Blake, William. "And Did Those Feet" and "With Happiness Stretch'd Across the Hills." Complete Writings, Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Rev. London: Oxford UP, 1971. 480-81, 816-18.

"Booster Rockets Prevent 'Space' from Fizzling Out." Atlanta Journal April 12, 1985. Newsbank: Film and TV 1984-85, 11:116 B1-2.

Boxer, Tim. "Tube Launches Space Program." New York Post April 10, 1985. Newsbank: Film and TV 1984-85, 11:105 F11.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald A. Stauffer. New York: Modern, 1951. 109-428.

Day, A. Grove. James Michener. 2nd ed. Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Dougan, Michael. "Space." San Francisco Examiner April 14, 1985. Newsbank: Film and TV 1984-85, 11:116 A4-6.

Durden, Douglas. "Dern Carves Out 'Space' on TV." Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch April 12, 1985. Newsbank: Film and TV 1984-85, 11:105 F13-14.

Edelstein, Andrew J. "Can 'Space' Bring Minis Back to Earth?" Daytona Beach, Fla., Sunday News-Journal TV Log April 14, 1985: 4.

Marcus, Stanley. "News and Previews." TV Guide April 13, 1985: A4,

Meisler, Andy. "Will This Colossus Fly?" TV Guide April 13, 1985: 8-11.

Michener, James A. The Bridges at Toko-ri. 1953. New York: Fawcett Crest, n.d.

Space. 1982. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1983.

Letter to the author. Jan. 16, 1986.

Peckham, Morse. Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts. 1965. New York: Schocken, 1967,

Art and Pornography: An Experiment in Explanation. 1969. New York: Harper, 1971.

Space. CBS-TV. April 14-18, 1985. Abridged July 1987.

Watson, Keith. "Seeking Their Own Sense of Space." Houston Post April 9, 1985. Newsbank: Film and TV 1984-85, 11:105 F12.

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. 1979. New York: Bantam, 1980.

Charles H, Helmetag

SOURCE: "The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck: A German Story on American Television," in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1985, pp. 240-44.

[In the following essay, Helmetag examines the American television adaptation of Heinrich Böll's Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1974) as The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck (1984).]

Heinrich Böll's story Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum was published in German in 1974.¹ According to the author, the book was inspired by the treatment of Peter Brückner, a professor in Hannover, because of his alleged association with the Baader-Meinhof group.² An English translation by Leila Vennewitz appeared in 1975.³ The work gained an even wider audience with the release of Volker Schlöndorff's film adaptation that same year.⁴ The Schlöndorff film has been the subject of several scholarly articles.⁵ On Tuesday, January 24, 1984 The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck, an American adaptation made expressly for television, was shown on the CBS television network, giving Böll's story its widest exposure to date.

In Böll's story Katharina Blum is a decent, industrious young housekeeper living in West Berlin who attends a party where she meets a young man named Ludwig Götten, who she later learns is wanted by the police. Katherina and Götten spend the night together in her apartment. The next morning police storm the apartment and, when they discover Götten has fled, treat Katharina as if she herself were a criminal. She is interrogated repeatedly by the police and slandered by the newspaper Die Zeitung. Within a few short days her life is destroyed. She agrees to meet with the unscrupulous Zeitung reporter Tötges, calmly shoots him and turns herself over to the authorities.

As in Ende einer Dienstfahrt (1966) and Gruppenbild mit Dame (1971), Böll uses here the device of the objective narrator who has pieced his report together from various, sometimes conflicting sources.⁶ In order to prove the veracity and objectivity of his information, the Katharina Blum narrator lists his sources in the first paragraph. The presentation of the story's events on film is "necessarily more direct" than Böll's narrative, to borrow a phrase from William and Joan Magretta's analysis of Schlöndorff s film version of Katharina Blum⁷ Both the German film and the American television version present the bulk of the events in strict chronological order. Both permit us, literally, to see Katharina, who is never directly described in the story, and to witness the things that happen to her, some of which are dispensed with in a few sentences in the story. The reporter is also more visually present in the two film versions, while in Böll's story he was more of an abstraction, an allegorical representative of the media at their most ruthless.⁸ Most of these differences stem from the essential difference in medium: prose narrative and film.

Böll's story attacked the brutal destructiveness of yellow journalism of the Bild-Zeitung school and indicted West German society for failing to protect the dignity of the individual. The Schlöndorff film expands the themes of the story (or at least makes them more obvious) to include the "terrorism of institutions"⁹ not just the press, but also the police, the judiciary, business, the Church and, "formed by them, public opinion."¹⁰ Moreover, since the victim of this terrorism is not Peter Brückner but a woman and her persecutors are all men, the film also served as an example of the modern feminist film.

The feminist outlook is even more central in the American television adaptation. The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck was produced by Mario Thomas, who also stars in the title role. Thomas, one of the leading feminists in the American entertainment industry, suggested the story to CBS and personally recruited Kris Kristofferson to play the role of the suspected terrorist called Ben Cole in the American production, a part considerably smaller than that of the reporter or the police interrogator. Thomas' goals in producing the film, according to a newspaper report, were "to demonstrate that witnesses like Beck, who may or may not have relevant information to supply, are not granted the same full legal rights as suspects like Cole" and to show that female witnesses are particularly vulnerable.¹¹

The Karneval atmosphere and the pointed reference to the Bild-Zeitung make Böll's story and the Schlöndorff film peculiarly German, as does the portrayal of the strong West German reaction to terrorism. The American television adaptation written by Karl Miller changes the names of all the characters and transfers the setting from mid-1970s Berlin to a small midwestern American town in the 1980s (judging by Kathryn's late model automobile, which is ravaged by the police in their search for evidence). Whereas Götten was allegedly associated with the Baader-Meinhof group, there is a vague reference to the underground Weathermen organization in connection with Cole. Given these changes, the film is surprisingly effective, thanks to excellent acting and the direction of Simon Langton,¹² which in keeping with the style of Böll's story leans toward a documentary approach. Schlöndorff portrays the events of the story more subjectively from Katharina's point of view, a technique evident in departures from the novel such as her presence on the scene of Götten's capture and the emotional meeting of the lovers as prisoners.¹³ Langton, however, strives for the impression of greater objectivity (seen in his frequent use of medium and full shots), showing the heroine and what happens to her from the outside.

Both the Schlöndorff film and the American television movie make certain departures from Böll's story while remaining quite faithful to the spirit of the book. Schlöndorff introduces four new sequences: the opening scenes involving the filming of Götten's activities by police photographers, the rendezvous between Katharina and the businessman arranged by Pater Urbanus (designed to show the collusion of capitalism and the Church), the meeting between Katharina and Götten as they are being taken to jail and the epilogue which portrays the reporter's funeral. Although the television version Americanizes the setting and characters, it invents no major new episodes. There are a few new, economical early scenes to establish Kathryn's occupation, her industriousness and her loneliness and reserve as well as some very effective scenes from the perspective of the police before they storm her apartment. The TV movie also has the police enter while she is still nude and in bed rather than in the kitchen in her bathrobe, and it adds some symbolic American popular music at her cousin's party.¹⁴

Like the German film, the American version presents in some detail scenes which the book only mentions. One is the reporter's "interview" with Katharina's mother in the hospital. The scene is presented more abruptly by Schlöndorff with no preliminary establishing shot, underscoring the heartlessness of Tötges' behavior. The TV version leads up to the "interview" by showing Catton trying and eventually succeeding in getting into the old woman's room. In Böll's story the reporter claims to have used "the simplest trick in the book," namely disguising himself as a painter; the American version retains this costume while Schlöndorff s reporter opts for a more obvious surgical gown.

Both films allow several shots for the "terrorist's" capture by the police, an event only mentioned by Böll. In both film versions the massive array of military equipment and personnel dispatched to capture a single man recalls the SWAT team which invaded the heroine's little apartment and the helplessness of the individual against seemingly anonymous authorities.

In both the Schlöndorff film and the television version the police are portrayed even more clearly than in the written work as the heroine's unjust persecutors. In both productions, however, steps were taken to portray the police with reasonable accuracy. The eerie, helmeted military uniforms worn by the men who storm Katharina's apartment in the German film, for example, are authenic, bought from the same company that supplies them for the police.¹⁵ To satisfy the network, Mario Thomas obtained an affadavit from state officials in Illinois, the setting for the TV movie, stating that what happens to the heroine could actually take place there. Thomas also had police present as advisors for the scenes involving police.¹⁶ The storming of Kathryn's apartment and the surrounding of the summer house where her lover is hiding are both effectively staged, somewhat reminiscent of the scene where helmeted scientists invade the house where the incapacitated extraterrestrial being has been located in E.T. and the combing of Karen Silkwood's house by similarly dressed plant investigators in Silkwood. These are the anonymous authorities who outnumber, dwarf and intimidate the individual, not only in the 1980s, but even in stories of Böll's 1950 collection of stories Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa. . . .

It is, however, the dry, detached modus operandi of the police, the politicians and, above all, the reporter Catton which make the television film so frightening—and so frighteningly real. The police interrogate and subtly threaten Kathryn in an unfeeling monotone. They order sandwiches and coffee in the same tone of voice as they sit in their car eavesdropping on the woman's lovemaking by means of an electronic listening device.

An important departure from Böll's story in the TV version deals with the reporter's character. Catton, though still unscrupulous in pursuing a story, is somehow less obnoxious than his conterpart Tötges in the book and the Schlöndorff film. Surprisingly, the TV version barely suggests that the reporter tries to seduce Kathryn, while his proposition in both the book and the German film inspires a grotesque pun on Katharina's part, which almost implies that he has driven her over the brink:

Er sagte: "Na, Blümchen, was machen wir zwei denn jetzt? . . . Was guckst du mich denn so entgeistert an, mein Blümelein—ich schlage vor, daB wir jetzt erst einmal bumsen." Nun, inzwischen war ich bei meiner Handtasche, und er ging mir an die Kledage, und ich dachte: "Bumsen, meinetwegen," und ich hab die Pistole rausgenommen und sofort auf ihn geschossen.¹⁷

Considering the preceding scenes, it seems unlikely that the American adaptors were making concessions in the murder scene to meet network guidelines of taste.¹⁸ Perhaps it was simply the difficulty of finding a decent translation which caused the Americans to settle for Catton's merely toying verbally with Kathryn. Leila Vennewitz' translation of the passage does not seem appropriate for the Catton character:

He said: "Well, Blumikins, what'll we do now, you and me? . . . Why do you look at me like that, Blumikins, as if you're scared out of your wits? How about us having a bang for a start?" Well, by this time I had my hand in my purse, and as he went for my dress I thought: "Bang, if that's what you want," and I pulled out the pistol and shot him then and there."¹⁹

The omission weakens the final scene, since the reporter's blunt advances to Katharina in Böll's story underscore his complete lack of respect for her as an individual. In his view, women have significance only as news stories or as sexual prey.

In both the story and the Schlöndorff film the reporter Tötges appears as Katharina's principal antagonist. Just as the police regard the need to break a case as justification for their treatment of Katharina, the reporter thinks nothing of hounding the woman and her dying mother and distorting the truth for the sake of a story. In Americanizing Böll's book, the TV version foregoes associating the reporter with one of the tabloids sold in super markets and replaces the nationally sold Bild-Zeitung with a local newspaper called ironically (since it pillories an innocent bystander) the Ledger-Citizen.²⁰ In this age of electronic media when wars, assassinations and grieving loved ones are presented closeup on the evening television news, it might not have distorted the novel to make Catton a TV reporter, but here again the TV film is faithful to the novel. Böll's reporter uses the written word to distort the facts. In literary works, essays and interviews Böll has often expressed his respect for language and his disdain for those who misuse it,²¹ for, as the German name of the Zeitung reporter suggests and both film versions demonstrate, in unscrupulous hands the written word becomes a deadly weapon.

Böll's story ends with Katharina's own detailed written account of Tötges's murder. The Schlönderff film, on the other hand, ends with a eulogy at the reporter's funeral defending freedom of the press and with an ironic "disclaimer" about the Bild-Zeitung which Böll placed at the beginning of his book. The final scene of the American television film, in contrast to both the book and the German film, shows Kathryn surrounded by police and media representatives as she arrives at the police station. The scene ends with a slow zoom in to a grainy image of her anguished face, a freeze-frame which goes to the black-and-white of a newspaper photograph. This final tightly framed shot graphically summarizes in cinematic terms the basic theme of Böll's story: an innocent bystander trapped and robbed of her human dignity by the authorities and the press.

NOTES

¹ Heinrich Böll, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1974).

² Dieter Zilligen, "Interview Heinrich Böll," in Bücherjournal, NDR Television, October 19, 1974, quoted in Hanno Beth, "Rufmord und Mord: die publizistische Dimension der Gewalt. Zu Heinrich Bölls Erzählung 'Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum'," in Heinrich Böll. Eine Einführung in das Gesamtwerk in Einzelinterpretationen, ed. Hanno Beth. 2nd edition (Königstein: Scriptor, 1974), pp. 71-72.

³ Heinrich Böll, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead, translated by Leila Vennewitz (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975).

⁴ The film was directed by Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta from a screenplay by Schlöndorff.

⁵ E.g., Lester D. Friedman, "Cinematic Techniques in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum," Literature/Film Quarterly, 7 (1979), 244-52: David Head, "'Der Autor muss respektiert werden'—Schlöndorff/Trotta's Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum and Brecht's Critique of Film Adaptation," German Life and Letters, 32 (1979), 248-64; William R. Magretta and Joan Magretta, "Story and Discourse. Schlöndorff and von Trotta's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975). From the Novel by Heinrich Böll," in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), pp. 278-94.

⁶ Böll has used the concept of an artist's pattern ("Malvorlage") in connection with the form of Katharina Blum. Heinrich Böll/Christian Linder, Drei Tage im März: Ein Gespräch (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1975), p. 67. Cf. Handbuch der deutschen Erzählung, ed. Karl Konrad Polheim (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1981), p. 540.

⁷ Magretta, p. 285.

⁸ For a more detailed discussion of the Tötges character in the Schlöndorff film, see Magretta, pp. 285-286.

⁹ Volker Schlöndorff, "De Toerless à Katharina Blum," Juene Cinéma, No. 94, April 1976, p. 11. Quoted in Magretta, p. 280.

¹⁰Idem.

¹¹ Lee Winfrey, "Telemovie Tells Story of a Lost Reputation," Philadelphia Inquirer, January 24, 1984, p. 6-C. On the feminist concerns raised by the German film version, see Magretta, p. 281.

¹² Langton is best known as the director of the television miniseries Smiley's People, Kathryn Beck is also distinguished as the first television film of cinematographer Gordon Willis.

¹³ For a discussion of Schlöndorff s use of visual symbolism and imagery, see the article by Friedman in note 5.

¹⁴ Kathryn and Cole dance to a recording of Roberta Flack's "Making Love to You" and Kathryn observes that she likes the singer's other record "Killing Me Softly." The dance serves as foreplay for the couple's lovemaking while the reference to the other song provides those familiar with the lyrics ("Killing me softly with his songs, Telling my whole life with his words.. ..") with an ironic foreshadowing of the reporter's exploitation of the heroine.

¹⁵ Magretta, p. 290.

¹⁶ Winfrey.

¹⁷Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, p. 185.

¹⁸ Not surprisingly, the police interrogator's first question to Katharina: "Hat er dich gefickt?" has been toned down to "Did you sleep with him?" This alteration, however, does not seriously lessen the question's impact on Katharina or the authorities' assault on the privacy of an innocent person.

¹⁹The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, p. 137.

²⁰ A key to Katharina's guilt or innocence in Böll's eyes is to be found in a statement which the author made in an interview which predates the publication of Katharina Blum. Here he maintained that someone who conceals another person from the authorities may have committed a punishable act and be subject to the law, but he is by no means a criminal. Stern, February 17, 1972, p. 190. For another view of Katharina's innocence, see J. C. Franklin. "Alienation and the Retention of the Self: The Heroines of Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, Abschied von Gestern, and Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum," Mosaic, 12 (1979), iv, 87-98.

²¹ Cf. Theodore Ziolkowski, "The Inner Veracity of Form," Books Abroad, 47 (1973), p. 22.

Derek Paget

SOURCE: "Screening The Mill on the Floss: David Edgar and Peter Hall's George Eliot," in Critical Survey, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1991, pp. 275-82.

[In the following essay, Paget discusses preparations for a television adaptation of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, noting particularly issues relating to the development of the script, the collaboration of the writer and director, and financial and technical aspects of production.]

INTRODUCTION—ADAPTATIONS AIN'T WHAT THEY USED T'BE

When I began work on this article, my intention was to follow the process by which a front-rank modern dramatist (David Edgar) and a key post-war theatre director (Sir Peter Hall) adapted a major nineteenth-century novelist's work (George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss), then televised it via the agency of a national broadcasting institution (the BBC). My presuppositions were two-fold: the first was that the article would essentially be about the reading of a novel inevitably offered through adaptation. If all readings of novels involve mental prioritising of meanings disclosed to the reader, 'transformation artists'¹ engaged in the translation of one medium into another visualise, indeed physicalise, their priorities in their eventual re-production. When texts shift into performances, all hint of possibility, all interpretative hedging, must necessarily give way to the achieved reality of the final product. Anything critically ucertain must be made certain; on the subject of Tom and Maggie's demise in the Floss flood, for example, David Edgar observed:

As an adaptor, you can't take the view that the flood is a mistake, as David Lodge does, without rewriting the end.²

Although much of the subsequent debate about adaptations tends to concern their 'truth to the original', this matters not so much, perhaps, as the continuation of an ongoing debate about the meanings inherent in the 'host text'.

My second presupposition was that the project was going to become one more example of a minor genre, the Televised Classic Serial, which from the 1950s onwards has been a feature of our cultural life. Tending historically to occupy a hallowed 'family slot' (often early on Sunday evenings), its scheduling always carried more than a hint of Sunday solemnity—as well as being 'entertainment', it was also profoundly serious. What was being taken seriously was, after all, the literary part of our English 'heritage'. Looking back, those Sunday evenings watching David Copperfield, Pride and Prejudice and the rest were Preliminary Courses in canonical works of the Victorian period. If Hall/Edgar's two-part adaptation had reached our television screens by Christmas 1990 (which seemed possible), I was confident that readers of this periodical who were studying The Mill on the Floss would encounter it as their teachers strove to make the text accessible. After all, what better way of 'getting to know the story' of a long book has there ever been?

The project to make a television version of The Mill on the Floss was Hall's idea. His choice of David Edgar as adapter was the result of an interest in the playwright's 1985 Dorchester 'community play' Entertaining Strangers (performed by the National Theatre at the Cottesloe in 1987). The BBC were initially favourable to the idea, and Edgar's first draft of the adaptation, in two ninety-minute episodes, was with them by March 1990. Hall hoped to receive their go-ahead in time for autumn filming, and was aiming for the Christmas 1990 schedules. By summer 1990, however, the project was stalled because the BBC had turned the treatment down; the cold winds of economic change meant, in Edgar's words, that 'the BBC's present plans did not include expensive two-part adaptations of long nineteenth century novels'. The Mill on the Floss project is now dormant, although in an interview in the Observer on 12 August 1990, Hall mentioned it as one of several possible film ventures vaguely scheduled for 'the next two years' (Edgar has 'cobbled together a single-episode version, just to show it can be done as a film'). Having seemed an institution which time could not make mortal, the 'market place' has intervened and Classic Serial adaptations (of George Eliot anyway) are surplus to requirements.

The reasons for this high-level 'editing' of George Eliot are worthy of scrutiny, disclosing as they do the symbiotic relationship between the economic and the aesthetic. The pun on 'screen' in my title has therefore taken on a different, and wider, dimension from the obvious one (the thing onto which a film or programme is 'projected' / that which is 'sorted' or 'selected' in adaptation). For George Eliot has been 'screened off, or 'screened out' in a far more drastic selection process. While the project may yet see the light of day, it also seems that television adaptations, like nostalgia in the famous joke, are not what they used to be.

PARADISE LOST?—HALL, EDGAR AND THE COMMUNITY PAST

Amongst the items marking out Sir Peter Hall's career is a film he made in 1974 called Akenfield. Adapted from Ronald Blythe's 1969 'oral history' of an East Anglian village community, this film was a kind of personal homage from Hall to his own past. The film articulates two interconnected myths which resonate with The Mill on the Floss, and which also drew Hall to the communityinflected Entertaining Strangers and its author. There is the myth of an idealised 'rural past' always already disappearing under the inexorable pressure of technological and industrial 'progress'. In The Mill on the Floss, for example, Mr Tulliver's folk-craft world is under pressure from the enterprise culture of St Oggs, a culture through which his son Tom, wheeler-dealing successfully with Bob Jakin, ironically repossesses the Mill in Book 7, chapter 1. In Akenfield, Blythe remarks that the testimony contained in his book 'covers half a century of farming slump and the beginning of what is being called the second agricultural revolution'. Blythe presents a nuanced view of this world, acknowledging 'a conservatism as heavy as the clay lands themselves' under pressure from the 'new villagers' and from new farming methods.³

The other, interconnected, myth is of personal 'roots' which are somehow recoverable through quasi-ritualistic acts of homage to precise localities. Like the phenomenon of the community play itself, these artistic imperatives represent an interest in the past as the repository of certain values which are threatened by the galvanic forces of historical shifts.⁴ 'Communities', it is argued, shape us and we need to return to them from time to time to renew ourselves. Change from the outside threatens them, and by extension us. Part of the semi-autobiographical dimension of The Mill on the Floss is an articulation of this myth, which paradoxically speaks of belonging as it simultaneously asserts alienated difference. Blythe is equally strong on this idea, claiming that the newcomer 'never becomes joined' to the village, but that 'the atavistic thread, whether he likes it or not, remains unbroken for the [old] village man'. Blythe's use of individuals (different from characters) and their testimony about a twentieth-century community/paradise lost marks a privileging of semi-documentary authenticity over fictional invention, and this tendency was accentuated in Hall's film.

For Hall, the past is a railwayman's cottage in a remote East Anglian village not unlike the one in Blythe's book. He talked about this recently, and at length, on Anthony Clare's radio programme In the Psychiatrist's Chair. Hall's personal story can be read as a representative history of the postwar experiment with class boundaries; it discloses the parameters of its success and failure. As the classic achieving working-class child of postwar reconstruction, educated into a new élite, Hall is an alienated figure of class translation pulled both towards and away from 'origins' which, like ghosts, must be exorcised from time to time. Such alienation inevitably makes for a confused attitude towards Self (individual fulfilment) and Others (social responsibility). In this he is not unlike George Eliot herself, or rather, like Maggie in The Mill on the Floss,

Hall's created Self (successful, indeed revolutionary, shaper of postwar British theatre) is inscribed with these contradictions. His art has always been his business, and his recently published diary bears frequent testimony to how hard-up he thinks himself. He is in the market place with only his talent to sell, and has had (literally) to 'sell' his name. He has endorsed products, for example—much as John Cleese now endorses American Express, Hall once helped sell wallpaper in an advertisement. The existence of this entrepreneurial Hall illustrates the historical necessity for even the most 'creative' to commodify their fame in a capitalist society. In the Observer interview, he quantified the current saleability of his name, claiming that 'in marketing terms there are 40-50,000 people who will think seriously about coming to see a play I do'. This, clearly, was a bargaining counter used in the attempt to finance The Mill on the Floss.

David Edgar, by contrast, is a committed left-wing play-wright, where the diaries reveal Hall to have drifted rightwards. Edgar's commitment has been less obviously to the development of a personalised talent and an entrepreneurial 'trading' on a recognisable identity, more to collectivities increasingly under threat through the 1980s (especially since the collapse of Eastern European socialism). His career as a dramatist has been built around overtly political plays, the most recent being the 1990 The Shape of the Table (about Czechoslovakia's 'velvet revolution'). But he too has had to 'make his name', so to speak, as a political playwright in a capitalist world.

But the Edgar oeuvre has another strand which answers to the old 1960s phrase 'the personal is political', and which resonates with Hall's more conservative desire to explore his past. Plays in this category include adaptations like the 1978 The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. Some dramatists can be more than slightly sniffy about adapting, but Edgar has always viewed the exercise positively, and perhaps his biggest success to date has been the 1980 stage adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby for the RSC (televised on Channel 4 in 1982). Crucially, Edgar sees adaptations as 'in part about the author of the original work' (Edgar, p. 146), and it is possible to see his script for The Mill on the Floss as partly about the character 'George Eliot' and her articulation of the contradictory pull of rootedness (responsibility) against detachment (selffulfilment). If, for Hall, the novel's repeated tropes of passion and repression, duty and self-fulfilment, transgression and reconciliation are bisected by the soft-focus, semi-documentary sense of loss evident in his film of Akenfield, the process for Edgar has been slightly different. His meeting-ground with Hall may be defined through the concept of the 'community' as an arena in which the personal-political may yet be meaningfully expressed in a 'post-socialist' world.

GEORGE/MARY AND MARY/MAGGIE—THE DOUBLE PRESENCE

In the Victorian novel, it has been argued, there is a 'hierarchy of discourses' which produces realism as an 'effect of language'. In reading, we are made aware that some 'voices' are to be trusted more than others. Our 'knowing subjectivity' as readers (or our view as privileged observers outside a 'real' action) is assured by technical, as opposed to natural, strategies. The figure of the Narrator him/herself is usually at the apex of the discourse hierarchy.⁵ In George Eliot's work, this figure has the kind of lofty intelligence which induces implicit trust on the part of a reader. Her authority ultimately underwrites our 'knowingness' and, as Roger Ebbatson has noted, the 'unity of the experience . . . is that of the author, not of the character'.⁶ But the narrator in The Mill on the Floss has a double—Maggie Tulliver.

Ebbatson defines the double authorial presence in The Mill on the Floss as an * "impersonal" narrator/historian' and an 'authorial "second self" (p. 35). The first is standard procedure in a Victorian novel; in The Mill on the Floss, there is authorial commentary on, among other things, economic shifts in a provincial community which is being inflected inexorably with 'modern' industrial/business and legal/financial meanings. But the second authorial presence is what often draws readers to The Mill on the Floss as a kind of autobiographical work. In this presence, we might understand some of the reasons why Mary Ann Evans became 'George Eliot'. We certainly see how the psychological forces of 'character' or 'nature' drive Maggie towards personal fulfilment, then contradictorily towards repression (especially sexual repression). Over and against this force, there is 'causation' or 'nurture', conditioning social being (and a sense of 'duty' and 'responsibility') and producing (in Tom's case) economic activity.

Mary Ann Evans became 'George Eliot' in order to become economically active. That is, to get her material accepted, typeset, printed, published and distributed—to gain access to the means of literary production in the Victorian period—she had to take a male identity. In doing so, she recognised that 'the only gender that can presume to speak as if ungendered and for all genders is the dominant gender', which was, and is, male.⁷ It is interesting to see how Edgar mediates this Narrator in his script, and how the mediation addresses the novel-narrator's gender (which is far from clear from the text alone).

A lone middle-aged female figure is glimpsed in the opening frames of Episode One, observing Dorlcote Mill and the young Maggie Tulliver from a distance. This figure is the filmic equivalent of the 'dreaming narrator' of the novel's first chapter. The figure links up gradually with a female 'voice-over', supplying narration. Figure and voice are one by the end of the episode, but the ambiguity of Eliot's 'simultaneous . . . endorse[ment] and subver[sion of] the norm of patriarchal dominance' (Ebbatson, p. 70) is partly mediated by the 'male companion' who questions her on the significance of the river in the final dialogue sequence of the episode:

MAN: So what's the river?

WOMAN: Well, I suppose, it is the unpredictable. That which lies beyond our control or understanding.

MAN: What, accident? Or fate?

WOMAN: That is the question.

At the conclusion of Episode Two, these 'framing' characters debate the problematic deaths of Tom and Maggie:

MAN: How will you end it?

WOMAN: They drown.

MAN: They drown?

WOMAN: In a mighty flood. Hence the river. Hence the mill.

MAN: I see.

Because the drowning precedes the discussion in film-time, Edgar can underscore his reading of Eliot's message. He has, in fact, killed his Tom and Maggie with a 'huge part of the Mill itself (my italics), thus making their past catch up with them—both literally and metaphorically.

Finally, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes (only the 'stage directions' use the names) get into a horse-drawn trap which sets off down the road away from the now-deserted mill. The dialogue continues:

MAN: Don't you think—that we'd like to know how they'd grow up? Or marry? or not marry? Bring up children? And grow old?

Pause.

WOMAN: I don't know if she could. Perhaps that's work for other minds.

Slight pause.

WOMAN: Or perhaps it's better as it is.

The adaptation concludes with Maggie in voice-over repeating the last part of the legend of St Ogg as the trap bearing 'Eliot' and 'Lewes' disappears into the distance. Ogg, the son of Beorl, is, of course, the ferryman of 'the heart's need' (see Book 1, chapter 12); Edgar may not exactly 'change the ending' of the novel, but he undoubtedly endorses the heart's need to escape the heavy clay of origin.

In one of his earlier 'readerly' interpolations, Edgar again equates yet differentiates Maggie and Mary Ann. Following Maggie's seduction-that-isn't by Stephen Guest (Book 6, chapters 13 and 14), Edgar tidies up the confused itinerary by which she returns to St Oggs, and has her almost board a coach to London:

MAGGIE: And this coach? Where does this coach go?

INNKEEPER: O, this 'un's London, Miss. No good for you.

The Innkeepeer carries on loading. Maggie looks at him, and the coach.

Edgar shows a 'real' London coach, which Maggie does not board, but connotes a mythic 'London coach', which took Mary Ann Evans away from Warwickshire, and from obscurity to fame. This fame was superintended by a male (Lewes), and protected, at least initially, by a male identity (George Eliot).

CONCLUSION—'CONTESTABLE AREAS'

Having read all Eliot's novels as part of his background research for adapting The Mill on the Floss, Edgar was particularly drawn to this passage from Daniel Deronda:

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship .. . for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge ... (Book 1, chapter 3)

In common with the left as a whole, Edgar has had to take stock of an altered situation in the late 1980s. As part of his own, and a wider, reappraisal, he made connections between

this question of her and her treatment of her own life [and] notions of place and issues of responsibility to the collectivities in which you grow up, and to notions of alignment.

These questions, Edgar believes, are 'crucial for socialists in a post-socialist period'. Ideas (like personal responsibility) seized by the right, must be 'contestable areas' for the left in the future.

The classic 'nature/nurture' argument is at the heart of the contest. Edgar was particularly interested in the implicit decision by the author to destroy her younger self. His female narrator and her implied 'act of leaving' signified to him a rite de passage, her nature finally able (unlike Maggie's) to break the bonds of nurture. He dramatises the narrator accordingly, leaving the 'historian' figure largely in the hands of mise-en-scène and camera work. The dialectical pull between self-denial and self-fulfilment is achieved by juxtaposing the gypsy in Maggie ('a code for her desire to let it all hang out') with the repressive determinism she draws particularly from her reading of Thomas à Kempis ('a code for her will to keep it all in').

Edgar's newly differentiated view of the individual's struggle between competing notions of duty and responsibility, on the one hand, and personal fulfilment on the other, contrasts with his own much starker earlier views:

I'm quite admiring of Tom's settling down and lashing himself to the wheel and getting his father's mill back. I would have been more dismissive of that twenty years ago, and less ambiguously critical of Maggie's repression of herself. I think I'd want to view the contradictions as being more painful today.

The essential collectivity found in the theatre has become for him an emblem of that politics-of-the-personal which can harness the energies of the individual to the common good:

the theatre challenges the notion that people's basic work motivation is material advantage, and gives some support to the idea that within the right environment people of individuality and talent can function collectively, collaboratively and efficiently.⁸

However, another version of the theatre industry might see conditions not unlike an old-fashioned agricultural hiring fair, and collectivity still tending to suffer in the search for that 'right environment'.

In the environment of television, a costume drama such as The Mill on the Floss would probably cost £3-4 million (a film would require twice that). The Mill on the Floss was, and is, Hall's project, and his name is crucial to its financing. That may have been one of his problems; his stock is low at present (especially following Born Again, his musical version of Ionesco's Rhinoceros). But the marketing problem goes further; classic serialisations have always tended to be of some novels (and writers) rather than others. George Eliot has never been quite so marketable as, for example, Dickens. Silas Marner, her one significant 'success' on TV, in 1985, had the notable advantage of being short and easily convertible into a ninety-minute film drama. There was also a beefy role for a star name (Ben Kingsley as the eponymous hero), and the winter scenes were tailor-made for the Christmas schedules. Finally, the novel can be read as a classic tearjerker in which everything ends up happily; it is (and perhaps this says it all) the least 'George-Eliotic' of Mary Ann Evans's novels. It has even been made into a cartoon version, as have a number of Dickens's novels; it is unimaginable that any other of George Eliot's works could be so treated.

Although Edgar makes the most of the book's Christmas scene (Book 2, chapter 2), The Mill on the Floss fails the rest of the above criteria. As a result, we must wait to see whether The Mill on the Floss does eventually get screened through the 'open market', or whether it has been completely 'screened out'.

¹ See 'Adapting Nicholas Nickleby', in David Edgar, The Second Time As Farce (Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), p. 143.

² Unless stated otherwise, quotations are from an interview of 6 June 1990. I am also grateful to David Edgar for permission to quote from his draft adaptation of The Mill on the Floss.

³ See Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (Penguin, 1972), p. 19.

⁴ For further information, see Ann Jellicoe, Community Plays (Methuen, 1987).

⁵ See Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (Methuen, 1980).

⁶ Roger Ebbatson, The Mill on the Floss—Penguin Critical Study (Penguin, 1985), p. 46.

⁷ Nancy Armstrong and Lawrence Tennenhouse (eds.), The Violence of Representation (Routledge, 1989), p. 3.

⁸ David Edgar, 'Stage Left', in Marxism Today, December 1990, p. 3.

Martin Esslin

SOURCE: "The Art of Television Drama," in The Boston Review, Vol. IX, No. 4, July/August, 1984, pp. 12-14.

[In the following essay, Esslin discusses the abandonment of literary drama by American commercial and public television programmers.]

There is an immense amount of "drama" on American television—situation comedy, police and detective series, soap operas. Yet "television drama"—in the sense, that is, of serious drama specially conceived for the medium—is to all intents and purposes extinct in the United States. There was, once upon a time, a golden age of it in the 1950s, when writers like Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky produced a series of near-masterpieces in the genre, plays like Chayefsky's Marty (1953) or Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957). But that time has long since gone, (Serling, for example, gave up writing serious television drama in 1959, when he denounced censorship by sponsors and declared that "It's a crime, but scripts with a social significance can't get done on TV.") The sponsors gradually abandoned the series of "play-houses" and "theatres of the air" in the 1960s, and today's occasional blockbuster "dramas" like The Day After are, by their very nature, simply feature films made for television and certainly cannot aspire to be regarded as works of art.

Most of what little television drama with literary aspirations there still is tends to appear on the "public" network under the idiotic label of "Masterpiece Theatre," which covers an incongruous medley of imports from England. These range from adaptations of classic and not so classic novels, to soap operas like Upstairs Downstairs, to the occasional detective story, with introductions designed for illiterates by a "host" (the unfortunate, charming and intelligent Alistair Cooke) who has to explain, for example, that there was such a thing as a First World War from 1914 to 1918, or who Dickens or Trollope might have been. Genuine television drama, as it exists on the continent of Europe (and for that matter, in Canada), hardly ever gets a showing on American television. Some of the best works of major writers like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, David Mercer, and others have thus remained unknown on this side of the Atlantic.

Nevertheless, television drama is a powerful art form in its own right, poised somewhere between the stage and the cinema, with the advantages, and some of the liabilities, of each. At first glance, television drama is obviously closer to film than to live theater: here, as in the cinema, the spectator can see the story only through the viewpoint dictated by the director's use of shots and camera angles. Yet television is not just film on a small screen.

The most significant basic difference between film and television drama lies in the conditions under which the work is watched. The film happens not only on a large screen, but in a theater that has been darkened and is filled by a crowd. The television viewer, on the other hand, is usually sitting in his own home, with the lights on, alone, or with very few people. Moreover, he is in control of his set. If he is bored, he can switch it off or go to another channel. The need to keep the viewer riveted to the screen is thus far greater in television than in the cinema, with its captive audience securely settled into their seats and determined to get a ticket's worth of performance. Television drama has to capture the audience's attention immediately and hold it relentlessly, which has led to the false assumption that the viewer must, in the very first minute, be overwhelmed by events so exciting and mysterious that he is simply compelled to go on watching. (Hence the medleys of violent stunts and tantalizing sex scenes that precede the American police or adventure series installments as trailers or "appetizers.") In fact, however, the intimacy of the television screen is so great that the relatively slow establishment of a milieu or atmosphere can indeed become hypnotically riveting and intriguing enough to hold the viewer. Pinter's television play Tea Party, to give just one example, opens with a long surrealistic travelling shot of rows of sanitary appliances displayed in glass cabinets, establishing that the principal character is a rich manufacturer of toilet bowls and washbasins. This seemingly surrealistic, and yet completely real opening sequence demonstrates that the need to capture the viewer's attention from the very beginning can be met by imaginative visuals that endow everyday objects with mystery, suspense, wit, and the promise of intriguing events to come.

On the other hand, television drama cannot, like the cinema, offer the viewer vast and spectacular vistas. Television drama does not work well in the long shot, and is at its best in close-up. And indeed, to the viewer sitting at home in his living room, only a few feet away from the screen, such close-ups of faces will appear on a human scale, barely different in size from the faces of the people he would see in the room itself. (On the large screens of today's cinema, however, the close-up has to be used sparingly: a face blown up to gigantic size easily becomes grotesque.) Thus, the most effective scenes in television drama involve only two or three people, whose emotions and reactions will register in the minutest detail in their features, no further away from the viewer than those of people with whom he interacts in real life. television drama is thus the ideal chamber play, as postulated by Strindberg and the early naturalists.

Another of the specific characteristics of television drama (which derives from its affinity with the other, and even more intimate electronic medium, radio) is that the spoken word registers more intimately at low volume in a living room than at high volume in a theater. Some of the finest effects of television drama derive from the use of narration that ironically contrasts with the images being shown. (For example, a voice reciting a letter describing the wonderful place the writer is in, contrasted with shots of the sordid reality of the place.) Internal monologue and the visualization of the daydream and fantasy are also much more effective on television than in film or live drama.

Intimacy and closeness to the characters, which television drama shares with the radio play, are thus the special strengths of the best of serious television drama. On the other hand, this intimacy and closeness also allow television drama to exploit to the hilt a quality it shares with the cinema: the ability of the director to control the point of view from which the action is seen. In the rich literature of British television drama, for example, there are a number of major works that make use of this special strength of the medium. John Hopkins's famous television tetralogy Talking to a Stranger (1966), for example, showed the same family reunion from the different points of view of four different members of the family. The late David Mercer—one of the most important television dramatists to have emerged in the short history of the genre—repeatedly dramatized case histories of mental breakdown (for example in his A Suitable Case for Treatment, which later became a feature film). In Peter Nichols's classic television play The George (1965), the variation of points of view was made even more complex: it showed a family viewing a home movie of an outing to the country and contrasted the clumsy, cliched images of a happy family occasion with what had actually happened during the excursion—at least as remembered by one of the principal people involved in the events, the young son of the family.

This tendency to "internalize" the action is balanced by television's ability to represent the real world with photographic accuracy. Moreover, perhaps the most characteristic feature of television as against the cinema is its essential nature as a continuous, never-ending stream of images. Television is perceived by the viewer as a continuum of virtually undifferentiated "real" events (the news, sports) and fiction. The faces appearing on the screen are at one moment those of actors, at the next those of real people, and then again, in the person of anchormen and women and announcers, those of real but entirely artificial "personalities." Contemporary television drama often exploits this characteristic of the medium by using semi-documentary techniques, mixing actors with real people and even, as in the outstandingly interesting work of directors like Mike Leigh, improvising dialogue and action in the rehearsal process. Directors like Ken Loach, writers like Colin Welland (who won an academy award for his screenplay for Chariots of Fire, but had written many television plays in the preceding decade) have produced an impressive body of this type of documentary-realistic drama.

Many other writers have kept within the area of psychological realism, which, of course, involves the fantasy and dream life of the characters as well as the realities of their environment. In plays like Harold Pinter's The Lover, for example, we are given a glimpse of a married couple whose erotic life is based on their playing the parts of a prostitute and her client. The situation is real enough, yet at the same time we are taken into the fantasy life of the couple. Another way in which fantasy and reality can be merged in this most intimate of all media is that of the lyrical play of reminiscence, of which perhaps Laurie Lee's Cider With Rosie is a classic example—an evocation of childhood memories halfway between reality and dream-like, nostalgic reminiscence.

The impact of television drama in a country like Britain is immense. While it is true that it cannot rival situation comedy or major sports events in attracting the largest mass audiences, its viewing figures are still impressive. An average television play on BBC1 or on the major commercial channel in Britain can attract between six and ten million viewers; the most successful plays have reached audiences of up to 15 million. (British audience research is carried out by an independent body for the BBC and the commercial TV companies, and is far more thorough than the "ratings" research in the United States, being based daily on a far larger sample. These figures represent percentages of the total adult population of the United Kingdom. Thus 15 million is 30 per cent of the total adult population.) On the "minority" channels, BBC2 and the commercial "Channel 4," the more intellectually demanding plays still attract audiences around three million. (It must be stressed here that in Britain even the commercial channel can show advertisements only in "natural breaks between programmes," hence even in commercial television serious drama is possible.)

No wonder, then, that British television drama attracts the best playwrights: it offers them an audience much larger than they could ever reach with a stage play, while sparing them the humiliations suffered by writers in the film industry. Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, John Osborne, Trevor Griffiths, David Hare, Simon Gray, Howard Brenton, Michael Frayn, Peter Nichols, John Mortimer, and a host of others have written some of their best work for television.

The sheer quantity of serious drama on British television has an important impact on the cultural life of the nation. Playwrights can make a steady living by regularly providing material for the continuous demand constituted by the programming needs of three national radio and four national television channels, which, between them, need many hundreds of hours of television drama each year. Adaptations of novels and short stories can, in this context, be seen as preliminary steps towards the mastering of the techniques that will come to full fruition in original plays. Moreover, the existence of the BBC as a public service (and not, as most Americans tend erroneously to assume, a government-controlled organization), creates an ideal training ground: many writers start with short radio plays, progress to longer and more complex radio work, and gradually enter television; when they have established themselves there, the step to the live theatre and the cinema becomes much easier.

The flowering of dramatic writing in Britain since the late 1950s is undoubtedly a consequence, in part, of the opportunities the mass media have offered to new writers to acquire polish and professional experience. The situation in countries like France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Italy is similar. It is surely no coincidence that even major world figures like Ingmar Bergman choose to produce some of their best work for the television medium. Bergman's Portrait of a Marriage, for example was ideal television material and he made it for television. Nor is it a coincidence that one of the greatest playwrights of this century, Samuel Beckett, has been experimenting with television drama since 1966 (when the BBC produced his first play specifically written for television, Eh Joe!) and has since written four more plays specifically conceived for television and unthinkable in any other medium—Ghost Trio (1976), " . . . but the clouds ... " (1976), Quad 1 1/3 2 (1981) and Nacht und Traeume (1982). In these haunting pieces Beckett uses the television's capacity for intimacy, for a dialectic between word and image, and, above all, its ability to turn simple objects into profound metaphoric images, to create what amounts to a new kind of visual poetry.

These short plays (none longer than about twenty minutes) are very difficult to describe. Their scripts, insofar as they have been published, cannot give even a faint idea of their impact, simply because they were conceived as images and only work as such. In Ghost Trio, for example, the faint voice of a woman is heard describing the familiar Beckett chamber—bare walls, one window, one mirror, a door, a pallet (or mattress) on the floor. The faint woman's voice comments on the actions of an old man with gray hair who is sitting holding an unidentifiable object on his lap. From time to time music, a passage from Beethoven's fifth piano trio ("The Ghost"), is heard. The old man is waiting for someone, a woman, to appear; he goes to the window to look out, to the door, when he thinks he has heard someone approaching. But there is nothing there. Eventually steps are heard—there is a knock at the door. Outside stands a small boy in a plastic rain coat. Drenched by the rain, he looks up at the old man and faintly shakes his head in a denying gesture, then departs. The old man remains alone; we realize that the object in his hands is a small cassette recorder on which he has turned the phrase from Beethoven's trio on and off. The play ends with a shot of his tired, sad old face.

This short play does not tell a story. It is merely an image, a visual metaphor for the human condition, compressed in to its most concise form. The waiting man, the little boy with his negative message recall Waiting for Godot, but here the image is even more telling, more concise. As in Beckett's other late television plays, which are a new form of visual poetry, everything depends on scale. Blown up to the size of a cinema screen these images would lose their power; live theatre, on the other hand, would not be able to provide the extreme precision of timing and gesture, the subtle interplay of voice-over and music, they require.

It is unfortunate that these masterpieces of a new art form have hitherto been denied to American viewers. What has caused the virtual death of television drama in the United States? The short answer is: the prevailing system, which makes one of the most powerful media of communication and culture ever available to mankind subject to the control of advertisers. Serious drama, undoubtedly, is not among the most popular of entertainments for a mass audience and will thus never get the highest ratings. It can be harrowing and intellectually demanding; above all, it requires a degree of concentration that cannot be attained in a medium subject to incessant interruptions by commercials which are not only trivial and ugly but are bound to destroy any sustained emotional tension or mood. Serious drama is, in fact, impossible under the conditions of American commercial television.

But advertising is not the only culprit. The public television service (insofar as it can be said to exist at all), hardly ever carries serious drama, written specifically for television, as distinct from adaptations of novels and short stories, or studio reproductions of stage performances, This is due not only to public television's poverty. After all, it would cost no more to buy an original work by Beckett or Stoppard than six episodes of Dorothy Sayers or a soap opera about Edward VIII. The reason seems to be that the television industry is convinced that American audiences, used as they are to the fare they are offered by the commercial networks, are not capable of watching any serious work on the television screen. The industry also seems to believe that the American audience has become so accustomed to the series format that a play, which stands by itself, has no chance of being watched. Television executives reason that a series can be advertised and will have a chance to establish itself; it forms a habit of being viewed at set times on set days of the week. In the serial form of situation comedies and police and detective series, moreover, the need for an exposition that has to be followed with concentration is eliminated by the familiarity of milieu and characters. The same is even more true of the endless serial form of the soap operas which dominate the afternoon hours.

The "single play," on the other hand, lacks these advantages and will simply disappear in the vast amorphous mass of programming. The consequence is that on commercial television adaptations of novels in several installments have to be dubbed "mini-series," from which it would follow that a play standing by itself like Hamlet or Hedda Gabler would have to be described as a "mini-mini-series" consisting of only one installment! This concept has also seeped into "public" service. And here, moreover, the organization of the network as a federation of independent units that have to be separately persuaded to carry programs, is so complex that scheduling an isolated program is in itself far too difficult to be considered worth the effort.

A television drama which explores and opens up new frontiers of expression that have become available through new technology is obviously of immense importance. Unfortunately, it is now under constant threat everywhere. As screens become bigger, as video cassettes make the whole past output of the classic cinema accessible, as more and more feature films are being produced with television in mind, the intimate form of the television play concentrating on the subtle interplay of a few characters and their dreams and fantasies is being assailed from many sides. Television has become, and will increasingly become, a huge industry relying, for the enormous demand of hundreds of new channels, on more and more industrialized methods of mass production. It would be a sad loss if this outlet for the creative imagination were lost in Europe, where it still flourishes, as it has already been lost in the United States. It would be even more wonderful if ways could be found to make this body of work accessible here. Perhaps the new forms of distribution—cable, and video-cassettes—-will make that possible. Let us hope so.

Stuart Laing

SOURCE: "The Three Small Worlds of David Lodge," in Critical Survey, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1991, pp. 324-30.

[In the following essay, Laing discusses the plot, themes, and techniques of David Lodge's novel Small World (1985), considers alterations including a shift in point of view and compression of events in the serial adaptation for British commercial television in 1988, and examines issues of the television medium central to Lodge's 1987 documentary "Big Words: Small World. "]

David Lodge's novel Small World was published in hard-back in 1984, put into paperback in 1985 and turned into a six-part television serialisation in 1988 by the ITV company Granada. In this essay I consider first the main narrative structure and issues of the novel, then the changes made in the process of transforming the story into television serial drama, and finally some further issues of television form arising out of a documentary on a literary conference ('Big Words: Small World') presented by David Lodge on Channel Four in November 1987.

SMALL WORLD—THE NOVEL

Small World, the novel, presents events occurring during the annual round of international literary critical conferences in the year of 1979. In particular the exploits of three figures are followed. Both Philip Swallow (a middle-aged and traditionalist English literary critic) and Morris Zapp (an ambitious American post-structuralist) are characters resurrected from Lodge's earlier novel, Changing Places (1975); their past personal and professional histories become factors in this novel. By contrast Persse McGarrigle, the main protagonist, is a young naïve scholar ('a conference virgin', as Morris Zapp calls him during the conference at Rummidge which opens the book) from a rural Irish Catholic background whose initiation into the complexities both of literary critical theory and politics and of sexual desire, love and romance run in parallel through the novel. The events of the novel follow the conference / international lecture circuit from April to mid-winter, moving from Rummidge (a thinly disguised Birmingham) to Amsterdam, Geneva, Lausanne, Turkey, Greece, Jerusalem, Hawaii, Seoul and finally the MLA conference (the 'Big Daddy of conferences') at New York.

While the adventures of these three characters form the main forward narrative movement of the novel they do not constitute its exclusive centre. The narrative mode is that of an omniscient author deploying a range of characters situated across the globe. Thus the story of events at the Rummidge conference is followed by a lengthy thirty-page section (in which Persse plays no part at all) evoking the characteristic world of the modern literary international network—a world linked by telephones, fax machines and international travel. In a typically modernist device Lodge shows us a number of his characters (Morris Zapp in England en route for Italy, Wainwright in Australia preparing his conference paper for Jerusalem, Désirée Zapp asleep at her writer's retreat in New Hamp-shire, Fulvia Morgana, Italian Marxist professor, and the Ringbaums en route for London—and other academics in Chicago, Berlin, Paris, Turkey and Tokyo) all simultaneously acting, planning and scheming as part of a single system of which at best they have only partial knowledge.

The novel's dominant attitude is, however, not that of modernist writing, nor even of campus novel comic realism; rather Lodge uses the notion of 'romance' (the book is sub-titled 'An Academic Romance') in a particular formal sense. As Cheryl Summerbee explains to Persse: 'Real romance is a pre-novelistic kind of narrative. It's full of adventure and coincidence and surprises and marvels, and has lots of characters who are lost or enchanted or wandering about looking for each other, or for the Grail, or something like that. Of course, they're often in love too . . .' (p. 258).¹ Persse (whose surname means 'Son of Super-valour') spends the novel looking (mostly in vain) for the brilliant and beautiful Angelica Pabst; his quest is impeded by the existence of Angelica's 'bad' twin sister Lily and aided by the visionary Miss Maiden (a retired scholar from Girton College and a former pupil of Jessie Weston's who shares Persse's deep interest in Eliot's The Waste Land). Morris's kidnapping (by Italian revolutionaries seeking his ex-wife's money) and Philip's apparently miraculous rediscovery of Joy, a lost love he thought dead, also add to the romance elements of the various plots. The novel's climax comes at the MLA conference when the elder statesman of international literary criticism, Arthur Kingfisher (having just been awarded the UNESCO chair of literary criticism, for which the various characters have been competing throughout the novel) is revealed to be the father of Angelica and Lily—their mother being Miss Maiden.

Lodge's adoption of a free-wheeling romance plot structure is a major source of the novel's comedy (in addition to the numerous parodies of academic literary discourse and behaviour). However it also serves as a way of placing some of the many positions on literature and criticism which characters adopt in the novel. The definition of romance used by Cheryl is in fact learnt from Angelica and the latter's ideas on romance, including her analogies between various literary forms and forms of sexuality, constitute one position which Lodge has to offer against various kinds of reductionism as offered by critical theorists (Marxist or post-structuralist) or computer stylistics (exemplified in the novel by the character of Dempsey). However, ultimately the novel offers a balance between romance and realism as its particular vision. All three central characters are shown as experiencing certain professional, personal and sexual adventures in parallel—although largely unknown to each other. In each case an extreme philosophical or romantic view of the world is undercut by their experiences. Morris's kidnapping leads him to have 'lost faith in deconstruction . . . death is the one concept you can't deconstruct. Work back from there and you end up with the old idea of an autonomous self. I can die, therefore I am. I realized that when those wop radicals threatened to deconstruct me.' (p. 328). Philip's recognition of family responsibilities leads him to have 'failed in the role of romantic hero . . . My nerve failed me at a crucial moment' (p. 336); he rejects Joy to stay with his wife Hilary and to support her in her new career as a marriage counsellor. Finally, Persse realises, through making love with Lily while thinking she is Angelica, that his 'love' for Angelica is a fantasy; he discovers instead that he is really in love with Cheryl, the girl at the Heathrow Information desk, and the novel ends with his setting out on a new search for her.

SMALL WORLD—THE TELEVISION SERIAL

In adapting any novel for television a number of broad constraints immediately present themselves. From the adapter's point of view the most significant is the amount of time available and the shape of that time. This may vary from the single play (average ninety minutes) to the multi-episodic serial (traditionally thirteen in the case of the BBC Sunday afternoon Dickens of the early sixties—twenty-six for War and Peace). Small World was accorded a reasonably generous amount of air-time—six episodes of an hour long (or rather around fifty-three minutes allowing for advertising). This decision then posed three further issues about the shape of the adaptation. Firstly, even with well over five hours' script-time it was unlikely that all the novel's events could be included. Secondly, the material needed to be rendered into six reasonably discrete portions; and finally, a form of narration needed to be adopted which could hold the material together. This could have been a televisual version of the novelistic omniscient voice—an all-seeing camera going far beyond the knowledge of any individual character accompanied, when required, by an unseen narrative voice-over.

In fact the adaptation chose to deal with all three problems at once by radically recasting the way the story is told. Each of the six episodes opens with the figure of Persse in the underground chapel at Heathrow telling the tale of his adventures into a miniature tape-recorder as a form of confession (a variant of an actual Catholic confession) to Professor McCreedy, his departmental head at the University of Limerick who has financed his conference globe-trotting. The whole story is then told in flashback and at any point in any episode Persse's voice-over can be introduced to carry the narrative forward plausibly as part of his confession. This device allows a good deal of disparate material to be unified by being passed through the consciousness of Persse—thus events which are told as free-standing components in the novel are now converted into letters or stories told to Persse. The draw-back, however, to this re-rendering of a third-person novel as in effect an autobiographical narrative is that now everything that happens must first come to be known to Persse. He moves firmly to the centre of the story, altering that balance between the fate of individuals and the construction of a general conference world which the novel carefully preserves.

This decision then dictates the inevitable compression of events and detail which occurs in the serial. Certain minor characters disappear. The Australian dimension is excised altogether. The (admittedly rather unpleasant) character of Wainwright and the story of his never to be finished conference paper with its unanswered question 'how can literary criticism maintain its Arnoldian function of identifying the best which has been thought and said, when literary discourse itself has been decentred by deconstructing the traditional concept of the author, of authority?' (p. 84)—both disappear. So too do the Ringbaums—even more minor characters, although Thelma plays an important part in the novel's ending, as part of Morris's return to a belief in human relations, rather than deconstruction and professional ambition, as a personal goal. Another minor figure to be dropped is Akira Sakazaki, the Japanese translator of the English 'Angry' novelist Frobisher; his main role in the novel is to serve as the butt of various linguistic jokes about the difficulty of translating English idioms—material which would in any case have had no visual equivalent.

This reduction, within the serial, of concern with specifically linguistic literary issues is reflected also in the greatly diminished role of Dempsey who now only figures in the first episode as one of those used by Angelica to fuel Persse's jealousy and desire. In the novel a powerful and depressing sub-plot turns on his obsession with computerising the stylistic study of literature at his new University of Darlington; this leads by turns to Frobisher's blockage as a creative writer (on being told that his favourite word is 'greasy') and to Dempsey's breakdown as he comes to look to the computer to solve his personal problems. Another character with a greatly reduced role is Philip's Turkish host Akbil Borak; as with the Japanese component of the novel (reduced in the serial to Persse and Frobisher singing 'Hey Jude' in a karaoke bar), this attempt to render something of the complexity and absurdity of how 'English Literature' is understood in a quite different culture is largely deleted.

In fact in the serial the implications of the idea of 'small world' change—not absolutely, but as a matter of degree. The novel's emphasis on the existence of a particular invisible, but powerful, literary academic network which functions through the most modern communications systems shifts more towards the idea of a romance world of symbolic coincidences, interconnections and identities as a smaller cast of characters are more explicitly linked to each other in a multiplicity of ways. In particular the plot narrows considerably to become much more dominantly the sentimental education of Persse, closely and directly interwoven now with the two stories of his friends and mentors Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp. Their relationship is explicitly denoted as fellow knight-errants on a quest, and is even more strikingly described by Persse (when Philip and Morris become lost in their own rivalry for the UNESCO chair) in romance terms—'My surrogate fathers were lost to ego and competition with no time for their surrogate son'. From the first episode a closeness of relationship between the three is firmly established.

In the case of Philip it is now he rather than Dempsey who is tricked by Angelica into waiting in bed for her at the Rummidge conference. Persse's discovery of Philip leads to a shared sense of disappointment and to Philip's sharing with Persse his memories of Euphoria and his desire for 'intensity of experience'; this is followed by his telling both Persse and Morris (not just Morris as in the novel) the story of his brief encounter with Joy. Later, in a café in Amsterdam, he again tells them both of his rediscovery of Joy in Turkey. In the novel, Persse has no knowledge of Joy and indeed, after Rummidge, has no further contact at all with Philip until the end of the novel. Similarly with Morris, Persse is now on hand in Geneva to hear from Désirée of Morris's kidnapping, is present at Désirée's apartment when his release is arranged and accompanies Philip to rescue Morris from the abandoned villa where he has been held. In the novel Persse has no knowledge of these events, being on the other side of the world at the time.

Such perhaps plausible interweaving is supplemented by an intensification of more overt romance elements. Miss Maiden's role as a seer becomes more important as she becomes used indiscriminately to keep the plot moving (as when she turns up beside the Lake Isle of Innisfree to give Persse further instructions) without the need to provide much explanation. In one of the more imaginative uses of the television form, the novel's central mystery—the fact and origins of the identical Pabst twins—is replicated at another level by the casting of the same actresses in the parts of Philip's wife and mistress (Hilary and Joy) and of Morris's ex-wife and mistress (Désirée and Fulvia). This derives perhaps from a hint in the novel where Joy is seen by Philip as a younger version of Hilary, but, while visually striking and adding to the sense of play in the whole serial, this device contributes to some confusion in the way the closure of the various plot lines is handled. In particular the pairing off of Morris with Fulvia at the end (rather than with the essentially cipher-like Thelma) loses the novel's implication of Morris's abandonment of radical theory. The final scene sees the whole cast involved in a dance whose general celebratory quality implies the victory of a comic and romantic view of the world from which Persse removes himself only to seek to rejoin it again by a renewed quest for Cheryl.

BIG WORDS: SMALL WORLD

Adapting Small World for television posed one further problem in addition to those present with any novel. Lodge's novel is itself concerned with questions of literature, literary criticism and literary form. Its comments on these issues are moreover made not only via the thoughts, speeches and actions of the characters or even the ruminations of the narrative voice, but also by the very form of the book itself—the particular mix of romance and realism and the implicit assumptions about the relations between literature and life which underlie the novel's mode of writing. As the example of The French Lieutenant's Woman shows, this creates an extra level of difficulty—solved in that case by the device of replacing a novel about writing a novel with that of a film about making a film. Small World is not such a clearcut example of a metafictional novel and it is unlikely there was ever any question of developing a form for the serial in which self-consciousness about formal televisual questions would play any significant part, although clearly some thought was given as to how to convert the emphasis on romance conventions into televisual form (as in the double-casting discussed above). Nevertheless it is clear that the adaptation resulted in a considerable loss in the range and depth of implication of the specifically literary issues with which the novel was concerned. For an example of the kinds of questions which would have arisen had there been some attempt to produce a televisual equivalent of such issues it is worth considering the Channel Four documentary Big Words: Small World on the subject of a literature and linguistics conference held at the University of Strathclyde in the summer of 1986.

This documentary, presented by Lodge, was a collaborative production involving also some of the conference organisers (including Nigel Fabb, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe), and at certain points explicitly invoked a parallel with Lodge's novel in its attempt to explain what goes on at literary conferences and in what terms they can be understood. Without giving anything like a full account of the programme, I will note a few of the issues with which it attempted to deal, especially those concerning televisual form. One general point of comparison between the serial and the documentary is that of their use of the typical 'look' or mode of presentation of their particular genre. Whatever its leanings towards romance the basic narrative mode of the Small World serial was that television version of theatre naturalism which is the staple of popular television drama. Characters address each other (not the camera) and play across our line of vision; the writing and editing are designed to allow us to close each scene as part of a fixed sequence of events. As against this the typical documentary mode is a series of more disparate items—'descriptive' shots of the general social or natural environment involved, the presenter talking to camera, and other talking heads talking to a seen or unseen interviewer or sometimes directly to the camera itself. We rely predominantly on the unifying presenter or the voice-over to provide us with the significance of much of what we see, and to keep the sequence and argument moving.

Much of the first part of Big Words: Small World works like this with Lodge setting the scene both directly to camera and as voice-over. Part of his task here is to discuss the subject matter of the conference; an attempt is made to explain structuralism to the viewer (in much the same terms as it is explained to Persse and to the reader/viewer during the Rummidge conference) and reference is made to Derrida's view that 'all our discourse is founded on the void'. The arrival of the American critic Stanley Fish is shown (with reference to the commonly held view that he provided the model for Morris Zapp). Part Two opens with Lodge's own paper on Bakhtin (his commentary refers to Small World as itself a Bakhtinian 'carnivalesque novel about literary conferences') which turns on a paradox that while ideally we should favour the dialogic above the monologic in our discourse, literary criticism must perhaps necessarily be monologic in its attempt to persuade and to assert authority. The most we can hope for, Lodge suggests, in our critical discourse is that it should display 'openness about its closure'. Resuming his position as narrator, Lodge comments that the documentary too is a form of monologic discourse, which is the cue for the camera to pan back revealing that Lodge's 'office' is in fact a television studio and for Colin MacCabe to enter from the side asking that Lodge's control over the material be broken. After a short debate they agree that Lodge's narrative should continue but should be interrupted by other voices commenting on the conference as seems appropriate to MacCabe. These other voices (inserted by superimposing framed talking heads over the main shots of the conference) include many non-participants (such as Stuart Hall, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Rosalind Coward) as well as, later, ordinary conference members who feel that their concerns have been excluded from the main conference business. This disruption of the single line of the documentary narrative is parallelled by the story Lodge's narrative goes on to tell. By the final day of the conference many participants began to complain about the lack of social and political contextual issues (concerning both English as an international language and the specific regional concerns of Glasgow) and even about the effect of the presence of the television cameras themselves. Such comments are partly contained by Lodge's narrative through seeing them as typical of the way in which conferences themselves tend to become their own subject matter and the documentary concludes with Lodge and MacCabe continuing to debate and disagree over the best form for the programme itself.

In however obviously staged a way, this debate over documentary form within the programme is an attempt to parallel the arguments within the conference itself over the kinds of discourse which were possible or desirable within literary critical practice, and over the very nature of the conference event. In this sense there was an effort to effect a translation of the issues of the conference into another medium (television) by taking account of the distinctive features of that other medium, rather than simply by regarding that medium as a potentially neutral channel for the presentation of ideas. The television serial of Small World was certainly not unaware of this problem. It sought to select certain key ideas and issues, dropping those which could not easily be translated into a television serial format, and using televisual opportunities to develop the romance elements and to stress close parallels between the three heroes. The use of unusually explicit sexual scenes for prime-time main channel television (prompting the prior warning each week that an 'adult' comedy was to follow) emphasised the argument that the link between literary forms and sexual desire (suggested by Angelica, Morris and others) offered one way of seeing how literature did relate to practical questions of how to live, as well as stressing the importance of primary sensuous experience (as against the various theories which sought to place literature, language or even criticism as of greater value). Within the confines of its received form the serial did all that was reasonable to ask of it; it would have been a different and much more radical project to have taken the novel's underlying issues of representation, creativity, criticism and the new international order of academic life and asked how they could best be televised in fictional form. Both may be seen as worthwhile projects and neither should be seen as fully substitutable for the other; there is of course no reason why, in any rationally ordered culture and television service, we could not and should not be able to have both.

¹ David Lodge, Small World (London, 1984; Penguin edition, 1985). All page numbers refer to the paper-back edition.