The Classics, Edited

There’s an extensive discussion going on at Amba’s place about a project that’s been undertaken by a friend of hers:

Jesse Kornbluth, a magazine, book, and Web journalist and the host of a spirited, personal cultural tip sheet called Head Butler (and an old friend of Jacques’), has a new enterprise: stripping down style-heavy classics, starting right now with Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, to something that today’s distracted, attention-deficient kids—and adults!—can and will read. Why?

He tried reading it to his daughter, she found it boring, so he decided to cut out all of the extraneous description and clunky old language. An example follows in the post.

I suspect he’ll be disappointed with the result. As I’ve mentioned here before the transition to visualcy rather than literacy doesn’t just mean relying on pictures rather than written descriptions and shorter attention spans. It also points to a requirement for a more agonistic presentation and greater difficulty in understanding abstractions and following abstract reasoning.

In the particular case of the works of Dickens when you eliminate the lengthy descriptions, you eliminate London, its inhabitants, and their lives, and the work becomes impersonal. You lose Dickens.

As a craft (rather like découpage in which you cut one thing up and repurpose it as something else) I have no particular problem with this. As an alternative to reading the classics, I find it horrifying for any number of reasons. For one thing I don’t see how one could possibly avoid editing the works according to one’s own sensibilities. Thomas Bowdler, from whose name the word “bowdlerization” was derived, did that with the works of Shakespeare to make them more acceptable to 18h and 19th century readers, particularly ladies. Hey! Let’s give Hamlet a happy ending!

To make a film analogy, think about editing Casablanca or The Maltese Falcon into a 15 minute short. You can digest the plots and characters into that. But you lose the movies themselves. They become uninteresting. Come to think of it, why not just flesh out the trailers a bit?

Or why not just revive Classics Comics/Classics Illustrated? Add some additional titles beyond the 160 some-odd originally published. More female authors (who were rather short-changed in the original CI). Add more 20th century works. More works by Asian and African authors. I can imagine A Farewell to Arms or Of Mice and Men as Classics Comics. I’ll admit I have a bit more difficulty imagining The Sun Also Rises or East of Eden in that format. Not to mention Rabbit, Run.

No, if you’re really going to introduce the younger generations to literary classic it will need to be in video form and heavily edited. Not only will you need to chop Moby Dick into a 30 page comic (which was actually done and did, indeed, lose Moby Dick while preserving the basics of the plot) but into a 20 minute cartoon. Or maybe a series of 30 second vignettes.

20 comments… add one
  • sam Link

    “In the particular case of the works of Dickens when you eliminate the lengthy descriptions, you eliminate London, its inhabitants, and their lives, and the work becomes impersonal. You lose Dickens.”

    I forget the movie, but Woody Allen’s character told someone he was a speedreader and had just finished War and Peace.

    “Oh really, what was it about?”
    “Russia.”

  • sam Link

    “As I’ve mentioned here before the transition to visualcy rather than literacy ”

    I’d include, in the rather than category, audicy (?), but I’m old. When I was child, before there was tv to any great extent, the radio was a primary source of entertainment. Listening to stories on the radio required you to use your imagination. You had to construct a mental world to track to the auditory world presented to you on the radio. In this it resembled reading. I can’t help but think that tv has robbed kids of the opportunity to exercise their imaginations.

  • PD Shaw Link

    I believe there are already numerous abridged versions of children’s classics in the children’s section of book stores that simplify the language in order to adapt them to younger readers. I believe I had several given to me as a kid, which has always left me a little uncertain about whether I’ve read a certain book, though I know the action elements of the plot. (e.g., some of the Vernes and Wells books) Also, I had access to my father’s original editions of Classics Illustrated, and there were more modern versions available at the newstand when I was about 10-12.

    I don’t recall Dickens or a Christmas Carol as being “style-heavy.” Indeed, wasn’t JK Rowling compared favorably to Dickens as writing in a popular style?

  • PD Shaw Link

    Having now clicked through the link, I should recognize that Amba mentioned previous juvenile editions of the classics. I would just add that there are a lot of them; sometimes it seems more than originals in the classic childrens canon.

    And she excerpted prose from the Christmas Carol. I still don’t think that particular passage is style-heavy or compels us to immerse ourselves in a foreign land or time the way Melville demands we become familiar with Nantucket whalers or Kipling wants us to know the many tensions of British India. What I can see is that this particular book has been so adapted for other stories, that there might be little patience for the foreshadowing details: when do we get to the d____d ghosts?

  • michael reynolds Link

    Kids will not only read long books, they often prefer long books. I write long books and I’m buried in contracts to write more.

    What has changed is that choice has exploded. As a consequence kids won’t put effort into something that — in their estimation — sucks. You have a shot at them, they’ll give you a few minutes, but if you can’t close the sale, well, they’ve got about a million other things they can do with their time. Tick tock, Mr. Dickens.

    In fact, considering the dominance of series books in the middle grade and young adult markets, you have kids reading what are, in effect, books that run to 3,000 pages or more. Our ANIMORPHS series was 63 books in all, averaging 150 pages each, for close to 10,000 pages. So something like half a million kids read 10,000 pages about the same characters.

    The truth is I found Moby Dick boring. It could have used some editing. I like Dickens a lot, but is there anything about the story of a 19th century English boarding school student that should automatically enthrall readers?

  • sam Link

    Hey, my mother’s maiden name was Applegate.

    “The truth is I found Moby Dick boring. It could have used some editing.”

    Maybe. But not the opening line….or the last.

  • conradg Link

    In some defense of the project, I’d point to the revolution in literature that occurred early in the last century, by the efforts of writers like Hemingway, towards shorter, crisper sentence structure, doing away with extraneous descriptions and qualifiers, etc. This made writers like Dickens into quaint cultural artifacts that most people now can’t directly relate to, because we simply don’t speak or write in that language any more. Reading Dickens isn’t just reading an historical work of fiction any more, it’s entering a time machine of language and thought, which is rather hard for adults to do, much less kids.

    It’s not a bad idea in itself to update classics like these for kids. The execution is what’s hard. I’m reminded of Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare, which was highly popular in Dickens’ own time, as a popular simplification of Shakespeare’s plays for children. The literary effort was of high quality, of course, which made it acceptable even among Shakespearean scholars of the time. So it all depends on the skill of the adapter.

  • sam Link

    Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

    “The devious-crusing Rachel.” Beautiful.

  • What has changed is that choice has exploded. As a consequence kids won’t put effort into something that — in their estimation — sucks.

    Bingo!

    My son loves to read. He reads all sorts of books, but if they don’t capture his interest forget it, he’ll never open it up because there are so many other books out there that are much more interesting.

    In fact, considering the dominance of series books in the middle grade and young adult markets, you have kids reading what are, in effect, books that run to 3,000 pages or more. Our ANIMORPHS series was 63 books in all, averaging 150 pages each, for close to 10,000 pages. So something like half a million kids read 10,000 pages about the same characters.

    I agree here as well, at least it comports well with my son’s reading habits. He loves a good series, the characters become almost like friends. Hell, I even read some of the series as well as they are fun and it gives us something else to talk about.

    As for Dickens after reading the two passages, I have to say Dickens needed an editor…badly. However, the stripped down portion is too lean as well. It leaves out too much. In the original why is there that part about the Lord Mayor? Everything up to that point had been “painting a scene out on the streets” then we shift to the Lord Mayors might mansion? Uhhhh…what?

    In the stripped down version he covers how cold it is and the church tower ringing while lost high up in the fog, but the imagery of people moving about the street is lost.

  • Drew Link

    Wait. Isn’t Moby Dick the drum solo for Bonzo on Led Zeppelin II??

    nyuk, nyuk, nyuk

  • In the original why is there that part about the Lord Mayor?

    To give you a picture of London from bottom to top. Don’t forget that Dickens was a rather political writer.

  • The writers of the classics become much more interesting when you go off the beaten path.

    Nathaniel Hawthorne changes into a different person when you know that he and Xenobia shacked up in a commune in northern New York for a while. Or was it Connecticut?

    Smart writers write for an audience. They always have.

  • My two oldest kids (now almost 8 & 7) are pretty much what Michael describes. The problem isn’t “distracted, attention-deficit kids” – a concept I think is mostly hogwash. The reason there are college courses on the classics is because they are often inscrutable and written in a language that simply isn’t used today. There’s a reason most of the classics are read in school or college.

    Here’s another way to make them more accessible. 🙂

  • ponce Link

    A picture I came across as a kid of Bill Sikes beating Nancy to death used to give me nightmares. I think it was in the Classic Comic version of Oliver Twist.

  • Tully Link

    Kids today grew up on media. You have to plant the hook on them earlier in the read to hold their attention. Slow development of interest in the story doesn’t do it.

  • PD Shaw Link

    If kids aren’t reading the first question to ask is what are the parents’ attitudes towards reading? Do the parents enjoy reading? Do they give kids input to what they read or do they simply buy/borrow books that their kid should read?

    If the kids are fidgety, easily distracted and unable to concentrate very long, do the parents share these traits? Are typical parental conversations events that take place during and between looking at or for an electronic device?

  • PD Shaw Link

    More to the topic of the post, I would argue that a number of the pre-novel classics, in particular the epics of Homer, Beowulf, Arthurian legends like Sir Gaiwan and the Green Knight, would still be valuable works re-written as plot summaries that avoid difficult poetic conventions. The stories have significant independent value from the verses.

  • Maxwell James Link

    To echo Michael and Steve V. a bit – what made Dickens great was story. He was a great plotter and a master of creating vivid characters. But as a prose artist he was just OK – good at times but definitely overly wordy. And as you wryly noted in the other thread, he was paid by installment, so his economic incentives were driven in part by length.

    I don’t think we should have the same expectations when it comes to reading Dickens vs. reading Shakespeare. Only one of them was the best wordsmith the English language has yet created. Similarly, I would put Melville in a different category – a far better, and far stranger writer, albeit one with a much more broken sense of incident.

    Overall, I’m not too concerned about the reading habits of well-off kids nowadays. Readers develop over time, and while we tend to think of twelfth grade as a cutting-off point, it really isn’t. Getting kids to become readers in the first place is the tricky part.

  • To give you a picture of London from bottom to top. Don’t forget that Dickens was a rather political writer.

    It still strikes me as out of place. He is going on about the cold and the fog and what is going on in the streets…the street scene of London…then wham we are in the Lord Mayor’s mansion hearing about his holiday preparations…sorry, it is a bit jarring, seems out of place.

    Don’t get me wrong, I love the story, but an editor would have been good.

    Are typical parental conversations events that take place during and between looking at or for an electronic device?

    Well…World of Tanks…its awesome.

  • <i.It still strikes me as out of place. He is going on about the cold and the fog and what is going on in the streets…the street scene of London…then wham we are in the Lord Mayor’s mansion hearing about his holiday preparations…sorry, it is a bit jarring, seems out of place.

    It contrasts the lives of the rich and powerful (warm and toasty and fat and bossy) with the lives of the peons (cold and wet and desperate and bossed). I’m not sure it could be any clearer with a footnote.

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