This blog is all about adaptations and representations in modernist literature. It is not just about the literal adaptations: versions of stage plays or book to film, but also about the forms shifting and adapting to their environment within the literature and how they are represented and their changing natures, such as the rejection of dead matter by Schulz in ‘A Treatise on Mannequins; or, The Second Book of Genesis’ or the mannequins in Jean Rhys’ ‘Mannequin’ rigidly conforming to the ‘type’ she was assigned to seeming more character than human.
Modernism lends itself particularly well to adaptations, from the many different ways that the plays of Alfred Jarry, Oskar Kokoschka, and Tristan Tzara to transforming the stories of Bruno Schulz into film. From the emergence of modernism in the theatre and its rejection of the traditional realist set design that the audiences were so comfortable with, modernism has been an exciting method to present place, space, and matter in new ways spanning many mediums.
In the theatre in particular, with the move from the classic box set, the boundaries were pushed and the comfortable boundaries between audience and performance were broken down to a point were it is sometimes unsure were they lie. Bruno Schulz’ fiction is praised for its rich narrative and incredible sense of place, but like the theatre it has an edge that takes it away from reality. Reading Schulz’ stories most of it could technically exist within the reality, but there is the sense of the surreal following it.
A short video on the riot that broke out at Tzara’s performance of ‘The Gas Heart’
The Gas Heart is, out of the modernist plays I have studied, the one that has the most variety in production design. With characters named after body parts but with no actual advice within the text as to how these characters should be costumed and performed, there is a huge variety in design choices between various productions of The Gas Heart.
Costumes for the 1923 production of The Gas Heart, designed by Sonia Delaunay.
Sonia Delaunay’s costumes for The Gas Heart are the most infamous, unfortunately due to the events that transpired at the performance where the costumes were worn rather than the costumes themselves. These costumes were worn at The Gas Heart‘s second performance as part of the show Le Cœur à barbe (The Bearded Heart). In the run up to this show there had been conflict between Tristan Tzara, the author of the play, and Andre Breton, a fellow modernist author. During the performance Breton climbed on the stage and started to attack the actors, and due to Delaunay’s large, stiff cardboard costumes the actors were hampered in their escape from Breton. Breton’s actions sparked a riot within the theatre which has overshadowed the performance ever since. The impracticality of the costumes followed the ideas of Dadaism where the absurd was celebrated and there was no need for practicality in the costumes, instead the design was prioritised. The angular costumes are similar to Delaunay’s art work and also to the abstract style that was becoming popular. Delaunay’s costumes have been remembered in popular culture, with David Bowie wearing a costume based on Delaunay’s design while performing on Saturday Night Live in 1979.
David Bowie performing on Saturday Night Live in 1979, wearing a Sonia Delaunay inspired costume by Mark Ravitz
The second act of a performance of The Gas Heart
This performance of The Gas Heart that I found on Youtube is what I consider a brilliant production. The characters are differentiated by having the various body parts marked on the mask, with literally representing the characters as the body parts they are named after being a popular staging choice. It represents everything that modernist theatre is about- there is a rejection of traditional realist sets and the minimal effort put in to make the viewing uncomfortable and confusing with the use of the floor as the backdrop and the cutting between scenes is a brilliant use of the advantages of modern technology in using the effects of a recorded performance to enhance it. The absurdity of the mask swapping and the covering up and changing of the actor follows Dadaist principles where they reject the establishment of the theatre, which is shown within the play itself as it mocks the tradition three act play with its inclusion of three acts that are so short it would be expected to be a one act play.
Jean Rhys shares a theme with Bruno Schulz in the inclusion of mannequins in their short stories, however Schulz and Rhys’ views on the mannequins are very different. As the first female writer I am discussing on this blog, Rhys has a valuable viewpoint in the gender politics of assigning beings to the status of living and non-living. As Rhys well knows, women are more often reduced to something non-human, but usually not for reasons like Schulz to question the lines between living and non-living matter, but because they are refused to be seen as a full equal. Rhys was also discriminated against for her Caribbean background, giving her an insight into how it felt to be dehumanised and excluded from the nation. Rhys struggled with attempts or refusal to fit in with the society around her as it rejected her, as in ‘‘Mannequin’ reworks the fashion house into a metaphor for the city (and further the nation), with protagonist Anna’s assimilation into its society dependent upon her public performance of a prescribed identity through dress.’[1].
Rhys describes the scene as ‘A depressing room, taken by itself, bare and cold, a very inadequate conservatory for these human flowers’[2]. The metaphor of the mannequins as human flowers is interesting: flowers are renowned for their beauty, but their beauty is often their downfall as in the desire to commodify them and use to beauty for themselves, humans cut them down for display which shortens their lifespan drastically. The parallel with the mannequins that they are forced to parade in display fashions to buyers who hardly notice the human modelling the clothing, and at the end of the story when Anna struggles with a desire to escape her life as a mannequin that this has a severe impact on the mental well being of the girls, despite the apparent glamour of the role.
It is significant in the story that the girls are less powerful than the others working with them, as by the others Anna is ‘hustled into a leather coat and paraded under the cold eyes of an American buyer’[3]. Being hustled and paraded implies that this decision was not made up of Anna’s own agency, but instead the girls are plucked, dressed and paraded regardless of their wishes as though they are dolls sat waiting for their chance to be played with. Kate Jones writes ‘The stories introduce a major theme of Rhys’s later works of the marginalization of poor young women. There is also often the element that these women are treated indifferently by the elite.’ and ‘the whole story gives an account of the girls as simply commodities to sell the expensive fashions.’[4]. Jean Rhys had worked as a model and the character of Anna feels semi-autobiographical as she grapples with a distaste for the life of a mannequin, as Rhys who already struggled with a sense of belonging likely also struggled with the feelings of being objectified and loss of agency that came with being a mannequin.
The mannequins themselves also begin to enable their own transition from human to mere object as they discuss and behave according to ‘genre’: ‘Each of the twelve was a distinct and separate type: each of the twelve knew her type and kept to it, practising rigidly in clothing, manner, voice and conversation.’[5]. The genres are shown to be something that the mannequins are exhibiting in their every day lives, as one of them is describes as ‘it was her type, her genre to be haughty.’[6] in just a conversation with the other mannequins, so it is not just pushed on them by their superiors but has instead permeated their very personality. The idea of having a genre feels more like an advertising gimmick for a range of dolls rather than the personalities of living models
Transition from model to mannequin for display only. ‘Mannequin’ is almost sadder even than the disturbing confusion of The Street of Crocodiles as at least in that story there is ambiguity in the characters and what they actually are, while in ‘Mannequin’ they are so human that their emotions are painfully apparent when it is shown that it is a difficult profession to take up.
[1] Sarah Downes, ‘I Should Never Make Such a Fool of Myself as to Wear Them’: Fashioning Public/Private Identities in Jean Rhys’ Modernist Fiction’ in Trending Now: New Developments in Fashion Studies. (Leiden: Brill, 2013). https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9781848882119/BP000016.xml [accessed 25/01/2020]
[2] Jean Rhys, ‘Mannequin’ in The Collected Short Stories. (London: Norton, 1992) p. 21.
Downes, Sarah, ‘I Should Never Make Such a Fool of Myself as to Wear Them’: Fashioning Public/Private Identities in Jean Rhys’ Modernist Fiction’ in Trending Now: New Developments in Fashion Studies. (Leiden: Brill, 2013). https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9781848882119/BP000016.xml [accessed 25/01/2020]
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes. Image from Visual Editions website.
Tree of Codes is a die-cut book that crafted a new story from the story of Bruno Schulz. In physical print, the book is literally full of holes. Each word Safran Foer cut away from Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles book has left a rectangular hole in the page, through which you can see what has been cut or what remains in the pages behind.
Except, the words Jonathan Safran Foer cut to craft his new art from where not Bruno Schulz’s words. They were his story being retold through the medium of a translator. Changing the story from Schulz’s original Polish to English changes some meanings. Some phrases are entirely different depending on which translation you look at. If Safran Foer had chosen a different translation to base his work off, then he could have ended up with a completely different book. This is the issue with translation: many words or phrases do not have an exact translation into other languages leading the translator to have to make a decision on what fits best, or even if they do have a direct translation then this may lack a nuanced meaning featured in the original. Just look at King Ubu, practically every English translation has a slightly different interpretation of even the very first line of the play – just one word – ‘Merde!’
I had concerns when I learned of this art piece in the form of a book. Given that Bruno Schulz was killed by the Nazis in Nazi occupied Poland and his premature death caused a great deal of his work to be lost, as well as the Nazis well known approach of destroying Jewish literature, I worried that erasing Schulz words could be an insult to his death and what was lost through it. After further analysis and the arguments of Jessica Pressman, who states ‘Schulz was murdered by the Nazis, and his writing was largely lost to history. The sense of loss – the loss of people, books, and cultural memory – permeates Tree of Codes figuratively and formally, most notably in the gaping holes in its carved-out pages’[1], I instead perceive Tree of Codes as a tribute to Schulz and a refusal to let his death silence him. While we may not be able to read any of Schulz’s lost works, Safran Foer has come up with a new way to memorialise Schulz by crafting a new story from what he left behind.
[1] Jessica Pressman, ‘Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes: Memorial, Fetish, Bookishness’ in ASAP/Journal Volume 3, Number 1. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
Bibliography
Pressman, Jessica, ‘Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes: Memorial, Fetish, Bookishness’ in ASAP/Journal Volume 3, Number 1. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)
Safran Foer, Jonathan, Tree of Codes. (London: Visual Editions, 2010)
Alfred Jarry, Deux aspects de la marionnette originale d’Ubu Roi, premiered at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on 10 December 1896. [Accessed via Wikipedia]
The main difference between Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu and the other modernist plays featured in this blog, Jarry had a set idea for the design and this has largely been stuck to throughout various productions of the play and adaptations into other forms. Jarry’s design for Pa Ubu as a fat, extremely round man in with a black spiral drawn across his front has endured.
King Ubu is in part a parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Shakespeare is popularly considered the finest works of English literature ever, so it is unsurprising that Jarry chooses it to parody and mock within his play. Jarry’s work was a precursor to the Dada movement within modernism and holds many of the same values: the point of Dada means that nothing means anything, much like King Ubu means nothing. Even the title and characters names are nonsense, while sometimes translated as ‘King Turd’ from the French title Ubu Roi, it has been stated that Ubu is a nonsense word evolving from the name of Jarry’s schoolteacher, who originally inspired Jarry to write the play when he was a schoolboy. The difference between Pa Ubu and most Shakespeare villains is that Pa Ubu has no great motivating factors or backstory, he is just inherently bad and stupid in his plot to kill the king and take over. Pa Ubu even soliloquises like a Shakespearean villain but ends his speech with ‘Bloody good speech. Why thangyew. Pity no one else was listening. Back to work!’[1] showing that Pa Ubu is still not taken seriously, nor does he take himself seriously like a villain who feels the need to lay out his grand plan and motivations to the audience.
Originally, King Ubu only managed two stage performances (one being the dress rehearsal) before it sparked a riot with its opening line of ‘merde!’, which has been given various forms in English translation but all along the lines of ‘shit!’, and was banned from performance. Due to this, Jarry swapped live actors for puppets. The puppets mark Pa Ubu as even more of a ridiculous being, he becomes even more a parody of a grand villain when reduced to a simple puppet, something mostly associated with children’s entertainment. The relationship between Ma and Pa Ubu is reminiscent of Punch and Judy from their comic abuse to one another, as at the beginning Pa Ubu remarks to Ma Ubu ‘you look really ugly today. Because we’ve got company?’[2]. Kimberly Jannarone writes ‘Bringing the rural puppet into focus in a discussion of the Ubu cycle, Kimberly Jannarone exposes Père Ubu’s identity as a class hybrid, whose maddening and elusive nature stems from the fusion of popular and elite forms. Further, she reveals that Jarry’s use of puppet forms is radically different from that of the Symbolists, who conceived puppets as theoretical figures within a fully formed aesthetic doctrine. By contrast, Jarry used puppets for their very incompleteness – their makeshift nature making them ideal catalysts for the audience’s imaginations.’[3] The fusion of the popular and the elite, Shakespeare into a puppet show, is a furthering lowering of the form and an emphasis on its lack of higher meaning. The puppets ‘incompleteness’ is also a reason why Ubu has been so popular for adaptation.
Ubu’s roots in puppet theatre as well as its characters that seem more like caricatures than human has meant that it has been a popular piece to adapt into puppet shows. These adaptations have not just followed the original play’s plotline, but have adopted Pa Ubu as a symbol of mocking for, in particular, clueless political leaders. Currently, if you search for information on King Ubu online a popular suggestion to add to your search is Donald Trump. Despite King Ubu premiering in the late 19th Century, Jarry’s careless villain has captured something timeless in the oppressor. William Kentridge directed and designed ‘Ubu and The Truth Commission’, a play featuring Ubu used as a commentary on apartheid South Africe. “One of the characteristics of Jarry’s Ubu is that there is no affect in anything he does,” says Kentridge, who animates Jarry’s drawing in one of his backdrop films. “Yes, we did this, we butchered these people, but why are you accusing me of being a monster?”[4] . Kentridge‘s play is in response to those who committed atrocities during apartheid being given amnesty despite their crimes, and Ubu parallels this in his meaningless slaughter and lack of consequence.
A Guardian article on King Ubu and Kentridge’s adaptation states ‘It’s often said that Ubu Roi uncannily predicted the fascist regimes of the 20th century, but this is because it experiments with violence in a way that anticipated fascism.’ but I think that King Ubu simply illustrated the human nature to do awful, violent things over and over again throughout history, and that it does not require great motivation to do so.
[1] [Gale, Maggie et al.The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance] p. 200.
Jannarone, Kimberly, ‘Puppetry and Pataphysics’ in New Theatre Quarterly Volume 17, Issue 3. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Jarry, Alfred, ‘King Ubu’ in The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance, Maggie Gale et al. (London: Routledge)
Clip from the Brothers Quay 1986 animated short film ‘Street of Crocodiles’, courtesy of BFI.
The Brothers Quay’s Street of Crocodiles does not so much follow the narrative of Schulz’ story but instead takes the feel of the place and creates their own. A stop motion animation featuring no dialogue and an instrumental soundtrack, the Brothers Quay’s film loosely takes the idea presented by Schulz and turns it into a sinister, uncomfortable film. A description of Street of Crocodiles from the Culture.pl, a project promoting Poland and Polish culture, states that: ‘Crocodile Street is inspired by the collection of short stories by Bruno Schulz of the same title, said to be inspired by Schulz’s own childhood and upbringing, however the flourish of the pen brings about a dreamlike vision of reality, using metaphor and colourful language to blur the line between life and death, the real and the imaginary in a time of impending onslaught of fascism.’[1]. This line between life and death was also shown in Schulz’s ‘Treatise on Mannequins’ stories as well as in ‘The Street of Crocodiles’ showing Schulz’s interest in the removing the separation of life and death and imagining a world where there was no line between the two but instead where death does not really exist except as in a transitionary state before an object is remoulded for the living world, or as Schulz puts it ‘lifelessness is only an external appearance behind which unknown forms of life are hiding’[2]. To look retrospectively at Schulz’s musing on life and death are all the more poignant with the knowledge that Schulz was brutally killed in Nazi occupied Poland in the Second World War for no reason other than being Jewish in the wrong place and wrong time. This knowledge that the Quay Brothers possess that Schulz did not may be an influence in why their adaptation of Schulz’s work feels more sinister and threatening, while Schulz’s may feel confusing, but it also feels exploratory and inspires a further investigation.
The clip featured at the start of this page features a scene from Street of Crocodiles that is closest to a direct adaptation from a scene in the original story. The Brothers Quay have recreated Schulz’s tailor shop with ‘tiers of empty shelves’ that ‘conduct one’s gaze upwards as far as the ceiling, which may be the sky – the quarter’s miserable, colorless, shabby sky.’[3]. Schulz’ shopgirls ‘slender and dark, each with some defect in her beauty’ who would ‘suddenly race out on a shiny cockroach’s zigzag course.’[4] have been replaced by the Brothers Quay with unsettling blends of object and human/dolls, a puppet torso with an empty headed baby doll head sitting atop wheeled podiums wheeling through the tailor shop and advancing upon the human puppet figure in a menacing way and swapping his parts until the audience is sure that he is doomed, before their doll leader calls him away and he is released. The half imitation living/half inanimate object make up of the dolls takes an idea of Schulz’s story a step further; the shopgirls do not seem just as though they work in the tailor shop but they seem to belong to it, being a part of it like the empty shelves. The dolls seem as though with their podiums and drawers that they have been built into the shop.
The use of stop motion animation is particularly effective in the adaptation of ‘The Street of Crocodiles’ as the imitation reality mirrors that in the place that Schulz creates. The Street of Crocodiles is somewhere in between reality and fiction, it is not solid enough to be reality but also too animated to not exist but still flimsy as Schulz writes ‘The reality is as thin as paper and betrays its imitative quality with its many gaps’[5]. The stop motion may be imitative of reality but it is key that it is not trying to convince you that it is – the puppet and the dolls are never going to be mistaken for a real human, nor do they want to be. Their setting amongst to scale everyday objects such as the nuts and bolts that roll around of their own accord creates an uneasy world that unsettles due to it being familiar but all wrong simultaneously. We recognise the things in it, but they do not behave as they should. The most significant case of this is the use of the chunk of meat within the animation. It is completely unexpected and disgusts the audience: it all feels wrong. The other objects that we recognise in the film are allowable to us because they are inanimate, simply an object being included but meat is a different concept as while it is now dead, it came from living matter and feels out of place. In our brains, puppets and dolls are not living matter, they have no flesh or meat to them so it is disconcerting to see the two paired together.
‘Puppet and flesh, the animate and the inanimate, gather together on the Street of Crocodiles.‘ From entertainment.time.com.
[2] Bruno Schulz, ‘ A Treatise on Mannequins; or, The Second Book of Genesis’ in Collected Stories. Translated by Madeline G. Levine. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018).
Schulz, Bruno, ‘ A Treatise on Mannequins; or, The Second Book of Genesis’ in Collected Stories. Translated by Madeline G. Levine. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018)
Modernist Adaptations 