andrewducker | Interesting Links for 03-07-2023

The quantity of fallacious, irrelevant, and ass-covering statements offered has now reached Augean levels, and I decline to wield the shovel. I'll just note that the dichotomy offered in the fourth paragraph is useless in discussing this question.

Rilstone watchers waited with baited breath to see what his next move would be. Would he

1: Double down on the language. "Yeah -- well so's your face!"

2: Simply restate his not especially controversial premise "There is an analogy between saying that unfaithful movie adaptations damage books and saying that unfaithful productions of plays are the same as physically altering paintings."

3: Flounce out and say that he is obviously wrong about everything and is never going to review another play until he dies.

Two questions remain:

Would the match have been more interesting, albeit less entertaining, if his opponent had said "Actually, the two things aren't very similar, for the following reasons..."?

Why do twenty year old adaptations of century old novels induce such strong emotions?

This is small enough to be worth a reply.

q1. They're not similar because the movie side was discussed ineptly. I was responding to the ineptness.

q2. Because they haven't gone away. If they'd gone away, would you have brought them up?

Analogy and Meta-Analogy: The Deep Structure of Rilstonian Rhetoric

To clarify the central argument of Rilstone's text, it is helpful to present it in tabular form.

Rilstone refers to ten real and hypothetical events:

A
A production of Waiting for Godot in which the four male parts are played by women

B
The act of wantonly damaging a building or object (vandalism)

C
A production of Footfalls in which May is allowed to move freely around the stage

D
The act of making an intervention on a classic work of art (doodling on a Rebrand)

E
A movie adaptation of Lord of the Rings

F
The act of changing, destroying or altering ("violating") the text of Lord of the Rings

G
Deleting the word "n*gg*r" from Thank You Jeeves

H
Deliberately and specifically damaging a site regarded as holy, e.g inverting a crucifix or nailing bacon to a synagogue. ("Desecration")

I
Printing explanatory or apologetic text in copies of Thank You Jeeves

J
Prohibiting, confiscating and publicly destroying literary texts ("Nazi book burning")

He states that each pair of events have been claimed to be analogous:

I: The Spectator Magazine claimed that A is analogous to B.
II: The theatre critic of the Guardian claimed that C is analogous to D
III: Unspecified "Tolkien Fans" have claimed E is analogous to F
IV: Members of a P.G Wodehouse fan group have claimed that G is analogous to H
V: Other members of the P.G Wodehouse fan group have claimed that I is analogous to J.

Rilstone's proposal is that Claim I and Claim II are analogous to Claim III. His argument appears to be that since Claim III is fallacious, Claims I and II are also fallacious; or, more weakly, that they are three examples of the same kind of argument. He also asserts, less specifically, that Claims I and II are analogous to claims IV and V. This is clearly are rather complicated form of argument; since it involves drawing analogies between claims that are themselves based on analogy.

However, the shape of his argument may be clearly seen: cases A, C, E, G and I are all examples of the interpretation literary texts; and cases B, D, F, and J are examples of making permentant changes to valuable objects. Rilstone's observation is that The Lord of the Rings, Footfalls, Waiting for Godot and Thank You Jeeves are not exhausted by the creation of new productions and adaptations, where destroying or physically altering a painting or systematically destroying extant copies of a work make that work, in its original form, permanently unavailable.

As a matter of fact, a desecrated church or temple could generally be reconsecrated; and the bowdlerisation of a text might, over years or decades, make the un-bowdlerised version un-available. To that extent, changing the title of Agatha's Christie's text to "And Then There Were None" is indeed analogous to Hitler destroying every copy of Betolt Brecht, because the end result in both cases is to make Mother Courage and Ten Little N-rs unavailable.

Anti-Rilstonian scholar Calimac argues that the meta-analogy fails because

1: An adaptation of a literary work may result in a physical change to the form in which the book is distributed (new cover, blurb, back-matter, introductory material, etc.) and

2: An adaptation of a literary work will effect every subsequent re-reading of it.

It may in fact be that some enthusiasts would only wish to read Thank You Jeeves in facsimile -- that any variation from the original 1934 edition (cover, blurb, back matter, dust jacket etc) amounts to the creation of a new and inferior work. In that sense the proposed changes to the book do make the 1934 version unavailable. Many comic book fans would validly say that a Superman comic printed on high quality art paper between hard covers is a different proposition from an original cheaply printed periodical with many advertisements for bubble gum, air-rifles and brine-shrimp interrupting the story. But this does not appear to be what the hypothetical claim (that Jackson violated Tolkien) and the supposed response (Tolkien's text is still unchanged) was referring to, and so, while very interesting, it does not effect the argument Rilstone is making.

It may in fact be the case that a film adaptation of a work conditions subsequent readings of it -- that once you have seen the 1939 Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes will always look like Basil Rathbone in your head. The curved pipe, for example, inveigles itself into any reading of the texts, despite the fact that Doyle never mentions them. Readings of Mary Shelley necessarily struggle agains the image Boris Karloff. Indeed, the better the adaptation, the greater the risk: very few people imagine Tolkien's Boromir to look like a Viking, because that so clearly clashes with the text; but nearly everyone imagines Gandalf looking and sounding like Ian McKellen because his portrayal was so faithful to the original. (Jackson was, indeed, very much presenting a consensus Middle-earth that can be traced back through Ralph Baski and the Hildenbrandt brothers.) Again, this real possibility does not seem to be what is implied by the original "Jackson violated Tolkien" claim, and while interesting, is not relevant to Rilstone's argument.

It is, in fact, highly probably that "Jackson violated Tolkien" is simply a flowery way of saying "I did not think that his adaptation was very good" and, equally, that "It would be sacrilegious to remove the n-word from Jeeves" means "I would rather they didn't" and "Changing Beckett's stage directions is like smashing old building to pieces" means "I don't think that they should do this". The drawing of close analogies, and indeed the refutation of those analogies, is not particularly helpful.

Rilstone's case -- in an essay that was not about Tolkien but about a political clown show -- was that many people regard literary texts as being sacrosanct, and that he regards this view as fallacious.

The quantity of effluvia in the Augean stables has now been increased by more of the same irrelevancies and invalid argumentation as before, now added with false characterizations of the previous responses, which carry the air of disingenuous pseudo-stupid mockery. The world does not contain enough time to unpack all of this nonsense.

But apart from that, how did you enjoy the play?

disingenuous
pseudo-stupid
mockery
inept
fallacious
irrelevant
ass-covering
Augean
cheap
unimaginative

Interesting Links for 03-07-2023

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