Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky: Transposing Novels into Opera, Film, and Drama
256
Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky: Transposing Novels into Opera, Film, and Drama
256Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810127159 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/17/2011 |
| Series: | Studies in Russian Literature and Theory |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d) |
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Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky
TRANSPOSING NOVELS INTO OPERA, FILM, AND DRAMABy Alexander Burry
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Northwestern University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2715-9
Chapter One
Transposition as Criticism
THE NOTION OF MULTIMEDIA transposition as a form of literary criticism is hardly surprising. After all, as Wilde reminds us, artists have always played as major a role as critics in providing insights into each other's art. Novels such as James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, which indicate source texts in their very titles, function not only as rewritings of The Odyssey and Faust, respectively, but also as critiques that illuminate their relevance for future ages and cultural contexts. Various commentators have viewed art as a continual process of criticism in itself, with artists reflecting upon each other's creations. "The genetic components of a work of art," writes Guy Davenport, "are responses, both of agreement and modification" (77).
Dostoevsky's fiction in particular has inspired many such reworkings in the twentieth century and beyond. Literary works by Evgeny Zamyatin, Joseph Conrad, André Gide, Ralph Ellison, and many other writers have played an enormous role in both retelling and critiquing Dostoevsky's prose. As Gary Adelman and Inna Tigountsova have shown in recent years, these critiques can take diverse forms. Adelman examines various Russian and non-Russian literary responses to Dostoevsky in the twentieth century. The Soviet novelist Leonid Leonov's The Thief (1927), for instance, parodies scenes from Crime and Punishment and other Dostoevsky texts by substituting faith in Bolshevism for Christianity. Bernard Malamud's 1957 novel The Assistant, by contrast, extends the implications of Crime and Punishment by exploring criminality, guilt, and isolation in light of anti-Semitism. In thus shifting Dostoevsky's narratives into new cultural, social, and political contexts, such writers act as critics by altering the premises of their source texts, adding new emphases, and in some cases reversing or implicitly arguing against Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism, Russian messianism, and other controversial ideologies. Tigountsova, exploring Dostoevsky's impact on contemporary Russian literature, finds his poetics of ugliness (bezobrazie) to be a shaping factor in works of Yuri Mamleev, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. While Dostoevsky opposes the ideal of beauty to the disorder of everyday life that he depicts, Tigountsova shows, these postmodern writers foreground the ugly, substituting it for beauty as the center of their works. In doing so, they implicitly question Dostoevsky's utopian, Christian solution to disharmony and alienation.
Many critics have seen similar possibilities in reworkings into other media as well. For Caryl Emerson, the loftiest goal of transposition "might in fact be the most vigorous commentary possible on another's work of art" (1986: 8). Neil Sinyard, in the same vein, points out that "the best film adaptations provide a critical gloss on the novels [they transpose]" (117). Moreover, criticism and transpositions can play complementary roles in interpreting literary works. Brian McFarlane remarks that the English critic Q. D. Leavis's essay on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations should serve as a model for how to transpose the novel into film (119). The situation can easily be reversed, however: operas, films, and dramas based on novels often impart insights that change the way critics view the source texts. This chapter will focus on the question of how transpositions of literary works into other media accomplish this type of critique. How does a film, opera, play, or work in another medium go about making such a statement about the text that it transposes? What does this criticism involve, and how can we understand it as such, given the indirect form it takes in transpositions, compared to straightforward interpretive discourse?
Transpositions function quite differently from the types of literary reworkings mentioned above. In some respects, their potential is even greater: films, dramas, and operas do not merely retell narratives with variations, but also superimpose new media onto their source texts. At the same time, however, they bear certain burdens that literary reworkings do not. The primary (and sometimes sole) expectation of multimedia transpositions of literature is to convey the same narrative in a different format; any critical functions—what Gerard Genette refers to in Palimpsests as "metatextual," or the critical relation between two texts—tend to be seen as secondary. And because of this prioritizing of the replicating function, transpositions into new media are given less latitude than literary transpositions, which tend to develop selected plot situations and motifs rather than reproduce the narrative as a whole. Many transpositional processes in a film or opera that would seem to comment on a novel by altering a plot event, character, or other element, or by putting it in a radically new context, as literary reworkings do, are vulnerable to attacks for departing from the "original." This is particularly true since transpositions so often keep the title of the source text. Many times, this can indicate a parodic relationship; however, all four of the artists I will be analyzing in depth use the same title straightforwardly, openly acknowledging their sources, although their ambitions are far greater than simply reproducing Dostoevsky's narratives.
FIDELITY CRITICISM
Critiquing transpositions based on how closely they adapt their source texts, of course, has long dominated discourse on the subject. Numerous attempts have been made, particularly in recent decades, to establish new ways of evaluating such artworks. Nevertheless, this approach, widely known as "fidelity criticism," has pervaded all levels of response to transpositions, coming as it does from critics, writers, transposers, and audiences alike. Writing in reaction to this trend in 2000, James Naremore calls adaptation studies a "moribund field" (11), remarking:
Even when academic writing on the topic is not directly concerned with a given film's artistic adequacy or fidelity to a beloved source, it tends to be narrow in range, inherently respectful of the "precursor text," and constitutive of a series of binary oppositions that poststructuralist theory has taught us to deconstruct: literature versus cinema, high culture versus mass culture, original versus copy. (2)
In the field of cinema, fidelity criticism spans the history of the medium itself, as early writings on silent film transpositions of novels show. Virginia Woolf famously opined that an early film of Anna Karenina ruins the image of the title character that the reader mentally puts together through its very concretization via the actress (88). This approach continued in the second half of the twentieth century. George Bluestone, for instance, asserts in his seminal 1957 study that films generally have a destructive effect on canonical literary works that they adapt, due to the inherent untranslatability of the two media (62). Nor is fidelity criticism, in practice, outdated, as contemporary reviews of films continue to follow this method. This concern for fidelity is equally deeply rooted in opera. Romantic composers such as Hector Berlioz and Giuseppi Verdi, who frequently transposed literary classics, felt—and themselves created—a great deal of pressure to capture the spirit, if not the letter, of the source text. The reverence for individual genius characteristic of the romantic period naturally led to a protective attitude toward Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, and other artists whose texts became popular subjects for nineteenth-century musical settings.
This phenomenon has held particularly true for Russian opera, which is younger than its western European counterparts. Two of the greatest Russian composers—Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky—have been severely critiqued for infidelity to Pushkin's works. Writing to Tolstoy in 1878, Turgenev praises the music of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, but censures its treatment of the literary text: "The music is undoubtedly wonderful; the lyrical, melodic parts are especially good. But what a libretto!" (145). Such negative Russian responses to transpositions in part reflect a nearly universally reverent attitude toward Pushkin, but they also reveal a type of anxiety stemming from the relatively recent establishment of Russian national culture noted by Westernizers such as Belinsky. The concern that operatic versions of classics could replace their source texts turned out to be a valid one. Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, for instance, has far outstripped Pushkin's play, which poses various performance difficulties, in popularity. The fact that operas such as Boris Godunov, Eugene Onegin, and The Queen of Spades carry the same titles as the texts they set undoubtedly increased this anxiety.
RUSSIAN TRANSPOSITION OF CLASSIC LITERATURE
This attitude toward the canon, and a tendency to respond by creating maximally "faithful" transpositions, is especially characteristic of Russian culture. As Nicholas Rzhevsky points out in a recent study affirming the continued interdependence of theater with literature, modernist directors such as Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold turned to classic works of Pushkin, Gogol, and Alexander Griboedov at the beginning of the twentieth century "as a way of invigorating the theatrical present by thorough and exact representations of past epochs" (4–5). Meyerhold, in his essay "Theater: On Its History and Technique," stressed the need for directors to interpret the author correctly and pass this knowledge along to the actors, and he exemplified this method in his close interactions with Alexander Blok in the staging of the poet's Balaganchik (1906) (Rzhevsky 12–13). Thus, even in such director-centered theatrical productions, those who staged literary works used their authority to reinforce the author's intentions as they understood them.
The aforementioned examples of Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky's operas notwithstanding, Russian composers have also shown a strong interest in close transposition of literature. Three years before composing Boris Godunov, as I mentioned in the introduction, Musorgsky attempted a verbatim transposition of Gogol's play Marriage; this incomplete opera followed up on Dargomyzhsky's similar technique in The Stone Guest. Prokofiev's The Gambler in fact represents a revival of this tradition of close text setting. As I will show in the following chapter, though, his technique is much more flexible, and the opera differs greatly from its source text in many important respects.
In the case of Russian film, close transposition of literary texts has taken on special political importance, both during and after the Soviet Union. As Stephen Hutchings points out, Soviet cultural authorities emphasized fidelity to literary classics along with socialist realist principles. Critics and filmmakers often demanded this kind of approach long after the Stalinist period: Hutchings notes Nikita Lary's criticism of Soviet filmmakers, in his 1986 study, for their departures from Dostoevsky's texts. Following a brief drop in the number of films based on literature, occasioned by severe reduction of governmental support immediately after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian directors have returned to close reproductions of classic literature in the twenty-first century. As Hutchings suggests, this tendency reflects the use of television under Putin to promote Russian national identity (22).
Vladimir Bortko's 2003 television serial of The Idiot exemplifies this trend. As this production (along with the same director's 2005 serialization of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita) shows, it is entirely possible to create a film that includes nearly all of the plot events, characters, and situations of the novel, albeit in an eight-and-a-half-hour production. Climactic scenes involving characters of the novel's principal love triangle—the troubled fallen woman Nastasya Filippovna, the Christlike Prince Lev Myshkin, and the violent, passionate merchant's son Parfyon Rogozhin—are particularly effective dramatically: these include Nastasya Filippovna's birthday party, the prince's tirade on Orthodoxy and the evils of socialism and Catholicism at the Epanchins' dinner party, and the final scene with Myshkin and Rogozhin's vigil by the body of the murdered Nastasya Filippovna.
Moreover, Bortko accentuates the underlying psychological situations in various subtle ways. For instance, some time after Rogozhin asks Myshkin if he believes in God, he reaches into his jacket pocket, as if to grab for the knife that we know he has put there, although the two end up exchanging crosses (as in the novel). This detail, added by the director, nicely juxtaposes Rogozhin's noble and murderous impulses, or perhaps points to the inseparability of the two. Such brief episodes underscore what many viewers and critics have praised as fidelity to the "spirit," as well as the "word," of the novel. And in general, the choice of passages, the photography, the period costume and setting, and the acting indeed convey a great deal of what the novel does, and provide an experience that is as close to reading The Idiot as one can get through film. Bortko extensively researched the layout of St. Petersburg and Pavlovsk, and visited museums to make certain that the interiors and costumes reflected those of the nineteenth century as precisely as possible. Moreover, the serial, which Lyudmila Saraskina aptly calls "one of the main cultural events of the year 2003" (665), was extraordinarily effective in regenerating interest in the novel, the Russian literary heritage as a whole, and even discussion of the phenomenon of ekranizatsia (filming) of classic novels.
The question of what the film adds to the novel, however, must also be asked. What kind of critical angle does it shed on Dostoevsky's work, and how does it help us appreciate The Idiot anew? The very fact that Bortko reproduces so much of the novel is both a blessing and curse. His skill in replication of scenes, characters, and dramatic situations notwithstanding, the film makes no apparent attempt to engage or extend any of the problems the novel raises regarding the failure of goodness to impact the world in a positive way. Bortko's serial therefore underscores some of the problems with the "fidelity" approach to transposition. Since it responds to a Russian and Soviet critical tradition of demanding close transposition, it also reveals many of the deficiencies of fidelity criticism, precisely by satisfying its requirements but not going very far beyond them. Demonstrating the absence of a quality is a difficult task, but I anticipate that my analyses of how other artists accomplish the goal of creating the necessary distance from their source texts in the following chapters will in turn clarify what is missing in this film.
OVERCOMING FIDELITY CRITICISM
Finding ways of articulating different expectations of transpositions over the past decades, however, has proven to be difficult. The fact that as late as 2006, Linda Hutcheon remarks that it is time to move away from the language of fidelity criticism indicates the very persistence of this method, despite the substantial documenting of its defects (85–86). The very terms of the fidelity criticism approach, as Robert Stam points out, are highly tendentious: "The language of criticism dealing with the film adaptation of novels has often been profoundly moralistic, awash in terms such as infidelity, betrayal, deformation, violation, vulgarization, and desecration, each accusation carrying its specific charge of outraged negativity" (2000: 54; Stam's italics). The persistence of this discourse stems in part from a gap between adaptation theorists and audiences. Nonprofessional viewers, readers, and listeners in general are more likely to value fidelity than critics; this underscores the need to continue searching for more effective means of appreciating films, operas, dramas, and other transpositions as dialogues.
This issue is not unique to transposition. The same search for ways to reconfigure the standard hierarchy of "primary" and "derived" versions of a text, in which the source is invariably privileged, has bedeviled translators of the past two millennia. Translation practitioners and theorists alike questioned this relationship long before adaptation studies became a field, characterizing translation as an interpretive act as well as a communicative one. Walter Benjamin viewed translation to be part of a much larger linguistic project of harmonizing and renewing languages in order to reveal the "pure language" hidden behind them, toward which all tongues have striven since Babel. For Benjamin, the translation should make both itself and the original "recognizable as fragments of a greater language" (78). The translator, then, functions not simply to convey a text as closely as possible in a different language but also to represent it as a living organism, and to release hidden meanings that reveal the text's "afterlife," or "overlife" (Überleben). Jacques Derrida, enlarging on this idea in his essay "Des Tours de Babel," remarks that just as the translator has a debt to the author of an "original" text, the author has a debt to the future translator as well. Derrida's comment that "the original is the first debtor, the first petitioner; it begins by lacking and by pleading for translation" indicates an inherent incompleteness in the sources that demands their reworking via translation (17).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky by Alexander Burry Copyright © 2011 by Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................viiIntroduction: Dostoevsky and Transposition....................3
Chapter One Transposition as Criticism....................16
Chapter Two The Artist as Gambler: Prokofiev and Dostoevsky....................37
Chapter Three Voices of the Folk: Janácek's From the House of the Dead....................70
Chapter Four Secularizing Dostoevsky's "Positively Good Man": Kurosawa's The Idiot....................107
Chapter Five Restaging Two Sources: Wajda's The Devils....................139
Afterword....................174
Appendix A: Musical Examples from Prokofiev, The Gambler....................177
Appendix B: Musical Examples from Janácek, From the House of the Dead....................189
Notes....................199
Works Cited....................225
Index....................237