Kimberley Reynolds

SOURCE: "Books on the Box: The BBC Chronicles of Narnia," in Critical Survey, Vol. 3, No. 3,1991, pp. 313-23.

[In the following essay, Reynolds centers on the BBC adaptation of C, S. Lewis's Chronicles of Íarnia in a broader examination of issues and assumptions about the translation of children's books into television.]

It is rare to find parents and educators actively promoting a television series (other than the specifically didactic 'schools' broadcasts) and treating it as a cultural event. This reflects a deeply rooted ambivalence about television as entertainment which is directly linked to attitudes surrounding children's reading. Watching television is inevitably regarded as an activity less worthwhile than reading, and for long has been accused of seducing children away from books. Nevertheless, when in 1989 the BBC launched its three-year serialisation of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, families around the country regularly settled down to an early Sunday evening's viewing, and the whir of institutional video recorders switching themselves on was almost audible. The ongoing adaptation of the Narnia books for television (at the time of writing The Silver Chair is being screened in the six weeks leading up to Christmas 1990) raises a number of key issues about children's literature and television. These have primarily to do with status, audience, and the construction of narrative. In particular, the 'made-for-TV' nature of the series (as compared with the many film adaptations of children's texts such as Black Beauty, National Velvet, The Secret Garden and Treasure Island) created problems and possibilities which need to be explored. In this article I shall be less concerned with the specific adaptation of Lewis's books than with the attitudes toward televised versions of children's books the series highlights. In particular, I want to question long-held assumptions about the fugitive and reductionist nature of visual renditions now that the video recorder has come of age.

SCREENED STORIES: SCEPTICS, STATUS, AND SKILLS

C. S. Lewis belonged to a well-established school of thought which holds that books are infinitely superior to films and (especially) television, and that any attempt to make a filmed version of a 'good' book is doomed to fail. He identified some of the reasons for this failure in a brief analysis of a filmed version of Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines.

Of its many sins—not least the introduction of a totally irrelevant young woman in shorts who accompanied the adventurers wherever they went—only one here concerns us. At the end of Haggard's book .. . the heroes are awaiting death entombed in a rock chamber and surrounded by the mummified kings of that land. The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one better by adding an earthquake. Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps the scene in the original was not 'cinematic' and the man was right, by the canons of his own art, in altering it. But it would have been better not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to the screen only by being ruined.¹

Lewis goes on to say that the story is ruined not because one ending is necessarily better than another, but because they create entirely different feelings in the reader/spectator. This difference in feeling he attributes to two causes. First, the dictates of cinematic conventions and expectations (his prejudices against which are not denied), and second, the lack of understanding on the part of the film's director of what constitutes a good story. The educated élite, Lewis argues, tend to disparage the power of narratives which concern themselves more with plot than character development or portraits of society, and particularly those plots which involve excursions into other worlds or 'shadow lands'. The kind of literary snobbishness which dismisses genres such as children's fiction or science fiction as all plot and no substance misses an important point, for to a certain kind of reader such writing has the power to convey 'profound experiences, which are . . . not acceptable in any other form.'²

Lewis's defence of literature characterised by powerful plots is based entirely on the subjective nature of the reading experience. It is unique, personal, private and capable of enabling the reader to transcend mundane reality. Because of these qualities the written text is supremely able to adapt to the needs of the individual reader and to do this at different stages in his/her development. Lewis believed utterly in the power of the written word, be it poetry for the educated or adventure stories for the masses, and likewise deprecated filmed narratives. 'Nothing', he wrote, 'can be more disastrous than the view that cinema can and should replace popular written fictions. The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world. There is a death in the cinema.'³

In such passages Lewis is articulating the fear held by many that television and films would do two things; especially with regard to the juvenile population. First, that they would prove so seductive that children would abandon, or fail to acquire, the habit of reading. Second, that filmed versions of texts would make even the best stories mechanical: each viewing would be identical to the one before; the child would not be free to change emphases; the viewer would become a passive spectator, as all the 'work' (e.g. the animation of the text) had been done, etc. All in all, the viewing process was protrayed as an entirely impoverished one when compared to that of reading. It was believed that the child would develop no analytical skills through watching rather than reading. Perhaps most important of all, Lewis is suggesting that watching a film prevented the child from making the complex series of unconscious identifications with characters and situations which make fantasy literature useful for psychological development.

However valid some of these arguments may be, they must also be understood as typical of attitudes toward popular culture throughout the ages. Ironically, Lewis was at great pains to defend the virtues of popular forms of literature (including children's fiction) precisely because of their appeal to less experienced or sophisticated readers. It needs also to be remembered that at the time that Lewis was writing his defence of popular texts (1947), television ownership was not widespread, prolonged daily viewing was impossible, the VCR had yet to be invented, and no research had yet been done into the viewing process.

Since Lewis's death in 1963 a considerable amount of research into the effects of television on the child has been conducted, and much of it can be used to debate the objections outlined above. In particular, it is now recognised that children are not necessarily passive and indiscriminate viewers, but may instead develop 'visual literacy' skills which can complement those acquired through reading. The ability to decode a complex visual narrative often precedes but does not necessarily preclude a similar degree of sophistication and facility with written texts. Despite frequent media discussion of these issues, there has long remained a distrust of television and filmed versions of classic children's books, and the advent of cable and satellite TV seems bound to provoke a reactionary revival of those parents who announce that they have no television as if this were a virtue. (Funnily enough, such behaviour is closely related to the nonsmoking, teetotalling, vegetarian adults Lewis repeatedly mocks in the Narnia books.) Recently, however, there has been a volte-face on the part of many adults who previously deplored filmed versions of children's books as at best inevitably disappointing and at worst travesties of the original. There seem to be two key reasons for this U-turn. The first is that far from discouraging children from reading, television and films have given birth to a vigorous new publishing activity—the book of the film/programme. Children's book sales have increased by 170 per cent over the last five years, precisely the period over which domestic sales of VCRs have also rocketed.⁴ Through TV tie-ins young readers are introduced to an eclectic range of writing, from Ghostbusters to Adrian Mole and back to such classics as A Little Princess and, of course, the Chronicles of Narnia. More importantly, the viewing and reading processes have increasingly been recognised to be complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

The second and in some ways more interesting reason for the new acceptability of filmed versions of juvenile texts, also based on the widespread use of VCRs in homes and schools, is the growth of a children's video library. Much work needs to be done to raise the overall quality of material readily available on video for children, and this is important. Video's are not just 're-usable resources', useful for keeping children quietly entertained; they have the potential to make the viewing process more analogous to reading and so for developing analytical skills useful for both activities. VCRs make it possible to review, to skim, to watch selected scenes repeatedly, to omit sections and pause over others—all of which make viewing more personal, more creative, and potentially more intellectually demanding. They also mean that greater care has to be taken over the translation of complex texts into videos, as re-viewing, like re-reading, demands that there be something new to discover at different stages in the young viewer's development.

The ramifications of this degree of control over the presentation of video material are many. For the older child it enables very detailed interaction between the written and visual texts. By encouraging visual decoding, videos may enhance understanding of the director's version of a text and so the potential for comparison with the reader's own interpretation. Repeated watching of a visual version of a text with which the child is familiar can highlight differences in the narrative functioning and capabilities of the two media. Even a young child will notice and understand adjustments to the way in which a story is told; for instance, the need to make the narrator a character in the action or to substitute descriptions of events (as in a letter) with enactment. By comparing the narrative organisation of printed and visual versions of a text a great deal can be learned about the relationship between structure, form and meaning.

Re-viewing is undoubtedly the most important aspect of video material. According to Lewis, the desire to re-read indicated that a story was not just being read to find out what happened or whodunnit; indeed, his criterion for a good book was that it became more pleasurable on subsequent readings. Particularly in the young child it is not aesthetic qualities which are being sought through repeated readings, listenings, or tellings but (as the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim has observed) the satisfaction of having resolved difficult emotional problems. The same applies equally to the viewing process, which additionally has the reassuring property of never forgetting or changing what comes next.

For all of these reasons videos have the potential both to complement printed versions of juvenile texts and to raise the standard and status of televised adaptations. If they are to do this effectively it is necessary to overcome established attitudes to children's literature itself and, just as importantly, habitualised practices in the adaptation process. To render the narrative complexity of texts (and particularly those which were not originally intended for reading aloud), those involved in making adaptations must be encouraged to exploit the medium of television to its full potential. At present most books which are adapted for television make unhappy compromises as to how far they are prepared to 'adapt' the original text, and as a consequence generally leave the viewer dissatisfied. In a recent article for Screen, Paul Kenidentifies the principal cause of this dissatisfaction as the tendency for televised versions to 'flatten' a text so that, 'it is less a "novel" as such that is being adapted than its plot, characters, setting [and] dialogue'.⁵ The reason for this flattening is a direct consequence of the elevation of the written text over the film (and especially over TV). Tradition has enshrined the practice of trying to be entirely faithful to the original, which means treating film or television as a transparent medium purely concerned with showing what the writer has written.⁶ The irony is that a great deal of most literary texts (as opposed to sensational stories) cannot be shown in the conventional sense, as they tend to be concerned with exploring internal states, providing ancillary information, and generally digressing from the main action of the text. At present a limited range of visual conventions is used to render the most crucial of these (voice-overs, flashbacks, etc.), but too much experimentation is avoided as this is deemed to call attention to the fact that what is being watched is television rather than an animated book. This is surely ironic as it is only through interpretation—the translation from literary to visual language—that the 'flattening' process can be minimised and the complexity of the original restored.

This debate is concerned equally with the adaptation of novels for adults and those intended to be read primarily by children, but because juvenile fiction is generally regarded as inferior to and of less importance than adult fiction it could be in this area that the break with traditional ways of approaching the adaptation process could most readily be challenged. As well, the narrative structures of most children's books are necessarily less sophisticated than those for more experienced readers, thus simplifying the problems of recreating their effects visually.

C. S. Lewis was convinced that a strong plot was crucial to a book's success in stimulating the young reader to the point where entertainment became a form of spiritual enlightenment. The Narnia books were designed to be read aloud as well as for private reading (each chapter is a satisfyingly complete episode but is short enough to make a good 'bed-time' story) and so have an in-built sensitivity to the needs of interrupted performance. With their high status in the juvenile canon (which means the ability to attract funds but not necessarily the same level of constraints on the adaptation process experienced by those working on adult texts), their emphasis on plot, their adherence to classic-realist narrative conventions, and yet their dependence on fantasy lands, images, and experiences, Lewis's books seem ideal for television adaptation. The Paul Stone / Alan Seymour adaptations of the Chronicles of Narnia for the BBC thus provide a useful indication of how much work has been done to date to release the potential of the text-to-television transition, not least because the production and viewing processes have been spread over three years, thus allowing comparison of earlier and later episodes.

WITCHES AND WARDROBES: WHY, WHEN, AND FOR WHOM

The Chronicles of Narnia are among those few children's texts which adults take seriously. The reason for this is not based primarily in nostalgia, for those books which are given to children by adults are not necessarily those which adults most enjoyed when children themselves, but generally comprise a canon of those works of juvenile fiction deemed to have literary merit. This means in essence that the texts are capable of appealing simultaneously to readers at a variety of intellectual levels. Thus the very young readers of the Narnia stories may be primarily interested in the events which befall the children, while older readers may respond more to the ways in which Lewis has blended allegory, myth, legend, and children's fantasy to tell his story. At the primary level the stories are both exciting and also deal with problems such as separation, which frequently trouble young children. For the more mature reader, the most striking feature of the first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), may be the way in which Lewis manages successfully to defamiliarise the Christian Passion story through the self-sacrifice of the lion, Asian.

Lewis began writing the Narnia books in 1950, producing one annually for seven years. The books were immediately successful and have grown in popularity and critical stature over the decades. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has frequently been adapted for the stage, and there has been at least one previous attempt to adapt the series: an animated version for US television. None has so far succeeded in winning the vast popularity and approval accorded the books. Paradoxically, the principal reason for this failure is a consequence of the books' prestige. The tendency to 'flatten' texts through insistence on textual fidelity increases with a text's cultural status.⁷ It is in the adaptation of what are now called 'classic texts' that accuracy to the original is most insisted upon. In the children's canon at least, the Chronicles of Narnia have been designated modern 'classics', a status reflected in the transmission of the BBC adaptations. Each of the series is aired early on Sunday evenings (the institutionalised day for 'classic serials') and always in the six weeks before Christmas (a significant time in the television year and the battle for ratings). More important to this discussion is that the books were also treated as classics. Great care was taken to be true to the originals and to maintain those characteristics which contributed to the high regard in which they are held. This includes carefully reproducing the war-time, upper-middle-class setting, which is known to appeal to critics and sponsors.⁸

Such concern with literal fidelity creates problems of expectation. The production team had to cope with the imaginative projections and prejudices of a large proportion (those who had already read the books) of the 10 million UK viewers who have regularly watched the current Narnia adaptations. Additionally, they were faced with the problem that there was not one but seven texts to be considered, not all of which were felt to be equally suitable for filmed adaptation. (I will argue that this 'lack of suitability' is largely a consequence of traditional expectations of adaptations of classic texts.) Even when it was decided not to dramatise three of the books in the series, the size of the original Chronicles meant that the adaptation had to straddle two different television categories: the serial (usually associated with the action which makes up a single text) and the series (in which continuity is derived primarily from the characters), each with its own conventions and constraints.⁹

The scale of the project has been enormous, spanning three years and costing in excess of £7 million. It has nonetheless required substantial adjustments to Lewis's original series. The most obvious change is that the BBC adaptations are based on only four of the original seven Narnia books: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), and The Silver Chair (1953). Those familiar with the Narnia books will know that while these were the first four books about Narnia which Lewis wrote, they do not follow the internal chronology of Narnian history, which technically begins with The Magician's Nephew (1955). The Horse and His Boy (1954) properly belongs to the period when Peter was High King of Narnia and so should follow The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, It was decided not to try to telescope these later embellishments into the original tales in the televised version for a number of reasons. First it was felt that they would disrupt the continuity and coherence which exists between the first four tales. In the first two books the four Pevensie children all appear; in the third only Lucy and Edmund return to Narnia (Peter and Susan are now too old), but they are joined by their despicable cousin, Eustace. In The Silver Chair it is Eustace and his schoolmate Jill Pole who journey into Narnia. The two later books introduce a range of characters and events which do not advance the overall plot of the four original stories about Narnia.

The logic behind the decision to drop the books about the creation and history of Narnia is perfectly clear and could at this stage be defended on the grounds that the original readers of the series would not have had the information and material they contain as they first read the Narnia stories. Their exclusion, which is based on facilitating comprehension of the central plot, highlights one of the major differences between the viewing and reading processes. The BBC Chronicles of Narnia will have been shown over a period of three years, each annual screening spanning six weekly slots. While a good proportion of the audience will have read the books before watching the adaptations (though perhaps not for some years), there are also a large number of very young and first-time viewers. It is rare to find as widely mixed an audience for reading or even listening to a text as needs to be catered for in these television broadcasts, and it inevitably has led to constant simplification. The episodic viewing pattern in which the adaptations are originally broadcast demands that all the connections necessary to the advancement of the plot are made very clear and that most of the loose ends are tied up at the end of each week's instalment. The degree of simplification could perhaps have been minimised by relying on the young viewer's familiarity with a range of basic viewing conventions (significant music, who is in/excluded from a particular shot, pace, flashbacks, montage, significant looks in close-up, voice-overs, etc.) which help to encode meanings and reduce the flattening effects of literal adaptations, but frequent reliance on such devices is deemed to be antipathetic to the concerns of the classic serial.

In fact, imaginative use of the medium to build up layers of meaning is necessary if a visual version of a text is actually to be truthful to the original and to retain its ability to appeal to viewers of different ages and stages in their development. For example, while Lewis's narratives have very strong plots, they also use a number of juxtapositions and narrative delays. In the books such devices are crucial to understanding internal processes within the characters. For the first-time viewer, however (and particularly when a week intervenes between episodes), they could be confusing. This, together with the dictates of the thirty-minute time constraints on each episode, has necessitated simplifying and sometimes reorganising events. The result is that, particularly on first viewing, many of the levels on which the texts work appear to be missing. While the plots are essentially intact, the 'dual address' which has given the printed texts their status has been seriously diminished. The most obvious example is in Prince Caspian, certainly the least successful adaptation of those so far screened. Six half-hour slots were allotted to both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Silver Chair, and four to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Prince Caspian, however, was condensed into two thirty-minute episodes. While the bare bones of the plot were included, this meant that the televised Prince Caspian served primarily to introduce The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The ways in which the story tried and tested individual characters were almost completely lost, and without them it is extremely difficult to understand why only Lucy can see Asian at first and why Peter and Susan are told they can never return to Narnia.

Prince Caspian is a more wordy and in some ways more reflective book than the other three which have been serialised. It is more overtly concerned with character development and emotional resolutions than the other texts, and perhaps for this reason was deemed to make less good children's TV. Such truncating and changing of an original text, however, both violates the code of the 'classic serial' and exaggerates the 'flattening' effect. While the plot is essentially unchanged, the feeling and effect of the Stone/Seymour Caspian is very different from the original. For example, in the original text the pace of events is often slow, and realisation dawns on individual characters gradually over a range of incidents. The reader, from the privileged vantage point provided by the omniscient narrator, often knows more than the characters, yet also learns with them. The marvellous stages by which, for instance, the Pevensie children realise that they have returned to Cair Paravel hundreds of years after their reign (but only a year in their own lives), and the mixed emotions this knowledge engenders are completely lost in the televised version. The pace is too rapid and the gaze too external. The incident is rendered trivial to those who have not read the book, but brutalises those who have. Unfortunately, in this case departure from the orthodoxy of the 'classic serial' was neither innovative nor helpful in reproducing the meaning of the original. Moreover, the amount of condensing which has had to go on has resulted in a lack of clarity at times, and though for most of the series it is not necessary to have read the books in order to understand the televised version, this is not true of the BBC Prince Caspian. In particular, the book spends a considerable amount of time explaining the damaging effects of Miraz's rule. All of the best and most beautiful facets of the land have gone into a permanent state of hibernation—a living death—to await Asian's coming. Just as in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Asian's presence thaws the White Witch's eternal winter, so in Prince Caspian he recalls to life the dormant dryads, nymphs, giants and other 'mythical' creatures. The televised version of this waking is unsuccessful largely because who or what is being wakened is never explained. The activities of Asian and the girls are seen as entirely separate from those of Caspian and the Pevensie boys (and of less importance), while they are meant to be simultaneous and complementary.

The adaptation of Prince Caspian highlights many of the weaknesses of the Stone/Seymour Chronicles (and especially the refusal to engage with those aspects of the texts which are not directly related to plot), but it would be unfair to judge the series as a whole by its weakest part. If it has been some time since you have read the books, many of the subtleties of this dramatisation may be lost, but if (as is true of many of the children in the audience) you read the books in tandem with the broadcasts, the thought and attention to detail lavished on the series become evident. Close viewing shows that the adaptations are not as passive as they may appear on first viewing when, as with a first reading, concerns of plot are all-important. For instance, Lewis drew on a range of myths, legends, sagas and earlier romance, epic and fantasy material in the construction of his stories. These sources are reflected in the costuming of the adaptations which reflects a wide range of influences and periods but nevertheless manages to make a unified world, as Lewis does in his texts. A more radical element is provided in the enactment of certain scenes. For instance, Lewis has often been criticised for making his characters conform to sex-role stereotypes. In his books boys are always active, publicly tested heroes, while the girls are associated with passivity and spirituality. The televised versions do not alter the plots or adjust the boys' roles, but they do show the girls taking active roles in some of the battles—not only fighting, but actually killing enemies. They are also allowed to give vent to anger and frustration more forcefully than they do in the originals. A good example of this is in the opening of Prince Caspian when the children are shown to be waiting for trains which will take them to various destinations. Susan is going to America, which marks her out as the most changed of the children (she is the only one never to return to Narnia), and she quarrels spitefully with Lucy.

Another useful change is made in The Silver Chair. In the book, when the children first met Prince Rilian in the Underworld, they noticed that though he was 'handsome and looked both bold and kind . . . there was something about his face that didn't seem quite right'.¹⁰ The error in his visage is repeatedly registered in the children's thoughts until the Prince is finally released from his enchantment through the destruction of the silver chair:

'Lie there, vile engine of sorcery," he said, 'lest your mistress should ever use you for another victim.' Then he turned and surveyed his rescuers; and the something wrong, whatever it was, had vanished from his face.¹¹

In the Stone/Seymour version the abstract 'something wrong' is rendered concrete: the Prince's face is partially encased in an ornate metal helmet which he removes and crushes once he has broken the spell. This device works as effectively visually as the narrator's remarks do verbally. Both require interpretation; we are never told why his face was wrong or what the mask represents. More of this kind of translation of verbal to visual meanings would have greatly enhanced the series.

The final element of the BBC Chronicles I want to discuss in relation to children's reading and viewing habits is that of the problems surrounding any attempt to visualise an alternative world and the enactment of events which are impossible in our own. Narnia is like Never Never Land: some of its characteristics are described but much of it is the product of the unconscious—collective and individual. All of the events which take place there work on a variety of levels. For instance, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is certainly a religious allegory, but it is also a story about the child's need to deal with separation (boarding schools and war-time evacuation being the specific causes which promote anxiety in the children's real world¹²), and the problems of believing in the love of a person (or deity) who cannot be physically present. The alternative world is thus evoked not only to deal with the problems of Christian faith, but also to comment on contemporary social problems and individual emotional needs.

There is a danger that if the alternative world is made too real in enactment then the viewer's capacity to project aspects of the self into the events may be diminished. It was therefore in the creation of Narnia itself that most care needed to be taken and most thought given to the potential of the medium to imply and create feelings rather than always to show what was happening. This presented a paradox for the production team, for one facet of the appeal to those devising and creating the televised Narnia was that the stories required the kind of 'high-tech' interpretation usually associated with films such as Superman and Star Wars while also operating on a more complex level. The televised versions of the Chronicles relied on a vast range of special effects to help create an acceptable Narnia, including mixing animation with 'live' action. Perhaps inadvertently this mixture of real people and cartoons proved a successful way of presenting an alternative world for two reasons. First, it provided a metaphor for the relationship between reality and fantasy in the individual's life. Second, because the mixture was often crude, the viewer was regularly made aware that this was in fact not the 'real' Narnia but only television. The other world thus remained intact for readers and viewers alike. However, the point is not so much whether the television Narnia ultimately worked as that the production team felt compelled to make their Narnia look as much as possible like that described by Lewis and drawn by his illustrator, Pauline Baynes, rather than attempting to use television imaginatively. Surely there are ways of suggesting states of mind when journeying endlessly underground that don't depend entirely on dialogue, or to imply the existence of giants without reverting to the 'camera magic' which seemed dated when Land of the Giants was first broadcast more than two decades ago.

It was this reluctance to deal with states of mind (which is what the Narnia books are really about) rather than actions which led to the decision not to include The Last Battle in the BBC series. This is the final volume of Lewis's saga and the one for which he was awarded the Carnegie Medal in 1955, but it is also a book filled with problems for the adapter who is concerned with making 'good' children's television (that is programmes characterised by exciting action and external achievements). The images and events in the text are predominantly prophetic and visionary and, as in Prince Caspian, the plot is in many ways subordinate to internal development. Since the producer and dramatist conceived the BBC Chronicles as an extended classic serial, it is not surprising that they fell at The Last Battle. If, however, they had conceived their task throughout the series as developing and accommodating their audience to a new language for viewing that did not simply imitate but actually translated words and narrative devices into images, then by the time this final text had been reached the viewing audience would have been able to make the transition in the same way that the reader does. Indeed, by far the majority of viewers have read, are reading, or will soon read the Narnia books, and since this series has ultimately been designed for commercial video release as well as one-off viewing, by this time in the series the relationship between readers and viewers could have been made a strength.

Classic texts and their adapters rarely exploit the strengths of their relationship, and this is largely because to date adaptations have succumbed to the flattening process and pretended to be books. This pattern is deeply entrenched with adult fiction, particularly since most adults do not re-read and re-view with the same frequency and intensity as children. But as all the statistics prove, there is a high level of interaction between children, their books, and television adaptations. Added to this is the fact that children's books are not guarded with the same ferocity as are adult texts. Rather than slavishly aping adult television adaptation practices it would be exciting to see producers and dramatists of books for children capitalising on the unique qualities of children's reading/viewing habits to tackle the adaptation process in a more imaginative way. This can only stimulate further children's interest in the original texts, and in the process develop links between verbal and visual literacy in the next generation.

NOTES

¹ Cited in The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children's Reading, ed. M. Meek, A. Warlow. and G. Barton (Bodley Head, 1977), p. 78.

²The Cool Web, p. 86.

³The Cool Web, p. 86.

⁴Young Telegraph, no. 1 (6 October 1990), p. 1.

⁵ Paul Kerr, 'Classic Serials—To Be Continued', Screen, vol. 23, no, 1 (May-June 1982), p. 11.

⁶ Kerr, p. 12.

⁷ For a comprehensive discussion of the tendency of visual texts to 'flatten' novels see Kerr's article.

⁸ Kerr, pp. 17-19.

⁹ Kerr, p. 7.

¹⁰ C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (Puffin Books, 1953), p. 132.

¹¹The Silver Chair, p. 143.

¹² M. and M. Rustin, 'Narnia: An Imaginary Land as Container of Moral and Emotional Adventure', in Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children's Fiction (Verso, 1987), p. 55.

The author would like to thank Paul Stone (the producer of the BBC series) for discussing the process of making The Chronicles of Narnia.

Susan Drain

SOURCE: '"Too Much Love-Making': Anne of Green Gables on Television," in The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children's Literature, Vol. 11, No. 2, October, 1987, pp. 63-72.

[In the following essay, Drain discusses the manner in which plot alterations in the television adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables shifted focus from Anne's maturation to her romance with Gilbert Blythe.]

"Ruby Gillis . . . put too much love-making into her stories and you know too much is worse than too little."

—(Chapter 26)

Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables has been a popular book since it first appeared in 1908. Generations of girls have followed Anne's misadventures with love and sympathy, recognizing beneath the regional colour and the particular details the aspirations and periods of loneliness which are part of all growing up. It is one of the few books still commonly read that emerged from the nineteenth-century tradition of "orphan" books: Pollyanna is perhaps the only other example, and even she, after her reincarnation in Walt Disney's film, has faded again from view. Although Anne's appeal has been more enduring, it has been limited by its reputation as a girl's book. It is a rare boy who identifies with the dreamy, excitable, bookish, romantic Anne. However, Kevin Sullivan's translation of Anne to the small screen in his 1985 film version for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has finally made Anne known to a wider audience, not just outside Canada, but also beyond its female readership.

Curiously, the television version both brings the story to life and distances it. On the screen we see the places and the costumes which help make the story seem more real: the fabrics and the furnishings, the buildings and the landscape bring the past reassuringly before our eyes. But at the same time as the setting becomes vivid, the immediacy is lost. It is all there, but it is outside us. It is a convincing Green Gables, but it is not ours. We are visitors to this world, not co-creators of it. The same distancing affects our response to Anne. The reader's Anne is seen from the inside out; the reader identifies with her, and participates in her adventures. Though the identification is not complete—the narrative is not first-person, for example, and from time to time the reader shares the perspective of other characters, or even the occasionally ironic stance of the narrator—it is closer than is possible on the screen. Those images are seen from the outside; however sympathetic the camera, its eye settles on exteriors. Intimacy and identification are replaced by interpretation: we watch actions and expressions, we listen to words, but we remain outside.

Despite this distancing, however, the television version of Anne of Green Gables was a tremendous success—an Oscar is popular proof of that. Perversely, however, the success has been achieved only by sacrifice. Beautiful and moving as it is, the film Anne is yet a lesser accomplishment. It succeeds by reducing to predictability the leisurely complexities of character development and the gradual accommodation of individual and community that are the deeper patterns of Montgomery's original.

Admittedly, television is a special medium and its storytelling functions under certain constraints. For one thing the usual pattern of a television film is that of an extended viewing period, uninterrupted except perhaps by commercials. Even a mini-series, spread out over several days, is viewed in large chunks. The episodic quality of the novel is at odds with this pattern. The novel requires that the reader meet and accept Anne; then it proceeds in a leisurely way through a score of episodic incidents. Many a chapter is self-contained, and the book lends itself, after the initial half-dozen introductory chapters, to interruption and resumption. That is not to deny the book's unity, but only to say that its unity is chiefly on the level of theme and character, rather than plot. The expectation is, however, that television productions must compel attention for the duration of the broadcast, and it is plot that must compel. The episodic structure will not serve, and so the viewer who knows the novel will notice some major structural changes.

In fact, the story line is broken into two sub-stories, which we can briefly identify as "The Trial" and "The Love Story," "The Trial" is the story of Anne's adoption: will she or won't she be able to stay at Green Gables? "The Love Story" is the thread which ties together all Anne's subsequent adventures: will she or won't she be reconciled with Gilbert? These two sub-stories are unequal in length, approximately one-third, two-thirds rather than half-and-half, yet the broadcast requirement is for two equal sections. The scriptwriters' solution to this difficulty is to bridge the gap with the plot complication of Anne's friendship with Diana. The growth of their friendship is intertwined with the early development of the love story, but the last minutes of the first broadcast are devoted entirely to the crisis which occurs when Mrs. Barry accuses Anne of "getting Diana drunk" and forbids their meeting. The program closes with the girls' swearing an oath of friendship before they part. The viewer is left in suspense until the broadcast resumes: will Anne's innocence be proven and her friend restored to her?

When the broadcast does continue, a new school year has begun and Anne is taken up by the new school teacher, Miss Stacey, but these events are intercut with glimpses of Anne's estrangement from Diana. The viewer is not allowed to forget Anne's suffering, until at length Anne is restored to Mrs. Barry's good graces after saving Diana's baby sister during an attack of the croup. Immediately thereafter, the love story, temporarily overshadowed by the severed friendship, is resumed. The bridge succeeds in keeping the viewer's interest over the intermission in a way that the only gradually unfolding love story could not.

It is worth examining exactly how the scriptwriters have restructured the episodic narrative of the novel into the two sub-stories whose conflicts give direction and unity to the film. For instance, the opening third of the film ("The Trial") includes not only the opening scenes of the book, in which the Cuthberts are surprised by the outcome of their request for a boy to adopt, but also scenes of Anne's life before her adoption, a life only briefly described, in retrospect, in the novel. Furthermore, the first part includes most of Anne's early adventures in Avonlea, such as the affront to Mrs. Lynde and the loss of the amethyst brooch. What binds these incidents is the viewer's anxiety about Anne's fate, for the script writers have imposed a trial period of Anne's adoption. "You may not be happy here with two old grumps like us," says Marilla, though the viewer has no doubt about Anne's allegiance. It is purely a plot device, instituted to give an edge—will they send her back?—to the viewer's reaction to Anne's scrapes.

That edge is sharpened by a further rearrangement of episodes. Immediately after Anne's apology to Mrs. Lynde, Anne is sent to school, even though there are only a few weeks left before vacation. Marilla is prompt to warn Anne that going to school does not mean that the trial is over: "It's just as easy to take you out of school as to put you in." The novel's Marilla, however, had explicitly decided against Anne's going to school for such a brief period: "You must go to school; but it's only a fortnight till vacation so it isn't worth while for you to start before it opens again in September" (Chapter 8). This alteration allows the film version to include within the Trial section the "Tempest in the School Teapot" episode (Chapter 15), in which Anne cracks her slate over Gilbert's head, though in the novel Gilbert does not appear until school resumes in the fall. Nor is it enough to add this episode; the scriptwriters link it immediately with a scrape from much later in the book—Anne's disastrous attempt to dye her hair (Chapter 27). It does follow aptly enough that Gilbert's taunt of "Carrots" should have provoked her to buy the peddlar's dye, but the cumulative effect of all this trouble is to plunge Anne into the depths of despair and to raise the viewer to the peak of anxiety. At this very point, however, Marilla announces that the trial is over. Apparently, Anne is staying at Green Gables because of, rafter than in spite of, her penchant for trouble. To her own surprise, Marilla recognizes that she prefers the tumultuous Anne to the well-behaved child she had thought she wanted. "Did you really crack the slate?" she asks. The question seals her acceptance of Anne: "I think you may be a kindred spirit after all." In accepting Anne, Marilla is realigning herself, siding with Anne against the larger community, who might justly see Anne's behavior as something to be punished rather than condoned. This realignment is slightly but significantly different from its depiction in the novel.

The novel opens by introducing the reader to the chief members of the community of Avonlea long before the stranger Anne appears. The film, however, opens with Anne some time before she reaches Avonlea. She is shown in the squalor and the emotional and physical isolation of life with the Hammonds, and we watch as she is dispossessed of even these unsympathetic companions, and is returned to the orphanage, unwelcome even there. The only constant in her life, we see, is loneliness, and the imaginary companion her loneliness has made for her in her own reflection in a piece of glass. The scenes where Anne talks to her own reflection are glimpses of something dangerously close to madness: she is living in a dream-world, as the matron tells her, and that dream-world must be shattered if the child is to be saved. Thus, by the time Anne reaches Avonlea, the viewer's anxiety on Anne's behalf is heightened by our awareness of Anne's fate if she does not survive the trial. Marilla is unaware that sending Anne back to the orphanage means condemning her to misery and madness. But the viewer is firmly allied with Anne—and in due course, with Matthew—because it is clear that she is in need—"we might be some good to her" (Chapter 3).

Once the trial is over, another plot complication must develop to carry the viewer through to the end. The relationship between Anne and Gilbert Blythe provides the conflict which gives shape to the remainder of the story. From the hints and possibilities in the novel, the scriptwriters have woven a love story—almost, in fact, two love stories.

We have already noted that Gilbert appears several months earlier in the film version than he does in the novel, but in fact, he has already been glimpsed at a distance. The Sunday-school picnic has shown us Anne and Diana in competition with Gilbert and Moody in the three-legged race—a pure invention. The race, however, foreshadows the academic competition between Anne and Gilbert, and also allows for an exchange of glances between the two. Although Anne declares to Diana that Gilbert is bold to have winked at her, the possibility of something other than a mere playground rivalry has been raised already, especially as Diana hints that Gilbert is a desirable object of romantic interest.

Even more curious is the way a second love-story is adumbrated. Very early, when her amethyst brooch has vanished, Marilla declares, "That brooch meant a great deal to me, more than any picnic," but she does not explain why, though Anne's imagination is quick to supply a reason. "Was it a keepsake from a tragic romance?" she asks. The novel permits no romantic mystery about this "treasured possession. A seafaring uncle had given it to [Manila's] mother who in turn had bequeathed it to Marilla" (Chapter 13). But the scriptwriters suppress that explanation and invent new details to deepen the mystery. Immediately after Marilla has announced the end of Anne's trial, Diana reports to Anne a conversation she has overheard, in which Marilla is described as having a temper similar to Anne's. Here, we are to understand, is the basis for that statement, somewhat startling to readers of the novel, that Marilla and Anne may be kindred spirits after all. But that is not all; the eavesdropper had also heard that Manila's temper had caused her to break her engagement. Anne's imagination, of course, immediately seizes on this news: Marilla is bathed in the glamour of those who have been disappointed in love. What the scene also does is to draw the parallel between Anne's fight with Gilbert and Manila's lover's quarrel, thus confirming what we have already suspected, that there is a romantic tension in the classroom squabbles.

From this point on, Gilbert is omnipresent. In the book his role during these years is essentially as an academic rival to Anne—a rival she will not acknowledge; the rest of her life is related without reference to him. The scriptwriters, however, have worked Gilbert into several other episodes: the spruce-gum scene, for instance, has been rewritten as an episode in which the boys tease the girls, and Anne chases Gilbert like an avenging fury. Thus Gilbert becomes not only the punishment (when Anne is sent to sit with him in class), but also the occasion, of Anne's trangression. Again, a series of picturesque scenes, used to indicate the passage of time, concludes with the sight of Gilbert languishing behind a tree, following Anne and Diana with ardent eyes.

To speed up the plot, several episodes are ingeniously linked: the teacher's departure is honored with a party, at which Anne responds to Josie's dare to walk the ridge-pole of the kitchen roof. She is not allowed to break her ankle, however, for she is to return from the party through the Haunted Wood. In the novel, these last are two self-contained episodes, "Anne Comes to Grief in an Affair of Honour" (Chapter 23) and "A Good Imagination Gone Wrong" (Chapter 20). Gilbert, of course, is made to link them all. By this time, Josie Pye's jealousy of Gilbert's attention has been established in an invented schoolyard scene, so that her daring of Anne implies her wish to diminish Anne in Gilbert's eyes. In the novel, daring was simply "the fashionable amusement among the Avonlea small fry .. . that summer" (Chapter 23). On screen, it is an exchange of glances with Gilbert that confirms Anne's determination to carry out the dare. After Anne's fall, Josie's triumph is short-lived, for we see Gilbert snub Josie, even though he is smarting from Anne's refusal of his help to get home. It is because of this stiff-necked refusal, then, that Anne and Diana choose the shortcut home through the woods, where they terrify each other with tales of ghosts. In the novel, these scenes are part of the gradual maturing process Anne goes through; her early scrapes have shown her her faults, such as temper and absent-mindedness; these two later episodes show Anne learning that even virtues—imagination, honor, and courage—may be faults if exercised without moderation. All this careful characterbuilding has been sacrificed to the television love story.

To recognize this change is to realize why it is wrong to shift the hair-dye episode to the beginning of the story. In the novel, that chapter begins with Marilla comfortably looking forward to "a briskly snapping fire and a table nicely spread for tea, instead of to the cold comfort of old Aid meeting evenings before Anne had come to Green Gables" (Chapter 27). Thus Anne's dereliction of duty is seen to be an unusual back-sliding, for she is clearly much more steady and reliable than she used to be. Despite her improvement she is no paragon, and it is not by chance that her fall from grace is caused by vanity. That fault has not been her most apparent, though it is her most persistent—and it must be subdued before she can go on to real achievements. Anne suffers her "vexation of spirit" in confronting her own vanity, and in learning to distinguish true from meretricious qualities: to reduce this vexation to a mere petulant reaction against a schoolboy's taunt is to obliterate the moral subtleties of the novel.

It is not moral subtlety that concerns the scriptwriters, however, as much as "boy meets girl," and as soon as the estrangement between Anne and Diana is over, Gilbert resumes his role as romantic interest. Hitherto, no major changes have been necessary, but from this point forward, the scriptwriters take increasing liberties with the text in order to make the romance prominent. The school's Christmas concert, for instance, is transmogrified into a Christmas ball to which Anne is invited by the Barrys as part of their renewed kindness to her. A ball serves as well as a concert to allow Matthew to insist on puffed sleeves and to precede the girls' late-night leap onto Aunt Josephine in the spare-room bed, but a ball also has dancing, and thus provides the scriptwriters with a chance to complicate the romance. Anne tries to demonstrate her power over Gilbert, but he spurns her. Lest we think he has lost interest, however, we are shown his secretly pocketing Anne's dance card. The scene is pure fabrication, but we see that Anne's interest in Gilbert is sparked by his snubbing of her.

The linking of scenes, again, tightens the plot as selfcontained episodes from the novel are integrated with others, but it also produces certain incongruities. For example, it is harder to accept that the Anne who coquettes, even unsuccessfully, at the ball is the same person as the madcap who dives into the spare-room bed. In the novel, the leap takes place ten months before the Christmas of the puffed sleeves, and during those months episodes such as tea at the manse show Anne becoming somewhat steadier.

The ensuing scenes of school and entrance exams are shadowed by Anne's awareness of Gilbert; even her teacher urges Anne to reconcile. Anne, however, is adamant, though clearly miserable. By the time Gilbert rescues her after the sinking of the lily maid's barge, her hurt pride compels her to return his Christmas-time snub. The chronology has again been altered here: in the novel, "The Unfortunate Lily Maid" (Chapter 28) takes place before "The Queen's Class is Organized" (Chapter 30), whereas the film makes the adventure coincide with the announcement of the Queen's entrance-exam results. Thus the film's Anne swings even more wildly between childhood and young womanhood than does the novel's. Though in both, Anne's near-drowning leads to her renunciation of romance ("Today's mistake is going to cure me of being romantic"), in the film the word "romance" is clearly intended to include any relationship with Gilbert, as well as the attempt to recreate "towered Camelot" in Avonlea.

Thus far, those who are familiar with the novel will recognize shifts of emphasis, changes in chronology, and some small inventions, but here begins a series of events that departs drastically from the novel and leaves no doubt in the reader's mind that the love story is the new heart of the television Anne.

Marilla meets Gilbert by chance, and warns him away from Anne: "She has the talent to make something of herself," she tells him, "but she's still very young." Despite her warning, Gilbert makes another overture, an offer of a ride home to an Anne laden with parcels. Anne apologizes and Gilbert renounces any grudge, but it is hardly a reconciliation. Both are touchy, and Anne is quick to take offense. Nevertheless, they are looking forward to each other's company at the White Sands Hotel concert. Any chance of this truce mellowing into friendship is destroyed by Marilla's angry reaction to Mrs. Lynde's report of Anne's buggy ride with Gilbert. Manila's motives are unclear, here, except that she is anticipating the unhappy separation when Anne goes to Queen's. She doesn't want Anne "making any ties here she'll regret," she says; in attacking Gilbert, she is able to voice her own fear that Anne may outgrow both Avonlea and her guardians. Fortunately Anne is sensitive to Manila's real anxiety, declaring she will always be "Anne of Green Gables."

Nevertheless, events conspire to thwart the relationship with Gilbert: first Manila's disapproval, and then the acclaim Anne receives after her recitation at the concert (a portent of Anne's outgrowing Avonlea). As a result, Anne and Gilbert spend their Queen's year in unhappy isolation from each other. Gilbert appears unconscious of her, but Anne is clearly preoccupied with him. Certainly, very little of Anne's life at Queen's is shown except when it reveals the tension over Gilbert. Even crusty Aunt Josephine is drawn into the love story: recognizing Anne's dreams and ambitions, she nevertheless urges her to "make room in your plans for romance." The alternative, she warns, is a cantankerous old-maidhood like her own.

The place of Gilbert in Anne's thoughts is quite different from the one assigned him in the novel. There, when Gilbert accompanies Ruby, Anne "could not help thinking .. . that it would be very pleasant to have such a friend as Gilbert to jest and chatter with and exchange ideas about books and studies and ambitions. Gilbert had ambitions, she knew." In case the reader suspects that Anne is merely fooling herself about the nature of her interest in Gilbert, the narrator explicitly pronounces upon Anne's state of heart: "There was no silly sentiment in Anne's ideas concerning Gilbert. Boys were to her, when she thought about them at all, merely possible good comrades" (Chapter 35). The film-makers have no such scruples about sentiment, silly or otherwise. Nor do they hesitate to complicate the love story even further, making Gilbert the price Anne must be willing to pay for her ambitions. Discussing her four years ahead at the university on her newly won scholarship, Anne is dismayed to learn that Diana is in love with Gilbert. She confesses only because she is convinced by Anne's denial of interest. Anne is caught in a trap of her own making, her loyalty to her friend in conflict with her own inclination.

Now events rush to their close: catastrophe strikes, without the novel's foreshadowing. A deeper understanding with Marilla is achieved, as in the novel, and the secret of Marilla's broken engagement to Gilbert's father is revealed. This revelation, a surprise in the novel, ends the speculation that was raised with the amethyst-brooch story and fed by Avonlea's gossip. Marilla's sense of loss is greater in the film than in the book: "Everybody has forgot about me and John. I'd forgotten myself," says the novel's Marilla. "But it all came back to me when I saw Gilbert last Sunday" (Chapter 38). It is more as if Marilla's life had lost a potential richness when she lost romance, than that it was blighted. By making this loss more prominent, the film-makers reinforce Aunt Josephine's implied equation of fulfillment with romance.

So the scene is set for the reconciliation with Gilbert which is clearly the climax of the film. In the novel, Mrs. Lynde tells Anne of Gilbert's giving up the Avonlea school for her, and it is by chance that Anne meets Gilbert and is moved to hold out her hand to him, but the film brings Gilbert to deliver the news of his magnanimity himself. The situation is thus profoundly different, in that, by coming in person, Gilbert assumes control. His power to compel Anne's gratitude, and her acknowledgment of him, are symbolized in the horse that he rides. His assertion that her help with his studies will be a fair exchange for his sacrifice sounds almost condescending, and his descent from his horse to walk her home underlines the fundamental inequality in this reconciliation. Ambition vanishes in the glow of sunset; the restoration of romance is the film's culmination.

The novel ends, as it began, on a different note: "Anne sat long at her window that night companioned by a glad content." Her thoughts embrace the landscape before her eyes, her future, and indeed, the whole world; her happiness is multi-faceted, and Gilbert only a part of it. "The joys of sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship were to be hers" (Chapter 38).

Whether Montgomery is not so much delicate as uncomfortable in handling romance is another question. What is clear is that the script-writers' version of Anne of Green Gables is profoundly different from Montgomery's. Their added complication of the love story is fascinating to watch, and is so skillfully interwoven with the original fabric of the novel that the full import of their changes almost evades the viewer who knows the book.

Certainly, the film has many virtues: its handling of moods is deft; it is visually heart-stealing, and it avoids the sentimentality which would have been as stickily treacherous as Anne's raspberry cordial. Furthermore, its acting is superb: henceforward no one will ever imagine Marilla except as Colleen Dewhurst. But the film, by concentrating on the love story, is in some ways more old-fashioned, or even narrower, than the book. The film is an exquisite romance, but the novel is a Bildungsroman. That reduction is, finally, a loss.

Perry Nodelman

SOURCE: "Not Much More Than Once upon a Classic," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 3, Fall, 1982, pp. 27-30.

[In the following essay, Nodelman presents a negative appraisal of Once upon a Classic, a PBS series which adapted nineteenth-century novels into television for children.]

This is not so much a review as it is a confession. I did try to watch Once Upon a Classic. Lord knows I tried. I wrote it down on my list of things to remember: "Watch Once Upon a Classic." But somehow, Sunday at twelve thirty passed, and I had not watched Once Upon a Classic.

Yes, Sunday at twelve thirty. That was part of the problem. Half past noon on Sunday, when sensible people are eating their lunch and yelling at their husbands to turn off that TV and get in here immediately or else: that's when my local PBS station shows Once Upon a Classic. Well, I turned off that TV and I got in there at once, and made plans for next week. I told sensible people about the serious nature of my project. Sensible people pretended to understand. She planned to delay lunch next week. I wrote it down on my list of things to remember, and underlined it twice, and added two exclamation marks: "Watch Once Upon a Classic: DON'T FORGET!!"

I forgot. So I told my son, who is seven and impressionable, that if he forgot to remember to remind me to watch Once Upon a Classic next Sunday, I would lock him in his room for a whole week and feed him nothing but tomatoes and asparagus, both of which he hates. He remembered. I forgot.

On succeeding Sundays, I made complicated soups for lunch, tidied my desk, changed the filter on the furnace, and wrote letters to old friends I had been meaning to write for years but had never got around to. One Sunday I even read some student essays. In the seven months that I've been planning to write this article, I've actually managed to watch Once Upon a Classic four times. I probably shouldn't be writing the article; I can't guarantee those four episodes are representative.

But I suspect they are. They were so much alike in the ways that made me so inventive about not watching the program that they suggest a horrifying consistency. To put it plainly, Once Upon a Classic is boring. Very boring. It is boring enough to actually deserve being shown to the three people who watch PBS at half past noon on Sunday. It is boring enough that anyone who does watch it even only four times in seven months has undeniably earned the right to tell the rest of the world how very boring it is.

Produced in Pittsburgh, Once Upon a Classic consists for the most part of adaptations of well known nineteenth-century novels, divided into half-hour segments. The shows were originally produced in Britian. Once Upon a Classic is a sort of mini-Masterpiece Theatre. It even has a host who explains everything at the beginning and the end of each show, just like the maxi-Masterpiece Theatre. The mini-Alistair Cooke is Bill Bixby, an American actor who is much better known for playing the meek, mild-mannered guy who turns into the Incredible Hulk when he gets angry on commercial TV. On PBS, we get Bixby very much without the Hulk. He's a meek, mild-mannered guy wearing these tasteful two hundred dollar sweaters and standing in front of this tasteful fire-place in what may be the only tastefully understated British room in Pittsburgh. He looks as though if he ever did get angry it would probably be at the unBritish tastelessness of the rest of Pittsburgh; and his anger would probably transform him from a meek mild-mannered guy into a meek, mild-mannered guy with a frown. There's just no way anything as macho and as energetic as a green former Mr. America would ever show up in that quiet room, and it would be criminal for expanding green muscles to rip up those wonderful sweaters.

During the months I planned to watch Once Upon a Classic, the show presented adaptations of three novels:

Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Scott's The Talisman, and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. These are the sorts of novels they used to make us read in high school literature courses, before relevance and self-image building became more important considerations for curriculum planners than the fact that we've done it ever since 1892, have copies for everyone, and if it was good enough for me when I was your age then it's good enough for you, punk. I don't mean to suggest that these aren't good novels. They're all at least pretty good, and A Tale of Two Cities is particularly good, as melodramatic now as it ever was and a tremendous amount of fun because of it.

But these are not the sort of novels that many children nowadays do read; and I don't think they're the sort of novels most children should read. Pleasure in them depends on knowledge of their genre and of the idiosyncrasies of nineteenth century prose, and few children nowadays possess that competence. Better they shouldn't read these books at all than that they should be bored by them! For those lucky few bookish enough to develop a taste for such things, Scott and Dickens and Eliot will be as pleasureful as they ever were; for those who aren't, obviously, there is Once Upon a Classic. It's clearly meant to provide painless culture for those who don't want to waste their valuable time on cultural monuments: this is a TV version of those Classic Comics of my youth, the ones you couldn't trade for a Superman no matter how hard you tried.

Dickens and Eliot, and particularly Scott, were pretty good storytellers. That is, they invented interesting, suspenseful plots. But when it comes right down to it, none of them were as good at inventing things to write about as they were at finding interesting ways to write about those things. They are novelists, dealers in words, not inventors of action-filled scenarios. In those old Classic Comics, and in Once Upon a Classic, the events these novelists describe so well in their novels get divorced from the novelists' descriptions and become just scenarios. And the worst thing about the scripts based on these scenarios is that they deprive Dickens and Eliot and Scott of their wonderful, distinct styles, and make them all come out the same. Once Upon a Classic is an appropriate title in more ways than one: in these TV versions, all these classics are the same classic.

Part of their sameness derives from the inevitable limitations of TV production. For one thing, each novel must be divided into segments of equal length, like swatches of yard goods. The episodes I saw of both The Talisman and A Tale of Two Cities were bad television mostly because they were opening chapters, and therefore, mostly exposition. Now, you can get away with presenting lots of information at the beginning of a novel because your readers know it'll lead to some exciting action later on; but we expect each of the episodes of a TV series to have its own developing action and climax—as well we might, since we have to wait a whole week between episodes. Viewers, therefore, expect a more immediate return on the attention invested than something that is going to happen two or three months in the future. But no matter how hard they tried, the script writers of these adaptations simply could not find a suspense-building shape in the events of any episodes based on an early chapter of the novel. In the Dickens I saw, the characters nattered about people who weren't even on screen, and most of the Scott episode consisted of a bunch of people in mediaeval robes sitting around a table and explaining the history of the crusades to each other, like a graduate seminar in drag. I suppose it all amounted to something three or four episodes later, but by then, for some reason, the furnace filter seemed to promise more adventure.

Even if good novels could easily make good TV, the unfailingly consistent production values of Once Upon a Classic would probably murder it. There appears to be a confusion in the minds of British TV producers between fiction and history. These books were historical novels in their own time, and they are all historical novels to us. But there's a big difference between historical fiction and history. Scott wanted to capture the romance, the exuberance, the excitement of the crusades; Dickens felt much the same about the French revolution. But the Once Upon a Classic productions invest so much effort on historical detail that all those indubitably correct sets are more interesting than the things happening on them, and I found myself thinking about how clever the costumes were instead of becoming involved with the characters wearing them. Not only is the atmosphere accurate, it's quite astonishingly beautiful, just like Masterpiece Theatre is; but the beauty inhibits the actions like a frame around a picture. Watching these shows is like looking at those "authentic" rooms in museums with a rope in front of them. The characters are so clearly part of a detailed and beautiful past that they sink into a fog of nostalgia, a dense atmosphere of historicity that even the best of actors would have trouble cutting through. These are not always the best of actors, even if they do have British accents.

At least part of that historical atmosphere is actually physically present, created by what I've come to mink of as PBS lighting. PBS lighting is white light only, and lots of it, coming from discrete sources that create a chiaroscuro of many different browns and a lot of white, and not much else. Characters frequently appear in front of windows filled with white light; they almost always have haloes of white light on their hair. This is lighting that deliberately avoids the atmospheric effects of colored light but it is not without atmosphere. In fact, the mood PBS lighting creates supports the feeling of accuracy in the sets and costumes. It is a mood of documentary, of seeing things as they actually might have been, uncolored by the eccentricities of fictional style.

Enmeshed by all this low-key accuracy, the characters seem odd, very odd indeed. They talk like characters in Dickens and Scott and Eliot; and when they do it, they sound silly. Surely people wearing these highly unfictional clothes and walking in these real-life rooms under this ever-so-natural lighting did not talk in this eccentric way. The fact is, Dickens' characters are caricatures; Scott's are made out of cardboard, and even Eliot's are larger than you and me. They all need a more distinctly colored, more one-sided atmosphere to feel at home in, and when they don't get it, they seem objectionably self-indulgent even when their authors intended us to like them. When a Dickens' character says, "I have no imagination, none whatsoever," it's not the truthful statement it is in the book: either he's teasing, or self-congratulatory. And when Richard the Lionheart in The Talisman says, "Ah, my sweet Berengaria, how fares she?" it is to upchuck. No human being in real life ever talked like that, at least not in a gray room with accurate smoke from a naturalistic fire.

In the long run, it's the feeling of documentary they all convey that makes these Once Upon a Classics, set in such different times and places, seem much like one another. They become a sort of seamless classic running forever on PBS, convincing us yet again that classics, like all the other monuments we know we ought to respect, are actually monumentally boring.

But not quite. I did see one episode that was interesting: and my children, who fled like startled robins from the other Once Upon a Classics, watched this one with great involvement and much enthusiasm. It was the final episode of something called Black Island. You've probably never heard of it, and that's instructive. Black Island was "based on a story by Peter Van Praagh." Peter Van Who? It's hardly a classic.

In fact, Black Island turned out to be quite unclassically exciting, a typical adventure story, the sort that gets by on lots of action and no style at all. Michael and Joe, stuck on a deserted island, end up being kept as hostages by a pair of escaped convicts. Since the setting is contemporary, the people talk like people—mostly in grunts and hesitations, not like characters in novels at all. Since the story this was based on seems to have been filled with action, we got good, action-filled television. In the episode I saw, after a few harrowing Once Upon a Classic moments at the beginning during which it seemed to take four days for a kid to bandage his fingers and stare at an old man, who stared back, we had twenty good minutes of almost hair's-breadth escapes, recaptures, a scavenging trip to the mainland to steal food, scenes of impending starvation and the joyful discovery of wild potatoes, a house on fire and near escape from death by burning, and finally, rescue in the nick of time. Now that's exciting, a lot more exciting than I'd come to expect from Once Upon a Classic!

But it was obviously the non-classic status of the material that allowed it to be exciting. There was no good or even distinctive writing to contradict or to dissipate, no novel-length plot to break into wrong-sized equal segments, no historical period to overaccurately represent, and no distinct style of speech for characters to seem silly speaking. Black Island is good TV because it is no classic.

Once Upon a Classic proudly announces on each show that it's been honored by Action for Children's Television as an outstanding program for children and their parents. Sure, as we used to say when I was young, out standing in the rain. Once Upon a Classic is too tasteful to be interesting; even worse, it makes classics dull by misrepresenting what it was that made them classics. If the Incredible Hulk ever did show up in front of that tasteful fireplace with the remnants of one of those snazzy sweaters dripping from his biceps, he'd know what to do: give those British videotapes a big squeeze, until the weak tea that runs in their veins spilled onto that tasteful British floor, and they could inflict their numbness upon us no more.

Perry Nodelman

SOURCE: "The Objectionable Other, or Walter de la Mare Meets My Little Pony," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer, 1987, pp. 58-60.

[In the following essay, Nodelman addresses the ways in which the enjoyment of television negatively affects the enjoyment of literature among children.]

The articles in the special section of this issue deal with aspects of the lives of children that experts in children's literature often feel superior to. For educated adults of good sense and good taste, the most obvious response to a book with wheels attached to it or a Walt Disney image of love's young dream is horror. "This," we say, "This is what the world has come to? This is what we feed the tender imaginations of our young with? This pap? This garbage? This insult to good sense and good taste?"

But despite our own smug invulnerability to such insultingly vulgar objects, we nevertheless believe that the real trouble with them is not just their bad taste; it is the fact that children do like them so much. Surely something so obviously silly and vulgar should not be so enjoyable. Surely something so enjoyable must be bad for those who enjoy it. So we view aspects of popular culture for children with great alarm—and then, most likely, we turn our backs upon the offending objects, dismiss them from our thoughts, and purify our minds of the tainting stench by immersing ourselves in that which is truly great and truly inspiring; we imbibe a poem by de la Mare or a novel by Eleanor Cameron not because they are inherently enjoyable but as Peewee Herman antidotes. If we think at all about popular literature for children or about the mass culture of toys and television and such, it is merely to point out how inferior they are in relation to that which is truly worthwhile.

In this we are not alone—it is a common habit of highminded people to attack the artifacts of popular culture in defense of real excellence. Tania Modleski speaks of "the tendency of critics and theorists to make mass culture into the 'other' of whatever, at any given moment, they happen to be championing—and moreover, to denigrate the other primarily because it allegedly provides pleasure to the consumer" (Studies in Entertainment [Bloomington: Indiana Universty Press, 1986] 157).

These are dangerous attitudes, I think. They depend on two assumptions, one arrogant and one silly. The silly assumption is the puritanical one that pleasure is always a bad thing, a sign of dangerously unproductive self-indulgence; any worthwhile work of art has to be important, serious, and therefore, obviously, no fun at all. The arrogant assumption is the elitist one that what most people most easily like is inevitably both bad art and bad for them—that they aren't smart enough to know what's not good for them. Both assumptions are wrong.

The main (maybe the only) thing art has to offer is pleasure. The only good reason for reading Walter de la Mare or Eleanor Cameron is that they are a pleasure to read. Even art that makes us think is merely offering us the pleasure of thinking. It's surely not the intention of artists to be educational, to teach us important things about important subjects; in my own experience, what people say they've learned from a work of art is always in fact something they already knew, and in any case, what a novel or a painting might actually happen to teach us could always be learned more easily in less circuitous ways—if Shakespeare had merely wanted us to understand that he who hesitates is lost, a simple five word statement would have been more efficacious than Hamlet. Those who really don't like to think but force themselves to experience serious art because it's good for them, because they'll learn to be better people from it, are rather missing the point; and as for the theory that great art can ennoble us and lift us above ourselves, I believe it was George Steiner who once pointed out how that theory was contradicted for eternity by those highminded Nazi officials who read poetry and listened to Beethoven recordings before they went off to inspect the gas chambers.

As for the second, dangerous assumption: to feel superior to those who enjoy what's popular is to deny the obvious fact that much of what gives us pleasure in high culture resides in what it shares with popular culture. In addition to what is essentially Picasso-like, Picasso offers us the same basic sensual enjoyment of line and shape and color that we find in Superman comics; at the heart of King Lear is a satisfying fairy tale about a youngest sister who does better in a contest than her two older sisters; and the profiles of nuclear physicists that appear in the New Yorker offer the joys of gossip, just as do the profiles in People. Which is to say, merely, that high art is not the opposite of popular art—not its "other" at all, but merely an extension of it, a variation on the same basic patterns and pleasures. Neither high culture nor popular culture is particularly good for us; both have the main purpose of offering us pleasure.

The main difference between popular art and high art is that high art is harder to learn to appreciate—and therefore, harder to take pleasure from. By definition, popular culture appeals to a lowest common denominator ability to enjoy; it offers pleasures we all (or at least the largest number of us) can share, usually by giving us exactly what we expect in a form just superficially different enough to seem new—for instance, another situation comedy about a family that is eccentric in a slightly different way than were the families in the other situation comedies we've already seen. Indeed, the inherent widely-based enjoyability of popular art is neatly confirmed by the fact that most of us who actually do enjoy high art nevertheless have our secret trashy vices, indulged in moments when comfort is required: those of us who are honest will surely have to admit to a secret passion for romances, perhaps, or slasher movies, or superhero comics (I am myself a sucker for TV beauty contests). But high art offers less immediate comfort, for the differences in it are more than superficial; high art tends to refer to familiar patterns or archetypes in order to undercut or to change them, so that what emerges is less significantly familiar than different. High culture offers not just the pleasures of the familiar but also the pleasures of distinctiveness—it gives us something we did not expect rather than merely confirming our expectations. It gives us Picasso as well as basic form, unique poetry as well as a fairy tale.

Now it is possible to read King Lear as a fairy tale, and to enjoy it as such—and to miss what is distinct and most specifically pleasurable about it. It is possible to read New Yorker profiles of nuclear physicists in order to get the dirt about famous people, and to enjoy them as such—and to miss pleasurable insights into science and culture that distinguish such profiles from those in People magazine. And it is possible, never having read anything but Choose Your Own Adventures, to expect all novels to have the exciting plots of Choose Your Own Adventures—and to quickly get bogged down in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Taking pleasure in that which is distinct as well as in that which is expectable is a learned skill, and it is arrogant indeed to feel superior to those who have not learned it—especially if we know that nobody has tried to teach it to them. It is especially arrogant when it is an attitude expressed towards children who enjoy Punky Brewster on TV instead of reading novels by Virginia Hamilton: if we believe that Virginia Hamilton can be pleasurable too, then we need to teach younger readers how to take pleasure in her work.

That is why it is dangerous to dismiss the mass culture designed to appeal to children from our consideration when we think about children's literature. If we want to help children to a greater enjoyment of good children's books, we need to understand what they know already, and we need to use our understanding to develop ways of showing them how to extend that knowledge into new and alien territories. Because Saturday morning cartoons and the imaginative world implied by the advertising for My Little Pony form the context in which children read literature, we need to understand the meaning, the characteristic structures and implications of the Saturday morning cartoons and the My Little Ponies before we can hope to understand how children read literature. If we do not understand the contexts which define children's literature for most young readers, then we will not be able to find ways of teaching them how to develop other contexts.

In choosing the relationships between popular culture and children's literature as the topic for this issue's special section, the Quarterly editors had hoped for articles that would consider the ways in which things like Saturday morning cartoons and My Little Pony might influence a child's reading of literature. While the articles you will find here do not always spell out the connections, they do indeed offer some understanding of some popular cultural contexts past and present into which the "good" literature for children fits. We rejected many other submissions, however, not because they were not competent discussions of popular culture, but because so few of them tried to analyze relationships between popular culture and so-called "good" children's literature. That's not particularly surprising—a glance through any journal of popular culture quickly reveals that those interested in writing about it are often rather mindless celebrants of its joys, and just as dismissive of the elitism of "good" literature as the proponents of good literature are dismissive of popular culture. When it comes to the culture of childhood, apparently, popular culture and good literature continue to be each other's "other"—the alien evoked merely to be dismissed.

I hope the articles in this issue will help to lessen the distance between these two "others," which are obviously less distant in the lives of real children than they are in the minds of most scholars. And I hope this issue will stimulate thinking that will encourage the writing of more articles in this important area.

Before that will happen, however, a lot more specialists in children's literature will need to be persuaded that popular culture is more than just offensive trash to be avoided—that it has meanings and patterns that can and do significantly influence both the adults and the children who enjoy it, and that those patterns and meanings are therefore worthy of analysis. For those who need to be so persuaded, I suggest a fascinating book. Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture is a collection of essays edited by Tania Modleski that offers a number of subtle analyses of various aspects of popular culture—or mass culture, as these essays perhaps more accurately call it—from fashion to the I Love Lucy show, The critics represented in this volume are working at trying to understand popular entertainment in the context of contemporary literary, social, and psychoanalytical theory; their arguments are often based in the work of thoughtful commentators like Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan. They never talk about popular entertainment specifically directed at children; but what they do talk about is provocative indeed—and suggests much that might well stimulate further thinking about the relationship between popular culture and children's literature.

To take one example: television is the aspect of popular culture that probably bulks largest in the lives of most children. Many of the essays in Studies in Entertainment refer to and grow out of Raymond Williams' concept of television as flow—as a continuous sequence of events rather than the discrete unities we expect of other forms of narrative. Television programming continues uninterrupted all day; and emerging as it does from the context of that continuous flow of information, each separate program lacks the discrete wholeness, the sense of a separate beginning and ending, that we expect and demand of novels and poems. Furthermore, the narrative structures of individual TV programs are themselves constantly interrupted by commercials and news breaks and such, so that each segment of a story becomes part of a continuous flow of other kinds of information. That television characteristically structures events in this way suggests much about the narrative expectations that children who watch a lot of television are most comfortable with, and therefore, I suspect, approach literature with.

Since TV offers a continuous uninterrupted flow of information, we cannot and do not always give it our complete attention—we tend to watch intensely only that which specifically interests us, and learn to be inattentive to parts of its continuing message that we shove into the background—the commercials, perhaps, or the promos for other shows, or even parts of shows that don't interest us. In an essay called "Television/Sound" in Studies in Entertainment, Rick Altman says that " . . . there is a growing body of data suggesting that intermittent attention is in fact the dominant mode of television viewing" (42). Programmers who understand that take it into account; Altman describes how various aspects of TV sound are designed to attract our attention back to a TV set that may be on but not closely watched. One significant result is a characteristic narrative structure that does not require our full and continuing attention; we may, for instance, watch segments of a weekly situation comedy in random order, or we may understand that we can watch a few minutes of the Tonight show without being confused as to the shape of the whole; and, as Altman says, "Dallas does not expect to subordinate all our attention to the linearity, directionality, and teleology of a goaloriented plot. Instead, it recognizes from the start our desire to choose the objects of our attention on other grounds as well"—those grounds being our individual interest in specific characters or sub-plots (44-5). Children used to the flow of TV might well have trouble giving certain kinds of novels the close attention they demand and deserve; such children might well need to be taught a different form of attentiveness as they approach written fiction.

That seems particularly true if we consider Altman's assertion that the ultimate message of TV, in constantly offering us messages on the sound track that request our attention to the picture, is "that the TV image is manufactured and broadcast just for me, at precisely the time that I need it" (51). Such a message might well encourage TV-watching children into a misleadingly solipsistic reading of written fiction. Instead of bewailing the shallow egocentricity of the young, we might better understand that TV has taught it to them, and, understanding that, work to find ways of moving them beyond egocentric reading into the less self-centered dividing of attention among a number of different characters required by most serious fiction.

In an essay called "Brief Encounters: Mass Culture and the Evacuation of Sense," Dana Polan suggests another way in which television flow might affect the attitude of TV-watching children towards reading. Polan believes that the mixture of varying kinds of information in the sequential flow of TV makes it similar to experimental art, "which works through an interplay, a kind of montage, of moments that vaguely hint at meanings and moments that disavow posited meanings, engage in contradiction, undercut every sense by a subsequent or coincident non-sense" (182). Polan offers as an example the varying messages and non-messages of the series of interviews and other segments on any given Tonight show; he might equally have suggested Sesame Street, which also offers isolated bits of meanings with no relationship to each other, and for which the "whole effect of the show comes from the incongruous confrontation of each bit with the other, the ongoing flow that forces each scene to give way to the next" (182). For Polan, "Flow involves the transcendence of meaningful units by a system whose only meaning is the fact of its global non-meaning," and that results in a particular attitude of cynical powerlessness for viewers: "powerlessness in postmodern mass culture now comes from a situation in which the montage of elements calls into question each and every role that one might care to adopt. There is no position except that of alienated cynicism" (183). Whether cynical or not, young TV viewers might have need of special training in coming to grips with written narrative forms that do in fact imply global meaning.

In a third essay, "Situation Comedy, Feminism and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy," Patricia Mellencamp suggests yet another way in which TV viewers may have developed narrative expectations quite at odds with much serious fiction. She says, "Situation comedy, with 'gaps' of performance and discontinuities, use narrative offhandedly. The hermeneutic code is not replete with expectation, not in need of decipherment, not ensnaring us or lying to us" (91). If TV narrative is at odds with our usual fictional expectations in all these central ways, then an inexperienced reader who knows mainly TV narrative will not understand the reader's obligation to decipher, and to enjoy being ensnared and lied to as conventional fictional plots always do.

Other essays in Studies in Entertainment, on topics such as the characteristics of TV news, the relationship between femininity and colonization in advertising, and contemporary horror films, have a less immediate relevance for those interested in the culture of childhood—but throughout the book, these commentators offer interesting insights that might well stimulate further thinking about children and literature. Margaret Morse's discussion of the news makes the fascinating point that all the visual images in news broadcasts are symbolic rather than representational—even the actual White House becomes a symbol when used as a backdrop for any story about the presidency. Such a focus on the visual as symbolic rather than representational might well run through all TV programming, and might explain much about what children expect to see when they look at picture books. And in a discussion of romances, Jean Franco suggests how the plots of fiction relate to the plots we impose on life itself—how conventional fictional narratives relate to the societally-engendered narratives about our expectations, our national values, and so on that help to define us; her comment on comic-strip novels intended for Mexican women might well apply to certain kinds of narratives for children: "Often this moral and ending are so arbitrary in relation to the sequence of events that they highlight the arbitrary nature of all narratives, including the master narrative of nationalism with its appeal to rootedness, to place, to community" (135).

Popular culture is too powerful—and often, too enjoyable—to be merely dismissable. It needs our attention, not just as an example of what we disdain, and not just as an example of what we can uncritically immerse ourselves in. If we could persuade ourselves that the objectionable other were less objectionable, perhaps we could find a way of seeing it as less "other"—and then, maybe, we could find ways of helping minds filled with the life history of My Little Ponies to enjoy Walter de la Mare.