5 - How to do it
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2009
Summary
Originally, this was where I took on the paradigmatic, conventional adaptations I'd like to displace, productions like the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby and Christine Edzard's Little Dorrit. That face-off started as an autonomous chapter. And then it retreated to an Appendix. And now, as you see, it's disappeared entirely. I've found I can't make rejection and resistance sound anything but sour. And this is a book that at least aims to provide, as I've just said, bliss.
The stage is in love with the timely. It knows “the readiness is all,” and, consequently, it not only suspects but loathes the timeless. Ignore whatever claims to be spirits, it warns us, sublime or other. Above all pay no attention to ghosts, even dear, familial, predecessor ghosts, when live friends and lovers, and blooming cherry orchards, call for attentive cultivation. The stage is about Cordelia's dead body, or Iphigenia's, or even Hamlet's, and that nothing can excuse, or explain, or compensate for those bodies' loss.
Dickens, as we've seen, writes against the body, and against the stage. He is, famously, smitten with Cordelia's dying. Little Nell (his first Cordelia; Amy Dorrit being the last) he tenderly, lingeringly transforms into an embalmed fetish, the site of pilgrimage and distended, lachrymose cherishing. Indeed, nowhere, no way can Dickens find good use for bodies. He writes to overcome, to transcend, to idealize the shameful necessities and feared inadequacies of the flesh.
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- Information
- After DickensReading, Adaptation and Performance, pp. 155 - 188Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999