Jane-sploitation*

This has got to stop.

The publisher who brought us the explicably but undeservedly popular Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has moved on to its next target: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

The concept itself makes me wearily angry but the publisher's press appearances make me furious.

First, the concept, from the Canadian distributor's website:

"SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS expands the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of giant lobsters, rampaging octopi, two-headed sea serpents, swashbuckling pirates, and other seaworthy creatures."

People, if you wanted to combine Austen and sea monsters, the logical novel would be Persuasion. That you opted for the catchy alliteration and easy title recognition confirms that you don't really care about the original text. Thankfully there are no more Austen novels with the "X and Y" title structure to be used.

Next, there's editor Jason Rekulak's absurd claim that he's resisting the trend to do something with vampires: "I know there are a lot of vampire fans, but the genre feels exhausted to me." Because remember, when he published P&P&Z, zombies weren't trendy at all.

Instead, he draws on a genre that hasn't been overplayed, mainly because it's not an actual genre (note also the sentence fragment):

Whereas Sea Monsters allowed us to draw inspiration from so many rich and diverse sources—most obviously Jules Verne novels and Celtic mythology, but also Jaws, Lost, Pirates of the Caribbean, even SpongeBob Squarepants!

Spongebob Squarepants might be a little tongue-in-cheeck (unless little Margaret Ferrars breaks into a plaintive rendition of "Where's Gary?") but the rest of the listed inspirations (Celtic mythology?) are too diverse to be brought together into anything cohesive.

But who needs cohesion when we have—wait for it—originality!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fans are counting on us to deliver something original, and I don’t think they will be disappointed.

Following up a bestselling Austen literary mashup with another Austen literary mashup? Very original.

And how does one achieve such originality? By employing the Grandpa Simpson method of literary adaptation: a little of column A and a little of column B. No, I'm not exaggerating:

Quoted in the Guardian story, original here:

"I thought it would be funny to do a 'new and improved' version of a classic that kids are forced to read in high school," he [Rekulak] told Publishers Weekly. "So I made a list of classic novels and a second list of elements that could enhance these novels—pirates, robots, ninjas, monkeys and so forth. When I drew a line between Pride and Prejudice and zombies, I knew I had my title and it was easy to envision how the book would work."

Because a title is totally a strong enough concept to base a book on. And because classic novels need improving: "Fix me, Jason Rekulak! Fix me! Readers throughout the decades and centuries didn't know what they were missing by reading Moby Dick without robots!"

We have crossed a line from the mashup, in which disparate elements are brought together to create a cohesive and new original, and are well into exploitation terrority, in which a popular author in the public domain is used to sell half-baked, poorly written books. It is disrespectful to the Austen, to Austen's novels, to those who appreciate the novels, and to anyone who values real originality and creativity.

The first defence against such criticisms is that extreme Austen-lovers have no sense of humour and take themselves too seriously. But bad writing is not "literary mashup" and exploitation is not originality. Someone needs to put her foot down and that someone might as well be me: Stop it, Quirk Books. It's fine with me that not everyone likes Austen. But there are a lot of people who like Austen very much, and they would prefer that she be left alone.


* credit for the term to the Guardian caption writer

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Snap Judgement/Review

The following paragraph was originally going to be my conclusion, but it's too important to leave until the end of an incredibly long post, so I'll just say it here:

What bothers me the most about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is that I know that people who have never read Pride and Prejudice before bought this book, but instead of getting Austen plus some cool zombie action, they are going to get decent zombie action and sub-par Austen. New readers are going to think that Austen is a poor writer who cannot develop characters or move a plot along. Instead of bringing new readers to Austen, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies does a disservice to the text that its entire existence is based on.

---

What follows is sort of a rant, not quite an essay. Possibly in the same way that zombies are sort of dead but not quite inanimate. It is, however, long.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a lot like a zombie: lumbering, ill-mannered, and serving no purpose but to be nuisance to be dispatched. It's an interesting idea clumsily executed with little attention to important narrative elements such as pacing, style, and characterization. Considered as an "adaptation/alteration" of Austen, it's distractingly inconsistent; considered as a novel on its own merits, it's pedestrian.

The book follows the plot of Austen's novel closely, hitting almost all the major (and most of the minor) plot points. Seth Grahame-Greene's most evident contributions to the book are the zombie-related details (all five Bennet sisters are trained zombie fighters). The zombie scenes themselves range from clever to pedestrian; the quality of writing takes a noticeable dip as it perfunctorily describes action with little of Austen's irony or wit. Graham-Greene is most successful when he integrates the martial-arts world of zombie fighting with appropriate moments in the novel, such as Elizbeth's response to Darcy's first, insulting proposal (there's kicking). Graham-Greene also inserts references to zombies or the plague into characters' dialogue, with less success. Placing his own work immediately next to Austen's, in the same paragraph, further emphasizes the differences in style, tone, and skill, especially when he steps on her punchlines. For example, Graham-Greene alters Mr. Bennet's classic response to Mrs. Bennet's insistence that he make Elizabeth marry Mr. Collins. The new version reads as follows. Guess which part is added.

An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do; for I shall not have my best warrior resigned to the service of a man who is fatter than Buddha and duller than the edge of a learning sword. (88)

Yes, Grahame-Smith's idea of humour consists of fat jokes, double entendres about balls, and vomitting. Classy.

Grahame-Smith is not only the co-author of this book, but also an editor. Sections of the original are cut completely (the portrait scene is missing from the Pemberley visit) or condensed. Some chapters begin on the left-hand page and end on the following right-hand facing page. While this was presumably done to make the narrative shorter, it paradoxically results in making it read slower. How can this be?

Two reasons. First, the pleasure of getting into any novel lies in getting caught up in the story and the characters. Cutting down Pride and Prejudice means cutting back on characterization and lessening the reader's investment in that most basic of questions: what happens next? Just because something is shorter does not mean that it will read shorter; flow is as important as length. Secondly, Austen's rhythm, which carries the reader along, is disrupted. Why? Because Graham-Smith inexplicably takes it upon himself to edit Austen's prose. He makes seemingly minor edits that ruin entire paragraphs. Take, for example, this paragraph, in which Jane finally realizes that Miss Bingley is not as nice as she seems. This is the altered version:

As she predicted, four weeks passed away, and Jane saw nothing of him [Mr. Bingley]. She endeavoured to persuade herself that she did not regret it; but she could no longer be blind to Miss Bingely's inattention. After waiting at home every morning for a fortnight, the visitor did at last appear; but the shortness of her stay and the alteration of her manner would allow Jane to deceive herself no longer. The letter which she wrote to her sister will prove what she felt. (113)

All the words are Austen's except the first three (which introduces a vague pronoun reference, but hey, nobody's perfect), yet the paragraph comes to a clunky stop with that final sentence. Here's the original, with the excised portions in bold:

Four weeks passed away, and Jane saw nothing of him. She endeavoured to persuade herself that she did not regret it; but she could no longer be blind to Miss Bingley's inattention. After waiting at home every morning for a fortnight, and inventing every evening a fresh excuse for her, the visitor did at last appear; but the shortness of her stay, and yet more, the alteration of her manner, would allow Jane to deceive herself no longer. The letter which she wrote on this occasion to her sister will prove what she felt.

The first eliminated phrase relates to Jane's characterization—of course she would find an excuse for Caroline Bingley's rudeness. The second excision is unforgiveable because the "yet more" indicates the importance of the detail. Taken as a whole, the paragraph builds, starting with a short sentence, culminating in the long third sentence and then transitioning smoothly to the letter in the final sentence. The altered paragraph reads oddly because the sentences are of a more uniform length—there is little variation to maintain interest and the repeated rhythm is annoying. The last omission, "on this occasion", seems excusable, yet it is more precise than the edited version (Jane writes more than one letter to Elizabeth) while the edited version is more abrupt.

Grahame-Greene's own writing could have used a better editor. In a sentence quoted by Entertainment Weekly as an example of his cleverness, Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy, and Mr. Bingley find that the Netherfield kitchen staff has been killed by zombies. To prevent further infection, Mr. Darcy must decapitate the dead servants: "He then made quick work of beheading the slaughtered staff, upon which Mr. Bingley politely vomited into his hands" (82). For "upon which" substitute "whereupon" and it won't sound like poor Bingley threw up on his servants and on his hands. Here's another example where "upon which" should not be used next to a noun: "Kitty put the creature down with a shot to the face, upon which Lydia placed her barrel against its head and promptly dispatched it to Hell" (91).

In addition to awkward writing, the zombie part of the novel needs a clearer narrative arc. It is uninteresting to have the Bennet sisters already be capable zombie killers—there are few opportunities for tension or development. It would have been much more fun to have mysterious creatures appear, slowly at first, and watch people figure out what was going on (see: Dracula). The novel already has an education component, as Elizabeth learns to distrust first impressions; adding how to kill zombies to the mix could have been fun. Moreover, the best zombie texts (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) have used zombies as a metaphor, pointing out how grind of modern society (dreary job, mass consumerism) reduce us to nothing more than hollow shells of our former selves. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes no advantage of the potential for social commentary, even as it appropriates a classic work of social satire.

Having already gone into great detail about the writing style, I'll spare you, my poor reader, the litany of abuses visited upon characters, whose inconsistent behaviour (would Lydia have ever paid sufficient attention in class to master the art of killing zombies? Would Mrs. Gardiner ever cheat on her husband? Would Mr. Collins be so dismayed over Charlotte's death that he would hang himself on her favourite tree?) could lead to diagnoses of schizophrenia.

Instead, I will end with what I believe is the most unforgiveable of Grahame-Smith's additions, pure cliché which any good writer would blush to acknowledge:

For the more she dwelled on the subject, the more powerful she felt; not for her mastery of the deadly arts, but for her power over the heart of another. What a power it was! But how to wield it? Of all the weapons she had commanded, Elizabeth knew the least of love; and of all the weapons in the world, love was the most dangerous. (213)

And here I was, thinking that love was a battlefield.

Going gentle into that good night

In reference my previous Onion-beats-up-on-Bush post here:

After one more (Spiders Hatch in Bush's Brain), it's over.

I'm still not sure I completely get it.

The Onion's feud with Bush continues

A follow-up from a previous post about The Onion's series of satirical news stories detailing increasingly violent things happening to outgoing President Bush.

The latest:

Single-Engine Cessna Crashes Into Bush

It's like a morbid cross between fan-fiction and a snuff film, if said film was to be rendered as a newspaper article.

Eponymous: Or, Eighteenth-century novelists liked using names as titles

Talking to someone at the birthday party this weekend, I was asked which novels I'm writing my dissertation on. The list made me realize just how many eighteenth-century novels are titled after their heroine's names (and how protagonists in eighteenth-century fiction are routinely referred to as "heroes" and "heroines" in the scholarship).

From my dissertation, four out of five:
Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson
Cecilia, Or Memoirs of an Heiress, by Frances Burney
Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth
Emma, by Jane Austen (along with Mansfield Park)

And then...
Moll Flanders and Roxana, by Daniel Defoe
Evelina and Camilla, by Frances Burney
Shamela and Amelia, by Henry Fielding (who is more famous for the likewise eponymous Tom Jones and Joesph Andrews)
The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, by Eliza Haywood
Adeline Mowbray, by Amelia Opie
Pamela, by Samuel Richardson
Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, by Frances Sheridan
The History of Miss Emily Montagu, by Frances Brooke

The above list was compiled from my bookshelf alone. There are plenty more, but I think I've made my point.

There are also many novels named after their heroes, such as Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and Sterne's wonderfully titled The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. But it turns out that a dissertation about domestic interiors leads me to write about novels about women. I wonder why that is.

Speaking of writing and eponymous novels, I have started chapter two, which is on Frances Burney's Cecilia. However, I'm experiencing a weird brain fart where, as I type, I think "Clarissa" (the topic of my first chapter), but then I type "Cecilia". It's like my brain is eight months behind my fingers.

Chapter Two:
Pages written: 1
Pages written and then deleted and then rewritten: 1

Sweet Valley High (on a diet)

There's been a lot of comment online about the rerelease of the ghostwritten-by-committee young adult novel series Sweet Valley High that was immensely popular in the 1980s and 1990s, specifically the modern updating of the twins from size 6 to size 4. I agree that it's stupid (why provide their sizes at all?) and unnecessary.

But why hasn't anyone really pointed out...

That the books aren't that good to begin with? Predictable, soapy, formulaic, they suffered due to the episodic nature of the series (Jessica, forget all the lessons you learned in the previous book!) and the writing was straightforward without being at all interesting. I wasn't obsessed with SVH like some of my classmates were in junior high; I just couldn't get on board with a series where you could see the ending by chapter three.

50 greatest books (available in English, by dead white men whom you've all heard of)

I have been following with increasing dread the Globe and Mail's Book section series of the 50 Greatest Books ever written. Not because I don't think people should read (of course I do!) or that lists like this seem rather arbitrary (they will at least spur discussion). But frankly, the list has been kind of... predictable.

Let's see: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, James Joyce's Ulysses, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Marx's Das Capital, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Dante's Divine Comedy. Bonus points for Origin of Species, but points taken away for another famous dead white guy (Charles Darwin).

Okay, fine, yes. I'm going to rehash the "dead white guy" argument. Look, I know that one reason a disproportionate number of books are written by dead white men is because the number of educated white men has historically been high compared to educated women and/or minorities. (I also know that there are currently more dead authors than live authors.) But my issue with the list isn't that the books so far have been written by dead white guys, but what the preponderonce of dead white male authors suggests—that the list will tell us nothing new or encourage us to re-think what it means to be a "great" book. Many of the chosen books are of great historical import, but any undergraduate student currently making his/her way through a liberal arts degree will encounter many of them in time. In fact, an undergrad student of 40 years ago would have encountered many of these books in time. At the rate the exercise is going, the list is beginning to look like the "great hits of the Western canon."

Every week, I have greeted the announcement of the next "great book" with a deflated resignation and a touch of resentment. Oh, Machievelli's The Prince! How original! How exciting! How daring to select a book by an author whose name has entered everyday vocabulary, becoming synonymous with ruthless dictatorial actions, on the basis of this book.

There are any number of "great books" lists in the world, fiction and nonfiction, all easily found on Google. There is even a list of great books lists! Considering all of this, the Globe and Mail list seems redundant at best and frankly, a little wanky at worst.

And to test my precognitive abilities, herewith are my guesses for books that will appear on the Globe's list of the 50 Greatest Books E-VAH:

Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Paradise Lost, by John Milton (unles Dante's Divine Comedy cancelled it out in the balloting?)
The Republic, by some guy named Plato
The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes
The Cantebury Tales, by Chaucer
something by Nietzsche
War and Peace

Some off-the-wall guesses:
Johnson's Dictionary (or possibly the Oxford English Dictionary, but Johnson's came first)
Strunk and White's The Elements of Style
Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien

And if an Austen novel does make the list, I hope it's the superior Emma, rather than the go-to Pride and Prejudice.

Current and future (and future) reading

This
is The Secret History of Domesticity, all 873 pages of it.

It is shorter than Clarissa, but lacks those characteristics, such as plot, characters, conflict, which renders novels much easier to read.


This is a sample sentence taken at random from the middle of the book:

What dominates the modern idea of the aesthetic is instead one pole of this dialectic, a (therefore) frozen sense of concrete virtuality as monolithic and self-subsistent, virtual yet somehow posited with an idealized objectivity that needs no subjective stimulus.

And this is the modified Homer Simpson quotation that pops into my head whenever I pick the darn thing up.

Okay, book. You don't like me, and I don't like you, but let's get through this thing and then I can go back to killing you with beer.

Can I interest anyone in a readalong?

Big book

This came in the mail today:

It's a 1000-page reference book that I ordered from an American used book seller over abebooks.com last Thursday, back when the US/Canadian exchange rate was near but not quite at parity.

It is a former public library book that is in pristine condition. Seriously. The binding is a little wonky, but there is not one mark in it. (Thank you, Wolfeboro Public Library!)

I didn't expect it to arrive so quickly, so when I saw it in front of my door (the mailman had kindly left it there, underneath my newspaper), yes, I squealed.

Because not only is it an excellent reference book edited by one of the giants in the field (Richetti), but it cost me only $22 USD. That includes shipping.

So on the one hand, it's sad that this lovely though perhaps too-academic reference book was underused in a public library. On the other hand, it's great that it remained in excellent condition until I was able to give it the appreciative home it deserves. Used books, yay!

Recommend this, Amazon!

Tonight, in a weird pique, I got pissed off at Amazon's stupid "Recommended for You" feature and tried to circumvent it not by signing off my account like any sane person, but by going through the list of "Items You Own" and deleting all of them. The same list showed me items I had bought from Amazon, which could not be deleted but whose "Use to make recommendations" setting could be deselected.

My act of defiance (ha!) did not stem from any concerns about privacy or the company's attempt to make me buy more things using my personal purchasing patterns. No. For while it was kind of interesting to see how Amazon reconciled my Austen purchases with my purchases of Simpsons DVDs and a Christmas-related purchase of the children's classic The Hungry Caterpillar, I usually ended up getting insulted by the recommendations. Just because I like The Simpsons doesn't mean that I like The Family Guy, okay? In fact, I hate The Family Guy. And just because I bought some Austen-related books, it doesn't mean that I'm interested in a poorly written sequel to one of her clearly superior novels. And being inundated by recommendations for a plethora of children's books based on one (one!) purchase seems a little excessive as well. As it is, Amazon didn't really seem to know what to do with my ownership of Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere or purchase of Foucault's The Order of Things—except to recommend The Birth of the Clinic.

But I shouldn't be too angry with Amazon, really. It's not like they've taken one look at my purchasing history, categorized me as a "hipster intellectual" and offered me a reading list based on said categorization. Or asked me to take a quiz to determine which reading list my lifestyle would be the best match for.

(Found while searching for a recently married friend's wedding registry.)

Marginalia (Annoying)

I've been guilty of marking up library books when writing papers and whatnot (in pencil only!) but seriously, this is ridiculous:


Practically every sentence (and even a footnote!) on both pages has been marked off with a bracket. The distracting nature of the marginalia is exacerbated by the thickness of the pencil used. No mechanical 0.5 mm pencil lead here. Nope.


It's a fascinating book (Terry Eagleton's The Rape of Clarissa) but while reading it, there were points where all I wanted to do was take a giant white eraser to the margins. I still might.

Re-readings

While I haven't been reading much of Clarissa (see post below), I have been dipping in and out of a book of collected essays about re-reading edited by Anne Fadiman, titled, simply enough, Rereadings.

I find it highly appropriate that while I'm struggling to reread Clarissa, I'm also reading essays in which authors detail their experiences rereading books they loved as kids or teenagers. Fadiman's introduction, I think, speaks to my current experience with Richardson: "The former [reading] had more velocity; the latter [rereading] had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story."

When I had the pleasure of interviewing Carol Shields for the Gauntlet, she mentioned that she never re-read books, which took me aback. I've always enjoyed re-reading my favourite books, and I find that I'm never comfortable writing an essay on a novel until I've at least skimmed it a second time and made copious notes. Ironically, I believe that Shields' books reveal themselves more fully upon rereading. I like Fadiman's simile for the pleasures of rereading: "...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again."

Incidentally, Fadiman also notes that Edward Fitzgerald (who?) read Clarissa five times. Dear lord.

Poor Charlotte Bronte

Browsing in the bookstore today when I saw this, which is part of Penguin's new campaign to repackage the best novels of all time as bestsellers:



















And it looks like Emily Bronte got the same treatment:



















It even makes the pastel-coloured Jane Austen chick-lit covers look half decent.

Cover this book!

An antidote, perhaps, to the chick-lit covers?

Penguin Books UK has begun selling six of its classic books with blank, art paper covers so readers can draw their own. They're calling it My Penguin, and Jane Austen is present in the form of Emma (though none are evident in the gallery on the website).

I'm not sure what this will do for sales, but I'm glad that Penguin is acknowledging that people do indeed judge a book by its cover. One of my literary/academic pet peeves are all the books about the Chinese-Canadian or Chinese-American experience that use stereotypical images of China or "Chinese-ness" in the cover art. (Yes, Amy Tan's books are repeat offenders.) Another are the covers of the otherwise-excellent Broadview Press editions of Austen's novels, which use photographs that are anachronistically at least 50 years later than the Regency period. When you're teaching these books to first-year students, you hope for as much historical accuracy as possible, and a cover like that is not going to help.