Dear Mr. Eco,
It is not without trepidation that I write you, but I don’t know to whom else I might address my thoughts (and I’m not familiar with another semiotician; I’m sure I could kick off some minor research, find a few others—among them certainly one or two less busy, and maybe even from my own country). However, I confess I’m a fan of yours (fear not! I’ll keep the adulations to a minimum), and I haven’t been able to shake my questions, which would not have arisen, except I read a book of yours. Additionally, I’m sorry in advance for the inevitable meandering this missive is sure to take along its way to its purpose, but it’s sort of necessary. I need to start with some autobiography.
I am principal and English teacher for a small—miniscule, even—private school in Salt Lake City. It’s a good enough job. Not a dream come true, but it pays the bills, if not always punctually. In my spare time, I read, write, play drums. I’ve always been a creative person, spending nearly my entire growing-up at the drawing pad, Lego pile, piano, and so on; I also took to books, though more non- then than fiction now. Eventually, I took up my education at Brigham Young University (though raised in Ohio), majoring in illustration. The major didn’t hold. While living two years in Italy, my creative interests turned more dominantly toward language. (By the way, though I pride myself on my level of Italian “fluency,” I’m not writing in Italian; I trust this isn’t a problem, and should you reply, Italian is welcome.) This shift led to a total change of plan. I took up English, and soon had a job teaching seventh graders. That was ten years ago. Not until two years ago did I take adopt the private school and all its tagalong insecurities, which brings me to a month ago: a fundraiser fireworks stand in Draper, Utah, and the beginnings of this letter.
The fundraiser was a unequivocal flop. In eight days I had fewer than two dozen customers; I had a LOT of time for reading.
I don’t often get such an extravagance of time for reading, but this opportunity presented again an observation that has cropped up over other similar, though few, opportunities: it seems to me that any string of books, and read in sequence over a relatively short period of time, is replete with interconnections and similarities, likely unconsidered by the authors. Well, I had a pretty eclectic stack, and still it happened, and perhaps more poignantly than ever:
- The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester;
- Redemption on Sand Mountain, by Dennis Covington;
- the first half of your Experiences in Translation;
- The Facts of the Helsinki Roccomatios, by Yann Martel;
- the rest of Experiences in Translation;
- Stevenson’s Treasure Island;
- and finally The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster.
My understanding of the subject of semiotics (and o’, so broad a subject it is, I’ve discovered) is embarrassingly limited, but as I read The Phantom Tollbooth against the recently spread backdrop of Experiences in Translation, I found an explanation—or at least a localization of definition—for a problem I’ve had regarding two other books (three, really—grouping two as one), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, and L’Inferno. My definition for the problem is new; the problem itself goes back years.
I’ve a particular fondness for Alice (both Alice Liddell and her counterpart—avatar, even—in Carroll’s books) and her Wonderland, as they accompanied me on my very first covertocover-at-a-sitting reading experience when I was a kid—eight or nine years old. Nutty and exciting, the simple wisdom, the clearly present-though-inexplicable danger of everything Mad, the book seemed almost impossibly suited to me, and I ate it up. By that time, of course, I’d already experienced Disney’s mosaic impressionism of the book, and, though I’d once liked it quite as much as any other Disney “classic,” I was quickly disenchanted. Like many other immature and impatient reader-/viewers, I wanted a movie that showed ALL of the book, not just some ridiculous mishmash that, in this case, only emphasized the erroneously-applied drug-trip or just-for-the-heck-of-it-madness interpretations (and, yes, I specifically remember thinking “interpretation” as the correlative word between text and film as a nine-year-old). Seemingly dozens of Alice movies later, I am still disappointed. There have been remakes, remakes of remakes, literal and figurative interpretations, and, most recently and ridiculously, a sequel (such pretentiousness) of some neo-gothic Carroll-meets-Austen and Alice-is-betrothed-and-18 rubbish! And my diatribe flows not from any particular gall from the rubbing of some demonstrated movie-making ineptitude against faithful/-lessness-to-book, as certainly many of these Alice movies are fine indeed, but because they are NOT REALLY Alice OR Wonderland, and should be named and titled something else. Contrastingly, there are many movies optioned from books which I do enjoy, not frequently as “accurate” interpretations of the books, but just as well-made and well-written, enjoyable movies. That does not make them the book. Is it entirely erroneous to feel such disappointment?
None of this should be a problem, though, right? If I don’t like the movies, I just won’t watch the movies. But here’s my problem, and it applies as significantly to L’Inferno as Wonderland for two reasons: first, my students, and students are students, and students are kids, and kids watch movies (and so do I, for that matter); and second, movies are movies, and people are going to make movies, and it’s a safer bet for a movie maker to make a movie from a successful book rather than risk a brand new story and new characters, so someone like Alice is going to get cast again and again; she’s a profitable franchise. So here’s the big deal, if we’re going to make movies, why not make movies that really tell the whole story (and, yes, I understand that because of the change from one system to another, the story will never be the SAME; not to mention a moviemaker has to keep in mind the projected audience…)? I think it can be done, but I’m not sure I know how.
Back to Norman Juster and The Phantom Tollbooth.
My liking or not of the book and its contingent parts notwithstanding, I was enormously entertained by the verbal contortionism Juster displays throughout Milo’s road trip across the strange lands of Dictionopolis, Digitopolis, the Sea of Knowledge, and so on, but how could this book be translated to a visual medium, and yet stay to true to itself? It’s greatest asset is its wordplay! Sure, there’s a good, kid-friendly plot, and you could easily write a screenplay about some kid named Milo who receives some mysterious tollbooth through which he drives an electric car and meets a “watch dog” and so on, but practically none of the verbal genius lacing it all together will work its way through the surface of the screen. For example, TPTB is REPLETE with puns; well-crafted visual puns are TOUGH! I just can’t see or even sense any way to truly TRANSLATE The Phantom Tollbooth to the cinema.
As a point of contrast (bear with me), there are millions of popcorn, grocery-store novels so linguistically flat that there’s essentially no loss of substance in translation from one system to another. The whole story is there in the translation, because there’s nothing more to the original text than hackneyed plot, archetypal characters, and set pieces so overused that even just reading them, not actually viewing, we “see” exactly what the novelist sees, because we’re all basing our knowledge of those same fagged out places and people from all those same movies or TV shows we’ve all already seen a bajillion times!
Draw a line from Tollbooth to some such paperback, say, The Bourne Identity.
If there’s a continuum of “translatability to film” for narratives along this line, then Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and L’Inferno should fall somewhere in the middle. Neither is impossible (I think) to make into fully honest movies, but man, they certainly seem to fall on the south end of the bell curve. More on that in a bit.
I’ve got one more preparatory observation before I finally get to my questions:
A former student of mine and I have a sort of loose reading club together. We chase after a book (Martel’s most recent effort, Beatrice and Virgil, for instance) then critique and discuss it. It’s a marvelously rewarding exchange for me, as I find myself continuously less frequently in the classroom (where I truly belong, but where I can hardly afford ($) to be). This friend recently purchased a digital book reading device, and has been selling me on its benefits for a bibliophile like me. I had just picked up a new paperback edition of Treasure Island; he received a free E-edition with the purchase of his “Nook.” TI was the subject of our most recent critique.
Though I had a lot of fun reading the book, I couldn’t help but think that my impression of the World of Pirates and Treasure was sullied by the recent and wildly successful farrago of buccaneer flicks. One of my very favorite reasons for reading books is to sink myself into that exhilarating first impression, where the world created by the author and peopled by his characters are all new, at least to my own experience—producing a new scheda for my schema. Of course, you can never experience that newness and discovery a second time, because, of course!, you can never read the same book for the first time twice (and this never-a-second-shot-at-the-magic is, for me, another and equally deep issue altogether—even this: Does a text undergo a shift from one system to another—albeit within one contiguous intellect—from the First-Read to the Second-Read?). When I finally picked up and read Treasure Island, I had—though I’d never before cracked its printed cover—already “read” the book. I knew everything that was going to happen, because there are a million stories just like it; I just read/viewed them in the wrong order to really EXPERIENCE Treasure Island. Not to say that I was disappointed by the reading, but that experience was less than it could have been, certainly had I read it a hundred years ago, before Errol Flynn or Johnny Depp.
To a certain degree, and despite the aforementioned impossibility, it’s yet really difficult to ESCAPE that first-read—or, I should say, its impressions. I think I’ll make myself clearer with an effective, though inartistic example:
When I was a teenager, I liked heavy music. A favorite was a piece titled “Man in the Box,” by a grunge-band called Alice in Chains. The song was great! Gritty. Powerful. As I got older, however, I also got a little more—well—pious. I consider myself now a pretty religious guy, and there’s a line in the song that goes, “…Jesus Christ! Deny your maker!” Well, no matter how much I enjoyed the accompaniment, I couldn’t let myself listen to something LIKE THAT, so I shrugged off the song.
About ten years later, I was driving with a student and his father when the damnable song came on the radio. I was surprised—both of them claiming a level of religiosity similar to my own—to hear both father and son exclaim, “Man! Love this song!” and crank up the volume. As subtly and un-self-righteously as I could, I expressed my discomfort. The duo argued, “Dude! It’s not sacrilegious! The singer’s addicted to heroin! He’s torn up—split in two. One side’s praying for help, the other’s saying, ‘Screw it, just do it!’” I was impressed. I hadn’t heard—understood—the song that way, which is sort of embarrassing, really, since I don’t seem to have any problem interpreting much more difficult stuff; Alice in Chains, after all, isn’t exactly James Joyce. I just couldn’t get past my first impression and initial understanding.
Similarly, it wasn’t until I finally TAUGHT Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to a group of college-prep kids that I finally and inadvertently got over that initial-understanding hump and literally experienced it for the first time AGAIN, a thing I’d never imagined possible. I thought I appreciated the book before. Now, there was so much more! This was the point at which things came to a head. I wasn’t any more greatly frustrated with the Alice movies then than I was before this trumping epiphany, but I finally saw an opportunity that had never been exploited, that I’m aware of. A number of years ago (this is another aside, by the way), there were some filmmakers who made a similar attempt (and the ultimate purpose for this letter) at a similar opportunity, though not, I believe, successfully, called Finding Neverland. Someone, somewhere along the line, realized you couldn’t really do a truly faithful rendering of Peter Pan without including a traditionally missing central character. How could you leave out a PRIMARY character in any retelling? Easy. No one ever considers the author as a character!
The reason there is no completely accurate film version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—or, I should say, no 100% satisfying film version—is that no one has ever included the story’s second, though no less significant, protagonist, Carroll himself, who is densely present throughout both books. But how to show him, without bogging down a potential film in painfully obvious contrivances?
I don’t know. I’m working on it.
Once upon a time, I gave my students a creative writing assignment. Taking inspiration from a work of their choice from the list we’d read over preceding months, compose a new stage play (and not necessarily performable—we’d enjoyed Fitzgerald’s “Mr. Icky: The Quintessence of Quaintness in One Act,” which clearly was never intended to be performed), making obvious the student’s interpretations of the work’s significances. Most kids picked something from a list of fairy tales we’d deconstructed, but a few of them went elsewhere. As I always made sure to do—demonstrate—the same projects I gave my students, I chose to base my stage play on the story of Ugolino and Ruggieri from L’Inferno’s canto 33. Though I was unable to finish the project, I found immense satisfaction blending history (or what is known—or what I know) and Dante’s beautiful poetry. While what I began those years ago isn’t exactly what I’m looking at doing now, it seems to offer a glimpse of possibility.
L’Inferno holds so much beauty, tragedy, power, absolute genius. I’ve read a variety of translations; I’ve read it in Italian. I’ve seen movies that use as inspiration bits and pieces of it, but I’ve never seen or even heard of a movie that actually covers the whole thing. And I think I know why. What would the story be? By nature of the poem, any telling would be frenetically episodic. Episodic narratives are problematic, the least troublesome of which having cripplingly weak plot or central motif attempting to pin down all the ephemeral bits and pieces. But I think—I SENSE—there is something there in L’Inferno that could make it work. It’s always seemed to me, via my superficial studies of Alighieri himself, especially his life over the period of his writing, and this understanding contrasted against his fictional avatar of himself in the book, that there is indeed a substantial character development there—significant enough to STRONGLY hold together the episodes along the Descent. Could one write a screenplay for L’Inferno (and imagine if it succeeded!? the movie moguls have a ready-made trilogy!) in which the underlying story is the development of Dante as a character?
My problem is I don’t want to invent what isn’t there. While it certainly worked for Joyce with his Italian translation of his own Finnegan’s Wake (your description and analysis, by the way, I thoroughly enjoyed), I’m not—thank heaven, and may its holy inhabitants so help me—Dante Alighieri (how would he write a screenplay of his own work? he was, after all an early purveyor of pop). But, just like Wonderland, the physical Dante Alighieri is as present in Hell as are his avatar and Virgil. (And I guess I’m using the word “avatar,” because though Dante calls the protagonist of his epic after himself, the two men—Dante-in-the-Book, Dante-in-the-Real-World—are not identical; rather it seems that Dante-in-the-Book is the projection of Dante-in-the-Real-World’s mental self image, not reality. So, “avatar….”)
I anticipate the same problem that vexed the telling of James Barry in Finding Neverland: the beauty and wonder of the original masterpiece are TOTALLY LOST amidst the scads of contrivances apparently-required to make him fit—stuffing him—visually/narratively into his own story.
Two things I know:
First, the artist is never entirely separated from his art (you can always find definition of the author as a person within the text of his art), and so it seems—particularly with the examples here—that the more deeply the artist roots himself—Dante Alighieri and Lewis Carroll—in his production, and intentionally or not, the more sublime the art.
Second, there will always be substantive change across any intersemiotic transition of a text; so, contrary to my desire to not “invent,” invention is inevitable. Indeed, it seems that even subtler transitions can drastically affect the signs of a text. For example, years ago, my grandfather invested a considerable sum of money into the production of audiobooks from a series of juvenile novels called The Great Brain. Sure, it was just an audio book, and I’d have never thought such a basic and seemingly slight shift in systems (the books are read word-for-word, after all) should so significantly alter interpretation, until I heard a second, contemporary recording. The first recording had a brilliant interpretive reader—an enthusiastic actor performing character voices, effects of timing, inserted chuckles, etcetera; also, this first recording had added music and atmospheric sounds. The contemporary recording has naught but a bone-dry reader. No inflection. No music. And, for all it lacks (or didn’t gratuitously add), the book is completely different from how I remember it via the original recording (though perhaps truer to the original text). Despite my love for the books, I can’t listen to that second recording.
What I want to do is write thorough translations/interpretations/adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and L’Inferno as stage- or screenplays, but I don’t want to murder them! I am (and have been for five years) practically bursting with creative energy at the prospect of paying significant and finally-adequate homage to two of my literary heroes and their quintessential works, but I don’t know if it’s even freaking possible!
I guess, when it comes down to it, Mr. Eco, I’m not looking for a lesson in semiotics (though I’d love to be a student in such capacity), but for your opinion and, if available, your advice regarding such an undertaking. I am a writer—inasmuch as I write, love to write. A pair of projects like these, though…. Hmm. There’s a PASSION there, which I could really home in on, but I’m leery of undertaking the enormity of such a risk on, first—and lamely—my TIME, which is woefully limited (though you mightn’t guess as much based on the blatant prolixity of this letter). And speaking of time, I know I’ve taken more than my share of yours, for which I’m grateful, as clearly, you’ve made it to the end. I guess it’s more like this—the risk, I mean: I once considered myself an artist in the visual media—pastels, watercolors, etcetera. I had the desire to do religiously-themed works but was hesitant to undertake them, because I wanted to make sure I was skilled enough to do them well—even perfectly—else disrespect God with my ineptitude. That’s how I feel about the works and characters of Carroll and Alighieri (though, a-religiously, in this case).
So there it is. Doctor, your diagnosis (emphasis on the –“gnosis”)? Please?
May it be said, and without sycophancy, that I admire and thoroughly enjoy your work—enough so that I’m thrilled you’ve done so much; I’ve got a lot more to read.
Thank you, sincerely,
Joseph Center
P.S. Interesting: my English-language edition of Experiences in Translation has for its cover art the same painting referenced and of metaphoric significance to Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. I just noticed. Now there’s a fascinating piece of potentially adaptable work.
