Anghraine

My best friend and I had an interesting, fairly wide-ranging conversation about the distinctions between adaptation, retellings, fanfiction, other forms of directly intertextual storytelling (à la Wide Sargasso Sea, Lavinia etc), covers (as in music), heavily illustrated editions of texts, collage, sampling, novelizations, ekphrasis generally, translation, and inspiration.

The distinctions here are mainly ones that he makes and I do not. For me, all of these things are on a spectrum or scatterplot of something like intertextuality. As I was saying on Tumblr the other day (re: fanfiction), I don’t actually think that most of these kinds of terminology reflect coherently defined art forms at all. They reflect norms, values, and conventions shaped by laws and corporations and other economic/cultural concerns, not any consistent system of understanding intertextuality more broadly.

This is a frequent point of disagreement between him and me, because he prefers to refine terms like these into … philosophical coherence, I guess? So he’ll say, well, I think of the term as more specifically meaning X, not Y, and that lets us examine the different approaches that X and Y take in a more systematic, artistically formal way. (As in the linked post, this is formal in the sense of form not as in propriety.)

And I’m like … it does, yes, but I don’t think that kind of re-definition corresponds to the meanings of those terms in actual usage. Narrowing the definitions imposes a coherence and logic to these distinctions that I don’t think actually exists. It’s more like a grab bag of imprecise, overlapping categories defined by values and customs and legal practice than anything they’re doing artistically.

Him: inconsistent laws and customs are kind of arbitrary and uninteresting in terms of theorizing categories of art, though.

Me: not to me, but anyway, I think the way we theorize art is very profoundly shaped by modern customs and laws to a degree we often can't even see, and words are defined by usage, not philosophical convenience.

(Yeah, we’re super fun at parties. But seriously, this is how we’ve talked since high school.)

Regardless, his theory is that adaptation is actually a narrower category of intertextual art than in casual (or academic) usage. His view is that an adaptation is an attempt to represent the actual source; there may be new material added, and some of the original material may be removed, but there is an effort to preserve not just character outlines or plot structure or elements of setting, but considerable amounts of the original source, usually in a different medium than the original. A re-telling, on the other hand, is a work that re-casts the source material into new language and sometimes generic (as in genre) form.

This is all according to him, not me. I think all storytelling of this kind = re-telling and that there is no hard line separating these approaches, just gradations of variance.

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An anon asked:

Piggybacking off the Harker discussion, which Darcy actor best matches the standards of handsomeness of the time?

I replied:

It’s hard to say, tbh—they all seem really ‘off’ to me.

Tagged: #i'd like to have a more helpful answer but...

A Tumblr anon asked:

do you think keira knightley is the right level of attractiveness for elizabeth?

I replied:

Mmm, I’m kind of on the fence.

On the one hand, she seemed like a really odd casting at the time—it was clear that she was considered a beautiful woman in general, where Elizabeth is mildly and unfashionably pretty. OTOH, Keira Knightley is set against an absolutely stunning Jane in Rosamund Pike, which I think diminishes the effect, and her looks would be quite unfashionable in 1795.

So I think it’s really a question of adaptational aesthetics—are we talking about period conventions or how appearances register to audiences in the twenty-first century? I lean towards a mixture but more the latter than not, so I’m inclined to consider her a bit much for Elizabeth, though not to the point that it’s really a big deal for me.

Tagged: #she's not how i imagine elizabeth but it is kind of funny to me that the people wringing their hands about how she was too attractive #were often the same people going on about how people didn't look like her back then

An anon asked:

Which Darcy do you like the most? Colin Firth or Matthew McFadyen?

I replied:

I, uh, bitterly hate Colin Firth’s Darcy, so Matthew Macfadyen wins by default, even though I have a lot of issues with his, too.

FWIW, I have no objection to CF’s acting in itself, just the writing/direction choices. It’s kind of epitomized for me in the “and yours is wilfully to misunderstand them” scene, where the dialogue is all but identical to Austen’s, but the dynamic at play is quite different. CF!Darcy snaps the line out, giving the moment a sort of sexy mutual antagonism, where Austen’s Darcy gives a smiling riposte—it’s good-humoured banter to him rather than seriously adversarial, by contrast to Elizabeth’s understanding of the conversation as quite adversarial, showcasing their mutual misunderstandings.

I feel like that sort of (sometimes) similar dialogue/very different dynamic is pervasive throughout Davies et al’s take on Darcy (and others, but esp Darcy bc of the compulsion to transform him into a brooding, sexualized love interest). It’s not necessarily more wrong than the way the 2005 softens Darcy up and romanticizes him (though still in a fairly humourless way), but it personally bugs me a lot more.

(This, of course, is all setting apart how the Darcys work if you consider the adaptations as independent works in their own right, in which case both are quite well-done. But as adapted versions of Austen’s character, this is what I think.)

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An anon said:

Your mention of how P&P adaptations tend to lean toward making Elizabeth an introvert makes me curious. What do you think of the various adaptations' portrayals of Elizabeth? I remember you've said your favorite is Elizabeth Garvie in the 1980 BBC version, but what are your opinions on Jennifer Ehle, Kiera Knightley, Greer Garson and others? And what do you think tends to be most "off" about screen portrayals of Elizabeth compared to Austen's version?

I replied:

Hmm. At this point, it’s been a pretty long while since I watched any of them (thanks, grad school), but my overall impressions:

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Another anon asked (almost immediately afterwards):

(Different anon here) but what are your thoughts on the 1940 P&P? (I def remember your hatred for the 1995 and might or might not have sourced you on that when people hate on the 2005)

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