Novels are stories, and the earliest stories come to us as myths. The joy of myths, of course, is that they are readily reinventable. I don’t mean in the sense that there are only (x) stories in the world, and they’re being constantly repeated. This rather depressing proposition is usually achieved by simplifying stories to the point at which they’re virtually unrecognisable, and is more beloved, I suspect, by sociologists than writers. I don’t think any of them have, yet, gone the next logical step and claimed that all stories are the same story (it’s the one about the person and/or people) for fear of ridicule but it’s only a small step from the 5 plots idea. The point of stories is in the detail, not in some relentless Linnaean classification that leaves them dead and dry like beetles in a case. (1)
Myths, then, are a fertile ground for a retelling. Look at Beowulf. More, look at the Neobeowulfs given to us by Michael Crichton and (several times) by Neil Gaiman. This is a particular type of relationship between the original and the new: not a mere pastiche, not a plagiarism, and not one that (necessarily) lessens the original, but a phenomenon that recognises that the first telling is big enough and ugly enough not to mind a little knocking, or a little homage for that matter. Where this gains a new level of interesting is where a novel itself becomes enough of a “classic” that it, in itself, gets retold and reinvented, either in other novels or even in film.
There are a few in particular I want to demonstrate, chiefly because they are fine candidates for the most reinventable books ever written, but a few general examples first.
Take Austen, for example, Pride and Prejudice, and then look at a recent book that was made into a film involving Renee Zelweger (3). Like the spin-off or not, it has solid literary antecedents. Similarly, Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac has been rewritten at least twice for the screen, once as Roxanne and once, with an interesting gender reversal, as The Truth About Cats and Dogs. Yes, Cyrano is a play, and so, for example, is The Tempest, which arguably is Shakespeare’s most reinventable work (4), the one that always seems to make people go back and rethink it. The fingerprints of Shakespeare are still visible in the glorious film Forbidden Planet (and its own derived musical), and the fantasy author Tad Williams quietly brought out an erudite reworking entitled Caliban’s Hour. Alan Moore, whose League of Extraordinary Gentlemen draws on almost everything, singles out Prospero and The Tempest for special attention, making Shakespeare’s magician the leader of a prototype Elizabethan League.
It is sometimes hard to draw the line between pastiches and this particular kind of reinvention. Look at Lovecraft, for example. Ol’ HP got a lot of pastiches, many of them with his blessing, and there are more fauxthulhu (6) stories than ones by his own hand. Entire collections of his Mythos can come and go without a single word penned by its originator, so that the entire body of work boils and churns ad infinitum, alien and heedless, like one of his own Great Old Ones. However, in later ages, although the Lovecraft pastiche is still very much alive and well (7), the Mythos has become enough of an insidious cult classic that it has spawned exactly the sort of reworking I’m talking about – just to drop one name, look at Gaiman’s comic reworking of Shadows over Innsmouth in his collection Smoke and Mirrors, or his Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft hybrid A Study in Emerald. These are not simply writing in the style of Lovecraft, although there’s plenty of that about: they are Lovecraft taken and turned upside down, back to front, looked at from unexpected directions. Because in order to be worth doing that with, a book must have attained a kind of classic status.
But which are these ur-novels, the novels that, whilst original, have prompted reworking after reworking?
Alice, for one. The mere name is sufficiently iconic that nobody is going to be crying “Who the f--- is Alice?”. Carroll’s two books are staples of children’s literature, and repay adult reading as well, and their influence is shot through the later annals of western film and literature so that it can be extremely difficult not to run into Alice somewhere along the way. I’m not really thinking about the very minimal Alice imagery in, say, The Matrix, which is mere lip-service really, and I’m not talking about the drug interpretation. It’s very easy to claim that Alice’s adventures underground are intended to be a hallucinatory trip, and that’s the problem with that interpretation. It’s very easy, and it means you don’t actually have to look at the details. Far from being a mind-expanding way to look at it, mushrooms and caterpillar and all, it’s an imagination-shrinking solution – because with that solution you don’t need any other thought about the subject – a kind of literary version of religious fundamentalism.
What I mean, for example, is Jeff Noon’s Automated Alice, an intricate and beautiful “trequel” that manages to intermingle the originals seamlessly with Noon’s own work, whilst retaining Carroll’s style. What I mean is the gothic reinterpretation by the computer game American McGee’s Alice (now being filmed with, I think, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Alice), or the extremely dark Looking Glass section in Tad Williams’ Otherland. Lewis Carroll managed to create, in the mad worlds of Alice, something that strikes very deep in the mind, which seems bizarre given that it’s all stitched out of nonsense, pastiches of songs and little satires on Victorian manners. The worlds of Alice really are looking glass worlds, because everything in them is a distorted reflection of the real, an adult’s world seen through the fish-eye lens of childhood, and this is surely why it has stayed with us so long.
Needless to say, Alan Moore makes much play of both Alice and The Hunting of the Snark in his League world, whilst elsewhere, Jasper Fforde recasts the Cheshire Cat as a civil servant. Fiction can be stranger than fiction.
The next work is very similar, and yet treated extremely differently. Another childrens’ classic, another fantasy world with strange and contra-logical rules, and yet something is rotten in the state of Oz. L. Frank Baum’s world has spawned, Lovercraft-like, a lot of follow-on pastiches, but also a large number of reworkings. For just a few examples, Williams’ Otherland also visits Oz, but turns it into a nightmarish post-apocalyse wargame. Gregory Maguire’s Wicked shows Oz as a fascist police state, held in the tyrannical grip of the arch-industrialist Wizard (8). Oz is a television drama set in the “Emerald Wing” of an experimental prison. The Scissor Sisters’ song Return to Oz is crammed full of bizarre, disturbing and thought-provoking imagery of decline and decay (9).
There are a lot of dark reworkings of Alice, but their relationship with the original is much more comfortable. Alice is plenty dark all on its own. The worlds Alice finds herself in are twisted, illogical and unfair. Nobody gives her an even break, and the characters she meets are either indecipherable tyrants or hapless victims. Oz, on the other hand, is a utopia. All right, Dorothy overcomes a few trials on her way home (10) but Baum’s Oz sequence become progressively more simplistic as the books go on, until the typical Oz plot can be summed up as “the good characters faff about accomplishing very little but being terribly considerate to each other, whilst the evil characters concoct a supposedly threatening plot that is dismantled via deus ex machina without any of the good characters even knowing about it.” The level of twee rises exponentially and everyone is terribly nice. Except we know they’re not. The Oz spin-offs are so bleak, and explore such blighted tracts of the human soul, because we don’t believe in Oz as reported, any more than we’d believe the self-congratulatory state newspaper of a dictatorship. We know, you and I and Gregory Maguire know, that even fantasy isn’t like that, and they have to be covering up something. (11)
(1) There are, however, only five archetypal sociologists in the world, and they’re all the same. (2)
(2) Again, the psychologist’s instinctive derision for a discipline seen as worth even less than psychology. It’s all subjective, yes, I know.
(3) A wonderful name until you have cause enough to spell it.
(4) Arguably the special interest that The Tempest generates is because it is one of the Bard’s few original ideas. Horrors! What I mean is, though, that most of the plots of his plays were pre-existing – never mind Shakespeare in Love, the story of Romeo and Juliet was already in circulation before he dramatised it. In general Shakespeare was a writer whose own professional practice was to rework existing stories (as did his peers, but his genius was in being very good at it), but although there are certainly influences on The Tempest the actual plot and story are a rare example of Shakespeare the fabulist, the inventor rather than the reinventor. (5)
(5) The play also includes probably the most obscure joke in all of the canon, which I have had to deliver when playing Stephano: “Mistress line, is not this my jerkin? Now is the jerkin under the line. Now, jerkin, you are like to lose your hair, and prove a bald jerkin.” Ah, the wonder of Shakespeare. Apparently it’s a complex joke involving the (incredibly) then-belief that if you crossed the equator, all your hair fell out. I find it hard to believe that Shakespeare’s audience, even Shakespeare’s fellow thespians, got this. It was towards the end of his career and he probably didn’t brook editing.
(6) Pronounced, surely, F’thulhu.
(7) “That is not dead, which can eternal lie...”
(8) The clever trick that Maguire pulls off is that, if you assume Dorothy is utterly blinkered, gullible and naive, a reasonable assumption, then Wicked doesn’t contradict the original much, bringing it all down to a matter of selective reporting. The musical based on Maguire’s book, I’m reliably informed, is horribly bowdlerised and lacks the punch of the original.
(9) Interesting digression. Of course Return to Oz is actually about something specific but, listening to it unprimed, it’s a grand phantasmagoria of the imagination, which I find I prefer.
(10) Although if she’d just clicked her heels together then she’d have been deus ex’d out of there faster than you can say machina. Supposedly the message here is that she can do it herself without wizards to help her, but it actually means that a material possession, some bling shoes from a dead witch, are all she needs to achieve her heart’s desire, and she needn’t have had to work for it either. What a moral for the modern age.
(11) A final touch on Alan Moore – Oz gets only a cursory mention in the gazetteer of his League collections, but Dorothy and Alice both feature in his upcoming and controversial Lost Girls (12). The third girl, who presumably furnishes the title from her own adventures, is Barrie’s Wendy. (13).
(12) As I write this, Lost Girls has just arrived at my local, contents awaited with interest.
(13) Although it has had its semi-sequels and influences, Peter Pan has not quite sparked the same organic growth of reinterpretation and reworking as Alice or Oz have. One wonders if it is a matter of crossing the same river twice. Alice could, at any time, find some other route behind the mirror, and Oz, whatever the truth of it, lurks unseen in the shadow of Dorothy’s Kansas, but Wendy can never return to Neverland. She has grown up, as Barrie himself shows us, and the land of her adventures is forever barred to her, whilst Pan himself, whose choice is either to join Wendy on the far side of the river or to remain wholly unchanging, is similarly difficult to reinvent. .
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