A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  Another example from Jane Austen, the most widely adapted ‘classic’ novelist of modern times, is instructive. Her novel, Mansfield Park, centres on a large country house and its aristocratic owners. The house itself is a symbol of England and its lastingness over generations. But where does the money which supports the estate come from? Austen does not say, but we see the owner, Sir Thomas Bertram, going off to put things right in the family's sugar plantations in the West Indies. The 1999 film version of Austen's novel, directed by Patricia Rozema, highlighted the likelihood that Mansfield Park's prosperity came from slave labour and exploitation. ‘Behind every great fortune’, said the French novelist Balzac, ‘lies a crime’. Behind elegant, refined, quintessentially ‘English’ Mansfield Park lay a crime against humanity, it could be argued, and Rozema's film did just that. It was controversial thesis, but again, the film complicated our response to the original novel, and in an illuminating way. (What is that noise we hear? Miss Austen spinning in her grave in Winchester Cathedral.)

  Let's look at another couple of Austen fantasias. In the 2008 TV series, Lost in Austen, the young heroine, Amanda Price, finds herself transported back in time to the world of Pride and Prejudice and gets tangled, romantically and hilariously, in the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy. It was done with a light touch (which, one suspects, might have charmed Austen), confident that everyone watching knows the novel.

  Lost in Austen's literary game-playing drew on the fanfic vogue on the internet. The website ‘The Republic of Pemberley’, for example, invites ‘Janeites’ (as lovers of Austen are called) to come up with alternative and supplementary narratives for their beloved novels (such as, what will the Darcy marriage be like?). But underlying Lost in Austen is a more serious question: How relevant, across the centuries, are the novels to the lives (specifically lovelives) we nowadays live? The same question underlies that most farfetched, and utterly delightful, transposition of Emma Woodhouse to the dilemmas of the Southern Californian ‘valley girl’ in the 1995 film, Clueless. What, this comedy asks, is ‘universal and timeless’ in Austen?

  A central question in the process of literary adaptation is whether it is a service (as I think the above examples are) or a disservice to the text in question. In 1939 the Samuel Goldwyn company produced an immensely popular Hollywood film version of Wuthering Heights. It starred, as Heathcliff, the greatest stage actor of the time, Laurence Olivier, whose performance is regarded as a classic. But the film cut out great swathes of the original narrative and pasted a happy ending on to Brontë's story. Unquestionably the film inspired many to return to the original text to discover the real thing but, for the greater number who had not read and never would read the novel, was this not a cheapening of great literature? A disservice? ‘Fidelity’, one concludes, is as tricky in art as it is in our love-lives.

  In the same year, 1939, MGM brought out, with huge fanfare, the film Gone with the Wind (GWTW to its millions of fans). It's often voted the greatest film of all time. In commercial terms it was, and still is, one of the biggest ever money-spinners. It was based on a novel by Margaret Mitchell which had been published three years earlier – the only novel this very private woman ever published. There is a romantic story behind it. Mitchell was born in 1900 and brought up in Atlanta, Georgia, in a family who had lived there for generations. There were old citizens in the town who could remember the Civil War, which the South had lost calamitously. There were even more Atlantans who could remember the grim aftermath of ‘Reconstruction’, as it was called.

  Margaret was a young journalist. She broke her ankle at work, and while laid up in bed began writing a ‘Civil War novel’. Her husband brought her the necessary research materials, and she polished off the work in a few months before she got back on her feet. Once recovered, she left the manuscript in a cupboard for six years. There it might have remained had Mitchell not been assigned to show a publisher round her town in 1935. He was scouting for new material and, when she mentioned her novel in passing, persuaded her to let him see the dilapidated manuscript. Gone with the Wind was accepted instantly and rushed out, with mammoth publicity. It was a runaway bestseller under the slogan ‘One million Americans can't be wrong. Read Gone with the Wind!’ The novel stayed at the top of the bestseller list for two years and won a Pulitzer Prize. Mitchell sold the film rights to MGM for $50,000 and Gone with the Wind was adapted, using the new process of Technicolor, by David O. Selznick. It starred Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable.

  Even though it remains a very popular work of fiction, for every reader of Mitchell's novel there must be a hundred who only know Gone with the Wind as a film. Is the film ‘true’ to the book? No, it isn't. MGM kept the main outlines of Mitchell's plot but softened the favourable references to the Ku Klux Klan, and omitted the hero Rhett Butler's murder of a freed black man who dared to affront the virtue of a white woman. They took the ‘edge’ off a very edgy novel. To those who respect the remarkable book, it matters.

  There is another objection that we can legitimately bring against adaptation. Unlike many novelists, Jane Austen (to draw on her again) never gives a clear pictorial image of her heroines or heroes. All we know about Emma Woodhouse, for instance, is that she has hazel eyes. This is an artistic decision on Austen's part. It enables the reader to construct their own image. If, however, one watches the 1996 film of Emma, Gwyneth Paltrow's face will probably impose itself on every subsequent re-reading of the novel. It's a very nice face – but it's not what Austen wanted.

  Translation, it is said, echoing an Italian proverb, is ‘betrayal’ (Traduttore, traditore). Is adaptation, more even than translation, inevitably something of a travesty? Or is it an enhancement? Or an interpretation that supplements our own understanding of the text? Or an invitation to go back and read the original? It can, of course, be any or all of those things. What is fascinating, though, is the question of where adaptation, with its partnering technologies, is going. What will happen, as it will in the not-too-distant future, when thanks to new technology we can enter a virtual world of the literature that interests us – with our sense organs (nose, eyes, ears, hands) activated? When we can literally get ‘lost in Austen’, not just as spectators, but as players? It will be exciting. But still, one doubts it would entirely please Miss Austen.

  CHAPTER 33

  Absurd Existences

  KAFKA, CAMUS, BECKETT AND PINTER

  If you made a list of the most gripping opening lines in literature, the following would surely make it into the top ten:

  As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

  It is from a short story, ‘The Metamorphosis’, by Franz Kafka (1883–1924). It's probable that Kafka did not much care whether we read this sentence or anything that he wrote. He instructed his friend and exectutor Max Brod to burn his literary remains ‘preferably unread’ after his death – he died prematurely, aged forty, from tuberculosis. Brod, thankfully, defied the instruction. Kafka speaks to us despite Kafka.

  The human condition, for Kafka, is well beyond tragic or depressed. It is ‘absurd’. He believed that the whole human race was the product of one of ‘God's bad days’. There is no ‘meaning’ to make sense of our lives. Paradoxically that meaninglessness allows us to read into Kafka's novels such as The Trial (which is about a legal ‘process’ which doesn't process anything), or his stories like ‘The Metamorphosis’, whatever meanings we please. For example, critics have viewed Gregor Samsa's transformation into a cockroach as an allegory of anti-Semitism, a grim forecast of the criminal extermination of a supposedly ‘verminous’ race. (Kafka was Jewish, and just a little older than Adolf Hitler.) Writers often foresee such things coming before other people do. ‘The Metamorphosis’, published in 1915, has also been seen as foreshadowing the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, after the First World War. Kafka and his fellow citizens in Bohemia, centred in Prague, had lived under that vast empire. They woke
up suddenly to find their identities had vanished. Others have read the story in terms of Kafka's problematic relationship with his father, a coarsegrained businessman. Whenever Franz nervously gave his father one of his works, it would be returned unread. His father despised his son.

  But any such ‘meanings’ crumple because there is no larger or underlying meaning in the Kafka universe to underpin them. Yet absurdist literature still had a mission – to assert that literature is, like everything else, pointless. Kafka's disciple, the playwright Samuel Beckett, put it well: the writer ‘has nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’.

  With that in mind, consider the opening paragraph of Kafka's last and finest novel, The Castle:

  It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay under deep snow. There was no sign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest gleam of light suggested the large Castle. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness.

  Everything quivers with enigma. ‘K.’ is a name, but no name (is it ‘Kafka’?). It is twilight, that nothing-time between day and night. K. stands on a bridge, suspended in the space between the outside world and the village. Fog, darkness and snow shroud the Castle. Is there anything in front of K. at all but ‘emptiness’? We never know where he has come from, nor why he has come. He will never reach the Castle. He cannot even be sure it is there, but it is where he is going.

  Kafka, who wrote in German, lived his life in utter literary obscurity. He worked, for as long as his delicate health allowed, in a state insurance office in his native city, Prague. (He was good at the job, reportedly.) He had studied law but was, by profession, a bureaucrat. He had tormented relations with women and his family. He died before his genius could fully flower, and was for decades after his death merely an obscure footnote in the history of German-language literature.

  It was not until the 1930s, well after his death, that translations of his works (The Castle was the first) began to appear in English. They inspired some writers, but mystified most readers. He was resurrected as a major literary force after the Second World War, not in Prague, London or New York, but Paris.

  Kafka was installed as a patriarchal figure in the 1940s French Existentialists' godless universe. It was their philosophy that triggered the ‘Kafka Revolution’ in the 1960s when everybody discovered the world was either Orwellian or Kafkaesque or possibly both. Kafka no longer mystified, he explained. His time had come.

  Albert Camus's opening proposition in his best-known essay, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, is that ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide’. It echoes Kafka's bleak aphorism: ‘A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.’ Why not, when life is pointless? Camus's essay pictures the human condition in the mythical figure Sisyphus, doomed for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, only for it to fall down again. Pointless. Only two responses are feasible in the face of man's Sisyphean fate: suicide or rebellion. Camus appended a long note – ‘Hope and the Absurd in the Works of Franz Kafka’– to his Sisyphus essay, commemorating the writer to whose influence he was indebted.

  Kafka's influence is evident in Camus's fictional masterpiece The Outsider, written and published under Nazi occupation censorship. The action is set in Algiers, nominally part of Metropolitan France. The narrative opens bleakly: ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday: I can't be sure.’ Nor does the French Algerian hero, Meursault, care. He cares about nothing. He has, he confides, ‘lost the habit of noting his feelings’. For no particular reason, he shoots an Arab. His only explanation, not that he troubles to come up with explanations, even to save his life, is that it was very hot that day. He goes to the guillotine, not even caring about that. He hopes the crowd watching the execution will jeer.

  It was Camus's comrade in philosophy, Jean-Paul Sartre, who perceived, most clearly, what drastic things Kafka had done to fiction's rule book. Generically, as Sartre wrote in a digression in his novel Nausea (1938), the novel presumes to makes sense, fully aware that life doesn't make sense. This ‘bad faith’ is its ‘secret power’. Novels, said Sartre, are ‘machines that secrete spurious meaning into the world’. They are necessary, but intrinsically dishonest. What else do we have in life other than the ‘spurious meanings’ we invent?

  Absurdity took a long time penetrating the Anglo-Saxon/American world. The moment of penetration occurred in August 1955 when Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot was first performed in English at a club theatre in London. Beckett was an Irishman, long resident in France, bilingual and steeped in the Existentialism that dominated French intellectual life in the postwar period.

  Waiting for Godot opens with two tramps, Estragon and Vladimir, by a roadside. We don't know who, or where, they are. They talk incessantly throughout the play, but nothing ‘happens’. As it transpires the tramps are indeed doing something by doing nothing – they are waiting for a mysterious person, or entity, called ‘Godot’. Is this ‘God’? Towards the end of the play a boy comes on stage to tell the characters that Godot isn't coming today. Estragon asks Vladimir if they should leave and Vladimir replies, ‘Yes, let's go’. The final stage direction is: ‘They do not move.’

  It's impossible to exaggerate the impact that Waiting for Godot had on English theatre and culture in the mid-1950s. On one actor, who performed in the play in provincial repertory theatre, it had perhaps the most significant impact of all. Harold Pinter went from performing Beckett into writing, as a confessed disciple. Like Beckett, he would go on to win a Nobel Prize.

  Pinter's breakthrough play was The Caretaker (1960). The action is set in a seedy lodging house with three main characters, two brothers and an outsider – a tramp named Mac Davies. One of the brothers, Aston, has had his brain shattered by ‘curative’ electroconvulsive therapy. This little community intend to do something – build a garden shed, undertake some random house repairs. They do nothing but quarrel. Mac is constantly intending to get his papers from a nearby government office. He never gets them. None of them carry through their plans, any more than Estragon and Vladimir move along their road. The dialogue in The Caretaker is reminiscent of Beckett, but Pinter also cultivates a unique use of silence. The breaks in the dialogue build up a mood of vague menace. Pinter's is the art of the eloquently ‘left hanging’.

  The least silent of playwrights, Tom Stoppard responded creatively and with firework displays of wit to the comedy in Beckett. Stoppard's first major play was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967). The action revolves, with dazzlingly clever dialogue, around the two background characters in Hamlet who, again like Vladimir and Estragon, do not move. They cannot move. They are only minor characters. All they can do is chatter, which they do incessantly.

  The playfulness in the play, and in Stoppard's later works, in some ways evokes the great Italian dramatist, Luigi Pirandello, and plays such as his Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921). Playful drama and mind games are, for Stoppard, what Sartre called novels: ‘machines that secrete spurious meaning into the world’. But, in Stoppard's case, they are great fun, not nauseating or menacing. Absurdity has its hilarious side.

  Literature is always and everywhere a diverse thing. No single container fits all. The Theatre of the Absurd was revolutionary, but it was avant garde (or ‘cutting edge’), and it happened in Europe, and in circumstances where there are few writers and small audiences. There was, simultaneously, an ultra-realistic new style of British drama that was not absurd but angry, and which from the beginning drew massive audiences, and particularly young ones. The play that launched this new wave in British theatre was John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, first performed in 1956, the year after Godot, but coming at audiences from a very different direction.

  Osborne's hero, Jimmy Porter, is not a Sisyphus figure but an ‘angry young man�
�� (as Osborne and his ilk came to be called), raging at 1950s Britain – throwing rocks, not pushing them. It was a moment in British history when things were badly falling apart. The British Empire was in its death throes. The colonial war against Egypt, over the Suez Canal, was its final humiliating moment. The British class system was a dead hand throttling the vitality of the nation. Or so Osborne's play asserts. The monarchy was a gold tooth in a rotting jaw, as one of his characters puts it.

  In the play, Jimmy lives in a cramped attic with Alison, the daughter of a colonel who was a colonial administrator before India gained its independence in 1947. Jimmy is anger incarnate. He is university educated, but at an unfashionable (not ‘Oxbridge’) institution. He cultivates a noticeably working-class lifestyle but is essentially apolitical. His raw anger discharges on Alison, whom he both loves for herself and despises for her class background. Jimmy's anger – eloquently expressed in furious rants – is, we feel, the raw fuel of revolution. But what kind of revolution? The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan called Look Back in Anger a ‘minor miracle’ that presents ‘postwar youth as it really is’. It cleared the way for the youth revolution (sex, drugs and rock'n'roll) of the 1960s.

  Absurdism never took firm root in the USA, although there was always plenty of anger to be found on the stage. Dramatists like Arthur Miller, in Death of a Salesman (1949), followed Henrik Ibsen's example, attacking the falsity at the core of middle-class life under capitalism. Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee were similarly scornful about marriage in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). The great ‘Expressionist’ American playwright Eugene O'Neill left his play Long Day's Journey into Night to be performed after his death (it was first staged in 1956). It portrayed family as a different kind of hell. American theatre, we may say, found its own way to speak about ‘meaninglessness’.