 121 122 123 Harrison Nancy 102 Hawke Ethan 55 Hawkes Terence 116 H D 80 Head Dominic 90 108 110 111 122 Heaney Seamus 65 Heckerling Amy 22 Herzog Werner 130 Hesmondhalgh Desmond 40 Hill Anita 53 Hill Geoffrey 159 hiphop 1578 164 historical fiction 13846 INDEX 181 Hoffman Alice 90 Hogarth Mary 133 Holderness Graham 52 Holinshed Raphael 46 Homer 57 78 horticulture 12 55 HUAC House UnAmerican Activities Committee 139 Hughes Ken 23 55 Hughes Robert 131 Hugo Victor 23 27 Hughes Ted 65 Hulme Peter 51 Hutcheon Linda 143 hybridity 1718 1612 Ibsen Henrik 21 intercultural performance 99 intertextuality 1 2 3 17 24 25 35 40 60 74 101 154 155 159 160 162 Iser Wolfgang 77 Isler Alan 59 602 James Henry 78 97 Jarman Derek 22 jazz 1011 40 534 116 155 John Elton 75 Jones Charlotte 59 Jonson Ben 48 13940 Jonze Spike 158 Joyce James 5 Ulysses 57 35 63 Jung Carl 86 Kaufman Charlie 158 Keneally Thomas 2931 131 Kennedy Edward Senator 1456 Kennedy John F President 140 143 145 King Martin Luther 53 Kopechne MaryJo 1456 Kristeva Julia 2 3 17 138 162 Kurosawa Akira 55 68 Ledent Bénédicte 114 Lee Hermione 80 117 legal discourse 4 149 Levine Jennifer 6 LéviStrauss Claude 2 83 161 Lewinsky Monica 145 Lodge Thomas 34 47 Luhrmann Baz 20 64 1223 Moulin Rouge 747 122 William Shakespeares Romeo Juliet 20 McNeice Louis 160 Madden John 29 51 Madonna 75 150 magic realism 69 83 889 130 Malcolm X 53 Mao TseTung 149 Marber Patrick 157 Marquez Gabriel Garcia 65 Marsden Jean 46 48 Maurel Sylvie 100 104 105 Mendel Gregor 12 18 155 156 Millais John Everett 152 Miller Arthur 139 145 The Crucible 139 146 Miller J Hillis 3 159 Milton John 67 70 Comus 15960 Paradise Lost 67 68 159 Miola Robert 59 Mnouchkine Ariane 99 Modernism 8 Monroe Marilyn 143 1445 14950 musicals 23 279 83 153 musicology 3 12 3841 myth 13 401 45 6381 143 Naylor Gloria 11 Nesbit E 66 ní Fhlathúin Máire 132 Nirvana 75 Nooteboom Cees 65 Oates Joyce Carol 65 Black Water 1456 Blonde 1445 149 The Sons of Angus McElster 65 Old English poetry 37 38 Olivier Laurence 54 152 opera 153 182 INDEX originality 12 8 Orleans Susan 158 Ortiz Diego 39 Oswald Lee Harvey 140 Ovid 234 34 46 64 77 87 97 Heroides 64 Metamorphoses 23 47 6470 pastiche 5 13 18 106 163 Pavis Patrice 99 Perrault Charles 90 91 Peterson Oscar 10 40 Phillips Caryl The Nature of Blood 11215 photography 1489 pilgrimage 388 plagiarism 32 40 Plutarch 34 46 47 Poe Edgar Allan 154 Poole Adrian 3 121 Pope Alexander 7 Porter Cole 21 23 postcolonialism 13 46 88 157 postmodernism 13 17 46 57 64 74 87 122 143 1489 poststructuralism 2 13 Powell Michael and Emeric Pressburger 37 Powers Richard 3940 149 153 The Gold Bug Variations 3940 154 Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance 149 1512 PreRaphaelites 121 123 152 Presley Elvis 149 psychoanalysis 54 82 84 86 107 Puccini Giacomo 76 Pullman Philip 159 Purcell Henry 39 queer theory 13 46 100 Radcliffe Ann 123 Rego Paula 83 Reilly William 23 55 Rhys Jean Wide Sargasso Sea 49 98 107 10006 111 118 130 135 140 144 145 157 158 Rich Adrienne 7 9 163 Richardson Samuel 109 Rivera Diego 151 RobbeGrillet Alain 125 Robbins Jerome and Robert Wise 23 278 Rossetti Christina 124 Rozema Patricia 22 Rushdie Salman 64 65 88 The Satanic Verses 6770 Said Edward 1 131 Sale Roger 567 sampling 4 401 1578 164 Sander August 151 Sanjek David 40 Saxo Grammaticus 58 Scott Walter Sir 121 Sears Djanet 534 Shakespeare William 4 6 11 13 19 20 34 45 48 82 86 101 13940 151 152 Antony and Cleopatra 47 56 60 97 As You Like It 47 The Comedy of Errors 23 Cymbeline 82 Hamlet 6 21 26 28 35 52 5462 66 98 112 152 The Henriad 55 Henry V 48 Henry VIII or All is True 47 King Lear 4950 56 82 112 Loves Labours Lost 201 23 28 60 Macbeth 23 The Merchant of Venice 11314 A Midsummer Nights Dream 28 47 Othello 47 524 62 11215 Romeo and Juliet 23 278 71 The Taming of the Shrew 23 28 The Tempest 11 212 47 501 52 53 62 923 112 120 1412 The Two Noble Kinsmen 47 The Winters Tale 55 Sharrock Alison 65 Shaw George Bernard 23 Pygmalion 23 27 Shelley Percy Bysshe 70 Sherman Cindy 1501 INDEX 183 Sidney George 23 27 289 Simpson OJ 53 The Simpsons 155 Smiley Jane A Thousand Acres 49 50 57 141 Sondheim Stephen 83 South Park 155 Spenser Edmund 108 Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty 100 128 Stoppard Tom Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead 557 structuralism 2 46 82 83 Sutherland John 126 Swift Graham 3241 64 Ever After 35 5960 Last Orders 3241 158 The Light of Day 35 7781 127 Out of This World 78 Waterland 33 35 39 122 Tate Nahum 46 Teale Polly 157 Thomas Clarence 53 Tiernan Ellen 133 Todorov Tzvetan 83 ToulouseLautrec Henri de 74 75 Tournier Michel 107 108 T Rex 75 Turner J M W 126 127 147 Uccellini Marco 39 Updike John Gertrude and Claudius 579 Van Sant Gus 55 Virgil 70 77 Wallace Christopher The Pied Pipers Poison 846 Warhol Andy 149 Warner Marina 83 Indigo or Mapping the Waters 501 923 141 Watson James 40 154 155 Waugh Patricia 1001 Webster John 97 Weimann Robert 1 13 19 34 Wells H G 116 Welles Orson 55 Wertenbaker Timberlake Our Countrys Good 301 White Hayden 123 146 Widdowson Peter 8 34 100 103 140 Williams Raymond 121 Wilson James The Dark Clue 1257 128 136 147 Winterbottom Michael 23 Wood Hugh 159 Woodcock Bruce 104 130 1323 142 Woolf Virginia 13 52 Between the Acts 152 Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown 116 Mrs Dalloway 11519 Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street 116 Worton Michael and Judith Still 158 Young GM 123 Young Tory 116 Zabus Chantal 12 46 50 52 120 Zeffirelli Franco 21 54 Zipes Jack 85 92 93 184 INDEX Annual subscription packages We now offer special lowcost bulk subscriptions to packages of eBooks in certain subject areas These are available to libraries or to individuals For more information please contact webmasterebookstandfcouk Were continually developing the eBook concept so keep up to date by visiting the website eBooks at wwweBookstoretandfcouk A library at your fingertips eBooks are electronic versions of printed books You can store them on your PClaptop or browse them online They have advantages for 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0415174740 Pb 0415174759 Available at all good bookshops For ordering and further information please visit wwwroutledgecom Related titles from Routledge The Author Andrew Bennett the NEW CRITICAL IDIOM What is an author In this clearlystructured introduction Andrew Bennett discusses one of the most important critical and theoretical terms in literary studies Examining the various debates surrounding the concept of authorship The Author discusses Roland Barthess controversial declaration of the death of the author explores concepts of authority ownership and originality traces changing definitions of the author and the historical development of authorship from Homer to the present examines the interaction of debates on intentionality femi nism and historicism with author theory considers the significance of collaboration in literature and film Accessible yet stimulating this study offers the ideal introduc tion to a core notion in critical theory and is essential reading for all 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