The Problem with Literary Necessity

It's become a commonplace of critical praise to claim that a book is necessary. Books that receive this supposed encomium are usually topical, obviously and evidently tied to an issue subject to heated discussion on twitter, late-night tv, and cable news. A necessary book has a clear, delineated point of view that expresses a politics that fits easily into our current political binary (liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican, etc. etc.). It could be a novel with a protagonist who is transgender, or a refugee, it could be a polemic against a powerful figure, ideology, or institution, it could be a personal essay that dissects a traumatic experience. The critic who employs the word necessary is telegraphing his or her agreement with the political point of view of the book under review.

There's nothing inherently wrong with deeming a book necessary, but it's a word that, used without a consciousness of its purpose, says little to nothing about the book itself and much more about the reviewer and the reviewer's politics. It's a euphemism that signals a belonging to a particular club, a defensive deployment meant to shield the critic from attack in a deeply polarized climate dominated by quick outrage and increasingly quantified methods of critiquing literature, for instance, the starred rating rather than a complex analysis.

When the critic deems a book necessary, the label functions as a means of dividing the presumed readership of the book. Anyone who reads that a book about the mass incarceration of black Americans, for instance, is necessary, receives a signal not that the book has some crucial function to perform in the world (though it may or may not - the course of history will indicate whether or not it performs such a function), but rather that the book bolsters a political belief that he may or may not share. The reader who already feels outrage towards the situation of black Americans in prison will feel positively towards the book; the reader who believes that imprisoned black people fare no worse than white people will feel negatively. As a result, the first group may very well read the book, share the review on social media, or otherwise indicate support for it, while the second is unlikely to do those things, or might take an actively negative action, such as purposely giving the book low ratings on sites like Amazon and Goodreads. Any book with controversial or possibly inflammatory content, once it's reviewed within this critical economy of necessity, is subject to this binary (including books that attempt to critique, dismantle, or question the existence of a binary). If this demarcation sounds simplistic, that's because it is, but that is where the line is drawn by the word necessary.

It's a word that is nearly always meant positively, though its effects are anything but. It's a means of preaching to the choir. The problem is that necessary is so very rarely followed by the answers to the obvious questions: to whom? for what purpose? to what end? The critic takes for granted that the reader can answer those questions already, isolating the book among readers that are most likely to share its point of view. Instead of persuading individuals to allow themselves to be challenged and to question their immediate assumptions and opinions, the critic who talks of necessity presumes that not only is his point of view fundamentally correct, it needs no qualification and no explanation. Necessary is an encrypted word; decoded, it says: "Agree or you're wrong."

To demonstrate how important it is to follow up any description of a book as necessary with an explication of why, to whom, and for what purpose it is so, I will employ a highly inflammatory example: Mein Kampf is necessary. Now, if I were using the word necessary the way that it is most commonly used critically today, I would have just declared myself a Nazi. So I will answer the questions that ought to be engendered by that statement: Mein Kampf is necessary as a primary source for research for people who study Nazism and anti-Semitism because it was historically a crucial and widely-read text for followers of Hitler and helps to explicate the history that followed it. The truth is that Mein Kampf did perform a function historically, one that in retrospect we can recognize as necessary to the events that followed. The fact that that function was genocide on an unprecedented scale does not make it less necessary, only more horrifying.

In great part, the difficulty facing critics at this moment implicates the fraught issue of identity. As we increasingly use online aggregators, complete with ratings and mini reviews, to catalogue our likes and dislikes, we also increasingly conflate these quantified masses of data with our very identities. It's no wonder, then, that a book's necessity becomes conflated with the degree to which we agree with it. As a result, the critic risks being locked into a position that demands allegiance rather than analysis, answering a yes-or-no question instead of a why, or how. Politically speaking, this is disastrous. If a book's necessity is determined by whether or not we agree with it beforehand, then persuasion in literary form is no longer possible. A necessary book, in today's critical usage, is a sterile book, a book without the very power the critic claims for it. Before we claim that any given book is necessary, we need to confront our reasons for doing so, and if we do so, we need to say why.

If It Ain't Broke, It's Probably Boring

Though the franchise has never been as centrally situated in the entertainment landscape until now, valuable intellectual property has been exploited across media since the advent of modernity. Little Women spawned theatrical adaptations and character dolls within less than a decade of its release; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein were major stage hits; A Christmas Carol all but invented the capitalist bonanza that we celebrate today. It's understandable that producers and publishers, not to mention toy manufacturers, make use of popular stories, characters, and concepts to produce more content, and therefore more money, but it also means that the same works get adapted over, and over, and over, and even over again. This is a shame because it often means that less famous works get forgotten and passed over. 

Do we really need two more adaptations of Anne of Green Gables? L.M. Montgomery wrote twenty novels and dozens of short stories. A miniseries of A Tangled Web, for instance, a novel with well over two hundred characters, or the Emily series, with its ambitious, sensitive heroine, would offer many of the same pleasures without simply retreading the same ground. In fact, given the current predominant taste for dark, gritty stories of trauma, Emily - with her strange 'flashes' that could be indications of supernatural power, or the residual effects of the trauma of her father's death and her own desperate feelings of abandonment - is a far more apropos protagonist than Anne, preternaturally sunny, a believer that "Tomorrow is always a new day, with no mistakes in it." 

Jane Eyre, too, has been adapted dozens of times (and with decidedly varying success), but Charlotte Brontë's other novels have been neglected: Shirley, with its radical, land-owning, gender norm-flouting heroine, was adapted, in 1922, while Villette, an intense and rich story of a repressed teacher, was adapted in 1970 for television, but neither adaptation is available online (the former may even be a lost film). And, while no one can complain that Charles Dickens's works are under-adapted, my favorite, Dombey and Son, has suffered from the low-budget constraints of old-style BBC filmmaking. It would be a treat to see Mr. Carker, Captain Cuttle, and the formidable Edith Dombey onscreen, instead of the next in an endless line of Ebeneezer Scrooges, Pips, and Oliver Twists. 

One could cite oodles more examples: we are forever getting a new Peter Pan, while J.M. Barrie's other (better) work, such as The Little Minister and My Lady Nicotine, is ignored; another Anna Karenina, while the more politically invested Resurrection hasn't been adapted for the silver screen since 1934; another Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, with nary a Boy who Left Home to Find Out about the Shivers in sight; another Treasure Island or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, instead of a Prince Otto or Catriona; an endless string of Austen adaptations, while her forebear Fanny Burney's novels have never once seen a screen adaptation. There are two more Little Women adaptations on their way, after two silent and three sound films, plus a number of miniseries, while none of Alcott's other novels have received a single decent adaptation. And I haven't even mentioned Shakespeare.

While in the scheme of things, repetitive adaptation is hardly a pressing problem, it indicates a lack of creative imagination and an excess of conservative calculation in filmmaking that prevents the production of films that insist on forging new paths forward, following wild and strange new directions, and thus - in fact, rather than rhetorically - increasing the diversity of cinematic vision. There are occasional flashes of the frisson of adaptation, the fruitful merging of the literary and cinematic at its most successful, but they are rare. One thinks of Park Chan-Wook's The Handmaiden, which transplanted Sarah Waters's Fingersmith from Victorian London to Korea under Japanese Occupation, or Whit Stillman's Love and Friendship, based on the blissfully hitherto un-adapted Austen novella, Lady Susan. It's remarkable that in an age that claims to value the new, original, and innovative, that our entertainment conforms so strictly to a focus on the most popular, most adapted works out there. We're spinning the wheels, but don't seem to be going anywhere. With literal millennia of literature to choose from, what a pity that we can't see the astonishing treasure trove we have in even a small neighborhood library.

Film Review: "The Rise of Catherine the Great" (1934)

Catherine the Great is one of a handful of historical figures, like Napoleon, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth the Virgin Queen, Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, whose legend so exceeds the historical record that she proves an irresistible subject for filmmakers. Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Pola Negri, Jeanne Moreau, and Julia Ormond, among many others, have all played the Russian empress; in Alexander Korda's The Rise of Catherine the Great the part is played by German actress Elisabeth Bergner, who fled Nazi Germany for England after Hitler's accession to power and whose collaborations with Laurence Olivier and J.M. Barrie are of greater interest today for their sakes than for hers.

In fact, the most common complaint lodged against this sumptuous and historically fantastical film is that Bergner lacks charisma. She is accused of dullness, of vapidity, of artificiality, but I wouldn't call these charges quite fair. The screenplay, based on a play by Lajos Bíró and Arthur Wimperis, frames Catherine as an ingenue, devastatingly in love with the Grand Duke Peter before she sees him, easily softened by kindness, insistent on the right of the peasant to bread and the right of her mad and beloved husband to live. The domain where the young Catherine gained her skill in intrigue and her prowess in domination, the bedroom, must perforce remain off-screen; even under the less rigid censorship standards of England, as opposed to the absurd strictures of the Hollywood Production Code, the film suffers from the impossibility of allowing Catherine any but imaginary adultery. The centrality of sex in royal politics is not as prudishly papered over as it is in Hollywood films, but the insistence on Catherine's sexual purity as a sign of her morality, and thus right to be the heroine, prevents Bergner from delving too deeply into the most complex parts of her character. 

She stars opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., whose striking physical beauty isn't at all effaced by a blonde wig and a brilliant performance free of vanity. Fairbanks never attained the super-stardom of his athletic father, and is remembered today mostly for his debonair looks and his tabloid-sensation romance with the much older Joan Crawford, but as the Grand Duke Peter, volatile, moody, changeable, lusty, always contrary, and dangerously close to genuine insanity, Fairbanks proves his abilities as an actor. In the first scene of the film, without dialogue, he broods in his dacha as fawning courtiers sing songs and make love on cushions scattered on the floor. Staring into the fire, his ears prick up at the sound of a lady's tinkling laughter. He glances up and sees her, and the man, his dearest friend as it turns out, who ravenously kisses her arm and neck. Peter observes them a moment before taking the hand of the woman and leading her away. His entire character is established in this first wordless scene, a tour de force for directors Paul Czinner and an uncredited Korda, for production designer Vincent Korda, and for Fairbanks himself. He is matched by Flora Robson, as his strong-willed aunt, the Empress Elizabeth. Robson was an actress who became somewhat type-cast as powerful aging monarchs, even as a young woman, but she was consistently a stand-out in every film fortunate enough to include her. Here she is called upon to radiate power like the sun: her furious grip on power, Elizabeth claims, is all the more tenacious because she is a woman. Women ought to rule, she tells Catherine, for men lack the strength to do so.

In many ways, the film's story is beside the point. The title already says everything about the plot and even a glancing notion of Russian history reveals the ultimate fates of the characters. The real reason to see it is visual, not narrative: the enormous sets, grand rooms of state scattered with velvet and gilt furniture, ceilings painted with cherubs and adorned with candle-bestrewn chandeliers of crystal, balustrades set with roaring lions, and the lavish costumes, a sweeping, glossy black dressing gown for Peter, both rakish and hinting at his sickly mind, a fur-lined brocade gown for Elizabeth, making her seem twelve feet tall, glittering lace cuffs for Catherine as a princess, her luxurious shackles, as well as a stunningly boyish uniform, to match that of her regiment and to foreshadow her victory. Even if the drama passes without surprises or emotional highs, every frame is a treasure trove of exquisitely designed objects.

I can understand the reservations most critics have about this film, especially when compared to its predecessor, Korda's mega-hit The Private Life of Henry VIII, a film that made Charles Laughton an internationally renowned star and featured equally gorgeous costumes and sets with a story bursting with incident. The Rise of Catherine the Great moves at a more stately pace, its intrigues negotiated tacitly more often than not, its political alliances too clearly delineated by declarations of passionate love or loathing, but there is no scenery-chewing in the Laughton mold. Fairbanks, in particular, gives a performance quite modern in its subtlety, all the more striking given that it is insanity that he portrays so delicately. Yet, this film, in contrast to Henry VIII, embraces a more challenging and complicated perspective on despotism. The great rulers here are women, while men are essentially tools of power, dangerous, useful, alluring, but not eligible for the governance of empire. The throne of Mother Russia seems to demand a female body, but it would be too easy to simply stick a feminist label on Catherine and call it a day. Compassion, an abhorrence of cruelty, a horror of murder, a melting and maritally sanctioned adoration of a husband - these are the qualities that Catherine must combat in order to take power and save Russia from the wandering whims and tantrum-driven vagaries of Peter III. The paradox of queenship renders the political maneuverings of this film fascinating, for Catherine is both the perfect woman and the perfect empress, but cannot be both at once. Rather than a conflict between a mad emperor and a sane empress, The Rise of Catherine the Great traces the conflict between the woman who loves Peter and the empress whose rise to power necessitates destroying him.

Film Review: "The Triumph of Love" (2001)

It is perhaps a strange irony that the most performative literary genre, the play, rarely adapts well to the cinema. In the small gap between live performance on a stage and recorded performance on a set or dressed location, the difference between genius and imbecility lurks. This is made clear in Clare Peploe's adaptation of the 1732 play by Marivaux, The Triumph of Love, which despite its playful treatment of gender and flirtation with polyamory, fails to translate 18th-century sources of merriment into 21st-century comedy. Peploe injects the slightest of postmodern touches - an audience seated in transparent plastic chairs occasionally appears, looking frightfully bored - and sprinkles on a calcifying patina of progressive gender politics - the middle-aged Leontine is a scientist and seems to discover how to generate electricity. Though the soundtrack is mostly dominated by Rameau and a classically inflected score by Jason Osbourn, an electric guitar pops up at emotional moments, doodling at melodies that are not at all benefited by amplification. Such signs of contemporary provenance are jarring and distracting, but they are also rather slight and half-hearted. Rather than go for broke, Peploe makes a mere gesture at reinterpretation, and so makes neither a frightfully modern new version, nor an especially scintillating recreation of the original play.

Though produced by Bernardo Bertolucci (incidentally or not, the director's husband), and dominated by a story of seduction, deceit, and titillation, The Triumph of Love retreats to prudishness, partly faithful to Marivaux and partly a coy castration of the transgressive elements of the story. Mira Sorvino stars as a princess who disguises herself as an ardent young man in order to gain access to the rightful heir to the throne (Jay Rodan), who hates her as the daughter of the usurper. He is guarded by the misogynist philosopher Hermocrates (Ben Kingsley) and his repressed sister (Fiona Shaw), while she is aided by her portrait-painting lady-in-waiting Corine (Rachael Stirling). The princess's plot involves seducing all three and ultimately restoring the rightful heir to the throne, without giving it up, by marrying him. All this is aided by two servants straight out of commedia dell'arte, Harlequin and Dimas (Ignazio Oliva and Luis Molteni). They are the only two Italians in the cast, which leads to an unfortunate ethnic metaphor: the aristocrats are all British and American, while the servants, buffoonish to a fault, are Italians speaking English with exaggerated accents.

Kingsley and Shaw both give deeply felt performances, too good for such a fluffy approach, and their inevitable, cruel disappointment shimmers like genuine gold on a bed of glitter. The effect, however, is to cast the dross into clearer light, thus highlighting the superficiality of the adaptation. It is upon Sorvino's shoulders that the weight of the film falls and she is not quite equal to it, never at all convincing as an ardent adolescent and too melting for a princess capable of such easy deception. She is not aided by a wooden performance by Rodan, who comes alive only when called to vigorous physical action, shooting arrows and stealing kisses with a zeal never felt in his line readings.

The Triumph of Love suffers not from being too stage-bound and static, as many play adaptations do, but from the resulting overcompensation. The camera swoops around trees, through carriage windows, and across long rooms, there are frequent jump cuts (at least some of which are meant to be self-consciously modern, but that more often come off as amateurish, or more worryingly, as though they couldn't get a decent shot together without one), and characters are constantly running about, presumably in order to do the next scene in a fresh location. The insistence on the possibilities of cinema, all those dynamic touches impossible in the live theatre, exposes the theatrical seams.

Since Marivaux's play resists being contorted into anything we could call 'realistic,' the filmmakers try to run the other way, into artificiality, affectation, and farce. Interestingly, the original play was a notable failure, possibly as a result of its heroine seducing multiple characters of both genders. This subversive element seems to beg for a deeper exploration of the dynamics of power, gender, sexuality, and monarchy, but the filmmakers get snarled up in the creaky turnings of the dramatic wheel. Rather than a fun, if slow-moving, romp in wigs and panniers, one longs for an anarchic dive into the treacherous waters of political and sexual machination, a pastoral Dangerous Liaisons or a gender-bent Rapunzel. This film is an attempt at a cappuccino without the espresso shot, and thus, despite its glossy costumes and sophisticated vocabulary, proves un-stimulating.