A wise someone once said “What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
And by someone, I mean the Book of Ecclesiastes from the Tanakh, or the Christian Old Testament.
And this bit of knowledge has maintained its relevance more than 2000 years later,
especially when it comes to the fiction we enjoy. And I’m not saying that because I’m
rereading the latest New York Time’s Best Seller retelling of Pride and Prejudice.
But from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Bridget Jones’s Diary,
you’ve probably read a book that was just a modern retelling of a well-established
story. Which is to say nothing of other forms of media and their own obsessions with retellings.
And despite what your Writing 101 instincts might tell you,
this is neither bad nor lazy writing—or even a new concept.
Because let’s be honest: sometimes a story is just so danged good, it bears repeating.
Sometimes more than once. Sometimes multiple times. I’m looking at you, Jane Austen.
So why do we retell
stories? In the words of Oscar Wilde, “The originality which we ask from the artist is
originality of treatment, not of subject. It is only the unimaginative who ever invent. The
true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.”
To put it simply, in Wilde’s words, “There is art found not in a work’s perceived originality,
but in the way the artist has used (or deliberately not used)
and arranged pre-existing thoughts and motifs to make something that is entirely their own.”
So with that, let’s take a look at three authors who’ve engaged in
literary upcycling and compare. Starting with the Bard himself, William Shakespeare. That’s right,
our Billy Boy would probably be rocking an Archive of Our Own account today.
Written centuries before Wattpad was a twinkle in the internet’s collective eye,
many of Shakespeare’s works are retellings of historical events
or common narratives that were already well-established in Elizabethan England.
According to Professor Gordon McMullan, director of the
London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College: “With almost no exception, [Shakespeare] got
his stories from elsewhere and reworked them in his own way. The point was, everyone did
this. The concept of originality, like genius, was invented at the end of the 18th century.”
Even works as ubiquitous and widely-taught as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet are a retelling
of some sort. The former being based on a 1562 English translation of an Italian poem,
The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke. The latter being derived
primarily from the medieval Scandinavian legend of Amleth—and, perhaps more alluringly, from what is
referred to Ur-Hamlet—a play of unknown origin published more than a decade earlier in 1587,
which some scholars believe may have been written by Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare’s contemporary.
Then there are his historical plays, which take a …. very loose but poetic take on real-life figures
like Julius Caesar and King Richard III. BTS fan fiction has nothing on Shakespeare’s take on
Henry V, for example—reshaping the Lancaster monarch of England as not just a war hero,
but as a complex and sometimes unscrupulous ruler whose military ambitions come at the
cost of tremendous violence and bloodshed. Whole academic careers have been devoted to the study of
Shakespeare’s Henriad plays, dissecting how the text paralleled and prophesied
events in the playwright’s contemporary England and the rise of the Tudor dynasty.
And yet, as much as we think of them as high literature today, Shakespeare’s works at the time
were seen as popcorn for the unwashed masses: that is, easily available, written in language that was
easily understandable to poor, uneducated folk, and *gasp* cheap rehashes.
Professors Jessica McCall and Kavita Mudan Finn perhaps capture best the
uncanny parallels between how Shakespeare’s retellings and modern “fan fiction”, saying
“Amongst fans and the academics who study them, it is generally accepted (perhaps even a truth
universally acknowledged) that a good portion of what we consider canonical literature – including
Shakespeare – also fits the broadest definition of fanfiction, in that it is clearly written in
response to or adapting a specific source text. Although it is difficult to reconcile any category
that comfortably includes both Shakespeare’s plays and E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey – 89 per cent
of which had already appeared on the Internet as a piece of Twilight fanfiction entitled ‘Master
of the Universe’ – some have argued that this juxtaposition is the very point of fandom.”
But Shakespeare was hardly the first or last person to throw his hat
into the retelling ring and come out the victor,
nor was he the only person making modernized hay out of antiquity—and we can’t talk about
modernized retellings without talking about James Joyce and the sprawling work that is his Ulysses.
Ulysses is based on that flagship of high school literature, The Odyssey, Homer’s ancient Greek
epic poem concerning its titular hero, Odysseus, and the many perils he faces trying to return
home to his kingdom, Ithaca. and FYI, Ulysses is just the Roman version of the name Odysseus.
A fixture of study, Joyce was hardly the first person to grapple with retelling The Odyssey.
However, what Joyce ended up creating is considered one of the most important
modernist texts of the 20th century.
In place of Odysseus is Leopold Bloom, and instead of spanning a decade in ancient Greece,
his adventures occur over one June day in modern Dublin. Where the Odyssey is comprised of 24
chapters, Ulysses roughly corresponds to them in eighteen stream-of-conscious segments, brimming
with characters and plot situations that are all directly lifted from the source—your Penelopes and
Stephen Dedaluses and whatnot. But Joyce uses these similarities to convert Odysseus’s trials
into the psychological feeling of being lost— lost to modern conceptions of day-to-day living,
lost to feelings of national identity, lost in Ireland’s relationship to the United Kingdom.
In his 1980 introduction to the work, Canadian literary scholar William Hugh Kenner remarked:
“[Ulysses and The Odyssey] are identical in not existing, save as manifestations of human
creative power, products of an artistic process that is like a natural process,
and that intuits in many times comparable situations, whether in the mind of Homer of Chios
or in the mind of James Augustine Joyce. Both, far from the scenes of their stories, created
their heroes and re-created an epic geography… Both were guided by the circumstances they knew
(warfare, seafairing, marvels; commerce, perambulation, novelties).”
All this is to say that James Joyce is what the kids might refer to as the true godfather of
the modern AU—that is, the writer who is able to take a story older than written tradition
and deftly draw significance from both the similarities and differences
by placing it in a new setting. So this is why I toil and labor over my Game of Thrones coffee
shop AU. Sansa Stark finding agency through her day shift at a Starbucks has meaning, damn it.
Speaking of female desire, misunderstood by audiences, no video essay about modern retellings
would be complete without talking about the queen herself, Jane Austen. And the profound legacy
she has left to literature and its fascination with retellings. I bring up Austen not because
her novels are specifically retellings—though she herself often used well-worn romantic and comedic
contrivances that had long existed in literature and contemporized them for her readers—but because
of the profound impact her body of work had on the modern commercial novel and media in general.
From Bridget Jones’s Diary to Clueless to Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, if we have one
socially acceptable cache of stories for retelling outside of Shakespeare, it’s our girl Jane.
I don’t think there’s a way to capture this vibe succinctly, so here are just (some) of
the 20th and 21st novels that are direct retellings of her work. This doesn’t even
begin to touch on film, comic book, and television re-iterations of her works, in
which case we’d have an eight-hour long episode. And this is publicly funded programming, okay?
Arguably the most financially successful from this list is Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s
Diary and its sequel, The Edge of Reason, based on Austen novels Pride and Prejudice
and Persuasion. Though the Bridget Jones character existed before the publication of both books as a
recurring fictional columnist for The Independent, when writing her book, Fielding saw the parallels
between Jones’ obsession with modern femininity, fashion, and dating and the way Austen’s Elizabeth
Bennet finds herself constantly struggling with the social mores of regency England.
Said Fielding, rather cheekily, when asked if she had lifted the plot of her books from Austen:
“I thought both plot and leading man had been well market-researched over a number of centuries,
and that Jane Austen wouldn't mind. (Anyway, she's dead.) Austen wrote about the minutiae of women's
lives in a way that is funny and dazzlingly accurate, giving you insights into what was going
on in the social world without your even realizing you're getting an incredible history lesson.”
But we reach a conundrum here, despite Bridget Jones’s Diary’s success, there is a bigger issue.
For all of the Austen retellings that exist in the market,
almost all of them are relegated to the dreaded genre of “chick lit” or “women’s literature”.
Why is it that, if we can peg down Shakespeare and James Joyce as artistically acceptable examples of
literary recyclists, that we look at books like Bridget Jones’s Diary or Jenny Lee’s best-selling
retelling of Anna Karenina, Anna K., as disposable or *gasp* barely a step above fan fiction.
We’ve already done an episode in part on this—click the link above.
But to be succinct, retellings, especially ones sold as retellings, are a huge part of genres that
tend to skew towards audiences with women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC audiences. And that’s a whole basket of
conceptually difficult apples to unpack. We’d be here picking through those dynamics for another
twelve hours. ( Another public funding/‘viewers like you’ joke). But I think these actually
speak to a larger truth about WHY retellings exist and why we keep coming back to them.
Says scholar Richa Nagar: Stories shape our sense of self: who we believe we
are, our sense of our own inherited privileges and misfortunes, our affinities, identifications, and
allegiances. Stories also shape what we wish or hope to do in order to give our existence meaning:
whom we want to stand or fight with, whom or what we want to help or rescue in order to uphold
what we think is ethical or just…. Telling stories involves making decisions or moves,
and each retelling of a familiar story may either give birth to new meanings, nuances, and affects,
or erase their possibility. Thus, each storyteller can be seen as a translator
of stories with a responsibility to retell stories in ways that can do justice to them.
That is, that the saying “there is nothing new under the sun” is not an inherently negative
statement—rather, that stories persevere because they have some universality to them that has their
time and place as society moves away and towards them again. The minutiae may change, the trappings
different, but when we retell a story, we are asked to consider its power. What does a story
say about where we came from? What does it mean about where we are now, and where we are going?
And while necessity might be the mother of invention,
it is in repetition we find those truths.
All this to say, please pre-order my upcoming reimagining of Frog and Toad
titled Gerbil and Hamster.