Adaptation and Illustration: New Cartographies 3031321340, 9783031321344

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

Adaptation and Illustration New Cartographies

Edited by Shannon Wells-Lassagne Sophie Aymes

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture Series Editors

Julie Grossman Le Moyne College Syracuse, NY, USA R. Barton Palmer Atlanta, GA, USA

This series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture.

Shannon Wells-Lassagne  •  Sophie Aymes Editors

Adaptation and Illustration New Cartographies

Editors Shannon Wells-Lassagne Université de Bourgogne Dijon, France

Sophie Aymes Université de Bourgogne Dijon, France

ISSN 2634-629X     ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture ISBN 978-3-031-32133-7    ISBN 978-3-031-32134-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: filo/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

About the Book

Description of Project’s Scope and Content This collection of essays examines the relationship between illustration and adaptation from an intermedial and transcultural perspective. It aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between two fields that co-exist without necessarily acknowledging advances in each other’s domains. It provides an argument for defining illustration as a form of adaptation as well as an intermedial practice that redefines what we mean by adaptation. The volume embraces both a specific and an extended definition of illustration that accounts for its inclusion among the web of adaptive practices that developed with the rise of new media and intermediality. The contributors explore how crossovers may contribute to reappraise the objects they scrutinize and their theoretical remits. The essays provide original perspectives by prominent authors, young scholars and practitioners. They rely on a transmedial and interdisciplinary corpus that allows us to explore the boundaries between illustration and other media such as texts, graphic novels, comics, theatre, film and mobile applications. Arguably adaptation, like intermediality, is an umbrella term that covers a variety of practices and products, and both of them have been shaped by intense debates over their boundaries and internal definitions. Illustration belongs to each of these areas, and what this volume proposes is an insight into how illustration not only relates to adaptation and intermediality, but how each field is redefined, enriched and also challenged by such interactions.

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Contents

1 Introduction:  The Circulation of Images—Illustration, Adaptation and the Global Turn  1 Sophie Aymes and Shannon Wells-Lassagne Part I Afterlives  23 2 Illustration  and Adaptation in the Balbussos’ Pride and Prejudice (2013) and The Handmaid’s Tale (2012) 25 Kate Newell 3 “[T]o  Mix Colours for Painters” and Illustrate and Adapt Gulliver’s Travels Worldwide: Street Murals, Adaptability and Transmediality 47 Nathalie Collé 4 Adapting  Novel Illustrations for the Almanac: Text/ Image Relations in Chodowiecki’s Illustrations for Rousseau’s Julie 69 Ann Lewis 5 “Alternative  Dickens”: The Graphic Adaptation of the Inimitable in The New Yorker 95 Chris Louttit vii

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Contents

Part II Beyond Illustration: Expanded Fields 115 6 Ad-app-tive  Illustration: Or, the Uses of Illustration117 Kamilla Elliott 7 Drawing  from Ozu: An Intermedial Consideration on Clear Line Illustrations Based on Film Frames139 David Pinho Barros 8 Ekphrasis,  Illustration, and Adaptation: Annie Ernaux’s Intermedial Autobiographic and Photographic Production153 Julie LeBlanc 9 The  “Great Image-Maker,” or the Animation of Illustrations in Karel Zeman’s Deadly Invention175 Hélène Martinelli Part III Illustration and Transcultural Adaptation 197 10 The Bobrov Affair: Creating a Graphic Novel Adaptation of a “Lost” Russian-Empire Crime Novel199 Carol Adlam 11 Adapting,  Translating, Illustrating: French Ballads of Reading Gaol in Word and Image217 Xavier Giudicelli 12 What  If the Grimms Had Been Born in Brazil? The Case of Five (Illustrated) Adaptations239 Miriam de Paiva Vieira 13 The  Transcultural Adaptation of The Little Prince to Brazilian Cordel Literature259 Camila Augusta Pires de Figueiredo

Notes on Contributors

Carol Adlam  is a writer and illustrator. She is a part-time Senior Lecturer in Illustration at Nottingham Trent University, and in 2021–2022 is the Mary Amelia Cummins Harvey Visiting Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. She specialises in graphic novels, scripts, short stories, and reportage, and works closely with archives, museums, and universities. She is category winner of the 2018 World Illustration Awards for Research and Knowledge Communication, and her graphic novels and illustrated books include The New Wipers Times (2014), Suzanne’s Story (2014), Ministry of Women (2015), Amy in Love (2016), Chronicles of Dissolution (2016), Thinking Room (2017), Armistice and Legacy (2018). Her forthcoming graphic novel The Russian Detective will be published by Jonathan Cape. In 2020 she was Writer-in-Residence at the University of St Andrews, and her clients include The National Archives, The National Army Museum, Delayed Gratification/The Slow Journalism Magazine, The Guardian, the House of Illustration, and the United Nations. Sophie  Aymes teaches British literature and visual culture at the Université de Bourgogne. Her research focuses on intermediality, modernist book history, printmaking and illustration in twentieth-century Britain. She is co-founder of the network Illustr4tio devoted to Illustration Studies and a member of the Board of IAWIS (International Association of Word and Image Studies). She has co-edited several online journal issues (in the word-and-image journals Interfaces and Image [&] Narrative), three volumes on illustration in the book series Book Practices

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and Textual Itineraries of Université de Lorraine (France), as well as a word-and-image collection (Art and Science in Word and Image: Exploration and Discovery, 2019). David Pinho Barros  (Porto, 1986) is a professor, researcher and curator in the fields of literature, film and comics. He holds a BA in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Porto, an MA in Communication Sciences from the New University of Lisbon, with a ­thesis about New Wave Japanese Cinema, a PhD in Literature from the KU Leuven and a PhD in Literary, Cultural and Interartistic Studies from the University of Porto, with a dissertation elaborated under a cotutelle agreement between both institutions and entitled The Clear Line in Comics and Cinema: A Transmedial Approach. Since 2008, he has worked as a curator and producer of exhibitions and film events in Portugal, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Brazil, and taught film and comics history and analysis at the Alliance Française, at the University of Porto, at the University of Minho, at the New University of Lisbon, and at the Catholic University of Portugal. He is now an assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. Nathalie Collé  is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France. She is the director and an active member of the research group IDEA (Interdisciplinarité Dans les Études Anglophones), and also a member of SHARP (the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing), IAWIS (the International Association for Word and Image Studies), SAIT (Société angliciste Arts, Images, Textes), SELVA (Société d’Étude de la Littérature de Voyage du monde Anglophone), SÉAA XVII–XVIII (Société d’Études Anglo-­Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles), and IJBS (International John Bunyan Society). The author of a doctoral thesis on the illustrated editions of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, she specialises in the illustration of classics of English literature, particularly of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fictional travel literature. The fields covered by her research include book history, print and material culture, reading and reception, text-image relationships, literary afterlives, adaptation, and intermediality. She is the cofounder of the international research network Illustr4tio and the co-founder, co-director and co-editor of Book Practices & Textual Itineraries, a book collection devoted to book history, textual scholarship and illustration studies published at the Presses Universitaires de Nancy— Éditions Universitaires de Lorraine (now EDUL) since 2011.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Kamilla Elliott  is Professor of Literature and Media in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her principal interests lie in relations between British literature of the long nineteenth century and other media (painting, illustration, theatre, film, television, new media). She is co-chair of the Association of Adaptation Studies, and author of Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764–1835 (2012), and Theorizing Adaptation (2020). She is working on a sequel to Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction, continuing the study to 1918. Prior works on illustration include Chapter 2 of Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate and “The Illustrated Book”, in Late Victorian into Modern, 1880–1920 (2016). Camila Augusta Pires de Figueiredo  has a Doctorate in Comparative Literature from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, with a mobility period at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, and Master’s in English Literature in the subarea of Literature, Other Arts and Media. Her research focuses on intermedial studies, with an emphasis on transmedia and adaptations, especially those involving cinema, TV series, and comics. She is the author of Hollywood Goes Graphic: The Intermedial Transposition of Graphic Novels to Films (2010), “Transmedial Collaborative Productions in Secret Path and Airplane Mode” (2018), and co-editor of the volume of translations A intermidialidade e os estudos interartes na arte contemporânea (2020). She currently works at UFMG University Press (Editora UFMG), as editorial manager and vice-director. Xavier Giudicelli  is an associate professor at the English Department of the University of Reims, where he teaches British and American literature as well as translation, and a member of CIRLEP (Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Languages and Thought). His research interests include Oscar Wilde, fin-de-siècle art and literature, word and image studies, as well as questions of rewriting and translation. He authored a monograph entitled Portraits of Dorian Gray (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2016), which proposes an analysis of the illustrated editions of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. He co-edited a collection of essays on The Importance of Being Earnest in 2015 (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne) and edited an issue of Études anglaises on Wilde and the arts in 2016. He has also published essays on contemporary British writer Alan Hollinghurst and is currently working on several translation projects, including a translation of Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play The Invention of Love.

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Julie  LeBlanc  is a full professor in the Department of French and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her research pertains to autobiographical narratives, word and image theories and genetic criticism. She has had numerous research grants from SSHRC, a university federal granting agency, on various topics dealing with her principal fields of inquiry. She is an active member of l’Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ENS, Paris: équipe de recherche Autobiographie et Correspondence). Her more recent funded research project (2015–2020) deals with unpublished illustrated diaries and notebooks of writers and artists of WWI and WWII.  She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters. She has published theoretical and critical books: Genèses de soi: l’écriture du sujet féminin dans quelques journaux d’écrivaines; Énonciation et inscription du sujet: textes et avant-textes de Gilbert La Rocque; Les Masques de Gilbert La Rocque; Narrativité et iconicité au féminin (under review). Her new monograph (Journaux de guerre illustrés, nearing completion) pertains to the intermedial and autobiographical nature of the war diaries/notebooks of writers and artists. She has also edited several thematic volumes of Texte. Revue de théorie et de critiques littéraire, Recherches sémiotiques, Voix et images, Arborescence, and so on pertaining to autobiography, genetic criticism, feminist writings, intermediality, rhetoric and literary theory. Ann Lewis  is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is programme director for BA French Studies, and BA Comparative Literature & Culture. Her research interests centre on eighteenth-­century French literature and text/image relations, especially the illustrated book. She is author of Sensibility, Reading and Illustration: Spectacles and Signs in Graffigny, Marivaux and Rousseau (2009) and has co-edited several collections, most recently: Adapting the Canon: Mediation, Visualization, Interpretation, with Silke Arnold-de Simine (2020); “Picturing the Eighteenth-Century Novel Through Time: Illustration, Intermediality and Adaptation”, with Christina Ionescu (special issue of Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, December 2016) and Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture: Sex, Commerce and Morality, with Markman Ellis (2012). She is currently working on a monograph on the figure of the prostitute in eighteenth-century France. Chris  Louttit  is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He works primarily on the midVictorian novel and its multimedia afterlives. He has published articles and

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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chapters on Dickens’s later illustrators and numerous articles dealing with aspects of the classic novel adaptation in venues such as Adaptation and Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance. A co-editor of special issues of Nineteenth-Century Prose (on Dickens’s non-fiction) and NeoVictorian Studies (on screen Victoriana), his other recent publications include articles on Tim Burton and neo-Victorianism in Gothic Studies and on Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Bohemianism in Women’s Writing. He serves as editor-in-chief of English Studies and is the current vice-president of the Dickens Society. Hélène Martinelli  is a university lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. She has a PhD in comparative literature from the Aix-Marseille University and the Sorbonne University (Dissertation title: “The Practice, Imagination and Poetics of Self-illustration in Central Europe (1909–1939): Alfred Kubin, Josef Váchal and Bruno Schulz”). Her main research topics are Central European literature, book history, illustration and, more recently, adaptation issues. She co-edited the proceedings of the international conference on “Commissioned works in contemporary literature” in the online journal COnTEXTES.  Revue de sociologie de la littérature 29 (Logiques de la commande XXe-XXIe). Kate Newell  is the dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Library Services at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her areas of research include adaptation and intersections of literature and visual culture. She is the author of Expanding Adaptation Networks: From Illustration to Novelization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and has published essays on the topics of adaptation, illustration as adaptation, and intermediality. Miriam de Paiva Vieira  is a professor at the Department of Letters, Arts and Culture at Universidade Federal de São João del Rei, Brazil, as well as a National Council for Scientific and Technological Development Researcher (CNPq/PQ2). Before her postdoctoral fellowship, also funded by CNPq, at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (2018), she was awarded a PhD in Literary Studies by the same institution with mobility funded by Erasmus Mundus at Lunds Universitet, Sweden (2016). She also holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture (1991). She is a member of the International Society for Intermedial Studies, the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AIERTI), and the Centre de recherches intermédiales sur les arts, les lettres et les techniques (CRIalt). She also belongs to Grupo Intermídia: estudos sobre a

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intermidialidade, chaired by Claus Clüver and Thaïs Flores Nogueira Diniz, and is currently the vice-coordinator of Anpoll’s GT: Intermidialidade: Literatura, Artes e Mídias. Vieira has published several articles in Portuguese on ekphrasis, adaptation and the relations between literature, painting and architecture, and some in English. She has edited journal dossiers on intermedial studies and the volumes: Escrita, som, imagem, V.1—leituras ampliadas (2020), and V.2—perspectivas contemporâneas (2019). She is currently co-editing the Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. Her main research interests are comparative literature and intermediality, with emphasis on ekphrasis and the relations between literature and architecture. Shannon Wells-Lassagne  has worked extensively on film and television adaptation. She is the author of Television and Serial Adaptation (2017) and Étudier l’adaptation filmique (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010), and the editor of Adapting Margaret Atwood—The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond (Palgrave, 2021), Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptations (2021), Adapting Endings from Book to Screen (2019), Screening Text (2013), L’adaptation cinématographique: premières pages, premiers plans (Mare et Martin, 2014) and De la page blanche aux salles obscures (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011), as well as special issues of The Journal of Screenwriting, Interfaces, GRAAT, and TV/Series, and special dossiers in Screen and Series. Her works have appeared in journals like Screen, The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Critical Studies in Television, Irish Studies Review, and Journal of Popular Film and Television. She is currently completing a collection on the short form in television narratives.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3

Anna and Elena Balbusso. “Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush.” In Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. The Folio Society, 2013. Frontispiece29 Anna and Elena Balbusso. “Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing field after field at a quick pace.” In Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. The Folio Society, 2013. Facing page 32 32 Anna and Elena Balbusso. “We turn the corner onto a main street … There are other women.” In The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. The Folio Society, 2012. Facing page 30 36 Anna and Elena Balbusso. Cover illustration for The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. The Folio Society, 2012 38 Anna and Elena Balbusso. “You’ll need to paint your face too; I’ve got the stuff for it. You’ll never get in without it.” The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. The Folio Society, 2012. Facing page 238 39 Hugh Madden, Gulliver’s Travels mural, General Register Office in Werburgh Street, Dublin (2017). https://twitter. com/dubcitycouncil/status/ 933703351019196416 (accessed 5 June 2022) 51 Boris Bare and Dominik Vukové, Gulliverian mural, Opatovina Park, Zagreb, Croatia (2016). https://www.journal.hr/ lifestyle/div-­gulliver-­na-­opatovini/ (accessed 5 June 2022) 55 Hector Duarte, “Gulliver en el pais de las Maravillas,” Pilsen, Chicago, 2001–2005. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ pov_steve/244762469/in/photostream/lightbox/ (accessed 5 June 2022) 57 xv

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Fig. 3.4

(a) and (b) Icy & Sot and Sonni, “Gulliver 2.0” mural, Brooklyn, New York, 2014. https://streetartnews. net/2014/06/icy-­sot-­x-­sonni-­gulliver-­20-­new-­mural.html (accessed 5 June 2022) 62 Fig. 4.1 Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki, “Calender Narr.” [Calendar Mania], in the Göttinger Taschen Calender von Jahr 1783 (Göttingen, Lower Saxony: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1782, n.p.). (Reproduced courtesy of the Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, digital collection. Creative Commons CC BY. https:// digitalcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/view/item/1619869)70 Figs. 4.2 The first six of twelve images illustrating Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, designed by Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki and engraved by Daniel Berger for the Genealogischer Calender, displayed on album pages in the British Museum’s collection (Object number 1900.12316440-6451) © The Trustees of the British Museum 80 Figs. 4.3 The last six of twelve images illustrating Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, designed by Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki and engraved by Daniel Berger for the Genealogischer Calender, displayed on album pages in the British Museum’s collection (Object number 1900.12316440-6451) © The Trustees of the British Museum 81 Fig. 4.4 Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki, 8th of 12 illustrations for Julie in the Almanac généalogique pour 1783. (Reproduced courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana) 87 Fig. 5.1 J.B. Handelsman. “‘I beg your pardon,’ said Alice, ‘but which of you is the Democrat?’ The New Yorker (16 December 1991), p. 42 100 Fig. 5.2 J.B. Handelsman. “Alternative Dickens: Sydney Carton Refuses to Go to the Guillotine without his Cat.” The New Yorker (20 May 1991), p. 46 103 Fig. 5.3 Frederick Barnard. “Sydney Carton”. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Cassell and Company, 1896. n.p. Author’s collection 104 Fig. 5.4 J.B. Handelsman. “Alternative Dickens: Tiny Tim, Who Did Not Die, Grows up to Marry Little Nell, Who Did Not Die, Either.” The New Yorker (7 October 1991), p. 86 106 Fig. 7.1 Frame from the film The Only Son (1936) which inspired Adrian Tomine’s illustration (© Yasujirô Ozu 2022) 143 Fig. 7.2 Painting Mariko Okada / Scene from An Autumn Afternoon (2015) (© Bren Luke 2022) 145

  List of Figures 

Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4

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Frame from the film An Autumn Afternoon (1962) which inspired Bren Luke’s illustration (© Yasujirô Ozu 2022) 146 Illustrations inspired by frames of Yasujirô Ozu’s films, made for Le Minimalisme (2016) (© Jochen Gerner & Christian Rosset / Dargaud-Lombard S.A. 2022) 147 Illustrations inspired by Hergé’s album Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, made for Le Minimalisme (2016) (© Jochen Gerner & Christian Rosset / Dargaud-­Lombard S.A. 2022) 149 Photograph of Annie Ernaux as a young child taken from her “Photodiary” (Écrire la vie, 20) 159 Four photographs published as one single image in Annie Ernaux’s “Photodiary » (Écrire la vie, 21) 160 A still from the YouTube video of J. Champagne’s theatrical adaptation of The Years. http://cie-­theatreecoute.com/ les-­annees.html (page accessed June 14, 2022) 161 A manuscript page of The Years. It is hand-written and annotated by Annie Ernaux. Fonds Annie Ernaux, Bibliothèque nationale de France, cote NAF 28647, boîtes 18–19. (The digital photograph that I took of the manuscript is paginated: « 62 Ter ». I am extremely grateful to Annie Ernaux for her generosity and more notably her permission to reproduce this manuscript) 170 Back-cup island. Illustration by Léon Benett for Jules Verne, Face au drapeau. Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel, 1896, p. 97. Gallica183 Engine room. Karel Zeman, Vynález Zkazy, 83 min., Filmové Studio Gottwaldov, Československý Státní Film, 1958 (2015), 38:23. Karel Zeman Museum 184 Cross-section view at water level. Illustration by Édouard Riou for Jules Verne, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin, 1871, p. 425. Gallica 186 Collage. Karel Zeman, Vynález Zkazy, 83 min., Filmové Studio Gottwaldov, Československý Státní Film, 1958, 1:01:21. Karel Zeman Museum 187 Carol Adlam, 2019. The Bobrov Affair. Prologue 207 Carol Adlam, 2019. The Bobrov Affair. Map of the Ruslanov house; glass roof 209 Carol Adlam, 2020b. The Bobrov Affair. The Investigator takes a wrong turn 212 Carol Adlam, 2020b. The Bobrov Affair. The censor’s mark; embedded text 214

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List of Figures

Fig. 11.1 Jean-Gabriel Daragnès, frontispiece (woodcut) for Ballade de la geôle de Reading par C.3.3., trans. and preface Henry-D. Davray, Paris: Léon Pichon, 1918 (University College, Oxford: The Robert Ross Memorial Collection, Ross c.35). (Courtesy of The Master and Fellows of University College Oxford) Fig. 11.2 Jean-Gabriel Daragnès, woodcut preceding stanza 7 of section III of Ballade de la geôle de Reading par C.3.3., trans. and preface Henry-D. Davray, Paris: Léon Pichon, 1918 (University College, Oxford: The Robert Ross Memorial Collection, Ross c.35). (Courtesy of The Master and Fellows of University College Oxford) Fig. 11.3 Jean-Georges Cornélius, engraving facing p. VII, Oscar Wilde. La Ballade de la geôle de Reading, trans. and preface Henry-D. Davray, Paris: Javal et Bourdeaux, 1927 (University College, Oxford: The Robert Ross Memorial Collection, Ross c.3). (Courtesy of The Master and Fellows of University College Oxford) Fig. 11.4 Engraving facing title page, Oscar Wilde. La Ballade de la geôle de Reading, trans. and preface Henry-D. Davray, Paris: Javal et Bourdeaux, 1927 (University College, Oxford: The Robert Ross Memorial Collection, Ross c.3). (Courtesy of The Master and Fellows of University College Oxford) Fig. 12.1 Cinderella crying in the kitchen after her step family leaves for the ball without her. Agostinho, Cristina, and Ronaldo Coelho. Cinderela e Chico Rei. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 2015, 8–9. Watercolor. Fig. 12.2 Afra takes a pot of stew to apologize. Agostinho, Cristina, and Ronaldo Coelho. Afra e os três lobos-guarás. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 2013a, 12–13. Watercolor. Fig. 12.3 Pequeno Polegar’s house with Serra da Capivara on the bottom left and the Jamelão fruits on the top right. Agostinho, Cristina, and Ronaldo Coelho. O pequeno polegar. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 2019, 2–3. Watercolor. Fig. 12.4 Native animals. Agostinho, Cristina, and Ronaldo Coelho. O pequeno polegar. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 2019, 5; 15. Watercolor. Fig. 13.1 Cordel Literature prints. (Photo: Diego Dacal, CC BY-SA 2.0. Wikimedia Commons)

229

230

232

233

246 248

250 251 266

  List of Figures 

Fig. 13.2 (a) and (b) Front cover and opening pages of a chapter. Limeira, Josué. O Pequeno Príncipe em Cordel. Illustr. Vladimir Barros. 2.ed. Recife: Cativar, 2017, cover; p. 18-19. Art design by the artist. (Reproduced with permission of the artist) Fig. 13.3 Characters and other elements compared: on the left, Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations; in the middle, Barros’s illustrations; on the right, objects/events that served as references for Barros. (Source: Limeira, Josué. O Pequeno Príncipe em Cordel. Illustr. Vladimir Barros. 2.ed. Recife: Cativar, 2017, p. 21, 71, 76, 113, 64. Art design by the artist. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photos: Prefeitura de Olinda, Carnaval 2010, CC BY 2.0. Maracatus de Baque Solto and Carnaval de Pernambuco; Raul Romario/iStock. Cactos mandacaru de flor; Petyson Antonio, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pomba Asa Branca)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Circulation of Images— Illustration, Adaptation and the Global Turn Sophie Aymes and Shannon Wells-Lassagne

This collection of essays examines the relationship between illustration and adaptation from an intermedial and transcultural perspective. It aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between two fields that co-exist without necessarily acknowledging advances in each other’s domains. It provides an argument for defining illustration as a form of adaptation as well as an intermedial practice that redefines what we mean by adaptation. The contributors explore how crossovers may be instrumental in reappraising the objects they scrutinize and their theoretical remits. The essays provide original perspectives by prominent authors, young scholars and practitioners. They rely on a transmedial and interdisciplinary corpus that allows us to explore the boundaries between illustration and other media such as texts, graphic novels, comics, theatre, film and mobile applications. Arguably, adaptation, like intermediality, is an umbrella term that covers a variety of practices and products, and both of them have been shaped by intense debates over their boundaries and internal definitions. Illustration

S. Aymes (*) • S. Wells-Lassagne Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_1

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belongs to each of these areas and what this volume proposes is an insight into how illustration not only relates to adaptation and intermediality, but how each field is redefined, enriched and also challenged by such interactions.

The Circulation of Images: Illustration in an Expanded Field Images travel. In the first half of the fifteenth century, new conditions for their reproduction emerged. Prints in the shape of woodcuts and metal engravings started circulating across Europe before Gutenberg’s invention of metal mobile-type printing. Copying, borrowing, reprising were common practices that phased in very creative ways into the newly developing print culture, whilst the pre-existing scribal culture of the illuminated manuscript was still thriving (Lepape; Parshall and Schoch; Raven and Proot). The second half of the century saw an even greater variety of usages since images in prints circulated as autonomous pictures—whose verso sometimes bore the later addition of a manuscript text—and were also variously pasted into manuscripts and incunabula, sometimes combined with illuminations. As Alberto Milano and many others have underlined, such itineraries and their extensions produced their own dynamics of change but also intersected with “chains of copies and translations along which the composition format and meaning of images changed as they were adapted to new contexts”, a process which bypassed national borders (Milano 152). Those de- and recontextualizing processes continued in later eras, especially in the nineteenth century when a large number of those pictures were typically taken from the books that hosted them and transferred into new museum collections along a nationalistic agenda (Rudy; Tran). Traditionally illustration has been defined in relation to books and texts. This association has shaped the narrow definition of the term within the compass of the Western history of the codex and its evolving editorial chains of production, and it is more specifically associated with a conception that became prevalent from the second quarter of the nineteenth century (Male 2019, 3). Yet, as shown by late mediaeval and early modern prints, illustrative pictures are not necessarily made after a written text. However, the prevalent number of preserved books in comparison to other early printed matter has probably been instrumental in shaping the

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traditional vision of illustration as being text-bound. The much larger amount of jobbing that served a variety of social, religious and commercial purposes has been lost due to its ephemeral nature (Raven and Proot 150–58), a factor which may also account for the notion that illustrations are to be found within the pages of a book as tipped-in plates or in-text pictures. Like the concept of adaptation, illustration is a historical construct. Its semantic apparition was predated by older processes of reprise, recontextualization and translation, but it reflected major shifts in attitudes to authorship, originality and imitation at the turn of the nineteenth century. As Evanghélia Stead has observed, the modern and technical meaning of the word “illustration” first appeared in England in the 1810s. It became prevalent across Europe in the 1840s as the illustrator’s status was shifting (Stead 2012, 77–78) and the professionalization of the trade reflected the changing editorial division of labour in the publishing industry. The term still encapsulated the early meaning of illumination derived from the Latin “illustrare”, “putting into light”, “clarifying” and “providing a commentary”, which also accorded the illustrated topic, narrative or character the quality of being “illustrious” (77), and therefore part of a canon. The etymological meaning has been retained, as shown by Alan Male’s contemporary definition of illustration as “the only discipline within the realm of the visual arts and communications that explains or elucidates information” (Male 2007, 90). Nineteenth-century technological, editorial and cultural factors shaped the ambivalent status of illustrators. As interpreters, their autonomy was challenged by their perceived ancillary relation to the text and its author. However, from the 1880s the introduction of photomechanical process contributed to increase their artistic freedom, a shift which is mirrored by the use of new terms to refer to illustration as embellishment, interpretation and critical commentary (Stead 2012, 83–89; Elliott 2016, 539–40; Kaenel 124; Kooistra 2). And yet, as Julia Thomas stresses, actual practices belied the idea of “the book being the primary partner” (Thomas 618), since authors sometimes wrote to pictures and the reception of texts was crucially influenced by illustrations. Turn-of-the-century technological experimentations and improvements aimed to guarantee the best possible reproduction of originals, which displaced the issue of fidelity as faithfulness to the text. Reproducibility remained one of the defining features of illustrations, as reflected by Laurence Housman’s article in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which dwells on the technical aspects of the “transference of

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one idea from one medium to another” (321) and is based on the default notion that illustration accompanies a printed text. Half a century later, David Bland placed illustration on a continuum from looser to closer association to a text, seamlessly subjecting the lesser or greater independence of the illustrator to his “ability to control the medium of reproduction” (14). Yet he also recorded the shift from book illustration to advertising and commercial art (109–11). Arguably, the recognition of the artist’s creative role in modern design as it developed in the first half of the twentieth century not only created new outlets, but also fostered the cross-over from book illustration to commercial jobs. This enacted a shift away from medium specificity in the sense that it loosened the association of illustration with the printed literary text. This trend was reinforced with the post-war move into cross-­disciplinary multimedia practices, and it was given renewed impetus by the postmodern revaluation of canonic works, as well as by the digital revolution. As Whitney Sherman underlines, the digital turn ushered in an unprecedented “expansion beyond print” (462) whereby illustrators “gained a hitherto unknown position of authorship over their creative work. The opening up and cross-pollination of traditional markets and dissolution of discipline boundaries liberated practitioners to explore new directions in their editorial art, picture books, self-published ‘zines, surface design, and a concept art for films and gallery-specific works” (463). Published in the recent History of Illustration (2019), which aims to give the “first global overview of illustration practices from before the development of written language to the digital age” (Doyle, Grove and Sherman xiv), Sherman’s assessment of the changing role of contemporary illustration reflects the extended definition which our volume embraces. Generally speaking, illustration is “visual communication through pictorial means” (xvii); and more precisely, it is “pictorial communication that is designed to give insight, clarification, commentary, and reflection on ideas, information, and narratives” whatever the medium (Hoogslag and Sherman 500). It may refer to a written or spoken text, but the term also applies to independent productions (Doyle, Grove and Sherman xvii). Thus, the digital turn has triggered the emergence of a new narrative of “emancipation” (Walther 322) whereby illustration’s traditional function of depiction and supplementation has been revised in terms of

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augmentation and appropriation.1 The changing status of illustrators is related to a number of factors such as the affordances provided by digital media and the creative industries, the new division of labour entailed by the introduction of desktop publishing (314–15), the restructuring of publishing corporations into transnational media conglomerates (Hemmungs Wirtén 364–68; Jenkins 11), the rise of stock art (Male 2007, 5), the creation of new curricula in art schools2 and the shifting patterns of consumption and dissemination of images. This (non-exhaustive) list dovetails with contemporary definitions of media and artistic productions as networked and converging practices. Nanette Hoogslag and Whitney Sherman have stressed that the language of illustration “is undergoing remediation: converging with other media traditions and technologies, adjusting or continuing existing practices, and transforming into new hybrid forms” (486). A case in point is the career of the illustrator, graphic novelist and teacher Andrzej Klimowski who has navigated different school curricula and cultures (Klimowski 29) by working as a poster designer in Poland, a book cover artist for Faber & Faber, Everyman Library and Oberon Books in Britain, and who has witnessed how the market for book illustrators working for independent publishing houses has been shrinking (38–40). As a printmaker and graphic artist, he adapted to demand at a time when digital media began to offer “almost infinite possibilities of image manipulation” (26). Rather than mere interpreters, illustrators have become “authorstrator[s]” (Male 2019, 9) who advertise their independence and authorship whilst the images they produce are no longer defined by their reproducibility but by their fitness for a diversity of 1  Legal reality (the existence of equal copyright for instance) is often obscured by the fact that “traditional hierarchies deriving from academic discourse” survive in the book industry where “editorial and publishing parties often hail from the humanities” (Walther 308; see Murray 18). The editors, as well as the majority of contributors to this volume, are academics specializing in literary and visual studies, whose contribution aims to show that such hierarchies are being fruitfully questioned in academia. 2  Alan Male points to the changes in art and design undergraduate education, namely the “reduction of overtly vocational emphasis with subjects such as studio-based illustration practice now integrated with professional practice studies and contextual, historical and cultural studies”, generating the ability to multitask, independence, transferable skills, research in field of expertise, in a word, “a breadth of intellectual and practical skills” (Male 2007 11; 112). The definition of illustration overlaps with that of graphic design which, according to Andrzej Klimowski, provides its general context (8). Male brings illustration within an equally broad scope, but discriminates between graphic design and illustration, in spite of “occasional overlap” (2007, 10).

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platforms across the “creative, media, and communication industries” (7). Unconfined to book/literary illustration, contemporary illustrators engage in a large variety of practices exemplifying their “multi-disciplinary, authorial and polymath-driven focus” (4). Some of these specificities are reflected in Chap. 10 which offers insight into Carol Adlam’s creative and academic work as an instance of the mixed skills of artists-cum-researchers and which provides a stimulating example of practice-led research. Taking into account the material, institutional and economic status of illustrators ties in with Simone Murray’s Bourdieusan approach to adaptation as an industry. Taking its cue from her plea to consider the sociology of adaptation as a cultural field (7, 12), this volume gives pride of place to production contexts and materiality. The recognition that illustration is “in a state of flux and transition” (Male 2019, 4), the fluid self-definition of illustrators whose transferable skills allow them to gain expertise in a variety of different areas, from book illustration to advertising, animation, or filmmaking, is one aspect of a more general trend that also accounts for the development of adaptation studies. Such an expanded definition of illustration is not only related to the social history of the publishing industry and of illustrators—whose careers are rarely taken into account by art history and usually carefully differentiated from those of book artists –, but is also contemporary with the rise of new media, the development of intermedial studies, and subsequently of adaptation studies.

Overlapping Fields, Convergence and Specificity The present volume takes into account the specific meaning of illustration when it is anchored to a text, as well as its expanded definition as a type of visual art that is no longer necessarily text-bound and has expanded beyond print. As such, it adopts the perspective of the scholars involved in Illustr4tio3 who co-organized with this book’s editors the 2019 international conference Illustration and Adaptation at the Université de Bourgogne (Dijon, France) where specialists from different disciplines were invited to exchange on practice, methodology and theoretical frameworks. The event was motivated by the observation that if illustration is a legitimate object of study within intermedial studies (see Rippl), 3  Illustr4tio is an international network devoted to illustration and co-founded by Sophie Aymes, Nathalie Collé, Brigitte Friant-Kessler and Maxime Leroy. See the website: https:// illustrationetwork.wordpress.com.

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there were few publications that investigated the status of illustration as adaptation, with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as the work of Kamilla Elliott (2003, 2017) and Kate Newell (2017a, 2017b). The conference also aimed to look at how the conceptualisation of illustration introduces questions about the relationship between adaptation and intermediality, a starting point for analysing the intersection of the two domains, which Lars Elleström calls for in his essay “Adaptation and Intermediality”— although, as Ann Lewis and Silke Arnold-de Simine point out, “not all types of intermediality correspond to forms of adaptation” (5). Arguably illustration is a species in the family of adaptations, and adaptation, in the sense of Irina Rajewsky’s “medial transposition” (55), is in turn subsumed by intermediality as an “umbrella term” (Rippl 10). Within this broad ensemble, adaptation is, if we follow Simone Murray, the “unifying discipline at the centre of contemporary communication studies” (24) and illustration is one of the “points of entry” into the networks generated by adaptive practices, to borrow Henry Jenkins’s expression applying to transmedia storytelling (97). This poses institutional and theoretical questions: do illustration studies get diluted in adaptation studies? How is each field redefined, enriched and also challenged by their mutual interactions? Generally speaking, the necessity to define the boundaries of illustration and adaptation as expanded fields is correlated to the fear of seeing them dissolved (Leitch 15), and many authors have underlined the difficulty inherent in “trans-theoretical principles” to which adaptation can never fully conform (Elliott 2017, 682). One of the most significant similarities between illustration and adaptation is the fact that the relation to their sources has long served as a default definition for both fields and practices, which has accounted for their neglect in literary studies, as Kamilla Elliott points out (2016, 539; see also Thomas). Authority and canonicity are key values pertaining to sources that have shaped the fields of illustration and adaptation. Their perceived ancillary position, their inferior status as “substitute[s]” and “duplicate[s]”, and the debates over fidelity to the source text are common denominators (Walther 307; Jellenik 2017a, 38–39; Newell 2017a, 478–80). Such labelling has arguably even been more disparaging in the case of illustration (Leroy § 3–4). Yet each of them has also defined its growing field of application according to a logic of empowerment, freeing them respectively from association with print, and from the interaction between film and fiction. Emancipation has also been called for in intermedial studies. Discussing the fruitful links between intermediality and

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post-colonial studies, Gabriele Rippl observes that the former “touches upon notions of hierarchy, superiority, and legitimacy in the field of cultural representation” (14). Contesting one-way relationships with hypotexts has opened a wider horizon of application, and foregrounded the ability to revise, subvert and appropriate the objects that are illustrated and adapted within cross-cultural and dynamic networks. Arguably, illustration provides an archaeology of adaptation as an interactive model. Illustration’s specific meaning, historically related to print culture, implies the existence of a source, an anchorage shared with adaptation which, to follow Julie Sanders, “signals a relationship with an informing source text or original” (26), although illustration and adaptation have different temporalities and modes of reception. As a simple contrastive way of depicting these differences, it has been argued that illustration has a shorter lifespan (Klimowski 41) and that it “can be omitted without loss of […] content” (Walther 307; see Kooistra 9). It is also instantly recognizable because of its medial and material manifestation, and it is construed as a specific individual response to the source text in the form of a motionless image. On the other hand, adaptation implies an extended engagement with a source (Hutcheon 170), a large variety of media manifestations, as well as a greater degree of intertextual and interpictorial knowledge on the part of the receiver who relates to an “unrestricted network” (Cutchins and Perry 7). Yet, as shown in our section devoted to graphic afterlives, the circulation of iconic images ensures their diachronic survival in a way that forces us to qualify such assumptions about the synchronic brevity and dispensability of illustrations. As Nathalie Collé demonstrates in Chap. 3, when the connection with the illustrated text becomes looser, there is a greater reliance on audience knowledge and on a limited corpus of iconic images in order to secure recognition (see also Figueiredo and Vieira 15). This reductive trend is particularly visible in their commodification as spin-offs, or “image-objects”, to use the more precise term proposed by Brigitte Friant-Kessler in relation to visual Sterneana (657). However, if the “derivativeness” of illustrations (Newell 2018, 255) may render the spotting of references and allusions problematic, as shown here by Ann Lewis in the context of “parallel illustration” (see Dillard), it is also the condition for their autonomy. This is even more pregnant in the case of the illustrations based on film frames explored by David Pinho Barros in Chap. 7, an authorial practice that further questions the subservience of illustration to narrative climaxes. As independent images, illustrations become

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“self-reliant” works, definitely shedding their status of quasi-“assisting work”, to use Elleström’s labels (519). Illustration and adaptation are thus as much defined by their interpretive practices as by their reception and their temporal and spatial extensions, since the readers/viewers will pick points of entry into an adaptive web regardless of chronological sequence. They will also appropriate its archival system, “transferring [narratives, characters and themes] from the potentiality of the archive into active memory through public circulation” (Lewis and Arnold 3). Since the advent of the cinema, illustrations are no longer the sole pictures that shape their initial responses in the realm of print culture,4 since the readers/viewers’ entry points may be located anywhere in the network. Therefore, responding to an original (textual or visual) work proves more problematic as the sources may get “diluted” in the sheer number of adaptations (Gabilliet 13). Paradoxically this destabilizing of the aura of the original contributes to the consolidation of cultural memory as well as of a personal “complex” (Cutchins and Perry 13). Not only do illustrations provide forms of recontextualization according to “shifting frames of reference” (Leroy §7; see Sanders 45–46; Jellenik 2017b), but their relocation in the case of graphic afterlives involves an evocation of their source in absentia, as Friant-Kessler has argued, which is “more of a way to memorialise than to illustrate” (650; 658). Illustrations are nodes within adaptive webs, and they partake of the consolidation and appropriation of the canon (Sanders 8–9), be it visual or textual. As such they acquire a form of authority, as underlined by Newell apropos the “consensus as to what ‘counts’ as Frankenstein” for instance (Newell 2018, 240), although their autonomy and successive relocations also threaten their status as illustrations with a form of figurative exhaustion (Tran n.p.). One of the most fruitful benefits of studying illustration as adaptation is to map out illustrative networks as partaking of the constant reconfiguration of adaptive webs, and to envisage the mutual influence of source and target rather than their linear supersession (Bruhn; Leitch; Elleström; Elliott 2003). As Trung Tran shows in his analysis of networked illustration and reprised engravings, a potential pictorial interpretation is actualized by the context and by the illustration’s new fictional and narrative co-text (n.p.). This invites us to consider the unfinishedness 4  We are aware that this restrictive view omits the performative arts: the theatre is one of the first sites of adaptations, as in the case of Frankenstein whose first illustrations adapted the stage performances (Gabilliet; Newell 2018).

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and open-endedness of sources, a stance explored in the  volume The Unfinished Book coedited by Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch, who stress that “a material object does not end at the moment of its manufacture, any more than its intellectual history does” (6). A source is indeed a work or object that contains and calls for potential responses. The circulation and relocation of illustrations—whether source-bound or autonomous—remain abstract processes if their contexts of production and materiality are disregarded. In the wake of Murray’s plea for an industry-­centric and material analysis of adaptation in publishing, Christina Ionescu ponders the reluctance to include book illustration within adaptation studies (144–45) and advocates the view that “text-to-illustrated-­ book adaptation is fashioned by a network of forces acting in specialized roles” at the “textual, artistic, material, and editorial” levels (145). As underlined by Chris Louttit in this volume, this should not only apply to book illustration, but to all types of medial contexts. The reluctance to take into account the embodiment and embeddedness of illustrative images as adaptive practices may stem from the wariness to reopen the vexed question of medium specificity. Yet a recognition of illustration studies may entice specialists of adaptation to qualify the call for top-down theorization by taking into account “medial specificities” (Rajewsky 53) in a non-essentialist way. In this respect, specialists of book illustration and of book history are used to working at the intersection of top-down and bottom-up perspectives. In a stimulating fashion, Elleström advocates “placing adaptation in a wider-ranging context of media interrelations” (509) and defining it as “a sort of transmediation” whereby “a medium represents again, but in a different way, some characteristics that have already been represented by another kind of medium” (512). Significantly, he stresses that this involves moving beyond the narrow definition of adaptation as “transfer of narrative traits” (517)—a stance that justifies the move away from fidelity criticism and from the emphasis on salient plot elements both in illustration and adaptation studies. For instance, looking at the illustrated book as a qualified medium and a multimodal object involves an awareness of how its constituent elements should be broken down (522), since “a qualified medium in its entirety can’t be adapted” (519). The multimediality of the illustrated book may therefore be examined according to which elements have been adapted or have prompted future adaptations, the text, the illustrations and the other material component of an edition, as exemplified by Ionescu’s analysis of different editions of Candide (145; see also

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Gillespie and Lynch 7–8). Disentangling the constitutive elements that characterize the material and cultural embeddedness of contingent objects of study provides a way of discriminating between what can be transferred and what needs to be adapted.5

Transcultural Illustration, Adaptation and Cross-Fertilization Illustration and adaptation are media-crossing practices with transformative and recontextualizing functions that can be described by using the topographical and territorial metaphors that permeate many fields such as intermedial studies (Englund), the anthropology of images (Belting), book studies and media studies. For instance, in their discussion of new approaches applied to media technologies, Pablo J.  Boczkowski and Ignacio Siles move beyond the alternative between “production or consumption” and “content or material dimensions”, advocating “a cosmopolitan perspective”, as opposed to “intellectual insularity” (56–57). De- and re-territorializing metaphors prove especially apt for the politics of empowerment at work in the fields of illustration, translation and adaptation in the wake of the post-colonial remapping of cross-cultural exchanges between centre and periphery (see Rukavina). Of course, every disciplinary, practical and theoretical domain defines its own objects of study. Illustration is not quite the same object for specialists of literary studies, of adaptation studies and of intermediality, for the book historian, the art historian and the artist. It is however fruitful to consider how “cognate fields” (Murray 16) provide reciprocal insights. As suggested at the beginning of this introduction, illustration, adaptation and book studies share methodological outlooks borne out by the expansion of their respective fields. For instance, the template of the communications circuit initiated by such book historians as Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier is contemporary with the transnational perspectives offered by global history studies (Raven 17; Chartier; Darnton). Placing illustration within the ambit of adaptation allows for a form of decentring, stretching out its meaning and remit in a manner that is conversant with the transnational turn in book history (see Shep). Publications such as Isabel Hofmeyr’s The Portable Bunyan (2004), Robert Fraser and Mary 5  This refers to Brian McFarlane’s distinction between transfer and adaptation taken up by Elleström (521).

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Hammond’s edited collection Books without Borders (2008), Alison Rukavina’s The Development of the International Book Trade, 1870–1895: Tangled Networks (2010), Boehmer et  al.’s Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices (2017) and Gillespie and Lynch’s edited volume The Unfinished Book (2020) have opened up new perspectives for research beyond narrow national and Western boundaries. If Frankenstein has become a by-word for adaptation networks (Baillon et al.; Cutchins and Dennis; Grossman), The Pilgrim’s Progress is a prototypical case for the transnational and transcultural itineraries of books. Building on Hofmeyr’s notion of the “transportability of the text”, Collé has examined how the circulation of its “wayfaring images” (636) contributes to expand the definition of illustration. Following the itineraries of such pictures, their border-­crossing and multiple remediations, tracing their intertextual and interpictorial circuits, observing their modes of consumption by global audiences should complement and converse with analyses of their contingent embeddedness. This is not to say that we oppose boundlessness to rootedness, but, as Stead has underlined, we need to adjust to objects (2017, 10) and to their materiality as providing “connective tissues” between communities (12). Adaptation encapsulates the “contingencies [that] define both act and product for the culture that produces and consumes them” (Jellenik 2017a, 44). This volume examines processes of cross-fertilization from an intercultural perspective that takes into account the proximity between illustration, adaptation and translation as emblematic of its interdisciplinary approach. Many contributors to this volume voyage across disciplines and explore transnational transfers, sometimes taking us away from well-­ travelled territory to under-studied cultural areas, and more specifically reflecting the stimulating perspective of scholars who extend the linguistic and textual remit of translation to cultural adaptation. As shown by Johannes Fehrle and Mark Schmitt, the linguistic and textual meaning of translation can be fruitfully extended to adaptation as a cultural practice. The relation between source and target can be spatialized as one between origin and destination (n.p.). We are aware of warnings that the model of translation as reductive one-to-one comparison should be definitely relegated. A landmark publication in the field of illustration studies shows however that the comparative model proves particularly fruitful in the case of illustrated translations: the special issue “Imago and translation” edited by Evanghélia Stead and Hélène Védrine in Word & Image, looks at cross-­ border translation in a literal and metaphorical way. In particular, Nathalie

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Ferrand’s article “Translating and Illustrating the Eighteenth-Century Novel” shows that “translation seems to generate images” (181)—whose role was crucial to enhance reception and secure foreign readerships in the period under study—and that illustration and translation shared similar constraints and an ambivalent status. The tension between their creative and reproductive roles (183) tied in with the semantic changes affecting the word “adaptation” itself, from passive faculty of suitability to active transformation (Jellenik 2017a, 39–40). The generative function of translation and adaptation is also underlined by Clive Scott who stresses that, “[s]ources are nomadic texts, in search of themselves […]. In a word, then, translation/adaptation does not recuperate meaning, but generates sense [i.e. addresses the sense], as it generates the future of the source” (25).

Afterlives The first section of this volume focuses on some of the more canonical works and their afterlives in autonomous illustrations which represent a previously existing text (or a key moment or aesthetic from that text) but have been placed in a new context. Implicit in this section, then, is the complex balance to be struck between the source text and its illustration, more or less independent from its inspiration, and how this new context offers new perspectives while enriching that initial relationship. Each author has chosen well-known sources, whose unmistakeable presence in the zeitgeist foregrounds the specificities of its new visual renditions, offered here in varying forms that subsequently change their context and their effect. Kate Newell’s study of the Balbussos’ depictions of Pride and Prejudice and The Handmaid’s Tale offers a case study examining how illustrations participate in a tradition of visual interpretation of a given narrative (what she refers to as “inwardly-directed adaptations”), while also testifying to the changing reception of that text (where the adaptation is directed outwards, toward its audience and contemporaneous works). Ironically, it is in their work on the more recent novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, that the Balbussos offer an example of how in-text illustrations may function significantly differently from a stand-alone poster form. Nathalie Collé continues this examination of stand-alone images in her analysis of different murals based on Gulliver’s Travels, focusing on the ways that the text’s considerations are adapted not only to a new medium or material, but to the context of this new time and place. However large the hero’s Lilliputian stature may loom in these new artworks, it is also securely tied

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to the needs of the contemporary artist and audience, taking on new political meaning that literally impacts the audience where he or she lives. Ann Lewis examines a remediation of another well-known text separated in both time and space from its illustrations. Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki’s illustrations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) in the Genealogischer Calender auf das Jahr 1783 (the calendar of the Berlin Academy) differ from our traditional conception of book-based illustrations not only in their physical and cultural separation from their source text, but, as Lewis notes, in their proximity to one another, becoming a sequence or a Hogarthian “progress” that offers new readings of the classic text (that may diverge from one viewer to the next according to their own status as knowledgeable readers). Finally, Chris Louttit’s analysis of J.B.  Handelsman’s “Alternative Dickens” illustrations in The New  Yorker reminds us how the Victorian novelist’s own talent for the grotesque has founded a veritable tradition of satirical cartooning, adapting iconic words and scenes to suit the needs of twenty-first century readers. Beyond this, however, Louttit offers this case study as a means of exploring the specificities of the cartoon, “a particularly fluid, intermedial form which adapts other images and texts in distinctive and often hilariously excessive ways”.

Beyond Illustration: Expanded Fields Our second section extends this idea of re-interpreting one’s source through its illustrations, focusing more particularly on the relationship between the illustration and new media. Kamilla Elliott builds on her work in the landmark Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate to examine new interactive apps of Alice in Wonderland. One of the more fascinating ideas behind this analysis is that the apps are both archive and playground, offering easy access to the original texts, illustrations and historical context, while allowing the reader to become a user, an active participant in creating action for the illustrated characters. The dialogue between these two functions is represented by examples like Alice for the Ipad that sometimes exaggerate the archaisms of the original source and its illustrations, foregrounding its own innovations as well as the canonicity of the text as venerable heritage. Ultimately, Elliott finds that the pleasure of play and the accessibility of narratives and images new and old means new possibilities for interaction; but these experiments are ultimately stymied by an all-too-familiar reverence for the text that recreates the hierarchies of

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source and visual adaptation. David Pinho Barros focuses on the visual in his discussion of clear line illustrations based on the films of Yasujirô Ozu; rather than the traditional “entryway paratext” of the film poster used for marketing a new release, his examples are adaptations of a well-known director and his work, offering through their images an a posteriori understanding of Ozu as a “clear line director”. In so doing, Pinho Barros suggests, the illustrators offer an implicit but convincing argument in their reading of the filmmaker and his creative principles, regardless of their mode of publication (as independent works or DVD covers for re-release), confirming Elliott’s claim in the previous chapter that “adaptation is a mode of criticism”. Julie LeBlanc uses genetic criticism to examine the intermedial impact of the photographs that inspired Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical work Les Années/The Years and were only published years after this ekphrastic work. LeBlanc’s chapter was influenced by and interpreted through the theatrical adaptation of Ernaux’s Years, where the photos become part and parcel of the play, featuring these images alongside images and music from the periods being discussed. In this way, the complex relationship between text and image, where the images precede and inspire the text, but are discovered after the fact by the reader, is dramatized and foregrounded by the performance. Finally, Hélène Martinelli analyses Czech film director Karl Zeman’s use of various illustrations of Jules Verne in his film Deadly Invention (Vynález zkázy, 1958), arguing that it adapts Pierre-Jules Hetzel’s engravings of the text more than it does the ostensible source. In a move that reverses the intermedial shift from moving to static images analysed by Barros, the Vernian illustrations are animated and integrated into the live-action of Zeman’s hybrid film. By doing so, Martinelli argues, Zeman ultimately bypasses the dichotomy of text and source, and comes close to what she refers to as an “animated book”.

Illustration and Transcultural Adaptation Martinelli’s analysis of Verne’s importance in Czech culture provides a transition with our final section, which highlights the way in which illustrations may be crucial in adapting the source to a new cultural context, the extent to which illustration is in fact translation and also thrives as a form of hybridization. Carol Adlam offers a practitioner’s perspective, recounting her adaptation of Russian author Semyon Panov’s nineteenth-­ century crime novel Tri suda, ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala [Three Courts, or

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Murder During the Ball] into a graphic novel entitled The Bobrov Affair. By making evocative choices in her adaptation of an unstable and fragmentary text, Adlam confirms her belief that adaptation can be a political choice, adding a subplot to increase psychological realism, while including imagery (such as mirrors and masks) and anachronisms to contradict expectations of fidelity, be it to the period or the source. In so doing, she deepens the Western reader’s understanding of Russian literature and culture, as well as sublimating the possibilities of the graphic novel for her narrative. Xavier Giudicelli’s study of French editions of Oscar Wilde’s Ballads of Reading Gaol centres on the idea of translation as a means of clarifying the relationship between adaptation and illustration. He offers Henry Durand-Davray’s translation from ballad to prose poem as an example of domestication, shaped by his own attachment to Symbolist aesthetics, and analyses the illustrations as informed not only by Wilde or its translation, but by the experiences of the artists and their reading of the text, arguing that this web of influences and sources call for a more rhizomatic vision of these renditions of the Ballad. Miriam Vieira and Camila Augusta Pires de Figueiredo both examine the transcultural adaptation of children’s literature in Brazil. Vieira investigates publishing house Mazza Edições’s re-centred versions of classic fairy tales by Grimm or Perrault, which focus on what Julie Sanders refers to as “proximation” (21) to facilitate identification between the Brazilian target audience and the illustrated text. While the texts and their fluid nature lend themselves to a new cultural transposition, Figueiredo’s study of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le petit prince/The Little Prince takes on both a well-known text and long-iconic illustrations of that tale that are integrated into the imagery and aesthetics of cordel literature. The variety of sources, media, approaches and cultures in this collection clearly indicate the wealth of possibilities inherent to the study of intermediality, adaptation and illustration. We hope that its perusal will inspire new research into this relationship that both clarifies and complexifies each of its component disciplines. Our thanks to our authors for adding their voices to what we hope will be an ongoing discussion, particularly in the trying times of the pandemic.

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Works Cited Baillon, Jean-François, Gachet Delphine, Labarre Nicolas, Menegaldo Gilles, and Natacha Vas Deyres, eds. 2020. Frankensteins intermédiatiques/Intermedial Frankensteins. Leaves 9. Accessed 13 June 2022. https:// climas.u-­b ordeaux-­m ontaigne.fr/numeros-­p arus/459-­n -­9 -­f rankensteinsintermediatiques-­intermedial-­frankensteins. Belting, Hans. 2020. The Migration of Images: An Encounter with Figuration in Islamic Art. In Dynamis of the Image: Moving Images in a Global World, ed. Emmanuel Alloa and Chiara Cappelletto, 63–77. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter. Bland, David. 1951. The Illustration of Books. London: Faber and Faber. Boczkowski, Pablo J., and Ignacio Siles. 2014. Steps Toward Cosmopolitanism in the Study of Media Technologies: Integrating Scholarship on Production, Consumption, Materiality, and Content. In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J.  Boczkowski, and Kirsten A.  Foot, 53–75. Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press. Boehmer, Elleke, Rouven Kunstmann, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, and Asha Rogers, eds. 2017. The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Bruhn, Jørgen, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, eds. 2013. Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions. London: Bloomsbury. Chartier, Roger. 1994. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity Press; Stanford: Stanford University Press. Collé, Nathalie. 2018. Wayfaring Images: The Pilgrim’s Pictorial Progress. In The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, ed. Michael Davies and W.R.  Owens, 624–649. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cutchins, Dennis R., and Dennis R. Perry. 2018. Introduction: The Frankenstein Complex. In Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture, ed. Dennis R.  Cutchins and Dennis R.  Perry, 1–19. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Darnton, Robert. 2009. The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future. New York: PublicAffairs. Dillard, Leigh. 2011. Drawing Outside the Book: Parallel Illustration and the Creation of a Visual Culture. In Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, ed. Christina Ionescu, 195–242. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Doyle, Susan, Jaleen Grove, and Whitney Sherman, eds. 2019. History of Illustration. New York: Fairchild Books; Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Elleström, Lars. 2017. Adaptation and Intermediality. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 509–526. New  York: Oxford University Press. Elliott, Kamilla. 2003. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2016. The Illustrated Book. In Late Victorian into Modern, ed. Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E.  Shepherd-Barr, 539–564. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. Adaptation Theory and Adaptation Scholarship. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 679–697. New  York: Oxford University Press. Englund, Axel. 2010. Intermedial Topography and Metaphorical Interaction. In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström, 69–80. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fehrle, Johannes, and Mark Schmitt. 2018. Adaptation as Translation: Transferring Cultural Narratives. In Komparatistik Online. Adaptation as Cultural Translation, 1–7. Accessed 13 June 2022. https://www.komparatistik-­online. de/index.php/komparatistik_online/issue/view/15. Ferrand, Nathalie. 2014. Translating and Illustrating the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Word & Image 30 (3) Special Issue: Imago and Translation: 181–193. Figueiredo, Camila, and Miriam Vieira. 2018. 19th Century Revisited: Adaptations and Appropriations. Belo Horizonte: FALE/UFMG. Fraser, Robert, and Mary Hammond, eds. 2008. Books without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture. New  York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Friant-Kessler, Brigitte. 2016. Visual Sterneana: Graphic Afterlives and a Sense of Infinite Mobility. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (4): 643–662. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. 2020. Frankenstein, roman d’illustrateur. In Frankensteins intermédiatiques/Intermedial Frankensteins, ed. Jean-François Baillon, Delphine Gachet, Nicolas Labarre, Gilles Menegaldo, and Natacha Vas Deyres. Leaves 9. Accessed 13 June 2022. https://climas.u-­bordeaux-­montaigne.fr/ numeros-­p arus/459-­n -­9 -­f rankensteins-­i ntermediatiques-­i ntermedial-­ frankensteins. Gillespie, Alexandra, and Deidre Lynch. 2020. The Unfinished Book: Introduction. In The Unfinished Book, 1–15. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grossman, Julie. 2015. Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity. New York: Palgrave. Hemmungs Wirtén, Eva. 2020. Globalization. In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book, ed. James Raven, 348–368. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2004. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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Hoogslag, Nanette, and Whitney Sherman. 2019. Digital Forms. In History of Illustration, ed. Susan Doyle, Jaleen Grove, and Whitney Sherman, 485–500. New York: Fairchild Books; Bloomsbury Publishing. Housman, Laurence, and Edward Fairbrother Strange. 1910–1911. Illustration. In Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th ed.), vol. 14, 321–324. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. London; New York: Routledge. Ionescu, Christina. 2020. The Illustrated Book as Source-Bound Adaptation: A Case Study of New  York Editions of Candide Published Around the Stock Market Crash. In Adapting the Canon: Mediation, Visualization, Interpretation, ed. Ann Lewis and Silke Arnold-de Simine, 144–168. London: Legenda. Jellenik, Glenn. 2017a. On the Origins of Adaptation, as Such: The Birth of a Simple Abstraction. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 36–52. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017b. The Task of the Adaptation Critic. In Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds, ed. Julie Grossman and R. Barton Palmer, 37–52. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Kaenel, Philippe. 2004. Le Métier d’illustrateur, 1830–1880. Rodolphe Töpffer, J.-J. Grandville, Gustave Doré. 1996. Genève: Droz. Klimowski, Andrzej. 2011. On Illustration. London: Oberon Books. Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. 1995. The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Leitch, Thomas. 2017. Introduction. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 1–22. New York: Oxford University Press. Lepape, Séverine, and in collaboration with Kathryn M. Rudy. 2013. Les origines de l’estampe en Europe du Nord, 1400–1470. Paris; New  York: Musée du Louvres. le Passage. Exhibition Catalogue. Leroy, Maxime. 2015. Distorted Dreams: Peter Ibbetson from Illustration to Adaptation. Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 82 (Autumn). Accessed 13 June 2022. https://journals.openedition.org/cve/2332. Lewis, Ann, and Silke Arnold-de Simine. 2020. Introduction. In Adapting the Canon: Mediation, Visualization, Interpretation, ed. Ann Lewis and Silke Arnold-de Simine, 1–18. London: Legenda. Male, Alan. 2007. Illustration: A Theoretical and Contextual Perspective. Lausanne: AVA. ———, ed. 2019. A Companion to Illustration. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Milano, Alberto. 2017. Change of Use, Change of Public, Change of Meaning: Printed Images Travelling Through Europe. In Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects, ed. Évanghélia Stead, 137–156. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Murray, Simone. 2012. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. London: Routledge.

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Newell, Kate. 2017a. Adaptation and Illustration: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 477–493. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017b. Expanding Adaptation: From Illustration to Novelization. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. Illustration, Adaptation and the Development of Frankenstein’s Visual Lexicon. In Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture, ed. Dennis R.  Cutchins and Dennis R.  Perry, 239–258. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Parshall, Peter, and Rainer Schoch, eds. 2005. The Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and their Public. Washington: National Gallery of Art. Exhibition catalogue. Rajewsky, Irina O. 2010. Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality. In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström, 51–67. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Raven, James. 2020. Introduction. In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book, ed. James Raven, 1–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raven, James, and Goran Proot. 2020. Renaissance and Reformation. In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book, ed. James Raven, 137–168. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rippl, Gabriele, ed. 2015. A Handbook of Intermediality: Literature—Image— Sound—Music. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Rudy, Kathryn M. 2013. L’interface entre l’imprimé et le manuscrit. In Les origines de l’estampe en Europe du Nord, 1400–1470, ed. Séverine Lepape, 117–146. Paris; New York: Musée du Louvres; le Passage. Rukavina, Alison. 2010. The Development of the International Book Trade, 1870–1895: Tangled Networks. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge. Scott, Clive. 2020. Translation, Adaptation, and the Senses of Medium. In Adapting the Canon: Mediation, Visualization, Interpretation, ed. Ann Lewis and Silke Arnold-de Simine, 19–42. London: Legenda. Shep, Sydney J. 2008. Books Without Borders: The Transnational Turn in Book History. In Books Without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture, ed. Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond, 13–37. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Sherman, Whitney. 2019. Print Illustration in the Postmodern World, Early 1970s-Early 2000s. In History of Illustration, ed. Susan Doyle, Jaleen Grove, and Whitney Sherman, 451–463. New  York: Fairchild Books; Bloomsbury Publishing. Stead, Évanghélia. 2012. La chair du livre. Matérialité, imaginaire et poétique du livre fin-de-siècle. Paris: Presses Université Paris-Sorbonne.

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———, ed. 2017. Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Stead, Évanghélia, and Hélène Védrine. 2014. Editors’ Introduction. Word & Image 30 (3) Special Issue: Imago and Translation: 177–180. Thomas, Julia. 2016. Illustrations and the Victorian Novel. In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, 617–636. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tran, Trung. 2012. Défaire et refaire l’image: l’illustration imprimée à l’épreuve de sa reproductibilité. Textimage (octobre). Accessed 13 June 2022. https:// www.revue-­textimage.com/conferencier/01_image_repetee/tran1.html. Walther, Franziska. 2019. Shifting Authorship: The Illustrator’s Role in Contemporary Book Illustration. In A Companion to Illustration, ed. Alan Male, 305–329. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

PART I

Afterlives

CHAPTER 2

Illustration and Adaptation in the Balbussos’ Pride and Prejudice (2013) and The Handmaid’s Tale (2012) Kate Newell

Illustration is a varied mode of adaptation.1 From frontispieces that concentrate an entire work into a single visual to magazines and editions brimming with illustrations on every page, illustrations contribute to our collective understanding of how a particular work “looks” and of its significance within the cultural landscape. “Just as in TV, film and stage adaptations,” Peter Harrington maintains, “the illustrations of a novel have the power to profoundly influence the audience’s perception and 1  Other studies have addressed the role of illustration as a visual and tonal source for film adaptations. See Elliott, Buchanan, Leitch, and Newell 2013. Nadežda Rumjanceva focuses specifically on representations of Pride and Prejudice in illustration and in film adaptation.

K. Newell (*) Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_2

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draw out different aspects.” Many factors contribute to how illustrations are understood as adaptations, including style and composition, and variations in the number, size, and placement. A frontispiece communicates a story differently than a suite of a hundred images, and illustrations juxtaposed against the text that they adapt function differently than those placed pages before or after. Consistent to all illustrations, though, regardless of number or placement, is the ability to concretize particulars of a text, to prioritize particular ways of seeing and reading, and to establish and reinforce the visual and thematic symbolism of the novels in which they appear. In this chapter, I explore methods by which illustrators reinforce ways of seeing a given text by drawing from established modes of visualization, and the ways in which illustrations broaden adaptation networks by connecting works to new contexts, texts, and meanings. The subsections that follow, “Illustration and Adaptation” and “Adaptation and Illustration,” highlight these distinct, but related activities. In “Illustration and Adaptation,” I focus on the manner by which artists signal their participation in an existing adaptation network through subject matter selection and compositional choices consistent with those of previous illustrators. Such practices are inwardly directed in that they affirm and reinforce established ways of visualizing a particular work. As I argue in Expanding Adaptation Networks: From Illustration to Novelization, commonly, a survey of multiple illustrated editions of the same novel shows the same scenes depicted again and again, and from similar perspectives. Such repetition establishes for audiences what moments in a text “count.” In “Adaptation and Illustration,” I focus on how illustrations connect a work aesthetically and thematically to a broader network of texts. Such outwardly directed practices also reinforce established ways of seeing a work, but they are equally invested in identifying connections between the work being adapted and other works or cultural touchstones. Inwardly directed and outwardly directed adaptations are correlative (rather than exclusive) practices evident in all illustrated editions in varying proportions. To demonstrate these complementary lines best, I consider two suites of illustrations created by the twin sister team of Anna and Elena Balbusso for the Folio Society: one for the 2013 edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and the second for the 2012 edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The strategies the Balbussos adopt in approaching these two very different novels reflect distinct yet related processes of adaptation and visual communication.

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Anna and Elena Balbusso have illustrated more than forty books, and their work has appeared in numerous publications, such as The Economist, The New York Times, and Reader’s Digest. Born in Udine, Italy, the sisters studied painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and began their professional careers as graphic designers within the advertising field before transitioning to commercial and book illustration. Their work has won numerous awards, including more than fifteen awards for excellence from Communication Arts Illustration Annual. The Balbussos’ unique style, described as having a “firm grounding in the traditions of European art history as well as a sharply modern design sensibility” (Parker), no doubt contributes to the range of their commissions. For the Folio Society, the sisters have illustrated Turgenev’s First Love (2011), Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (2012), Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (2016), and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (2018). The Balbussos’ deftness in aligning visual tone and content characterizes their illustration of Pride and Prejudice and The Handmaid’s Tale, both of which garnered recognition: 3x3’s Distinguished Merit award (2014) and Communication Arts Award of Excellence for Pride and Prejudice (2014), and 3x3’s Silver Medal (2012) and Communication Arts Award of Excellence (2012), and a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators (2012) for The Handmaid’s Tale.

Illustration and Adaptation: Pride and Prejudice Illustrated editions of Pride and Prejudice (1813) began to appear in the marketplace after 1832, the year in which publisher Richard Bentley acquired copyrights to Austen’s novels, and they continue through the twenty-first century. A challenge to adapting Austen’s work to visual media is, as Deborah Cartmell has noted, that “nothing much happens in Austen’s stories, the pleasure being in the choice of words and in the verbal subtleties” (4). Although illustrations’ physical proximity to words sustains readers’ connection to that source of pleasure, the illustrations themselves must still convey the appearance of at least something happening, having had happened, or about to happen. Most Pride and Prejudice illustrators solve the “nothing much happen[ing]” challenge, by selecting moments of “confrontation” or “discovery”; that is, moments in which characters challenge or learn new information about each other (Maunder 152; Newman 238). Contemporary audiences may think of Pride and Prejudice as a great love story; however, early illustrated editions did not emphasize the novel’s romantic aspects. Indeed, prior to the 1894 George

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Allen edition, illustrated by Hugh Thomas, illustrators did not depict Elizabeth and Darcy together (Newman 252). Rather, nineteenth-century illustrators focused largely on conveying visually the subtle mechanisms of the novel’s social world or reinforcing Austen’s humor. The Balbussos’ eight-illustration suite for the 2013 Folio Society edition, by contrast, focuses almost solely on moments significant to Elizabeth and Darcy’s developing relationship (Fig. 2.1). This thematic focus aligns their illustrations equally with the 1995 BBC television series and 2005 film adaptations, both of which prioritize the novel’s romantic elements and Elizabeth’s perspective, at the same time that the Balbussos’ selection of confrontations and discoveries remains consistent with those previous illustrators have identified as essential to visualization. This balance is evident throughout the Balbussos’ suite. I focus, here, on the Balbussos’ depictions of Lady Catherine’s visit to Longbourne and Jane Bennet’s convalescence at Netherfield, as the Balbussos’ adaptation of each demonstrates a range in inwardly directed reinforcement of established methods of seeing Pride and Prejudice. These two events have been adapted to illustration numerous times; a survey of illustrated editions across Pride and Prejudice’s adaptation network shows a common iconography to how Lady Catherine’s confrontation of Elizabeth “looks,” despite minimal direction from Austen. By contrast, the same survey shows that, while illustrators recognize Jane’s visit to Netherfield as a significant event, no consensus has been reached on which scene or moment in that visit is most essential. Lady Catherine’s visit to Longbourne to confront Elizabeth on her intentions regarding Darcy initiates a narrative pivot and, as such, is an often-adapted moment (even in editions with few illustrations). As Darcy later tells Elizabeth, his aunt’s recapitulation of her visit “taught me to hope” that Elizabeth’s “affections and wishes” had changed, and leads to his second proposal of marriage (317; 316).2 Located outside, the Balbussos’ image, captioned, “‘I will not be interrupted. Hear me in silence,’” depicts the two characters standing and facing one another. Elizabeth occupies the left portion of the image; she wears a simple white dress and stands with her hands folded before her. Lady Catherine wears dark clothing and a plumed bonnet, and leans toward Elizabeth from the right portion of the image. Lady Catherine’s left arm is fully outstretched 2  The pagination for all material quoted from Pride and Prejudice corresponds to the 2013 Folio Society edition, unless otherwise noted.

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Fig. 2.1  Anna and Elena Balbusso. “Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush.” In Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. The Folio Society, 2013. Frontispiece

and she points her index finger inches from Elizabeth; with her right arm, Lady Catherine extends, also, her cane toward Elizabeth. The visual effect of Lady Catherine’s outstretched arms is to symbolically “trap” Elizabeth. A visual motif throughout the Balbussos’ illustrations is a swirling brushstroke that creates the impression of movement. The stylistic effect is

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strong in this image, and gives the impression of a tempest of energy moving from Lady Catherine to and through Elizabeth. As Lady Catherine directs her emotional fury toward the calm and composed Elizabeth, the energy transforms and dissipates into the sky above. The Balbussos’ interpretation positions Lady Catherine as the clear antagonist to Elizabeth and, by extension, to Elizabeth and Darcy’s union. The Balbussos’ compositional choices reflect a pictorial lineage that originates with George Pickering’s title page vignette (engraved by William Greatbatch) in the first illustrated edition of Pride and Prejudice (Bentley, 1833). This image, captioned, “This is not to be borne, Miss Bennet. I insist on being satisfied. Has he, has my nephew, made you an offer of marriage?” situates the two women in the garden. Elizabeth faces the reader, though her expression is directed to Lady Catherine. Lady Catherine’s face is visible only barely in profile. She holds Elizabeth’s left forearm with her left hand and points her right finger upward toward Elizabeth. Pickering’s choices initiate a way of seeing this confrontation that subsequent illustrators follow; the outdoors setting, and Lady Catherine’s posture and gesture with pointed finger, in particular, are reiterated throughout Pride and Prejudice’s illustration history. For example, John Proctor’s illustration of this scene for the 1887 John Dick’s edition features the two figures in the garden, with Elizabeth standing to the left of Lady Catherine, whose right arm is raised slightly, her pointer finger extended (Bautz). William Cubitt Cooke’s illustration for the 1892 J.M.  Dent edition, titled “Lady Catherine beaten,” likewise features Elizabeth and Lady Catherine in the garden. Elizabeth sits to the left of the composition on a bench and Lady Catherine stands before her, her posture slightly inclined, the index finger of her right hand pointed in Elizabeth’s direction. H.M.  Brock’s illustration for the 1898 Dent edition, titled “Tell me, once for all, are you engaged to him?” depicts both Elizabeth and Lady Catherine seated on a bench in the Longbourne garden. The two women face each other, with Elizabeth to the left, and Lady Catherine, her mouth open in speech, points her right index finger toward Elizabeth. While not every illustrator adopts the pointed finger gesture for Lady Catherine, other consistencies in posture and setting characterize this scene’s history in illustration. C.E.  Brock depicts Lady Catherine and Elizabeth both standing in the garden for his illustration in the 1895 Macmillan edition. Lady Catherine stands with her back to the viewer, talking to Elizabeth who faces the viewer in a defensive posture, clutching

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her parasol across her body. Chris Hammond depicts Elizabeth and Lady Catherine seated on a bench in the garden in her adaptation of this scene for the 1900 Gresham Publishing edition, captioned, “‘Miss Bennet, do you know who I am?’” Though seated, Hammond’s Elizabeth, seated on the left, likewise adapts a defensive posture and holds her closed parasol tightly across her lap. Hammond’s Lady Catherine does not point her finger, but occupies physically a more substantial portion of the bench than Elizabeth, and grasps the head of her cane firmly.3 The patterns that emerge in illustrators’ depictions of this scene are particularly interesting given the little descriptive information Austen provides on where or how Elizabeth and Lady Catherine sit and stand. The narrator relates that Lady Catherine begins to speak “[a]s soon as they entered the copse” (304), but offers no other directional cue until further into the scene when Lady Catherine says, “[l]et us sit down” (307). The narrator does not specify where or if they sit, but does relate, again further into the scene, that Elizabeth “rose as she spoke” and that “Lady Catherine rose also, and they turned back” (309). That the Balbussos depict the scene as they do, with Lady Catherine leaning toward Elizabeth with an arm raised and gesturing with a pointed finger seems more the result of their attentiveness to Pride and Prejudice’s illustration history than of authorial direction. This example evidences inwardly directed adaptation and fluidity in the source-adaptation relationship. The “source” here is Pride and Prejudice, of course, but adaptations of Pride and Prejudice rather than a singular Pride and Prejudice. In addition to following established methods of visualizing Pride and Prejudice the Balbussos likewise provide new interpretations of often-­ adapted events. All adaptations of Pride and Prejudice include scenes of Jane Bennet’s visit to Netherfield Hall, as this event sets into motion opportunities for Elizabeth and Darcy to become further acquainted. The downpour that accompanies Jane’s journey on horseback brings about an illness that necessitates her convalescence at Netherfield, which, in turn, brings Elizabeth to care for her sister. This visit unfolds over many days and provides ample subject matter for illustrators. The Balbussos opt to 3  Some illustrators adapt other aspects of this scene. Hugh Thomson develops two images for the 1894 edition: the first depicts Lady Catherine’s entrance, and, the second, her survey of Longbourne’s rooms. Philip Gough’s illustration for the 1951 Macdonald & Co. edition depicts Lady Catherine’s departure from Longbourne, and Isabel Bishop depicts Elizabeth and Lady Catherine standing next to the latter’s carriage at the close of their conversation for the 1976 Vintage E.P. Dutton edition.

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Fig. 2.2  Anna and Elena Balbusso. “Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing field after field at a quick pace.” In Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. The Folio Society, 2013. Facing page 32

highlight Elizabeth’s walk to Netherfield Park and focus specifically on the moment she first beholds the estate: Elizabeth occupies the middle ground, her figure the largest form in the composition (Fig.  2.2). Netherfield also occupies the middle ground, though it appears comparatively smaller due to its distance from Elizabeth. A large pool of water in

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the foreground reflects Elizabeth’s upper torso and head. The visual doubling coupled with the heart-shaped bank of the pool heighten anticipation of the scene and foreshadow pending shifts in Elizabeth and Darcy’s relations. Elizabeth’s posture, too, is one of anticipation and foreshadowing, as her left arm reaches back slightly and her skirts and bonnet ribbons billow propelling her forward against resisting winds. The warm earth tones of the illustration’s palette help underscore the wet weather in which Elizabeth has traveled and the splatters that spring up at the bottom of her dress suggest the mud that will stain her petticoat and occasion comment from Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst upon her arrival. The Balbussos’ decision to focus on Elizabeth in their depiction of the Netherfield scene aligns the edition’s visual perspective with Elizabeth’s and reinforces the suite’s broader thematic focus. Though the illustration depicts Elizabeth in a moment of reflective pause, its caption, “Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing field after field at a quick pace,” highlights her independence and movement and is excerpted from Austen’s fuller description of Elizabeth’s motion: “jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity, and finding herself at last within view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise” (30). The Balbussos’ emphasis on activity evokes similarly active depictions of Elizabeth in the 1995 BBC television series adaptation and 2005 film adaptation, both of which include depictions of Elizabeth’s walk from Longbourne to Netherfield. The 1995 adaptation, in particular, includes a sequence of Elizabeth (played by Jennifer Ehle) climbing over fences and stepping into mud. The Balbussos’ active and independent articulation of Elizabeth stands out against other illustrators’ depictions of the Netherfield scene in which Elizabeth is absent or for which her presence serves to draw attention to intricate social practices and politics. The moments that illustrators select to adapt from Jane and Elizabeth’s stay at Netherfield illuminate the larger visual themes of their respective editions, as well as the singularity of the Balbussos’ selection.4 While some illustrators, such as C.E.  Brock, Helen Binyon, and Niroot Puttapipat, elect to picture Jane Bennet’s rain-soaked ride on horseback, many illustrators focus, instead, on more social moments. For example, Helen Sewell’s illustration, captioned “Indulged their mirth for some time,” for 4  As Susannah Fullerton notes, “Most illustrations of Pride and Prejudice depict graceful females,” and “Elizabeth is not shown climbing over stiles” (146).

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the 1940 Heritage Press edition, adapts the scene in which Caroline Bingley, Mrs. and Mr. Hurst, Charles Bingley, and Darcy discuss Elizabeth after she has left the table to attend to her sister. The title of the illustration conveys a slightly different tone than the text, which reads: “When dinner was over, [Elizabeth] returned directly to Jane, and Miss Bingley began abusing her as soon as she was out of the room,” and the group “indulged their mirth for some time at the expense of their dear friend’s vulgar relations” (1940, 36; 38). Thus, though the scene of the illustration appears a happy one, the text clarifies that the “mirth” here “indulged” is at the expense of the Bennet family. The illustration, which spans the middle of two pages, works with the prose to shape readers’ understanding of the group as self-satisfied and prejudicial. Hugh Thomson likewise injects moments of social reflection into his suite for the 1894 George Allen edition. “Covering a screen,” for example, features an anonymous woman decorating a room screen, and grants materiality to a vision conjured by Charles Bingley and Darcy in an exchange regarding the talents that grant a woman the epithet “accomplished.” Bingley groups “covering a screen” with other skills, whereas Darcy contends that “The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a screen.” Darcy adds to the list of necessary accomplishments “the improvement of her mind by extensive reading” (36), thus implicitly including Elizabeth in the grouping as much ado had been made previously in the scene regarding Elizabeth’s choice to read rather than join the group in cards. While the woman in the illustration is not a character in the novel, she is a standard against which Elizabeth is judged at Netherfield. For Carroll and Wiltshire, this illustration “reverses the emphasis of the text” by “giving graphic art priority over” reading, and by “com[ing] down on the side of young ladies who do what young ladies ought to do, never mind about skipping across fields” (71). The Balbussos situate their adaption of Pride and Prejudice within a broader tradition of visualization. Their decision to focus illustrations on the developing relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy distinguishes their interpretation from others, though, as we have seen, the moments that the Balbussos elect to adapt are consistent with those selected by previous illustrators and visual adapters. Such consistencies point to an adaptation practice that is inwardly directed, and reinforce the manner by which the Balbussos contribute to a larger legacy of how to visualize Pride

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and Prejudice, and which moments “count” in readers’ memories of the novel.

Adaptation and Illustration: The Handmaid’s Tale In addition to reinforcing patterns of adaptation within a given work’s history, illustrations also draw a work outward, developing and expanding the visual motifs and iconography from and into broader contexts. Prior to the publication of the 2012 Folio Society edition, The Handmaid’s Tale already had a varied adaptation network that includes a 1990 film adaptation, written by Harold Pinter and directed by Volker Schlöndorff, an opera composed in 2000 by Poul Ruders to a libretto by Paul Bentley, and John Dryden’s radio drama, developed in 2012. To my knowledge, the Folio Society edition is the first illustrated edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, though prior editions have included cover designs that offer visual interpretations of the novel.5 Variations in medium and modality aside, all adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale communicate the novel’s color-­ stratified dystopic society and underscore the symbolic value of the Handmaids. The Balbussos’ seven-illustration suite is consistent in tone and palette with established methods of visually conceptualizing The Handmaid’s Tale, yet the suite’s influence of Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism is equally consistent with the Balbussos’ previous works. This combination results in a set of illustrations that can be understood as in conversation with Atwood’s novel, and in visual motifs and iconography transferable beyond The Handmaid’s Tale. To establish the physical and psychological claustrophobia of Atwood’s dystopia, the Balbussos draw heavily from Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism in shaping environments. For example, their illustration of downtown Gilead positions the viewer between two buildings, in the midst of a thoroughfare, with a sight line to buildings in the distance. The buildings lean toward one another, distorted and crowded, with lit windows that slant toward the street watchfully (Fig. 2.3). The Balbussos use this effect, also, in the illustration in which the novel’s protagonist, Offred, and the Commander play Scrabble in his office. In the composition, they sit on either side of a table in his study with the game board between them, surrounded by bookcases, the dimensional flatness of which heightens the psychological instability of the scene. Offred and the Commander 5

 See Romney and Newell (2021).

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Fig. 2.3  Anna and Elena Balbusso. “We turn the corner onto a main street … There are other women.” In The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. The Folio Society, 2012. Facing page 30

are framed closely and the image’s bird’s-eye perspective causes Offred to appear diminutive and cornered. The desk cants toward the Commander, and viewers see both Offred and the Scrabble board from his perspective, a detail that reinforces his control over the board and the evening. The

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words already formed on the game board—valence, larynx, quince, zygote—reflect abstractly on the novel’s themes of control and propagation. Consistent to all visual adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale is careful attention to the Handmaids’ distinctive uniform, particularly the vivid red of the Handmaids’ dress (“the colour of blood” [2012, 8]). In addition to the red dress, Handmaids are required to wear a white Dutch-style cap with an extended poke-style brim when out of the home. With the exception of the 1990 film adaptation, which opts for red headscarves, the red dress and white bonnet are consistently adapted icons signifying The Handmaid’s Tale. The Balbussos’ headpiece is a variation on the Dutch cap—it covers the Handmaid’s head and forehead entirely, leaving only the face visible. The cap’s shape extends on either side of the head into two points, giving each Handmaid’s face the impression of being encased in a bubble. The Balbussos’ cover design features a dress form molded into the Handmaids’ uniform, divided into two pieces at the waist (Fig. 2.4). The upper torso and head float slightly above the lower torso and feet. Four hands overlay the mannequin—two posed at the figure’s waist, one across her right breast, and one entering into her hollow lower half from the divide at her waist. The form includes the bonnet, seemingly attached to the body of the uniform. The rigidity of the form gives the impression that the wearer’s body will conform to the uniform, rather than the uniform yielding to the wearer’s body. In contrast to Offred’s first-person narrative descriptions, which underscore the individuality of her fellow Handmaids against the homogeneity created by the uniform, the Balbussos accentuate the uniformity to underscore the emotional detachment that characterizes dystopia better. Even the narrator is indistinguishable visually from other Handmaids within the Balbussos’ suite. This strategy generates a dialogue between the depersonalized figures in illustrations and the novel’s personalized narrative voice. The hollowness of the dress form in Balbussos’ cover design highlights the Handmaids’ reproductive role (e.g., they are to be “sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices” [138]), yet also underscores the status of “the Handmaid” as floating signifier. While “Handmaid” signifies a distinct position within Gilead society, Handmaids function as floating signifiers in that others project desires and meanings onto them, depending on their own positions. Wives, for example, project fantasies of motherhood, whereas Commanders commonly project sexual fantasies on their Handmaids, or fantasies of companionship as in “the time before.” Such projection is perhaps best visualized in the Balbussos’ illustration of Offred applying lipstick in preparation to go with the Commander to

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Fig. 2.4  Anna and Elena Balbusso. Cover illustration for The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. The Folio Society, 2012

Jezebel’s, Gilead’s underground brothel (Fig.  2.5). The Commander stands in uniform, holding a hand mirror for Offred, who stands before him wearing the “mauve and pink” garment the Commander has provided, with its star sequins and feathers, and applying contraband lipstick (237). The Commander holds the mirror in front of his own face, blocking it from view. Instead, we see Offred’s face reflected in the glass of the

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Fig. 2.5  Anna and Elena Balbusso. “You’ll need to paint your face too; I’ve got the stuff for it. You’ll never get in without it.” The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. The Folio Society, 2012. Facing page 238

mirror. This positioning renders visible the slurring “Of Fred” to Offred— she is his projection, an extension of his identity. The universality of the faces allows Offred to be read as a surface onto which the Commander projects his fantasies of power and patriarchal normality. The “winged eye” symbol of Gilead covers the right breast pocket of the Commander’s

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uniform, and is echoed in the tattoo on Offred’s left ankle—another reflection that reinforces the doubling of this moment. The tone and palette the Balbussos’ have selected for this edition capture the subtleties of Atwood’s broader themes; a review of the Balbussos’ oeuvre, however, shows that the sisters draw from these styles fairly consistently, and for works with themes quite different from that of The Handmaid’s Tale. In the Balbussos’ illustrations for Leather Shoe Charlie (2008, Yeoman Media), a children’s book set during the British industrial revolution that tells the story of a poor young boy’s sacrifice for his mother’s health, Italian Futurism allows the Balbussos to convey vividly through their environments the pollution and poverty of the city. Similarly, the Balbussos convey the crowding and bustle of the city through canted buildings and angular shadows in Paola Capiolo’s Indira Gandhi (2009, Edizioni El). Further, the red-dominant palette, seemingly particular to The Handmaid’s Tale, is also a signature of the Balbussos’ work and evident in their earlier illustrated editions, such as the Black Cat editions of The Age of Innocence (2008), Jane Eyre (2009), and The Nutcracker (2009), and the Folio Society’s The Song of Roland (2010) in which red features prominently as an accent color. In this way, the decisions the Balbussos have made in adapting The Handmaid’s Tale to illustration are in keeping with readers’ expectations for adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale as well as with expectations for the Balbussos’ work. The 2017 release of the Hulu series adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, created by Bruce Miller, coincided with global social and political transitions and upheavals, such as the United States’ 2016 presidential election and protests to decriminalize abortion in Argentina, that allowed Offred’s story to resonate deeply with audiences. The series’ popularity helped broaden and diversify The Handmaid Tale’s adaptation history through series-related merchandise, fan-generated graphics (e.g., memes, posters, t-shirts, house wares), and additional adaptations, such as Renee Nault’s 2019 graphic novel adaptation and Atwood’s 2019 sequel, The Testaments. “Moved and artistically inspired” by the experience of illustrating The Handmaid’s Tale, and prompted likely by the success of the Hulu adaptation, the Balbussos revisited the story’s themes in 2018 in a series of award-winning prints and motion graphics adaptations (“The Wall”).6 The four seven-color, hand-pulled screen prints and related 6  The Balbussos’ screen prints received a number of awards, including the GoSee’s Gold Award in Illustration, and the Applied Arts Photography and Illustration Award of the Canadian Applied Arts Magazine. For a full list see Anna + Elena = Balbusso Twins Illustration.

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motion graphics, titled “The Wall,” “The Mask,” “The Blood,” and “The Face,” utilize a palette consistent with that of the Folio Society suite, and incorporate similar motifs and symbols. Visual continuities evident across these distinct but related works show iconography associated with one context moving across contexts, enhancing and expanding the significations of Atwood’s novel and forging connections to other works. “The Wall” follows the red, black, white, gray color palette of the Folio Society suite and amplifies the imagery of the Balbussos’ illustration, “We’ve been to the stores already.” At the center of the print, two Handmaids stand side by side, each holding a wire basket with a single egg inside. The Handmaids stand in front of a brick wall, which spans the background of the image. Atop the wall are two eye-shaped searchlights, both of which shine down on the two Handmaids. The image is bordered by a diamond pattern inset with barbed wire. Whereas the Handmaids in the Folio Society illustration walk along the foot of the wall, just barely in the searchlight’s path, the Handmaids in the poster appear trapped, standing against the Wall and facing the viewer. The women are caught within the crossbeams of the two eye-shaped searchlights, and locked together like paper dolls by their Handmaid uniforms, which appear fused at the headpiece, arm, and torso. The composition’s barbed wire frame further conveys the impression of captivity. This imagery transfers to the motion graphics adaptation, as well. “The Wall” opens on an image of black brick wall. The eyes rise up behind the wall, and the searchlights and Handmaids appear simultaneously. The twin lights pan their beams in opposite directions, crossing and re-crossing at the Handmaids. While the iconography is consistent across the platforms, each iteration tells a version of a story. The illustration that appears in the Folio Society edition is intended to work with the prose it adapts. As Offred and Ofglen walk past the Wall, Offred reflects upon this specific landmark and the city more generally as it was in “the time before,” and the illustration depicts this portion of Offred’s and Ofglen’s walk. The print is intended to signify much more broadly, to evoke imagery of the novel and dystopia in general, as well as the particular red circulated in the Hulu series’ publicity materials. Whereas the iteration in the Folio Society edition shows the women walking past the Wall, the print depicts them as trapped at the Wall. The print’s story of uniformity, surveillance, and confinement is reinforced by the motion graphic, which adds to the story a temporal link between Handmaids and surveillance. That is, the simultaneous appearance of Handmaid and searchlight suggests that, within this society, the

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installation of certain social structures results in their regulation. The eyes at the top of the wall only become searchlights with the installation of Handmaids, or, more specifically, when some aspect under their purview needs regulation. The Balbussos’ graphic, non-differentiated Handmaids universalize the figure and allow for connections to social and political contexts beyond that of The Handmaid’s Tale. In addition to illustrations for books, the Balbussos create illustrations for magazines and other publications, which provide additional platforms for tracing aesthetic and iconographic consistencies. Bella Pollen’s article in the February/March 2019 issue of The Economist, “Wise Guise: Has #MeToo changed what we wear to work?” featured illustrations by the Balbussos. As the title suggests, this article considers workplace dynamics in the wake of the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault, particularly in terms of dress and gender. In addition to the black, white, gray, and red color palette, these illustrations feature depersonalized figures and incorporate symbols of the Republic of Gilead. One illustration, for example, features four dress forms—three donning men’s suits and the fourth in a women’s blouse and skirt. Silhouettes of three large hands rest on the women’s dress form, two over the left breast, modeled by a series of concentric circles, and one inside the slit of the skirt. The women’s dress form, positioned at the center of the composition, recalls the Balbussos’ cover for The Handmaid’s Tale. Another features a wire dress form, the right half of which is dressed in a short, form-fitting red dress, and the left in a black suit jacket. In place of a pocket square on the suited side of the dress form, the Balbussos have included one of their signature eyes, the symbol of the Republic of Gilead, thus forging a connection between the suited form to which the article refers and Atwood’s Commanders. Such visual consistencies align the 2019 Economist article with the 2012 illustrated edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, and suggest implicitly analogies between real women’s experiences of sexual harassment and denied opportunities in the workplace prior to and in the wake of #MeToo, and fictional women’s experiences under the Republic of Gilead. Indeed, articles related to the Hulu series commonly cite #MeToo as contemporaneous touch-point.7 Like all forms of adaptation, illustration engages in distinct but related methods of connection and communication. Inwardly directed illustrations, such as the Balbussos’ illustrations for Pride and Prejudice, reinforce 7

 See Whelan, Moeggenberg, and “How ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Costumes.”

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long-standing traditions of which narrative moments should be depicted and how they should be conveyed visually. Outwardly directed illustrations, as illuminated by the Balbussos’ illustrations for The Handmaid’s Tale, establish connections between a work and external texts and contexts. Of course, few illustrations are exclusively inwardly or outwardly directed. Illustrations, like adaptations across media and modalities, contain a mix of inwardly and outwardly directed signifiers. Twentieth- and twenty-first century film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, for example, commonly engage in both inwardly and outwardly directed adaptation practices. Pamela Demory describes the intertextual network of such adaptations as “a thick tapestry, comprising not just Austen’s novel, but numerous other filmic and literary texts and colored by various genre conventions, reader and viewer expectations, and market forces” (123). While such adaptations point outwardly, they still, Demory explains, “adhere to the generally accepted sense of what Austen’s work means to readers of Austen in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries” (129). That is, regardless of the external networks in which the informing texts, conventions, expectations, and forces may be situated, they are assimilated by the adaptations and brought into the service of reinforcing a particular vision of the text and author. For their part, twentieth- and twenty-first century adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale likewise engage in both outwardly and inwardly directed communication. The latter is evident in various mainstays, such as the color-stratified hierarchy of Gilead’s theocracy and its associated iconography. As explored in this chapter, iconography and motifs associated with The Handmaid’s Tale are not exclusive to nor do they necessarily generate from that source. Ellen Grabiner comments on the permeability of The Handmaid’s Tale, noting that “[l]ike any rootstock narrative,” the novel “offers multiple ways in: it can be read as science fiction or a foreboding feminist tale” (224). Eileen Rositzka notes a similar generic flexibility in adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale as conveyed through lighting and set design: the Hulu series “places the plot within the framework of […] realist art,” whereas the “stylized spaces and surfaces” of Schlöndorff’s film “transport Atwood’s story into” the genre of erotic thriller (195; 201). Just as these examples demonstrate ways into The Handmaid’s Tale, they also demonstrate multiple ways out. As each iteration of The Handmaid’s Tale reinforces and expands specific ways of seeing characters and their story world, each also texturizes that world with additional symbols and motifs that reflect and inspire external reference points.

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Taken to their outermost points, inwardly directed adaptations have the potential to become stagnant reiterations and outwardly directed adaptations have the potential to spark alternative lives for their signifiers that may take them far beyond the realm of the source text or author, as evident in the number of women donning red cloaks and white bonnets at rallies in support of women’s reproductive rights (Beaumont and Holpuch). The Balbussos’ work sheds light on the role of illustration within adaptation networks and the manner by which illustrations communicate with other illustrations and visual content, forming partnerships beyond that forged with writing. In addition to prioritizing particular ways of seeing and reading these novels, the Balbussos’ work demonstrates how visual and graphic features concretize the cultural understanding of a work and expand its influence beyond its immediate or anticipated contexts. My aim in framing this discussion in terms of inwardly and outwardly facing adaptation is to point to two of many possible directions in which a given adaptation can direct energies within an adaptation network.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. 2012. The Handmaid’s Tale. Illustrated by Anna and Elena Balbusso. London: Folio Society. Austen, Jane. 2013. Pride and Prejudice. Illustrated by Anna and Elena Balbusso. London: Folio Society. Bautz, Annika. 2013. ‘In Perfect Volume form, Price Sixpence’: Illustrating Pride and Prejudice for a Late-Victorian Mass-Market. In Romantic Adaptations: Essays in Mediation and Remediation, ed. Cian Duffy, Peter Howell, and Caroline Ruddell, 101–124. London: Ashgate. Beaumont, Peter, and Amanda Holpuch. 2018. How The Handmaid’s Tale Dressed Protests Across the World. The Guardian, 3 August. Accessed 5 June 2022. www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/03/how-­the-­handmaidstale-­dressed-­protests-­across-­the-­world. Buchanan, Judith. 2012. Literary Adaptation in the Silent Era. In A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, ed. Deborah Cartmell, 17–32. London: Blackwell. Carroll, Laura, and John Wiltshire. 2009. Jane Austen, Illustrated. In A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, 62–77. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Cartmell, Deborah. 2010. Screen Adaptations: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: The Relationship Between Text and Film. London: Methuen.

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Demory, Pamela. 2010. Jane Austen and the Chick Flick in the Twenty-first Century. In Adaptation Studies: New Approaches, ed. Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins, 121–149. Madison: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press. Elliott, Kamilla. 2003. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fullerton, Susannah. 2013. Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. London: Frances Lincoln Limited. Grabiner, Ellen. 2019. In The Handmaid’s Tale: The Optics of Dystopia. The Handmaid’s Tale: Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders, ed. Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Janis L. Goldie, 223–232. Lanham: Lexington. Harrington, Peter. n.d. Jane Austen, Illustrated. Accessed 5 June 2022. www. peterharrington.co.uk/blog/jane-­austen-­illustrated/ How ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Costumes Became a Symbol of #MeToo. 2018. Gulf News, 23 October. Accessed 5 June 2022. www.gulfnews.com/entertainment/ tv/how-­handmaids-­tale-­costumes-­became-­a-­symbol-­of-­metoo-­1.2292926. Leitch, Thomas. 2007. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone With the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Maunder, Andrew. 2006. Making Heritage and History: The 1894 Illustrated Pride and Prejudice. Nineteenth Century Studies 20: 147–169. Moeggenberg, Zarah. 2018. Power, Consent, and The Body: #MeToo and The Handmaid’s Tale. Gender Forum 70: 4–25. Newell, Kate. 2013. ‘You Don’t Know About Me Without You Have Read a Book’: Authenticity in Adaptations of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Literature/Film Quarterly 41 (4): 303–316. ———. 2017. Expanding Adaptation Networks. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2021. Transferring Handmaids: Iconography, Adaptation and Intermediality. In Beyond Media Borders, Volume 2: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media, ed. Lars Elleström, 33–57. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Newman, Emily L. 2014. Illustrating Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Journal of Illustration 1 (2): 233–256. Parker, Charley. 2012. Anna and Elena Balbusso. Lines and Colors, 29 August. Accessed 5 June 2022. www.linesandcolors.com/2012/08/29/annaand-­elena-­balbusso/. Pollen, Bella. 2019. Has #MeToo Changed What We Wear to Work. The Economist, 1843 Magazine (February/March). Accessed 5 June 2022. www.1843magazine. com/style/has-­metoo-­changed-­what-­we-­wear-­to-­work. Pride and Prejudice. 1995. Directed by Simon Langton, Performances by Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, BBC1. ———. 2005. Directed by Joe Wright, Performances by Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, StudioCanal.

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Romney, Rebecca. 2017. Thirty Years of Cover Designs for The Handmaid’s Tale. 13 March. Accessed 11 November 2019. www.rebeccaromney.wordpress. com/2017/03/13/cover-­designs-­Handmaids-­tale/. Rositzka, Eileen. 2019. No Light Without Shadow: The Question of Realism in Volker Schlöndorff’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Hulu’s TV Series. In The Handmaid’s Tale: Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders, ed. Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Janis L. Goldie, 195–205. Lanham: Lexington. Rumjanceva, Nadežda. 2015. ‘And She Beheld a Striking Resemblance to Mr. Darcy’: Nineteenth-Century Illustrations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In Pride and Prejudice 2.0: Interpretations, Adaptations and Transformations of Jane Austen’s Classic, ed. Hanne Birk and Marion Gymnich, 51–76. Göttingen: V&R Unipress. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1990. Directed by Victor Schlöndorff, Performances by Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, and Aidan Quinn. Cinecom Pictures. Anna + Elena = Balbusso Twins Illustration. 2020. www.balbusso.com. The Wall. n.d. Dark City Gallery. Accessed 5 June 2022. www.darkcitygallery. com/The_Handmaid_s_Tale_Set_by_The_Balbusso_Twins_p/bthmtset.htm. Whelan, Ella. 2020. #MeToo, Trump and Misreading The Handmaid’s Tale. Spiked, 10 January. Accessed 5 June 2022. www.spiked-­online. com/2020/01/10/metoo-­trump-­and-­misreading-­the-­handmaids-­tale/.

CHAPTER 3

“[T]o Mix Colours for Painters” and Illustrate and Adapt Gulliver’s Travels Worldwide: Street Murals, Adaptability and Transmediality Nathalie Collé

If translation has permitted literary classics to travel the world and reach audiences far beyond their original linguistic, geographical, temporal and cultural spheres, other forms of representation have allowed them to do so as well—in other words, to materialise in multiple and ever-renewed configurations and to feature publicly in different parts of the world. Murals are just one of these many forms that have allowed classic literary authors and their works to circulate around the globe and last through time, by being not only re-adapted to ever-changing publics and contexts of

Swift (168)

N. Collé (*) Université de Lorraine, IDEA, Nancy, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_3

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reception but also re-invented in the process. This chapter presents a selection of murals based on or inspired by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) which have appeared relatively recently in Dublin, Whitehaven, Chicago, Brooklyn and Zagreb. In tracing their origins and assessing their aspirations and impact, it aims at probing their relationship with their textual source (a literary work) and its original matrix (the paper book and page), as well as with their new (geographical and temporal) contexts of expression, and thereby questions their status as illustrations and/or adaptations. Altogether, these sundry murals testify to the extensive and lasting reach of Swift’s classic, as well as to its capacity to elicit multifarious responses and be continually re-mediated and re-contextualised. Individually, they constitute samples of artistic creations whose aesthetic dimension is shaped by a socio-political agenda which naturally varies from place to place and from artist to artist.1 Literary (or literature-­ inspired) street murals are indeed pieces of public art which express individual as well as collective responses to literary texts. Their creation usually implies commissions by city councils and work by the community (see Conrad; Delgado and Barton), and the result is likely to spark varied public reactions—not so much to the source texts they illustrate and adapt, but rather to these texts’ idiosyncratic interpretations by street artists and the messages these artists try to convey through them. They are therefore graphic interpretations with a political scheme and a social impact, remediations2 and re-appropriations3 of literary texts, characters, or motifs which are time-, place- and community-based rather than purely aesthetically minded and totally literature-dependent. My goal here is to investigate the interface between illustration and adaptation via literary murals so as to assess the transmediality of both the illustrative and adaptive processes which murals imply. Murals are indeed, like other forms of transmedial graphic afterlives (illustrative paintings, lantern slides, or stained-glass windows, for instance), both illustrations and adaptations of their source texts. Moreover, they are remarkably 1  See Goalwin on the agendas of Northern Ireland murals, and Arreola on those of Mexican murals. 2  As defined by Bolter and Grusin, and further explored by Elleström and Rajewsky. 3  As explored by Sanders and Young.

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twofold illustrations and adaptations: on the one hand, they are material illustrations in non-book and non-paper form (and, accordingly, transmedial adaptations) enlightening or exploiting elements and facets of the original text; they are also metaphorical illustrations, mirrors of these texts’ evolving production and reception, and notably of their assorted and sometimes conflicting interpretations (Gulliver as a harsh adult satire or as a classic of children’s literature, for instance). On the other hand, they are material adaptations in the sense that they physically adapt a text with new materials (paint), in a new form (wall painting) and to a new medium (the very substance of the wall, and the street or building that wall belongs to); they are also metaphorical adaptations in the sense that they conceptually adapt that text to a new temporal, spatial, and cultural environment. They are, however, more likely to be damaged (by the weather) or defaced (by human hands), and consequently more ephemeral than illustrated books, and as such much less reliable as means of preserving and transmitting literary heritage. Yet they are extremely valuable in a number of ways—as artistic and cultural productions, of course, but also as forms of visual art that question the acts of illustrating and adapting across media. In this collection devoted to the relationship between illustration and adaptation from an intermedial or transmedial perspective, I would like to show that literary murals act like illustrations in the sense that they highlight facets of the original or source text, as well as its evolving reception and interpretation; and also like adaptations in the sense that they do so in a different (and unusual) form and medium: on wall surfaces rather than on book pages or in print form or on canvas, and on the street or in public buildings rather than in the individual or private sphere. Perhaps more so than traditional book illustrations and more customary adaptations, though, they do so in ever-renewed shapes, colours and styles and in ever-­ changing milieus and, besides, in ephemeral forms. They thereby incite us to examine them beyond the prism of literary illustration and adaptation and to query the very adaptability and transmediality, not only of their textual sources, but also of more habitual illustrative and adaptive forms. In other words, looking at literary murals from the combined perspectives of illustration, adaptation, and transmediality allows us to assess the specificities of, and the overlaps and interactions between these modes of artistic (re-)creation and expression.

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Celebrating Swift at Home: Murals as Public Tributes and Timely Adaptations In the November/December 2017 issue of Books Ireland magazine, Editor Tony Canavan remarked: I was somewhat surprised that more was not made of the 350th anniversary of Jonathan Swift’s birth and that it was not more widely commemorated. I am willing to admit that some events may have passed me by, but there seemed to be little done, beyond the odd conference or festival like that to be held in St Patrick’s Cathedral (23–26 November), to mark Swift 350. Gulliver’s Travels alone is worthy of celebration, lending itself to television, film and stage adaptations and various other forms of representation.

In Canavan’s view, celebrations of “Swift 350” should have gone beyond the “odd” and visibly too conventional conference or festival and should have included consideration of the various forms in which one of Dublin’s major figures’ most famous literary work has been cast over time. Significantly, he was hoping for more public celebration of, at the very least, Gulliver’s Travels’ “adaptations and various other forms of representation.” The city-wide and year-long celebratory programme “Swift 350” in fact encompassed more than Canavan was aware of—notably festivals, exhibitions, lectures, and performances. It seems like some events indeed passed him by, including perhaps the most conspicuous ones to any Dubliner or Dublin visitor, that is, the creation of indoor and outdoor murals. For instance, Dublin City Council commissioned Dublin-based Irish comics and street artist Hugh Madden to create a mural on the inside walls of the car-park of General Register Office in Werburgh Street, behind Dublin Castle, in old Hoey Court, the area where Swift was born, interpreting the great satirist’s life and works (Fig.  3.1). The Council commented on 23 November 2017—a date which may partly excuse Canavan’s ignorance of its existence when writing his editorial—that “[t]he recently completed art work lifts the area in a very bright and vibrant way and is a joyous celebration and happy 350th birthday to one of Dublin’s greatest literary, social and political figures” (Dublin City Council, 23 November 2017b). Madden designed three panels interpreting Gulliver’s Travels pictorially and incorporating visual allusions to Swift’s love life in some places, as well as a political nod to his own time via a Trump-looking character

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Fig. 3.1  Hugh Madden, Gulliver’s Travels mural, General Register Office in Werburgh Street, Dublin (2017). https://twitter.com/dubcitycouncil/status/ 933703351019196416 (accessed 5 June 2022)

appearing in the panel on the right, which pictures giant Gulliver in Lilliput (Book I). The middle panel sets miniature Gulliver in a luxuriant natural environment in Brobdingnag (Book II), facing giant rats and fruit-­ carrying ants, and turning his back to “a jazz band made of frogs” (Hugh Madden Art) (perhaps an allusion to the musicians in Laputa, Book III), all under the gaze of bewildered and malicious human giants. The panel of the left is set in the country of the Houyhnhnms (Book IV) and represents Gulliver in animated conversation with the intelligent horses and in the presence of bestial Yahoos. This mural is a rare instance of a global approach to and adaptation of Swift’s text, as opposed to a partial one which would typically focus on Book I, and particularly on its most iconic scene, that of Gulliver being tied to the ground by the Lilliputians after falling asleep on the shore of Lilliput. This scene has persistently been treated as a synecdoche of the whole work, in abridged and adapted versions of the text as well as in the iconographic tradition born of it, and has been an all-time favourite of both text adapters and book illustrators. When asked about his approach to the conception of the mural, Madden responded: “I was particularly drawn to the wonderful images that one can draw from the imagination of Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. His works teem with fascinating and colourful characters and creatures and were a great honour and pleasure to depict” (Dublin City Council [2017a]).

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Madden’s mural interpretation of Swift’s classic was thus based on images, both mental and literary, as well as authorial and personal. Its making was for him a source of “great honour and pleasure”—a noteworthy appreciation of the process of adaptation from the perspective of the adapter. From the perspective of the receiver, it was deemed “[g]reat for walking tours and tourists” by the Dublin City Council, who advertised for it on their website saying: “we encourage the public to investigate this historic area of heritage and view the murals and see who you can identify from the stories,” noting that “[t]he mural is available to see during the opening hours of the General Register Office” (Dublin City Council, 23 November 2017b), and therefore subject to limited access—which is rather unusual for an adaptation. The mural is presented as enabling its viewers to relate to the original story or source (the adapted text); as providing an opportunity to explore the history of its location; and as contributing to local heritage development and tourism. It is therefore deemed beneficial, not only to the endurance of the original text and author, but also to the reputation and attractiveness of their local and national anchorage. However, like all street murals, it is potentially an ephemeral creation. Madden believes that “it is supposed to stay there for a while but as it is painted on metal sheets, it is possible that it could be taken down and moved somewhere else in the future.”4 On top of state-commissioned street art, “Swift 350” was also the occasion of spontaneous creations cum celebrations, notably a large mural painted in April 2017 by Dublin-based artist Will St Leger for MaSamba Samba School on Bow Lane West, with the support of the Dublin Bus Community Initiative and MRCB Paints. In a section entitled “My Work, Outdoor, Politics” on his Wordpress website, St Leger explains that he worked with young members of the school to create a Gulliver’s Travels-­ inspired mural “because the book’s author founded the hospital across from the school and this year is Jonathan Swift’s 350 anniversary” (St Leger 2017). The reason for this creation is clearly presented as being both place- and local history-related. It is a sort of homage paid to Swift for his philanthropist contribution to the city of Dublin, and an interesting case of partly personal, partly collective illustration and adaptation. A “Mural Project 2017 Album” features on the school’s Facebook page showing the various phases of the work. Photos are accompanied by comments explaining that, on top of providing concrete, physical help 4

 E-mail exchange with the artist, 25 February 2021.

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throughout the creative process, the participants contributed ideas based on their reading of the original text and acted as models for the figures on the wall. Artist, school pupils and staff, local partners as well as “others” all contributed to the final product, which is truly a collaborative and accumulative piece. It “now adorns” (MaSamba) the front wall of the school and therefore enhances it, as well as the street it is on, providing an illustration of both the source text and its author (a portrait of Swift appears on the left page of a book painted left of the figures, while the right page bears the title Gulliver’s Travels and his name—an unusual reversal of the traditional portrait on the left and title page on the right book configuration). Of the original story, however, the mural retains only a few basic elements: the author, the (short) title, and the size issue, the book being presented to us by two giant human hands, while the silhouettes of the little characters/pupils appear in pairs, back to back, as if measuring height. This mural, unlike the one by Madden, which teams with characters and details, offers a minimalist treatment of the original source, one visibly meant as street decoration more so than as text illustration. In its case, the notion of illustration applies to the recipient rather than to the source: it is the school and the pupils, and not so much Swift’s text and characters, who get illustrated here. Local embellishment and tribute, much more so than literary illustration, are at stake. A more extreme case of localism, and also one of local (re-)appropriation, is the mural on a gable end at Coates Lane in Whitehaven, Cumbria, by portrait and mural artist Paul Wilmott. Painted in July 2013, it represents the famous and iconic scene of Gulliver pinned to the ground by the Lilliputians, with the town and coastline of Whitehaven in the background. It was inspired by what The Whitehaven News called a “local legend,” according to which Swift as a baby was taken away from Dublin and his widowed mother and uncle to Whitehaven by his nurse, who had to visit a sick relative there. The mural project was a £2000 initiative by Whitehaven Heritage Action Group, whose members felt that the then-fading seascape image on the wall, which had been painted by local children over 15 years before, was due for renewal. The initial plan was that of a design featuring west coast sea life. On hearing the local story, Wilmott suggested “recreat[ing] the author’s greatest character: Gulliver” (Green). Group chairman Michael Moon is reported to have said that the mural “adds a literary connection to an old and much-loved town” (“Gulliver’s travels”). In an interview which he gave in September 2016, Wilmott explained that the Gulliver mural took a week to plan and three weeks to paint, and

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claimed that it was his biggest and most satisfying public artwork that far. The headline of the article played on the idea of murals as grand-scale art (“Artist Paul has big ideas”), while the subhead (“Mark Green meets a painter who is leaving his mark on Cumbria”) emphasised the notions of artistic imprint and local heritage (Green). Back in 2013, during the creation of the mural, The Whitehaven News had claimed: “Whitehaven’s links with writer Jonathan Swift are being celebrated in a new mural being painted by artist Paul Wilmott” (“Gulliver’s travels”). Mural adaptation is here again presented as a celebratory initiative, as well as a happening. Yet, the Whitehaven mural does not so much celebrate Swift himself as the place where he is thought to have spent time in early childhood (if not to have been born). It is not so much an adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels (or rather of its most iconic scene), as an adaptation of its author’s life story to local history. It is moreover an instance of the eagerness with which literary classics and their authors are re-appropriated and adjusted to their adoptive environments. The background of the Wilmott mural, which presents local features and topography—like the school children’s silhouettes on the St Leger mural in Dublin—, testifies to this propensity to adapt the original to its target location.

Adapting Swift Abroad: From Local or Regional Initiatives to International (Re)Appropriations Gulliver’s Travels has been adapted and appropriated, not only by Irish or British artists, but also by international ones. This has been the case not solely in the British Isles, but also in other parts of the world, that is, in other cultural spheres and for diverse publics. In 2016, for instance, the year before “Swift 350,” street artists Boris Bare and Dominik Vukové painted a 30-metre-long mural in the previously neglected Opatovina Park, in Zagreb, Croatia, representing a modern Gulliver wearing a blue jeans jacket, trousers, and sneakers, with dark hair, and a moustache, asleep and tied to the ground by ropes (Fig. 3.2). “It’s so hyperreal,” local journalist and blogger Andrea Pisac writes, “that the model […] gest [sic] asked in the streets: ‘Are you Gulliver from Opatovina?’” (Pisac). Freelance journalist and photographer Mirna Marić explains that it took the artists six days to paint the mural, that they were inspired by the elongated shape of the wall (an instance of the artistic product adapting itself to its medium), that the mural is “an homage to all the small and big everyday

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Fig. 3.2  Boris Bare and Dominik Vukové, Gulliverian mural, Opatovina Park, Zagreb, Croatia (2016). https://www.journal.hr/lifestyle/div-­gulliver-­na-­ opatovini/ (accessed 5 June 2022)

adventures, joys of life and encounters with giants, as well as with small people—the Lilliputians,” and that it “definitely brings joy to everyone who happens to pass through this park” (Marić). While rejoicing at the vibrancy of the Zagreb street art scene due to “[s]tunning murals […] popping up everywhere, even in the historic part of the city,” and at the fact that “once quiet, almost deserted, Upper Town has blossomed into a lively cultural hub” thanks to the transformative power and non-elitist character of street murals like Bare and Vukové’s Gulliver, Pisac deplores the controversy stirred up by an article in the Croatian press which “shredd[ed] ‘Gulliver’ to pieces” and presented it as “a (mis)deed of wannabe street artists” (Pisac). Whereas, Pisac claims, “Zagreb locals welcomed the painted giant,” which “is already a much beloved city sight,” and “foreign travellers took to the metaphor that Gulliver stands for: the meeting and embracing of different worldviews,” the unnamed article insists that “painted ‘Gulliver’ looks like a drunken manual worker from a Mexican soap opera […] slumped with a few

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tequilas in him, only missing a toothpick in his mouth”; that “the kitschy hyperrealism of ‘Gulliver’ is not on par with the central location of Opatovina Park”; and that it is “wrongfully” juxtaposed to the “sacred” city centre—in spite of the fact that the street artists obtained legal permission to paint the Gulliverian mural from the Kaptol administration. “And so once again,” Pisac remarks, “the travelling giant faced a hostile welcome in the land of Lilliput” (Pisac). Visibly, some adaptations don’t remedy the issues they evoke; they only remediate them. The debate points at the physicality of murals—their (welcome or unwelcome) tangible presence in a city (which Goalwin calls “their commanding visual presence,” 189), their (positive or negative) reception by residents and visitors alike, and their link with local and cultural politics, as well as at their metaphorical dimension: Bare and Vukové’s Gulliver indeed represents various things for various people. It has been considered a homage by some, including the authors, and an outrage by others. Like any other kind of illustration and adaptation, murals are prone to subjective interpretation and divergent reading; like the original they are based on, Gulliverian murals are likely to amuse, or to vex their viewers. According to the disparaging article reported on by Pisac, “the Gulliver mural is a cultural, artistic and civilizational breech [which] should have stayed in a backwater industrial stretch, inside a socialist-realist underpass, or in a deserted building on the outskirts of Zagreb” (Pisac). Today, however, it features in the “public art in Zagreb” guided tours promoted by Lonely Planet on its website (Lonely Planet, “Europe”), just as the “Gulliver en el pais de las Maravillas” mural painted by Mexican-born and Pilsen resident muralist Hector Duarte back in 2001–2005 features in the travel company’s “Public Art in Pilsen & Near South Side” section (Lonely Planet, “Public Art”). Whereas the Mexican connection of the Zagreb Gulliver is only a discriminatory interpretation of the painted character, that of the Pilsen Gulliver is totally intentional: when depicting Gulliver as a giant, masked, and reclining human figure trying to break free from the barbed wire that ties him down, Duarte had a point and meant to symbolise the difficulties of a twenty-first-century (Mexican) immigrant’s journey, border-crossing and acceptance in a new land (Fig. 3.3). Situated on 1900 West Cullerton Street, at the corner of Cullerton and Wolcott, the imposing mural “wraps around” (Chicago Public Art blog) the artist’s home and studio in Pilsen, a Mexican American district of Chicago. Said to be “based on” (Chicago Public Art blog) or “inspired by” (HI Chicago) Gulliver’s Travels, the

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Fig. 3.3  Hector Duarte, “Gulliver en el pais de las Maravillas,” Pilsen, Chicago, 2001–2005. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pov_steve/244762469/in/photostream/lightbox/ (accessed 5 June 2022)

giant figure “a [sic] la Jonathan Swift” (Mad About The Mural) has been termed “the modern version of the foreigner in a new land”: “[n]o longer a traveler looking for distant lands, Gulliver is instead portrayed as an immigrant struggling to adapt to his new environment and culture” (Mad About The Mural). Adaptations indeed sometimes take adaptation as a subject. On top of being a new, modern version of Gulliver, Duarte’s mural is also a personal interpretation of the eighteenth-century character and of his (mis)adventures. In a 2012 interview, Duarte explained that, “the size of the image reflects his own sense of accomplishment at having successfully immigrated to the US from Mexico, while the barbed wire reflects the dangers that the border represents to most immigrants.” In addition, “[t]he reclining figure wears a mask and cap, which represent factory and field workers as well as the death of his Mexican identity” (Chicago Public

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Art blog). The mural is therefore the expression of both a personal and a collective experience based on, or adapted from, that of a fictional character. Its size and scale are meant to appeal to the artist’s fellow immigrants via his own sense of the hardships of their journeys and lives. Duarte is known around Chicago for having explored through his art “the hopes and fears of the immigrant experience and the particular struggles of those who have come to Chicago from Mexico” (Esposito and Ballesteros) and for having addressed the connected themes of identity, migration and borders—which are all tackled in Swift’s text, albeit in a different form and context. These are meaningful themes in and of themselves, of course, and also as subjects for literary expression and illustration, but they are also significant from a theoretical perspective: adaptations and the transmedial products that result from them are precisely about the difficulties and potential rewards of media migration and border-crossing. Even though it is in line with its source of inspiration content- and intent-wise, Duarte’s mural adaptation of Swift’s Gulliver, like many others, implies a change in place, as well as one of medium and of language: from Dublin/Lilliput to Chicago,5 from paper to wall, and from verbal to visual signs. “I prefer murals because more people are able to enjoy my work; I am not painting for the privileged or for museums” (Chicago Public Art Group), Duarte articulates in his artist statement on the Chicago Public Art Group website, thereby reflecting the “assumption held by most Chicano artists […] that muralism is a form of community art that should not be displayed in galleries associated with traditional art forms” (Arreola 413). “Committed to the idea that art must be enjoyed by all,” the Latino Art Midwest project maintains, “Duarte embraces muralism as his visual language to explore issues of struggle and survival, as well as a transnational condition of the global moment” (Latino Art Midwest). Duarte’s murals, Wttw claims, “are intended not only to beautify the neighborhood, but to carry on a strong Mexican muralist tradition that seeks to educate, inspire, and engage with the public” (Wttw).6 Duarte indeed epitomises a tradition initiated by his Mexican predecessors (notably José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros), who “used 5  See the title of the article by Motchan, “Gulliver, Not in Lilliput, But in the Heart of Pilsen.” 6  See also Arreola: “in Mexican American districts of many cities […] mural art is not only an artifact that embellishes the barrio landscape but also a vehicle for political and social expression” (409). Goldman highlights “the active role of [mural] painting in the formation of Mexican consciousness and awareness since the 1920s” (124).

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mural art as an instrument of political expression,” first in Mexico in the 1920s and then in the United States in the 1930s, and continued by the Chicano artists of the 1960s, who were more “concerned with expressions of ethnic identity and political activism” (Arreola 410). Duarte’s Pilsen Gulliver provides an extension of “Chicago’s community-oriented street mural movement” of the 1960s (Goldman 125), and an instance of “a democratic art form with immense capacity to strengthen and expand multicultural understanding” (Conrad 98). Interestingly—and perhaps surprisingly considering the rich tradition of political murals in Northern Ireland, where they have famously been used to commemorative as well as propagandist aims7—, the Irish murals representing Gulliver and / or Swift are much more classical and literary than liberal and political in their approach and treatment of the source material. Perhaps national and cultural proximity with the source material reduces potential for more critical interpretations, or the scope for enlargement to external issues, at least on the street. Nonetheless, mural adaptations of Gulliver such as Duarte’s or Bare and Vukové’s prove that “what is involved in adapting,” as Hutcheon writes, “can be a process of appropriation, of taking possession of another’s story, and filtering it, in a sense, through one’s own sensibility, interests, and talents” (Hutcheon 18). They are, therefore, in Sander’s words, “celebratory of the cooperative and collaborative model of creativity” (Sanders 6) between a writer and his or her adapters / appropriators. And they testify to what Nicklas and Lindner term “the interplay between adaptation and cultural appropriation” (4). In a video accompanying the Wttw article, Duarte comments on the very process of adaptation by explaining that he “borrowed the name and the concept. But it’s a Latino Gulliver who crossed the border.” He also indicates that he encourages passers-by to “interact with it” so that they “become one of those little men that is on the island that tied him,” the point of the mural being not just an aesthetic experience but also, and above all, a form of political action—on the part of both its creator and its recipients, who are invited to act after looking at it: “Many young people come to ask me what it means, and I tell them that if we want to help this 7  See Goalwin, who analyses Northern Ireland’s political murals as “a striking medium used by political activists on both sides of the Troubles to express their ideological messages and further their political goals” (189). See also mural specialists Bill Rolston, Neil Jarman, and Jeffrey Sluka, all quoted in Goalwin.

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immigrant that crossed the border, to integrate into this society, we need to help put pressure on the politicians to change the law to allow him to enjoy this society here” (Wttw). Like Pisac when assessing Bare and Vukové’s Zagreb Gulliver, Duarte here presents his Gulliver as a piece of cultural appropriation (which James O. Young defines as “appropriation that occurs across the boundaries of cultures,” 5), as a political statement and as a potentially powerful civic tool. With Duarte’s Gulliver, we come close to the participatory forms of adaptation associated with video games or online fan communities’ engagement with favourite texts (see Hutcheon), and certainly move into what Henry Jenkins has termed participatory culture in contrast with older notions of media spectatorship (Jenkins). Like the mural-revitalised Opatovina Park, the mural-vibrant Pilsen neighbourhood, and particularly Duarte’s home and studio, “have themselves become a destination” (Wttw), the latter having been “one of the popular stops on the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s 2013 Open House Chicago tour” (Motchan). Duarte’s work, like his fellow muralists’ around the world, has indeed appeared in travel guides, attracting visitors from faraway places. Street murals occasionally become “reference points, places to meet, a source of wonder and admiration” (Esposito and Ballesteros), reviving and updating—and, as we shall see next, sometimes transforming and erasing—their sources of inspiration, therefore doing more than illustrating, adapting and expressing them in another language and medium. As Hutcheon writes, “adaptation is an act of appropriation or salvaging, and this is always a double process of interpreting and then creating something new” (20).

Playing with or Circumventing the Ephemerality of the Medium In their August 2019 appraisal of Duarte’s mural, Stefano Esposito and Carlos Ballesteros observed that, Over time, sunlight has faded the mural’s original earthy reds and golden yellows. And paint now curls up from the window frames in spots. Asked whether he has considered painting over his mural and starting again, Duarte is adamant. Definitely not, he says. Murals, he says, unlike graffiti, are meant to be permanent. That’s why he has always refused offers of work to paint over other artists’ murals. (Esposito and Ballesteros)

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Not all muralists share this view. In 2014, renowned Brooklyn-based Iranian duo Icy & Sot teamed up with equally renowned Argentinian artist Sonni, all associated to controversial street art, to create a “Gulliver 2.0” mural in Brooklyn, New York, which exhibited a “stenciled image of modern-day Gulliver being held captive by Sonni’s signature characters” (Levy). Fascinatingly, the mural took different forms and presented varying—if only briefly visible—images of the scene, providing us with a case of adaptation adapting itself to its environment and circumstances before disappearing, thereby illustrating the extraordinary ephemerality of this form of adaptation.8 In July 2014, an Urban Montage blog article entitled “UnTapped’s Top 10 NYC Street Art Murals in 2014 So Far” classed the Gulliverian mural second and reported that originally, it depicted a soldier being tied up and disarmed by Sonni’s little characters “in a strong political statement against war,” and that “[f]or some reason, the mural was buffed over not even a day after completion” (Fig. 3.4a). In response, the trio “rema[de] the piece” and “instead of using a soldier in the role of Gulliver, they decided to have a city worker being tied down by the characters” (Weisler) (Fig.  3.4b). Global youth entertainment network Complex.com signalled on its website that “[a]fter completing the political mural in Brooklyn, the artists painted over it and replaced it with a tombstone that reads: ‘R.I.P Gulliver 2014–2014’” (LaSane), an artistic wink to the world-famous Banksy versus King Robbo Camden street art duel. In addition to questioning authorship, murals also question, like many other types of adaptations, the very notion of the “original,” the Gulliverian soldier—not Swift’s original character—being presented above as the prototype of the Gulliverian worker. The Brooklyn Gulliverian mural therefore appeared in multiple versions and lived multiple, if only ephemeral lives, testifying to the transient and malleable nature of murals cum adaptations, as well as to their dialogical potential. Murals indeed engage audiences in their various forms—the artists who create them, the general public who sees them, the (art) critics who comment on them and the local authorities who judge and 8  Referring to Rolston’s expertise on political murals in Northern Ireland, Goalwin remarks that “[t]hough a significant number of murals remain extant, and indeed have even been turned into popular tourist attractions, many have disappeared, and recent efforts have been made by the Northern Irish government to remove the remaining murals as anachronistic reminders of a conflict both sides now wish to move past (Rolston, 2010)” (194). Anachronism is another interesting aspect of murals as adaptations, though one that applies less to literary murals than to political ones.

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Fig. 3.4  (a) and (b) Icy & Sot and Sonni, “Gulliver 2.0” mural, Brooklyn, New  York, 2014. https://streetartnews.net/2014/06/icy-­sot-­x-­sonni-­ gulliver-­20-­new-­mural.html (accessed 5 June 2022)

sometimes gag them. They are political statements, not so much about the works they illustrate and adapt but rather about the places and times in which these works are illustrated and adapted, and are consequently

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subject to censorship, even in the twenty-first-century Western world. Icy & Sot, “two renegade street artists” (Shahrzad) who have been dubbed the “Banksys of Iran,” had to flee their country after having “risked their lives and flirted with serious jail time to paint murals that gave voice to the problems and worries of the Iranian people.” And while “repression of their politically charged art lead [sic] them to claim asylum in the US and be barred from Iran for life” (King), federal and/or anonymous street censorship in the US prompted them to react by proposing yet other interpretations of the Swiftian iconic scene. Their final, “delightful, funny and strong response to censorship in the NYC street art world” (Weisler) consisted in burying their own Gulliver, rather than Swift’s original one, who keeps living on and being re-interpreted to this day and will no doubt continue to be in the future. Icy & Sot and Sonni’s Gulliver survives only in photographs of a now extinct illustration and adaptation—photography here allowing a sort of transmedial resurrection of mural expression, itself a transmedial expression of a literary text.

Conclusion “How often do you see murals inspired by literature?” was the question raised by Andrew LaSane at the start of his 2014 appraisal of Icy & Sot and Sonni’s collaborative Gulliver mural (LaSane). This far from exhaustive account of Gulliver’s Travels-inspired murals can only provide a very positive answer to the question. There are indeed innumerable murals worldwide representing literary classics and their authors, in addition to murals representing books and readers.9 Interestingly, the call for papers for the “Art and Action: Literary Authorship, Politics, and Celebrity Culture” conference organised by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities on 20–21 March 2020 (which had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic) used a mural by Jane Brewster as an illustration to its invitation to explore “the intersections of authorship, politics, activism, and literary celebrity across historical periods, literatures, and media” (TORCH). Brewster’s 1997 “Hawthorne Literary Mural,” in Portland, Oregon, features a series of portraits of famous, mostly English-speaking authors surrounded by quotations from and icons of their works. Likewise, the banner of the conference programme is illustrated by yet another literary 9  See for instance https://ebookfriendly.com/books-libraries-in-street-art/ (page accessed 30 January 2021).

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mural, “For Toni M.,” signed “e.shaw” and dated “8/10/19.” Murals are here used as illustrations and associated to the promotion of “causes that transcend the literary sphere,” and to “literary/political border-crossing” or “double acts.” Like literature, they are, or can be, “form[s] of political intervention” (TORCH). We have seen examples of literary murals by artists with a local or regional agenda, as well as murals by international muralists (some of whom immigrants, and therefore originally foreign to the originals they adapted) with a more global agenda, both geographically and politically speaking. Some murals based on or inspired by literary classics are indeed examples of what I would call committed or engagéd illustration and adaptation. Yet, if they are all adaptations and transmediations in the sense that they make us see literary works in pictorial form (rather than in verbal form) and on walls (rather than on book pages), they are on the other hand not always direct illustrations of these works, but rather illustrations of the contexts and circumstances in which and publics for which they are produced. On top of being direct and indirect illustrations (of a text’s and its author’s contemporary reception and popularity, and of contexts of production and reception), adaptations (to different contexts and publics, and in different forms), and transmediations (from verbal signs to pictorial ones, and from book pages to public walls) of literary classics and authors, literary murals are also forms of cultural and political appropriation—some local or regional, others national, others still international. They reflect at least three of the five “acts of cultural appropriation” identified by Young (5–6): content appropriation, motif appropriation and subject appropriation—the other two, object appropriation and style appropriation, being inoperative with the transposition of a literary text circulated in book form into a mural painting. Some Gulliverian and other literary murals have become touristic attractions and assets for small towns and big cities, albeit ephemeral ones; others have provoked civil controversies and artistic rivalry or games; and all have a socio-political message to deliver to their publics, even if this means twisting the original—or, in Hutcheon’s terms, “the adapted text” (xv). The latter, however, remains recognisable, even if only vaguely so, through intertextual/visual references or allusions and thanks to literary heritage and collective memory. Unlike illustrations, but like some other forms of adaptation, murals may indeed function

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independently from the source text: the street artists who have interpreted Swift on walls have often made their statements independently from Swift’s words, thereby providing street visuals and embellishments rather than illustrations of his text, which seems to have become dispensable. In addition, they have predominantly relied on what has long been Gulliver’s Travels’ most iconic scene (i.e., Gulliver being tied to the ground by the Lilliputians), which has become emblematic of the work as a whole and inspired artists worldwide, and not only street artists: the scene has also long been a favourite of political cartoonists’, and before them of book illustrators’; it is also an unavoidable scene in film adaptations. In turning Gulliver’s Travels into wall images, muralists have transmediated the original text, and thus transformed our perception of and relationship to that text—whether we know it directly, through reading, or through its previous illustrations or other adaptations (i.e., whether we are knowing or unknowing audiences, in Hutcheon’s terminology, 120). Hence they have contributed, with other adapters working in other media, to the evolution of its reception, and to its multi-faceted afterlife and (what I would call) post-literary longevity. The Irish muralists in particular have moreover contributed to re-contextualising a text which had long been de-contextualised, both from its original national sphere and reach and from its original audience. Whether the result of localism or of trans/national cultural appropriation, literary murals are therefore, like book illustrations, much more than mere adornments. Ranging from plain representations to overt political statements, they participate in various ways and to varying degrees to contemporary story-telling cum political activism. They relate to the cultural and civic spheres, as well as, if not more so than, to the artistic and aesthetic fields. By taking literature outside of the private home, university, public library or bookshop, literary murals contribute, with other forms of adaptations such as films, TV series or video games (to name but a few), to the democratisation of literature, as well as to the sharing and circulating of local and national cultural heritage. We may therefore claim that, if “[a]uthors have at all times been fiercely outspoken campaigners for a wide range of socio-political causes” (TORCH), so have their adapters and, particularly, their adapters on walls.

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Works Cited Arreola, Daniel D. 1984. Mexican American Exterior Murals. Geographical Review 74 (4): 409–424. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Brewster, Jane. 1997. Hawthorne Literary Mural. Portland, Oregon. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://janebrewster.tumblr.com/. Canavan, Tony. 2017. Editorial. Books Ireland 376 (November/December): 3. Chicago Public Art Blog. 2013. Gulliver en el pais de las Maravillas / Gulliver in Wonderland (August). Accessed 5 June 2022. http://chicagopublicart. blogspot.com/2013/08/gulliver-­en-­el-­pais-­de-­las-­maravillas.html. Chicago Public Art Group. n.d. Hector Duarte. Accessed 5 June 2022. http:// www.chicagopublicartgroup.org/hector-­duarte. Conrad, David. 1995. Community Murals as Democratic Art and Education. Journal of Aesthetic Education 29 (1): 98–102. Delgado, Melvin, and Keva Barton. 1998. Murals in Latino Communities: Social Indicators of Community Strengths. Social Work 43 (4): 346–456. Dublin City Council. 2017a. A City of Words: Jonathan Swift. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://dublin.ie/live/stories/city-­of-­words-­jonathan-­swift/. ———. 2017b. New Jonathan Swift Murals to Celebrate SWIFT 350, 23 November. Accessed 28 December 2020. http://www.dublincity.ie/ new-­jonathan-­swift-­murals-­celebrate-­swift-­350. Elleström, Lars. 2014. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Esposito, Stefano, and Carlos Ballesteros. 2019. Pilsen Muralist Hector Duarte’s House Is a Home and Also a Work of Art. Chicago Sun Times, 16 August. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://chicago.suntimes.com/murals-­mosaics/ 2019/8/16/20746862/hector-­d uar te-­m ural-­h ome-­m urals-­p ilsen-­ michoacan-­mexico-­immigrants-­immigration. Goalwin, Gregory. 2013. The Art of War: Instability, Insecurity, and Ideological Imagery in Northern Ireland’s Political Murals, 1979–1998. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26 (3): 189–215. Goldman, Shifra M. 1977. Resistance and Identity: Street Murals of Occupied Aztlán. Latin American Literary Review 5 (10): 124–128. Green, Mark. 2016. Artist Paul Has Big Ideas: Mark Green Meets a Painter Who Is Leaving His Mark on Cumbria. News & Star, 30 September. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/16700632.artist-­paul-­has-­ big-­ideas/. Gulliver’s Travels Bring Him Back Home. 2013. The Whitehaven News, 11 July. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.whitehavennews.co.uk/news/17122888. gullivers-­travels-­bring-­him-­back-­home/.

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HI Chicago. n.d. Neighborhoods: Explore Pilsen. Vamonde. Accessed 28 December 2020. https://www.vamonde.com/posts/gulliver-­en-­el-­pais-­de-­ las-­maravillas/2456. Hugh Madden Art. 2017. Facebook Page, 29 November. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.facebook.com/HughMaddenArt/. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006 [2013]. A Theory of Adaptation (2nd ed.). New  York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry. 2006a. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press. ———. 2006b. Welcome to Convergence Culture, 19 June. Accessed 5 June 2022. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2006/06/welcome_to_convergence_ culture.html. King, Alex. 2016. Icy & Sot: The Exile of Iran’s Radical Street Artists. Huckmag. com, October. Accessed 28 December 2020. LaSane, Andrew. 2014. Icy & Sot Collaborate With Sonni on a Gulliver’s Travels Inspired Mural in Brooklyn, 26 May. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www. complex.com/style/2014/05/icy-­s ot-­c ollaborate-­w ith-­s onni-­o n-­a -­ gullivers-­travels-­inspired-­mural-­in-­brooklyn. Latino Art Midwest. n.d. Muralist Héctor Duarte. Accessed 28 December 2020. https://latinoartmidwest.com/project/hector-­duarte/. Levy, Rom. 2014. Icy & Sot x Sonni ‘Gulliver 2.0’ New Mural, New York City, 5 June. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://streetartnews.net/2014/06/icy-­sot-­x-­ sonni-­gulliver-­20-­new-­mural.html. Lonely Planet. n.d.-a Europe, Croatia, Zagreb, Attractions. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.lonelyplanet.com/croatia/zagreb/attractions/gulliver-­ mural/a/poi-­sig/1594499/358800. ———. n.d.-b Public Art in Pilsen & Near South Side. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/chicago/attractions/gulliver-­i n-­ wonderland-­mural/a/poi-­sig/1615010/361932. Mad About the Mural. 2010. The Chicago Connection, 12 May. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://madaboutthemural.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/the-­ chicago-­connection/. Marić, Mirna. n.d. Gulliver Mural: How Gulliver Traveled to Zagreb. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.spottedbylocals.com/zagreb/gulliver-­mural/?cn-­ reloaded=1. MaSamba Samba School. n.d. Dublin, Ireland. Facebook Page. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.facebook.com/masambasambaschool/photos/?tab= album&album_id=10155246874842801. Motchan, Bill. 2013. Gulliver, Not in Lilliput, But in the Heart of Pilsen. Chicago Architecture, 23 October. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2013/10/23/gulliver-­not-­in-­lilliput-­but-­in-­the-­heart-­of-­pilsen/.

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Nicklas, Pascal, and Oliver Lindner. 2012. Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter. Pisac, Andrea. 2017. Zagreb Street Art Controversy: Why You Should Love ‘Gulliver’, 3 January. Accessed 28 December 2020. https://travelhonestly. com/zagreb-­street-­art/. Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality. Érudit 6: 43–64. Sanders, Julie. 2006 [2016]. Adaptation and Appropriation (2nd ed.). London; New York: Routledge. Shahrzad. 2013. Icy and Sot in LA. FatCap, 2 April. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.fatcap.com/article/icy-­and-­sot-­in-­la.html. St Leger, Will. n.d. Personal Website. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://willstleger. wordpress.com/?s=gulliver. ———. 2017. Swift Mural for MaSamba Samba School on Bow Lane West, Dublin. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://twitter.com/mrcb_pandp/ status/1075430786357170176. Swift, Jonathan. 2008. Gulliver’s Travels. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics). TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. 2020. Art & Action: Literary Authorship, Politics, and Celebrity Culture, Conference, 20–21 March. [Cancelled]. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/ event/call-­f or-­p apers-­a rt-­a nd-­a ction-­l iterar y-­a uthorship-­p olitics-­a nd-­ celebrity-­culture. Weisler, Charlene. 2014. Urban Montage: Street Art in All Its Forms. “UnTapped’s Top 10 NYC Street Art Murals in 2014 So Far” (July). Accessed 5 June 2022. https://thestarryeye.typepad.com/streetart/2014/07/untappeds-­top-­10-­ nyc-­street-­art-­murals-­in-­2014-­so-­far.html. Wilmott, Paul. 2013. Gulliver’s Travels Mural, Coates Lane, Whitehaven, Cumbria. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.pinterest.com.mx/pin/6377519972 05167868/. Wttw. My Neighborhood Pilsen. n.d. Hector Duarte Muralist. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://interactive.wttw.com/my-­neighborhood/pilsen/hector-­ duarte. Young, James O. 2008. Cultural Appropriation and the Arts. Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing.

CHAPTER 4

Adapting Novel Illustrations for the Almanac: Text/Image Relations in Chodowiecki’s Illustrations for Rousseau’s Julie Ann Lewis

In its depiction of a fashionable group absorbed in discussion of a tiny illustrated volume (Fig.  4.1), Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki’s “Calender Narr”, the last of twelve illustrations of Centifolium Stultorum, Narrheiten [Book of One Hundred Fools] for the Göttinger Taschen Calender in 1783, nicely brings out the fascination exerted by a particular type of luxury almanac and of the visual pleasure it might procure (while simultaneously suggesting that such appreciation in high society may be a sign of affectation). This image provides a playful and self-reflexive engagement with the act of reading illustrations as the beholder sees a group viewing an image within an almanac exactly like the Taschen Calender before him/her. The man’s pointing gesture draws our attention to the clock and paintings on the wall (which are mostly obscured, aside from a couple of allegorical figures): thus are foregrounded both the theme of time and its connection

A. Lewis (*) Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_4

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Fig. 4.1  Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki, “Calender Narr.” [Calendar Mania], in the Göttinger Taschen Calender von Jahr 1783 (Göttingen, Lower Saxony: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1782, n.p.). (Reproduced courtesy of the Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, digital collection. Creative Commons CC BY. https://digitalcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/view/item/1619869)

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to the almanac, and, more broadly, the iconographical networks and pictorial codes through which the tiny image in the almanac may be read, quite apart from any literary textual “origin” or accompaniment. The consumption and enjoyment of novel illustrations within an almanac of this kind, independently of the text they adapt, is a key example of what Leigh Dillard has referred to as “parallel illustration”.1 When considering illustration as a form of adaptation, this phenomenon opens up a number of interesting questions about the status of such images and their captions whose connection to the “source” text becomes potentially more ambiguous when viewed at a distance from it. Whereas “source-bound” illustrations2 present us with a particular mode of adaptation in which the visual transposition is viewed alongside the adapted text and cannot but be read in an oscillating relation to it (this is the norm for eighteenth-century series of illustrations), this relationship is disrupted when the images appear in other contexts. Linda Hutcheon’s celebrated definition of adaptation as “an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of particular work of art” (2006 [2013], 170) may be destabilised if we consider whether the readerviewer of parallel illustrations necessarily recognises them as ‘revisitations’ in this way. In the absence of the anchoring presence of the source text, models of viewing derived from print collections and displays of other sorts (whether the gallery, wall hanging, portfolio, recueil or album) may become as important as literary “influences” in structuring the reading of the series of illustrations. In my focus on questions of reader-response in the present chapter, I follow Kate Newell’s emphasis on adaptation as “experiential and dependent on the audience” (2017b, 8). This chapter will explore some of these dynamics with reference to Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki’s illustrations for Rousseau’s bestselling epistolary novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), which was illustrated many times over during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mainly in France. It is highly likely that Chodowiecki would have been conversant with this iconographical “adaptation network” in Kate Newell’s sense (2017b, 8), and especially with Gravelot’s series which Rousseau had commissioned to accompany the novel. The latter can be considered the first “canonical” visual adaptation of the novel (and indeed an integral part of 1  Examples of parallel illustration include: “literary galleries, collected illustration […], miscellaneous paintings and engravings—each influenced by, but displayed separately from, the text itself” (Dillard 196). 2  I am borrowing Christina Ionescu’s useful formulation here (2020, 165).

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it given the author’s close involvement in its design and production).3 Chodowiecki was one of Germany’s most distinguished artists, best known for his drawings and engravings, including a large number of book illustrations.4 His twelve images for Julie appeared in the Genealogischer Calender auf das Jahr 1783 (the calendar of the Berlin Academy), as well as its French language edition (Almanac généalogique pour l’année 1783), in a tiny format—the images themselves measure 82  mm x 51  mm.5 Chodowiecki’s illustrations for Julie have received relatively little critical attention compared with other series, with only a few exceptions (Mrozińska 1982; Lewis 2009; Martin 2011). These images with their captions provide rich material for analysing the complex relationship between illustration and adaptation at various levels. As is the case for the many other series of eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century illustrations for Julie, they visually transpose key moments from the epistolary novel, in a complex intermedial encounter which is especially intricate since the novel itself already strongly evokes the tableau and engraving through the use of textual description.6 Appearing twenty years after the novel’s first publication, and within a German rather than French context, the images produce a very particular interpretation of the novel, through the selection of scenes, and manner of representing them—Christophe Martin (2011) notes the ideological coherence of Chodowiecki’s vision in his comparative reading of the series alongside Gravelot’s images. The existence of separate engravings from 3  The critical literature focusing on Gravelot’s authorially directed series is too vast to list in full here, but see the following summaries (Lewis 2009, 247–48 notes 29–32, 46–49; Ionescu 2011, 22–24) referencing the key work of Claude Labrosse, Nathalie Ferrand, Elizabeth Lavezzi, Yannick Séité and Philip Stewart, amongst many others. For surveys of the wider iconographical oeuvre surrounding Rousseau’s novel, see Alexis François (1920), Fernand de Girardin (1910 [1971]), Christophe Martin (2005), Ann Lewis (2009) and Benoît Tane (2014), amongst others. 4  He worked in Berlin throughout his artistic career, but was born in Danzig to a Polish father and a mother of French Huguenot descent (his wife was also a member of the French Huguenot colony at Berlin). He became the director of the Berlin Academy in 1797. On his connections to French culture, see Maria Mrozińska (1982). For a brief summary of his life and career, see Bénézit (957–58) and Griffiths with Carey (50–68). 5  I have transcribed the full titles on the title pages as follows: “ALMANAC Généalogique pour L’Année 1783. Avec l’approbation de L’Académie Royale des Sciences et belles Lettres A. Berlin.” and “Genealogischer CALENDER auf das Jahr 1783. mit Kupfern, gezieret und mit Genehmhaltung der Königl: Academie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, herausgegeben.” 6  On this point, see amongst others, Lewis (2009), David Marshall, Tane. On the broader significance of “prose pictures” within an adaptation context, see Kamilla Elliott (31–76).

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Chodowiecki’s designs for each of the two language versions of the almanac exemplifies a double adaptation typical of the copper-plate techniques of this period in which a first transposition from text to image via an artist’s designs for the illustration (usually in the medium of drawing) is further adapted through the process of etching and engraving onto a plate by a specialist engraver. Here, for example, Daniel Berger’s etchings for the German version of the almanac create effects of light that are different to Chodowiecki’s own version for the French edition (although my focus in this chapter lies elsewhere than in comparing the two). Rousseau’s story is thus adapted both for a different audience (in time and place); across media (in the transposition from text to image, from drawing to etching and engraving); and for a new material context (rather than being bound opposite relevant textual passages dispersed within an edition of the novel, the images are viewed in rapid succession within the almanac). The inclusion of selected quotations from the novel, in French or in German, recontextualized alongside the images as captions, adds a further layer of complexity to the adaptive process. My main focus in the present chapter is how these iconotexts’ status as adaptations is inflected by the specific viewing context of the almanac, so I will start with an examination of this particular format, which has rarely been discussed in detail in relation to the interpretation of illustrations. I will then turn to Chodowiecki’s series itself to explore how the positioning of the prints generates a range of possible readings in which the images are no longer necessarily viewed as the illustration of specific episodes from the novel, but can also be seen as an independent “progress”, or as a series of almost autonomous “genre scenes”, in which the anchoring function of the captions tying the images to the novel becomes indeterminate. While the study of illustration of eighteenth-century novels is a rapidly growing field of scholarship, it is rarely considered in terms of adaptation (on this point, see Ionescu 2020, 144–45).7 Additionally, where illustrations have been explored as a form of adaptation, this has tended to focus on the source-­ bound model (this is certainly the case for the voluminous critical work on illustrations for Julie noted earlier).8 This chapter therefore provides a new  Newell notes this as a more structural gap in adaptation studies not confined to the eighteenth century alone (2017a, 477). 8  But see the introduction and various articles in Ionescu and Lewis’s Picturing the Eighteenth-century Novel Through Time for a wider range of approaches in terms of illustration, intermediality and adaptation (2016, 479–87). On the English context, see also Luisa Calè and Leigh Dillard. 7

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reading of Chodowiecki’s series within its material context, while also proposing to open up new ways of considering the relationship between illustration and adaptation.

Chodowiecki and the Almanac Format9 Cultural historians as well as the bibliophiles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attest to the fashionable “craze” for almanacs in Europe, particularly in the 1770s–1780s, while also noting the variety of publications that could be encompassed in that category. Antony Griffiths and Frances Carey note that illustration “became so marked a feature of German book production, particularly of the almanacs, calendars and miniature pocket books (Taschenbücher) that were avidly read by all members of the educated public, that by the end of the century it was charged with subverting public taste for more elevated forms of visual art” (15). In his survey of the field in the British context, Sandro Jung considers that the illustrated “pocket diary-cum-almanac” aimed at a “middle-to-upper-­ class” readership should be considered as a genre in its own right, clearly distinct from the unillustrated almanacs consumed by a more popular and agricultural audience (54).10 A large proportion of Chodowiecki’s œuvre was commissioned for publication in the more elegant of these productions, many of which appeared in both French and German language editions—his collaboration was in many cases a major factor in their success, and his involvement with the Berlin almanac généalogique lasted over

9  I would like to thank the staff of the following libraries for their invaluable help whilst completing bibliographical research for this chapter: the British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France (Cabinet des Estampes); Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; The  Royal Library, the  National Library and  University Library, Copenhagen; Duke University Library; the National Library of Warsaw (and the Prints Department, National Library of Warsaw); the University Library of Nijmegen; the Bayersische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; and the Lilly Library, Indiana University. 10  Much work on almanacs in the French context focuses on the more “popular” type (see Bollème, for example). For lists of different types of almanacs in this period (neither exhaustive, nor always entirely accurate), see, amongst others, Grand-Carteret; Champier; Lanckorońska with Rümann. Of these, only Lanckorońska provides any satisfactory details for the Berlin Almanac généalogique which concerns us here. But see also Lüsebrink et al. (2013) for a methodologically rich collection focusing on French almanac culture in an eighteenth-century German-speaking context, including a couple of chapters on the Genealogischer Calender.

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twenty years (Mrozińska 160; Focke xii–xiii).11 Chodowiecki’s contributions comprised various types of prints such as sets of fashion plates; moral and satirical series or “progresses” like Natural and Affected Behaviour (1779–1780) and The Progress of Virtue and Vice (1777); as well as illustrations of contemporary English, French, and German novels and plays. These included many sentimental classics such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. According to Ann Schmiesing (492), of his 2075 engravings, 1905 were illustrations of novels, and the majority of these (1275) were produced for almanacs. Bibliographically speaking, copies of individual almanacs are notoriously hard to track down. Book historians frequently draw attention to their ephemeral quality and consequently the few remaining copies (see Sandro Jung 71, Maria Męzṅ icha 15), and research in the field is further hampered by the confusingly similar titles of such publications (not always correctly catalogued or identified in the lists). I was lucky to find a copy of the 1783 edition of the Genealogischer Calender in the British Library [shelfmark: C.97.f.6/25], while a copy of the French version exists in the collection of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington [shelfmark: B-LILLY STACKS-AY859.A4355 [1783]]. This allows me to confirm that both French and German versions have the same format, as bibliographers claim. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich) helpfully provides links to several digitalised issues of the almanac with a very similar configuration to that of 1783 (e.g., 1776, 1789). Examples of the layout that I discuss in what follows can therefore be viewed online, even though it is not possible to provide a link to the 1783 copy.12 The various almanacs and pocket books do not have an identical configuration but the Berlin almanac généalogique is fairly typical in its inclusion of an eclectic range of information loosely related to the yearly cycle: a list of important historical dates, religious festivals and eclipses, the times of sunrise and sunset, the presentation of assorted weights and measures and of various genealogical tables (including births, marriages and deaths 11  Focke notes that Chodowiecki collaborated most consistently with the Genealogischer Calender (later Historisch genealogischer Calender. Berlin)/Almanac généalogique. A Berlin. (from 1770–1803); the Gothaischer Hof Calender/Almanac de Gotha (from 1778–1794); and Göttinger Taschen Calender/Almanac de Goettingue (from 1778–1794), amongst others. 12  For the 1776 and 1789 issues, see for example: https://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/ title/BV013357821 (click on “Einzelbände”, page accessed 5 June 2022).

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of European royal and aristocratic families), the “tableau du cours des postes”, and a range of other inserted texts (sometimes literary, sometimes factual). The twelve illustrations are included in an early section of the almanac, opposite the months of the year (each of which comprises a page with a list of dates and days of the week, details of the “fêtes de la cour”, “les phrases de la lune”, and “longueur des jours”)—a layout shared by other almanacs. But the key point here is that in the 1783 volume of the Berlin almanac généalogique/Genealogischer Calender, the novel illustrations to Julie are all included in one section (interspersed between the twelve months), thus following one after the other in quick succession, in a recognised and established format. And unlike some other issues of the almanac, the text to which they correspond is not to be found anywhere in the almanac itself, so the part and letter references—where included—correspond to a text external to the volume. This layout clearly has a bearing on how these images could be “read”. Their close proximity to each other reinforces their constitution of a “narrative series” in which the iconographical connections between them, and their visual articulation as a “story”, are more immediately perceptible by the reader than when they are dispersed throughout a long volume. It should be noted that most series of illustrations for Julie were bound into copies of the novel, opposite the relevant textual passages, and that different artists’ series were usually designed for specific editions. In the case of Chodowiecki’s series, however, they are almost never found in editions of the novel, perhaps because of their tiny size. Chodowiecki resisted claims that he was “the German Hogarth” (see Griffiths and Carey 51; Męzn ̇ icha 11–12), but several of his other series of images (with captions) for almanacs stand independently as “progresses” without reference to a literary text, so this practice of illustrating may have influenced his conception of how a series might function, and indeed the viewer’s expectations of how such images might be consumed. This notion of the independent progress is one of the models that I will explore, in the examination of Chodowiecki’s visual adaptation of the novel, to which I now turn.

Changing the Focus: Chodowiecki’s Series as “Julie’s Progress” Chodowiecki’s series provides a strikingly original interpretation of the novel, and the evidence strongly suggests that the selection of scenes and designs for their visual adaptation were inspired by his own artistic vision

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rather than determined by the almanac’s publisher.13 This section will not provide a detailed account of the way in which the series’ chosen scenes bring out certain themes in the story while occluding others, as this has already been discussed elsewhere, but a brief overview is important as a context for my argument to follow. Martin usefully summarises the selective actualisation of Rousseau’s story by noting that, “the representation of love relationships has been replaced by those focused on the family”14: erotic scenes depicting the couple Julie and Saint-Preux are all but edited out, despite being privileged in earlier series of illustrations (on this point see Lewis 2009; Martin 2011). Even the celebrated scene of the “first kiss” involves no physical contact between the lovers—Martin suggests that we are dealing with “a novel in which not just passion, but also the sexual dimension, have been altogether removed” [‘un roman dépassionné et plus encore désexualisé’] (2011, 207). Likewise omitted are those scenes in the “virtuous” second half of the novel, following Julie’s marriage, which bring out elements of disruption and disturbance connecting back to the earlier love affair between Julie and Saint-Preux (e.g., the revisiting of the rocks at Meillerie, Saint-Preux’s nightmare at the inn, the upset chess-board).15 Martin (2011) notes that the rococo aesthetic of previous illustrations has been replaced by the style of the drame bourgeois, with a preference for the silent moment of stasis (tableau stase) rather than the climactic moment of the narration (tableau comble). Domestic scenes replete with emotion certainly dominate (with a focus on parents and children, and the bond between husband and wife), and this is combined with 13  According to Lanckorońska, from 1770 Chodowiecki was given a free reign in the choice of subjects for the Berlin Almanac généalogique following the success of his 1769 illustrations to Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm (x). This was not the case for other almanacs, where the commissioning editor might determine the subjects/themes—for example, Chodowiecki’s designs for the Göttinger Taschen Calender for each year between 1778 and 1783 were didactic-moral cycles whose theme was chosen by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (see Griffiths and Carey 56). Griffiths also notes that Chodowiecki was familiar with the literary subjects he illustrated: “he enjoyed a close relationship with many of the authors whose didactic or literary works he illustrated and was proud of the creativity he invested in the interpretation of their ideas” (1994, 15). 14  “La série de Chodowiecki est le seul programme idéologique entièrement original de la période […] la représentation de la relation familiale s’est substituée à celle de la relation amoureuse” (2011, 207). 15  For a fully comparative survey of which scenes were illustrated by different artists, see “(Re)reading Sentimental Topoi, Scenes, and Spectacles in Julie” in Sensibility, Reading and Illustration (Lewis 2009, 163–256), especially 168–216.

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an increasingly visible religious dimension, to which I will return. This selection of scenes interestingly maps onto Rousseau’s own conceptualisation of the novel’s economy of images as articulated in the second preface: “The details of domestic life expunge the faults of an earlier age: the chaste spouse, the thoughtful woman, the worthy materfamilias cause us to forget the guilty mistress” (Rousseau 1997, 11).16 The critic Claude Labrosse has talked of a progressive “épuration des images” (79) over the course of the novel,17 and arguably, Chodowiecki’s series effects this visual “purification” from the start, producing an interpretative line which corresponds clearly to Rousseau’s moral prescription. Martin suggests that in the desire for readability by a particular public and for the minimising of ambiguity (“ce souci de lisibilité et de désambiguïsation des situations”, 2011, 204), Chodowiecki’s actualisation of the story results in over-simplification—a “reductive” interpretation of Rousseau’s text (compared especially with Gravelot’s series). In contrast, I will argue that ambiguous elements in the story are not entirely eliminated in Chodowiecki’s series, but simply confined to the captions, allowing a double reading of the series in which the visual tells one story, while the verbal—connecting the images back to the adapted text—suggests another. I will focus less on questions of fidelity to the novel’s complex moral position, or indeed its status as an “interpretation” of the source text, and instead explore the way in which Chodowiecki’s series embodies a creative rewriting with its own integrity, following the recent direction of travel in adaptation studies (see much of the critical literature in this field, as summarised by Leitch 2017, Lewis with Arnold-de Simine 2020, and others). By examining more particularly the question of visual perspective and focus in the adaptive process, and the unstable relationship between caption and image, I will consider how the series lends itself to a stand-alone reading (more akin to cinema, theatre, or comic-book adaptations, which are complete in themselves). * * *

16  “Les détails de la vie domestique effacent les fautes du premier âge: la chaste épouse, la femme sensée, la digne mere [sic] de famille font oublier la coupable amante” (Rousseau 1964, 17). 17  “J. J. rêve d’une épuration des images. Tout s’épure dans son roman, à travers le temps, les conflits, les désordres, les discours, et même les délires” (79).

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Chodowiecki’s transposition of selected scenes self-reflexively foregrounds the dynamics of beholding, while visually shifting the focus of the story onto a single character. Rousseau’s text is a polyphonic epistolary novel with many correspondents, juxtaposing multiple perspectives on any given scene or event, so the transposition into images with captions reflects a complex negotiation of narratorial perspective. For example, the character writing a letter may or may not appear in the scene depicted, and the external reader’s ‘view’ may or may not correspond to the letter writer’s perspective, and so forth. The appended Table of Captions brings out some of this complexity in the analytic presentation of the various quotations used as captions to the illustrations for each of the two language versions of the almanac (showing which of these correspond to direct speech voiced by a character within the scene, and which represent subsequent reflections on the part of the letter-writer at the time of writing, a discursive status that the caption itself does not show). Indeed, in their selective presentation and recontextualisation of elements of the text alongside image, and in the translation process, the captions represent a form of adaptation in their own right—but I will examine the visual aspect of the illustrations first, before considering the role of the captions.18 Figures  4.2 and 4.3 are Daniel Berger’s etchings for the Genealogischer Calender, taken from an album in the British Museum, where the series is divided into two strips corresponding to images 1–6 and 7–12 respectively. I will refer to this numbering in my discussion below. Within the almanac, images 1–12 are bound in a continuous sequence opposite the months January–December, as described earlier.19 In Chodowiecki’s series (see Figs. 4.2 and 4.3), Julie becomes the subject and focus of the story—each image, and each successive groups of images, marking a different stage in her story, and of her changing status (from daughter, lover, to wife and mother). She appears in some form in all but one of the images and within almost every grouping of figures, she 18  It is worth noting that the captions to Gravelot’s series, supplied by Rousseau, were supplementary to rather than quotations from the novel, and bear a different relation to it. Much has been written about them (by Philip Stewart and Catherine Ramond, amongst others), so I will leave them to one side. 19  The points made in this section become even more salient in cases where the illustrations were viewed as “strips”. Griffiths and Carey note that Chodowiecki’s illustrations for calendars were executed twelve to a plate, with two sets of six back to back, and collectors often bought the images before they were cut up for insertion into almanacs, displaying them instead in albums (63).

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Figs. 4.2  The first six of twelve images illustrating Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, designed by Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki and engraved by Daniel Berger for the Genealogischer Calender, displayed on album pages in the British Museum’s collection (Object number 1900.12316440-6451) © The Trustees of the British Museum

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Figs. 4.3  The last six of twelve images illustrating Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, designed by Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki and engraved by Daniel Berger for the Genealogischer Calender, displayed on album pages in the British Museum’s collection (Object number 1900.12316440-6451) © The Trustees of the British Museum

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is the cynosure of the other characters’ gaze, usually occupying a central position within the composition. We see this most obviously in images: • 1: she is the central figure, beheld by Saint-Preux, framed by him and cousin Claire on either side, and by the trellis overhead; • 3: she and her father are the object of the mother’s blissful contemplation, she is placed between them, a darkened figure with face obscured, although surrounded by light; • 4: Saint-Preux rapturously beholds her portrait, held at in the middle of the image, although we do not see it; • 5: her action of kissing her mother’s hand is central, while Claire and her mother look on; • 6: she is the object of her father’s embrace and his contemplation; • 7: she stands between Wolmar and Saint-Preux at the gates of her house, both men watching her; • 8: she is centrally placed, surrounded by children, the object of her son’s and Saint-Preux’s gaze, while she looks away from the latter, focusing on her child; • 9: she is again viewed by Saint-Preux and Wolmar, surrounded by the whole family, while framed by the window and curtains in her central elevated position; • 10: her prayer is espied by Wolmar and Saint-Preux coming through the doorway; • 11: Julie on her deathbed is observed intently by Wolmar, their eyes meet, echoing their handshake at the centre of the image, encircled by the protective canopy; and • 12: framed by the draperies of her deathbed, eyes uplifted towards heaven, Julie is a spectacle viewed by the four figures to her left. In this way, the act of beholding Julie has become the implicit subject of almost every image, in a kind of mise-en-abyme of the reader’s apprehension of her story through reading the letters or viewing the illustrations. These visual dynamics are underlined by several of the captions, with their emphatic reference to vision, observation and witnessing (whose significance is available even to readers unfamiliar with the story itself): “when all of a sudden I saw you turn pale”, “Julie! … O my Julie… I

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behold you…”, “what a sight!”, “I am about to appear before your throne”.20 Of the captions using direct speech employed by a character in the scene (see Appendix), seven of the twelve are addressed to Julie— echoing the emphasis outlined above, while four are captions that represent Julie’s voice, addressing herself, her husband and God. Her own gaze within each image reflects her domestic and virtuous status; in no image (except, maybe, the first) does she look at Saint-Preux—the first scene shows her in a swoon, and in other images where he is present, her gaze is fixed elsewhere: on her husband (7 and 9) and on her child (8). Interestingly, her face is often turned away or hidden through modesty or overwhelming emotion—so she is not made the object of our gaze (as the external viewer of the image) in a way that becomes seductive or voyeuristic. A celebration of the marital bond is strongly brought out through the reciprocal look shared between Julie and her husband in successive images, subtly shifting the emphasis towards the enjoyment of domestic pleasures and away from the dangerous emotions suggested by the forbidden love affair. The use of lighting effects throughout the series also serves visually to accentuate the focus on Julie: both through the way in which the slant of light (often from windows) almost always falls directly on her (see especially images 5, 6, 8, 10, 11 and 12); but also insofar as Julie becomes increasingly set apart from the other figures (except perhaps Wolmar, who is at times treated similarly) by being illuminated by a radiant glow. (See, e.g., images 8 and especially 9, where her framing by the window and curtains, and the pale texture of her person, gives her an ethereal quality, as does her halo-like framing by the bedclothes and curtains of her deathbed in images 11 and 12.) This strongly reinforces the religious dimension of the story (announced by the rare eighteenth-century depiction of her prayer in image 10), which becomes a narrative of Julie’s increasing transcendence from the here and now, her religious apotheosis, culminating in a joyous deathbed. Julie’s story, and her changing status in relation to other characters, thus forms the connecting narrative of Chodowiecki’s “progress”, unlike Gravelot’s series commissioned and directed by Rousseau, which, I would argue, is structured around the character of Saint-Preux and his 20  “quand tout à coup je te vis pâlir”, “Julie! …O ma Julie… je te vois…”, “quel spectacle!”, “je vais paroître devant ton trône”. English translations by Philip Stewart (Rousseau 1997).

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experiences. There, he is present in all but two of the images, while Julie herself is absent from five of them, and his relationships of love and friendship dominate—as Julie’s lover and ex-lover [1, 5, 8, 10], potentially Claire’s husband [11], friend to Edouard Bomston [2, 3], and member of the community at Clarens [7, 9, 11]. By focusing our vision on Julie as the central character, Chodowiecki arguably sets up a reading of the story as a stand-­alone progress, in which her movement through recognisable family relationships provides enough of a narrative to engage the viewer, tying into paradigms inherited from visual and print culture. These might include temporal schemas that connect to the almanac’s broader function (such as the “stages of life” or “before and after” [marriage]); or alternatively, correspond to a moral progress following the Hogarthian model. In this context, we might read the series as “the triumph of virtue” in line with the domestic and religious trajectory that the images articulate. When read through this lens, the series does not need to be understood primarily as an adaptation of Rousseau’s text (in its thoughtful interpretation of the text and revisionist engagement with the French adaptation network around it), but can be enjoyed as an archetypal visual narrative and accomplished artwork in its own right. The reading of the series as a linear narrative does, however, rely on a basic prior knowledge of the story for the decoding of Julie’s changing status, and the bust of Rousseau at the front of the almanac announces this. However, I would argue that another reading of the images as a collection of “genre prints”, without reference to Rousseau’s text at all, is also possible, and I will turn to this now.

Reading the Images as a Collection of “Genre Scenes” Eighteenth-century print collectors and connoisseurs typically assembled and displayed prints and illustrations (desirable early impressions, before letters) within recueils, albums and portfolios, in which context they could be evaluated and admired for their aesthetic qualities, and/or grouped according to thematic interests, rather than necessarily being considered in relation to a text “of origin”.21 It seems highly likely that images within the almanac might be consumed in a similar way, and enjoyed as a collection of domestic genre prints, grouped around the theme of “The Joys of Motherhood”, “The Diligent Mother”, “The Good Mother”, “Mother  See Griffiths (2016, chapters 10–11, and 26–27) and Rudy (43–55).

21

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and Child”, “Household Peace”, “The Well-Beloved Mother”, “The Mother of the Family”, “The Virtuous Wife” (all titles of contemporary prints, see Schroder 72, 76–80).22 Indeed, Chodowiecki privileges the figure of the mother, including two images focusing on Julie and her mother, and two depicting Julie with her children—a theme that other eighteenth-­ century series did not tend to bring out. If approached in this way, the images function as a visual celebration of family values, and as a series of visual stereotypes or topoi23—and the plot context of Rousseau’s novel becomes all but irrelevant. However, the role of the captions interestingly complicates this scenario. Within the almanac, the captions provide the main anchoring link back to Rousseau’s text.24 In Chodowiecki’s series, almost all of the ­captions take the form of direct speech (see Appendix for a more systematic overview)—but the captions themselves do not indicate who is speaking, or who is being addressed, so within the almanac, where the full text of the novel is not visible, such captions may become meaningless unless the viewer is very familiar with the story. In order to explore the ambiguities and double-readings that emerge, I will focus on three images. In each case, we see a contrast between what appears in the image (if the caption is ignored), and the subversive reading which is implied if the caption’s significance is understood. 22  Many of these were reproductive prints of paintings by artists such as Chardin, Greuze, and Fragonard. On the seventeenth-century Dutch tradition of painting on the themes of women, virtue and domesticity (whose influence on genre painting in this period is clear), see Wayne E. Franits. 23  For example, image 7 of the series, depicting Julie welcoming Saint-Preux to the family home and introducing him for the first time to her husband, is very close to Chodowieckis’s emblematic image “The Bliss of Friendship” [Das Glück der Freundschaft], part of a series of four images designed for a Heilbronn almanach: Almanach und Taschenbuch für Häusliche und Gesellschaft: Freuden (by Carl Lang, 1797). See https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1900-1231-6369 (page last accessed 5 June 2022), and Engelmann (421) catalogue no. 789. It is worth noting that Chodowiecki was well-known for his idealistic depictions of family life, and his works in this genre—whether novel illustrations, moral series designed for almanacs, or independent prints—were highly collectible. 24  Strangely, in the French language edition of the almanac, the references to letter and “tome” do not indicate the Part/Letter which would have enabled a reader to find the relevant passage in any edition (see Appendix). They rather seem to refer to the Rellstab edition with Cramer’s German translation of the novel (J.  J. Rousseau’s Sämmtliche Werke, 1785–1791, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin shelfmark: 50 MA 4774–6). It seems that the letter numbers given correspond exactly to their numerical position within each of volumes 1, 2 and 4.

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In the first example (image 3 in the series), an embrace between Julie and her father beheld by her delighted mother visually suggests a happy scene of filial devotion and intimacy. But the caption, if understood, brings the forbidden love plot to the fore in the reference to Julie’s lost virginity (“Sweet and peaceful innocence, my heart lacked nothing but thee”), while also suggesting the complex and ambivalent relationship with the father.25 A similar dynamic is at play in the fifth image, where the focus on Julie kissing her mother’s hand appears as another moment of uncomplicated family affection, while the caption alone refers obliquely to the love affair through the mother’s wistful remark that she would have accepted Julie’s choice of marriage partner were it not for her husband (“—Ah, if it were only up to me”26). Perhaps the nicest example of the way in which the caption introduces a subversive reading is in illustration 8: the scene in which Saint-Preux has tea with Julie’s children (Fig. 4.4). This image seems to show a simple celebration of family life, an exemplary embodiment of Julie’s status as mother. If the visual aspect alone is considered, this may be enjoyed as a domestic genre scene, corresponding to any number of pictorial representations of the family.27 Chodowiecki’s choice of caption, though, changes this (“Reason can go astray just as well in a chalet as in a cellar”28). This is Saint-Preux’s indelicate reference to the sexual aspect of his former relationship with Julie preceding her marriage, a transgression that is underlined by the fact that he is intruding on female space (the “gynécée”) in his presence at the children’s tea time. So if the caption’s contextual significance is understood, this becomes a scene of indiscretion and a reminder of the love plot which has been visually occluded. Thus, the racier side of the novel and its theme of forbidden love are not completely excised from 25  “Douce et paisible innocence, tu manquas seule à mon Coeur”. For a more detailed discussion of this image, see Lewis (2019, 102). 26  “—peut-être, ah! S’il ne dépendoit que de moi”. 27  See for example Chodowiecki’s “Die Gattin” [The Wife]—an illustration to Christian Ludwig Neuffer’s poem “Die Braut, die Gattin und die Matrone” in the Taschenbuch für Frauenzimmer von Bildung auf das Jahr 1800. See British Museum: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1900-1231-6411 (page last accessed 24 May 2022), and Engelmann no. 910–12, 1857 489. Or “Häusliche Glückseligkeit / Félicité domestique” (c1800–1801), part of a moral series of twelve illustrations for Göttinger Taschen Calender on the motives and consequences of marriage (“par inclination”, “par ambition”, “par intérêt”, etc). See Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden: https://digitalcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/view/item/1623791 (page accessed 5 June 2022)—and Engelmann no. 598 (318). 28  “La raison peut s’égarer dans un chalet tout aussi bien que dans un cellier”.

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Fig. 4.4  Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki, 8th of 12 illustrations for Julie in the Almanac généalogique pour 1783. (Reproduced courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana)

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Chodowiecki’s series, but they are mostly confined to the captions which require the reader’s familiarity with the novel to become meaningful (especially as these are relatively obscure quotations rather than famous lines from the novel). The meaning of the images hinges on whether they are read as adaptations, in the light of their captions, in connection with their “source text”, or as autonomous genre scenes whose connection with an iconographical network provides a very different set of reference points.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to bring out the different levels at which Chodowiecki’s series of illustrations for Rousseau’s Julie may be considered as an adaptation (as a transposition across media, culture, and time). I have focused less on the questions of fidelity in relation to the “source text” or on reading the images as an “interpretation” of Rousseau’s novel, in order to consider more fully their complex engagement with other visual models which structure the reader’s response to the images. By exploring this example of “parallel illustration”, and particularly the material context of viewing within the almanac, I hope to have shown the different reading strategies that such images allow and encourage. In the absence of the anchoring presence of the text that we find in “source-­ bound” illustrations, the status of the illustrations as adaptations is highly unstable. The series may certainly be read as a direct adaptation—a sophisticated encounter with Rousseau’s text (and its adaptation network) which consciously shifts the emphasis away from the tradition established by Gravelot, Moreau and other canonical French series of illustrations, and whose captions provide a subtle suggestive link back to the love story which the images themselves occlude. But for the reader who is less familiar with the text and unable to situate the captions within the novel’s context, the series may be apprehended as an archetypal “progress” with only a tenuous link to the novel’s celebrated plot, or indeed as a collection of genre prints to be enjoyed for their celebration of the pleasures of domestic life, quite independent of any connection to Rousseau’s novel. In this way, reading for the text and reading for the image alongside different networks of association (whether intertextual, iconographical, or intermedial) can produce very different meanings.

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Appendix Table of captions and inscriptions for Chodowiecki’s illustrations for Julie in the Almanac généalogique pour l’année 1783 and Genealogischer Calender auf das Jahr 1783. Captions are transcribed as they appear and not modernised French captions German captions [with English translation, by Philip Stewart in Julie, or the New Heloise (Dartmouth College, 1997)] 1

…quand tout à coup je te vis pâlir, nouvelle Héloise T.I.Lettre XIV. D.Chodowiecki inv. et [?] [when all of a sudden I saw you turn pale; Stewart 52]

2

Milord—je reconnois maintenant vôtre ame grande et genereuse. T.I.Lettre LX. [Milord, […] I now recognise your grand and generous soul; Stewart 133]

3

Douce et paisible innocence, tu manquas seule à mon coeur. T.I.Lettre LXXIII. [Sweet and peaceful innocence, my heart lacked nothing but thee…; Stewart 144]

4

Julie!.....o ma Julie….je te vois……. T.II.Lettre XXII. [Julie!.... O my Julie!.... I behold you….; Stewart 229]

Part and Letter number from Rousseau’s novel. Note on narrative perspective and voice

Part I, Letter XIV Saint-Preux’s voice (subsequent description of events depicted), narrated in his letter addressed to Julie. Mÿlord—Jezt erkenne ich Ihre Part I, Letter 60 erhabene grossmüthige Seele. Saint-Preux’s voice 1.Th.60. B. (direct speech addressed to milord Edouard within the scene depicted), described in SP’s letter addressed to Julie. Süsse, ruhige Unschuld, du allein Part I, Letter 63 fehltest meinem Herzen. Julie’s voice 1.Th. 63. B. (subsequent reflection on her own state of mind in the episode depicted), narrated in a letter addressed to Claire. O Julie—o meine Julie—dich Part II, Letter 22 erblicke ich…. Saint-Preux’s voice 2.Th.22.B. (direct speech addressed to Julie’s portrait within the scene depicted), narrated in his letter to Julie. ……als ich dich auf einmal erblassen sah… Rousseaus neue Heloise.1.Theil14.B. D.Chodowieki del. F.Berger sculpsit.

(continued)

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(continued) French captions German captions [with English translation, by Philip Stewart in Julie, or the New Heloise (Dartmouth College, 1997)]

Part and Letter number from Rousseau’s novel. Note on narrative perspective and voice

5

—peut-être, ah! Sil ne dépendoit que de moi…. T.II.Lettre XXXII. [Ah if it were only up to me….Stewart 257]

6

Ah! veux tu donner la mort Ach! willst du deiner ganzen à toute la famille? Familie den Tod bringen? T.II.Lettre XLVI. 3.Th.18. B. [Ah! Do you want to inflict death on the entire family? Stewart 286]

7

—je ne vous le présente pas, je le reçois de vous, T.III.Lettre XXII. [I do not introduce him to you, I receive him from you; Stewart 345]

.…ich stelle ihn nicht Ihnen vor; ich empfange ihn aus Ihren Händen….. 4.Th.6. B.

8

—La raison peut s’égarer dans un chalet tout aussi bien que dans un cellier. T.III.Lettre XVI. […reason can go astray just as well in a chalet as in a cellar; Stewart 372]

—Man kann so gut in einer Milchhütte als in einem Keller um seine Vernunft kommen. 4.Th.10. B.

Part III, Letter 4 Julie’s mother’s voice (direct speech addressed to Julie within the scene depicted), cited by Claire (Mme d’Orbe) in a letter addressed to Saint-Preux. Part III, Letter 18 Julie’s father’s voice (direct speech, addressed to Julie within the scene depicted), scene described by Julie in her letter to Saint-Preux. Part IV, Letter 6 Julie’s voice (direct speech, addressed to Wolmar within the scene depicted), described in letter from Saint-Preux to Milord Edouard. Part IV, Letter 10 Saint-Preux’s voice (direct speech addressed to Julie within the scene depicted), described in SP’s letter to Milord Edouard.

—vielleicht, Ach! wenn es nur auf mich ankäme— 3.Th. 4.B.

(continued)

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(continued) French captions German captions [with English translation, by Philip Stewart in Julie, or the New Heloise (Dartmouth College, 1997)] 9

Part and Letter number from Rousseau’s novel. Note on narrative perspective and voice

Part V, Letter 3 Wolmar the husband’s voice (direct speech, addressed to Julie within the scene depicted), described by Saint-Preux in his letter to Milord Edouard. 10 quel Spectacle! welch ein Anblick! Part V, Letter 5 T.IV.Lettre II. 5.Th.5.B. Saint-Preux’s voice [What a sight! Stewart 488] (subsequent reflection, addressed to Milord Edouard as part of his description of the events depicted, where he and Wolmar discover Julie praying). 11 Non, mon ami, je me sens Nein, mein Freund, ich fühle Part VI, Letter 11 bien: la mort me presse, il mich; der Tod dringt auf mich Julie’s voice (direct faut nous quitter. ein; wir müssen uns verlassen. speech, addressed to T.IV.Lettre XXII. 6.Th.11. B. Wolmar within the [No my friend, I am all scene depicted), right: death urges me on; described in a letter we must part; Stewart 581] from Wolmar to Saint-Preux. 12 O grand Etre! Etre O grosses Wesen! ewiges Part VI, Letter 11 éternel;— Je le sais je m’en Wesen!... Ich weiss es und freue Julie’s voice (direct réjouis, je vais paroître mich darüber, das ich nun vor speech, addressed to devant ton trône. deinem Thron erscheinen werde. God, but within her T.IV.Lettre XXII 6.Th.11. B. longer discourse [O Great Being! Eternal directed at the Being, […] I know, I pastor and rejoice in it: I am about to assembled family), appear before your throne; described in letter Stewart 587] from Wolmar to Saint-Preux. —il y a long-tems que nous —wir sind alle zusammen schon sommes tous vos Sujets. lange Ihre Unterthanen. 5. T.III.Lettre XXVI. Th.3.B. […we have all long been your subjects; Stewart 457]

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Works Cited Bénézit, Emmanuel. 2006. Dictionary of Artists. Volume 3. Paris: Gründ. Bollème, Geneviève. 1969. Les Almanachs populaires au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Mouton. Calè, Luisa. 2006. Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: “Turning Readers into Spectators”. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Champier, Victor. 1886. Les Almanachs illustrés: Histoire du calendrier depuis les temps anciens jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: Frinzine. Chodowiecki, Daniel-Nicolas. 1782a. ‘Calender Narr’. One of Twelve Illustrations of Centifolium Stultorum, Narrheiten [Book of One Hundred Fools], in the Göttinger Taschen Calender von Jahr 1783. Göttingen, Lower Saxony: Johann Christian Dieterich, n.p. ———. 1782b Twelve Illustrations of Rousseau’s Julie. In Almanac généalogique pour l’Année 1783 and Genealogischer Calendar auf das Jahr 1783. Berlin. Dillard, Leigh. 2011. Drawing Outside the Book: Parallel Illustration and the Creation of a Visual Culture. In Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, ed. Christina Ionescu, 195–242. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Elliott, Kamilla. 2003. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engelmann, Wilhelm. 1857. Daniel Chodowiecki’s sämmtliche Kupferstiche: Beschrieben, mit historischen, literarischen und bibliographischen Nachweisung, der Lebenbeschreibung des Künstlers und Registern versehen. Leipzig: W. Engelmann. Focke, Rudolf. 1901. Chodowiecki et Lichtenberg, 1778–1783. Leipzig; T. Weicher, ancienne maison Dieterich. François, Alexis. 1920. Le Premier baiser de l’amour ou Jean-Jacques Rousseau inspirateur d’estampes. Geneva; Sonor/Paris: Georges Crès. Franits, Wayne E. 1993. Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-­ Century Dutch Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Girardin, Fernand de. 1910 [1971]. Iconographie des œuvres de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. [Paris: Morel]. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints. Grand-Carteret, John. 1896. Les Almanachs français. Bibliographie, iconographie des almanachs, annuaires, calendriers, chansonniers, étrennes, heures, listes, adresses, tableaux, tablettes et autres publications annuelles éditées à Paris, 1600–1895. Paris: Alisié. Griffiths, Antony. 2016. The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550–1820. London: British Museum Press. Griffiths, Antony, and Frances Carey. 1994. German Printmaking in the Age of Goethe. London: British Museum Press.

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Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. 2006 [2013]. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. Abingdon; New York: Routledge. Ionescu, Christina. 2011. Introduction: Towards a Reconfiguration of the Visual Periphery of the Text in the Eighteenth-Century Illustrated Book. In Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, ed. Christina Ionescu, 1–52. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2020. The Illustrated Book as a Source-Bound Adaptation: A Case Study of the New  York Editions of Candide Published Around the Stock Market Crash. In Adapting the Canon: Mediation, Visualization and Interpretation, ed. Silke Arnold-de Simine and Ann Lewis, 144–168. London: Legenda. Ionescu, Christina, and Ann Lewis. 2016. Introduction. In Picturing the Eighteenth-Century Novel Though Time: Illustration, Intermediality and Adaptation, ed. Christina Ionescu and Ann Lewis. Journal for Eighteenth-­ Century Studies (JECS) 39(4) (Special Issue): 479–487. Jung, Sandro. 2013. Illustrated Pocket Diaries and the Commodification of Culture. Eighteenth-Century Life 37 (2): 53–84. Labrosse, Claude. 1985. Lire au XVIIIe siècle: La Nouvelle Héloïse et ses lecteurs. Lyon and Paris: Presses Universitaires de Lyon/Editions du CNRS. Lanckorońska, Maria Gräfin, and Arthur Rümann. 1954. Geschichte der Deutschen Taschenbücher und Almanache aus der klassisch-romantischen Zeit. Munich: Ernst Heimeran Verlag. Leitch, Thomas. 2017. Introduction. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 1–22. New York: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Ann. 2009. Sensibility, Reading and Illustration: Spectacles and Signs in Graffigny, Marivaux and Rousseau. Oxford: Legenda. ———. 2019. Texte, légende et image dans sept illustrations de La Nouvelle Héloïse: autour de Julie et son père. In Penser et (d)écrire l’illustration. Le rapport à l’image dans la littérature des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, ed. Joanna Augustyn, Jean-Pierre Dubost, and Sarah Juliette Sasson, 79–106. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise-Pascal. Lewis, Ann, and Silke Arnold-de Simine. 2020. Introduction. In Adapting the Canon: Mediation, Visualization and Interpretation, ed. Silke Arnold-de Simine and Ann Lewis, 1–18. London: Legenda. Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen, York-Gothart Mix, Jan Fickert, and Bianca Weyers, eds. 2013. Französische Almanachkultur im deutschen Sprachraum (1700–1815): Gattungsstrukturen, komparatistische Aspekte, Diskursformen. Göttingen: V & R Unipress; Bonn University Press. Marshall, David. 2005. The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Martin, Christophe. 2005. “Dangereux suppléments”: L’Illustration du roman en France au dix-huitième siècle. Louvain; Paris; Dudley MA: Peeters.

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———. 2011. De Gravelot à Chodowiecki: L’illustration de La Nouvelle Héloïse en Europe au dix-huitième siècle. In Traduire et illustrer le roman au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Nathalie Ferrand. Special Issue of Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (SVEC) 5: 197–214. Męzṅ icha, Maria. 1967. Daniel Chodowiecki’s Anglicana in the Gdańsk Library. Gdynia: Biblioteka Gdańska, Wyawnictwo Morskie. Mrozińska, Maria. 1982. Daniel Chodowiecki illustrateur de la littérature française. In Illustration du livre et la littérature au XVIIIe siècle en France et en Pologne, ed. Jean Ehrard, Zdzislav Libera, and Ewa Rzadkowska, 155–171. Warsaw: Éditions de l’Université de Varsovie. Newell, Kate. 2017a. Adaptation and Illustration: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 477–493. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017b. Expanding Adaptation Networks: From Illustration to Novelization. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1964. OEuvres complètes, II: La Nouvelle Héloïse. Théâtre—poésies. Essais littéraires. Edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade]. ———. 1997. Julie, or the New Heloise. Translated and annotated by Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché. Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England. Rudy, Elizabeth M. 2013. On the Market: Selling Etchings in Eighteenth-Century France. In Artists and Amateurs: Etching in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Perrin Stein and New Haven, 40–67. London: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press. Schmiesing, Ann. 2008. Daniel Chodowiecki’s Illustrations for Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel’s Über die Ehe (On Marriage). In Text, Image and Contemporary Society, ed. David Adams. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (JECS) 31(3) (special issue): 491–511. Schroder, Anne L. 1997. Genre Prints in Eighteenth-Century France: Production, Market, and Audience. In Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Richard Rand, 69–86. Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Tane, Benoît. 2014. Avec figures. Roman et illustration au XVIIIe siècle. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

CHAPTER 5

“Alternative Dickens”: The Graphic Adaptation of the Inimitable in The New Yorker Chris Louttit

Just before Christmas 2020, The Times cartoonist Peter Brookes took aim at British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s shaky record in tackling a new Covid-19 wave with a seasonal nod to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). Reworking John Leech’s illustration “Marley’s Ghost” from Dickens’s famous ghostly tale of moral redemption, Brookes depicts England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty as the spectral figure of Jacob Marley’s Ghost—dragging behind him chained ledgers titled “Lockdown” and “Lockdown 2”—who startles a night-capped, Scrooge-­ like Johnson browsing through holiday brochures for 2021. Brookes’s cartoon was one of many in 2020 that satirised the British government

C. Louttit (*) Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_5

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with visual reference to scenes from Dickens’s fiction.1 While the parallels between a Dickensian vision of ignorance and want, and the challenges of a year dealing with the repercussions of Brexit and Covid-19 may have seemed particularly pertinent, Brookes was drawing from a rich popular cultural seam. Starting with John Leech and John Tenniel’s work for Punch, through numerous cartoons in nineteenth-century American magazines such as Puck and Judge, and on to the likes of Brookes, Martin Rowson and Steve Bell in the present day, Dickens has long been a key inspiration for cartoonists keen to satirise the social and political foibles of their age. As the early twentieth-century Dickens scholar, Walter Dexter noted reflectively, “With the flow of time, cartoonists come and go; but Dickens is always there to give them a helping hand” (264). Cartoonists’ reliance on Dickens as a cultural reference point is understandable for a number of reasons. He is, after all, an iconic author whose popularity, according to Juliet John, is “unparalleled” (2), and whose “mass cultural impact” is defined by the “portability […] of his novels” which are able effortlessly “to travel across various media and national boundaries” (15). Public knowledge of Dickens, in other words, was and continues to be widespread; in 1939, nearly 70 years after Dickens’s death, George Orwell “was convinced that audiences would recognize Dickensian characters from books they had never read” (Trezise 162). Gareth Cordery notes that other features of Dickens’s fiction lend themselves particularly well to the cartoonist’s art, from the association of Dickens’s characters with defined characteristics—“Pecksniff is inseparable from humbug, Scrooge from mean spiritedness”—to “Dickens’s famed visual quality” (19). As a result, “it was hardly surprising” that cartoonists, “when in need of direct, bold, and easily comprehended statements on the affairs of the day, found their ideal social and political dictionary in Dickens’s novels” (Cordery 19). As Cordery points out, however, beyond the work of early twentieth-­ century Dickensians such as Walter Dexter and F.G. Kitton, there has been little sustained discussion of the relationship between Dickens’s œuvre and cartoons such as the one by Brookes discussed above (18–19). This 1  Other examples include Martin Rowson’s “A Gruelling Ordeal”, which uses the famous “Please, sir, I want some more” scene from Oliver Twist to satirise the school meals crisis, and Chris Riddell’s “Boris Johnson and the Ghost of Christmas Present” which adapts John Leech’s illustrations to A Christmas Carol to throw light on Boris Johnson’s Brexit and Covid-19 woes.

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oversight can be explained in part by the methodological challenges inherent in the cartoon form. A “cartoon image”, as Richard Scully and Marian Quartly claim, “often seems to be immediately accessible to the reader” (1). In reality, “the cartoon as text” (Scully and Quartly 1.1) is a much trickier prospect for scholarly analysis than it first seems. In dealing with the form as researchers, we must consider what Scully and Quartly label the “sample”, and not just treat the cartoon out of context through anthologies and in other collected forms, but “go back to the source in which it originally appeared” (1.2). For a subject as wide-ranging as the Dickensian cartoon, tracking down individual examples in their original publication context is a labour-intensive task, even with the help of modern digital tools. These challenges extend, moreover, beyond decisions about the limits of the “sample” or corpus since, as Scully and Quartly note, our full understanding of cartoons is dependent on “a broad range of public knowledge and experience: theatrical, literary, architectural, religious and particularly aesthetic” (1.3). In order to analyse cartoons successfully, scholars must be knowledgeable enough to parse this dense network of socio-cultural references. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that a history of Dickens and the cartoon has yet to be written. This chapter makes a start on telling that story, discussing a focused but nonetheless revealing case study: “Alternative Dickens”, a series of ten cartoons by J.B. Handelsman (1922–2007) that appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in the early 1990s. I have chosen Handelsman’s series as my “sample” to avoid some of the well-trodden paths in the study of Dickens. Scholars have tended to focus either on the rich, popular cultural life of this canonical author during his own hugely successful career or, alternatively, have turned to Dickens now, exploring an aspect of contemporary, Dickensian pop culture. Handelsman’s New Yorker cartoons fall somewhere between Dickens’s own period and the present, and offer up new ways of thinking about the long middle period of the Inimitable’s popular reception. As a case study, the significance of Handelsman’s “Alternative Dickens” also extends beyond Dickens scholarship, bringing what follows into conversation with recent discussions of intermedial adaptation. The work of Kate Newell in particular has stressed the importance of illustration in “a given work’s adaptation network by establishing distinctive iconography and by distilling a work to representative scenes, moments, and elements” (64–65). More specifically, Newell notes how.

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[c]omparisons of successive sets of illustrations in illustrated editions of canonical works will quite often show the same moment or scene being illustrated again and again. The data from such comparisons indicates what ‘counts’ in a particular work and which aspects of a work mold the popular imagination. As is to be expected, illustrations tend to represent ‘hinge’ points. (93)

Newell’s insights are also relevant to the examples of what Leigh Dillard has termed “parallel illustration” (196) which are my focus here. Handelsman’s “Alternative Dickens” cartoons do indeed refer at times to the “hinge points” in the illustration history of Dickens’s novels. As the title of the series suggests, however, they interact with this established Dickensian iconography in unexpected ways. In fact, rather than responding straightforwardly to Dickens’s original texts or even the work of his initial illustrators in recursive or reiterative fashion, they adapt a Dickensian macrotext, made up of a complex, layered intermedial network of other visual and cultural forms. This chapter chooses “to approach adaptation and transmediation as a polydirectional and dispersed practice where multiple pieces are needed to create the whole picture” (Lopez Szwydsky 210). In doing so, it acknowledges the complexity of intermedial adaptation networks; nonetheless, at the same time it nuances the “big picture” (18), transhistorical view Lissette Lopez Szwydsky presents of those networks in her important study. The chapter contends, more specifically, that in dealing with Handelsman’s Dickens cartoons, medium specificity matters. Those features of the cartoon form that make it difficult to study—its topicality, its location in sometimes ephemeral print contexts, its reliance on knowledge of a range of social, cultural and literary references, its often humorous or exaggerated tone—also define the way it functions distinctively as a node within larger adaptation networks.

Introducing a Cartoonist with “A Scholarly and Serious Bearing” When his series of “Alternative Dickens” cartoons appeared, J.B. Handelsman had made his mark as a successful cartoonist and illustrator on both sides of the Atlantic. Born in the Bronx in 1922, Handelsman completed his first cartoon for The New Yorker in 1961, and would go on to publish 950 cartoons and five covers for the magazine up until shortly

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before his death in 2007 (“J.B. Handelsman”). Between 1963 and 1982, Handelsman lived in London, where he continued to contribute cartoons to The New  Yorker and other US publications such as Playboy, and also published his work regularly in Punch magazine (Fox). It was here that his strip Freaky Fables appeared; these reinterpreted classic fables, drawing on sources such as the Bible, Greek mythology and European history, literature and folklore were published in collected book form in 1979 and 1986. Handelsman worked extensively too as an illustrator of volumes of popular psychology, humour titles such as The Mid-Atlantic Companion (1986), and even extended his talents into children’s books and a short animated film based on the story of creation (Jeffreys). Handelsman, then, enjoyed a varied career as a visual artist, but his greatest achievements lie in the regular cartoons he produced for The New Yorker and other publications. Handelsman’s work is “characterized by its simplicity of line” (Fox) and by its control of the cartoon frame, so that every one of his productions “was arranged […] as if it was a film set” (Jeffreys). Alongside these aesthetic qualities, Handelsman’s cartoons are defined by erudition and deep historical, cultural, and literary knowledge. The man himself was, according to Susan Jeffreys, “more like a poet” than the stout, “[s]elf-satisfied businessmen” who “featured frequently in his cartoons”; he possessed, moreover, “a scholarly and serious bearing”. These personal characteristics are certainly expressed in an allusive strain to his work that encompasses references to “Schopenhauer, Zeus, Romulus, Rousseau, Epithemius, Dickens, or the [US] Constitution” (Franklin 27). This particular tendency in Handelsman’s art is perhaps most notable in Freaky Fables and Further Freaky Fables, which amongst their dizzying range of subjects include strips with titles such as “The Little Match Girl”, “Orpheus and Eurydice”, “Hansel and Gretel”, “The Pearl Fishers”, “Billy Budd” and “It is an Ancient Mariner”. While this discussion of the dense web of Handelsman’s literary and cultural references may seem to emphasise Biblical, Classical and folkloric topics, the cartoonist was also impressively well-versed in Victorian culture. As his colleague and fellow New Yorker cartoonist Bob Mankoff has noted, “Most people have, at best, ‘Jeopardy!’ knowledge of Dickens. But Bud, an Anglophile who spent some years working for Punch, knew the novels inside out, and his cartoon parodies played with the nineteenth-­ century graphic style used to illustrate them” (Mankoff 2012). His strong interest in “nineteenth-century graphic style” is certainly evident in the “Alternative Dickens” series. Close study of Handelsman’s work for The

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New Yorker in the period in which this series appeared shows that his interest in visual Victoriana extended beyond the Dickensian. Handelsman seems, in fact, to have been a particular admirer of his illustrious predecessor at Punch, Sir John Tenniel. Between 1988 and 1992, Handelsman returned frequently to pay homage to Tenniel’s famous illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872). Handelsman’s Alice cartoons are generally faithful to the bold line and framing of Tenniel’s original images, but subvert and update them with pointed captions. Examples include one cartoon, published on 1 July 1991, which playfully reworks the “Alice and the Knitting Sheep” illustration from Through the Looking-Glass by adding the text “‘I should like to buy a handgun while it is still legal,’ said Alice very gently”. Another, which appeared in The New Yorker on 16 December 1991, draws on “Alice calling on Tweedledum and Tweedledee” from the same novel with the addition this time of “‘I beg your pardon,’ said Alice, ‘but which of you is the Democrat?’” (Fig.  5.1). In total, Handelsman created an impressive nine Alice-inspired cartoons, regularly signed off as a

Fig. 5.1  J.B. Handelsman. “‘I beg your pardon,’ said Alice, ‘but which of you is the Democrat?’ The New Yorker (16 December 1991), p. 42

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collaboration between the cartoonist and his influential Victorian forebear. The individual examples were not formally brought together as a series, but in its visual references and coherence, this set of cartoons could justifiably have been given the title “Alternative Alice”.

Handelsman and Visual Dickensiana Handelsman’s “Alternative Dickens” series, which appeared in The New  Yorker between 24 September 1990 and 17 February 1992, demonstrates a similarly well-tuned understanding of the contours of Victorian visual culture.2 It is striking, however, how much more actively Handelsman engages with a variety of Dickensian visual culture than he did with Alice iconography: rather than sticking respectfully to the work of a noted, original illustrator, Handelsman draws upon “the rich pageant of pictures inspired by [Dickens’s] scenes and characters” (Louttit 2014, 355). More specifically, of the ten cartoons,3 five respond directly or indirectly to e­ xisting images from that “rich pageant of pictures”. Only the first instalment of the series refers to one of the original illustrations: “Mr Pickwick Tries to Elude the Law” playfully reworks George Cruikshank’s illustration “The Last Chance” from Chapter 50 of Oliver Twist (1837–1839). The other four graphic adaptations refer instead to the work of a later generation of artists who contributed to the posthumous Household Edition of Charles Dickens (1871–1879).4 “Oliver, Having Received More, Requests a Doggy Bag”, for example, references the Household Edition itself, sidestepping George Cruikshank’s better known original illustration depicting Oliver Twist’s most famous scene in favour of James Mahoney’s interpretation of the same moment from the 1871 edition.5 Several other cartoons from the series respond to the work of Frederick Barnard, favouring not his extensive illustration of Household Edition texts but rather his popular Character Sketches from Dickens (first 2  I used Mankoff (2004), The Complete Cartoons and The New Yorker Digital Archive to study and contextualize Handelsman’s Dickens cartoons. A selection of “Alternative Dickens” is also available online in Mankoff (2012). 3  Beyond “Alternative Dickens”, Handelsman completed four other cartoons for The New Yorker on Dickensian subjects. 4  For more discussion of the Household Edition see Allingham, Golden and Louttit (2014, 2020). 5  Handelsman also reworks this illustration by Mahoney in an earlier cartoon not included in the “Alternative Dickens” series. See “Ch II-A. Oliver Falls Among Bleeding Hearts”.

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published in three sets between 1879 and 1885). “Still Waiting for Something to Turn Up, Mr. Micawber Is Ignored by a Woman who Is Trying to Look like Cher”, for instance, sticks closely to Barnard’s Character Sketch of Micawber from David Copperfield (1849–1850). In similar fashion, Handelsman adapts Barnard’s influential portrait of Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities (1859–1860) on his way to the guillotine, comically adding a reluctant feline in his interpretation “Sydney Carton Refuses to Go to the Guillotine without his Cat” (Figs. 5.2 and 5.3).6 Handelsman’s particular focus on this era of iconography is intriguing and can be interpreted in multiple ways. It is certainly noticeable that in “Alternative Dickens” the cartoonist does not engage at all with the work of Hablot Knight Browne, the artist better known as Phiz who illustrated ten of Dickens’s novels and has helped define readers’ sense of the Dickensian. The visual reference points in his cartoons suggest instead that he responded more sympathetically to the sober realism of the 1860s generation of black-and-white artists like Tenniel, Mahoney and Barnard than he did to the more caricatured illustrations by Phiz.7 Whatever the underlying personal reasons for this preference, Handelsman’s visual adaptation of Barnard rather than Phiz underscores his deep knowledge of visual Dickensiana which is then put to use in refreshing our image of Dickensian characters and scenes. While the Household Edition illustrations and Barnard’s series of Character Sketches had been extremely popular in the years between Dickens’s death and World War I, their influence waned somewhat in the course of the twentieth century.8 By the 1990s, in fact, Cruikshank, Phiz and the other original illustrators had resumed their position as the best-known visual interpretations of Dickens’s verbal text. In reworking these more dimly remembered images from the Dickensian archive by Barnard and Mahoney, Handelsman’s choice of visual references subverts expectations and—true to the series title—presents an alternative view on the work of the Inimitable. 6  Handelsman also adapts Barnard’s Character Sketch of Bill Sikes in an earlier cartoon not formally part of “Alternative Dickens”. See “Bill Sikes Goes on Johnny Carson”. 7  Handelsman’s own bold and direct aesthetic, “characterized by its simplicity of line” (Fox), certainly recalls elements of the 1860s style and John Tenniel in particular. 8  For more on the reception history of the Household Edition, see Louttit (2014).

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Fig. 5.2  J.B. Handelsman. “Alternative Dickens: Sydney Carton Refuses to Go to the Guillotine without his Cat.” The New Yorker (20 May 1991), p. 46

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Fig. 5.3  Frederick Barnard. “Sydney Carton”. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Cassell and Company, 1896. n.p. Author’s collection

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Handelsman’s Expanded Dickensian Universe The series’ knowledgeable take on Dickens extends beyond its engagement with the visual culture influenced by the great author. Bob Mankoff’s observation that Handelsman “knew the novels inside out” is certainly borne out by the ways in which the cartoonist playfully remixes elements of the original novels into amusing new vignettes. Handelsman’s focus is largely on the novels that had maintained their popularity into the 1990s, either through frequent adaptation or their presence on school and university curricula: Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield all feature three times, with A Christmas Carol appearing twice, and single, cameo roles being given to The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), Great Expectations (1860–1861) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841). This means there is less engagement with smaller, less iconic hits from the Dickens canon. Nonetheless, what Handelsman does with some of the better known characters and sequences from Dickens is distinctive, with the cartoonist taking the work of graphic adaptation in two main directions. One approach is to invent alternative realities within Dickens’s established narratives. In “My Aunt’s Left Hook Expels Uriah from the Chaise”, for instance, David Copperfield watches on as Aunt Betsey thwacks Uriah Heap violently out of her carriage, informing him “You are not meant to appear, hypocrite, before Chapter XV”. “Pip Is Found in Possession of a Controlled Substance”—another of Handelsman’s alternate textual tableaux—loosely reinterprets the Christmas dinner scene in Great Expectations: while Pip is being searched by an officer of the law, two suspicious figures scarper into the distance and the officer, finding something in Pip’s pocket, states “Cannabis resin, or I miss my guess”. Handelsman’s other tactic is to take his cartoon reinterpretation of Dickens beyond the pages of a single novel, mashing up characters and moments from different texts to humorous effect. In “Mr Pickwick Tries to Elude the Law”, for example, the benignly incompetent Mr. Pickwick is reinvented as a desperate Sikes-like figure being pursued by the law across the rooftops of London in the closing stages of Oliver Twist; Pickwick’s crime is not brutal murder but “insider trading”, but he nonetheless boldly states “They’ll never take me alive”. And as its title suggests, “Tiny Tim, Who Did Not Die, Grows up to Marry Little Nell, Who Did Not Die, Either” succeeds in marrying Handelsman’s two methods, knowingly charting a different, and more comic, path for two of Dickens’s tragic children within a new, unified cartoon narrative (Fig. 5.4). This, moreover,

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Fig. 5.4  J.B. Handelsman. “Alternative Dickens: Tiny Tim, Who Did Not Die, Grows up to Marry Little Nell, Who Did Not Die, Either.” The New Yorker (7 October 1991), p. 86

is an imagined scene that punctures the aura of Dickensian sentimentality surrounding both characters, as a newly married Nell tells her husband Tim “One more ‘God Bless Us Everyone’ out of you, dearest, and I shall brain you with this frying pan”. An extra layer of playfulness is added by a

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small detail in the background of the image: a framed portrait of Dickens himself. This impassive, middle-aged Inimitable looks on, with his own image now also a part of the graphic adaptation of his scenes and characters. With the comic violence they perform on Dickens’s œuvre, Handelsman’s 1990s mash-ups still seem quite daring. In reality, they are part of a much longer heritage of the loosening of Dickens’s characters from their original textual environments. This process was already at work during Dickens’s lifetime in examples such as the appearance of characters from The Pickwick Papers in Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840–1841); as Maureen England has recently pointed out in surveying the broader cultural terrain, “Dickens’s characters have lived outside their novels from their moment of inception, from Pickwick cigars to Little Nell dolls” (315). After the author’s death in 1870, the liberation of Dickens’s characters from their novelistic confines has, if anything, become more conspicuous, with his passing having “freed his characters from the constraints of their books, allowing them to wander between novels as their readers engaged with a larger Dickensian World” (Sickmann Han 36). In her analysis of the spate of posthumous images paying tribute to Dickens, such as J.R. Brown’s Charles Dickens Surrounded by his Characters (1890–1891) and R.W.  Buss’s Dickens’s Dream (1875), Carrie Sickmann Han argues more specifically that the “impulse” in these works of art “to integrate characters from different novels coincides with the readers’ recognition that Dickens wouldn’t be introducing any new characters to the fold” (36). Handelsman’s “Alternative Dickens” series also represents a desire to engage with an expanded Dickensian universe. Even when it places Dickens alongside his characters in new visual narratives—as in “Tiny Tim, Who Did Not Die, Grows up to Marry Little Nell, Who Did Not Die, Either”—its approach is nonetheless rather less valedictory and mournful than works such as Dickens’s Dream. This shift in tone has less to do with their historical distance from the Inimitable, I would suggest, than with their unusual position within the Dickensian intermedial network as cartoons, and specifically as New Yorker cartoons. While it is often the visual aspect of cartoons that has the greatest impact, other textual and generic factors play an equally important role in shaping the meaning of the cartoon form. In writing about New Yorker cartoons in particular in a special cartoon issue published in 1997, Roger Angell noted simply but perceptively that “Cartoons in this magazine—most of them at least—reward the noticer” (135). To be able to read and interpret the magazine cartoon successfully, the “noticer” of its range of reference points must be attuned

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not only to visual and literary culture narrowly defined, but also to a densely networked cultural context beyond the limits of the cartoon image itself.

Handelsman’s Cultural Networks As Steven H.  Gale has noted, “[f]or many readers who pick up The New Yorker the cartoons are the most important and consistently appealing part of the magazine” (95). Perhaps more importantly, this feature of the publication has “profoundly influenced the development of the American gag cartoon” (Inge 61). The most influential element of New Yorker cartoons that distinguishes them from what came before is their combination of “graphic and verbal humor” (61). The magazine’s particular innovation was with the “one-line cartoon” in which “both picture and caption had to work together simultaneously to achieve a total effect which neither would have alone” (68). As a long-time contributor to the magazine, J.B. Handelsman was well-­ versed in the conventions of the New Yorker one-liner. Indeed, assessments of his work remark on his talents as a caption writer. In her Obituary notice for The New  Yorker, Nancy Franklin argues, in fact, that Handelsman’s “legacy has as much to do with writing as it does with drawing—Handelsman may be better known for his captions than for the cartoons” (27). The “Alternative Dickens” series certainly showcases his mastery with captions and speech bubbles which provide an extra layer of commentary on his distinctive visuals. Handelsman’s Dickens captions, in fact, diverge from the conventional features of the New Yorker one-liner he and so many other of the magazine’s cartoonists have manipulated to such great effect. Rather than presenting us with a comic, one-line comment the reader is asked to imagine has come from one of the figures within the cartoon frame, “Alternative Dickens” uses descriptive captions which provide more of an authorial or narratorial perspective on events. These are often—just like the cartoons they describe—slightly skewed, and can be read as parodic versions of the titles published below the original illustrations during the serial appearance of Dickens’s novels. In some cases, they refer directly to famous Dickensian lines,9 but in most instances, Handelsman saves actual quotations from the fiction for his speech bubble 9  See, for instance, the echo of a line from David Copperfield in “Still Waiting for Something to Turn Up, Mr. Micawber Is Ignored by a Woman who Is Trying to Look like Cher”.

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dialogue. The speech bubbles are also sometimes used to mash together references to entirely different novels within the same cartoon frame. In “Rehabilitated at Last (Mr Sikes finally learns some manners)”, for instance, a surprisingly courteous, alternate-universe Sikes leads Nancy into dinner. Sikes’s dog Bull’s-eye is with them, and offers a thought bubble commentary on these unexpected proceedings which alludes to the famous lines towards the end of A Tale of Two Cities that describe Sydney Carton’s self-sacrifice in going to the guillotine in the place of his double, Charles Darnay: “It is a far, far better thing than he has ever done”. Significantly, this polydirectional network of references in Handelsman’s “Alternative Dickens” extends beyond famous lines and iconography from what Carrie Sickmann Han calls the “larger Dickensian World” (36). While not precisely in the socially engaged vein of political or editorial cartoons, the cartoonist’s work in this series nonetheless makes frequent and quite varied nods to the culture of 1990s America. The spirit of that age adds yet another layer to Handelsman’s cartoon referentiality. The economic sharp dealing and subsequent collapses that characterised the Reagan-Bush era, for instance, feature repeatedly. The first cartoon in the series, “Mr Pickwick Tries to Elude the Law”, depicts a rather desperate Pickwick on the run from the law as someone “[w]anted for insider trading”. And in “Dr Manette Sinks in his Daughter’s Arms as She Tells Him the Sad News”, the reference to financial misdoings is even more obvious, as Lucie explains to her distraught father “And when I tell you of the S&L bailout, weep for it, weep for it”, referring specifically and unexpectedly not to anything connected to the French Revolutionary context, but rather to the Savings & Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Handelsman’s topical references also go beyond the world of high finance, extending into the war on drugs in “Pip Is Found in Possession of a Controlled Substance” and into the realms of contemporary pop culture with “Still Waiting for Something to Turn Up, Mr. Micawber Is Ignored by a Woman who Is Trying to Look like Cher”. As its title suggests, this quirkily amusing instalment of “Alternative Dickens” depicts a curlymopped woman standing next to Micawber impersonating the “Goddess of Pop” exactly at the point she was enjoying movie stardom in films such as Mermaids (1990) and chart success with her twentieth studio album, Love Hurts (1991). These visual and textual allusions to the broader society and culture of Handelsman’s own time, then, blur the boundary between his Dickensian vignettes and late twentieth-century reality itself. This

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“transgression of the boundaries of the fictional world” (Kukkonen 4) and the real one mean that Handelsman’s “Alternative Dickens” series can be defined in narratological terms as a form of metalepsis. This concept, first explored in detail by Gérard Genette, is most often applied in readings of postmodern literary fictions, but is also relevant in thinking through the blurring of the fictive and the real in Handelsman’s mini Dickensian alternate universe specifically, and in the cartoon form more generally. A singular connection back to Dickens’s words in the source texts—or even the original illustrations—is, importantly, qualified further. In this context, it is also worth reiterating that this cartoonist’s work not only contains lots of references to 1990s culture; it is also firmly embedded within the pages of a weekly magazine. Anyone who encounters “Alternative Dickens” now or in the future is likely to stumble across it during an internet search. But—as is the case with all cartoons in The New  Yorker—in original form, they appeared alongside a range of the magazine’s regular writing. The beginning of the original run of “Alternative Dickens” coincided, in fact, with an anxious series of reports on the situation in Baghdad in the run up to the First Gulf War. More specifically, individual Dickens cartoons were printed on the same pages as a variety of different sorts of pieces. The absurdly comic “Sydney Carton Refuses to Go to the Guillotine without his Cat”, for example, appeared alongside A.S. Byatt’s short story “Art Work”. By way of contrast, “Tiny Tim, Who Did Not Die, Grows up to Marry Little Nell, Who Did Not Die, Either”, was published beside a piece of reportage on Brunei in The New  Yorker’s regular “Our Far-Flung Correspondents” column. Like all adaptations temporally distant from their original source texts, illustrations and other forms of literary iconography “update stories to meet the needs of modern audiences” (Lopez Szwydsky 104). As I have shown in my own, earlier work on the posthumous illustration of Dickens, this process of visual updating is equally central to the reception history of the Inimitable. More specifically, what the Household Edition “succeeded in doing” in the first major republication of Dickens after his death “was to adapt and update [his fiction] for a later generation of readers more familiar with the sober, realistic style of the 1860s and 1870s than with the satirical and finely detailed approach of artists like Browne and Cruikshank” (Louttit 2020, 150–51). Handelsman’s “Alternative Dickens” certainly responds to these waves of Dickens imagery, as we have seen, by adapting images by Cruikshank, Barnard, and Mahoney. One productive way of

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viewing Handelsman’s cartoons, then, is as a series of micronarratives within this Dickensian visual macrotext. What I have also wanted to stress, however, is the importance of medium specificity in assessing cartoons as adaptations. In exploring the relationship between illustration and adaptation in the nineteenth century, Lissette Lopez Szwydsky has claimed that “print illustrations and textual forms created permanent objects in nineteenth-century homes, to be experienced again and again” (114). This idea of print-object permanency applies less convincingly to the cartoon, tied as it is to a set of more transitory contexts: the world of newspaper and magazine publishing, the attention-grabbing conventions of the print form itself and—last but not least—the social and cultural references that find their way into the cartoon as text. Taken together, all of these factors help shape a particularly fluid, intermedial form which adapts other images and texts in distinctive and often hilariously excessive ways.

Works Cited Allingham, Philip V. 2012. Reading the Pictures, Visualizing the Text’: Illustrations in Dickens from Pickwick to the Household Edition, 1836 to 1870, Phiz to Fred Barnard. In Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room, ed. Paul Goldman and Simon Cooke, 159–178. Farnham: Ashgate. Angell, Roger. 1997. Congratulations! It’s a Baby. The New Yorker, 15 December, pp. 132–139. Barnard, Frederick. 1896. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Cassell and Company. Brookes, Peter. 2020. Whitty’s Ghost. Twitter, 10 December. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://twitter.com/BrookesTimes/status/1336995339514109953. Cordery, Gareth. 2005. An Edwardian’s View of Dickens and His Illustrators: Harry Furniss’s “A Sketch of Boz”. Greensboro: ELT Press. Dexter, Walter. 1934–1935. Dickensian Peeps into ‘Punch’. The Dickensian 31 (Winter): 264. Dillard, Leigh. 2011. Drawing Outside the Book: Parallel Illustration and Building of a Visual Culture. In Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, ed. Christina Ionescu, 196–241. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. England, Maureen. 2020. Dickens’s Afterlife: Character and Cultural Memory. Victoriographies 10 (3): 301–331. Fox, Margalit. 2007. J.B. Handelsman, 85, New Yorker Cartoonist, Is Dead. New York Times, 26 June. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.nytimes. com/2007/06/26/arts/26handelsman.html.

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Franklin, Nancy. 2007. Postscript: J.B. Handelsman. The New Yorker, 2 July, p. 27. Gale, Steven H. 2001. Seventy-Five Years of The New Yorker Cartoons: A History. American Periodicals 11: 95–130. Golden, Catherine J. 2017. Serials to Graphic Novels: The Evolution of the Victorian Illustrated Book. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Handelsman, J.B. 1979. Freaky Fables. London: Sphere Books. ———. 1984a. Bill Sikes Goes on Johnny Carson. The New  Yorker, 10 September, p. 105. ———. 1984b. Ch II-A. Oliver Falls Among Bleeding Hearts. The New Yorker, 2 July, p. 35. ———. 1986. Further Freaky Fables. London: Methuen. ———. 1990a. Alternative Dickens: Mr Pickwick Tries to Elude the Law. The New Yorker, 24 September, p. 50. ———. 1990b. Alternative Dickens: My Aunt’s Left Hook Expels Uriah from the Chaise. The New Yorker, 12 November, p. 95. ———. 1990c. Alternative Dickens: Rehabilitated at Last (Mr Sikes Finally Learns Some Manners). The New Yorker, 15 October, p. 63. ———. 1991a. Alternative Dickens: Dr Manette Sinks in his Daughter’s Arms as She Tells Him the Sad News. The New Yorker, 4 February, p. 37. ———. 1991b. Alternative Dickens: Oliver, Having Received More, Requests a Doggy Bag. The New Yorker, 2 December, p. 86. ———. 1991c. Alternative Dickens: Pip Is Found in Possession of a Controlled Substance. The New Yorker, 7 January, p. 23. ———. 1991d. Alternative Dickens: Still Waiting for Something to Turn Up, Mr. Micawber Is Ignored by a Woman who Is Trying to Look like Cher. The New Yorker, 18 March, p. 36. ———. 1991e. Alternative Dickens: Sydney Carton Refuses to Go to the Guillotine without his Cat. The New Yorker, 20 May, p. 46. ———. 1991f. Alternative Dickens: Tiny Tim, Who Did Not Die, Grows up to Marry Little Nell, Who Did Not Die, Either. The New Yorker, 7 October, p. 86. ———. 1991g. ‘I Beg Your Pardon,’ Said Alice, ‘But Which of You Is the Democrat?’ The New Yorker, 16 December, p. 42. ———. 1991h. ‘I Should Like to Buy a Handgun While It Is Still Legal,’ Said Alice Very Gently. The New Yorker, 1 July, p. 24. ———. 1992. Alternative Dickens: Scrooge Is Audited. The New  Yorker, 17 February, p. 35. Inge, M. Thomas. 1984. The New Yorker Cartoon and Modern Graphic Humor. Studies in American Humor 3 (1): 61–73. J.B. Handelsman, 85: His 950 New Yorker Cartoons Ran Gamut over 45 Years. 2007. Los Angeles Times, 27 June. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-­xpm-­2007-­jun-­27-­me-­handelsman27-­story.html.

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Jeffreys, Susan. 2007. Bud Handelsman: A Cartoonist whose Dark Wit Lit Up the Pages of Punch, Playboy and the New Yorker. The Guardian, 21 July. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/jul/21/guardianobituaries.media. John, Juliet. 2010. Dickens and Mass Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kitton, F.G. 1891. Dickens and ‘Punch’. English Illustrated Magazine 8 (August): 799–807. Kukkonen, Karin. 2011. Metalepsis in Popular Culture: An Introduction. In Metalepsis in Popular Culture, ed. Karin Kukkonen and Sonja Klimek, 1–21. Berlin: De Gruyter. Lopez Szwydsky, Lissette. 2020. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Louttit, Chris. 2014. ‘A Favour on the Million’: The Household Edition, the Cheap Reprint, and the Posthumous Illustration and Reception of Charles Dickens. Book History 17: 321–364. ———. 2020. Boz without Phiz: Reading Dickens with Different Illustrations. In Reading Dickens Differently, ed. Leon Litvack and Nathalie Vanfasse, 149–164. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Mankoff, Bob, ed. 2004. The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers. ———. 2012. A Far, Far Better Cartoon Gag. The New  Yorker, 7 February. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/ bob-­mankoff/a-­far-­far-­better-­cartoon-­gag. Newell, Kate. 2017. Expanding Adaptation Networks: From Illustration to Novelization. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Riddell, Chris. 2020. Boris Johnson and The Ghost of Christmas Present— Cartoon. The Guardian, 1 December. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2020/dec/19/boris-­johnson-­and-­the-­ ghost-­of-­christmas-­present-­cartoon. Rowson, Martin. 2020. A Gruelling Ordeal—Cartoon. The Guardian, 26 October. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2020/oct/26/martin-rowson-johnson-oliver-twist-schoolmeals-cartoon. Scully, Richard, and Marian Quartly. 2009. Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence. In Drawing the Line: Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence, ed. Richard Scully and Marian Quartly, 1.1–1.13. Melbourne: Monash University ePress. Sickmann Han, Carrie. 2016. Pickwick’s Other Papers: Continually Reading Dickens. Victorian Literature and Culture 44: 19–41. Trezise, Simon. 1993. The Making of Dickens: Three Themes in the Criticism of 1837–1939. Dickens Quarterly 10 (3): 161–170.

PART II

Beyond Illustration: Expanded Fields

CHAPTER 6

Ad-app-tive Illustration: Or, the Uses of Illustration Kamilla Elliott

[W]here is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations? —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (n.p.)

That Michael Burstein, president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, assesses that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has “become the most widely illustrated novel in existence” (Burstein 2012, vii), makes it a particularly appropriate case study for a discussion of illustration. Originally illustrated by Lewis Carroll (the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832–1898), the celebrated illustrator and political cartoonist Sir John Tenniel (1820–1914) created the drawings for its first published edition. Carroll’s prose subsequently attracted other luminaries of illustration, including Beatrix Potter in 1893 (Norman 83–84), Arthur Rackham in

K. Elliott (*) Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_6

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1907, Mervyn Peake in 1946, Tove Jansson in 1966, Salvador Dalí in 1969, Ralph Steadman in 1973, Lisbeth Zwerger in 1999, Yayoi Kasama in 2012 (Popova),1 and Helen Oxenbury in 2014. Beyond notable illustrators, the online database “Alice Illustrated: Alice Illustrated around the World,” provides links to illustrations produced on every continent (University of Maryland Libraries). Although Graham Ovenden in 1972 and Jeff A.  Menges in 2012 adhered to a narrow definition of illustration as pictures printed in books containing Carroll’s words, Alice illustrations have extended beyond books, populating postage stamps (Bennett), card games (Burstein 2014, viii), photographs (Kérchy 144), magic lantern slides (Bill Douglas Cinema Museum), tie-in merchandise (Elliott 2014), and cosplay (Kérchy 123). They have been animated in the imagery of theatrical productions, puppet shows, ballet performances, film and television adaptations, museum installations, videogames, and theme park rides. Michael Hancher contends that “Alice lives in the popular culture; she does not need books” (2009, 202). And yet this chapter is interested in books and with the adaptive uses of its illustrations in twenty-first-century mobile software applications or, “apps,” as they are more commonly termed. From 2008, an “app” has been defined as “an abbreviation of application used in the context of mobile computing […] a computer program run on a smartphone or hand-held computer” (Burdett and Brown, n.p.). My title, “Ad-app-tive Illustration,” constructs a Carrollian portmanteau of adapt and application. (Carroll defined a portmanteau as “two meanings packed into one word” – Through the Looking Glass 127). The OED defines adapt as “to make something suitable for a new use or purpose” and application as “The action of putting something to a use” (Oxford English Dictionary). Adapt foregrounds making something for a new use; application foregrounds putting it into use. Emphases on the usefulness of apps have generated a terminology in which consumers are nominated “users.” As such, they are decidedly Victorian, or neo-­ Victorian. What, then, are the uses of the Alice illustrations?

 Many of these illustrations can be viewed on Popova’s website.

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The Uses of Illustration In the opening paragraph of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1862–64), Alice questions whether books without illustrations have any use. In this first draft of what would be published by Macmillan as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, Carroll prioritised pictures over words, illustrating Alice’s question before it is articulated in prose (Carroll, “Under Ground,” Chapter 1, n.p.).2 The priority of illustrations over words is here marked first and foremost by illustration itself. Although Alice secondarily ponders the importance of dialogue (“conversations”) in her rhetorical question, dialogue is absent from the opening illustration (Alice and her sister sit silently, mouths closed), and from the prose until the second chapter. When Alice does shift from thinking to herself to speaking “aloud,” her words remain rhetorical questions or are remarks to her absent, non-verbal cat Dinah. The White Rabbit too eschews conversation with others, speaking only “to himself” in Chap. 1. Even when conversation begins between Alice and Wonderland animals who do have the power of speech, their conversation is preceded by an illustration of its participants. My chapter too is more concerned with pictures than conversations, but it is keenly concerned with conversations about pictures. Artists, reviewers, literary critics, illustration experts, book historians, and museum curators too numerous to mention have entered into conversations with the illustrations of the Alice books. Scholars have compiled print curations of their illustrations with commentaries (Burstein; Jaques [sic] and Giddens; Menges; Nichols; Ovenden), joined by online curations (see Popova). My chapter develops conversations between illustration and ad-­ app-­tation, focusing on the uses of illustrations in nineteenth-century books and twenty-first-century apps of the Alice books. Alice’s comment about the uselessness of books without pictures and conversations does not solely represent “Carroll’s assumption of his readers’ familiarity with the delights offered by pictures,” as Stuart Sillars remarks (Sillars 17), nor is it an ironic smirk at Alice confusing usefulness with pleasure. With the rise of Utilitarian philosophy and the foundation of organizations such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1827), which published books such as The Penny Cyclopedia [sic] of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1833–1843), the rhetoric of 2

 Each page of the manuscript can be viewed on the British Library website.

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useful books was pervasive. Utilitarianism propounded a moral arithmetic predicated on beliefs that people were motivated to moral action only by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. In such contexts, John Locke’s treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education was widely reprinted and followed. However, Locke not only recommended the pleasures of pictures to motivate children to suffer the pains of learning to read but also stressed the educative role of pictures in teaching them the meaning of words: If his Æsop has pictures in it, it will entertain him much the better, and encourage him to read, when it carries the increase of knowledge with it; for such visible objects children hear talked of in vain, and without any satisfaction, whilst they have no ideas of them: those ideas being not to be had from sounds, but from the things themselves, or their pictures. (156)

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll similarly instructed readers, “If you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture” (38). Similar educational theories underscoring semantic and interpretive interchanges between words and pictures persist today (see, e.g., Tackas and Bus). My study is more concerned with their interchanges in adaptation studies: Alice’s insistence that books without pictures or conversations are useless foregrounds the inter- and multi-mediality that have been central to the field: book illustrations hail from the visual arts; conversations predominate in theatre and media such as radio, television, and film drama. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate traces a trajectory of conversations about words and pictures from illustrated books through worded films to literary film adaptations (Elliott 2003). Words and images engage in new conversations in twenty-first-century “apps,” as apps go beyond phenomenologies of seeing, hearing, and touching books to new audio-visual forms and haptic interactions with prose and illustrations (Elliott 2020a, 50–53). Many Alice book apps offer a choice of whether to consume the words aurally or visually: for example, the TabTale Alice in Wonderland app offers users a choice of “autoplay,” “read it myself,” or “read to me.” However, the app discards both Carroll’s prose and Tenniel’s illustrations, retaining basic characters and plots, but rewriting the words as rhyming couplets and reillustrating the book with original, partially animated art. As the pages turn, “record” buttons allow users to inject their own words and voices into the app; the illustrations offer opportunities

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to game them and solve puzzles (see TabTale and TabTale YouTube). More recently, Bear Hug Entertainment’s Alice Legends invites the user to “Immerse yourself in beautiful artwork and gorgeous graphics” and to “Design your own perfect Wonderland,” but not to read words. Gameplay locates Alice walking on a path containing illegible words and finding pages that cannot be read but are waved as objects. The focus is on her interactions with visual objects and obstacles; there is no time to read. The only verbal activity offered in the preview is “Invent new curse-words as you try to outsmart hundreds of engaging levels!” (Bear Hug Entertainment).

Apps and Adaptation The remainder of this chapter focuses on apps that more closely adapt illustrated print books of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the ways in which they reconfigure concepts of adaptation as a process of repetition with variation (Hutcheon 4 and many others). For Burstein, the “innovative linguistics” of Carroll’s prose created “a radical literary departure” from literary traditions that “encouraged a different type of imagination than had ever appeared before, stretching the movement and range of illustrative art” (2012, ix). Here, Carroll is credited with variations on literary traditions and with inspiring variations on illustrative traditions as well. In their publishing history of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Zoe Jaques [sic] and Eugene Giddens evidence the many new experiments in art that Carroll generated. Beyond their effects on illustrations, Carroll’s words have been aligned with cutting-edge innovations in other fields, used to explain complex concepts in quantum physics (the Cheshire Cat principle; see Richmond and Smith) and evolutionary biology (the Red Queen hypothesis; see Van Valen). Not only has Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland been used to explain quantum physics, physics has also been used to adapt the book to new illustrative technologies on apps. When Jaques and Giddens assessed that “Nearly 150 years after its initial publication, editions of Alice […] are still pushing the boundaries of book arts” (171), they were discussing Alice for the iPad, released by Atomic Antelope on 31 March 2010, the first app to use pioneering technologies of “particle physics [and] regular physics” (Heller). Chris Stevens, a writer for The Telegraph and The Times (London) and a game show designer for the BBC, designed this hybrid of art and science with programmer Ben Roberts. In an interview, he explained:

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Photoshop graphics were imported into Apple’s Xcode software, where we added virtual gravity and physics to the characters and objects. The book uses data from the iPad’s accelerometer (a special circuit that senses velocity and orientation of the iPad) to figure out how objects topple around the screen. (Heller)

Reviewers of Alice for the iPad saw it as revolutionary: the BBC nominated it “the future of digital reading” (Cellan-Jones), while the Huffington Post declared that it “reinvents reading” (Huffington Post). These are astonishing claims from mainstream journalists. However, it is only the illustrations that warrant these claims, not its words. The words, for the most part, are relegated to the domain of repetition while the illustrations leap light years into the future. The ad-app-tation of Carroll’s words is minimal and conventional. Just as Alice grows in the story, so too the app supersizes and bolds the font of a few words to suggest sound or speech.3 In the abridged version of the app, the book’s lower case “thump! thump!” of Alice’s landing at the bottom of the rabbit hole (Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1869)4 becomes a single, supersized, capitalized “THUMP!” condensed and emphasized (epitomizing the ad-app-­ tation as a whole) (Alice for the iPad-Lite). Subsequently, the “general chorus” of “There goes Bill!” in the book (51) appears in even larger font, with the first word bolded: “THERE HE GOES!” But these effects inhabit earlier word-image forms such as comics and graphic novels (in some cases, far more inventively so) and are used sparingly in the app. It is the app’s adaptation of illustrations that “reinvent” reading. Some pictures animate spontaneously when the page is turned: for example, the marmalade jar, the “DRINK ME” bottle, comfits, magical cakes, mushrooms, a pepper mill, rose petals, tarts, and playing cards float down the pages containing them. Alice and the Mouse bob in the Pool of Tears; Alice shrinks and grows; smoke and Bill the Lizard erupt from the White Rabbit’s chimney. Beyond these automatically generated animations, the reader / user can move some images by touching and dragging them across the screen and others by tilting the iPad, so that they move (with few limitations) in whatever direction the user directs. Some effects 3  Audible sound is absent apart from the fanfare blown with the unfurling of the table of contents. In Designing for the iPad: Building Applications that Sell, Stevens explains why he omitted music from the design (2011, 143–4). 4  Further references to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are from this 1869 edition, illustrated by Tenniel and available in full view on Google Books.

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happen only through user manipulation: tilting the iPad back and forth makes the otherwise static Rabbit’s pocket watch swing and the Cheshire Cat appear and disappear. My language here falls short in describing these effects; therefore, just as Carroll instructed his readers to look at the picture of the Gryphon, so too, I advise my readers to look at videos of the app (Atomic Antelope; Children’s Technology Review). To emphasize its innovations on prior illustrations and prior book apps, Alice for the iPad antiquates Carroll and Tenniel’s book. This has the further effect of creating a bipolar evocation of the app as a process of archaic repetition with technological variations so innovative that they seem magical. Anna Kérchy assesses that “the app’s parchment-like page design” and “the virtually simulated wear-and-tear of the physical book” point to its “having been widely read and enjoyed” (44). Yet its sepia pages, burned and decaying at their edges, its table of contents rolled out on a scroll of pre-print era parchment, ceremoniously unfurled by the White Rabbit clad in heraldic costume and blowing a mediaeval fanfare trumpet reach back centuries prior to its reading history from 1865 to the present. The illustrations too engage in bipolar repetition with variation, retaining older illustrative forms amid their dazzling technological innovations. Not all illustrations are colourized, animated, or interactive: many appear as sepia antiquations of the black-and-white line drawings in the book; some are only partially coloured and animated, as when a black-and-white Alice in a black-and white line-drawn room pulls back a black-and-white curtain to view a coloured, animated view of the outdoors. Even fully colourized, interactive illustrations retain some static and black-and-white dimensions: as a colourized Alice and Mouse bob in the Pool of Tears, their strongly defined, black outlines remain stiff, even as they bob, their faces and limbs frozen, like ice cubes bobbing in a glass. The technologies of the app, then, do not displace the technologies of the book: rather, they co-exist in exaggerated repetition with in-your-face variation. Colourizing, animating, over-sizing, and rendering 3-D parts of the illustrations while other parts remain colourless, static, proportioned, and two-dimensional accentuates not only the variations, but also the repetitions of the app, and in turn accentuates the app as an adaptation. Alice for the iPad refuses to become a film animation of the book, insisting on unfolding as a new way of reading an illustrated book. Partially retaining the stasis and black-and-white lines of the book’s illustrations and the heavy-handed antiquation of the pages never allows the page to disappear or to be conflated with the silver screen, or any screen. Moreover,

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in order to progress through the story, readers must turn pages. Touching arrows at the bottom of the screen curls and turns the pages with a heavily shadowed, 3-D flourish.5 Reviews prioritise the innovations of the app and look towards “the future of digital reading” (Cellan-Jones); some hail it as ushering in “a new generation of pop-up books” (Independent). Beyond its formal properties—or, more accurately, tied to them—Alice for the iPad’s reinvention of reading carries users beyond phenomenologies of looking at and listening to print literature, where children read or are read to and look at pictures, their hands limited to pointing at, touching, or turning pages and beyond the conventions of reading print pop-up books, where interactive touching is limited and without sound effects (see e.g., Saduba). Readers of the app are called not only to “Watch as full-screen physics modelling bring[s] John Tenniel’s gorgeous illustrations to life” (The App Store, “Alice for the iPad”), repeating and varying a centuries-old rhetoric of incarnation invoked in many media (Elliott 2003, 161–73), but also to bring the illustrations to life themselves, as the “physics modelling” grants animating powers to users who, like magicians waving wands, make inanimate objects move by touching and dragging them or tilting the iPad. Haptic encounters between readers and the app manipulate objects and characters, making them move, grow, shrink, appear, and disappear, expanding the senses involved in reading, and granting readers magical powers over formal objects. Shelley L. Walsh assesses that “using the iPad’s tilt controls and touchscreen interface to make Alice in Wonderland come to life […] adds even more whimsy and wonder to the tale” (Walsh). Yet the app’s ad-app-tation goes beyond “whimsy and wonder” to inject something decidedly otherworldly, if not transgressive, into its reinvention of reading. Many critics have noted that Carroll undermined the moral literature that permeated children’s literature in his day (e.g., Gardner): the app’s design and marketing similarly highlight morally subversive aspects of its uses. The App Store preview invites readers to “Tilt your iPad to make Alice grow big as a house, or shrink to just six inches tall. Throw tarts at the Queen of Hearts—they bounce off her! Witness the Cheshire Cat disappear and help the Caterpillar smoke his hookah pipe” (The App Store, “Alice for the iPad”). In these interactions, child readers make child characters grow 5  This option was introduced in the fourth version of the app (Stevens 2011, 155); prior to that, users touched the arrows or swiped to turn pages.

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menacing and threatening or so small as to escape observation; they attack arch villains without retaliation or consequences; they assist characters in ingesting opium. It is striking that marketers highlight these interactions, rather than the more benign activities described earlier in the chapter (swinging the White Rabbit’s pocket watch, bobbing Alice and the Mouse about in the Pool of Tears, swirling comfits and rose petals around the page). Quite apart from the content of reader interactions, interactive technologies are formally transgressive. Beyond expanding the senses and sensory relations engaged in reading (from eye/ear relations to hand/eye/ ear relations), the app carries readers from the dualistic body-mind theories of reading—of material book and childhood imagination—into virtual worlds where, as users of illustrations, they gain magical, occult powers over images. Kérchy observes that. [child readers] are provided with an embodied simulation of Alice’s metamorphic corporeal experiences, and become fully endowed with her wondrous capacity to stretch physical boundaries and reach spatial pleasures resulting from the extension and the boundlessness of the weightless yet powerful body-in-space. (43)

Such uses of illustrations change how children identify with fictional characters, going beyond empirical identification of and projective identification with them to physics-defying manipulations of them. Elsewhere, the AvatarBook Alice in Wonderland app allows children to photograph their own faces and superimpose them on Alice’s head and body: “Make your children the fairy tale star” (theavatarbook). The interpenetration of selfie face with character body creates a multimedia pastiche of imaged, interactive, performing self and/as character and makes readers participatory users in fictional domains. Apps here grant users agency to co-produce the books that they read, rendering them what Alvin Toffler has nominated “prosumers,” and blurring traditional media boundaries of production and consumption (Toffler 265). Kérchy regards such breaches of traditional print media boundaries and word-image dyads as limiting rather than expansive: Even if the “produsers” [a portmanteau of producers and users] of Alice for the iPad enjoy a certain degree of interactive agency, their liberty is minimalized. […] The greatest limitation is reading experience’s being reduced to

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playground fun as the physical pleasure of tapping the screen to produce multimedia effects (via features more often distracting from the story than enhancing its comprehension) predominate the more complex intellectual challenge to make sense of imagetextual meaning by relying upon one’s own creativity and imagination. (45)

What’s really at stake here, however, is not so much the limits of the app as its transgressive crossings of the conventions of production, consumption, and critical theory governing older media. Andy Lowe was keenly aware of the tensions that would erupt over such Alice for the iPad’s reinvention of reading in this regard: “it will irk luddites with its sumptuous interactive rendering of Alice in Wonderland” (Lowe). In his book on interactive programming, Joshua Noble argues that “varying the physical interaction frequently leads to new experiences, new realizations, and new ways of thinking” (199). This is the real threat—and the real potential—of app book technologies. We critics of digital media are ourselves delimited and programmed by prior critical discourses: we also engage in critical repetition with variation. Just as literary scholars and critics of the 1880s protested against the sumptuous illustrations of the Book Beautiful for their sensual superficiality and easy consumption against the harder task of delving deeply into the verbal representation (Elliott 2016, 550–3), critics such as Kérchy have adapted these arguments to downgrade digital books and digital reading. Just as elite literary authors of the 1920s and 1930s joined humanities critics in denouncing film as a shallow and superficial art encouraging passive consumption (Elliott 2003, Chapter 3), so too, contemporary scholars have adapted older arguments to pit illustrated print literature against interactive digital media. Kérchy (by no means a luddite or an iconophobe) nevertheless makes the case for print literature over digital reading: Technological sophistication has its downsides. The slow close-reading literary experience and the challenging interpretive process looking for the multitude of layers of meaning embedded in the Tenniel-Carroll imagetext risk being turned into a shallow, instantly-gratifying, interactive game [.] (44).

As she does, she repeats and varies a longstanding discourse in which words represent mind, intellect, truth, seriousness, and deep meaning, while images represent the body, sensory pleasure, superficiality, deception, and easy, superficial consumption. Discussing the “compulsory

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idiotic pleasure of consumption” and applying this to the app, by contrast to the consumption of the print book, which she valorizes (44), Kérchy eviscerates choice, intellect, and depth from its reinvention of reading, repeating and varying arguments made about prose versus illustration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Elliott 2016, 552). Unlike her predecessors, in the twenty-first century, Kérchy is ready to defend print illustrations, but reluctant to extend that defence to newer illustrative technologies. If sensorially represented and perceived images have for centuries proved threatening to words and to the invisible domains of theology and pseudo-religious Romantic theory, virtual images prove even more threatening, intruding on the territory of the imagination, a domain generally (and erroneously) reserved as an accompaniment to verbal representation and pitted against images of all kinds (Mitchell; Elliott 2003, Chapter 3). Kérchy constructs a neo-classical, mind-body, dualistic defence of print reading as a precious, material, textual body consumed by a Romantic imagination and pits the union against the phenomenological boundary crossings of virtual reading. Virtual books, she argues, “cannot be passed on to family and friends, they cannot be inherited, collected” (45). Here, printed textual bodies cease to be mass-produced books, becoming icons of bourgeois individualism and property rights: “unique physical objects, precious personal belongings” (45). Pseudo-religious Romantic theories of imagination join commodity fetishism to set the book as owned material object, further possessed by the transcendental imagination, against the occultic possession of the virtual, which blurs boundaries between producers and consumers, bodies and minds, sensory pairings, real/not real, true/not true, creating dynamics that are neither dualistic nor dialectic and neither binary nor deconstructed oppositions. I too am repeating and varying arguments that I have made before with regard to older media forms. In the critiques that I am critiquing here, the rhetoric of loss outweighs the rhetoric of gain in adaptation—inaccurately and culpably so. The rhetoric of loss is common to adaptation generally. When I teach literary film adaptation to literature students, I find them well versed in the rhetoric of literary loss, with little awareness of filmic gains. When I ask them to focus not on what has been cut from a book but on what film has added—images, music, sounds, actors, sets, props, costumes, makeup, lighting, special effects, and more—I am asking them to see literary film adaptations not as dilutions of reading but as bringing new modes of representation to literary texts, representations that function

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further as interpretations of literary texts. In Theorizing Adaptation (2020b), I join other critics who have argued that criticism is an act of adaptation and, concomitantly, that adaptation is a mode of criticism. In this chapter, I ask readers to ponder what digital technologies have added to books and reading and what theories of books and readings they challenge. Repetitions and variations occur not only between books and their ad-­ app-­tations, but also within apps. Alice for the iPad has itself been adapted from its original version (1.0 in 2010) to its final version (4.0.1 in 2016). Intriguingly, as it has self-adapted, its price has devalued. The App Store preview announces (and has done so for quite some time): “And now, for a limited time, you can purchase Alice for iPad at a price that is 70% off of the original launch price!” (The App Store, “Alice for the iPad”). This devaluation is in part because subsequent apps have developed its technologies beyond its updates, causing it to be pronounced “rudimentary by 2015’s standards” (Digital Arts Staff). Between 2010 and 2015, A1000Castles adapted the design concepts and digital technologies of Alice for the iPad to Alice in Wonderland, Arthur Rackham, released on 13 December 2013. The app features the illustrations of Arthur Rackham (1907), which themselves made use of new photographic printing technologies that allowed for more detail, full colourization, and other design possibilities unavailable to Tenniel in 1865 (Nichols 25). The A1000Castles app likewise seized on digital technological innovations, which allowed it to offer multiple interactive elements within a single illustration, heighten three-dimensionality through layered animations, and add background music and sound effects. Again, the only way to experience this is either to use the app or watch the YouTube preview (A1000Castles). With so many media and layers, and so many ways to interact with different modes of representation, the app offers more opportunities for complex close reading and analysis than any print book. What has been lost is the priority of the words and the reservation of complex, deep, layered reading to words alone. When the app heightens interactivity by allowing users to take a selfie and insert their image into the illustrations, this offers a panoply of interpretive possibilities for scholars of identity, phenomenology, psychology, reception, and more. As with the design and marketing of Alice for the iPad, Alice in Wonderland, Arthur Rackham’s design and marketing present it as an ad-­ app-­tation that does not remove the original, even partially, but rather retains it:

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• The application is enriched by a full set of Arthur Rackham’s original plates in their original proportions and frames as they appeared in the 1907 first printed editions. • You can move between two different ways of enjoying Rackham’s work, the present and past, allowing you to explore the extraordinary work that this great illustrator used to bring Carroll’s work to life. (The App Store, “Alice in Wonderland, Arthur Rackham”) Here, choice is not presented as an either/or affair, but rather as both/ and process of moving back and forth between original illustrations and their digital adaptation. Apps, then, are not only interpretations of what they adapt but also self-reflexive interpretations of their own adaptations. Most marketing for the app suggests that it, like Alice for the iPad, improves upon the original. In 2010, marketing for Alice for the iPad engaged the re- prefix that is itself an iteration of repetition and variation, nominating it “Lewis Carroll’s original Alice in Wonderland digitally remastered for the iPad” (The App Store, “Alice for the iPad”). Remastering conveys a double sense of gaining control over the “original” and of making it suitable for new media and audiences. Marketing for Alice in Wonderland, Arthur Rackham repeats and varies this rhetoric: Take a journey through the wonder of “Alice in Wonderland” with the lavishly restored illustrations of Arthur Rackham. One of the most beautiful and romantic versions of the Carroll tale ever designed is now totally renovated and expanded through a crisp and bright adaptation of the illustrations for a modern audience of all ages. (The App Store, “Alice in Wonderland, Arthur Rackham”)

Controverting discourses that represent adaptation as a process of loss, marketing here figures ad-app-tation as a process of restoration, renovation, expansion, and modernisation. Restoration and renovation convey a sense of returning a fading original to its former glory; expansion and modernisation carries it to new media, audiences, and epochs. Interactive elements join modified (crisper, brighter) aesthetics: • Complete set of interactive illustrated boards beautifully adapted for iPad and iPad Mini with animations, physical objects, and interactive sounds.

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• “Invisible ink objects” to play with on every text page, just touch the letters! • Camera function to mix your portraits inside these wonderful compositions and save on your iPad or share with family and friends. (The App Store, “Alice in Wonderland, Arthur Rackham”)

The last modification counteracts Kérchy’s worry that child readers of digital apps “might lose opportunities to communicate, expand in language, relate to other readers, and share the literary experience” (44), highlighting new technologies of sharing. The app’s design and marketing further rebut claims that digital books are superficial reductions of print books. The app presents itself as a virtual scholarly edition: • Complete set of original boards presented in the Historical Notes section. • Full texts in the original version and from the earliest translations: English (1856), French (1869), German (1869), Italian (1871), Spanish (1922) and Portuguese (1931). • […R]ich and interesting historical notes about Arthur Rackham, his work, the world he worked in, and the context of Carroll’s fantastic book (English only). (The App Store, “Alice in Wonderland, Arthur Rackham”)

The app thus offers historical, literary, cultural, and biographical contexts and various opportunities for comparative scholarship—what would occupy volumes in print—within a single app. The following year, The Alice App (Emmanuel Paletz Corporation, 2014) repeated and varied the marketing rhetoric engaged by earlier Alice apps. Its “Welcome again and for the first time to the wonderful world of Alice!” casts it as both a return to an original and an original experience. Claiming that the app “opens the door to the world of Wonderland like nothing ever has before,” marketers promise not only to renew memories of reading the book but also to create emotionally and aesthetically enhanced new memories: “It’s the story we all remember, but our interactive landscape will create new warmer and more vibrant memories than ever before!” (The App Store, “The Alice App”). Countering claims that apps foster superficial reading, it draws on Romantic theories to claim both depth and transcendence for its reading experience: “You’ll dig deeper beyond the words and beyond the pages into the vibrant heart and

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soul of this timeless classic” (The App Store, “The Alice App”). Adapting the spirit of a prior work is also a centuries-old discourse spanning many art forms, with origins in theologies of exegesis (Elliott 2003, 136–43). Strikingly, however, the claim is not so much that the app is superior to what it ad-appts but that it offers superior access to the original, going “deeper beyond”—that is, deeper into the original, even as it reaches beyond it. The Alice App intensifies its gestures towards going back farther than Tenniel’s illustrations to adapt their origins in Dutch and Flemish Renaissance art. At the same time, it post-modernizes them by turning them into collages (Capwell; Paletz). Assuaging Kérchy’s concerns that apps eviscerate the “layers of meaning” in print books, the app’s creator, Emmanuel Paletz rightly remarks, “The book has many, many different layers of meaning and each of these paintings has its own meaning as well. I combine the significance and symbols of the paintings with the text in order to give new meaning to the book” (interview by Capwell). The app preview furthermore counters claims that apps represent the playground, while print reading embodies the classroom, and that its technologies will obviate imagination and creativity and discourage reading while fostering isolated consumption (Kérchy). On the contrary, the app will: • • • • • • • • •

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ENCOURAGE literacy skills by following along with the narration. [Allow users to both] LEARN and EDUCATE about art. IGNITE imaginations. INTERACT [with] the story via [p]layful, interactive illustrations and games. STIMULATE creativity. [Allow users to] NAVIGATE effortlessly to any location. [Allow parents to] ENGAGE with your child in a fun activity that can be enjoyed by adults and children alike. ENJOY the energetic narration and hilarious sound effects. INSPIRE children to read, create, and engage more. (The App Store, “The Alice App,” original capitalisation).6

 Minor edits were made for grammatical accuracy.

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Building on research that interactive media technologies develop children’s intellects and provide mental challenges rather than dulling them (Bolton), the preview advises: ** TIP: DON’T JUST SIT AND LISTEN TO THE ALICE APP ** Alice is a book filled with riddles, puzzles, brainteasers, and new surprises on every page! So JUMP IN and become a part of the experience. (The App Store, “The Alice App”)

As with Carroll’s prose, the app challenges children to do more than read and look at pictures: it asks them to think about and play with the representations. Thinking reflects upon what is already there; playing allows new representations and meanings to unfold, as in Carroll’s own play with language in the Alice books. And yet the Alice apps discussed in this chapter only authorize children to play with Tenniel’s and Rackham’s illustrations, not with Carroll’s words. As Lowe observes of Alice for the iPad, in all three apps, “The text remains the same, but it is surrounded by pokable background detail and strokable illustrations” (Lowe). While the two later apps do offer children choices about how to consume the prose (to read silently to themselves or have the story read aloud to them), they are not offered a chance to change or manipulate the words as they are with the illustrations. Alice in Wonderland, Arthur Rackham comes close, offering users the ability to partially obscure Carroll’s words by touch-dragging “invisible ink symbols” (footprints, clubs, hearts, diamonds, and spades) across the text. While this does not allow them to change words, it does allow an overwriting of words with symbols (hovering between pictures and words) images, tapping into longstanding concerns that images overpower words when both appear together (Elliott 2003, 33; 2016). More broadly, images are profane by comparison to sacred words in Islamic, Judaic, and Protestant theologies (Mitchell 7–9). These apps are conservative in not subjecting canonical literary words to subversive ad-app-tations and radical in what they allow users to do with illustrations. Yet from another angle of view, these apps extend Carroll’s subversive, linguistic play and experimentation in the book (Gardner; Lecerle) to the illustrations. While film animators have played with Tenniel’s and other images and made them play (Elliott 2003, Chapter 6), Alice for the iPad and other apps allow users to not only watch image play created by others but also to play directly with images ourselves. If Alice for the iPad did

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reinvent reading, it was not so much new ways of reading words as new ways to interact with illustrations. We await the reinvention that will allow users to play with canonical literary words in more adventurous ways.

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https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/illustration/6-­amazing-­alice-­in-­ wonderland-­inspired-­art-­design-­projects/. Elliott, Kamilla. 2003. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2014. Tie-Intertextuality, or, Intertextuality as Incorporation in the Tie-in Merchandise to Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (2010). Adaptation 7 (2): 191–211. ———. 2016. The Illustrated Book. In Late Victorian into Modern, 1880–1920, ed. Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, 539–564. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2020a. Ad-app-ting the Canon. In Adapting the Canon: Mediation, Visualization, Interpretation, ed. Ann Lewis and Silke Arnold-de Simine, 43–64. Oxford: Legenda Press (Transcript Series). ———. 2020b. Theorizing Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gardner, Martin. 1960. The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. New York: Bramhall House. Hancher, Michael. 2009. Alice’s Audiences. In Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, ed. James Holt McGavran Jr., 190–207. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ———. 2019. The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books. 2nd ed. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Heller, Steven. 2011. The Most Technologically Advanced Book for the iPad? Atlantic Monthly, 17 March. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/enter tainment/archive/2011/03/ the-­most-­technologically-­advanced-­book-­for-­the-­ipad/72610/. Huffington Post, The. 2010. Alice for the iPad App Reinvents Reading. The Huffington Post, 14 June. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.huffpost.com/ entry/alice-­in-­wonderland-­ipad_n_537122. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge. Independent, The. 2010. Alice for the iPad Points Way toward a New Generation of Pop-up Books. The Independent, 14 April. Accessed 5 June 2022. https:// www.independent.co.uk/arts-­e ntertainment/books/alice-­a pp-­f or-­i pad-­ points-­the-­way-­toward-­a-­new-­generation-­of-­pop-­up-­books-­5534650.html. Jaques [sic], Zoe and Eugene Giddens. 2016. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass: A Publishing History. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate (Ashgate Studies in Publishing History). Kérchy, Anna. 2016. Alice in Transmedia Wonderland: Curiouser and Curiouser New Forms of a Children’s Classic. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 1994. Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature. London: Routledge. Locke, John. 1693. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. London: A & J Churchill.

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Lowe, Andy. 2010. Is Apple’s iPad a Looking Glass on Your Cultural Future? The Sunday Times, London, 23 May. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www. thetimes.co.uk/article/is-­apples-­ipad-­a-­looking-­glass-­on-­your-­cultural-­future-­ mhmvdlw3cr0. Menges, Jeff A., ed. 2012. Alice Illustrated: 120 Images from the Classic Tales of Lewis Carroll. Mineola, NY: Dover. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1986. Image, Text, Iconology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nichols, Catherine. 2014. Alice’s Wonderland: A Visual Journey through Lewis Carroll’s Mad, Mad World. New York: Race Point Publishing. Noble, Joshua. 2012. Programming Interactivity: A Designer’s Guide to Processing Arduino, and openFrameworks. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly. Norman, Andrew. 2014. Beatrix Potter: Her Inner World. Barnsley, Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Books. Ovenden, Graham, ed. 1972. The Illustrators of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. London: Academy Editions. Oxford English Dictionary. n.d.-a 2nd. rev. ed. “adapt,” definition 3.b. Note: OED subscription required for access. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www-oed-­ com/view/Entry/9705. ———. n.d.-b “application,” definition 3.a. Note: OED subscription required for access. Accessed 1 May 2020. https://www-oed-com/view/Entry/2110. Paletz, Emmanuel. 2014. The Alice App ‘Alice in Wonderland’ for the iPad, iPhone and Android. YouTube, 25 June. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=_vXovjHZlXw&t=30s. Popova, Maria. 2014. The Best Illustrations from 150 Years of Alice in Wonderland. Brain Pickings, 7 July. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.brainpickings. org/2014/07/07/best-­illustrations-­alice-­in-­wonderland/. Richmond, M.H., and D.C. Smith. 1979. The Cell as a Habitat: A Royal Society Discussion. London: Royal Society (dist. Scholium International). Saduba, Robert. 2003. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: A Pop-up Adaptation of Carroll’s Original Tale. New York: Simon and Schuster. Sillars, Stuart. 1995. Visualisation in Popular Fiction 1860–1960: Graphic Narratives, Fictional Images. London: Routledge. Stevens, Chris. 2010. Making Alice for the iPad. The Literary Platform, April. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://theliteraryplatform.com/news/2010/04/ making-­alice-­for-­the-­ipad/. ———. 2011. Designing for the iPad: Building Applications That Sell. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. TabTale. 2016. Alice in Wonderland: Unlimited Books and Interactive Ebooks for Kids. YouTube, 20 June. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=O4whI7Bju_0.

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———. n.d. Alice in Wonderland Book: An Interactive Story Book. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/alice-­in-­wonderland-­book/ id492472346. Takacs, Zsofia K., and Adriana G. Bus. 2018. How Pictures in Picture Storybooks Support Young Children’s Story Comprehension: An Eye-Tracking Experiment. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 174 (October): 1–12. theavatarbook. 2011. Avatarbook Alice in Wonderland—iPad App. YouTube, 13 September. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FN67aEUb02M. Toffler, Alvin. 1980. The Third Wave. New York: Morrow. University of Maryland Libraries. n.d. Illustrated Alice: Alice Illustrated around the World. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.lib.umd.edu/alice150/alice-­ in-­wonderland/alice-­illustrated. Note: The link can only be accessed via a WWW search for “Alice illustrated around the world.” Maryland library user permissions block clicking on the link directly. Van Valen, Leigh. 1973. A New Evolutionary Law. Evolutionary Psychology 1: 1–30. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.macworld.com/article/1146705/ alice_iphone.html. Walsh, Shelby Lee. 2010. Alice for the iPad Invites Children into a Hi-Tech Classic Tale. Trendhunter, 16 April. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.trendhunter. com/trends/alice-­for-­the-­ipad.

CHAPTER 7

Drawing from Ozu: An Intermedial Consideration on Clear Line Illustrations Based on Film Frames David Pinho Barros

Throughout the decades since the invention of the Cinématographe and in several production contexts, illustration based on films has been a constant exercise of paratextual and derivative creation surrounding cinema. From as early as the poster for the first paid film screening at the Salon Indien du Grand Café, which adapts into drawing a frame from the comics-­ inspired comedic gag L’Arroseur arrosé (1895), to the retro-­ looking disc cover for the soundtrack of the latest Quentin Tarantino blockbuster Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019), illustration based on the photographic image has produced a particularly piercing effect in the collective imaginary of moviegoers, and inspired a whole range of collecting practices and of academic research. Certain contexts of drawn film poster production have even been considered as autonomous artistic phenomena deserving particular scholarly attention, such as the silent film

D. P. Barros (*) University of Porto, Porto, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_7

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posters signed by Danish graphic artist Sven Brasch (see Dailey), the posters for Brazilian Cinema Marginal films (see Wilke and Farias), the Polish posters of Roman Cieślewicz for both national and international films (see Grabowska-Konwent) or the Japanese post-war posters of the 1950s and 1960s (see Laird). In all these articles mentioned, the interest of the scholars’ approach is based on reflection about an understudied adaptation process, which emphasises the transformation of moving photographic images into static drawn ones, and leads to conclusions concerning significative economic and ideological strategies underlying drawn poster designs. Although they make use of divergent analytical procedures, they all seem to agree on the fact that [p]aratexts are the materials that surround a target text (e.g. a film), but they are more than marketing campaigns and bonus features; they manage context and manipulate meaning-making. Film posters act as “entryway paratexts”, texts that prepare and inform audience expectations before they encounter the primary media. (Laird 95)

The recent phenomenon of authorial illustration based on film frames which I will analyse in this chapter could be considered in similar ways, but it differs from poster creation in two radical aspects which must be taken into account. First of all, it is not part of the original marketing paratexts that accompany the films, and therefore is not moved by any economic urge related to the consumption of the films in their original theatrical format. Secondly, contrary to what Colleen Laird names the “entryway” nature of the film poster, it usually targets a public that is already familiar with the cinematic works and that does not have to be convinced to watch them. The conception of these illustrations, which assume authorship in a way that is profoundly divergent from the normative authorial invisibility of the film poster designer, plays a delicate equilibrium between the references to and direct importation of elements pertaining to the film which is being adapted and a highly subjective and interpretative approach developed by the author. This explains, for instance, why Bren Luke’s, Jochen Gerner’s, and Adrian Tomine’s illustrations based on frames of Yasujirô Ozu’s films are immediately identified by any connoisseur of the Japanese filmmaker’s oeuvre as such, but, in addition to that, why they also carry their respective author’s stylistic idiosyncrasies. In the last decade, these three artists have, indeed, dedicated some attention to the adaptation of frames from Yasujirô Ozu’s works, which I

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have defended, in my book The Clear Line in Comics and Cinema: A Transmedial Approach (2022),1 to be prime examples of clear line filmmaking. In 2010, American comics artist Adrian Tomine was invited by the prestigious Criterion Collection to design the covers and booklet illustrations for its edition of two of Ozu’s films, The Only Son [Hitori Musuko] (1936) and There Was a Father [Chichi Ariki] (1942). Across the Pacific, since 2015, Australian illustrator and painter Bren Luke has been developing a series of drawings inspired by Ozu’s late films, from Late Spring [Banshun] (1949) to An Autumn Afternoon [Sanma no Aji] (1962), exhibited in several art galleries across the years. Finally, in 2016, OuBaPo member Jochen Gerner produced eight drawn interpretations of Ozu’s unpopulated shots (often called “pillow shots”) for his book Le Minimalisme, an essay in comics format written by Christian Rosset and published in Le Lombard’s collection La Petite Bédéthèque des savoirs. All of these propose an idiosyncratic look on the Japanese director’s compositional style, but their approach seems to be absolutely unanimous as to the detection and use of certain characteristics of the filmmaker’s oeuvre which they try to import, and which originates, I will argue, a formal proximity of all three to clear line aesthetics.2 In the Criterion Collection project, Adrian Tomine made a series of drawings which are reproduced in the covers of the two DVDs, as well as in the booklets accompanying them and the discs themselves. On a first look at the images, one of the most noticeable choices made by Tomine is that of using a very limited set of toned-down colours (beiges, browns, 1  The “clear line”, a term coined in 1977 by Dutch essayist and artist Joost Swarte, has become shorthand in the field of comics studies for the style originally developed by Hergé and the École de Bruxelles. It refers to certain storytelling strategies that generate a deceptively simple, lucid, and hygienic narration: in Philippe Marion’s words, it is a style “made out of light, fluidity and limpid clarity” (205). In this book, besides cataloguing and critically analysing clear line comics from historical and theoretical perspectives, I expand the concept of “clear line” to other artistic domains by introducing and defending its transmedial use, which is particularly relevant for the understanding of the oeuvres of certain mid-twentieth century filmmakers such as Yasujirô Ozu. 2  American comics author Chris Ware also made a series of three illustrations based on Ozu films frames using the clear line, which served as the cover of the November/December 2008 issue of The Cinefamily, the magazine of the now defunct Los Angeles non-profit cinematheque of the same name. This example, however, will be left for an analysis in another instance outside of this article, since the similarity between Ware’s and Tomine’s production context, very different from that of Bren Luke and Jochen Gerner, makes this case somewhat redundant in relation to my analysis of Tomine’s DVD covers and booklet.

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greys, light blues, dark blues, light yellows and, in one single instance, red—for the depiction of one of Ozu’s iconic teapots), and applying them monochromatically, that is, with no tone variations and in contour-­ delimited shapes. Shadows are present, especially in the representation of the meditative male character of The Only Son, but are barely perceptible in the cover of There Was a Father, and are altogether excluded from the cover illustration of the pack. Finally, Tomine designs the readings of Ozu’s frames as completely silent and static, as well as conceiving them in strict obedience to the Japanese filmmaker’s rigid principles of geometry and frame construction. It is here that what Jared Gardner defines as Tomine’s style, his “minimalist realism” (144), or, in Greice Schneider’s words, his “clean line style” (62), meets Ozu’s obsessive compositional drive. Objects are meticulously placed in positions which avoid shape superimpositions, and each one frames the others: the umbrella follows the line of the cupboard, the mirror is centred in relation to the third sliding shōji, the tea bowl is centred in relation to the wooden pole separating the first from the second sho ̄ji, the two lateral sliding doors which delimit the room are equidistant from the centre of the image, and so on. As Tomine himself explains, Ozu’s visual style could be compared to the cartooning style that books like “How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way” are adamant about avoiding. It’s like the supposedly boring side view of Dr. Strange walking into a room, as opposed to the “worm’s eye view” of him dynamically bursting through the door. In other words, it’s clear, straightforward, honest, devoid of flash, and it’s absolutely perfect. (Tomine and Timberg)

When comparing Tomine’s cover illustration for The Only Son with the frame from Ozu’s film which inspired it (Fig. 7.1), several aspects of this adaptation exercise are disclosed. Whereas the human figures are rendered in drawing in a literal way, that is, almost as if the shapes had been drawn making use of onion skin over a print of Ozu’s frame, the background required an additional creative effort due to its exceptionally blurry existence in the film—and resulted in very significative stylistic choices by Tomine. If Ozu is celebrated for having attained an extraordinarily bidimensional image in his interior scenes, mainly obtained via a consistent use

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Fig. 7.1  Frame from the film The Only Son (1936) which inspired Adrian Tomine’s illustration (© Yasujirô Ozu 2022)

of deep focus lenses3 associated with an avoidance of perspective, this was more difficult to reach, from a technological point of view, in open air scenes which included elements placed in layers separated by a large distance. In this particular frame, the couple is very focussed, but the background is extremely blurry and imprecise, materialising into a very vague industrial backdrop to the scene. What Tomine does in his graphic interpretation is that, like Hergé in his most paradigmatic clear line exercises, he applies the same thickness of line and an equal amount of detail to all elements in the image regardless of the layer they are placed in, and thus annihilates the hierarchy of importance of the elements in Ozu’s frame. In 3  This does not mean that Ozu never used shallow focus effects. Precisely in contrast to his regular use of the deep focus, certain instances in which shallow focus effects are deployed are highly significative both from a constructional and an emotional point of view. When, why and how this happens is one of the subjects of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s unsurpassed article “Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu” (41–73).

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this sense, he is more Ozuesque than Ozu, since he manages to apply a deep focus effect to what is inevitably depicted with a shallow focus in the Japanese film. Both images produce a similar bidimensional effect, but using different solutions in dealing with the background—in Ozu’s film it is so blurry that it is almost not there; in Tomine’s illustration, it is as present as the human figures and thus seems to belong to the same layer of depth. Equally aware of Ozu’s stylistic idiosyncrasies and the possibilities of their intermedial metamorphosis, Bren Luke’s work is produced for the art market and it introduces two particularly significative strategies and effects in its dialogue with cinema. The first is concerned with the selection of frames which are to be adapted. This choice is all but obvious, and usually searches for moments of Ozu’s films which are not climactic, but produced either for contemplative purposes or as articulation shots. The fact that for his Ozu series Luke works with a static non-sequential art form implies that these images are purposefully robbed of their chronological framing and consequently decontextualized, which enhances their enigma. If their meaning is often difficult to fully grasp when preceded or succeeded by moving images in Ozu’s films, when frozen in Bren Luke’s work they are even more cryptic. For instance, in his medial translation of Ozu’s frames which portray characters in a 180-degree-rule-infringing way and staring at the camera, the absence of the counter-shot is the key to its originality—as well as to the accrued preternaturalness of the image. If in Ozu’s films the viewer identifies with the interlocutor the character is talking to, shown at other moments of the scene, in Bren Luke’s paintings and drawings there is no other referent but the viewer of the image himor herself, a difference which stresses the existence of a direct and unmediated, albeit very perplexing, channel between observer and observed. The second strategy Bren Luke employs is a consequence of his stylistic choices: like Tomine, he looks at Ozu’s visuals as the result of a profoundly thought-out game of lines, shades, and colours. Although he does not always use contour lines, especially in his paintings, Luke comes remarkably close to Hergé’s clear line in the way it stylises reality: in such an artistic reduction of the world, not all natural elements deserve to be represented; and even those which do, should only be represented by what is significant or necessary to the comprehension of the image or of its diegetic implications. If Ozu is already, at times, considered a minimalist filmmaker, Bren Luke adds another layer of stylisation to his world.

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Fig. 7.2  Painting Mariko Okada / Scene from An Autumn Afternoon (2015) (© Bren Luke 2022)

In his Mariko Okada / Scene from An Autumn Afternoon (2015) (Fig. 7.2), for example, Luke represents the few elements which Ozu used for his composition (Fig.  7.3): the female character played by Okada, a table and its tableware, two hanging robes and a background formed by a cupboard, and a small-tile geometrical but asymmetrical pattern. While maintaining the original layout and list of elements, Bren Luke introduces two features which significantly alter Ozu’s frame and enhance its stylisation. First of all, he draws using a contour line, which is materially and ontologically inexistent in cinema, and which once again joins the clear line in its mission: there must be no space for guessing the border of shapes, for indecision as to where one object ends and where another one begins. There is thus more time and space for a speculation which matters much more in the drawing: who is this woman, what can we infer from her bodily position, how does she relate to the space that surrounds her, why

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Fig. 7.3  Frame from the film An Autumn Afternoon (1962) which inspired Bren Luke’s illustration (© Yasujirô Ozu 2022)

is she clinging to a bank note, what does her disquieting direct look into the viewer’s eyes communicate? Secondly, Bren Luke takes Ozu’s shapes into a chromatic adventure the Japanese filmmaker would never have dreamed of: he intensifies or changes the colours of the cinematic image (using only slightly modulated monochromes) and through this manipulation manages to attain a further state of clarity and readability. If in Ozu’s image Okada’s character almost blends into the background, in Luke’s version she is clearly detached from it by a striking chromatic difference. The bright red of her blouse, in violent contrast with the luminous blue of the cupboard, vehemently unfastens her from the background and adds another stratum of reflection on one of Ozu’s most obsessive considerations: how can we measure and deal with the distance between the existence and needs of an individual and those of a community? Finally, Jochen Gerner, in contrast to the interpretation of Ozu’s frames proposed by the other two artists, creates images that are part of a larger discourse on minimalist art, and which, in Le Minimalisme, follows and

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Fig. 7.4  Illustrations inspired by frames of Yasujirô Ozu’s films, made for Le Minimalisme (2016) (© Jochen Gerner & Christian Rosset / Dargaud-Lombard S.A. 2022)

precedes drawings based on films by Robert Bresson, Marguerite Duras, Robert Altman, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, Abbas Kiarostami, Béla Tarr, Aki Kaurismäki, and Tsai Ming Liang. They all are, according to Christian Rosset, the scriptwriter of the book, filmmakers who follow the rule of “showing less to show more”.4 Ozu, specifically, is described as being obsessed by narrative and compositional economy, as well as by a perfectionist approach to framing: He demonstrates in each shot an exemplary precision as to the structural links between the composition of the frame and the countdown of passing time. It is a matter of temperament: he jots down in his notebook in an equally precise way the number of saké bottles that he downs every day of shooting.5 (Gerner and Rosset 69)

These characteristics are imported by Gerner, who conceives a series of eight pillow-shot-based illustrations as small comics vignettes (Fig. 7.4), composed as Hergéan panels and resembling collectable stickers meticulously organised in an album. These are, in fact, the interpretations  My translation of the original French: “moins montrer pour montrer plus” (68).  My translation of the original French: “il fait preuve à chaque plan d’une précision exemplaire quant aux liens structurels entre la composition du cadre et le décompte du temps qui passe. Question de tempérament: il note dans son journal de manière tout aussi précise, le nombre de bouteilles de saké qu’il a vidées pour chaque jour de tournage…”. 4 5

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of Ozu closest to the aesthetics of the École de Bruxelles, and follow all of its graphic precepts: the images are composed through a minute geometric prism, apply colours monochromatically with no tone variations, within contour-delimited shapes, and employ the same line width to all elements regardless of the layer of representation they belong to and of their hierarchical importance. Except for the fact that Hergé rarely conceived images devoid of characters, under no circumstances would any of these panels seem misplaced in a Tintin album. Even the colour palette that Gerner uses is close to that employed by the creator of Tintin (which he had studied in depth in his 2016 non-fiction comics R.G., co-authored by Emmanuel Rabu and dedicated to Hergé’s style). The approximation could be coincidental, but the fact that Gerner and Rosset actually theorise, in the book, why Ozu, Hergé and the other mentioned artists rub shoulders with each other in this project leaves no place for doubt. In the three pages the book dedicates to Hergé and to the clear line, the authors explain, through a series of short, clear sentences which characterise this non-fiction comics, that the celebrated comics author Georges Remi (Hergé) was a lover of minimal art. He namely appreciated the work of Frank Stella and had acquired for his collection a work by Sol LeWitt. / The Dutchman Joost Swarte (1947–) forged the concept of “clear line” to characterise Hergé’s style. / The question is how to tell a story in a clear way, how to be understood, and not only by those who speak the language of the author. / Clarity is the quest for a universal graphic language that only simplification, the use of a radical economy, allows.6 (59–60)

After discussing Hergé’s biographically inspired obsession with the colour white in Tintin au Tibet, Rosset concludes his consideration on the author’s minimalism with a reflection on what he calls “a very beautiful swan song for Tintin”7 (61): Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, whose ambition 6  My translation of the original French: “Le célèbre auteur de bande dessinée Georges Remi (Hergé) était amateur d’art minimal. Il appréciait notamment le travail de Frank Stella et avait acquis pour sa collection une œuvre de Sol LeWitt. / Le néerlandais Joost Swarte (1947–) a forgé le concept de ‘ligne claire’ pour caractériser le style d’Hergé. / La question est de trouver comment raconter de manière claire une histoire, donc être compris, et pas seulement par ceux qui parlent la langue de l’auteur. / La clarté, c’est la quête d’un langage graphique universel que seule la simplification, l’usage d’une économie radicale, permet”. 7  Translation of the original French: “un très beau chant du cygne pour Tintin”.

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Fig. 7.5  Illustrations inspired by Hergé’s album Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, made for Le Minimalisme (2016) (© Jochen Gerner & Christian Rosset / Dargaud-­ Lombard S.A. 2022)

was to “try to tell ‘a story where nothing would happen’”8 (61). Gerner’s accompanying illustration (Fig. 7.5) is made up of two panels where only two images appear: the magpie, the deceptively unheroic robber of the opera-singer’s emerald, and its nest sitting on a tree. The first is captioned “Nothing”9 (61) and the second “End”10 (61). Besides echoing one of the most repeated commonplace statements pronounced about Ozu’s cinematic narratives (“It is often said nothing happens in an Ozu film”, DiPaolo and Stein 94) and evoking Noriko’s desolate remark in Tokyo Story [Tôkyô Monogatari] (“The days pass and nothing happens”), Gerner’s illustrations are designed in a way that highly resembles the Ozu drawings which appear eight pages later in the book, following exactly the same clear line approach to the construction of the image and explicitly bringing close Ozu’s films and Hergé’s comics. Further cases for the detection of stylistic elements in certain filmographies could be made through an analysis of illustrations based on them, such as Pierre Étaix’s for Jean-Claude Carrière’s novelizations of Jacques Tati’s films Les Vacances de M.  Hulot and Mon oncle, or Lucas Harari’s prints based on Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket and Steven Spielberg’s Duel.  Translation of the original French: “une histoire où il ne se passerait rien”.  Translation of the original French: “Rien”. 10  Translation of the original French: “Fin”. 8 9

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The examples offered in this article might only constitute fortuitous evidence of my defence of Ozu as a clear line filmmaker, but are nonetheless profoundly symptomatic: it is undeniable that in this process of medial transposition, the stylistic proximity of these clear line approaches to Ozu’s photographic image suggests the existence of certain clear line strategies of composition present in the Japanese filmmaker’s oeuvre itself, and which are intrinsic to its ways of constructing images and telling stories. Indeed, although Tomine, Luke, and Gerner create their Ozu-inspired drawings and paintings with different purposes and publishing goals, they can be equated in their practice of a palimpsestic illustration, in which the process of adaptation is not only evident and stated in the accompanying paratexts, but is at the core of their stylistic choices. In the perspective of these artists, economic clear line filmmaking strategies call for economic graphic clear line translations, a reasoning which confirms that a transmedial use of the concept of the clear line, as well as an extended scrutiny of the presence of this style in a plurality of contemporary art forms, are both pertinent and necessary.

Works Cited Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 1976. Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu. Screen 12 (2): 41–73. Bresson, Robert. 1959. Pickpocket. Compagnie Cinématographique de France. Dailey, Victoria. 1990. The Posters of Sven Brasch. The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 16: 4–21. DiPaolo, Marc, and Wayne Stein, eds. 2015. Ozu International: Essays on the Global Influences of a Japanese Auteur. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Gardner, Jared. 2010. Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim. In Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama, 132–147. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gerner, Jochen, and Christian Rosset. 2016. La Petite Bédéthèque des savoirs: Le Minimalisme. Brussels: Le Lombard. Grabowska-Konwent, Ania. Les affiches de cinéma polonaises de Roman Cieślowicz. 1895: Revue d’histoire du cinéma 85 (2018): 105–112. Hergé. 1993a [1963]. Les Bijoux de la Castafiore. Tournai: Casterman ———. 1993b [1960]. Tintin au Tibet. Tournai: Casterman. ———. 2008 [1952]. Popol et Virginie au pays des Lapinos. Brussels: Casterman. Laird, Colleen A. 2011. Star Gazing: Sight Lines and Studio Brands in Post-war Japanese Film Posters. Journal of Japanese & Korean Cinema 3 (2): 95–115.

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Lumière, Louis. 1895. L’Arroseur arrosé. Lumière. Marion, Philippe. 1993. Étoile mystérieuse et boule de cristal: Aspects du fantastique hergéen. Textyles 10: 205–221. Ozu, Yasujirô. 1936a. Hitori Musuko. Shochiku. ———. 1936b. Chichi Ariki. Shochiku. ———. 1949. Banshun. Shochiku. ———. 1953. Tôkyô Monogatari. Shochiku. ———. 1962. Sanma no Aji. Shochiku. Pinho Barros, David. 2022. The Clear Line in Comics and Cinema: A Transmedial Approach. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Rabu, Emmanuel, and Jochen Gerner. 2016. R.G. Paris: L’Association. Schneider, Greice. 2012. Lost Gazes, Detached Minds: Strategies of Disengagement in the Work of Adrian Tomine. Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art 1 (2): 112–122. Spielberg, Steven. 1971. Duel. Universal Television. Tarantino, Quentin. 2019. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood. Columbia Pictures, Bona Film Group and Heyday Films. Tati, Jacques. 1953. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot. Discina Film, Cady Films, and Specta Films. ———. 1958. Mon oncle. Specta Films, Gray-Film, Alter Films, Film del Centauro, and Cady Films. Tomine, Adrian, and Scott Timberg. 2010. Ozu’s Films vs. Adrian Tomine. CultureCrash. Accessed 15 May 2022. www.artsjournal.com/culturecrash/2010/07/ozus-­films-­vs-­adrian-­tomine.html. Wilke, Regina C., and Priscila L. Farias. 2011. Borderline Graphics: An Analysis of Cinema Marginal Posters. DHS Conference 2011. Accessed 6 July 2022. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.672.2348&rep =rep1&type=pdf.

CHAPTER 8

Ekphrasis, Illustration, and Adaptation: Annie Ernaux’s Intermedial Autobiographic and Photographic Production Julie LeBlanc

Ekphrasis […] adapts images into words. […]. Ekphrasis is a reading tool, a lens for magnifying and refracting, for opening a work up to significations unavailable or otherwise invisible. I view ekphrasis as a form of intermedial reference, as in most instances, ekphrasis uses one medium to evoke the attributes of another. […]. I argue that ekphrastic writing engages the dynamics of adaptation common to all modes of adaptation. —Newell (2017b, 166; 19)1

1  Claus Clüver also suggests a relationship between ekphrasis and adaptation: “[the] materials [of ekphrasis] are purely verbal. Adaptation […] is the concept covering […] the transposition to the verbal of configurations, usually narrative, in other media” (Clüver 474).

J. LeBlanc (*) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_8

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As a genetic critic interested in word and image relationships in the illustrated manuscripts of various writers and artists, I find myself confronted regularly with the theoretical ramifications of the theories of illustrations, intermediality, adaptation, ekphrasis and photography in my quest to analyse the complexities of my literary corpus of unpublished manuscripts, punctuated with ekphrastic, photographic and painted images. I have noticed that recent theories of adaptation, illustration, intermediality, and ekphrasis rarely focus their attention on narratives of an autobiographical nature, seldom reference photographic ekphrasis, and never extend their analysis to unpublished literary manuscripts.2 When these theoretical considerations are combined and added to genetic criticism (the formalistic study of literary manuscripts), the combination of these three fields of inquiry allows for rich explorations of the word/image relationships which underlie my textual/visual corpuses. Although my research has focused on a variety of illustrated autobiographical narratives and their unpublished manuscripts, my attention will center on Annie Ernaux’s Autobiographic/ Photographic production, as it represents an exceptional corpus for the study of ekphrasis, adaptation and illustration. Furthermore, her literary and photographic productions will allow us to explore how ekphrases and illustration represent modes of adaptations, as they are engaged in the “transfer of verbal texts to other media” (Clüver 474). Les années/The Years3 is an eclectic autobiographical text whose narrative structure is supported by the extensive use of photographic ekphrasis referencing a series of photos taken from Ernaux’s family albums. My study of The Years led me to examine Ernaux’s photographically illustrated diary (“Photojournal/ Photodiary”) published several years later in Écrire la vie. This text is punctuated with 100 black-and-white photos which visually represent her genealogy through family photos, spanning more than 100 years.4 The 2  In his definition of intermediality, Lars Elleström highlights media differences and media similarities and their “constitutive role for meaning-making within communication.” Within this framework, adaptation is perceived as a form of transmediation, that is “a medium represents again, but in a different way, some characteristics that have already been represented by another kind of medium” (Elleström 512–13). 3  Annie Ernaux, Les années (Gallimard, 2008). The Years (transl. by Alison L. Strayer, Seven Stories Press, 2017). 4  Écrire la vie (Gallimard, 2011) is a sort of anthology where Annie Ernaux’s many previously published autobiographical narratives have been assembled. Her “Photojournal” (which unlike Les années has not been translated) is placed at the very beginning as a form of introduction to this series of texts she chose to include in Écrire la vie.

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Years and Ernaux’s “Photodiary” display an intratextual relationship, as the first few important photographic ekphrases introduced in The Years are reproduced in her illustrated diary as black-and-white photos. I will continue my investigation into the intermedial, ekphrastic, illustrative, and adapted nature of Ernaux’s photographic/autobiographic production by very briefly referencing Jeanne Champagne’s theatrical adaptation of The Years. Regrettably, this aspect of Ernaux’s adapted repertory, which includes cinematic and theatrical adaptations of several of her narratives, cannot be fully exploited in the framework of this essay. The brief presentation of my findings introduced near the end of my article stresses the complexity and diversity of Champagne’s intermedial transpositions, which include the resonance of popular songs, dancing, the projection of images taken from newspapers, televised news events with sound-tracks, as well as the projection of some of the photographic portraits of Ernaux described in The Years and reproduced in her “Photodiary.” The theatrical adaptation is a vibrant eclectic intermedial production which was obviously influenced by Ernaux’s autobiographical, photographic, cinematic, musical, and socially referenced memoir, but it manages to revitalize Ernaux’s complex narrative under the banner of intermediality where various media connect to render an artistic and cultural production. Champagne’s play actually “performs” a certain conception of adaptation as “an act of re-vision […] an action that contributes to and communicates with a larger network of similar actions” (Newell 2017b, 19).5 My study of Ernaux’s autobiographical/photographic production will end with a brief look at a manuscript page of one of the photographic ekphrases analyzed. The preliminary hand-written versions of this ekphrastic image discloses Ernaux’s attention to visual details and how her numerous descriptions of family photos were expanded upon as she extensively corrected her memoir. In brief, these ekphrastic, photographic, illustrated, and adapted autobiographical texts represent an extraordinary corpus for the critical expansion of these various phenomena by exploring venues which have either been completely neglected or superficially created by theorists in these various fields of inquiry.

5  The first theatrical adaptation of The Years was produced in Cergy-Pontoise in 2016: Production Théâtre Écoute; Text Annie Ernaux; staging Jeanne Champagne; scenography Gérard Didier; soundtrack Bernard Valléry; images Benoît Simon.

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The Years: Photographic Ekphrasis as a Form of Adaptation and Illustration Ernaux’s problematization of the word/image relationship displayed in her autobiographical and photographic narratives (unpublished and published texts) invites us to ponder the complexity of the descriptive, illustrative, intermedial and adapted nature of her life narratives. As was previously mentioned, The Years is saturated with a long series of ekphrastic analepses. They are fundamental to the narrative structure of her autobiographical narrative, which references fragments of Ernaux’s life between 1944 to 2008; they are also used as a pretext to convey the evolution of her ideological convictions, to expand her autobiographies’ thematic framework, to reflect on the function of life-narratives as mediators of cultural memory, and to confer a performative dimension to her analeptic narrative by creating a visual stream of consciousness effect. The generic diversity of Ernaux’s autobiographical production, the verbal-visual relationship that her innovative use of photographic ekphrases introduces, the manner in which her descriptions of photos are driven by her need to expand their significance to ideological considerations, all invite me to adopt a more flexible and liberal definition of ekphrasis that goes beyond poetically focused conceptualizations offered by Lessing, Spitzer, Krieger, Persin, and other scholars. Whether we use Heffernan’s very general description of ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (30), Rajewsky’s perception of ekphrasis as a form of “intermedial reference” (60), Hoeck’s “intersemiotic trans-positional” conceptualization (66), or Louvel’s proposal that this figure generates a complex cognitive experience related to the “pictorial third” (43), Ernaux’s photographic ekphrasis is complex and multidimensional.6 She is skillful in expanding the relationship between words and images into an unexpected and inventive network that surpasses conventional conceptions of autobiography, photographic ekphrasis, and adaptation.7

6  Ernaux clearly discloses her interest in photographic ekphrasis: “This absence-presence. Also, the photograph is mute. These features make me want to write from and with what I feel in front of a photograph” (my translation; Le vrai lieu 23). 7  Studies dedicated to photographic ekphrasis are not very numerous but I would like to mention Justin Coombes’s doctoral thesis Ekphrasis (PhD, Royal College of Art, August 2012).

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Photographic Ekphrasis in the Years: The Adaptation of Family Photos The black-and-white photo of a little girl in a dark swimsuit on a pebble beach. […] She sits on a flat rock, sturdy legs stretched out very straight in front of her. One thick brown braid has been arranged in front, the other hangs down her back. Written on the back: August 1949, Sotteville-sur-­ Mer. She is about to turn nine. (The Years 30) In a black-and-white photo, two girls stand on a garden path … the brunette has short curly hair and glasses […]. Even if we do not recognize the brunette as the girl in pigtails from the photo on the beach it was she […] who was that consciousness. (49) In this [other] photo, a tall girl blinks against the sun. […] now there is nothing to remind us of the girl with glasses of two years ago. […] At the precise moment when she smiles, she is probably thinking only of herself, of this photo of herself. […] Now she is aware of the social standing. (60, 61) In the black-and-white group photo, inserted in an embossed folder, twenty-­ six girls stand in three tiered rows […] Class of 1958–1959. […] She is in the second row, third from the left. It is difficult to see in her the girl with the provocative pose from the previous photo, taken scarcely two years earlier. She wears glasses again and a ponytail […] (69–70)

Each photographic ekphrasis not only disrupts the linearity of her life-­ narrative, but this series of flashbacks serves to simulate the associative function of memory. The cross references and connections established by Ernaux between these various photographic ekphrases of herself not only reference physical resemblances and differences, but places, dates and social institutions that serve to anchor her autobiographical narrative within a historical context. These numerous descriptions of photos are a strategy for representing and performing memory, while reflecting on what and how one remembers in an age of mass media. The verbal descriptions of images transpose symbolic signs from one semiotic system to another, and as a result ekphrasis can be characterized as a phenomenon that is “close and analogous to the art of illustration: just as an illustration, it transforms (i.e., transposes) the verbal (literary) text into a visual text (photograph, painting, etc.) and can be treated as a sort of transposition

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of visual information into a linguistic message (literary text)” (Newell 2017a, 481). If one goes beyond the strictly descriptive and illustrative qualities of the photos Ernaux has chosen to include in her memoir, one quickly notices that all of her photographic ekphrases act as a pretext allowing her to convey her ideological convictions as they relate to her conception of class distinctions in France. While Ernaux thoroughly describes the many photos taken from family albums which span decades, she always enhances their descriptions by offering visual details and extends their meaning by systematically intervening at the end of each of her photographic ekphrases with lengthy comments describing her past and present social convictions. Along with Clüver and Newell’s previously referenced definitions of ekphrasis, I argue that Ernaux’s ekphrastic writing engages in the dynamics of expansion common to many modes of adaptation. For instance, the ekphrasis of a photograph from a seaside vacation in 1949 gives her the opportunity to disclose that her uncle and aunt work in a rope factory, that a holiday at the seaside was exceptional and that her mother remained in Yvetot on that occasion to run the café-grocery “which never closes” (The Years 30). The description of a photograph dated from 1955 in the gardens of the Saint-Michel boarding school is an opportunity to discuss her family’s conservative financial means: “Even if we don’t recognize the brunette […] from the photo on the beach, we can confirm […] that her skirt is cut from a dress worn the previous summer, the sweater knit by a neighbor […] maybe she does perceive the gap that separates her from other girls in the class […] which sets her apart from the well-off girls” (50). The longest photographic ekphrasis presented in The Years references a photo taken at Yvetot in 1957. It is enhanced by comments on her painful realization that her family lived deprived of basic amenities: “Her family does not have a Frigidaire or a bathroom, the lavatories are at the back of the yard. She is lower down on the social scale than her schoolmates” (61). Ernaux’s descriptions of photographic images, as with other strong examples of ekphrases, brings with it a pressure to discriminate and differentiate between the two media: the photo described and its referent. As four of these photographs described in The Years were published years later in her “Photodiary” and eleven of the images referenced are in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France with the manuscripts of The Years, the idea of discriminating between these two media becomes more complex from a cognitive perspective. Ernaux’s ekphrastic memoir (The Years), her fully illustrated “Photodiary” and even Champagne’s

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theatrical adaptation—which is punctuated with cinematic, photographic, and televised archival images referenced in The Years, along with the family photos reproduced in her “Photodiary”—each present distinctive challenges to the reader. Let us briefly focus on a few of the images which are the object of photographic ekphrasis in The Years, reproduced as black-­ and-­ white photographs in her illustrated diary and re-introduced in Champagne’s theatrical adaptation (Figs. 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3). This will allow for a discussion of how ekphrasis, illustration, and adaptation play a constitutive role in Ernaux’s complex intermedial autobiographical production and how they perform a particular form of cultural memory deeply connected to issues of mediation. Champagne’s insightful manipulation of these three phenomena expands our conception of the illustrative qualities of ekphrasis, challenges the referential status of photographic images and praises the transmedial, transformative qualities of adaptations.

Fig. 8.1  Photograph of Annie Ernaux as a young child taken from her “Photodiary” (Écrire la vie, 20)

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Fig. 8.2  Four photographs published as one single image in Annie Ernaux’s “Photodiary » (Écrire la vie, 21)

The photographic portraits of Ernaux alone and with her parents (Figs. 8.1 and 8.2) serve as an introduction to the ekphrastic nature of The Years in which they trigger a series of photographic ekphrases: Another photo, stamped by the same photographer—the folder is lesser quality, the gold border has disappeared—and probably destined for the same distribution within the family, shows a little girl of about four, serious,

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Fig. 8.3  A still from the YouTube video of J. Champagne’s theatrical adaptation of The Years. http:// cie-­theatreecoute.com/ les-­annees.html (page accessed June 14, 2022)

almost sad despite her nice plump face under short hair, parted down the middle and pulled back with barrettes to which little bow-ties are attached, like butterflies. Her left hand rests on the same carved Louis XIV-style table, which is fully visible. She bulges out of her bodice, her skirt with shoulder straps hiked up a little over a protuberant belly, possibly a sign of rickets. (circa 1944)

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Two other small photos with serrated edges, very likely taken the same year, show the same child, slimmer, in a flounced dress with puff sleeves. In the first one, she nestles playfully against a stout woman whose body is a solid mass in a wide-striped dress, her hair swept up in two big buns. In the other photo, the child’s left hand is raised, fist closed, the right one held back by the hand of a man. He is tall and has a light-colored jacket and pleated trousers, his bearing nonchalant. A clothesline hangs above their heads, a clothespin still hooked over it. (The Years 17–18)

They are focused on facial features, body shapes, particularities of the hair styles and clothing worn. Ernaux intervenes to offer a few insights regarding the demeanor of the photographed subjects: in the first photo Ernaux is “serious, almost sad” and in the next images she “nestles playfully” against her mother, while her father, described as “nonchalant,” holds back her right hand. Contrary to these initial ekphrases, those which follow are much more detailed and their hand-written manuscripts are saturated with corrections which become progressively more invasive as Ernaux moves from one photographic portrait to the next. These initial photographic portraits are referenced a few paragraphs later and Ernaux discloses that she is incapable of linking these photographs of herself and her parents taken in the 1940s to televised images she has just seen in a documentary on French Occupancy: “I have no images of the presence of Germans during the war. […] I am incapable of linking these televised images to the photographs taken in L. [Lillebonne] in 1941 and 1944. […] Jewish children were put onto trains for Drancy, resistants were gunned down, in Warsaw nude cadavers were piled up in wheel barrels” (The Years 20). It is not surprising that as a very young child she would not have any recollections of these historical events. More than 60 years have passed since these photos were taken and Ernaux astutely offers a historical context to her family photos by referencing cinematic images of these tragic events pertaining to the Holocaust and the death of young Jewish children. Despite the fact that these three initial ekphrases are not as detailed as all of the photographic ekphrases which follow, the vivid political context (a televised documentary) in which they are embedded serves to anchor these family portraits within a powerful collective memory that deeply resonates with readers. As we know, the photographs referenced in this ekphrasis were eventually published in her “Photodiary.” They have an unusual status as they are amongst numerous photos described in The

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Years, but the only ones Ernaux has used to illustrate the pages of the later publication. Thus, the photographic images previously described in The Years now serve to illustrate her entries in “Photodiary.” A collage of images (Fig. 8.2) immediately follows this diary entry dated January 23, 1998: 1. In Lillebonne, 1944 Wednesday, in the RER, […] I saw myself—really saw myself—with the eyes of an eight-to-twelve year old: a mature woman, elegant, very “educated”, going to speak in public in a Paris cinema, […] a woman a thousand miles from my mother, a foreign and intimidating woman, a woman I don’t like. […] This vision, more than ever, makes me feel the gulf between who my mother was and who I am—but also between the little girl that I was and who I am now. This little girl would not have wanted this woman that I am as a mother. This little girl is on her mother’s side forever. I am an enemy figure. The mother and that little girl are dead; the little girl has been dead longer than the mother. In this vision, there is the comparison of those women, my mother and the person that I am now. Between the two, the hostile gaze, still without a future, of a child, who was me (but what does that word mean?). (January 23, 1998 [my translation])

The historical context of the photographs is described with numbered legends (“2, 3, 4, 5.”): “2. With my father in 1944–1945. 3. My childhood home in 1990, Lillebonne. 4. The river behind the house. 5. With my mother in 1944–1945.” (Fig. 8.2). The three photographic ekphrases of Ernaux previously quoted from The Years now have a new illustrative function in her “Photodiary,” where they complete, complement, and supplement the photographic ekphrases introduced in her previously published memoir. The migration from described images to photographic images is revealing as they are indigenous to Ernaux’s visual project and are the hallmark of her entire writing experience which has become increasingly intermedial in her more recent publications. Her attention to various forms of visual representations and her new focus on intermedial interactions is commensurate with her obvious ambition to “extend the word-bound limits of the literary medium” (Ricci 17). These photos often function like conventional illustrations, as they are used to depict characters, situations, and events: Ernaux, her family, and the social context in which she evolved. She explicitly describes the use she makes of family photos in the introduction to her “Photodiary”: they convey “a material reality, have an irrefutable status and their

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chronological presentation traces my social trajectory” (Écrire la vie 8). Ernaux’s perspective is that the family photographs used to illustrate her diaries “testify to the existence of what they show” (Le vrai lieu 15) and have unwavering illustrative and referential qualities.8 Although a long history of scholarly work has challenged this double consciousness of autobiography and photography, Ernaux’s explicit claims to the strong representative qualities of family photos cannot be discarded, as they invite us to ponder the illustrative and representational qualities of the photographic portraits she has chosen to illustrate fragments of her diaries. As Franco Ricci so astutely suggests, illustration is rooted in notions of “interpretation and showing […] revealing something precisely as it is […] so that the object is finally seen, not merely indicated or described” (43). The iconotext which mingles illustrations and written words has the advantage of moving between media, of “walking hand in hand with icons and symbols” to invoke the importance of their dynamic interactions (Maia 377). When one reflects on the relationship between Ernaux’s various autobiographical narratives, her extensive use of photographic ekphrases and the introduction of photographic images to illustrate entries of her “Photodiary,” one quickly recognizes that they add to and clarify the prose with which they are juxtaposed. In many instances, the linguistic and pictorial signs dialogue with one another in an important “image-­ based cultural fabric” (Ricci 185). As with her use of ekphrastic images in The Years, her family photos introduced in her “Photodiary” appear to supplant memory, produce an arena for visualizing the structure of collective and personal history and act as a metaphor for the “processes of perception and memory” (Rugg 23). Media obviously play a crucial role in communicating personal memories and constructing a shared (collective) understanding of the past. The photographs Ernaux has chosen to illustrate her diary entries serve various functions. They have the ability to “compress multiple events” into a single image (an outing with family members, wearing their Sunday best, reunited to attend a first communion/wedding/graduation), “set a mood” (introspectiveness, 8  Many theorists have studied the relationship between family photographs, memory and identity: Adam, Rugg, Hirsch, Méaux, Montier, etc. As Sontag suggests: “As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family’s photographic album is generally about the extended family—and often, is all that remains of it” (Sontag 7).

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embarrassment, anxiety, happiness) or serve as pretext to delve into psychoanalytical or social commentaries. Ernaux’ photographs also shed a certain light on the “meaning(s) of her diary entries, which they serve to illustrate, while accentuating the ‘intrinsic value of illustration’ as a form of interpretation and adaptation” (Rugg 249).9 As we know, the photographic portrait of Ernaux as a child taken in Lillebonne in 1944 and the collage of images featuring photos of herself with her father and her mother (circa 1944–1945) were the object of photographic ekphrases at the very beginning of The Years. The new contextualization of these previously described photos in her “Photodiary” gives Ernaux an opportunity to expand their meaning as they serve to illustrate a diary entry dated January 21, 1998, almost 50 years after the photos were taken in the mid-1940s. Self-criticism nuanced with a psychoanalytical stance rejuvenates the significance of these old black-and-white photos: In this vision, there is the comparison of those women […] the little girl is on her mother’s side forever. I am an enemy figure. The mother and that little girl are dead […]. Between the two, a […] gaze, […] of a child that was me, (but what does this word mean?) (“Photodiary,” Écrire la vie 20)

What is accentuated is the gap that exists between the person she is in 1998 and the little girl that “she once was” (“who no longer exists”) and the person she grew up to be.10 Through her juxtaposition of a hundred family photos and her decade-spanning diary entries, Ernaux’s “Photodiary” echoes the convictions of many feminist writers whose autobiographical narratives are the sites of “embodied knowledge which reflect familial and social beliefs, cultural attitudes and codes” (Watson and Smith 10). Her identity, which has evolved within and between collectivities (family, marriage, educational, and professional frameworks) are textually and visually referenced, accentuating the roles that all these figures of alterity have played in the development of her consciousness. The endless 9  It is pertinent to reference Rugg who also considers the familial gaze, the looks exchanged with family pictures in her study of what she calls “unconscious optics”: “The photos are records, documents of the looks and gazes which order and organize familial relations, of the often unconscious and seemingly invisible patterns structuring familial interactions, of the screens through which we define ourselves responding to and resisting the familial gaze” (40). 10  We are not offered an image of Ernaux in 1998, as the “Photodiary” respects chronology, but near the end of her illustrated narrative Ernaux has introduced a photograph of herself with her sons Eric and David in 1999.

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diversity of photographic portraits of Ernaux introduced throughout her illustrated diary accentuates the provisional, unfixed, and physiological metamorphosis of Ernaux and they ultimately serve to “supply a visual metaphor” of the autobiographical subject as a “divided, fragmented, multiple and decentered self” (Rugg 2).

Jeanne Champagne’s Theatrical Adaptation: A Glimpse at This Intermedial Rendition of Ernaux’s Memoir (Fig. 8.3)11 In her theatrical adaptation of The Years, Champagne has chosen to use four photographs: these images are the object of detailed photographic ekphrases in The Years and they are the only photographs subsequently reproduced in her “Photodiary.” The three images of Ernaux as a child dated 1944–1945 and as a young adult in the family garden in 1957 are projected on a screen, placed on the stage, while fragments of Ernaux’s photographic ekphrases of this image published in The Years are read out loud by one of the two actors. The performance also features cinematic, documentary, photographic, and journalistic images of numerous political events: the Algerian War, May 1968, Sartre’s funeral, news clips of pro-­ abortionist movements in France, various forms of political activism, and so on. It was only after viewing Champagne’s theatrical rendition that I recognized how intermedial the manuscripts and the published version of The Years truly are. This text is saturated with intertextual references (musical, literary, cinematic, archival, and historical) which are extremely intermedial in nature, but it is the play which brings to the forefront the multimodal, transmedial, and intermedial dimension of Ernaux’s life-­ narrative. While the textual version of The Years is focused on establishing an intertextual network partially based on multi-medial references, the adaptation uses photographic, cinematic, televised, musical, historical, and cultural material and brings them to life through the use of popular songs, music, historical props and the projection of photos, televised news clips and advertisements, enhanced with sound-tracks throughout the

11  Due to  editorial restrictions, I  am  only reproducing one of  the  three photographic images that Champagne has chosen to  project as  slides during her adaptation. It should be noted that she does call upon the three photographs I have previously presented of Ernaux as a toddler and the other two photographic images with her parents.

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performance.12 The stage version of The Years is a vibrant, eclectic, and intermedial production which is obviously intertextual, as it explicitly references Ernaux’s memoir, but it also manages to revitalize Ernaux’s complex autobiographical narrative through the literal, visual, intermedial manipulations of her life-narratives.13 In other words, like most adaptations, Champagne’s production is a re-reading of earlier texts (The Years and the “Photodiary”), but with all of the advantages that live theatrical performances have the privilege of offering to spectators. When one focuses on how this particular adaptation has rewritten its source text, one immediately notices that Champagne’s play expands through sound, music, and images the intertextual, intratextual and intermedial nature of The Years. It is a fine example of what Elleström describes as a “transmedial transformation”, as she has taken particular elements from one medium—Ernaux’s ekphrastic and illustrated autobiographical narratives—and has used them in a “new way, within another medium” (Elleström 533). Referencing both texts in her adaptation has allowed Champagne to simulate and expand upon Ernaux’s use of intratextuality—her habit of referencing her previously published text within a given text. The play is also remarkable as it offers the spectators a venue to both view and listen to the rich social, cultural, intermedial and intertextual complexity of Ernaux’s literary production. This is where the originality of Champagne’s rendition lies, as she has not only adapted Ernaux’s text, and communicated the essence of her autobiographical narrative, but has also offered the spectator a particular reading of The Years as she manipulates, appropriates, and transforms the source materials in her transmedial production. The narrative complexity of The Years and its numerous historical references are effectively communicated in Champagne’s adaptation, which beautifully fuses Ernaux’s life-narrative with archival images, old family photos, news clips, slide shows, popular songs and commercial advertisements which are projected throughout the play. The extensive use of photographs, described/expanded upon in The Years are reproduced/adapted to another autobiographical context (her “Photodiary”). The photographic portraits used throughout her texts 12  In her study of theatre and intermedial transpositions, Claudia Georgi suggests that this concept refers to the “transformation of content or formal aspects of a source medium into another medium” (533). 13  Quoting Linda Hutcheon’s often cited definition of “adaptation,” I will argue that Champagne’s play is truly an “extended, deliberate, revisitation of a particular work of art” (170).

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have given her a venue to broaden her autobiographical practice, to further hybridize her writing, and to blur generic boundaries between autobiographical sub-genres—the diary, the memoir, the autobiography, the family album—that Ernaux adopts and then skillfully manipulates. Maintaining a balance between the personal (“mémoires individuelles”) and the historical nature of her autobiographical endeavor (“mémoires collectives”) is a fundamental trait that she strictly adheres to throughout her ekphrastic and illustrated narrative. The reader must wait until the very end of her memoir to clearly understand what motivated her to write this ekphrastic, non-linear, and politically charged memoir in the third person. It is in the last few pages of The Years that she explains the role played by her numerous photographic ekphrases, enlightening us as to the complexity of the narrative structure adopted, and emphasizing how her memoir is “not a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self […]. There is no ‘I’ in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ‘one’ and ‘we,’ as if now it was her turn to tell the story of the time-before” (The Years 228): So her book’s form can only emerge from her complete immersion in the images from her memory in order to identify with relative certainty, the specific signs of the times, the years to which the images belong gradually linking them to others […]. An outpouring, but suspended at regular intervals by photos and scenes from films that capture the successive body shapes and social positions of her being—freeze-frames on memories and at the same time reports on the development of her existence, the things that have made it singular. (The Years 228–29)

A Genetic Look at the Dynamics of Adaptation in Ernaux’s Photographic Ekphrases This excerpt serves as a form of conclusion to The Years, and explicitly informs the reader of Ernaux’s objectives, the complexity of the narrative structure adopted and the illustrative function of her photographic ekphrases. However, when one turns to the manuscripts of The Years and more importantly to the intensity of the corrections, omissions, and additions which her numerous ekphrases were subjected to during the writing process, one can clearly appreciate Ernaux’s relentlessness at describing, expanding, and adapting her numerous family photos to their new literary

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context: her ekphrastic autobiographical narrative. The ekphrases and the 11 original photographs that inspired them (which I found at the BnF with the manuscripts of The Years) display common characteristics. I have mentioned that every photographic ekphrasis retracing her evolution over numerous decades is always expanded upon with explicit details aimed at conveying her convictions on class distinctions. The manuscripts of these numerous ekphrases, which I have transcribed, are also endowed with extensive corrections aimed at expanding the descriptions of the photos with lengthier social commentaries. These affect-oriented expansions of her photographic ekphrases ultimately serve to enhance our reading of The Years, allowing us to extend the thematic network at play with other photographic ekphrases already introduced in previous pages of her memoir. To illustrate some of the arguments I have presented regarding the adapted and illustrative qualities of Ernaux’s photographic ekphrases, I have chosen a manuscript page (Fig. 8.4) of a photographic ekphrasis dated 1963. Like so many other documents found in the Fonds des Années, it is saturated with Ernaux’s hand-written corrections and additions aimed at expanding the description of the photo she has chosen to include in her autobiographical narrative. In the final, published version of this particular ekphrasis, which is in fact several pages long, Ernaux focuses on her feminist convictions, the importance of acquiring an education and her social standing in comparison to that of her bourgeois colleagues. She concludes with an insightful and self-reflexive comment on her desire to “write a novel in which images past and present […] alternate with an “I” who is her double, detached from herself” (The Years 80). Turning to genetic criticism to study the textual evolution of Ernaux’s photographic ekphrases allows us to revisit the position taken by many theorists—that in the most powerful examples of ekphrasis there is always a feeling of extension or enlargement—from a different perspective. Stephen Cheeke’s analysis is useful to our analysis of Ernaux’s photographic ekphrases, as her extensively annotated manuscripts explicitly reveal that she always starts with an “object/content” oriented description of a photo of herself and systematically moves to “affect-oriented” (Cheeke 21) comments which emphasize her politically charged reaction to her viewing of the photographic portrait. One can also turn to theories of adaptation in the analysis of the countless ekphrastic moments introduced within The Years, as they truly “perform similar functions to adaptations allowing [the description of the photos] to reflect, refract and reinforce the themes of the work, while simultaneously crystallizing their

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Fig. 8.4  A manuscript page of The Years. It is hand-written and annotated by Annie Ernaux. Fonds Annie Ernaux, Bibliothèque nationale de France, cote NAF 28647, boîtes 18–19. (The digital photograph that I took of the manuscript is paginated: « 62 Ter ». I am extremely grateful to Annie Ernaux for her generosity and more notably her permission to reproduce this manuscript)

iconography” (Newell 2017b, 19). As Kate Newell suggests, if one reads ekphrasis as a strategy to bridge the “divide between expository and descriptive writing,” one can read ekphrastic utterances as “mirrors” able

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to reflect “ideologically constructed differences, […] to expand the readers’ experience of a work and expand a given work’s large network of references” (170–71). Through her extended descriptions and expanded social commentaries aimed at conveying her ideological differences and embedding her descriptions of photos in a network of literary, intermedial and historical references, Ernaux’s photographic ekphrases display the “dynamics encountered in many forms of adaptation” (9). Through their enhancements, her photographic ekphrases are also better suited to the autobiographical narrative in which they are embedded whose main goal, from the onset, was to recount fragments of Ernaux’s personal life using an unusual narrative structure (a non-linear, third person narration, saturated with analepses), while primarily accentuating the social context in which she evolved. The Years is entirely written to reflect these constant fluctuations between the personal and the collective aspects of her life. As Ernaux explains in the last pages of The Years, “by retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History” (The Years 228).

A Few Concluding Remarks My analysis of Ernaux’s photographic ekphrases has given me the opportunity to accentuate how their extensive corrections were aimed at extending their pictorial qualities and more importantly at expanding their meanings.14 Additionally, access to the manuscripts of The Years and to the metamorphosis of her descriptions of family photos bring to the forefront other considerations. The hundreds of hand-written pages archived with the manuscripts of The Years at the Bibliothèque nationale de France offer us insights into how autobiographical narratives are conceived and they disclose how intermediality is a complex referential tool when embedded in life-narratives. Ernaux’s manuscripts, which disclose how her ekphrastic memoir was in fact constructed through a multifaceted textual/visual process, also serve to challenge and rejuvenate our conception of the memoir as a sub-genre of autobiography traditionally dominated by androcentric descriptions of men’s political lives. Furthermore, her photographic ekphrases, which are interwoven with fragments of her personal history 14  Genetic criticism is interested in the text in its making: “the new impact of genetic criticism in comparison to traditional philology [...] is that it explores the text as it comes into being […] it analyses the dynamic processes involved in the literary creation” (Schmid 9).

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and deeply embedded within various social contexts, serve to expand our perception of self-representational genres as a shifting entity between the self and figures of alterity. Many of the elements discussed in The Years come into play on a different level in Ernaux’s fully illustrated “Photodiary,” which has the advantage of adding a pictorial and anthropomorphic dimension to her autobiographical writings. With the publication of this illustrated diary, readers finally have free access to countless photographs of Ernaux, as well as many previously unpublished fragments of her diaries. However, this text goes well beyond conventional notions of the diary as a sub-genre of autobiography and of illustration that can act as a collaborative or a competing media. This text and the relationship it maintains with some of the photographic ekphrases presented in The Years ultimately challenges, in an unusual manner, our conception of illustration and adaptation and their relationship to ekphrasis. As for Champagne’s vivid theatrical adaptation of The Years, it constitutes a wonderful example of an intermedial transposition or “medial transposition” that is a “transformation of content or formal aspects of a source medium [The Years/Les années] into another medium,” i.e. a stage performance (Elleström 533). Champagne’s play is obviously intertextual in nature, but its complexity comes from the fact that it demonstrates how distinct types of intermediality can coexist, overlap, and enhance each other’s effects. It is as if Champagne wanted to teach us that in certain contexts, there can be no limits to the theatre’s potential to integrate other media into a given production; the intermedial potential of the stage is brought to the forefront to allow us to reflect on how ekphrasis, photographic illustrations, adaptation, and intermediality can come together to constitute meaning within an eclectic and complex autobiographical production. These media (text, figures of ekphrasis, and photographs) are more than conveyers of information, as they also play an important role in shaping our understanding of cultural memory mediating between the writer (Ernaux), her readers, viewers, and listeners. These multi-medial productions are useful contexts to consider how intermedial strategies shape the representation, communication, and performance of cultural memory. What has become relevant throughout our analysis is that adaptation and its relation to ekphrasis, illustration and theatre is a process endowed with distinctive performative qualities. When it is used as a strategy to enhance the form and content of autobiographical narratives, that thrive on intermediality, their interactive qualities come to life in a vibrant and provocative manner which will engage Ernaux’s readers for decades to come.

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Works Cited Cheeke, Stephen. 2020. Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Clüver, Claus. 2017. Ekphrasis and Adaptation. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 459–476. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coombes, Justin. 2012. Photography, Memory and Ekphrasis. London: Royal College of Art. PhD dissertation, August. Elleström, Lars. 2017. Adaptation and Intermediality. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 509–526. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ernaux, Annie. 2008. Les années. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2011. Écrire la vie. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2014. Le vrai lieu. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2017. The Years. Trans. Alison L. Strayer. New York; Oxford; London: Seven Stories Press. Georgi, Claudia. 2015. Contemporary British Theatre and Intermediality. In A Handbook of Intermediality: Literature—Image—Sound—Music, ed. Gabriele Rippl, 530–546. Berlin: De Gruyter. Heffernan, James A.W. 1993. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrases from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoek, Leo H. 1995. La transposition intersémiotique pour une classification pragmatique. In Rhétorique et image. Textes en hommage à Kibédi Varga, ed. Leo Hoeck and Kees Meerhoff, 64–70. Leiden: Brill. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York; London: Routledge. Krieger, Murray. 1992. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Louvel, Liliane. 2011. Poetics of the Iconotext. Ed. Karen Jacobs. Trans. Laurence Petit. Farnham: Ashgate. Maia, Gil. 2006. When What You See is What You Read. In Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image, ed. Rui de Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert, 377–388. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Newell, Kate. 2017a. Adaptation and Illustration: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 477–493. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017b. Expanding Adaptation Networks. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rajewsky, Irina. 2010. Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in Current Debate About Intermediality. In Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström, 51–68. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ricci, Franco. 2001. Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures: Word and Image in the Work of Italo Calvino. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Rugg, Linda Haverty. 1997. Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmid, Marion. 1998. Processes of Literary Creation: Flaubert and Proust. Oxford: Taylor and Francis. Sontag, Susan. 1990. On Photography. New York: Anchor Books. Watson, Julia, and Sidonie Smith. 2003. Introduction: Mapping Women’s Self-­ Representation at Visual/Textual Interfaces. In Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance, ed. Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, 8–20. Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press.

CHAPTER 9

The “Great Image-Maker,” or the Animation of Illustrations in Karel Zeman’s Deadly Invention Hélène Martinelli

Illustration and adaptation may be seen as two modalities of intersemiotic translation. Yet, in comparison with the numerous studies devoted to the relationships between literature and cinematographic adaptations, their connection has not been extensively studied. Furthermore, in addition to the homology between both processes, many filmmakers develop the visual universe of their adaptations based on already famous illustrations. This is the case of the Czech animated film director Karel Zeman, who used mixed technique combining live action and illustrations for his filmic rendition of illustrated books. His Fabulous Baron Munchausen (Baron Prášil, 1962) refers to the work of Gottfried August Bürger, who wrote the most famous version of the fictional Baron’s exploits (1796), includes explicit references to Cyrano de Bergerac’s as well as Jules Verne’s voyages

H. Martinelli (*) École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_9

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to the moon, but is actually closer to Georges Méliès’ experiments and to Gustave Doré’s illustrations for the French translation of the Baron’s adventures (1854)—just as Lewis Carroll’s text is inextricably linked to John Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice’s Adventures.1 Leaving aside this case of “synthetic” adaptation (from different verbal and visual sources), it is rewarding to reflect on Zeman’s approach in his film Deadly Invention (Vynález zkázy, also known as Invention for Destruction and The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, 1958), which is arguably less an adaptation of Jules Verne’s individual novel Facing the Flag (Face au drapeau, 1896) than a movie inspired by the engravings from Pierre-Jules Hetzel’s editions of Extraordinary Journeys (Voyages extraordinaires), the complete series of novels to which it belongs. To what extent does the consideration of the illustrations as part of the original work drive the dynamics of adaptation towards animation cinema or mixed technique? Is it more likely to overcome the media gap by using not only real shots, but also drawings, which appear in both books and animated films? The adaptation process differs from its original definition when its starting point is not a text but an iconotext,2 or even a medium, like an illustrated book. It can go as far as challenging the “transcendent criterion of the canonical text” (Roche et al. 21) when it gives priority to “visual fidelity” (Hassler-Forest 120) or to “fidelity to the spirit of the medium” (Gaudreault and Groensteen 52). Here, the virtual iconic narrator as the “Great Image-Maker,”3 who is supposed to “turn the album pages” (Laffay 81–82), finds a literal embodiment. What Laffay calls “album” must be understood as a picture book, whose pages are not only being turned but also animated into a movie. If we take a closer look at the work of Karel Zeman and its relation to Hetzel’s editions of Verne’s novels, the figure of a “Great Image-Maker” 1  Or—to mention a less known Czech work—The Good Soldier Švejk (Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za sve ̌tové války) from Jaroslav Hašek and Josef Lada’s original illustrations in the animated movies made by Jiří Trnka (see, among others, Martinelli 2020). 2  An iconotext refers to “an indissoluable unity of text(s) and picture(s) within which neither the text nor the pictures fulfill an illustrating function” (“une unité indissoluble de texte(s) et image(s) dans laquelle ni le texte ni l’image n’ont de fonction illustrative”, Nerlich 268; my translation). The term seems accurate here even if, according to Nerlich’s original definition, illustration is excluded, since Zeman’s adaptation process considers illustrations as part of the original work. 3  I borrow the trope of the “Grand imagier” from Albert Laffay, Christian Metz, François Jost and André Gaudreault (1988).

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is all the more relevant, since Deadly Invention turns out to be an adaptation, if not an animation, of the medium rather than an intermedial translation of the fable. Ultimately, it seems to amount to a mere collage of xylographic textures, made out of old woodcut illustrations. Zeman’s imports of xylographic images into animated films thus questions the relevance of the concept of adaptation when it comes to illustrated books. Indeed, the illustration process is itself an “intersemiotic translation” and, as such, has already operated a “transcoding” between a “telling” and a “showing” mode (Hutcheon 38) even before the book becomes a movie. In addition, the “shift of medium” is reduced to a minimum and, as such, is close to a “remediation” or a “refashioning” (Bolter and Grusin) of illustrated books into animated films, and even closer to the animation of a book.

Karel Zeman’s Mixed Techniques: Between Puppetry, Live Action, and Illustration The work of the Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman is still relatively unknown, even if Steven Spielberg, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, or Wes Anderson were explicitly influenced by his mixed-­ technique experiments. His first working experience in advertising and his encounter with the animator Elmar Klos brought him to Zlín’s animation studio,4 where he worked from 1943 as an assistant to the pioneering Czech animator Hermína Týrlová (who was already famous, thanks to Ferda the Ant / Ferda Mravenec). Zeman then experimented with new techniques and together they created his first short movie, A Christmas Dream (Vánoc ̌ní sen, 1945), which combined live-action footage with animated puppets.5 Starting from 1953 Zeman directed feature films mixing live action footage and makeshift special effects. Among them, four movies (initially developed as a pentalogy project) are inspired by Verne’s Extraordinary Journeys saga. Journey to the Beginning of Time (Cesta do prave ̌ku, 1955) pays tribute to Verne’s Journey 4  Zlín’s animation studio is one of the most famous Czech film production centers. Zeman did most of his works there, including Deadly Invention. 5  The tradition of puppetry, specific to Central Europe and especially to Czech animation, is key to understanding his work, from the ordinary citizen and wooden puppet, Mr. Prokouk (Pan Prokouk), hero of a series of humorous short films shot between 1947 and 1955, to the unique blown-glass figurines animated in stop motion for his Inspiration (Inspirace, 1948).

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to the Center of the Earth (Voyage au centre de la Terre, 1864) and its illustrator Edouard Riou, although its visual environment is mostly inspired by paintings by Zdeněk Burian, who is the best-known illustrator of Verne’s work in Czech editions. It is worth noticing that for the first time, a movie associated real actors with animation and special effects so that through a technique of superimposition, an engraving by Édouard Riou fades out and lets the spectator see the children played by actors (Kawa-Topor 2014, 120). We can thus appreciate the legacy of the aesthetics of the book within the film. Three years later, with Deadly Invention (Vynález zkázy, 1958), Zeman went further; not only did he adapt Facing the Flag (Face au drapeau, 1896), an archetypal novel bringing together all of Verne’s key themes (Kawa-Topor 2014, 123), but, thanks to this literary collage, he also blended various novels from the series and all the different illustrations which contributed to its fame. Before studying the use of the illustrations from the original edition by Léon Benett, and from other adventures depicted by Édouard Riou or Alphonse de Neuville, we should mention the last two movies in Zeman’s “verneovka”6 series, which derived their material as much from the illustrations as from the text itself. Zeman’s The Stolen Airship (Ukradena Vzducholod,̌ 1967) is a movie freely inspired by Two Years’ Vacation, illustrated by Léon Benett (Deux ans de vacances, 1888) and by The Mysterious Island, illustrated by Jules Férat (L’Île mystérieuse, 1875). Even if it is not a fully black and white movie like Deadly Invention, live action and different techniques of animation are also combined in order to make the scene look like the page of a book, thanks to “graphic scoring,” which gives the illusion of an engraved image (“rayures graphiques”; Kawa-Topor 2014, 124). Conversely, On the Comet (Na komete ̌, 1970), based on Verne’s novel Off on a Comet (Hector Servadac, 1877) with its images from an even more obscure illustrator than those mentioned so far, Dominique-Paul Philippoteaux, is a color film, like his earlier films The Fabulous Baron Munchausen or Journey to the Beginning of Time. His pentalogy project having been abandoned, this was his last Vernian film. Indeed, during the so-called Normalization after the repression of the Prague Spring in 1968, Zeman was asked not to get too close to the avant-garde and definitively

6  The Czech word “Verneovka” refers to “a novel by Jules Verne” and, by extension “any adventure novel”. As such, it may apply to Zeman’s movies as well.

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turned back to a cinematographic language closer to the style of American cartoons. In order to account for this nonetheless significant Vernian trend in Zeman’s movies, we have to recall a fact which is familiar to every Czech reader: Verne’s novels were first introduced into the Czech language, thanks to the publicist and writer Jan Neruda (part of the May School) who came back from Paris in 1863 with a copy of Five Weeks in a Balloon (Cinq semaines en ballon). It was published the same year in France, and it gained recognition by appearing in the Czech newspaper Národní listy. Furthermore, Verne’s works were released by a popular publishing house called “Association for publishing cheap Czech books” (“Spolek pro vydávání laciných knih českých”), beginning with Around the Moon (Cesta kolem me ̌síce, 1870 [Autour de la lune, 1869]), and Around the World in Eighty Days (Cesta kolem sve ̌ta za osmdesáte dní: cestopisný román, 1873 [Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, 1872]). Those popular novels were translated regularly and at fairly short intervals after French publication (see Raková 2019, 2020). However, the fact that Verne’s illustrated reception came years later and was mostly due to the efforts of Josef Richard Vilímek cannot be overlooked. Vilímek had established an epistolary relationship with Pierre-­ Jules Hetzel since 1880, thanks to which he negotiated the rights to the texts and illustrations in 1889, reaching an agreement with him in 1892 (Horák 28–31) despite the obvious reluctance of a part of the Czech public to open up to cosmopolitism after the Czech National Revival—especially since there already were German translations of Verne’s works easily accessible to bilingual Czech readers. In any case, the first Verne novel he published was The Carpathian Castle (Tajemný hrad v Karpatech, 1893 [Le Château des Carpathes, 1892]). Vilímek made Verne famous in Czech popular culture with his “Cheap Illustrated Edition of Jules Verne’s Novels” (Bubeníček 95–96), primarily because, while he issued a smaller, cheaper format, he retained Hetzel’s engravings, contrary to custom. He sometimes even got to choose among the original illustrations and changed the titles of the books (see Horák). It remains nonetheless an interesting case of the temporal persistence of illustrations, assuming a verbal and visual connection in the readers’ mind even before Zeman’s adaptations. Such a strategy was however not sustainable, since Vilímek replaced the original illustrations with those of Burian at the beginning of the twentieth century, though he continued to be one of the most famous among Verne’s mediators in the Czech language for 60 years.

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Deadly Invention or How to Propel Illustrations For the 54 novels in Voyages extraordinaires, Pierre-Jules Hetzel is known to have favored documentary illustrators over visionaries like Gustave Doré or Albert Robida (Parmegiani 71). This “stylistic homogeneity” justifies this chapter’s focus on the editorial and intermedial persistence of all of Hetzel’s illustrators rather than on the specific case of Gustave Doré, who inspired Méliès, but also numerous film directors like Zeman, Tim Burton, or Terry Gilliam. In this regard, it is the opening of Deadly Invention which is of most interest to us since it foregrounds the intermedial continuation of the book in the film, using a folioscopic (or flipbook) effect based on various engraved illustrations. It allowed Zeman to ground the aesthetic of animation in the tradition of the illustrated medium. He had used a similar technique in The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, which opens with turning pages crediting Gustave Doré. But Deadly Invention is more effective, since the credits do not simply mimic the pages but actually reproduce them: it turns out that these familiar, easily identifiable images are picked from different Vernian books published by Hetzel. After showing an engraved portrait of the narrator, Simon Hart, whose diary is then shown lying on a table, the camera dollies in on a series of his books in the Czech editions, the whole sequence being framed beneath the gaze of a portrait of Jules Verne. Only then does the voice-over begin to tell a story, while six pages of engraved illustrations are being flipped through. The first of these represents the Albatros airship (Zeman 1958, 2:45), a “lighter than air” craft from Robur the Conqueror (Robur-le-Conquérant 1886, 56), designed par Léon Benett. The second (2:48) is the famous fictional submarine Nautilus, floating through a crowd of squids, an image by Alphonse de Neuville taken from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: A World Tour Underwater (Verne 1871, 137). Then comes a series of prehistoric animals (2:50) that Édouard Riou designed to illustrate Journey to the Center of the Earth (Verne 1864, 1) and a picture of boats (2:52) drawn by Léon Benett, from Propeller Island (Verne 1895, 49). While the narrator mentions the heroes of his time, such as Robur the conqueror, Captain Nemo, or Barbican, the fifth image (2:54) reveals the well-known cannon used to propel Barbican from the earth to the moon. One might assume that this image comes from illustrations of Verne’s lunar trilogy—but it is not to be found in From the Earth to the Moon (De la terre à la lune, 1865), Around the Moon (Autour de la Lune, 1870), The

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Purchase of the North Pole (Sans dessus dessous, 1889), nor anywhere else in the French editions. Indeed, although the engraving is visually similar to the illustrations published by Hetzel, it only appeared as the frontispiece of the Czech edition of Around the Moon (Do Me ̌síce, Vilimek, 1894) and in a German edition of From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, which kept the original French illustrations except for the frontispiece (Von der Erde zum Mond. Reise um dem Mond, A.  Hartleben’s Verlag, 1874). Although it is well known that the French frontispieces also varied from one edition to another,7 the fact remains that the memorable image of the launching of the projectile differs significantly for each national readership. In the translated books, the image of the rocket, which looks like a train on the French original title page, was replaced with what has ultimately become the most popular representation of the event. Furthermore, the switching of the frontispiece between the two first books of the trilogy in Czech and German editions adds evidence to the hypothesis that intersemiotic and intermedial translations must be taken into account along with interlinguistic translations. The two books were often published together and bound as one volume, without always mentioning the names of the illustrators, as the German edition from 1874 shows. However, From the Earth to the Moon was illustrated by Henri de Montaut and engraved by Pannemaker, whereas Around the Moon mentions Émile Bayard and Alphonse de Neuville as illustrators and Henri-Théophile Hildibrand as engraver. The title page of the 1894 Czech edition mentions fewer illustrations by Bayard and Neuville (only 42 instead of 44 for the second volume in the French and German illustrated editions), but it nevertheless adds a frontispiece to the title page,8 which is adorned with the picture of a cloudy moon, as can also be seen on the French title page. The aforementioned Czech frontispiece to Around the Moon, also used 20 years before for the German edition of both From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon by Hartleben’s Verlag, reveals that in this case, it actually borrowed the imagery from the German publisher rather than the French one. This is evidenced by its presence on the cover of the first volume alone in an 1876 German edition, even if this drawing is not by Henri 7  See Gallica, where numerous editions of the books have been digitized, including the frontispieces from 1868 and 1906: https://gallica.bnf.fr/. 8  At least for the first edition of the volume, but the frontispiece changes to a picture of the US Navy vessel, Susquehanna, about to sink, in the 1912 second edition, whereas the memorable image of the launching of the projectile remains as a cover illustration.

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de Montaut but must have been designed by Neuville or Bayard for the second volume, since it is signed by Hildibrand. The circulation of images in the different editions of the lunar trilogy is therefore decisive in creating the memorable image that the movie director reused. If we go back to Zeman’s filmed flipbook, after the launching of the projectile comes a world map, mentioning “Jules Verne, Drawings by Riou, Etchings by Pannemaker” (“Jules Verne, Dessins de Riou, Gravures de Pannemaker”). This sixth image (Zeman 1958, 2:56) is easily recognizable as the title page of Captain Grant’s Children (Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant, also known as In Search of the Castaways, Verne 1868), illustrated by Édouard Riou. Then we can notice, in the seventh image (2:58), an unidentified sailing boat which could be a copy of the one we can see on the title page of this same book, but strangely fitted with a paddle wheel—and for a good reason: it is suddenly propelled by steam (3:00)! By using steam to give the illusion of movement, Zeman uses a famous Méliès trick, showcased in his film The Journey Through the Impossible (Voyage à travers l’impossible, 1904) which Zeman may have seen in the Prague Cinematheque (Kawa-Topor 2014, 125), thus confirming that he was as much inspired by Méliès, himself a Vernian reader, as he was by Verne. In any event, the animated film that follows is obviously launched by steam, which propels the old engravings into a world of actors in live action sequences. From then on, still images and moving images are combined to bring the film—a steampunk film, as it turns out—to life. The opening “flipbook,” however, is not to be considered as a graphic summary of the film: it is more of a patchwork, warning the watcher that the film’s motifs draw from different illustrators, books and even films, and plays on the recognition of Vernian-Hetzelian “icons.” Deadly Invention is officially an adaptation of Verne’s Facing the Flag. It borrows its heterogeneous and synthetic narrative structure—namely, a scientific invention becoming evil, a stolen submarine, an unapproachable fictional island, and many crimes perpetrated through technological advances. The source text is confirmed by the Czech title, which is the same as the title of the Czech translation of Facing the Flag, Vynález zkázy, and the use of the original names of the characters (Count d’Artigas, Professor Thomas Roch, Engineer Simon Hart). This is no doubt the reason why Zeman first and foremost draws on the original illustrations by Léon Benett for this work, especially those showing Back-cup island (Fig. 9.1), which are featured in long static shots, where only the smoke

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Fig. 9.1  Back-cup island. Illustration by Léon Benett for Jules Verne, Face au drapeau. Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel, 1896, p. 97. Gallica

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coming out of the crater, the sea, and a few birds are actually moving (Zeman 1958, 34:30). Zeman also imitates Benett’s compositions for the view inside the submarine (Verne 1896, 168; Zeman 1958, 01:05:03), which looks like the living picture of battles between underwater vessels (176; 1:05:54). However, he also reuses images designed by the same illustrator for Robur the Conqueror, in particular, among many birds, the winged machines like the Albatros (Verne 1886, 56; 07:04), the first image to be shown in the flipbook at the beginning of the movie, or the “Go-ahead” (209; 6:56), both of them giving significant insight into the technological age the narrative evokes. Benett’s illustrations from The Begum’s Fortune provides him with an elevated steam train (Verne 1879, 104; 04:37),9 a candlestick concealing a steel ladder (153; 1:12:43), the steel cannon (80; 1:16:09), and other machines displaying the hatching characteristic of the wood engravings. Many of them can be found in the animated movie, from various Vernian-Hetzelian sources, including some frames inspired by Édouard Riou, even when he doesn’t follow the original narrative—which implies

Fig. 9.2  Engine room. Karel Zeman, Vynález Zkazy, 83 min., Filmové Studio Gottwaldov, Č eskoslovenský Státní Film, 1958 (2015), 38:23. Karel Zeman Museum 9

 It was more than once represented by Benett (see also Verne 1886, 88).

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that most of the time the captions below the original illustration would no longer be accurate if they were used onscreen. For instance, here, a female character invented by Zeman with no link whatsoever with Verne’s stories is entering an engine room located in a pirate citadel (Fig. 9.2), whereas the borrowed illustration depicted the Nautilus’ engine room visited by Nemo and the narrator (Verne 1871, 88). As a matter of fact, for the fantastic aquatic scenes, Zeman mainly draws from Riou who illustrated (with Alphonse de Neuville) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, where we can find the Nautilus, giving its shape to Zeman’s submarine (Verne 1871, 424; 04:29)—even going so far as to reproduce the exact cross-section view at water level (Fig. 9.3; 26:43). To this we must add the many fish (105; 56:22) that seem directly extracted from the Riou-illustrated book, and processed through cut-out animation techniques, but also an octopus (392; 20:17) and a shark (232; 30:05) recreated in volume or even flocks of real birds. Riou and Montaut’s images, and especially the frontispiece of Five Weeks in a Balloon, may have inspired only the last episode of the animated film, where a happy couple flies aboard a balloon after the final explosion (Verne 1865; 1:17:44). To these many sources, we can add various special effects, like overlays and filters, the best of which being the numerous scenes shot through an aquarium in order to create an atmosphere of underwater adventures. Even more interesting is the juxtaposition between real-life footage and animation, which produces a three-dimensional representation inlaid with fragments from a two-dimensional paper world (Fig. 9.4). Such a mixed technique using so-called matte or glass painting (an ancestor of the green screen used nowadays) is, strictly speaking, an animated collage, which aims to give “the illusion of a genuine picture,” to quote Werner Spies’ comment on Max Ernst and his “total collage.”10 For Zeman, as for Ernst, the most important thing is indeed to unify the various elements of the film (Kawa-Topor 2009, 11), which he does, not by concealing the seams between these different media, but by highlighting them, notably by stylizing the settings and props of the live action shots. Thus, Zeman adds an engraved frame to the natural elements (sea, sky) and adds stripes to clothes, objects and machines, in order to evoke the hatching of line engravings (Bubeníček 97). Similarly, he always uses filters in his mixed-technique color films. In so doing, he also recreates pseudo-illustrations by making the moving images more static (if not 10  “collage total […] censé donner l’illusion d’un tableau véritable” (Spies 94, my translation).

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Fig. 9.3  Cross-section view at water level. Illustration by Édouard Riou for Jules Verne, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin, 1871, p. 425. Gallica

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Fig. 9.4  Collage. Karel Zeman, Vynález Zkazy, 83  min., Filmové Studio Gottwaldov, Č eskoslovenský Státní Film, 1958, 1:01:21. Karel Zeman Museum

stroboscopic). The character’s gestures are stilted, since they are often seen in very wide or very close shots. Given the ingenuity of his innovations, it is no wonder that his stylization work was compared to Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920) and called “mystimation” (a neologism apparently combining “mystique” or “mystification” and “animation”) by American producer Joseph E.  Levine for the 1961 English version of Zeman’s film.11 In other words, Deadly Invention, one of the most successful Czech films, can obviously be considered a “subversive adaptation” (as suggested by Bubeníček’s title), since it appears to challenge the adaptation process not only by mixing sources, but also by endowing them with a unifying common texture, prioritizing “visual fidelity” (Hassler-­ Forest 120) to wood engraving, which we can even associate with a “fidelity to the spirit of the medium” (Gaudreault and Groensteen 52), in this case, old illustrated books. The fidelity issue has long been regarded as 11  He used this neologism as an introduction to Zeman’s Deadly Invention, renamed The Fabulous World of Jules Verne for its US release: “The first Motion Picture Produced in the Magic-Image Miracle of Mystimation” (see the poster: Zeman and Philipp1961).

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insufficient to account for any adaptation process, but a focus on the way an animated film can bring life to illustrated books can be rewarding.

An Adaptation or a Mere Collage of Xylographic Textures? As an animator of well-known illustrations, Zeman turns out to embody Laffay’s “Great Image-maker”: [a] fictive and invisible character, brought forth by the joint efforts [of the film’s director and technical crew]. Standing behind us, he turns the album pages for us, directs our attention with a finger pointing discreetly to a detail, and at the right moment quietly tells us what we need to know. Above all, he imparts rhythm to the unfolding of the images. (Laffay 81–82, my translation)12

Laffay conceived of the Grand Imagier as a sort of omniscient figure, but he also played on the polysemy of the French term. An imagier is both a picture book—the album mentioned above—and the creator or seller of these images. Here Zeman is literally an imagier, insofar as he is the animator of xylographic illustrations emulating their texture on film, a phenomenon that could be interpreted as large-scale skeuomorphism.13 Thus, the theoretical similarity between illustration and adaptation as types of intersemiotic translation, is challenged by the collage technique. Is a series of moving illustrations to be characterized as film? Is the notion of adaptation still relevant when there is no longer a real change of medium implied, since images remain images, except that still images are set in motion and real moving shots stilled? If there is no change in the medium or the semiotic system, what is at stake here seems to be a kind of “homomediality” (Martinelli 2020, 304) much more than an adaptation or even a “remediation” (see Bolter and Grusin). The animated film certainly retains or refashions some features of illustrated books, but it goes as far as to reduce the media gap to a minimum. After all, have Ernstian collages ever been described as 12  “un personnage fictif et invisible à qui leur œuvre commune a donné le jour et qui, derrière notre dos, tourne pour nous les pages de l’album, dirige notre attention d’un index discret sur tel ou tel détail, nous glisse à point nommé le renseignement nécessaire et surtout rythme le défilé des images.” (Laffay 81–82). 13  Many thanks to Sophie Aymes-Stokes for this suggestion.

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adaptations of books? Likewise, this can hardly be seen as a true “deverbalizing process” (Elliott 2003, 82–83), since Zeman primarily borrows the original images—which are still familiar, even to readers who didn’t actually read the text. To put it another way, even if those pictures were to be considered literary illustrations in the first place, the film relies on the graphic identity and texture of book illustration, privileging the medium over the textual source, so that it tends toward stillness and silence. Moreover, the characters’ gestures seem inspired by early silent movies—despite the presence of music. It is the “spirit of the medium” that must be considered here, a spirit that mixes both stroboscopic hatching and the style of a broad range of graphic artists. The imagery preserves the graphic conventions of engravings, renewing and animating them without totally transforming them. Such a technique generates a retro-futuristic or even steampunk style which reflects the loss of enthusiasm for scientific progress perceptible in Verne’s Facing the Flag as well as in Zeman’s post-war productions. This may have been even more significant under the Soviet regime, which was soon to become wary of animation fantasies, even if Eastern European animated film directors remained non-subversive and reticent to technological innovation. The editorial link between Vernian texts and their illustrations is certainly emphasized by this “adaptation,” which Linda Hutcheon defines as a Darwinian process of cultural (as opposed to biological) evolution, selection (Borlotti and Hutcheon), and even transmission (Hutcheon 31–32; also see Elliott 2012). In any case, what is implied here is not only the mediageny (Marion 86) of Verne’s books, that is to say, the ability of his topics, stories, and even literary genres to find their optimal medium, but also the mediativity (79) of illustrated books or animated films, that is to say, their specific potential to take in and give shape to certain topics, stories, or literary genres. As it turns out, Zeman’s Deadly Invention can be studied both ways. Xavier Kawa-Topor, when he comments on another mixed-technique Vernian movie directed by Zeman, The Stolen Airship (Ukradená vzducholod,̌ 1967), underlines the predisposition for animation of Vernian speculative fictions. Does this stem from his technological imagination or from the (xylo)graphic imagery that Hetzel and Vilímek associated with his works? It seems that Zeman perpetuates a graphic universe (in the case of Deadly Invention, Hetzel’s rather than Riou’s) inspired both by Verne’s novels and contained in pictures whose links with the original stories has

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been severed. Does this mean that cultural selection has turned Hetzel’s Vernian books into conveyors of a graphic culture, even the anachronistic imagery of engravings? Illustrations have already been compared to a filmmaking process when they are facing each other, thus creating a “sequence” and giving the “illusion of movement” in Hetzel’s In Octavo editions (Compère 64; my translation). If we look at it the other way round, it is clear that animated films are very close to illustrated books, and when dealing with animation in mixed techniques this may be even more true. Kawa-Topor also indicates that there were few forays into this “field of formal experiments” mixing real shots and illustrations before the green screen became systematic. Only three examples come to his mind: Little Claus and Big Claus by the Prévert brothers (Petit Claus et Grand Claus, 1964), a film reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale; Taxandria by Raoul Servais (1996); and more recently Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow by Kerry Conran (2004) (Kawa-Topor 2009, 7). The first film actually mixes live action with animation at the beginning, but the pictures are not, strictly speaking, animated since the camera is set in motion without giving the illusion that they are themselves moving. Real shots in the film are on the contrary immobilized in freeze frames, which makes them look like still images or drawings. The last one, Sky Captain, is also the first motion picture to have been shot with a digital backlot, that is to say the shooting occurred in a blank background filled in only later on during post-production. But these rare cases are not comparable to the recurrence of such a phenomenon in Central Europe, where moving illustrations, and more precisely, xylographic illustrations, are almost an alternative practice to cartoons. The contrast between Zeman’s work and Walt Disney’s 1954 and 1962 adaptations of Vernian novels (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; In Search of the Castaways) is representative of very different national traditions; the latter recreates a whole graphic universe even if it remains dependent on a few characteristics of the original figures. By contrast, another Czech adaptation should be mentioned, Jiří Brdečka’s Tajemný hrad v Karpatech (1981), inspired by French illustrations that followed Zeman’s lead. Brdečka was involved in writing the script for Zeman’s Deadly Invention, and like Zeman, he recreated or imitated some of the old illustrations for his parody movie in live action (see Rychlik)— but without going as far as to “steam-propel” engravings. Yet original illustrations are propelled in other Czech films, like in Jir ̌í Trnka’s adaptation of The Good Soldier Švejk (Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka,

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1954–1955), where they are leafed through, animated in a traditional way and turned into puppets (Martinelli 2020), or in Jan Švankmajer’s short mixed-technique movies, such as Historia Naturae (1967)—though in the latter case, the illustrated plates depicting animals are browsed through rather than flipped in a folioscopic way, and then the animals in three dimensions are animated in stop motion. Is this trend due to the Czech animators’ taste for old illustrations, combined with real shots, or to the Czech graphic culture that forged the animators’ style?14 The xylographic textures that characterize Zeman’s films are also to be found in collage-movies with cut-out animations, like those directed by Lawrence Jordan (Hamfat Asar, 1965; Gymnopedies, 1966), which are explicitly linked to nineteenth-century xylographic imagery. But in this case, the background illustrations remain still, and they are not part of an animation process in mixed techniques, so that their very graphic nature is itself composed of paper. Some collage sequences in Deadly Invention show the exact same cut-out animation style, especially in the part where the news is projected through an old-fashioned magic lantern (Zeman 1958, from 51:06 to 53:44). The film as a whole, on the contrary, integrates illustrated backgrounds, stop motion, real actors, and settings, that are more or less overlaid with hatchings—to the point that Zeman initially considered hatching the characters’ faces, and not just their bodies and props (Veselá 64). In this regard, Zeman’s work is not just a collage movie, like those he has inspired, nor is it a simple juxtaposition of pages and puppets, since live action coexists with animation in each black and white shot, thus bringing back to life the pages of old books by literally embodying them. An anecdote may illustrate how the interpretation of the animated images from Zeman’s Deadly Invention remained dependent on the paper world from which they came. A scene was suppressed due to a controversy during the World Film Festival at the 1958 Brussels World Fair and reintegrated in the 2015 restored version (entitled Invention for Destruction instead of Deadly Invention). Indeed, an (unidentified) American critic had seen an anti-American symbol in the eagle adorning a pirates’ clock (40:11). It was an imperial Napoleonic symbol from the French engravings

14  To a certain extent, this anticipates the taste for old illustrations that also characterizes the style of the Polish animator, Jan Lenica (see Owen).

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which could have been borrowed from Hetzel’s books.15 Retrospectively, we can say that it surely was a way to reflect upon the use of a new technological discovery. But it was also a way for Zeman and the Czech animators who followed to create an animation that contrasted with the dominant trend of American cartoons, inventing new tricks without forgetting old ones. Deadly Invention is an emblematic work not only because it was successfully presented at Brussels World Fair in 1958, when Zeman became the “Czech Méliès” (Benešová), but also because it actually shows a great image (re)making process. Mixed technique, the recycling of illustrations and, last but not least, the illusion of continuity between live action and graphic fiction in the fashion of old books, rebuild the imagery outpassing Verne’s descriptions in cinematic form. Neither an adaptation of the text nor the adaptation of its medium, this animation film, which was composed of living illustrations adapting engravings to movement and live action to engravings, is actually closer to an animated book. Whereas Laffay’s “Great Image-Maker,” though anthropomorphic, is not supposed to be a real person, in this case, he finds a literal embodiment and invites us to reconsider the essential link between books and movies, by reflecting on the very nature of illustrations. If this says something about the longevity of Hetzel’s illustrations, it may say much more about the nature of Czech and even Central-European schools of animation, that inherited much from surrealistic collages and especially Ernstian collage novels— themselves “a discussion of the nature of engraving, and perhaps even of collage,” according to Umberto Eco (n.p.).

Works Cited Benešová, Marie. 1964. Karel Zeman, ce nouveau Méliès. Jeune cinéma 3–4 (Décember). Accessed 5 June 2022. http://www.jeunecinema.fr/spip. php?article710. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. [1999] 2000. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bortolotti, Gary R., and Linda Hutcheon. 2007. On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and ‘Success’: Biologically. New Literary History 38:3 (Biocultures. Summer): 443–458. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www. jstor.org/stable/20058017 15  See Karel Zeman Museum Website: https://karelzemanmuseum.org/invention-for-­ destruction/. I did not find such a clock among the images through which I browsed, though.

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Bubeníček, Petr. 2017. Subversive Adaptations: Czech Literature on Screen behind the Iron Curtain. New York: Springer International Publishing. Compère, Daniel. 1983. Fenêtres latérales. In Jules Verne 4: Texte, image, spectacle, ed. François Raymond, 55–71. Paris: Minard. Eco, Umberto. [1984] 2014. Postscript to The Name of the Rose. In The Name of the Rose: Including the Author’s Postscript, trans. William Weaver. Boston: Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Ebook. Elliott, Kamilla. 2003. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. The Adaptation of Adaptation: A Dialogue between the Sciences and Humanities. In Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film, and the Arts, ed. Pascal Nicklas and Oliver Lindner, 145–161. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter. Gaudreault, André. [1988] 1999. Du littéraire au filmique. Système du récit. 2e édition augmentée. Paris: Armand colin. Gaudreault, André, and Thierry Groensteen. 1998. La Transécriture: Pour une théorie de l’adaptation. Québec/Angoulême: Nota Bene/Centre national de la bande dessinée et de l’image. Gaudreault, André, and Philippe Marion. 1998. Transécriture et médiatique narrative. L’enjeu de l’intermédialité. In La Transécriture: Pour une théorie de l’adaptation, ed. André Gaudreault and Thierry Groensteen, 31–52. Québec/ Angoulême: Nota Bene/Centre national de la bande dessinée et de l’image. Hassler-Forest, Dan, and Pascal Nicklas, eds. 2015. The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence and Ideology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Horák, Vadim. 2005. Jules Verne v nakladatelství Jos. R. Vilímek. Praha: Thyrsus. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Jost, François. 1987. L’Œil-caméra. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Kawa-Topor, Xavier. 2009. Le Dirigeable volé de Karel Zeman. In Les Enfants de cinéma (“Cahiers de notes sur...”). Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.cnc. fr/cinema/etudes-­et-­rapports/dossier-­pedagogique/dirigeable-­vole-­le%2D% 2Dcahier-­de-­notes-­sur_216653. ———. 2014. Karel Zeman et Jules Verne: Le cinéma pour île merveilleuse. Revue 303: Images de Jules Verne, hors-série 134 (November): 118–131. Laffay, Albert. 1964. Logique du Cinéma: Création et spectacle. Paris: Masson & Cie. Marion, Philippe. 1997. Narratologie médiatique et médiagénie des récits. In Recherches en communication: Le récit médiatique, 7, 61–87. Louvain: Université catholique de Louvain, Département de communication. Martinelli, Hélène. 2020. Animer l’illustré: Švejk, Hašek, Lada, Trnka… et les autres. In Au milieu de l’image coulent les textes. Adaptation littéraire & Courts métrages d’animation, ed. Jerôme Dutel, 221–230. Paris: L’Harmattan. Metz, Christian. 1977. Le Signifiant imaginaire. Psychanalyse et cinéma. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions.

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Nerlich, Michaël. 1990. Qu’est-ce qu’un iconotexte? Réflexions sur le rapport texte-image photographique dans La femme se découvre d’Évelyne Sinnassamy. In Iconotextes, ed. Alain Montandon, 255–302. Paris: Ophrys. Owen, Jonathan L. 2010. Motion Without Escape: The Bleak Surrealism of Czech and Polish Animation. In A Story of Sin: Surrealism in Polish Cinema / Dzieje grzechu. Surrealizm w kinie polskim, ed. Kamila Wielebska and Kuba Mikurda, 44–59. Cracow, Warsaw: Korporacja Ha!art. Parmegiani, Claude-Anne. 1989. Les illustrateurs de Jules Verne. In Les Petits Français illustrés. 1860–1940, 71–83. Paris: Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.cairn.info/les-­petits-­francais-­ illustres%2D%2D9782765404309-­page-­71.htm. Raková, Zuzana. 2019. Les premières traductions tchèques de Jules Verne (1870–1900): Archéologie de la traduction. Studia Romanistica 19(2): 41–49. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://dokumenty.osu.cz/ff/kro/romanistica/ romanistica2-­2019-­full.pdf. ———. 2020. Jules Verne en Bohême (1870–1900): Ses premiers traducteurs et leur statut socio-professionnel. Studia Romanistica 20(1): 59–65. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://dokumenty.osu.cz/ff/journals/studiaromanistica/20-­1/ SR_20_1_Rakova.pdf. Roche, David, Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, and Benoît Mitaine. 2015. Introduction: Adapter les théories de l’adaptation à l’étude de la bande dessinée. In Bande dessinée et adaptation (Littérature, cinéma, TV), 11–38. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal. Rychlik, Jan. 2011. Le mystère du Château des Carpathes. Hommage parodique. Revue Jules Verne 33–34 (“Les Arts de la représentation”): 115–123. Spies, Werner. 1984. Max Ernst. Les Collages: Inventaire et contradictions. Paris: Gallimard. Verne, Jules. 1864. Voyage au centre de la terre, Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8600259v/f11.item. ———. 1865. Cinq semaines en ballon. Ill. Édouard Riou and Henri de Montaut. Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/btv1b8600252z.image. ———. 1868. Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant. Ill. Édouard Riou. Paris: Pierre-­ Jules Hetzel. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b8600254s/f11.item.texteImage. ———. 1871. Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin. Ill. Édouard Riou et Alphonse de Neuville. Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8600258f/f5.item. texteImage. ———. 1879. Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum. Ill. Léon Benett. Paris: Pierre-­ Jules Hetzel. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b8600251j/f5.item.texteImage.

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———. 1886. Robur-le-Conquérant. Ill. Léon Benett. Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6512278z. texteImage. ———. 1894. Do Me ̌síce. Trans. Jaroslav Č ermák. Ill. Émile Bayard and A. de Neuville. Praha: Josef R. Vilímek. ———. 1895. L’Île à hélice. Ill. Léon Benett. Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6133811r.texteImage. ———. 1896. Face au drapeau. Ill. Léon Benett. Paris: Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k58048213/f2.item. ———. 1897. Vynález zkázy. Trans. Albín Straka. Ill. Léon Benett. Prague: Josef R. Vilímek. Veselá, Tereza. 2017. Mediální obraz filmového režiséra Karla Zemana v letech 1945–1989 v c ̌eských médiích. Thesis under the supervision of Doc. PhDr. Barbara Köpplová, CSc. Praha. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://dspace.cuni.cz/ handle/20.500.11956/2082. Zeman, Karel. 1958. Vynález Zkazy (Invention for Destruction, also known as Deadly Invention and The Fabulous World of Jules Verne). 83  min. Filmové Studio Gottwaldov, Č eskoslovenský Státní Film (2015 digitally restored version). ———. 1962. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen [Baron Prášil]. 85 min. Filmové Studio Gottwaldov, Kratky Film Praha. Zeman, Karel, and Harrald Philipp. 1961. The Fabulous World of Jules Verne & Bimbo the Great. Warner Bros and Joseph E. Levine.

PART III

Illustration and Transcultural Adaptation

CHAPTER 10

The Bobrov Affair: Creating a Graphic Novel Adaptation of a “Lost” Russian-Empire Crime Novel Carol Adlam

In 2019 I was commissioned by Dr Claire Whitehead of the Department of Russian at the University of St Andrews to work in my capacity as freelance author-illustrator on a series of visual and text adaptations of previously well-known but now largely neglected nineteenth-century Russian crime novels, as part of a Knowledge Exchange and Impact project called “Lost Detectives: Adapting Old Texts to New Media.”1 Whitehead has identified 40 novels  by 30 authors in this category (Whitehead 2018, 1  Full details available here at https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/lostdetectives/. I am grateful to Claire Whitehead for her ongoing support and expert knowledge in the field of nineteenth-century European literatures and Russian crime fiction in particular, which underpins my work and has enabled me to undertake the series of adaptations described in this article.

C. Adlam (*) Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_10

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2019). Of these, Whitehead and I have selected four authors and their respective works for the  Lost Detectives adaptation project. They are Semyon Panov (?–?: active 1870s), a court reporter and author of five works of crime fiction including Tri suda, ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala [Three Courts, or Murder at the Ball, 1876], the subject of this article; Nikolai Timofeev (1841–?), a judicial investigator and author of a number of works of crime fiction and true-crime accounts, including the extremely popular Zapiski sledovatelia [Notes of an Investigator, 1872]; Aleksandr Shkliarevskii (1837–1873), a prolific author of several dozen crime works, including Sekretnoe sledstvie [A Secret Investigation, 1881]; and Aleksandra Sokolova (1833–1914), author of Bez sleda [Without a Trace, 1890] (Whitehead 2018, 6–7). These works by Timofeev, Shkliarevskii, and Sokolova are the subject of ongoing adaptations by me for audio and stage performance in 2019–2021, three of which have already been completed (Adlam Today in 1864, 2019; Curare, 2020a; Spade and Sand, 2021). The subject of my discussion here is my graphic novel adaptation of Panov’s Tri suda, ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala [Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball; hereafter Three Courts], for which I have completed ten pages of proof-of-concept artwork and a 90-page script, under the working title The Bobrov Affair, and which is currently being developed as a full-length graphic novel (Adlam 2020b).2 Three Courts is narrated by an unnamed judicial investigator who works with a local police detective, Kokorin, to investigate the brutal and baffling murder of an heiress, Elena Ruslanova, at a ball held in her father’s mansion to celebrate her engagement to a disreputable young man called Petrovsky. At some point in the evening Ruslanova is found with her throat slit, in a room with a glass ceiling, three doors (all of which are locked on the inside), and one internal window that gives onto a long gallery-corridor overlooking the garden. There are 227 guests present, including Ruslanova’s best friend, Anna Bobrova, who is found in a faint in a nearby room. The investigator and detective discover a series of clues: a broken statuette of Don Quixote; an internal ladder leading up into the attic, with access to the glass ceiling; an external ladder propped against a window opposite the room in which Ruslanova is found; a scrap of fine brown cloth in the ladder’s hinge; in the snow outside, a small, oblong-shaped indentation, a diamond from the tiara worn by the victim, and footprints and a trail of blood leading across 2  The Bobrov Affair will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2024 under the title The Russian Detective.

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the garden to a fence that is found to be covered in bloody handprints. The bloody trail disappears on the crossroads of the unnamed town “somewhere between Moscow and Petersburg,” on which the house stands. The narrative follows many twists and turns as the investigating duo locate the stolen diamond tiara in Moscow, where they arrest a pawnbroker and Nikolai Ichalov, the young man who has pawned the diamonds. Mistaking Ruslanova’s murder for an opportunistic crime motivated by theft, the investigator brings Ichalov to trial. The truth is revealed when Anna Bobrova, Ruslanova’s closest friend, declares from the public gallery that it is she who is the murderer. Ichalov, it emerges, is Bobrova’s lovelorn patsy. Bobrova has framed him for the murder by getting him to stand on the external ladder on a convoluted pretext involving the passing of a letter to her; in fact, in a reversal of this plan, it is she who passes him Ruslanova’s tiara and the murder weapon (a cutthroat razor belonging to Major Bobrov). It is Ichalov’s blood that is spattered across the snow, caused by a terrible injury to his hand received when he clutches at the open razor. In the final pages of the book we learn that Bobrova’s motivation for the vicious murder is revenge. Petrovsky, Ruslanova’s fiancé, had in fact had been betrothed to Bobrova, but had subsequently cast her aside in order to become engaged to the much wealthier Ruslanova. The origins of this story are not documented, but it is possible that Panov, like his contemporary Fedor Dostoevsky, drew on existing court cases to supply material for his fiction, particularly given his job as a court reporter. The wider context for the text is the period of sweeping reforms instigated by Tsar Alexander II in the early to mid-1860s, that included a comprehensive reorganisation of the judiciary, policing, and legal structure. The role of “judicial investigator” was created at this time, whose powers extended to arrest, interrogation, and collection of evidence for prosecution. The creation of this role left the police to tackle issues of public order (Whitehead 4–5). In Three Courts these changes are reflected in the role of the dual protagonists––the unnamed judicial investigator who narrates the story, and the detective, Kokorin, who belongs to the local police force, and whose job it is to monitor and patrol the comings and goings in the region. The investigator has the senior role, and sits in his rooms in the city waiting for witnesses and evidence to be brought before him for interrogation and assessment, while the younger man does the legwork. As a literary text Three Courts shares certain features that were typical of similar works of the period, and that were exploited to a greater effect

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by Dostoevsky, most notably the device of retelling the moment of Ruslanova’s murder from at least five different points of view and eschewing any omniscient direction to enable the reader to arrive at the truth. The narration appears at first to be repetitive and digressive, although further examination reveals that its repetition consists of narrative recapping at the start of each of its 12 sections, a feature that leads me to hypothesise that the first publication we have of this in book form may have been preceded by a serialised version. Origins in serialisation might also explain the uneasy fit of the tripartite “three courts” of the title with the text’s bipartite structure, divided as it is into “Part One: The Human Court,” and “Part Two: God’s Court.” In my work on this project, I have drawn upon an understanding of the adaptation process as one of transformative, expansive creativity, creating a text which functions both as a stand-alone entity and as commentary on the source text. My process of adaptation begins with an intensive period of working with the source, which I characterise as unstable for a number of reasons. The text itself is not widely known in Russia, although a 2018 re-print and audiobook of the original text in a collection of works by Roman Dobryi (R.L. Andropov) featuring a fictionalised version of real-­ life police detective I.A. Putilin––a figure known to the Russian reading public as the “Russian Sherlock Holmes”––may alter this somewhat (Rozman; Bodrukov). It has not been translated into English. I therefore produced my own working translation as the first step in the adaptation process. The text is therefore already at a remove, destabilised by the process of producing an unauthorised, working translation. Furthermore, the physical text itself that was available to me at the time of my translation (which predated the appearance of the reprint in Russia) was in the form of a photocopy from a Russian archive; this was the only version available to both Whitehead and me at the time. Significantly for my practice, this text was incomplete, with some torn pages that removed a crucial section of the text. At the point of adaptation there was, therefore, no “originating” text that was integral, authorised, or otherwise insulated from alteration. The ripped section contains a key scene in which the investigator, detective Kokorin, and the as yet-unmasked murderer Anna Bobrova listen to the confession of Nikolai Ichalov, who stands accused of Ruslanova’s murder. As I have described above, Ichalov is in fact the centrepiece of the text’s ongoing technique of distraction and diversion and is the largest narrative “red herring” offered to the reader by Panov. The accident of the

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damaged text allowed me to echo and expand upon the crisis of causality that this strand of the narrative enacts. I chose to replicate the lacunae in the text by separating Kokorin and Bobrova from Ichalov and the investigator, separating them by a closed door. In the following extract, the door-threshold between the inner and outer chambers of the investigator’s rooms becomes the physical and textual symbol of the unstable text, referencing the imperfect, conditional knowledge of the reader. EXTRACT Reception room. BOBROVA is sitting in an armchair. KOKORIN is standing, his ear pressed to the door of the INVESTIGATOR’s office. She is staring at Kokorin, smiling to herself. The following words, spoken by ICHALOV, come floating through the door in fragments. ICHALOV That’s my secret … if the window isn’t opened … cough … BOBROVA What is he saying? KOKORIN Quiet! I can’t hear! ICHALOV Here’s the letter … I had a peek in order to … so that it could not … her hand … give me … BOBROVA What’s he saying about the letter? KOKORIN Shhh! ICHALOV At around eleven o’clock in the evening I left … clothes in your possession … no-one would notice me … weather was bad and there was almost no one around … into the garden… I saw that … the basement window of the house … the kitchen, and most of the servants … BOBROVA Mr Kokorin — KOKORIN Will you just be — ICHALOV I was afraid that someone from … hidden around the corner, and waited … servant’s entrance. I … I looked … the time had come … More scraps of words float through the air as Bobrova moves towards Kokorin ICHALOV Lookin … less en …

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BOBROVA Mr Kokorin. Petr — KOKORIN Stop! Miss Bobrova! What are you…? ICHALOV to me … BOBROVA Petya… KOKORIN Stop that … Anna … ICHALOV ke… ah… KOKORIN aa… CUT TO/ Other side of door. ICHALOV stands in front of INVESTIGATOR. INVESTIGATOR So you saw it. You saw her do it—and you didn’t stop her— ICHALOV I was on the ladder. (Adlam 2020b, 63–4)

This door-threshold has also just been violated by Bobrova herself, who, the night before Ichalov’s interrogation, breaks out of the Investigator’s bedroom, where she is being held overnight (she is there because the  investigator feels he cannot leave a woman in a prison cell overnight). Bobrova crosses this threshold to enter the inner sanctum of the investigator’s office, where he lies sleeping on a couch. There, in a moment of high-flown Gothic drama, she appears before the investigator, and almost succeeds in bargaining her way free by seducing him. In my adaptation above, Bobrova also attempts to seduce Kokorin. In the original, Bobrova’s hyper-sexualised behaviour is jarring, since it suggests a transactional approach to sexuality that is not borne out in any sustained way in the character’s representation elsewhere. More generally, the character of Bobrova is narratively inconsistent and lacks credibility. Our first sight of her is as a haughty, self-assured young woman. She appears indifferent to the police investigation into her friend’s murder, but when Ichalov is brought to trial she suddenly appears and makes a dramatic confession to the murder from the public gallery. Immediately after

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this she retracts her confession and absconds with Major Bobrov. A lengthy carriage chase ensues. Kokorin first goes to the house of Bobrova’s aunt and uncle, who clearly have assisted in her flight; he then pursues them around the countryside. When Bobrova is caught, she confesses again, after which she again retracts her confession. In the closing pages of the book, she dies in a police holding-cell, apparently of distress. In the original text no motivation is given for these about-turns in Bobrova’s behaviour: all we are left with are Bobrova’s final words in which she says that her motive was “bloody revenge” on Petrovsky––who, in the very final line of the book we learn has been killed in a duel by Major Bobrov. Major Bobrov himself is a relatively minor figure in the original; his only noteworthy feature is that he is described at different times as both Bobrova’s brother and her father, in what was presumably human error, possibly a by-product of the circumstances of production I have already discussed. Whatever its cause, this authorial oversight is part of the general instability of the text, and, together with the narrative indeterminacy concerning the central protagonist Anna Bobrova, led me to make a decision concerning the degree to which the adaptation should cleave to the original. In arriving at this decision I follow the argument that adaptation can at times be a political act, and that the subject may be “fleshed out by modern psychological and scientific knowledge, […] and a more permissive approach to sexuality” (Sanders 2016, 365). From our perspective in the early twenty-first century, female sexuality and female criminality require more nuanced explanation than simply sexually motivated revenge. Inspired by the confusion over the status of the Major Bobrov character, I therefore created an underlying incest plot in which Bobrova would be in a coercive relationship with Major Bobrov. Bobrov would initially be presented to the reader as Bobrova’s (significantly older) brother, but he would, in a final twist, be revealed to be her father. I also decided to suggest a wider network of collusion and incestuous relationships involving Bobrova’s extended family. This implicates Bobrova’s mother, aunt, and uncle, and as well the array of female cousins whom her uncle suggests are physically indistinguishable and “fill half the town” (Panov 2018). An incestuous relationship and a wider network of familial abuse would therefore account for the many inconsistencies of the text. In particular, the final revelation that the man Bobrova believes is her much older brother is in fact her father would explain her rapid decline at the end of the text, when Major Bobrov and her mother visit her in the police cell; before that,

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Bobrova’s coerced relationship with her brother would explain her use of his razor as the murder weapon, her flight, and her instrumental behaviour towards the Investigator and Kokorin. An incest plot would also explain the murder of Petrovsky by Major Bobrov to a modern audience. And most importantly, it would provide a credible motivation for Ruslanova’s murder, if she were to have come across the pair in flagrante together. The introduction of this fundamental plot device also works as a structural tribute to the original text, mirroring the frequent surprises and layers of secrets presented to the reader by Panov in Three Courts. Further justification for this creative adaptation arose from knowledge of the wider literary and social context in which the text was produced: according to Whitehead, many other crime texts of this period feature incest as a plot device, referencing the legal term snokhorchestvo [father–daughter-in-law incest] (Whitehead and Adlam 2020). By understanding adaptation as a process of engaging with a network of texts and context, rather than a point-to-point mapping of one text to another, I was able then to proceed with the creation of a prologue that not only showed Bobrova and Bobrov together, but that also showed Ruslanova at the start as a living woman, rather than just the victim. In Fig. 10.1 we see Ruslanova wandering the halls of the mansion at night, when she hears a strange noise, eventually coming to the window of the internal room in which she will, a week later, be found dying. As Ruslanova peers in through an internal window in a gallery-corridor she sees Bobrov and Bobrova having sex. Ruslanova’s horrified words–– “but he’s your––you’re his––”––plant the seed for the revelation to come at the end of the book for the reader. Ruslanova flees, but not before both Bobrov and Bobrova have seen her. As well as introducing this significant plot change in the adaptation, the prologue also introduces key spatial elements that echo the source text. In the prologue I show the multiple internal and external windows that frame the murder, and I provide the first representation of the house, which is described as a large mansion of over 50 rooms. The house plays a significant role in Panov’s text: its interior space is so extraordinarily convoluted that detective Kokorin cannot remember which way to go when they enter the house, and the investigator’s first act after seeing the body is to call not for a doctor, but for an architect. The investigator’s account describes a house that is full of contradictions. On the one hand its spatial disposition is both modern and open, with references to glass ceilings, illuminated ballrooms, and the wide gallery space in which people “take the air” and

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Fig. 10.1  Carol Adlam, 2019. The Bobrov Affair. Prologue

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promenade. On the other hand, the house is represented as a Gothic space, with dead ends and rooms enfilade, the blinkered vistas of which also suggest possibilities for concealment. The three candle-lit corridors and the open, glass-fronted gallery space that abut the crime scene are the most striking examples of these contrasting spatial regimes (Jarzombek 2010). Such architectural eclecticism may not in fact be just the conceit of the author, but a reflection of the state of Russian elite’s urban architecture of the 1870s, in which, as William Craft Brumfield writes, “every major architectural style was imitated or paraphrased during the later part of the nineteenth century: neo-Renaissance, neo-baroque, neo-Greek, Louis XIV, Russian Revival, and Moorish” (410). Such a confusion of regimes, styles, and space nevertheless presented a challenge in terms of visual representation: how could the lengthy account of the literal twists and turns taken by the Investigator and Kokorin be represented, particularly given their significance as devices to presage the failings and frustrations of the investigation to come? The first solution was to map out the space––in an echo of the investigator’s request for an architect. The map serves the multiple purposes of indicating the layout of the crime scene, and compressing and condensing the dilatory textual journey of the duo into a single image (Fig. 10.2). This image also acts as a red herring. Superficially, it references the language of architectural maps and diagrams that function by enacting a symbolic ordering of otherwise incomprehensible or unarticulated space. Closer examination of it reveals that it fails in this primary visual task, with the trail indicating multiple dead ends, and the cropping of the larger image meaning that any adequate visual explanation of their route is not provided. I expand visually on this theme of illusory transparency and thwarted explanation through the representation of glass in my adaptation, in which glass and mirrors play a central visual role. Russia of the early nineteenth century had been gripped by glass and crystal fever, as elsewhere in continental Europe, and thanks to innovations in large-scale manufacturing techniques, by the mid-century large-scale plate glass, massive glass sculptures, and extraordinary crystal goods were on display in the big cities and among the wealthy. Julia Chadaga has explored this phenomenon in detail, giving us accounts of the vast glass engineering works commissioned by the tsars in the early part of the century, from the Crystal Swimming Pool sent to Fath Ali Shah in 1819, to the Crystal Sofa Bed (delivered on the

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Fig. 10.2  Carol Adlam, 2019. The Bobrov Affair. Map of the Ruslanov house; glass roof

ill-fated mission to Persia that saw the deaths of all but one of those who were sent with it, including, famously, the playwright Griboedov). Chadaga also cites travellers’ accounts of Russia, such as that of Johann Georg Khol, who reported on the “luxury displayed in the plate-glass windows” of St Petersburg, in which “the people of St Petersburg fill the whole aperture of the window with a single pane of glass […] these give them the appearance of transparent palaces built of crystal […] In the interior of apartments, also, mirrors are lavished with unheard-of prodigality” (Kohl in Chadaga 99). In Victorian Glassworlds, Isabel Armstrong suggests that the transformation of glass as a strong, seemingly flawless medium for large-scale, public use created a “scopic culture”; in other words, a culture of looking, mediated through glass, that divided space into internal and external locales, and conjured acts of performance, display, voyeurism, and surveillance (Armstrong 3). Armstrong’s arguments provide a useful framework for understanding the glass in Panov’s text as a site of heightened

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significance. The glass ceiling of the room in which Ruslanova is attacked (see Fig. 10.2) is a case in point: it clearly has symbolic weight, suggesting clarity, resolution, and new ways of looking that foreshadow the scientific methods of detecting employed by the younger man, Kokorin. But, as with other architectural features in the Panov’s work, it is in fact a conundrum, sitting as it does alongside a dark attic space providing ample opportunities for concealment. Indeed, the investigation is derailed by the question of the role of the glass ceiling/dark attic for some time, with Kokorin in particular convinced that the murderer entered the room from above. Glass is also present in the windows that characterise the vast 50-room mansion. When the investigator and the detective first arrive, their first sight is not of the house, but of the light that pours out of its windows, dazzling them. Again, the promise of enhanced scrutiny that modern glass offers is turned on its head: they cannot see through the glass at their suspects, but instead are, momentarily, themselves the objects of the scrutiny of those inside, who are described by the investigator as “leaning against the glass, impatiently waiting for my arrival.” So too windows play a critical role in both the execution and the resolution of the crime. Recall that the room has not just three locked doors, but in addition an inner window that gives onto the gallery-corridor. The outer side of the corridor is lined with windows looking onto the garden. A ladder leans against one of these windows. There are, therefore, two layers of windows, and a double layer of frames. It later emerges that the murderer, Bobrova, did not enter the room at all, but stood in the corridor outside the room, reaching through the internal window in order to slash the throat of Ruslanova, who was sitting on a small chaise longue inside the room, her back to the internal window. The internal window therefore shields Bobrova’s own body as she reaches through it in order to commit an act of extraordinary violence upon another woman. Bobrova stands with her back to the external window to do this, at the same time as, on the outside of the external window stands Ichalov, on a ladder, looking in. The outer window through which Ichalov looks simultaneously reveals and conceals the murder from him. Thus, Ichalov witnesses the murder while not seeing it directly, since Bobrova’s back is turned to him and the double layer of glass conceals Ruslanova from his line of sight. Panov’s ingenious construction of an almost impossible murder scene, with a witness who both sees and does not see, suggests many possibilities for the visual representation of this critical scene through multiple

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windows and frames. I foreshadow these possibilities in my prologue, in which I deliberately shift perspective between these same inner and outer windows. I first show Ruslanova as the object of vision, initially framed through three vertical, external window frames (see Fig.  10.1: panel 1, row 1). I then reverse the perspective so that we now look out from the circular internal window at Ruslanova as she passes in the corridor (Fig. 10.1: rows 2–3, panels 1–6). Lastly, I depict Ruslanova as simultaneously the object and the subject of looking, in the penultimate frames of this page, where she looks through the window through which she later will be killed (Fig. 10.1: Row 3, panels-1-2). Ruslanova sees the incestuous couple, who see her; in addition, she sees her own, horrified reflection in the glass and candlelight. In this way I seek to foreshadow the folding in on itself of the window trope at the point of the murder, where it contains, repels, and reveals a multitude of perspectives and renders the protagonists as simultaneously objects and subjects of looking. Armstrong’s description of windows as “staring panoptical sockets of power” (128) is germane here, as is her argument that objects have an “oneiric” life as well as a physical life. My prologue is intended to convey a dream-like effect, both through a muted, underwater palette, and by playing with windows, framing, and an echoing of the shapes and forms that will come later in the book. For instance, the window in the investigator’s office is also round, like the murder window—and to further emphasise the dream-connection between these two windows, I first show the investigator asleep. I further developed the idea of the contradictory nature of glass through the introduction of mirrors as a visual trope, to suggest the metaphorical and physical complexity of the place in which the detectives find themselves. In Fig. 10.3, the investigator ignores Kokorin to look for his own way through the maze that is the mansion. Here, the hallway he sees stretching before him is suddenly collapsed into an impossible space. Sight confounds him momentarily, and he is forced instead to confirm its truth—that this is a vast mirror—through touch, until he turns to see the actual hallway, and Kokorin, behind him. Mirrors also create false selves. I developed this theme further by populating the world of the ball by statues and masks. In Panov’s text the first section concludes with the investigator creating a vast tableau vivant—a spectacle of living statues, when he calls for all 227 guests to resume the exact position they were in when Ruslanova’s scream was heard. The statues I have created that are dotted around the Ruslanov mansion (see Fig. 10.1) foreshadow this moment, and reference the incest narrative, by

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Fig. 10.3  Carol Adlam, 2020b. The Bobrov Affair. The Investigator takes a wrong turn

suggesting subterranean narratives of physicality, coercion, and violence. For instance, a key panel when the investigator arrives shows the incestuous rape of Hera by her brother, Zeus. Similarly, I have chosen to show those attending the ball in masks. On one level masks serve as an obvious visual analogy, suggesting concealment and duplicity. They have further significance in my process in which I look for ways to resist a mimetic imperative in historical adaptation work: here, masks are intended to challenge any underlying assumptions about the world depicted being a “faithful” representation of a particular period, and in a deliberate and estranging anachronism, the characters wear a combination of loosely devised period and western costume as well as masks and animal headgear that evoke much older Russian mummering traditions.

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I have used an anachronistic historical detail elsewhere to explore the question of accuracy and verisimilitude, in the image of the zertsalo—the three-sided object that can be seen on the investigator’s desk. The zertsalo was an official object that was a compulsory feature of all court officials’ quarters during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825–1855), containing the three legal documents that were considered to be the cornerstones of Russian law (Chadaga 60). Etymologically the word zertsalo is a cognate of the word for mirror (zerkalo), and it suggests the all-seeing eye of the state and/or the tsar with regard to his subjects, embodying a visual projection of power throughout the official spaces of the state. My work on glass, mirrors, framing, and statues aims to create both the sense of a consistent material world and one with a fragmentary or illusory quality, requiring or potentially rewarding repeated reading, in a visual analogue of the demands of the source text and the structural demands of the genre of crime fiction that places clues and/or red herrings at the viewer’s disposal. In my representation of the investigator’s office, which is the site to which all clues and witnesses are brought, I have attempted to position this act of reading through a representation of material texture that is at odds with the glass world of the wealthy elite. Here I show that the walls of the inner-city office are crumbling, shadowed, made of layers of semi-translucent tone and texture that signals the investigator’s exclusion from the bright, translucent world of the elites. Here and elsewhere in the text I develop the idea of the palimpsest as an analogy for active reading, by introducing paratextual and/or extradiegetic visual devices into the material fabric of the world depicted. The first is a censor’s mark that sits at the bottom of the page introducing the investigator (Fig. 10.4). Three Courts describes the investigator constantly writing out statements and recording them, demonstrating to the reader how power is enacted and implemented through the act of writing. This censor’s mark and other paratextual artefacts (e.g. stamps, records, doodles, and other marginalia) will be used throughout to provide visual commentary on the act of writing. I have also embedded fragments of my copy of the source text in the walls behind the detective, as well as the library card catalogue record that documents the real-life location of the text in the National Library of Russia, thereby referencing the genesis of the project in Whitehead’s research, the text’s relationship to its wider literary context, and the ongoing acts of cultural preservation that ensure the text’s longevity, including this project of adaptation.

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Fig. 10.4  Carol Adlam, 2020b. The Bobrov Affair. The censor’s mark; embedded text

In creating The Bobrov Affair, I have sought through my process to interrogate the assumptions of “fidelity” to a source text that haunt adaptation studies, viewing my work as a self-sufficient artefact that explores, challenges, augments its source, and creates new forms of story for a twenty-first century audience while maintaining its connection to the original. I have sought to provide both visual analogues for textual features in the source, such as the absence of an omniscient narrator, and extended digression and repetition. I explore the problem of verisimilitude by referencing “authenticating” and “authorising” paratextual visual forms (maps, censor’s stamps, diagrams), while also suggesting their inadequacy as explanatory devices; I also use anachronisms to resist cultural stereotypes and broaden the range of reference in the reader. More

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generally, I seek to demonstrate that the graphic novel adaptation can be a rich and sophisticated medium, enabling new forms of knowledge not just about its source text, but about the text’s wider literary and sociopolitical contexts, and most of all, about the boundaries of our own understanding of that period and culture. And so, in this instance, The Bobrov Affair addresses western ideas about the Russian nineteenth century, and Russian literature in particular, that for a general public still remain limited to less than a handful of canonical names, and to stereotyped images of a place that never really was.

Works Cited Adlam, Carol. 2019. Today in 1864. Adaptation of Nikolai Timofeev, Zapiski sledovatelia [Notes of an Investigator]. Audio Play/TS. ———. 2020a. Curare. Adaptation of Aleksandr Shkliarevskii, Sekretnoe sledstvie [A Secret Investigation]. Audio Play/TS. ———. 2020b. The Bobrov Affair. Adaptation of Semyon Panov, Tri suda, ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala [Three Courts, or Murder during the Ball]. Artwork/TS. ———. 2021. Spade and Sand. Adaptation of Nikolai Timofeev, Zapiski sledovatelia [Notes of an Investigator]. Verse Drama/Libretto. TS. Armstrong, Isobel. 2008. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Print. Bodrukov, Aleskandr [Panov, Semyon]. 2018. Tri suda, ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala [Three Courts, or Murder during the Ball]. Moscow: Izdatelskii dom. Audiobook. Brumfield, William Craft. 1993. A History of Russian Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print. Chadaga, Julia Bekman. 2014. Optical Play: Glass, Vision and Spectacle in Russian Culture. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Print. Jarzombek, Mark. 2010. Corridor Spaces. Critical Inquiry 36: 728–770. Print. Panov, Semyon. 1876 [2018]. Tri suda, ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala. St Petersburg: Skariatin. Reprinted in Pokhititeli nevest. Staryi russki detektiv. Ed. Natalia Rozman. Moscow: Eksmo Press. Print. Rozman, Natalia, ed. 2018. Pokhititeli nevest. Staryi russkii detektiv. [Thieves of Brides. Old Russian detective stories]. Moscow: Eksmo Press. Print. Sanders, Julie. 2016. Adaptation and Appropriation. 2nd ed. London; New York: Routledge. Print. Shkliarevskii, Aleksandr. 1881 [1993]. Sekretnoe sledstvie. [A Secret Investigation] Chto pubudilo k ubisstvu? Rasskaz sledovatelia. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature. Print.

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Sokolova, Aleksandra. 1890. Bez sleda: ugolovnyi roman [Without a Trace: A Crime Novel]. Rodina 1: 1–148. Print. Timofeev, Nikolai. 1872. Zapiski sledovatelia [Notes of an Investigator]. St Petersburg: Plotnikov. Print. Whitehead, Claire. 2018. The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction, 1860–1917: Deciphering Stories of Detection. Oxford: Legenda. Print. ———. 2019. Spaces of Mystery, Knowledge and Truth in Early Russian Crime Fiction: Semyon Panov’s Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball (1876). Victorian Popular Fictions 1 (2): 110–122. Whitehead, Claire, host, and Carol Adlam, contributing guest. 2020. Episode One. Lost Detectives, episode 1. University of St Andrews. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.st-­andrews.ac.uk/lostdetectives/. Podcast.

CHAPTER 11

Adapting, Translating, Illustrating: French Ballads of Reading Gaol in Word and Image Xavier Giudicelli

The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. —Deleuze and Guattari (10)

The aim of this chapter is to offer a reflection on the relationships and intersections between the realms of adaptation, illustration, and translation. In Comparative Stylistics of French and English, Vinay and Darbelnet define adaptation as a translation procedure based on an adjustment to a new cultural environment, namely replacing a socio-cultural reality in the source-text with a reality which is specific to the target culture (39). Adaptation can more generally be defined as a process whereby semiotic systems and cultural contexts are “put into conversation and made to X. Giudicelli (*) University of Reims, Reims, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_11

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signify in new ways” (Newell 1). In that respect, it bears some kinship with translation understood as trans-latio—a carrying across cultures, necessarily producing new meanings (Fehrle and Schmitt 3)—, as well as with book illustration, an intermedial practice fostering dialectic relations between text and image, which may complement, or stand in tension, with each other: illustrated works are hybrid art forms (Elliott 16) in which semiotic systems necessarily engage in a form of dialogue. My hypothesis is that translation may help us conceptualise the links between adaptation and illustration and that affinities may exist between the acts of linguistic and intermedial translation. Both are forms of transpositions or adaptations, which are performed through the superimpositions of filters and the weaving of rich intertextual/interpictorial networks, thereby sparking dialogues between both cultures and media, and thus forming rhizomes, as I will try to show through a case study. I shall focus here on French versions in both text and image of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the last text Oscar Wilde published in his lifetime, drawing on hitherto little explored material from the Robert Ross Memorial collection.1 The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written in 1897—after Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol, where, following widely publicised trials, he had served a two-year sentence with hard labour for “gross indecency”—was first published in London by Leonard Smithers on February 13, 1898, when Wilde was in exile in France and had presumably just reached Paris after having spent a few months in Southern Italy (Wilde 2000b, 1017). The poem bears the imprint of Wilde’s prison sentence, as it draws on the true story of Charles Thomas Wooldridge (like Wilde an inmate of Reading Gaol), a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards who had been sentenced to death for murdering his wife and was hanged on July 7, 1896. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is itself already an adaptation, a rescripting of Wooldridge’s tragic fate, endowing it with a more general significance by turning it into a reflection on universal guilt. The French “transcription” of The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Henry-D. Davray first appeared in the May 1898 issue of the Mercure de France, a mere three months after the publication of Wilde’s Ballad in English, before being reprinted in a bilingual edition by the “Société du Mercure de France” in September of the same year. 1  The Robert Ross Memorial collection, curated at University College, Oxford, contains over 1000 books relating to Oscar Wilde and his circle. My warmest thanks to Elizabeth Adams, librarian at University College, who guided me through the collection.

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This chapter will first try and reconstruct the cultural networks behind the French translation and subsequent illustrated versions of Wilde’s Ballad, offering a glimpse into the rich Franco-British cultural exchanges of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It will analyse Davray’s collaboration with Wilde on the translation of The Ballad of Reading Gaol and will dwell on the discussions around the idea of turning Wilde’s Ballad into a prose poem in French, a form of domestication—a translation strategy of making a text conform to the target culture—or of transcultural adaptation. This chapter will then compare and contrast the two earliest French illustrated versions of Reading Gaol, both based on Davray’s prose translation and prefaced by Davray: a 1918 edition with woodcuts by Jean-Gabriel Daragnès (1886–1950) (Paris: Léon Pichon)2—containing a frontispiece, 6 woodcuts (1 at the beginning of each section), 14 in-text woodcuts, 5 tailpieces, as well as ornamentations—and a 1927 edition featuring 15 coloured plates engraved on copper by Thévenin from oil paintings by Jean-Georges Cornélius (1880–1963) (Paris: Javal et Bourdeaux)3—2 frontispieces and 13 compositions—with a view to showing the diverging ways in which the two artists visually adapted Wilde’s poem. The cross-examination of the verbal and visual translations of The Ballad of Reading Gaol will enable me to assess the way in which Wilde’s poem was re-appropriated and refashioned through the prism of French culture, as well as show how illustration may indeed be seen as a form of adaptation, based on a “mobilization of reference points” and on a process of re-vision and (re-)interpretation (Newell 8).

2  The woodcuts were initiated some time during World War I (Frank 45) but the luxury edition, of just 395 copies, was only published in 1918 by the Paris publisher Léon Pichon. The edition was self-financed, as Léon Pichon, a printer-publisher specializing in luxury books, was not keen on publishing it (45). 3  The publishing house, Javal and Bourdeaux, was set up in 1926: it specialized in luxury books for bibliophiles and developed an association with the Galerie Charpentier, where a yearly exhibition of the illustrations featured in the volumes was held. The 1927 illustrated Ballad of Reading Gaol was printed at 225 copies and was thus aimed at bibliophiles, like the 1918 volume illustrated by Daragnès.

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Franco-British Cultural Exchanges: Davray, Wilde, and the Transcultural Adaptation of The Ballad of Reading Gaol What initially aroused my interest in French Ballads of Reading Gaol in text and image was Davray’s affectionate dedication of his 1928 Oscar Wilde: la tragédie finale (Oscar Wilde: The Final Tragedy) in the copy of the book that he sent to Walter Edwin Ledger, a volume which now belongs to the Robert Ross Memorial Collection4: “To Walter Ledger, with my kindest regards and the happiness of bringing my humble contribution to your pious and noble work” (my translation). Davray’s Oscar Wilde: The Final Tragedy is a collection of several previously published texts by Davray about Wilde and Wilde’s works, including a 1913 account of how Davray translated The Ballad of Reading Gaol into French. Interestingly, the aforementioned piece was used as the preface for the first French illustrated version of Wilde’s poem by the artist Daragnès published in 1918. Davray’s Oscar Wilde: The Final Tragedy also features the preface for the French illustrated edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol published in 1927 with plates engraved from oil paintings by Cornélius. Intermediaries and Networks Henry Durand-Davray (1873–1944) was a French journalist, writer, and translator who, throughout his career, acted as a cultural mediator between Britain and France, so much so that his friends humorously referred to him as “the Channel Tunnel” (Brochard 57). He was well acquainted with literary circles, on both sides of the Channel, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 Davray’s work as a cultural intermediary 4  Not much is known about Walter Edwin Ledger (1862–1931), who created the Robert Ross Memorial Collection, apart from the fact that he was trained as an architect, lived in Wimbledon, was interested in sailing (about which he published two books), botany, and collecting books by and about Wilde. He originally worked with Christopher Sclater Millard on a bibliography of Wilde’s works, which was published by Millard in 1914 under the pseudonym Stuart Mason. 5  He frequented such writers as Stéphane Mallarmé, Édouard Dujardin, Lionel Johnson, and Arthur Symons (Brochard 48–67), to quote only a few, and, of course, Oscar Wilde, whom he is recorded to have met in November 1891, with Enrique Gómez Carillo and Paul Verlaine, in Paris (Ellmann 322) and whom he saw regularly in the last years of the Irish writer’s life (306, 322, 527, 530–31; Frankel 2017, 203–4). He was among the few mourners at Wilde’s burial in Bagneux (549).

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between Britain and France was multifaceted. In 1917, he was among the founders of the Anglo-French society whose aim was to promote the Entente Cordiale; he created The Anglo-French Review (1923–1926), of which he was the editor with James Lewis May, and, later, founded with Marie Reine Garnier Cross-Channel (1939–1940), a short-lived Franco-­ British bilingual review (Brochard 160). Davray also translated, mainly for the Mercure de France, and sometimes in collaboration, over 100 British (and, to a lesser extent, American) literary texts.6 As far as Wilde is concerned, he translated his prose poems for the May 1899 issue of the Revue Blanche, De Profundis for the Mercure de France in 1905, as well as Arthur Ransome’s Oscar Wilde (1914) and Frank Harris’s Life and Confessions of Oscar Wilde (1928). Davray also contributed to the dissemination of British literature in France through the columns “Lettres anglaises” (“English Letters”) which he published regularly in the Mercure de France from 1896 to the 1930s, in which he chronicled the most recent British books and periodicals, with a bias for so-called decadent writers, such as Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson, and “George Egerton” (Brochard 79–80) and, of course, Oscar Wilde7: it is his enthusiastic April 1898 review of The Ballad of Reading Gaol in “English Letters” which actually led Wilde to ask him to translate the poem into English. Davray’s contribution to Franco-British cultural exchanges, and his French version of Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, cannot be fully understood without taking into account the review and publisher for whom he worked for many years, namely the Mercure de France and its chief editor 6  For example, George Meredith, Essai sur la comédie [An Essay on Comedy], trans. Henry-D.  Davray (Paris: Mercure de France, 1898) (Wilde mentions this translation, Complete Letters, 946); H. G. Wells, La Guerre des mondes [The War of the Worlds], trans. Henry-D.  Davray (Paris: Mercure de France, 1900); Joseph Conrad, L’Agent secret [The Secret Agent], trans. Henry-D. Davray (Paris: Mercure de France, 1912); Rudyard Kipling, Simples contes de la montagne [Plain Tales from the Hills], trans. Henry-D.  Davray and Madeleine Vernon (Paris: Mercure de France, 1929); Stephen Crane, La Conquête du courage [The Red Badge of Courage], trans. Henry-D. Davray and Francis Vielé-Griffin (Paris: Les Libertés françaises, 1939). On Davray and H. G. Wells, see Escuret. 7  He reviewed for the Mercure de France Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (Oct. 1899, 271), The Importance of Being Earnest (July 1899, 268), A House of Pomegranates (Nov. 1902, 484), Lady Windermere’s Fan (June 1909, 539), Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (Nov. 15, 1905, 303–304) and wrote about apocryphal texts by Wilde (Davray 1925 et 1926a), Wilde and prison life (Davray 1926b), some unpublished prose poems by Wilde (Davray 1926c) and The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Davray 1927).

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Alfred Vallette. In 1890, Vallette, husband of writer Rachilde,8 relaunched the review Le Mercure de France which, right from the start in his reincarnation of it, had strong links with Symbolism. In March 1894, the Mercure de France set up a publishing house and Davray became, in 1898, at the age of just 25, the general editor of a series devoted to foreign authors (Brochard 86–87). An upmarket review and publisher, characterised by its attachment to Symbolist aesthetics, Vallette’s Mercure de France, placed under the aegis of Mercury, the winged messenger of the Gods, also had a cosmopolitan agenda and did much to bring foreign—and in particular British—literature to France, notably by publishing various translations of foreign texts, Davray’s rendering of The Ballad of Reading Gaol being one of them. Connections and Domestications Wilde himself, of course, was a cosmopolitan, and a notorious Francophile, keen on moving between languages, as his play Salomé, first written in French—partly as a homage to such Symbolist playwrights as Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck—demonstrates (see Cohen; Eells). A few weeks after the publication of The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Leonard Smithers in February 1898, Davray privately sent Wilde a laudatory review of the poem, a review which was to be published in Davray’s “English Letters” column of the April 1898 issue of the Mercure de France. Wilde, who was “touched and gratified” by that review, told Davray so orally (Davray 1928a, 103) and wrote to him the following day from the Hôtel de Nice in the rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris, to renew his thanks and suggest that Davray undertake the translation of The Ballad into French (Wilde 2000b, 1028), for it to be published in French “in a review or as a small separate volume” (1028). By 1898, several other texts by Wilde had already been

8  Marguerite Eymery (1860–1953), whose pen name was Rachilde, became famous with her 1884 Monsieur Vénus, a novel challenging gender roles. Rachilde was linked to the Decadent and Symbolist literary circles and held a Tuesday salon, frequented by prominent French Symbolist writers, and Oscar Wilde (see Dauphiné). An early presentation copy of Reading Gaol Wilde personally inscribed to Rachilde is owned by the William Andrews Clark Library (see Dierkes-Thrun).

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published in translation in France,9 yet the translation of The Ballad of Reading Gaol is an interesting case, as it is a collaborative undertaking, chronicled by Davray: it is arguably one of the best documented instances of collaboration between Wilde and one of his translators. Davray’s interpretation of the poem, which surfaces through his translation, testifies to his Symbolist ideals, through whose filter he envisages Wilde’s English ballad. Those ideals are conspicuous in Davray’s April 1898 review of Wilde’s Ballad for the Mercure de France, often overlooked by scholars. The first edition of the Ballad had been published by Leonard Smithers under the pseudonym “C.3.3,” the number of Wilde’s cell in Reading Gaol.10 In Davray’s text, Wilde’s name thus never appears: the Irish writer is merely referred to as “a poet” (although presumably some of the better-informed, educated readers of the Mercure de France would have been aware of whom Davray was speaking). The review falls into two parts. First, Wilde’s trials and imprisonment are evoked, using a highly metaphorical language and drawing on Greek and Biblical myths to account for what is presented as the “poet”‘s tragic fall (Davray 1898, 323). Wilde is seen as a tragic hero guilty of hubris; he is cast in the part of a Christ-like figure tempted in the Wilderness by the Devil to “throw himself down” (Matthew IV: 5) (323). Davray’s text echoes here Baudelaire’s metaphoric representation of the figure of the poet in his sonnet “The Albatross,” “exiled on earth amidst its hooting crowds.” (Baudelaire 10) Davray then turns to The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which is presented as a way for the poet both to express and transcend his personal experience: Davray notes that the poem is “strangely and powerfully realistic” (324), whilst also characterised by a “large symbolic unity,”(324) thereby testifying to the ideal of Beauty sought after by Baudelaire and the Symbolists in his wake, as well as 9  “The Birthday of the Infanta” had appeared in a 1889 issue of Le Paris illustré in a translation by Stuart Merrill (1863–1915), a Paris-based American Symbolist writer, who was to proofread Wilde’s draft of Salomé in 1891 (“L’Anniversaire de naissance de la petite princesse” [Paris illustré, 30 March 1889, 203–209]) a French version of “The Selfish Giant” by Marcel Schwob (a French writer close to the Symbolists who, like Merrill, was to proofread Wilde’s French Salomé) had also been published in 1891 in L’Écho de Paris, while the first translation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Eugène Tardieu and Georges Maurevert, came out in 1895 (Paris: Albert Savine, 12 rue des Pyramides, “Bibliothèque cosmopolite”). 10  Wilde’s name was only added, between square brackets, in the seventh edition, printed on June 23 1899 (Mason 423).

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corresponding to Davray’s own conception: his quest for beauty in all its forms and for the symbolic expression hiding behind the veils of reality (Brochard 76). Davray’s two prefaces for his transcription of Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (the first written in 1913 and used for the 1918 edition illustrated by Daragnès, the second published in the 1927 edition containing Cornélius’s coloured plates, both reprinted in Davray’s 1928b Oscar Wilde: The Final Tragedy) are a mine of information about the collaboration between Wilde and Davray on the translation of the poem. From the outset, Davray writes, Wilde was concerned that the French translator might experience difficulty in finding convincing equivalents for the “technical” words in the Ballad relating to prison and prison life (Davray 1928b, 96, 105). Davray reports Wilde’s jokes about this: one morning, Wilde told him: “Everything is arranged. You can leave as early as tomorrow morning, I have booked a cell in Reading for you. We shall resume our labours upon your return” (96, my translation).11 Moreover, Davray’s account of the lengthy process of collaboration with Wilde on the translation testifies to Wilde’s great fastidiousness. Before embarking on the translation, Davray invited Wilde to read and comment on The Ballad with him (106). The Frenchman subsequently proceeded to produce a first draft of his transcription and met again with Wilde: each stanza was read aloud in both English and French, the choice of each word discussed and compared (107). Wilde then reread the proofs of Davray’s translation and made a number of terminological comments, testifying to his great attention and his not always flawless mastery of French. Some suggestions, such as “enrobé de blanc” (Davray 1928b, 109) to refer to the prison Chaplain “robed in white” (section I, stanza 12, l. 3, Wilde 2000a, 97), are not exactly felicitous, although they have been retained in the final version. Wilde’s suggestions are also sometimes evidence of his French literary reminiscences: his idea of replacing “réprouvé” (rejected, ostracised, cast away by society or God) by “déshérité” (disinherited) to translate “outcast” (“Two outcast men we were,” section II, stanza 13, l. 2, Wilde 2000a, 200) may echo Gérard de Nerval’s famous 1854 sonnet “El Desdichado,” a self-portrait of the artist as melancholy (“I am the Man of 11  Also see Wilde’s letter to Robert Ross dated 28 March 1898: “It is a very difficult thing to translate, as, unluckily and oddly, Davray has never been to prison, so knows nothing of prison terms. ‘We banged the tins’ appeared as ‘On battait le fer blanc!’” (Wilde 2000b, 1051–1052).

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Shadows—the Widower—the Unconsoled” [Nerval 39, my translation]) whose Spanish title, borrowed from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819),12 is traditionally rendered in French as “le déshérité” (the disinherited). Finally, Davray relates an initial misunderstanding between Wilde and himself: Wilde originally thought that Davray wished to translate the poem into French verse (Davray 1928b, 106). When Davray said that he wouldn’t, Wilde expressed his reservations about a prose translation, thinking that much of the essence of the poem would be lost in the process of turning it into prose (90). Most of the more recent French translators, including Paul Bensimon in the 2006 “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” edition and Jean Besson for a 1989 version for “L’Âge d’homme,” have indeed opted for a translation in French octosyllables and alexandrines, rhyming in the case of Besson’s transcription, justifying their choice by stressing the importance of rhythm and rhyme in Wilde’s poem, its alternation of iambic tetrameters and trimeters, and its ABCBDB rhyme scheme (Bensimon 1996).13 Yet in 1898, Davray finally won Wilde over to his idea of a prose translation by arguing that French poets themselves had used prose to translate English poetry, citing, to support his point, the examples of Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1875 prose rendition of Edgar Poe’s The Raven (with illustrations by Edgar Manet) and of American-born Symbolist Francis Vielé-­ Griffin’s 1888 prose translation of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Laus Veneris, which first appeared in the Revue des Indépendants in 1888 and had been reprinted by the Mercure de France in 1895 (Davray 1928b, 93). Davray also contends that French prose lends itself easily to poetic expression and that Wilde’s own Salomé is a prose poem (94). I would be tempted to assert that the choice of a prose translation does not merely underline Davray’s shortcomings as a translator or his scruples about not being faithful enough to Wilde’s original but that it bears witness to a certain conception of translation: by turning an English ballad into a prose poem, Davray “frenchifies” Wilde’s text, placing it in the wake of such renowned predecessors as Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose (1869) or Mallarmé’s prose poems, which Wilde, who himself had 12  “His suit of armour was formed of steel, richly inlaid with gold, and the device on his shield was a young oak-tree pulled up by the roots, with the Spanish word Desdichado, signifying Disinherited.” (Scott 96). 13  The Ballad of Reading Gaol has been translated some 15 times into French. Most of the translations are in verse.

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written poems in prose for The Fortnightly Review in 1894, would doubtless have appreciated. It could nevertheless also be argued that turning a ballad—a popular, old, and reassuring poetic form—into an avant-garde prose poem—an arguably more subversive genre—changes the perception of Wilde’s poem. Davray’s transcultural adaptation, whilst harmonising with Wilde’s own Symbolist leanings, also offers a re-vision of The Ballad of Reading Gaol which is worth comparing with the French visual translations of the poem by Daragnès and Cornélius.

From Linguistic to Intermedial Translation: Daragnès’s and Cornélius’s Adaptation Strategies in their Illustrated Ballads of Reading Gaol In the 1913 text used as a preface to the 1918 edition of the Ballad with woodcuts by Daragnès, Davray expresses his surprise that the Ballad had not yet been illustrated (Wilde 1918, ix). He reminds the reader of how attentive Wilde was to the material presentation of his books (ix), a manifestation of the Irish writer’s taste for the book beautiful (Frankel 2000). From the outset, Wilde had wished his Ballad to be illustrated, naming as potential illustrators artists such as Aubrey Beardsley and Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff (Wilde 2000b, 933, 944).14 He had also met, interestingly at Davray’s, a German artist called Paul Herrmann (1864–1946) (who used the pseudonym Henri Héran) who, Wilde writes, “was anxious to do a cover and a frontispiece for the poem”, using “a method of printing in four colours” (944),15 although the project never

14  “As regards Beardsley, I wish you could get him to make a definite reply. […] If he will do it, it will be a great thing: if not, why not try some of the young Belges—Khnopff for example. I want something curious—a design of Death and Sin walking hand in hand, very severe, and mediaeval. Also, for the divisions between the separate parts of each canto of the ballad, I want no asterisks, nor lines, but a little design of three flowers, or some decorative motive, simple and severe.” (Wilde 2000b, 933). 15  “In Paris I met at Henri Davray’s a wonderful young artist called Herrmann who is very anxious to do a cover and a frontispiece design for the poem. He is a most interesting genius, and would do something very fine. He talked to me of a method of printing in four colours, which he says has great possibilities. His genius is sombre, troubled and macabre.” (Wilde 2000b, 944).

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came to fruition.16 The Ballad of Reading Gaol would nonetheless inspire artists after Wilde’s death and throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (over 20 illustrated versions have been published to this day).17 In the preface to the 1918 edition containing the woodcuts by Daragnès, Davray also draws an implicit parallel between translation and illustration. He states that Daragnès’s creation are not mere variations on the text or fanciful inventions, but that they form a harmonious whole with the text and convey the Ballad’s meaning with remarkable faithfulness (Davray 1928b, 98). Daragnès’s vision of The Ballad of Reading Gaol is moreover dependent on Davray’s translation, as is evidenced by the letter the artist sent to the translator, which, along with the first prints of the woodcuts, have found their way into the Robert Ross Memorial Collection (Ross Env C.35): “I am happy, dear Mr Davray, to offer you these first prints which, though of poor quality, shall be a token of my friendship for you who taught me how to appreciate, through your translation, a work which you told me you admired” (my translation). I wish to trace a selective path through the illustrated editions by Daragnès and Cornélius and to compare those two graphic translations of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, divergent in terms of the engraving technique used, of the viewpoints of the text they adopt and of the interpictorial networks on which they are based. 16  In a letter to Wilde (MS Clark), dated 22 January 1898 and written in French from Paris, he says he is enclosing a sketch for a frontispiece which he proposes to execute as “une eau-­ forte en quatre couleurs” (an etching in four colours), but it never appeared (Wilde 2000b, 944n). Wilde later writes to Ernest Dowson: “If you see Davray, as of course you are sure to do, will you tell him that I have received no drawing of any kind from Herrmann, and that consequently I have to bring out my poem without any design of any kind, as I cannot wait too long. Later on, if the poem is a success, I may bring out an adorned edition, but I know nothing of Herrmann’s view at all” (Wilde 2000b, 965). 17  Davray is not quite right when he suggests that the 1918 edition with woodcuts by Daragnès is the first illustrated edition of the poem. By 1913, The Ballad of Reading Gaol had already been the object of cover art in 1904 by Russian artist Modest Durnov (who also did the first illustrations for The Picture of Dorian Gray [Moscow: Grif, 1906]), of an American illustrated version by Latimer J. Wilson (New York: F.M. Buckles and Co, 1907) and of German illustrations by Expressionist artist Erich Heckel (done in 1907 but published in the 1960s [New York: Ernest Rathenau, 1963]). On Erich Heckel’s illustrations for The Ballad of Reading Gaol, see Giudicelli. For an overview of the illustrated editions of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, see Wilson.

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Daragnès’s Adaptation: “Walking with Other Souls in Pain” (Wilde 2000a, 195) Wilde’s poem is one of the first works illustrated by Daragnès, who was to become a celebrated artist of the book in the 1920s and 1930s. Daragnès would return to the Ballad towards the end of his career, in 1944, but this time with copper-plate engravings instead of woodcuts, and with the text in the English original rather than in Davray’s translation (Frank 45). Daragnès started working on the woodcuts published in 1918 during World War I, when he was being treated in a sanatorium for tuberculosis, the disease having rendered him unfit for service (45). The tonality of his images is dark, both literally and metaphorically, reminiscent of Erich Heckel’s 1907 gloomy Expressionist woodcuts for Wilde’s Ballad (see Giudicelli). The vision of the text offered by Daragnès relies on empathy: the reader-viewer seems to be turned into one of the prisoners, one of those “souls in pain” (section 1, stanza 4, l. 1, Wilde 2000a, 195) described in the poem, unable to escape the claustrophobic space of the illustrated book: right from the image of a prisoner behind bars in the frontispiece (Fig.  11.1) and the high-angle view of the illustration preceding the first section, the reader-viewer becomes one of the convicts, dwarfed and hemmed in by the prison walls. The sense of oppression is also conveyed through the return of the same motifs in Daragnès’s images, which is in harmony with the central trope of repetition in Wilde’s poem: the repetition of sounds, through the numerous alliterative effects and internal rhymes, the repetition of words or lines, with slight variations. One such recurrent visual motif in the 1918 edition is that of the prisoners’ round (Fig. 11.2), which appears twice, with slight variations (Wilde 1918, 35 and 53), and echoes Gustave Doré’s engraving “Newgate Prison Exercise Yard” from the 1872 London: A Pilgrimage—the French artist’s view of Victorian London, with an emphasis on its more sombre aspects.18 The high-angle view in Daragnès’s woodcut may contribute to erasing the convicts’ individualities and fostering a possible identification process with the viewer. Cornélius’s “Visions” The 1927 copper engravings by Thévenin from oil paintings by Cornélius offer a somewhat different visual interpretation of Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. In a letter to Robert Ross, Wilde wrote that his poem 18  Doré’s image also famously inspired Van Gogh’s 1890 Prisoners Exercising (80 × 64 cm, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow).

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Fig. 11.1  Jean-Gabriel Daragnès, frontispiece (woodcut) for Ballade de la geôle de Reading par C.3.3., trans. and preface Henry-D. Davray, Paris: Léon Pichon, 1918 (University College, Oxford: The Robert Ross Memorial Collection, Ross c.35). (Courtesy of The Master and Fellows of University College Oxford)

“suffered under the difficulty of a divided aim in style. Some is realistic, some is romantic” (Wilde 2000b, 654): Cornélius has obviously moved away from Realism and gone for an allegorical, mystical reading of the poem, testifying to the influence of the mystical symbolism of Gustave Moreau, whose pupil Cornélius had been (he had joined Moreau’s

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Fig. 11.2  Jean-Gabriel Daragnès, woodcut preceding stanza 7 of section III of Ballade de la geôle de Reading par C.3.3., trans. and preface Henry-D.  Davray, Paris: Léon Pichon, 1918 (University College, Oxford: The Robert Ross Memorial Collection, Ross c.35). (Courtesy of The Master and Fellows of University College Oxford)

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workshop in 1896 [Levasseur 12]). Cornélius’s traumatic experience of World War I—he was sent to fight on the front during the battle of the Marne (6–10 September 1914), lost the use of an eye because of a shell and witnessed the terrible distress of soldiers in the trenches (Levasseur 23)—may partly account for the artist’s emphasis on suffering and redemption in his vision of Reading Gaol. The religious dimension of the illustrations may also prefigure Cornélius’s conversion to Catholicism in 1931, under the influence of Catholic writer Georges Bernanos,19 who was to become a close friend of his (55). The engraving facing page VII (Fig. 11.3), placed just before the beginning of Davray’s preface, appears emblematic of Cornélius’s take on Wilde’s poem. Unlike Daragnès’s frontispiece, the image does not openly reference prison or carceral life. Behind a half-length portrait of Wilde is delineated an allegorical landscape characterised by a contrast between darker colours in the lower part and lighter colours in the upper part and by antithetical movements: the downward fall of the human figure is opposed to the upward flight of Pegasus, pointing to the redemptive power of poetry and consonant with Davray’s interpretation of the Ballad as a metaphoric expression of poetry’s power of atonement (Davray 1898, 324). The illustration facing the title page (Fig. 11.4) also corroborates the pull towards the allegorical, thus echoing Wilde’s poem and, for instance, the shift from “[…] each man kills the thing he loves” in the first section of the poem (section I, stanza 7, l. 1, Wilde 2000a, 196, italics mine) to the more generalising “All men kill the thing they love” in the last stanza (section VI, stanza 3, l. 1, Wilde 2000a, 216, italics mine). Universal guilt is pictured by Cornélius in the guise of an aging penitent bearing like a cross the body of a lifeless male angel, which looks at once macabre and erotically charged. Cornelius’s Ballad of Reading Gaol partakes of a Way of Sorrows, a Christic Passion leading to regeneration and resurrection. The figure of Christ, absent from Daragnès’s illustrations, is omnipresent

19  Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) is a French Catholic writer, famous for his exploration of spirituality and of the fight between good and evil, notably through his depiction of priests, in, for instance Sous le soleil de Satan (1926; trans. Under the Star of Satan. London: Bodley Head, 1927).

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Fig. 11.3  Jean-Georges Cornélius, engraving facing p. VII, Oscar Wilde. La Ballade de la geôle de Reading, trans. and preface Henry-D. Davray, Paris: Javal et Bourdeaux, 1927 (University College, Oxford: The Robert Ross Memorial Collection, Ross c.3). (Courtesy of The Master and Fellows of University College Oxford)

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Fig. 11.4  Engraving facing title page, Oscar Wilde. La Ballade de la geôle de Reading, trans. and preface Henry-D.  Davray, Paris: Javal et Bourdeaux, 1927 (University College, Oxford: The Robert Ross Memorial Collection, Ross c.3). (Courtesy of The Master and Fellows of University College Oxford)

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at the end of the 1927 edition,20 for instance in the hallucinatory vision of a gigantic, bleeding Christ resting on the roof of Reading Gaol, placed at the beginning of the fifth section of the poem, a virulent attack on the carceral system (“[…] every prison that men build / Is built with bricks of shame / And bound with bars lest Christ should see / How men their brothers maim,” section V, stanza 3, l. 3–6, Wilde 2000a, 213). It also strikes me as significant that Cornélius should have chosen to picture a detail from the text which has not often attracted the attention of the illustrators of the Ballad: the barren staff of the pilgrim “bloom[ing] in the great Pope’s sight” evoked in the 15th stanza of the 4th section of the poem (l. 5–6, Wilde 2000a, 210). Such an image harmonises with Cornélius’s vision of the poem as a parable about redemption and regeneration. It also draws attention to the rich layering of intertexts in Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, since the miraculous flowering of the staff is an allusion to the third act of Wagner’s Tannhaüser (1845), used by Swinburne in “Laus Veneris” (l. 369–372; Swinburne 28) and referred to by Wilde in his correspondence.21 I would also be tempted to read Cornélius’s illustration metapoetically as providing an instance of the strange, hybrid flowers produced by the crossfertilisation of British and French cultures. Both forms of translations analysed here, verbal and visual, shed light on the rich Franco-British literary and artistic exchanges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also invite us to reconsider the paradigm of lineage or genealogy, often used when dealing with both illustration and adaptation, whereby the illustration or the adaptation is cast as an offspring, at times rebellious, at times obedient, of the “original” from which it draws its inspiration—such an approach being foregrounded by an implicit hierarchy between the “original” and its various “derivative products.” I think however that such a vertical, hierarchical model fails to account adequately for the way illustration or adaptation works. I would be tempted to suggest, in line with Douglas Lanier’s approach to 20  References or allusions to Christ and Christic Passion appear several times in the poem, for instance section I, stanza 5, l. 1 (“Dear Christ”, Wilde 2000a, 195), section III, stanza 18, l. 5–6 (“bitter wine upon a sponge,” Wilde 2000a, 204), section III, stanza 24, l. 5 (“wounds of Christ,” Wilde 2000a, 205), section IV, stanza 17, l. 6 (“God’s son died for all,” Wilde 2000a, 211), section IV, stanza 22, l. 4 and 6 (“[…] That Christ for sinners gave,” “Whom Christ came down to save,” Wilde 2000, 212), or section VI, stanza 2, l. 2 (“Till Christ call forth the dead,” Wilde 2000a, 216). 21  Letter to Dallhousie Young,? 5 June 1897 (Wilde 2000b, 882); letter to Robert Ross, 16 April 1900 (Wilde 2000b, 1180).

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Shakespearian adaptations (Lanier 2014), that that paradigm be replaced by a horizontal, rhizomatic model. In other words, instead of setting oneself the reductive task of tracing origins, playing a game of spotting the differences between the original and its “copies” or looking for errors and inaccuracies, it would be more fruitful to conceive of both adaptation and illustration as networks in which older and more recent creations reflect and shed light on one another, and on the text on which they are based— to see both adaptation and illustration as Deleuzian rhizomes, characterised by dynamic processes of “becoming,” by constant movements of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. In his works, Gilles Deleuze repeatedly uses the metaphor of the wasp and the orchid (see for instance Deleuze and Guattari 10), a reference to the first encounter between Jupien and Baron de Charlus in the opening pages of Sodom et Gomorrha, the fourth volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Proust, drawing on a botanical metaphor inspired by Darwin, gives an account of the metamorphosis of both Jupien and Charlus as well as of their “mating dance,” under the scrutiny of the narrator/voyeur (Proust n.p.). With this passage as a starting point, Deleuze uses the term deterritorialise to explain how, in the context of pollination, the orchid forms an image of a wasp, but the wasp is also deterritorialised, becoming a piece of the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. For Arnaud Villani, the image of the wasp and the orchid stands as an emblem of the key concepts of in-betweenness and encounter (in the sense of cross-fertilisation or cross-pollination) in Deleuze’s philosophy (Villani 25–27). The metaphor of the wasp and the orchid may also provide an apt paradigm to make sense of the transcultural and intermedial adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol considered in this chapter, and more generally speaking, of the connections between adaptation and illustration envisaged in this volume.

Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. 1989. The Albatross. Trans. Richard Wilbur. In The Flowers of Evil [Les Fleurs du Mal]. Ed. Marthiel and Jackson Mathews. New York: New Directions, p. 10. Bensimon, Paul. 1996. Note sur la traduction. In La Ballade de la geôle de Reading. Oscar Wilde. Œuvres. Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.” 1596–1597. Brochard, Lucien. 1953. Henry Davray, Le Mercure de France et l’Angleterre. Unpublished PhD thesis. Université de Paris.

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Cohen, William A. 2013. Wilde’s French. In Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives, ed. Joseph Bristow, 233–259. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dauphiné, Claude. 1992. Rachilde et le ‘Mercure’. Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 92 (1): 17–28. Davray, Henry-D. 1898. Lettres anglaises. Mercure de France, April, pp. 323–324 [Contains Davray’s Review of The Ballad of Reading Gaol]. ———. 1925 [1926a]. Les apocryphes d’Oscar Wilde. Mercure de France, 1 October, pp. 104–117; and 1 March, pp. 308–317. ———. 1926b. Oscar Wilde et la vie de prison en Angleterre. Mercure de France, 15 October, pp. 313–336. ———. 1926c. De quelques “poèmes en prose” inédits d’Oscar Wilde. Mercure de France, 15 January, pp. 257–277. ———. 1927. L’histoire de la Ballade de la geôle de Reading. Mercure de France, 1 April, pp. 68–101 [Also Used as the Preface to the 1927 edition Illustrated by Jean-Gabriel Daragnès]. ———. 1913 [1928a]. Comment fut traduite en français La Ballade de la geôle de Reading. Reprinted in Oscar Wilde: la tragédie finale. Paris: Mercure de France. ———. 1928b. Oscar Wilde: la tragédie finale. Paris: Mercure de France. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum. Dierkes-Thrun, Petra. 2018. Oscar Wilde, Rachilde and the Mercure de France. In Wilde’s Other Worlds, ed. Michael F. Davis and Petra Dierkes-Thrun. New York/ Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge. [n.p., epub]. Doré, Gustave, and William Blanchard Jerrold. 1872. London: A Pilgrimage. London: Grant & Co. Eells, Emily. 2010. Wilde’s French Salomé. Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [Online] 72 (Automne). Accessed 5 June 2022. http://journals.openedition. org/cve/2729; https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.2729. Elliott, Kamilla. 2003. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellmann, Richard. 1987 [1988]. Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin. Escuret, Annie. 2005. Henry-D.  Davray and the Mercure de France. In The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe, ed. Patrick Parrinder and John S. Perington, 28–47. London: Thoemmes Continuum. Fehrle, Johannes, and Mark Schmitt. 2018. Adaptation as Translation: Transferring Cultural Narratives. Komparatistick Online, “Adaptation as Cultural Translation”: 1–7. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.komparatistik-­online. de/index.php/komparatistik_online/issue/view/15. Frank, Peter (ed.). 2007. Jean-Gabriel Daragnès. Un artiste du livre à Montmartre. Paris: Musée de Sens/Éditions du Lanteau.

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Frankel, Nicholas. 2000. Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. ———. 2017. Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Garnier, Marie Reine. 1927. Henry James et la France. Paris: Honoré Champion. Giudicelli, Xavier. 2016. Lire/voir The Ballad of Reading Gaol d’Oscar Wilde à la lumière de l’expressionnisme. Sillages Critiques [Online] 21. Accessed 5 June 2022. http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4989. Harris, Frank. 1928. La Vie et les confessions d’Oscar Wilde. Trans. Henry-D. Davray & Madeleine Vernon. Paris: Mercure de France. Lanier, Douglas. 2014. Shakespearian Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value. In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, ed. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, 21–40. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Levasseur, Olivier. 2009. Jean-Georges Cornélius. Un primitif du XXe siècle. Paris: Éditions Apogée. Mason, Stuart. 1914. A Bibliography of Oscar Wilde. London: T. Werner and Laurie. Nerval, Gérard de. 2005. Les Chimères. Ed. Bertrand Marchal. Paris: Gallimard, “Poésie/Gallimard”. Newell, Kate. 2017. Expanding Adaptation Networks: From Illustration to Novelization. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1875. Le Corbeau. Trans. Stéphane Mallarmé. Ill. Edgar Manet. Paris: Lesclide. Proust, Marcel. 2003. In Search of Lost Time, vol. 4. Sodom and Gomorrah. Trans. John Sturrock. London: Penguin. (ebook) Ransome, Arthur. 1914. Oscar Wilde. Trans. G. de Toulouse-Lautrec and Henry-D. Davray. Paris: Mercure de France. Scott, Walter. 1819 [1984]. Ivanhoe. Ed. A.N. Wilson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. 1888 [1895]. Laus Veneris. Trans. Francis Vielé-­ Griffin. [First Published in Revue des indépendants (May)]. Paris: Mercure de France. ———. 1970. Laus Veneris. In Poems and Ballads (1866), ed. Morse Peckham, 13–30. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Villani, Arnaud. 2020. Gilles Deleuze: la guêpe et l’orchidée. Paris: Éditions de la rue d’Ulm/Presses de l’École normale supérieure. Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet. 1995. Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation (1958). Trans. and ed. Juan C.  Sager and M. J. Hamel. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wilde, Oscar. 1898a. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by C.3.3. London: Leonard Smithers. ———. 1898b. Ballade de la geôle de Reading. Trans. Henry-D. Davray. Mercure de France, vol. XXVI, n°101 (May): 356–370; Paris: Mercure de France.

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———. 1918. Ballade de la geôle de Reading par C.3.3. Preface and trans. Henry-D. Davray. Ill. Jean-Gabriel Daragnès. Paris: Léon Pichon. ———. 1927. Ballade de la geôle de Reading. Trans. Henry-D. Davray. Ill. Jean-­ Georges Cornélius. Paris: Javal et Bourdeaux. ———. 1989. La Ballade de la geôle de Reading. Trans. Jean Besson. Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme. ———. 1996. La Ballade de la geôle de Reading. Trans. Paul Bensimon. Oscar Wilde. Œuvres. Ed. Jean Gattégno, introduction Pascal Aquien. Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade”, 45–64. ———. 2000a. The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Vol. I. In Poems and Poems in Prose, ed. Bobby Fong, Karl Beckson, and Ian Small, 195–216. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000b. In Complete Letters, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Fourth Estate. ———. 2006. In The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1890–1891, ed. Joseph Bristow. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics). Wilson, Simon. 2018. ‘Colours More Than Sentences’: Illustrated Editions of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. A Review of the Exhibition at the Berkshire Records Office, 12 March–15 June 2018. The Wildean 53 (July): 120–131.

CHAPTER 12

What If the Grimms Had Been Born in Brazil? The Case of Five (Illustrated) Adaptations Miriam de Paiva Vieira

“Once upon a time, there was a lovely princess … the charming prince lived in a beautiful castle … and they lived happily ever after”. This typical fairy tale framing has been feeding Western collective imagination generation after generation. It is not a novelty that the European oral tradition of fairy tales has been revisited through all sorts of transmediation processes, such as interlingual translations, rewritings, illustrations, and adaptations. Mazza Edições, a Brazilian publishing house that aims to bring the “best of Brazilian and African-Brazilian culture to their readers”,1 has released, so far, a collection of five illustrated children’s books that combines all the mentioned medial procedures. All five front covers assert that 1  My translation of “o melhor da cultura brasileira e afro-brasileira aos seus leitores” (Mazza Publishing House website). URL: https://mazzaedicoes.com.br/a-editora/

M. de Paiva Vieira (*) Universidade Federal de São João del Rei, São João del-Rei, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_12

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the volumes are adaptations by writers Cristina Agostinho and Ronaldo Simões Coelho, and illustrator Walter Lara. Meanwhile, the five back covers bear a text questioning what would have happened if the Brothers Grimm had been born in Brazil. Therefore, in order to “reimagine fantasy within fantasy, without losing the charm of tradition”,2 these tales are (re) told by “beings with our faces and our skin color”3 that confront creatures of local folklore, and the fairy tales were set in different regions of the country. By seeking the empowerment of Brazilian children who are not able to see themselves in previous transmediations of Rapunzel, Goldilocks and the Three Little Bears, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, and Thumbling, the children’s book collection features Rapunzel e o Quibungo (2012), Afra e os três lobos-guará (2013a), Joãozinho e Maria (2013b), Cinderela e Chico Rei (2015), and O pequeno polegar (2019). Lars Elleström suggests the study of adaptation within the “communication across borders of specialization” in “research areas that involve multiple media types” (Elleström 2017, 114). Kate Newell, likewise, proposes the expansion of adaptation networks (Newell 2017b). Since “most studies of illustration are performed within the context of illustration only” (Elleström 2013, 114), Newell’s cross-disciplinary approach to adaptation and illustration questions the maxim stating that “adaptation transforms whereas illustration explains” (Newell 2017a, 479). Henceforth, departing from Linda Hutcheon’s consolidated definition of “adaptation as an extended, deliberate, announced revisitation of a particular work of art” (Hutcheon 170), I here reflect upon the possibility of illustrations to be “openly acknowledged and extended reworkings” (16). Nevertheless, before Hutcheon recognized adaptations to be “translations in the form of intersemiotic transpositions from one sign system (e.g., words) to another (e.g., images)” (16), Claus Clüver had already claimed that “there are illustrations that can be read as intersemiotic translations” (Clüver 1989, 76). In a more recent work, the author argues that “representations of verbal texts by purely visual means are grouped as visual illustrations, which are usually not considered adaptations” (Clüver 2017, 470). Meanwhile, for him, adaptation should be distinguished from “all other forms of intermedial transposition”, illustration included, as it may 2  My translation of “reimaginar a fantasia dentro da fantasia, sem perder o encantamento da tradição” (Mazza Publishing House website). 3  My translation of “seres com nosso rosto e nossa pele” (Mazza Publishing House website).

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designate both the “process” or “the result of that process”, the latter being “a special configuration in a new medium that incorporates significant elements of the source medium” (459). Correspondingly, Newell, who sees adaptation as a process of “rewriting” (2017b, 8), suggests it to be “an act of re-visioning that contributes to and communicates with a larger network of similar actions” (19). Also grounded in Adrienne Rich’s notion of re-vision (1972), Julie Sanders stresses the “heartfelt political commitment standing behind acts of literary appropriation” (23). By developing the notion of “translation in its broadest sense, linguistic and interpretative, in global, intercultural contexts” (18) and relying on the “movement of proximation”, as suggested by Gerard Genette (1997, 304), Sanders discusses how adaptations and appropriations are likely to be brought closer “to the audience’s personal frame of reference, allowing always for variation between local contexts and audiences” (Sanders 21). For her, despite the more or less explicit and/or embedded relationship between source and target, the process involved is “frequently, if not inevitably, [a] political” act (123). In short, by “bringing together the comfort of ritual and recognition with the delight of surprise and novelty” (Hutcheon 173), the children’s book collection is here investigated as the result of a process in which Lara’s watercolor illustrations promote an extended engagement with Agostinho and Coelho’s text rewritten in Portuguese and aimed at a young Brazilian audience. Although Agostinho and Coelho’s text adds new geographical and sociocultural environments to the traditional oral tales, it is through the images provided by Lara that the readers are likely to culturally engage with the adaptations, since they not only supplement the plot events of the sources, but above all transform the long-standing tradition of Caucasian features for the characters. The aim of this article is, therefore, to discuss how the indissoluble relations between word and image make the investigated media products genuine cases of “repetition with [cultural] variation” (Hutcheon 4). All the volumes in the children’s book collection examined herein present the main “cardinal elements” (McFarlane 13–14) of the literary pieces (re)written by Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the nineteenth century: Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Aschenputtel, Daumesdick, as well as Goldilocks and the Three Little Bears, which happens to be the only tale not retold in Brothers Grimm’s classical two-volume collection Kinder und Hausmärchen (1812). Although this title implies that the content was aimed at both adults and infants, the German storytellers were inspired by

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oral narratives that explored moral values and carried sexual connotative symbols not aimed at children. The two-volume collection was translated by Margaret Hunt as (Children and the) Household Tales (1884). It should be noted that some of these literary pieces are themselves adaptations of Pentamerone, a seventeenth-century collection of fifty stories to be told in ten days by Neapolitan writer Giambatistta Basile. Two of the tales under study had also been adapted and translated into French by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (1697). All the source tales have been analyzed under different critical lines of research which will not be developed in this chapter. Having in mind that the notion of hybridity (Bhabha 207) in “colonial cultures […] is particularly problematic” (Sanders 21), the European colonial past in Brazil tends to dominate indigenous and African heritage. For instance, the mid-twentieth-century Walt Disney World animated adaptations are often regarded as originals of the so-called fairy tales, especially by the younger generations, reinforcing Sanders’s premise of how “disneyfication” has “had a profound influence on modern understandings of the form” (91). As much as the fidelity discourse has already been solved within adaptation studies, it is a hard task to investigate an adaptation without comparing it to previous related media products, as claimed by Jørgen Bruhn (Bruhn 2013, 83), who suggests that the source(s) will always be influenced by their adaptation(s) in a dialogic two-way process. Accordingly, in a transdisciplinary approach between biology and literature, Gary Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon propose that, like genes, narratives are “replicators” (Bortolotti and Hutcheon 447), so that an adaptation should be viewed as a descendent and the original work, its ancestor (446). It was thus provoked by thinking “anew about the broader questions of why and how certain stories are told and retold in our culture” (445, emphasis by the authors) that I got involved in the investigation of Agostinho, Coelho, and Lara’s children’s book collection. For instance, one of the adapted stories takes place in the state of Piauí, in the north region of Brazil, another in Bahia, located on the northeast coast, while the other three are set in the mountains of Minas Gerais in the southeast, where the authors, the illustrator, and I live. Besides, the great majority of fairy tale versions in Brazilian Portuguese have assumed Caucasian characterizations for their covers and/or inside illustrations, which are likely to be the main element of proximation between young children and books. Even if Hutcheon has suggested that “traveling stories adapt to local cultures” (Hutcheon 177), Disney-like

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characterization provides a glimpse into a universe that privileges the Caucasian ethnic segment so that Brazilian parents and schools end up perpetuating a preponderance that may directly affect the self-esteem of local non-Caucasian children. Just for the record, according to the latest census,4 over 50% of Brazilians declare themselves to be black or pardo, a phenotype resulting from mixed origins. So, according to the text presented on all the back covers of the investigated children’s book collection, in order to “reimagine fantasy within fantasy, without losing the charm of tradition”, these tales are set in the countryside of different regions of Brazil and (re)told by “beings with our faces and our skin color” (collection back cover). The next case study sections are not presented according to any chronology of publication, but rather according to their engagement as adaptors, with writers Agostinho and Coelho and watercolor illustrator Walter Lara, departing from the princesses’ tales—namely Rapunzel e o Quibungo (2012) and Cinderela e Chico Rei (2015)—and followed up with tales about (misbehaving) children—Afra e os três lobos-guará (2013a), O pequeno polegar (2019), and Joãozinho e Maria (2013b).

Rapunzel e o Quibungo The Brothers Grimm’s tale of the long-haired young lady locked in a tower (1812) was inspired by a story found in the 5th volume of the collection Kleine Romane (1790) by German writer Friedrich Schulz. Rapunzel also carries traces of Persinette (1698), by French writer Charlotte Rose de Caumont de la Force, which happens to be an adaptation of Petrosinella, a tale from Basile’s Pentamerone. It has also been said to loosely resemble the Persian tale of Rudāba, who also lets down her trusses as a rope for her sweetheart. Initially invented for adults, it was throughout later adaptations that the narrative became suitable for young readers. Rapunzel e o Quibungo (2012) is the first volume of the collection. Instead of the Portuguese translation for the traditional opening “once 4  Brazilian population is inherently mixed; for statistics about racial identity, Wikipedia provides a general overview on censuses conducted in 2010 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_Brazil#IBGE’s_racial_categories. Official information is available, in Portuguese, at: https://biblioteca.ibge.gov.br/visualizacao/livros/liv49891.pdf(accessed 5 June 2022).

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upon time”, the story starts with “há muito tempo, na Bahia”, stating that the story is set “a long time ago” in a Brazilian state located by the coast of the northeast region that happens to be one of the main centers of African-Brazilian culture. The narrator goes on by telling us how the long-­ haired young lady was singing by the beach and got locked in a bamboo tower by a papão named Quibungo, so that she would only sing to him from then on. Some time passes by and, as in the European narrative(s), a prince hears a very sad melody coming from a tower. Just for the record, probably in order to “evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places” (Hutcheon 176), the name of the prince, Dakarai, has African roots and means happiness. Meanwhile, Bicho papão is a Brazilian folkloric personification of fear that kidnaps naughty children at night and makes them disappear in his big sack. The name Quibungo, in turn, is given to an ugly brutally cruel creature without any moral purposes that belongs to the African-Brazilian oral tradition. There are a few other subtle variations at the textual level to reinforce that the events occur in the main center of African-Brazilian culture, such as the food brought to Rapunzel by Quibungo—manioc, fish, and cassava flour—and the presents prepared by prince Dakarai—coconut, other local fruits, and a colored seed necklace. Otherwise, despite the European witch being turned into a cultural hybrid monster, the plot events sequence is in accordance to the main cardinal elements of the source tale(s). Illustrator Walter Lara employs a watercolor layered technique in the children’s book collection that uses a minimum combination of water and paint to obtain a sort of drier, opaque effect in his illustrations. Although quite delightful to the eyes, especially the front cover5, the inside illustrations of Rapunzel e o Quibungo play a supplementary role as they reinforce the African-Brazilian references of the rewritten tale. In short, “just as populations of organisms adapt to local environments” (Hutcheon 177), Agostinho and Coelho’s re-vision of Rapunzel’s tale evolves and adapts it to the local culture at the textual level, but the exquisite images, as questioned by Newell, are there simply to explain.

5  For Rapunzel e o Quibungo’s front cover, see URL: https://www.mazzaedicoes.com. br/obra/rapunzel-e-oquibungo/ (accessed 5 June 2022).

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Cinderela e Chico Rei The Brothers Grimm’s Aschenputtel, the tale of a peasant working girl who marries a monarch, happens to be an adaptation of Cenerentola, another tale from Basile’s Pentamerone. It was also translated and adapted by Perrault as Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre (1697). The story of Cinderella carries traces from other Western ancient narratives as well, such as French author Marie de France’s Le Fresne (twelfth century) and the Greek writer Strabo’s Rhodopis (first century BC). Its narrative can even be traced back to Eastern oral tradition, as in the Chinese tale known as Yeh-Shen (circa 860). The tale’s main cardinal elements are present in Cinderela e Chico Rei in both text and image. Although the stepmother and the wicked sisters are only briefly mentioned by the text, the illustrations reinforce the core of the well-known narrative sequence alongside the text or in full doublepage illustrations. As expected, the protagonist is depicted in ragged clothes in a room with pans (which suggests she is in a kitchen) and a broom (which highlights her cleaning duties) beside a pumpkin (a foreshadowing of what is yet to happen). But Lara’s watercolor depicts a kitchen in a traditional colonial-style house, from the blue wooden windows, to the red brick wood-burning stove, and the peculiar floor tiles (Fig. 12.1). These characteristic features of Brazilian eighteenth-century colonial houses thus allow this unusual illustrated setting to play a major role within the (re)location of the source tale’s narrative. In the next plate, the protagonist is holding the pumpkins and the mice to the tiny God fairy just before the transformation charm. The rough wooden table, the blueish china, and the white cheese are all typical elements from the region of Vila Rica, today’s UNESCO’s World Heritage historical town Ouro Preto that was the State’s political capital until the beginning of the eighteenth century (1821). Due to this location reference, it may be assumed that Cinderella e o Chico Rei is set before the eighteenth century, which, for us Brazilians, feels like “a long time ago”, as indicated by the story’s opening sentence, “há muito tempo, em Vila Rica”. It should be mentioned that the prince is named after Chico Rei,6 a legend from Brazilian local oral tradition who was the king of a tribe in Congo, Africa, but was taken to Brazil as a slave. In Vila Rica, he bought 6  For Cinderela e Chico Rei’s front cover, see URL: https://www.mazzaedicoes.com.br/ obra/cinderela-e-chico-rei/ (accessed 5 June 2022).

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Fig. 12.1  Cinderella crying in the kitchen after her step family leaves for the ball without her. Agostinho, Cristina, and Ronaldo Coelho. Cinderela e Chico Rei. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 2015, 8–9. Watercolor.

his freedom and became one of the richest men in town. Meanwhile, in Agostinho and Coelho’s adaptation, Cinderella has been bought as a slave after the death of her royal parents. As in Rapunzel e o Quibungo, the characters’ heritage is made very clear by the adapted text. When Chico Rei, the prince, finds the missing shoe, the illustrative skyline recalls the many isolated local churches placed on the top of the regional mountain range typical of former Vila Rica. Thus, unlike the supplementary role played in Rapunzel e o Quibungo, Lara’s illustrations for Cinderela e Chico Rei not only explain, but also tie in with the tale’s relocated setting by means of relevant visual input.

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Afra e os três lobos-guará The tale of the girl and the anthropomorphic family is the only one in Agostinho and Coelho’s children’s book collection that comes from the British oral tradition. The folk tale about three bachelor bears who had their house invaded by a misbehaved old woman was anonymously published as “The Story of the Three Bears” (1837) in one of the seven volumes entitled The Doctor by Englishman Robert Southey, one of the great Lake Poets. After being set to verse in the same year by bookseller and publisher George Nicol, the tale was republished, acknowledging Southey’s authorship, in 1848. Like our two previous case studies, Rapunzel and Cinderella, very similar tales, also not targeting children, were previously circulated. For instance, in Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children (1849), Joseph Cundall turns the old woman into a silver-haired girl named Silver Locks. The badly behaved character later became Goldilocks, and the bachelor bears were turned into the likable trio formed by Papa, Mama, and baby bear. As there are no bears in Brazil, they became maned wolves in Afra e os três lobos-guará. The narrative does not start by establishing the setting after the opening “a long time ago” as do the other volumes of the children’s book collection. The first thing the narrator mentions is how the protagonist Afra received many presents from her parents for her birthday. In the second paragraph we learn that the family spent the following Sunday at a park located in a mountain range called Serra do Caraça. Another peculiarity of this volume is that, instead of the traditional Portuguese version of “they lived happily ever after”, it ends with the narrator telling how the girl befriended the wolves and often returned to Parque do Caraça to pay them a visit. The main plot events of Goldilocks and the three little bears can, however, be easily followed by both text and illustrated watercolors in Afra e os três lobos-guará: the protagonist breaks into a house, breaks chairs, jumps on the beds, falls asleep, and is suddenly wakened by the family composed by animals—in this case, maned wolves. Nonetheless, in this Brazilian version, after running away from the animals’ house, the protagonist goes home, tells her parents about her misbehavior, and returns to apologize with a pot of stew prepared by her mother. According to information informally provided by writer Cristina Agostinho, the aim of this added ending was to show that, in spite of being naughty, the girl would not lie to her parents. Since the possible perils of uninvited expeditions in someone else’s domains are already

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Fig. 12.2  Afra takes a pot of stew to apologize. Agostinho, Cristina, and Ronaldo Coelho. Afra e os três lobos-guarás. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 2013a, 12–13. Watercolor.

elicited, this additional ending offers a somewhat unnecessary moral, but what mainly interests me in the volume’s closure is the way the setting is depicted by Lara’s watercolor (Fig. 12.2). According to Agostinho and Coelho’s written narrative, the story is set in the Natural Park Serra do Caraça,7 a natural park also in the state of Minas Gerais, a pilgrimage destination controlled by Catholic priests from the Vincentian Family. Since the priests feed the maned wolves, the animals are people friendly and every night a pack goes to the main building peacefully seeking for food, which has become an attraction for families with children staying at the pilgrimage Inn. As suggested by Newell, “illustrators face decisions regarding whether and how to depict narrative events that might be absent from or not 7  URL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sergio_mourao/5887459363/in/ album-72157627084390648/ (accessed 5 June 2022).

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explicit in the prose text, but that seem essential to plot development” (Newell 2017b, 79). For instance, contrary to the children’s book collection’s version of Cinderella, who is said to have been bought as a slave after the death of her royal parents, there is no indication whatsoever in the text that the protagonist Afra is an African-Brazilian child. Her name might be considered a hint, but, other than that, there is no other clue. The new characterization thus relies heavily on Lara’s choices as presented by the watercolor illustrations. In a word, while the writers use a local curiosity as a departure point for their adaptation, the illustrator takes advantage of the inhabitants’ features and geographical environment to compose his visual narrative. The creative and interpretative watercolors of Afra e os três lobos-guará  8 not only fit the tale into the Brazilian context, but above all adapt the traveling story to Brazilian culture.

O pequeno polegar The Brothers Grimm published two tales about thumb-sized characters in the collection Kinder und Hausmärchen (1812): Daumesdick (Thumbling) and Daumerlings Wanderschaft (Thumbling as Journeyman). In the former tale, the tiny astute child convinces his father to sell him to two strange men and later tricks them, while in the latter, he chooses to go on adventures seeking money by himself. The character returns home safely at the end of the two narratives. Contrary to the German versions, the characters have the same name in both English translations. According to notes in Hunt’s Household Tales (1884), there have been records of stories about little Thumbs since ancient Greece. Agostinho and Coelho’s adaptation mostly relies on Daumesdick’s plot events to relocate the character’s tricks to the State of Piauí, situated in the North of Brazil. Although known as Pequeno Polegar (a literal translation for “little thumb” in Portuguese), the name of the adaptation’s protagonist is Jamelão, which happens to be a dark purple fruit from a tropical tree brought from India to Brazil by the Portuguese colonizers. The fruit is depicted by the illustrator on the volume’s first plate (Fig.  12.3), when the relocated setting is visually introduced. Besides the character’s name being Jamelão, much like in Afra e os três lobos-guará, there is no other allusion whatsoever to the character’s 8  For Afra e os três lobos-guará’s front cover, see URL: https://www.mazzaedicoes.com. br/obra/afra-e-os-tres-lobos-guaras/ (accessed 5 June 2022).

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Fig. 12.3  Pequeno Polegar’s house with Serra da Capivara on the bottom left and the Jamelão fruits on the top right. Agostinho, Cristina, and Ronaldo Coelho. O pequeno polegar. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 2019, 2–3. Watercolor.

heritage. The story, the only one starting with the traditional fairy tale opening “once upon a time”, is set in Serra da Capivara, a mountain range situated in the north of Piauí. The illustrator Lara reinforces both natural and man-made landscapes and even includes a watercolor illustration of the protagonist Pequeno Polegar admiring the mountain range’s pre-­ historical rock paintings. Meanwhile, the local environment is strengthened by the depiction of very characteristic regional native animals, such as the Jaó (undulated tinamou, a species of ground bird) the protagonist rides, an anteater, an armadillo, and red ants (Fig. 12.4). In the sequence in which Pequeno Polegar tricks the two strange men—thieves in the case of Agostinho and Coelho’s adaptation—Lara’s illustration places him on the top of a tower made of coins of one Real (Brazilian currency). In short, composed by typical Brazilian natural landscape, fauna, flora, and even Brazilian currency, it is the watercolor

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Fig. 12.4  Native animals. Agostinho, Cristina, and Ronaldo Coelho. O pequeno polegar. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 2019, 5; 15. Watercolor.

illustrations that overwhelmingly set the announced ambience of O Pequeno Polegar.9

Joãozinho e Maria The last case study is an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel, the well-known tale of the siblings who get lost in the forest and are captured by an anthropophagic witch. It loosely resembles previous tales, such as Basile’s Nennillo and Nenella (1634) and Perrault’s Le Petit Poucet (1697). The narrative also carries traces from Thumbling since Hansel has been described as being as tiny as a thumb. The tale has been translated into Portuguese as Joãozinho e Maria and, as in O pequeno polegar, authors Agostinho and Coelho chose to maintain the traditional 9  For O Pequeno Polegar’s front cover, see URL: https://www.mazzaedicoes.com.br/ obra/o-pequeno-polegar/(accessed 5 June 2022).

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translated title for their adaptation, in which the sequence of plot events proposed by the German storytellers is kept. But the volume presents other intriguing mutations regarding the extended engagement between text and illustrations. Like most of the volumes in the collection, the introductory trope “a long time ago” is followed by its (re)location—now in Serra da Mantiqueira, another mountain range, in the state of Minas Gerais. The text makes it clear that the tale is set in this specific region of Brazil also by means of local food references, such as native wild fruit—guava and jabuticaba—and the traditional regional sweets and candies that the witch’s house is made of—brigadeiro, pé de moleque, jujuba, maria-mole. In the same fashion as O Pequeno Polegar, the infant siblings are depicted in a very familiar environment surrounded by regional species of fruits, birds, and trees when lost in the wild forest. Just as in the Brothers Grimm’s source tale—Hansel and Gretel—the characterization of Joãozinho e Maria only makes it evident how poor the two young protagonists are. In this volume there is no evidence, nor subtle hints, of the children’s heritage, as in the other volumes of the children’s book collection. For instance, as a bedtime story when the narrative is only heard without following the illustrated book, the classical Caucasian features might easily be (re)produced in the listener’s mind. In short, by enhancing the indissolubility of the relations between word and image, it is Lara’s innovative watercolor illustrations of “beings with our faces and our skin color” that play the aimed variation role in the case of Joãozinho e Maria.10

Final Thoughts Although the children’s book collection examined herein is inspired by the Eurocentric oral tradition tales of Rapunzel, Cinderella, Goldilocks and the Three Little Bears, Thumbling, and Hansel and Gretel, Brazilian readers are likely to culturally engage with the adapted tales titled Rapunzel e o Quibungo (2012), Cinderela e Chico Rei (2015), Afra e os três lobos-guará (2013a), O pequeno polegar (2019), and Joãozinho e Maria (2013b). As observed in the study case sections, Agostinho and Coelho re-vision the Eurocentric tales by evolving and adapting their main cardinal elements to 10  For Joãozinho e Maria’s front cover, see URL: https://www.mazzaedicoes.com.br/ obra/joaozinho-e-maria/(accessed 5 June 2022).

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the local culture at the text level. In Rapunzel e o Quibungo, Lara’s illustrations, although exquisite, are there simply to explain. The creative and interpretative watercolors of Cinderela e Chico Rei and Afra e os três lobos-­ guará corroborate their setting (re)locations by means of relevant visual input composed of regional Brazilian natural landscape, fauna, flora, and even Brazilian currency, in the case of inventive O Pequeno Polegar. Despite having added fewer whimsical elements to the classical tale narrative, Joãozinho e Maria’s characterization is the one that confirms the premise that Lara’s illustrations transform as much as they explain. All things considered, as in “mosaics of citations” (Hutcheon 21), after having combined different (trans)medial procedures, such as interlingual translation, rewriting, illustration, and adaptation, as well as by crossing the “borders of specialization” and involving “multiple media types” (Elleström 114), the investigated children’s book collection has evidenced the several textual references to other tales, some of them belonging to Brazilian Folklore, as in Rapunzel e o Quibungo and Cinderela e Chico Rei. By openly acknowledging the deliberate announced revisitation of fairy tales, the Brazilian authors, Agostinho and Coelho, have shown how traveling stories “evolve and mutate to adapt to new times”, different places and cultures (Hutcheon 176). This “re-visioning” (Rich) of the European oral tradition not only offers the “comfort of ritual and recognition with the delight of surprise and novelty” (Hutcheon 173), but also endorses Sander’s emphasis on the “political commitment behind acts of literary appropriation” within “global, intercultural contexts” (23), as clearly evidenced by Afra e os três lobos-guará and O Pequeno Polegar. The illustrator’s “extended reworking” (Hutcheon 16) done in Joãozinho e Maria has confirmed Newell’s questioning of the premise that “adaptation transforms whereas illustration explains” (479). As is revealed in the re-­ appropriation of Rapunzel, in which the European witch is turned into a hybrid monster of African ancestry, the investigated word and image hybridization is able to innovate while repeating, relocating, and translating different traditions. Before closing my final thoughts, I would like to briefly share a didactic experience I promoted in (both undergraduate and graduate) Intermedial Studies courses I have previously taught in order to develop the thesis that Lara’s illustrations are the main trigger to transform the deep-rooted Caucasian features of the adapted tale’s characters into familiar faces for Brazilian readers. The experiment may be summed up as follows: the five adapted texts were transcribed and printed in regular A4 paper. Then the

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classes were divided into groups and each group was assigned with the reading of a different text. Without giving them any hint, the first given instruction was to identify possible sources and references. After having identified the source tale(s), the groups were supposed to highlight textual evidence of the protagonist(s)’s characterization. Based on such textual evidence, each group created their own visual interpretation of the tale’s protagonist(s). The visual interpretations were done according to the students’ skills: some drew, some used paper collage, others chose computer-­ based montage. One group even created a three-dimensional paper character. Students’ creativity aside, the results were quite similar in the three groups in which the task was performed: Rapunzel and Cinderella were beautifully depicted as African-Brazilian young ladies; Thumbling was depicted as a smiling African-Brazilian child. Afra, however, was depicted as African-Brazilian, as dark-haired, and as a blond little girl. When asked about their choices, the group that depicted her as African-­ Brazilian mentioned the name reference, and the ones that chose to represent her with yellow curls, recognized they had been influenced by the reference to Goldilocks’s narrative. As predicted, João and Maria were depicted as skinny frightened children, but only one group depicted them as African-Brazilian. When questioned, they said that since the story is set in the countryside of Serra da Mantiqueira, the characters should resemble the local inhabitants. This group was formed by primary school teachers who work in the countryside of Minas Gerais State, while all the other groups were formed by younger students who live in the city. This hands­on experience was an essential motivator for delving into the matter here presented. Departing from the transcription of fairy tale re-visions, students experienced for themselves the process of adaptation. Their visual (re)appropriations both (a) express the hybridity of our culture in which African heritage is inherently and undoubtedly intermingled with our European colonial past and (b) reinforce the relevance of Lara’s illustrations in the investigated collection. In a nutshell, Walter Lara’s watercolors are themselves adaptations of the adapted tales since they not only supplement the plot events and characterization of the sources, but also set them in nearby recognizable environments and transform the long-lasting Caucasian features of the characters into recognizable ones with which Brazilian children can identify. Meanwhile, the bridge between teaching and research contributed to the dissemination of multiplying agents that will hopefully impact the formation of critical readers apt to comprehend globalized literary and discursive cultural phenomena. The children’s

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book collection about “beings with our faces and our skin color” empowers Brazilian children by feeding their imagination of “fantasy within fantasy, without losing the charm of tradition” (Agostinho and Coelho, collection backcover) by means of the indissoluble word and image relation.

Works Cited Agostinho, Cristina, and Ronaldo Coelho. 2012. Rapunzel e o Quibungo. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições. ———. 2013a. Illustrated by Walter Lara. Afra e os três lobos-guarás. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições. ———. 2013b. Joãozinho e Maria. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições. ———. 2015. Cinderela e Chico Rei. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições. ———. 2019. O pequeno polegar. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições. Basile, Giambattista. n.d. Stories from the Pentamerone. Project Gutenberg’s Stories from Pentamerone, by Giambattista Basile. Accessed 5 June 2022. http:// www.gutenberg.org/files/2198/2198-­h/2198-­h.htm. Bhabha, Homi K. 1995. Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences. In The Post-­ Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 206–209. London and New York: Routledge. Bortolotti, Gary, and Linda Hutcheon. 2007. On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically. New Literary History 38: 443–458. Bruhn, Jørgen, Anne Gjelsvik, and Erik Hanssen, eds. 2013. Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions. London: Bloomsbury. Clüver, Claus. 1989. On Intersemiotic Transposition. Poetics Today 10 (1): 55–90. ———. 2017. Ekphrasis and Adaptation. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 459–476. New York: Oxford University Press. Cundall, Joseph. 1850 [2014]. Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children. Kindle Edition. Elleström, Lars. 2013. Adaptations within the Field of Media Transformations. In Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, ed. Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Erik Hanssen, 113–132. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2014. Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. Adaptation and Intermediality. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 509–526. New  York: Oxford University Press.

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Figueiredo, Camila. 2018. Introduction: Some Theoretical Models for Adaptation Studies. In 19th Century Revisited: Adaptations and Appropriations, ed. Camila Figueiredo and Miriam Vieira, 9–16. Cadernos Viva Voz: Belo Horizonte. France, Marie de. 1996. “Le Fresne”. The Lais of Marie de France. Trans. Judith P.  Shoaf. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://people.clas.ufl.edu/jshoaf/ marie_lais/. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Nebrasca: University of Nebraska Press. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. 1812. Kinder und Hausmärchen. Editions from 1812, 1819, 1837, 1840, 1843, 1850 and 1857. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Kinder-­_und_Hausm%C3%A4rchen. ———. 1884. Household Tales. Trans. Margaret Hunt. SurLaLune Fairy Tales. Ed. Heidi Anne Heiner. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.surlalunefairytales. com/book.php?id=33 Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. La Force, Charlotte-Rose Caumont de. 1698 [2008]. Persinette. In Les contes des contes, 97–131. Paris: Simon Benard. Digitalized by Bibliothèque nationale de France. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k109716f/f8.image.r=persinette. Leitch, Thomas. 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. New  York: Oxford University Press. Loo, Oliver. 2015. Rapunzel 1790: A New Translation of the 1790 Tale by Friedrick Schulz. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform: Kindle Edition. Louie, Ai-Ling. 1996. Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China. Illustrated by Ed Young. London: Puffin Books. McFarlane, Brian. 1996. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mourão, Sérgio. n.d. Flicker Account. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://www.flickr. com/people/sergio_mourao/. Newell, Kate. 2017a. Adaptation and Illustration: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch, 477–491. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017b. Expanding Adaptation Networks: From Illustration to Novelization. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Perrault, Charles. 2002. The Complete Fairy Tales in Verse and Prose/L’Intégrale des Contes en vers et en prose: A Dual-Language Book. Ed. and Trans. Stanley Appelbaum. Mineola: Dover Publications. Rich, Adrienne. 1972. When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision. College English 34 (1): 18–30. Sanders, Julie. 2016. Adaptation and Appropriation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

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Schulz, Friedrich. 1790 [2011]. Kleine Romane. Volume 5. Leipzig: Göschen. Digitalized by Austrian National Library. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://url. gratis/UmwzB. Shahbazi, A.  Shapur. 2002. Rudãba. In Encyclopædia Iranica online edition. Accessed 5 June 2022. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/rudaba Southey, Robert. 1839. The Story of the Three Bears. Versified by George Nicol. London: Wright. Free eBook digitalized by Google Books. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://url.gratis/MGA64. ———. 1848. The Story of the Three Bears. In The Doctor, &c, ed. John Wood Warter, 327–329. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. Accessed 5 June 2022. http://digital.library. wisc.edu/1711.dl/Literature.RSouthey5. Strabo. 1903. The Geography of Strabo. Ed. and Trans. H.C. Hamilton, W. Falconer. London: George Bell & Sons. Perseus Digital Library. Accessed 5 June 2022. https://url.gratis/URq3b.

CHAPTER 13

The Transcultural Adaptation of The Little Prince to Brazilian Cordel Literature Camila Augusta Pires de Figueiredo

From their academic origins in novel-to-film studies, adaptations today have come a long way to encompass not only the transposition of literature into films but also of a broad range of distinct media and media products such as TV series, comic books and graphic novels, video games, opera, and theme parks, among several others. More recently, some studies devoted to the relations between adaptations in diverse media and transmedial franchises have also contributed to widening or at least questioning the limits of the field. Although this has definitely brought many contributions to the understanding of the ever more complex media relations of contemporary cultural phenomena, it seems that the latest studies have concentrated on the crossing of borders of

C. A. P. de Figueiredo (*) Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 S. Wells-Lassagne, S. Aymes (eds.), Adaptation and Illustration, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32134-4_13

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distinct qualified media,1 sometimes disregarding those types of adaptation that involve media with similar characteristics, and the cultural contexts in which they are produced. This means that, besides the kinds of adaptations that usually involve a transference from one medium to a different type of medium, adaptations also encourage rich discussions when the same type of medium is kept in both source and target texts. This is not to say that the analyses of adaptations that take place between different types of media do not consider cultural contexts, but merely that cultural aspects tend to assume a more prominent role in similar media adaptations and also provide many possibilities of research within the scope of adaptation studies. This notion of adaptation as the transposition from one cultural field to another is not a new approach within adaptation studies. As shall be explained in the next section, the phenomenon—which will be called here transcultural adaptation—already has a long tradition within that field. In order to examine and illustrate the concept of transcultural adaptation, we propose the study of the 2017 Brazilian adaptation of Saint-Exupéry’s acclaimed The Little Prince into an illustrated book written by Josué Limeira, with drawings by Vladimir Barros. Published originally in the United States in 1943, and first published in Brazil in 1952, in this more recent version the famous story of the stranded prince has been adapted into Brazilian northeastern culture with changes on both semiotic and linguistic levels, alterations that take into account the conventions of cordel, a literary genre that is typical of that region. On the linguistic level, for instance, the analysis of the adaptation will focus on the transformation of Saint-Exupéry’s story, from prose to poetry, in terms of rhyming and metric schemes; and, on the semiotic level, I will comment on the transformations in terms of the choice of elements illustrated as well as the style of illustrations.2 The investigation has revealed that in O pequeno príncipe em cordel Limeira and Barros went far beyond finding linguistic equivalents for Saint-Exupéry’s story. From the choice of rhyming words to the style of 1  As used by Lars Elleström, qualified media are those artistic forms and other types of cultural media formed by one or more basic media (the ones that are mainly identified by their modal appearances), that depend on historical, cultural, aesthetic and communicative practices, discourses and conventions. Examples of qualified media are films, sculptures, theater, etc. (27). 2  The author would like to thank prof. Alvaro Hattnher for the valuable suggestions and comments for this text.

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drawing, and even to the use of specific font types, they also adapted the work geographically, to a certain group age, and to a literary genre. With this example, I intend to call attention to the importance of contextual elements to similar media adaptations; to how adaptations can operate in both verbal and non-verbal systems; to the relevance of cultural elements in a network of adaptations; and to the role of adaptation in reaffirming cultural identities. By doing this, I therefore hope to underline adaptation as a process that brings not only different media but also different cultures in contact.

Adaptation as a Cultural Practice In 1959, while investigating the role of linguistic and cultural elements in translation, Roman Jakobson coined the expression “intersemiotic translation” to designate the changing of a written text into a different form, for instance, visual signs. The concept appeared along with two other types of translation, intralingual—changes within the same language using, for example, rewording, paraphrasing, summarizing, commenting a text— and interlingual (or translation proper), from one language to another. In any case, however, the author highlights the relevance of contextualization as being of foremost importance: citing Bertrand Russell, Jakobson reminds us that “no one can understand the word ‘cheese’ unless he has a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheese.” (232) The crucial nature of cultural elements in adaptations has been a common theme in adaptation studies since then. Although not using the exact term, the idea of transcultural adaptation was already present in 2003, as Thaïs Flores Nogueira Diniz claimed that translations occur “in the in-­ between place of various traditions, cultures, and norms” (40). While examining adaptations from stage to screen as translations of the intersemiotic type, Diniz proposes that they should also be considered “cultural translations.” According to her, these are stories caught in-between different cultures and different sign systems. A few years later, in 2007 (with Bortolotti) and again in 2011, Linda Hutcheon observed that indigenizing or culturally adapting stories are a means to fulfill our need “to contextualize [them] temporally, nationally, medially” (Hutcheon 215). Hutcheon’s focal point in those studies lies beyond medial transpositions, as she argues that “all stories are in flux at all times: adapted in many different ways, but also cited, translated, referenced, recontextualized, updated, backdated, extended, abbreviated

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[…] They travel—across genres, media, and contexts (temporal, spatial, cultural, linguistic)” (217). Julie Sanders seemingly complies with and expands this perspective, as she does not especially mention media borders in her well-known definition of adaptations as “reinterpretations of established texts in new generic contexts or […] with relocations of […] a source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting, which may or may not involve a generic shift” (19). In fact, Sanders points to several adaptive practices that are not commonly identified as such, for instance, “a transpositional practice, casting a specific genre into another generic mode”; one that “can parallel editorial practice in some respects”; “an amplificatory procedure engaged in addition, expansion, accretion, and interpolation”; one which is “frequently involved in offering commentary on a source-text”; or which can “constitute a simpler attempt to make texts ‘relevant’ or easily comprehensible to new audiences and readerships via the processes of proximation3 and updating” (18–19). In “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” cinema scholar Robert Stam recognizes that there is not a stable core that can be translated/adapted, which not only relates to media specificities but also to the idea that each text “can generate a plethora of possible readings” (57). In this scenario of endless interpretations, the author suggests that fidelity becomes, thus, an inadequate trope, and should rather be substituted by the trope of adaptation as translation, which considers the inevitable losses and gains that are typical of any translation. (62) Thus, one may affirm that the number of translations a text can generate is as large as the different cultural, social, and political elements at play in the translation. One of the contributors to Handbook of Intermediality (2015), Barbara Straumann makes a clear statement in favor of a broader perspective of the phenomenon, affirming that, besides those types that happen between different media, “[a]daptation […] can occur within the same medium, for example in literary rewritings, which appropriate and refigure previous literary texts” (249). This is the case of certain literary rewritings that adapt the language and other narrative elements to specific groups of readers considering, for instance, age, gender, geographical location, or 3  Sanders emphasizes the importance of cultural contexts in adaptations by highlighting the use of circumstantial elements asa “movement of proximation” that “brings the text closer to the audience’s personal frame of reference, allowing always forvariation between local contexts and audiences” (26).

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particular interests. For Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, one could mention the publications: Eligible: A modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice by Curtis Sittenfeld (2016), Pride by Ibi Zoboi (2018), and 1932 by Karen M.  Cox (2010). Or, in relation to Antoine de SaintExupéry’s The Little Prince, the Brazilian illustrated books O pequeno príncipe preto and O pequeno príncipe preto para pequenos [the little black prince and the little black prince for children] by Rodrigo França (2020 and 2021), and A pequena princesa [the little princess] by Leandro Franz (2019). Considering the distinct characteristics and modes of qualified media, as well as all the possible media that can be involved in the process of adaptation, it is also essential to examine how culture influences certain aspects of visual, non-verbal representations. Kate Newell (2017a and 2017b) explains the influence of illustrations in general and, more specifically, illustrated novels in establishing an intertextual network of adaptations. More than just a supplement to their source texts, there are many cases in which certain illustrations are responsible for changing the way a certain story starts being adapted.4 And, as undeniable products of their cultural environment, illustrations too end up revealing how certain elements of a story change in different cultural contexts. The role of illustrations in illustrated novels is, thus, especially important in transcultural adaptations, considering that both texts and images will change due to the new geographical and sociocultural environments. Other attempts to emphasize the importance of cultural contexts in adaptations are the studies of Katja Krebs (2012), Lawrence Raw (2012), and Johannes Fehrle and Mark Schmitt (2018). The “domestication” of a text or, in other words, the idea of rewriting “a text in line with the requirements of a target culture,” together with the questions of “faithfulness” and “equivalence” that this process encompasses, is, for Krebs, exactly what brings both translations and adaptations together (42–44). For Fehrle and Schmitt, “such an approach that brings into contact the disciplines of adaptation and translation studies reveals not only that the boundaries between translation and adaptation are highly diffuse and dependent on historical and cultural contexts,” but, more importantly, “it also means that many of the questions and methods developed in the 4  For instance, the way Sidney Paget’s illustrations came to form our mental image of Sherlock Holmes. For more information on this, see Figueiredo (Chap. 4).

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respective fields are, in fact, compatible and can be fruitfully brought into contact” (3). In “Aligning Adaptation Studies with Translation Studies,” Laurence Raw defends the premise that both adaptation and translation mean adjusting to shifting circumstances and that this process of adjustment is performed both by individual experiences and by our cultures, “an institution that defines what is acceptable and what is familiar to us” (2017 499). As an example of how both operations hold similarities, Raw presents the case of the adaptation of Don Quixote to Brazilian Portuguese by writer and translator Monteiro Lobato. In the author’s opinion, Lobato did more than search for an adequate linguistic equivalent for the story; he also translated and adapted the text by localizing it in Brazilian reality. The process eventually led to the creation of a true Brazilian children’s literature, to which Lobato is considered a pioneer, as he was the first to use original characters with Brazilian folkloric and rural traits. He concludes by saying that Lobato did for Brazilian children’s literature what the Grimm Brothers did in Germany, Hans Christian Andersen in Denmark, and perhaps Lewis Carroll in the United Kingdom. In consonance with the perspective of these researchers about contextual circumstances in adaptations, in the next section I present the case study of a Brazilian version of The Little Prince, a story that has seen a myriad of adaptations and translations.

Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Its Publication in Brazil The Little Prince was originally published in the United States in 1943 with watercolors made by the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The story tells the adventure of a pilot, the narrator, whose plane crashes in the Sahara. While in the middle of the desert, he meets a boy who calls himself a prince. While he attempts to repair his plane, the little prince recounts the story of his life: from the everyday routine in his tiny home asteroid cleaning the volcanoes and weeding unwanted seeds before they overrun the surface of the planet, his falling in love with a vain and silly rose, his visits to six other planets, each of which inhabited by an absurd character, until his arrival on Earth. And, since then, his meeting with a snake, a desert flower, a fox, a railway switchman, and a merchant of water pills. After the prince decides to go back to his planet and disappears, the pilot

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leaves the desert, not before requesting to be contacted if anybody sees a boy with golden curls. The illustrated book was published in France in 1946, two years after the author’s death in an aerial reconnaissance mission during the Second World War. Despite the illustrations and the childish tone, the book won a legion of fans of all ages around the world for dealing with loneliness in a poetic and philosophical way and has recently become the world’s most translated non-religious book, to more than 300 languages (“Os livros”). In Brazil, the story was only published in 1952, with a translation by Dom Marcos Barbosa, a Catholic priest. For the first as well as for all subsequent editions by Agir Publisher, until entering the public domain, the format of the Brazilian edition was the same as the foreign one, meaning that Saint-­ Exupéry’s watercolors were present since the first publication in the country. In The Little Prince, as in many other illustrated novels, we observe that the original illustrations have served not only to clarify or collaborate with the prose—which are still widely believed to be the only functions of illustrations, as Kate Newell explains (2017b)—, but also to establish an iconographical frame of reference by which we all identify certain elements as belonging to The Little Prince in several other retellings of the story. In the case of Saint-Exupéry’s story, for example, these are the images of the blond prince himself with a long scarf, standing on his planet, either alone or with his beloved rose, among other elements and well-known characters. As we shall see, these key visual elements were preserved in the 2017 Brazilian adaptation, while at the same time they were also transformed to match the style of cordel literature for children.

The Brazilian Cordel as a Literary Genre Cordel is a literary genre that can be traced back to the sixteenth century, originally designating popular stories told by medieval minstrels in rhymed verses. In Brazil, it developed in the late nineteenth century, especially in the northeastern part of the country, with an important change: from oral narratives, stories also began to be told in written form. The term “cordel literature” literally means “string literature” because the chapbooks— cheap, thin printed brochures that contain popular-themed stories—are hung out on strings (as still can be seen today in several locations) as a way to display them to potential customers (Fig.  13.1). Besides writing the

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Fig. 13.1  Cordel Literature prints. (Photo: Diego Dacal, CC BY-SA 2.0. Wikimedia Commons)

stories, some authors (or “cordelists” as they are called) also recite or sing the verses in very excited performances in street markets. Until the 1930s, the covers of the chapbooks contained only the name of the author and the title of the book. But this was when the first woodcut illustrations, some of them made by the authors themselves, started appearing, as a marketing strategy to improve the sales. The woodcuts on the covers usually follow the armorial style, a movement manifested in different artistic expressions of the northeastern culture such as literature, music, sculpture, illustrations, tapestry, ceramics, painting, and street performances. The most prominent representatives of this movement were playwright, novelist, and poet Ariano Suassuna, woodcut artist Gilvan Samico, the Quinteto Armorial group in music, and ceramist Francisco Brennand, among other artists. In 1975, Suassuna defined the Brazilian armorial art as one that has as its main common feature the connection with the magical spirit of the “chapbooks” of the Romanceiro Popular do Nordeste (Cordel

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Literature), with the music of viola, fiddle or fife that accompanies its “singings”, and with the woodcut that illustrates their covers, as well as with the spirit and form of the Arts and popular shows with that same related Romanceiro. (qtd. in Reis, my translation)

Woodcuts in armorial style traditionally display heraldry elements such as banners and shields; figures of domestic, wild, and imaginary animals (dogs, horses, lions, lizards, snakes, dragons, lions with wings); as well as regional, religious, folkloric, mythological, and fantastic beings such as the devil, cowboys, two-headed creatures, and so on. It is also important to mention that cordel is originally a genre for an adult public. Several stories include adult themes such as betrayals and murders, erotic and obscene tales, famous robbers and their incredible prison escapes, legendary combats, tales of supernatural beings, spirituality, and mysticism (miracles, dreams, and visions), natural phenomena such as droughts and floods, political victories, and all sorts of adventures with heroes and anti-heroes.

O Pequeno Príncipe em Cordel Written by Josué Limeira and illustrated by Vladimir Barros, The Little Prince in Cordel (O Pequeno Príncipe em Cordel, its Brazilian title) was published in 2015 by Editora Cativar, located in the city of Recife, state of Pernambuco. In the next year, the book was nominated as a finalist in the 58th edition of Jabuti, Brazil’s most important literary prize. At the time of its release, positive reviews of the book appeared in several newspapers, in all parts of the country. Despite the open reference to cordel literature in the title, O Pequeno Príncipe em Cordel is not exactly materialized into a traditional cordel chapbook format—that would mean the story should have to fit in a small number of pages entirely composed by text (not images), in an adult-oriented language. While this 171-page adaptation keeps some key elements of cordel literature, it also changes them in order to fit the story to the target audience of children. The following sections examine the adaptive choices regarding text and image in the Brazilian cordel version of The Little Prince. As the front and back covers of O Pequeno Príncipe em Cordel already demonstrate, the illustrations are made to imitate the woodcut technique, with details in the background accentuating this attempt, as they evoke the carved texture on wood. As we move to the internal illustrations, we

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observe the presence of some characteristics of the armorial movement such as the straight lines and the rectangular frames in all pages. Moreover, each chapter has titles and opening illustrations in double pages, as if they were covers for several individual chapbooks. Cordel literature is also brought to mind when we consider the editorial choice of using the Cordelina font in the book’s and in all internal chapter titles (Fig. 13.2). Besides the attempt to simulate the materiality of cordel chapbooks, the illustrations also localize or regionalize the characters and other elements of the original story. The prince, for instance, is dressed in a regional fashion with leather clothes and hat, short trousers, and holds a long narrow knife popularly known as “peixeira.” Although he is blond with blue eyes, his skin is tanned, as the sun in the Northeast of Brazil is strong most of the year (see Fig. 13.3 for all characters and elements mentioned in this subsection). Other characters also have their regional version depicted. The king that demands that the prince obey his most absurd orders is illustrated in the adaptation as the Afro-Brazilian king of Maracatu. Maracatu is both a musical genre with African religious origins of Candomblé as well as a popular and colorful street festival typical of the Northeast, especially in the state of Pernambuco. In one of its versions, the Maracatu Nação, a procession marks the coronation of black performers as king, queen, and other members of the court. The festival supposedly originated from Congado, one of the few celebrations Portuguese colonizers allowed their black slaves to participate in during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the abolition of slavery in 1888, Maracatu gradually became a celebration typical of the carnival holiday in Pernambuco. Another character with a special depiction is the conceited man. In The Little Prince, the conceited man demands to be admired by the prince, who quickly rejects the man’s impositions and escapes from his planet. In the adaptation the conceited man bears resemblance with the “Midnight Man,” a famous giant doll figure that appears during carnival festivities in Recife. According to popular stories, the figure was inspired by a character in a movie, a thief who dressed up in high fashion and committed crimes at midnight. The giant doll figure wears either a green or a white suit with a hat and is about 3.5m high. Other characters, such as the geographer and the astronomer, are more similar to Saint-Exupéry’s iconical illustrations, and therefore will not be analyzed here in detail. Another interesting aspect that deserves a detailed examination at another moment is the artist’s interpretation of characters that are not depicted in Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations, such as the pilot of the plane that

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Fig. 13.2  (a) and (b) Front cover and opening pages of a chapter. Limeira, Josué. O Pequeno Príncipe em Cordel. Illustr. Vladimir Barros. 2.ed. Recife: Cativar, 2017, cover; p. 18-19. Art design by the artist. (Reproduced with permission of the artist)

crashes in the desert, the railway switchman (who becomes a “key keeper” in the Brazilian version), and the merchant who sold pills that quenched thirst (or simply “water pills,” according to this new version).

Fig. 13.3  Characters and other elements compared: on the left, Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations; in the middle, Barros’s illustrations; on the right, objects/events that served as references for Barros. (Source: Limeira, Josué. O Pequeno Príncipe em Cordel. Illustr. Vladimir Barros. 2.ed. Recife: Cativar, 2017, p. 21, 71, 76, 113, 64. Art design by the artist. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Photos: Prefeitura de Olinda, Carnaval 2010, CC BY 2.0. Maracatus de Baque Solto and Carnaval de Pernambuco; Raul Romario/iStock. Cactos mandacaru de flor; Petyson Antonio, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pomba Asa Branca)

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Some elements of nature were also adapted into regional flora and fauna, and therefore deserve to be briefly mentioned. The three-petal flower, for instance, who the Little Prince asks for some information while wandering in the desert, is depicted here as the mandacaru flower. The mandacaru is a type of spiked cactus that survives long periods of drought. Because of its resistance, it has become a symbol for the northeastern people, as they, too, are able to survive in these desert-like regions of the country. Of great beauty, the mandacaru flower usually blooms by the end of spring and lasts only a few hours, blooming at night and wilting early in the morning. In extremely arid areas, its appearance means the end of the drought season and the hope for rain. The wild birds that appear at the beginning of Saint-Exupéry’s book (in the book’s title page, in most printed editions) also found a Brazilian correspondent. While in the French version the Little Prince abandons his planet by holding firmly to ropes attached to a group of wild birds, in the Brazilian adaptation they are replaced by asas-brancas. An asa-branca [white wing] is the biggest pigeon species in Brazil, found in all parts of the country, and also in Bolivia and in Argentina. More important, Asa-­ branca is also the title of the most famous song about the Northeast, composed by Luiz Gonzaga and Humberto Teixeira in 1947. The lyrics tell the story of a drought period that was once so severe that it forced even the asas-brancas to migrate. The process of rewriting Saint-Exupéry’s text to adapt it to a Brazilian children’s audience and, more specifically, to the genre of cordel literature involved, first, a transformation from prose to poetry, with the division of the text in verses and stanzas, and the use of rhymes. Not only are the rhymes present, they are employed as in cordel literature: stanzas of six verses with rhymes in ABCBDB format. Yet, this is not a rigid pattern in the adaptation, as we can also observe stanzas with seven, eight, nine, and ten lines, with a variable number of poetic syllables throughout the book. Another adaptive strategy regarding rhyming are the cases in which some words only rhyme with others if we consider their oral forms. This happens, for instance, in the following except, in which the verbs “arrancar” [pull out] and “alastrar” [spread] end up rhyming with “baobá” [baobab] because of the erasure of the ending -r that happens in spoken Portuguese, which results in an “á” sound: Não devemos permitir O bom é logo arrancar Pois se encontram um jardim

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Nele vai se alastrar Em vez de flor bonita Teremos só baobá. (Limeira 45, bolded emphasis added)

The same thing happens in this other verse, in which “observar” [observe] and “arrancar” [pull out] rhyme with “má” [bad] when spoken: Como em todos os planetas Existe erva boa e má Basta pegar a luneta Para a gente observar E saber a hora certa Em que se deve arrancar. (Limeira 44, bolded emphasis added)

In another example, the verbs “durou” [lasted] and “olhou” [looked] rhyme with the noun “valor” [value] due to the effect that happens orally in some words ending in -ou and -or which come to be pronounced as “ô”: Mergulhou num pensamento Que muito tempo durou Tirou do bolso o carneiro E seu tesouro olhou Às vezes, as pequenas coisas… É que têm maior valor. (Limeira 29, bolded emphasis added)

Although Limeira uses standard Portuguese and almost no regional lexicon, in some passages he added elements, situations, explanations, and vocabulary that are perhaps more familiar to a Brazilian northeastern audience than to a foreign one. More than a linguistic adaptive procedure in this case, the author engages into a process of cultural contextualization— or proximation, to use Julie Sanders’s term. For comparative purposes, Limeira’s following excepts have been freely translated: And in answer he repeated, very slowly, as if he were speaking of a matter of great consequence: “If you please—draw me a sheep…” (Saint-Exupéry 7) And he softly spoke As a very serious thing: —I have a sheep in my mind Turn it into matter If it looks beautiful It will never be mocked (Limeira 22)

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I was very surprised to see a light break over the face of my young judge: “That is exactly the way I wanted it! Do you think that this sheep will have to have a great deal of grass?” “Why?” “Because where I live everything is very small…” “There will surely be enough grass for him,” I said. “It is a very small sheep that I have given you.” He bent his head over the drawing. “Not so small that—Look! He has gone to sleep…” (Saint-Exupéry 8) I was surprised with the happiness Of an accomplished dream —This was exactly what I wanted My so dreamed sheep! Thank you my friend For pleasing me. —Does it eat a lot of grass? —No … it’s a tiny little sheep — It is not so tiny Because the box is heavy And it will still grow And escape from it. —But why do you ask? —Because it is risky Where I live is small And there are no fences The cautious one anoints himself And avoids the evil eye. (Limeira 25)

In the first set of excerpts, we observe the allusion to the theme of mockery: “If it looks beautiful/It will never be mocked.” Mockery is a common theme in cordel literature, with roots in the Galician-Portuguese lyric movement or trovadorismo in medieval times, in which minstrels satirized the society of the time in stories filled with derision and cursing. The goal of those medieval melodies was to criticize individuals and situations through ambiguous jokes, irony, word, and semantic puns and parodies. The last two verses of the second set of examples—“The cautious one anoints himself/And avoids the evil eye”—evokes the belief that certain types of blessings and anointments could prevent envy from harming a person, an idea that reminds us of the popular rituals in which healers

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perform cures with medicinal herbs and prayers. These healers are usually considered wise individuals, who put their knowledge at the service of their community, acting especially where modern medicine is not or is only precariously available.

Conclusion Among the diverse types of media and processes that can be called adaptations nowadays, studies dedicated to transcultural adaptations within similar media types are not as common as those that examine medial transpositions between dissimilar media types. However, the fact that no different medial borders or characteristics are necessarily transposed in transcultural adaptations does not prevent them from revealing some adaptive and cultural practices that are thought-provoking in their own manner. One aspect that is highlighted in transcultural adaptations is the “movement of proximation” (Sanders) performed in order to adapt the story to a particular cultural context. In this sense, as the comparative analysis here proposed has revealed, adapting Saint-Exupéry’s book The Little Prince to a Brazilian context meant going far beyond finding linguistic equivalents for the story being translated. In the process of retelling the story, author Josué Limeira used rhymes and metric schemes typical of the cordel genre while added themes and imagery more familiar to Brazilian northeastern individuals. Important editorial choices were made in order to match the printed product with cordel chapbooks—such as the font type chosen for the titles as well as the drawings imitating the wooden marks of cordel cover illustrations. Finally, in Vladimir Barros’s illustrations, besides the drawing style that reminds us of cordel woodcuts, some elements were portrayed differently from Saint-­ Exupéry’s drawings, an idea that resonates with Kate Newell affirming that illustrations too offer “a particular interpretation or ‘reading’ of the text” (2017a, 480). Yet, not only was Limeira and Barros’s particular reading an attempt to bring the story closer to a Brazilian juvenile reading public so that these readers can more easily identify with it, but also—and perhaps more importantly—it can be seen as an act of reaffirming Brazilian northeastern culture, an important step in order to recognize the value of several traditional cultural elements of that region. This is of particular importance, especially if we consider that most of the times cultural practices of African

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ancestry—and the Northeast has the highest level of African descent in the composition of its population, among all geographical regions—tend to receive less attention and, consequently, less funding. O Pequeno Príncipe em Cordel manages to break with these constraints and to pay a beautiful homage to its regional legacy, as it became a finalist in the country’s most important literary prize; has been included in the reading lists of several elementary schools all over the country; and was adapted into a Carnival samba parade in São Paulo in 2022.5 One aspect that could profit from further reflections is whether a story bears certain qualities or characteristics that make it more disposed to transcultural adaptations. Perhaps a universally known story, one that shares values that are also universal (i.e. which are not specific to one national culture), such as Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, fosters a greater number of transcultural adaptations. In this respect, it is also important to consider the appeal and the role that Saint-Exupéry’s own watercolor illustrations, published since the first edition, play in its adaptive network. My analysis shows that, until now, they have served to establish a stable, easily recognizable, iconographical reference to the story, not only to the several adaptations of The Little Prince to other media (for instance, the 1978–1979 Japanese anime series, the 2016 animation film, and numerous live action movies, comic books, games, opera, and theatrical versions), but also to the several illustrated editions published worldwide, in more than 360 languages and dialects. However, especially after the work entered the public domain, in 2015 (except in France), printed editions have proliferated and the story seems to have been transculturally adapted more and more often, so a possible research theme in the next few years may focus on the way these more recent versions have transformed certain elements of the text and/or of the original watercolors. In any case, what is possible to affirm for now is that, while transcultural adaptations such as O Pequeno Príncipe em Cordel succeed in emphasizing cultural aspects of the narrative across genres and languages, they also collaborate in reminding us of the potentials and possibilities of adaptation studies.

5  Photos of the parade can be seen at Tom Maior’s Instagram profile: @grestommaior. Accessed on 26 Apr. 2022.

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