Adaptations: A Grotesque Form?

I can't believe this is already the last week of class. Today we watched the Disney adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, which turned out to be a little longer than I expected and cut into class discussion more than I'd hoped. As a result, I thought I'd post some thoughts I had on the theory of adaptation and how it applies to our course. After all, I know everyone's going to see the Never Let Me Go adaptation when it comes to theatres, so why not have some theoretical ideas to accompany the popcorn?

Linda Hutcheon notes in her text A Theory of Adaptation that everyone has a theory on adaptation. My theory changes with almost every adaptation, for I'm exposed to some sort of adaptation on a daily basis (books, film, television, art, music, blogs, etc). Sometimes it seems as though everything I encounter is an adaptation, or an adaptation of an adaptation. As Hutcheon argues, adaptation is a "process" rather than a "formal entity" (xv), which explains why mostly everything in art or the media these days seems like something I've seen before. Her focus on process reminds me of Bakhtin's concept of the grotesque body as "becoming," and I can't help but wonder if adaptations are a means by which we ensure that a text remains a living form, constantly recycled and revived. Yet I wouldn't consider adaptations the lower stratum of the body...

Are adaptations always inferior? No. As Hutcheon states, the criterion for judgement cannot be fidelity to the original text (6). Fidelity criticism is over and done with - we leave that to the journalists and their disparaging reviews of film adaptations and song remakes that so rarely come close to "the original" version. Hutcheon writes that the definition of "to adapt" is "to adjust, to alter, to make suitable" (7). Hence an adaptation isn't meant to be the same but to change the text - to alter the text; it requires both creation and reception, further emphasizing how adaptations are a process, rather than product, that requires both intent and interpretation.

While thinking about Hutcheon, I watched the trailer for Never Let Me Go for the fourteenth time, and I couldn't help but wonder if clones could be considered human adaptations - a means of ensuring the continuity of humanity (thus making the human body a grotesque figure constantly becoming). The obsession of the students to find their "possible" - and their anticipation that the "possible" will be exactly like them - reveals the problem with expecting an adaptation to mirror a text.  

Similarly, in A Wrinkle in Time, Meg states that "like and equal are not the same thing," a phrase that is repeated in the film version multiple times (almost as an apology for its failure as an adaptation). Trouble is, the failure of the film is exactly that - it assumes that like and equal are the same thing. The Disney version tries to remain faithful to the text, but imposes marketable changes on the narrative in order to make the movie accessible to a variety of viewers (removes the heavy Christian references, makes Meg more attractive, gives the parents first names, changes the period to the 21st century, includes visual minorities, the (fe)male Happy Medium, etc). The changes are minor, but they standout; yet not enough to subvert, to alter, to adjust, the original narrative. The adaptation can't seem to decide if it wants to be the text or be a text. 

On Thursday, we'll be discussing contemporary freaks and geeks, and all of them, in some way or another, are an adaptation - they are adjusted or altered versions of what constitutes freak and geek, for as we noted at the start of the course, a "freak" isn't a person, but a practice - not a product, but a process.

RIP: Michael Jackson

Friday this week will mark the one year anniversary of Michael Jackson's death. I remember finding out on the news from a hotel room in Mumbai. I was truly looking forward to his upcoming London show and couldn't believe my eyes when I watched the television footage regarding his death.

On Thursday, we'll be discussing Contemporary Freaks and Geeks. We'll begin with a discussion of how television shapes our cultural perception of "freaks" and then we'll discuss celebrity "freaks" in all their grotesque glory, including Michael Jackson. Although we'll watch a short clip from Thriller, I thought I'd embed the full length video, in case you've never seen it before. 

Voted the best music video of all time:

Never Let Me Go Adaptation

I've looked at this trailer several times now, and I can't wait to see the film. I'm hopeful, based on the trailer, that the film does the book justice.

Clowns, Consumption, and Controversy

Tuesday's Coming Attractions...

"And what am I without my Buffo's face? Why, nobody at all. Take away my make-up and underneath is merely not-Buffo. An absence. A vacancy" (Carter 142).

"It was a panopticon she forced them to build, a hollow circle of cells shaped like a doughnut, the inward-facing wall of which was composed of grids of steel and, in the middle of the roofed, central courtyard, there was a round room surrounded by windows" (Carter 247).

Some thoughts...

Teaching novels such as Geek Love and Nights at the Circus tests the limits of acceptability. I've been surprised by the multiple comments made on how offensive and disturbing the texts are - making readers uncomfortable with the characters and disassociated from the narrative. Why shouldn't literature offend? Television is full of despicable, discomforting, and even repulsive characters that garner praise from critics and adoring audiences (House, Samantha, Sylar, Spike, Chuck Bass, etc). Generally speaking, shows with only good looking, happy, and successful people performing good acts don't get very far - we aren't interested in dull perfection as viewers. The most popular characters are crass, selfish, and manipulative. Yes, often there's a little storyline to make them more "human" for certain viewers and to give more depth to their ways; however, the characters we love to hate are generally more popular than good little heroes (and even the good guys and dolls usually venture to the dark side at some point, even if just temporarily, in order to expand their roles beyond the boundaries of a boring box).

Authors such as Dunn and Carter challenge us as readers to question the limits of our comfort. The clowns and the images of the panopticon in Carter's novel serve as tools for Carter's reader challenge: clowns symbolize a (dis)comfort. I used to love clowns at birthday parties because I was both afraid and intrigued by them. Until I read IT and never wanted to find myself in the same room as a clown again. Clowns, intended to entertain, are portrayed by Carter as complicated figures locked behind a mask and battling despair. The clown, a symbol of the carnival, becomes a trope for the panopticons throughout the novel.

The actual panopticons in the novel (whorehouse, museum of women monsters, the prison, etc), fall to pieces - Carter subverts the patriarchal representation of the panopticon with these symbolic structures. But the clown, as a figurative panopticon, is confined to a masquerade under constant watch. Without the viewer, the clown ceases to exist: "As long as a child remembers..." (141).

Indeed, disturbing and discomforting. Given what graces our television screens and city streets, however, it takes someone theoretically complex like Carter to push our limits and think beyond the box - to confront our own discomforting and at times exploitative responses.

Geek Love illustrations

Here's the link to the website with the interesting illustrations of Geek Love:

http://picturebookreport.com/category/geek-love/

Positive Classroom Environment Guidelines

Keep cells on vibrate

Food is fine

Be respectful of opinions and ideas

Inclusive and open-minded discussions

Discuss disability theories and how they intersect with sexuality/gender

No verbal arm wrestling

Encourage all students to participate in class

No side conversations (respect the speaker)

Vote before holding class outdoors

Offer positive reinforcement

Provide clear assignment expectations and guidelines

Provide helpful research resources

Employ consistent grading style (letter grades vs. percentages)

Marks to be returned quickly (within a week)

First Class

During my undergraduate days at McGill, I loved taking summer classes. Although they were intense, they were short enough to maintain my interest and full of keen students. I particularly remember my Postmodern American Fiction course, which I anticipated despising, but from which I can recall nearly every lesson and discussion. A truly terrific and inspiring class.

Today is the first day of my Spring course “Freaks and Geeks” and I hope it’ll prove as engaging and intellectually exciting. Well, perhaps not today’s class per se, given it’ll encompass a lot of bookkeeping details, but the course in its entirety.

Geek Love sets the tone for the class. A strange, but enthralling novel written with imaginative language. Take the opening line: “‘When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets, “ Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing’” (3). The first sentence itself demands reader focus, as though we’re already spectators of the carnival, prepared to watch the show and listen to the story of these dreamlets and their parents that form a nuclear family. A family not unlike the ones that populate television shows such as Heroes (which featured a carnival this season).

The idea of breeding a freak show certainly guarantees that the children will always have jobs and raises questions regarding genetic control and/or cloning, which we’ll encounter throughout the course. Although the discussion topics that will arise from the required texts will prove interesting to most students, I’m unsure they’ll all enjoy the narratives themselves. Geek Love, for example, will either be adored or dismissed; it reminds me of Vandal Love, a novel I’ve taught before and on which I’ve written a chapter of my dissertation. Students had quite the reaction to Vandal Love – most expressing disappointment with the one-dimensional characters. What struck me was that many of the critiques of the novel focused on how the markers of difference in Vandal Love made it impossible for students to relate to the characters and care about the story. Several students felt the novel’s focus on deformed figures, in conjunction with the distortion of the text’s diction with interspersed French, prompted a sense of alienation and distance. Yet, I would argue that this perception of distance and disassociation is Béchard’s way of inspiring in the reader the same loss and dispossession experienced by the characters of the text. Most students understood my position, but I felt they were still disenchanted by the novel overall. Nonetheless, those who wrote term papers on the text, wrote the top essays – often the best papers stem from texts that students dislike, rather than texts they want to carry in their back pocket through trenches and over mountains.

Geek Love’s characters are more well rounded than those of Vandal Love; and the plot is more mysterious, prompting, perhaps, more engagement from the reader. But at the end of the day, both novels do seek to open minds and question perceptions of normalcy, the unbearable weight of idealized bodies, and the theoretically challenging and inspiring imperfections of humanity.  

Short Syllabus

Course Description:

Freaks and Geeks: Literary Insiders and Social Outsiders in Contemporary Fiction

“Geek: 1. A person, a fellow, esp. one who is regarded as foolish, offensive, worthless, etc.  2. A performer at a carnival or circus whose show consists of bizarre or grotesque acts, such as biting the head off a live animal” (Oxford English Dictionary).

“We live at a moment when the name “Freaks” is being rejected by the kinds of physiologically deviant humans to whom it has traditionally been applied…To them it seems a badge of shame, a reminder of their long exclusion and exploitation by other humans, who defining them thus have by the same token defined themselves as “‘normal’” (Leslie Fiedler, Freaks 13).

In this course we will discuss the ownership and rejection of the stereotypes that define “freaks and geeks.” The characters in the novels we will study are all considered “freaks” by conventional social standards. But what characterizes humanity, and who determines this characterization? From the Binewskis carnival family in Geek Love to the “dark and stormy night” that begins the award-winning tale of A Wrinkle in Time, we will examine how the novels under study are symbolic funhouses that make so-called “normal” people seem bland and bordered. But why have these authors chosen malformed figures as protagonists? Beyond their creative edge, do the physical deformities reflect social oppression? Do they make a statement on society’s tendency to showcase deformity and beauty as physical portrayals of what belongs, and what does not belong, to the “natural” human order? In addition, how do these misshapen bodies argue for the deformation of traditional literary canons and cultural icons? To answer these questions, we will approach the texts under a theoretical lens that employs theories of the body, the gaze, the grotesque, and the Carnivalesque.

Course Objectives:

On completion of this course, students should be able to:

• determine how social attitudes have shaped perceptions of “freaks” in literature, culture, and society. 
•  investigate how the boundaries of the body are redefined by “freaks and geeks,” and how marginal figures shift the canonical centre.
• engage in a critical discussion on the required texts and topics.
• write a critical analysis on the required text(s), and to support the thesis with relevant research and astute close reading skills.
• appreciate how literary studies contributes to critical thinking beyond the classroom.

Texts and Readings:

Pre-Session Study

Read: Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love.

Note: We will conduct close readings of the text in class. You are not required to use the edition purchased by the bookstore, but it will be easier to discuss the text as a group if we’re all on the same page.

Students are advised to read as many of the literary works as possible before the beginning of term. You might start to consider some of the interrelated issues evident in the works. Articles related to the texts, and considered required reading for class discussion, will be made available on Blackboard.

The other novels we will study include:

Angela Carter  Nights at the Circus (Vintage Classics)

Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go (Vintage Canada)

Madeleine L’Engle A Wrinkle in Time (Square Fish)

We will also watch the following during class:

Tod Browning’s Freaks

Selections from contemporary culture’s revision of geeks and the popularity of “the freak show” (for example: Freaks and Geeks, Glee, Star Trek, Michael Jackson, etc).