Retelling Of Myths In Modern Fiction

I am not a fan of myth. While it served a purpose once in pre-history and may be interesting to study from a sociological and anthropological perspective now, in a modern world with greater comprehension of cause and effect so as not to have to prescribe supernatural causes to natural phenomena, I can see no place for myth to still resonate.

In this video I explore this and go on further to explain why I am not interested in modern retellings of myth in literature.

Please feel free to disagree with me in the comments.

Film Adaptations Of Novels

I see that a film adaptation of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" opens this weekend. Recently we had all the excited pother around Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" being committed to screen. Two seriously literary heavyweight books I've read, but have no inclination to see either on the big screen. I rarely, if ever do.

Both these novels make demands of the reader's imagination. "Pi" has three changes of tone, starting with a light, charming tale of a boy's exotic upbringing in Pondicherry, moving into the fabulist and gripping shipwreck where he has a man-eating tiger as his onboard companion in the lifeboat, to the ending that turns the whole book on its head and makes the reader question everything that has come before. "Atlas" has six completely different stories, set in different times, written in different genres and linked thematically. The work that the author is asking of the reader in order to engage with these shifts throughout the novels, occurs within the reader's personal imagination. Because film is a visual medium and the visual is, for better or for worse, mankind's dominant sense, visualising what formerly only existed in the reader's imagination does I think, diminish the artistry of what the books achieve.

The remote relationship between a reader and an absent author, takes place through the words on the page. That's why there is such latitude for the reader's own interpretation to occur. The reader only has the words and his or her own interpretation of them. A film closes off too many of the options, bringing the director's interpretation to the script. Of course it is still perfectly possible for a film to leave much to the viewer's imagination. But faithful adaptations tend not to. The director and scriptwriters have each already played the role of reader, stamped their own interpretations of the book on the shooting script, so it enshrines an additional singularity of interpretation before the cinema audience sit down to watch the movie.

There is a question of when does a film stop being an adaptation and become 'based' on a particular book. The entire spectrum from faithful adaptations, through loose adaptations to inspired by a book exists. I cannot see the point of faithful adaptions. I don't believe that a film can bring the book to life any more than the book itself has done. Loose adaptations and 'based on' or 'inspired by' can do so, as they make a genuinely new work of art from that of the original book. That is the book may serve as a launch pad for a whole new artistic work. "Apocalypse Now" I believe is an example of just this. It's not merely Joseph Conrad's "Heart Of Darkness" updated and transferred from colonial Africa to the Vietnam War. It is wholly a vibrant, creative piece of art in its own right and one that acknowledges its literary sources of Conrad and TS Eliot in what is actually rather a literary film.

This differs from when say Shakespeare plays are given modern or historical settings other than those of Shakespeare's originals. Taking Macbeth, setting it in 1920s Prohibition Chicago, or the Politburo battling for power on Lenin's death, actually limit Shakespeare's art rather than expand it. For the words remain the same, as Shakespeare wrote them, so this is not genuinely a new art work. And though there may be some resonances with the power mongering of an Al Capone or a Josef Stalin, that history is already either known or sufficiently mythical to us, that again it closes too many interpretative options for its audience than it would when set in its vaguer and less well known times of 11th Century Scotland. The supernatural and prophetic element of Macbeth makes more sense in that setting than twentieth century Chicago or Soviet Russia.

Then there are the movies of books that are supposedly "unfilmable". William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" and Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" being two such. To me a film director's assault on these great texts smack of hubris; they've been told that they are unfilmable, but they're going to try and rise to the challenge and make their movie anyway. The film versions of both sought framing devices to try and navigate a way through these difficult texts; "Naked Lunch" had the author Burroughs himself as character in the film, which kept jolting the action of the film out of the fiction it was supposed to be portraying. "A Cock And Bull Story" used the device of actors playing a movie director and actors trying to film "Tristram Shandy" as some sort of comment about the layers of distancing the narrative that was already opaque (the book itself prefigures post modern literary techniques, of unreliable narrator- who doesn't even get born until Book 3; of insertion and rearranging another writer's text- a technique Burroughs also used; parody and literary and philosophical allusion). In my opinion, both films failed lamentably and only boosted the notion that these novels are indeed unfilmmable and accordingly ought to remain unfilmed.

While some authors may well have the film version in mind as they write, literary novels that are written qua novels ought to remain unsullied by celluloid in terms of adaptations. Firstly I think it's lazy of scriptwriters, or more likely film executives, in their relentless casting around for fresh celluloid 'meat', to settle on a novel to bump up their quota of ideas to pitch. In the same way that novels are written for the artistic medium and narrative form of literature, films really should develop their own inhouse filmic language right down to the level of an original script. Film does so many things better than novels, particularly in telling a certain type of story, that it should stick to ploughing that rich furrow. The one area of a novel they can't really replicate is its interiority. Yes an actor and some mis en scene imagery can highlight and illuminate key interior moments of a film, but a cinema audience outside of an arthouse crowd are unlikely to stand for, or rather sit through, an entire film of interiority conveyed in just such a way. The worst example of a book being mutilated by a film I experienced, was David Peace's stupendous novel "The Damned United" which is set entirely inside the tortured mind of a real life professional sports' team coach, but its sheer artistry renders it clearly as a work of fiction. The film version was a limp trotting out of the real life events that the book refers to, but was completely unable to convey the interiority of the man which made the book such a triumph of writing.

I may be a Puritan when I say literature is literature and film is film. And I'm sure I'm in a very small minority when I say this. But there is a difference between literary fiction  and commercial fiction, which mainly revolves around the latter's centre-staging of telling a story, which makes it have much in common with the art of film making and the two can be perfectly suited to one another. Equally, to base a film on a literary book as its start point, but to then proceed to make the film as a wholly different and fresh piece of art, such as "Apocalypse Now", is entirely a legitimate endeavour. I grant that sometimes the line between the two is hardly distinct, but it does seem to be the difference between an 'adaptation' and 'based on' or 'inspired by'.

So no, I won't be seeing the film version of "Life of Pi" or "Cloud Atlas" anytime soon.

My post on why "Apocalypse Now" Is My favourite film of all time and its literary roots.

The Visible Spectrum Of Colour - Friday Flash

Deciduous Decisions

Gripping her shoulders she shuddered at her own touch. She stared out the window and saw the autumnal trees in her garden. The kaleidoscope of reds and oranges through to browns and yellows. She looked down at her wrists displaying the same spectrum of colours. Contusions and confusions. Maybe Mother Nature too was full of irascible rage. That she seized hold the limbs of trees and lashed them with punishing blasts. Grabbed outstretched branches and shook them insensible. The coloured bruised flakes there falling from the ligneous skein. And like her, they obligingly returned to the fold year after year.

Trooping The Colour

The Accounting Department sought to splatter the Human Resources team with their green dye. Colour co-ordinated with the green visors on their helmets that were the sole way of identifying which side you were on, with everyone attired in the same camouflage combat jackets. "Green for rookies" jibed the HRers as they were suiting up. "Yeah? well they gave you lot yellow for the cowardy custards" retorted Malcolm as he clipped on his paint cartridge with a satisfyingly resounding snap. It instantly elevated him to team leader. He turned to address them all as he clasped the flag in one hand. "If I see anyone marked with green paint, it means we've shot one of our own. There will be no death by friendly fire got it? Or there will be most unfriendly in-house firing back at the office" he winked and brandished the flag reverberatingly in the air.

While middle management were ramping themselves up to make action paintings of their genial foes, somewhere else teenage boys were putting coloured bandanas around their necks or foreheads. Or just slipping them into the back pockets of their uniform denim. These colours the only way to distinguish one coterie from another. The projectiles emitted from their weapons however were not colour coded. And uniformly they splattered red across the bodies of those that found their targets.

Painting By Numbers

How would the Bard have done it he contemplated? Of course he was assisted by the Jacobean beliefs about the human body. The Theory of Humours. Yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm. Choleric, melancholy, sanguinity and phlegmatic. What an artist's palate that made for. Dip your brush in the yellow pigment and mix with the carmine, to dilute the aggressive ambition, or inject a bit of urgency into the dilatory sanguine. Blend the jet black with a dab of that mucal green and the melancholic comes to more of an acceptance of the absurdity and cruelty of the world. Ready-made characterisation. If only it was all so easy to reduce the human emotional scale to such graphic formula. We've gone too far the other way now. Those four character types reduced to simple emoticons. A new simplistic graded happy-sad pH scale of emotion.

If neutral is zero, then the happy clappy adjectival parade all range positively in one direction. A heliotropic embracing and blossoming. Contented-Pleased-Delighted-Gleeful-Thrilled-Jubilant-Ecstatic. But this branch has been viciously pruned into fruitlessness anyway. Alas, not so for the sad shower. The abject adjectives. A phalanx, not tight-knit, but overlapping. Braced dyads of dark-shaded feelings. For every melancholic, there’s somebody jaundiced. Downcast/Discomfited - Sorrowful/Cut up - Morose/Bitter - Miserable/Stricken - Despairing/Repining - Anguished/Tormented - Suicidal/Baneful. The umbra resolutely wallowing, stewing in one’s own juices. While the penumbra, wrings its wagging and pointing fingers of blame at a gnawing external source. One which can be lanced to drain all suppurating feeling. The tenor of its march therefore, can only lead to a confluence with revenge. Revenge is not itself an emotion, but spliced with them like a gene therapy, becomes one in most respects. It does, after all, itself impart motivation for swingeing action and deed. The impulse for revenge, if successfully discharged, can actually turn the emotional pH scale on its head. It will launch you into the happy alkalis, as you recast over in your mind the exquisite piquancy of how it played out. No wonder Shakespeare wrote so many plays about revenge. His so-called comedies just weren't funny though.

Laser Colour Therapy

"The man slashed his wrists and bled on to the carpet in an echo of his own colour splotch art. Only it was figurative for once with his corpse lying in the centre of it. Of course he was depressed! They're not spiritual paintings. If anything they were cries for help. Black canvases expressing his fatally dark moods."

"And the coloured canvases? Shimmering, dancing hues oscillating in front of your eyes?"

"Unlike this divine soufflé, I think you're over-egging it somewhat!"

"Not sat down here enjoying a fine wine and some bourgeois dinner chatter. I mean in a gallery, stood up close, entering the painting. Getting sucked into its heart. Windows and fiery forges... crucibles of creative power."

"I thought you said his paintings represented contemplative stillness? Now they're dancing?"

"Only in comparison with Pollock. He was all about the gross materiality. The paint trails succumbing to gravity. Rothko expresses... the metaphysical. Grasping towards the ineffable."

"With slabs of paint? It's still fabricated from matter though isn't it? He's like a die cast machine, stamping a great big press on all figurative and landscape art that preceded him. The arrogance of the man, trying to eliminate the history of art altogether."

"He did employ his own style of pentimento. Conservationists of his work using ultraviolet light have revealed just how carefully he layered his paint tones."

"They're not forges, they're furnaces."

"Pardon?"

"You're both in error. They're furnaces. In which human beings were burned. What you call pentimento are the remains of the human fat inside the furnaces. Clearly the paintings are windows on the Holocaust."

"Um, more wine I think..."

               

taken from the flash fiction collection available to buy from Amazon Kindle