61 replies to this topic

[Emrayfo]

Whoa!  I'm not calling for Fleming to be "censored."  What I'm advocating is that the owners (IFP) of Fleming's work seriously consider what's more important to them: Maintaining the historical integrity of his works at the expense of hurting a (very vocal) segment of the population or, potentially increasing the sales of updated versions of Fleming's novels via the positive PR they, IFP, would doubtlessly receive by taking such a bold, enlightened step towards the future?   

 

Perhaps, because it is Fleming, this hits too close to home on this site, so I'll use another, current-day, example to illustrate what I mean.  No one (except for a small minority) is upset with Bubba Watson for his plans to paint over the Confederate Flag on his Dukes of Hazard car.  It is his property, and as such, he can do with it as he pleases.  Mr. Watson realizes that the image of the Rebel Flag is hurtful to many, and as such, has decided to act accordingly.  No one, government or otherwise, is forcing him to do this. 

 

However, if Mr. Watson had not made the right choice, then it would be entirely within the rights of the those offended by such racist-tinged imagery to go through the legal system to force him to get rid of the painted flag.  We're a long way away from official, governmental  censorship of the less-enlightened elements of Fleming's novels.  In the meantime, I'm all for giving IFP the opportunity to do the right thing without feeling the need to get government involved.  

 

Double Naught: I thought the various responses to your first comment on this idea already covered this comprehensively enough. I'm not sure that you have added anything to your original argument, which I AM sensitive to the motivating factors thereof, but just cannot abide for reasons already explained. I know you don't mean it to, but what you are advocating DOES equate to censorship. Macmillan describes censorship as, "The process of removing parts of books, movies, letters, etc. that are considered inappropriate for moral, religious or political reasons", and Oxford says, "The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security".

 

At least the teenaged market abridged versions AMC Hornet has mentioned were marked as 'abridged' and of course the original novels still remained available in parallel to these. (Though for the record I am no fan of abridged novels either - I'm looking at you, Reader's Digest).

 

I agree with most of the points raised by Revelator, especially regarding sales etc. If someone wants to read a spy thriller without the dated and now 'offensive' references in Fleming then there are plenty of authors out there vying for readers' attention. And if the wish be for James Bond adventures in particular then there are the continuation authors for you. But if you wish to read Fleming, then read Fleming. Otherwise it's not Fleming, is it? I just don't think you can cut it both ways.

 

I disagree that the Bubba Watson example is at all analogous. While painting over the Confederate flag _will_ change the meaning of The General Lee (why not change the car's name as well while you're at it), it is not the same as changing, via retrospective CGI say, the appearance or meaning of that car in all of the original television episodes or the Hollywood remake (I'm looking at you, George Lucas). Nor will it affect the thousands of replica General Lee's that use the same model and continue to conform to the original specifications. But really the value of the car, while a symbol, is as an authentic and original prop, not as a body of work. It is a collectible, not a discourse. I think Bubba has taken a reasonably courageous and principled stand in this case - one that I don't necessarily agree with - but one that is responsive to the recent public interest around appropriated meanings and usage of the Confederate flag by some people and groups. In the case of the General Lee, I would probably just cover the paint job with a vinyl wrap of the American flag rather than stripping and repainting the roof.

[nanolark]

Whilst most of the topics nanolark has started have produced some interesting discussion, once you go to his/her profile on select 'content' it is clear this person is trying to crowd source their academic paper.

It’s 'her' profile. You’re very right; I'm looking for answers. However, if you prefer to see it as a crowding resource... I guess, I have to take that on the chin.. so to speak.

[Orion]

 

Whilst most of the topics nanolark has started have produced some interesting discussion, once you go to his/her profile on select 'content' it is clear this person is trying to crowd source their academic paper.

It’s 'her' profile. You’re very right; I'm looking for answers. However, if you prefer to see it as a crowding resource... I guess, I have to take that on the chin.. so to speak.

 

As someone trying to write an MSC dissertation on how the understanding of nonverbal communication aids language acquisition I'm more than happy to take part in your crowd sourcing :-)

[tdalton]

I agree with most of the points raised by Revelator, especially regarding sales etc. If someone wants to read a spy thriller without the dated and now 'offensive' references in Fleming then there are plenty of authors out there vying for readers' attention. And if the wish be for James Bond adventures in particular then there are the continuation authors for you. But if you wish to read Fleming, then read Fleming. Otherwise it's not Fleming, is it? I just don't think you can cut it both ways.

 

Well said.  If one is offended by an author, then they have one of two choices, IMO.  1, don't read the author, or 2, read the text as is and deal with the issues within the text that make them uncomfortable.  

 

There are quite a bit of offensive things in Fleming's writing, especially Live and Let Die.  That one in particular is a very good story (much better than the awful film version EON came up with), but there's a lot there that is offensive in today's society.  That doesn't mean that someone gets to come along and change everything about the work that is offensive just to line up with today's "morals".  There are a lot of literary works, which are universally considered to be classics, that are taught in today's schools that contain offensive language and themes.  I suppose they should be censored as well.

 

And, to further the point, there are plenty of offensive things in the EON films, most notably the treatment of women (I'm not delving back into that topic, just using it to prove a point).  Based on the presented thesis, EON should go back and remove every instance of the mistreatment and cruelty towards women, as well as every moment of racial insensitivity, and whatever other offensive themes are raised in the films.  

 

The best thing to do about these things is to leave them in the films and, in the case of Fleming, the novels.  If you watch or read them and feel uncomfortable by them, then that's a good thing.  People should feel uncomfortable by such things, but we've allowed the current culture to devolve into one where nobody is ever allowed to say anything that might make a single other person feel uncomfortable.  People should be able to read the literature of the past, see the attitudes that are contained within it, and both make not of the progress made as well as of the mistakes in thinking that were made and learn from them so that they are not repeated.  Censoring those works hampers that line of thinking and that potential for further progress.

 

Further, I think that there's quite a double-standard from the current PC-police culture that we live in.  They claim the goal is to make the world better for everyone.  Well, if they truly wanted to do that, and do so on the back of censorship and hampering free speech, then why isn't there protests and shaming over depictions of violence in the media?  Eradicating violence from the world would be a wonderful thing, but yet you don't see protests over that.  Instead, you see the latest violent Hollywood blockbusters making obscene sums of money each weekend.  It would seem to me that eradicating that from the world would also go a very, very long way towards accomplishing the goals of the current PC culture, yet there are no moves to censor films or literature or other forms of media over the issue of violence.  

[Call Billy Bob]

If one is offended by an author, then they have one of two choices.  1, don't read the author, or 2, read the text as is and deal with the issues within the text that make them uncomfortable.

If only more people prescribed to this line of thinking, tdalton. I'm with you.

[glidrose]

Whilst most of the topics nanolark has started have produced some interesting discussion, once you go to his/her profile on select 'content' it is clear this person is trying to crowd source their academic paper.

It’s 'her' profile. You’re very right; I'm looking for answers. However, if you prefer to see it as a crowding resource... I guess, I have to take that on the chin.. so to speak.

Welcome aboard Nanolark! Always a pleasure to have more women & more intellectually-inclined people on these boards. Crowd-source your academic work all you want - it has indeed resulted in worthwhile discussions.

[AMC Hornet]

Let's remove anything offensive or even potentially offensive from Fawlty Towers - then you can get through all twelve episodes in under an hour.

[Emrayfo]

The best thing to do about these things is to leave them in the films and, in the case of Fleming, the novels.  If you watch or read them and feel uncomfortable by them, then that's a good thing.  People should feel uncomfortable by such things, but we've allowed the current culture to devolve into one where nobody is ever allowed to say anything that might make a single other person feel uncomfortable.  People should be able to read the literature of the past, see the attitudes that are contained within it, and both make not of the progress made as well as of the mistakes in thinking that were made and learn from them so that they are not repeated.  Censoring those works hampers that line of thinking and that potential for further progress.

 

Completely agreed, tdalton. We _should_ feel uncomfortable with these things when we come across them, and when we do we should challenge and discuss them. Engaging with what makes something problematic is better than erasing it to suit a (potentially transitory) set of contemporary values.

 

 

 

Welcome aboard Nanolark! Always a pleasure to have more women & more intellectually-inclined people on these boards. 

 

Absolutely agreed, glidrose. To repeat my statement on another thread, welcome nanolark! 

[Revelator]

Let's remove anything offensive or even potentially offensive from Fawlty Towers - then you can get through all twelve episodes in under an hour.

 

Funny that you mentioned that--there's an episode of Fawlty Towers where the Major casually uses the plural form of the n-word, and from what I understand that's now edited out of current repeats (with Cleese's permission). One could argue that this backs up Double Naught spy's proposal, but I wouldn't.

 

The Major's use of the word shows that it could still be casually dropped well into the 1970s, which explains why Fleming casually used it 20 years earlier. But undoubtedly part of the joke in FT is that the Major, an old dotard, is casually using a disreputable word. 40 years later, the word has become more shocking, due to increased racial sensitivity in Britain, and the joke is more likely jar viewers than make them laugh. Cleese, being a pragmatist, decided a one-line edit wouldn't hurt.

 

With Fleming it would take far more than deleting one line to produce an inoffensive text of LALD. Actually, it's hard to determine where one would stop (should the phonetically-rendered dialogue be regularized?). Better to assume that a literary audience will realize that LALD was written over 60 years ago in a very different time--and they'll certainly realize that, because the Bond novels are now period pieces, whereas Fawlty Towers still feels less dated.
 

Edited by Revelator, 09 July 2015 - 12:53 AM.

[AMC Hornet]

Of course, the Major's offensive line was only a setup to the punchline, which was intended to demonstrate just how out-of-touch the Major and his generation -and Fawlty, for that matter - are.

 

"Oh no, they're not n*****s - they're wogs!"

 

There's an old British saying: "the wogs begin at Calais".

 

Reminiscent of a line from Monty Python: in order to increase British revenues, "We should tax all foreigners living abroad."

 

It's all about poking fun at the tenacious, outdated, diminishing British attitude of affected superiority over the rest of the world. Take away the setup, take away the punch line, then you might as well drop the entire sequence, or re-word it so the Major isn't saying anything offensive at all.

 

"Oh, isn't that sweet - the old Major has nothing but love for marginalized minorities, not only in the 1970s, but in all the years he was fighting against them! Those must have been golden years for the British empire."

[Emrayfo]

--there's an episode of Fawlty Towers where the Major casually uses the plural form of the n-word, and from what I understand that's now edited out of current repeats (with Cleese's permission). One could argue that this backs up Double Naught spy's proposal, but I wouldn't.

 

The Major's use of the word shows that it could still be casually dropped well into the 1970s, which explains why Fleming casually used it 20 years earlier. But undoubtedly part of the joke in FT is that the Major, an old dotard, is casually using a disreputable word. 40 years later, the word has become more shocking, due to increased racial sensitivity in Britain, and the joke is more likely jar viewers than make them laugh. Cleese, being a pragmatist, decided a one-line edit wouldn't hurt.

 

It is an interesting example. That is the episode titled "The Germans". Yes, an audience of the '70s would have been a little shocked and embarrassed at the Major's use of the word but not necessarily outraged; an audience of today would be completely aghast. Unlike with Fleming, who just betrayed his ignorance and prejudices with racist language, Cleese intended it to be shocking. It was meant to show how dated and behind the times the Major was then. We see this in Basil's reaction of being temporarily nonplussed, before he returns to his usual fawning attitude with the Major - one of his few allies and sympathisers in the hotel. As such it was also an illustration of Basil's ongoing craven servility when cultivating friends and influence. Basil doesn't condone the Major's usage but elides it and steers their conversation onto a favourite prejudice of his instead. So of course, within a few beats from the 'n' utterance Basil and the Major are exchanging some extremely disagreeable opinions regarding women. I'm guessing that bit of dialogue is still to be edited out, as it is a feature in nearly every episode and reflects Basil's personality and the state of his marriage. And then some disparaging things are also said of the Germans. We are meant to see the Major as racist and sexist, reflecting his class and age, and Basil as lacking in principles and willing to adopt whatever opinions that he adduces will gain him some sympathy. This is often the task of comedy, to reveal our worst sides to ourselves and to make us cringe at our casual prejudices. Cleese doesn't posit these two as a species to be admired in this scenario.

 

Cleese has obviously since re-thought the relevance of that particular utterance by the Major and elected to have it removed. Yet the audience still knows the Major is a dinosaur and a bigot with objectionable views, and his character can continue to perform the same role in the narrative, because there remain so many more examples of this kind of behaviour from him. So to edit or not to edit? My take is that consideration of this kind of change exists along a spectrum rather than a straightforward yes or no. Either way the decision shouldn't be taken lightly.

 

Double Naught is certainly right when he suggests an intellectual property owner can make these kinds of decisions. But as Revelator points out, when substantial changes need be made to a whole text (such as Fleming) rather than one utterance in one episode of a TV show (such as the Watery Fowls example) you risk completely transforming the piece of art into something else (and less) altogether. In those cases, where the identified indiscretions are so widespread that to remove them all would undermine the merit or change the voice of an entire work, you should instead be getting a continuation author to write a new, and values-acceptable novel, or in remaking whatever movie/show has become so problematic.

[Call Billy Bob]

Let's remove anything offensive or even potentially offensive from Fawlty Towers - then you can get through all twelve episodes in under an hour.

Just don't mention the war!

[glidrose]

Actually, abridged versions of Fleming's works have already appeared.
 
I remember seeing a couple of paperbacks for OHMSS and TMWTGG in the eighties (I think they may have actually been published in the 70s) that had been abridged for a teen readership. I did not collect them as I - like others here - am not interested in watered-down, juvenile versions of adult thrillers (yes, I bought Higson's volumes, as they were original works, but I find they don't compel rereading the way the master's do).
 
I don't remember which publisher put them out, but I do remember that Chapter One of OHMSS had been retitled 'Bond at the Beach' and was noticeably shorter than the original, as were all the chapters. Gone was anything deemed too racy and violent for impressionable young minds such as mine had been when I was ready to graduate from Hardy Boys Mysteries a decade earlier.

Publisher? Hutchinson. Their "Bulls-eye" series.

http://illustrated00...d-editions.html

http://illustrated00...-adaptions.html

http://illustrated00...-for-young.html

Better to keep these innocent, sanitized, inoffensive adventure stories on the same device they use for playing GTA and MoH and for surfing internet porn.

 
The internet has porn?!

 

Let's remove anything offensive or even potentially offensive from Fawlty Towers - then you can get through all twelve episodes in under an hour.

That's nothing. I just finished watching the family-friendly version of all 13 seasons of Family Guy in under five minutes.

[AMC Hornet]

That was Blazing Saddles? I thought it would be longer - and funny.

 

I also thought it was supposed to be an example of humour as an agent of social change, but it didn't challenge, didn't take any risks - it was rather pandering, in fact. What was with all those horses whinnying while those men were standing up and sitting down?

 

I wonder if the unrated director's cut would make any more sense? Nah, to hell with it - if I didn't like it on the Family Channel, I doubt I'd care to watch it again regardless.

 

(P.S.: Good find, Mr. G - those are the ones.)

[ChickenStu]

I read all of Fleming's original books in a marathon in late 2013 (I did a thread about it if you fancy looking for it). I found it to be a wonderful experience and they were SO addictive. True, a lot of the attitudes to certain things were a tad alarming - but it didn't stop the books being belting thrillers and a pleasure to read.

Why are they good? Why are they still popular? Well to answer that question - read the follow up novels by different authors. I've read them all and with the exception of MAYBE Higson - you'll see that Fleming had a magic which is pretty impossible to replicate. 

My ultimate answer to your question? Read the books. You won't be sorry. See for yourself. 

[glidrose]

You can't say anything anymore that has even the potential to offend just one person.  Say something that someone doesn't agree with, they claim offense, round up a bunch of like-minded people, and shout the other down with stupid phrases like "wrong side of history" until the person with the original comment is shamed into backing down or shutting up.

History is frequently on the wrong side of history.

[Dustin]

You can't say anything anymore that has even the potential to offend just one person. Say something that someone doesn't agree with, they claim offense, round up a bunch of like-minded people, and shout the other down with stupid phrases like "wrong side of history" until the person with the original comment is shamed into backing down or shutting up.

History is frequently on the wrong side of history.

This is quite off-topic so I'll try making this brief...

Only recently I've been thinking how utterly strange the year 2000 would have seemed to somebody who fell asleep in the mid-seventies. No Cold War and Iron Curtain any more; peace and prosperity in Europe after a series of bloodless revolutions in the Eastern Bloc that brought the end to Communist totalitarian rule; ten years previously a major crisis* solved by an international coalition. And another peaceful revolution at the doorstep in the shape of the Information Age and the Internet for everybody. A patient waking from a 25 year coma would think he's in a parallel universe. Or in paradise.

Of course we're doing our best now to get history back on track...



*What Americans often call the first Gulf War because they didn't much follow the one before that...

[AMC Hornet]

BASIL: "Austin,this is Commander Gilmour, Strategic Command, and General Borschevsky, Russian Intelligence."

AUSTIN: "Russian Intelligence? Are you mad?"

BASIl: "A lot's happened since you were frozen, Austin. The cold war's over."

AUSTIN: "Thank God. Those capitalist dogs will finally pay for their crimes against the people, hey Comrade?"

BASIL: "We won, Austin."

AUSTIN: "Groovy. Smashing! Good on ya! Yea capitalism!"

[DavidJones]

I've encountered people - usually English teachers - who believe that Fleming's books are only available because of the films. It's usually while they're trying to convince us that the only books which stay the distance are the ones which are designated classics. I believe, though, that Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Dickens remain popular because of the endless film and TV adaptations they get. It works both ways.

[glidrose]

I've encountered people - usually English teachers - who believe that Fleming's books are only available because of the films. It's usually while they're trying to convince us that the only books which stay the distance are the ones which are designated classics. I believe, though, that Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Dickens remain popular because of the endless film and TV adaptations they get. It works both ways.

 
 
I cannot let your assertion go unchallenged. Shake and Dicks are still with us because they have - rightly - stood the test of time. (Can't remember if I've read Jane Austen so we'll pretend she's not part of the equation.) Shake and Dicks are classics because they are classics. They really are that good - great even. That's why we get an endless succession of film and tv adaptations - well, that and the original works are in the popular domain. You're putting the horse in front of the cart. To prove my point, how many film/tv adaptations have any of us seen of "Two Gentlemen of Verona", "Two Noble Kinsmen", "King John", "Pericles", "Cymbeline", "Timon of Athens", and "Henry VIII"? *** Okay, so "Two Gentlemen of Verona" got an award-winning smash hit Broadway musical, and there's an understandably awful Ethan Hawke biker-gang vs dirty cops movie updating on "Cymbeline" that next to nobody has seen, but if your theory were true, then all the plays and all the novels would get roughly equal treatment.

And not just English teachers say that Fleming's books remain in print only because of the films. Lots of people say it, myself included. Because it's true.

And no English teacher in his - or her - right mind will ever claim "that the only books which stay the distance are the ones which are designated classics." From time to time gems slip through the cracks. And there's no shortage of academic and scholarly forums where well-read and well-educated people will happily list the most overrated "classics".


***Most of these works are from the final years of Shakespeare's writing career. Not entirely a coincidence.

BTW, this year is the 400th anniversary of Shakes' death. That's 1616 for the math challenged.

A REMINDER: in most English-speaking nations it's perfectly legal to assault anyone who says Shakes didn't write his own plays. In some jurisdictions it's even perfectly legal to draw and quarter anyone who advances the Oxfordian theory: that the perversely untalented 17th Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere somehow wrote the plays when not freeloading, begging members of the royal court for tin-mining concessions and dying before a third of the plays could be written.

[Major Tallon]

Bless you, Glidrose.

[Dustin]

Nothing to add.

[DavidJones]

 
I cannot let your assertion go unchallenged. Shake and Dicks are still with us because they have - rightly - stood the test of time. (Can't remember if I've read Jane Austen so we'll pretend she's not part of the equation.) Shake and Dicks are classics because they are classics. They really are that good - great even. That's why we get an endless succession of film and tv adaptations - well, that and the original works are in the popular domain. You're putting the horse in front of the cart. To prove my point, how many film/tv adaptations have any of us seen of "Two Gentlemen of Verona", "Two Noble Kinsmen", "King John", "Pericles", "Cymbeline", "Timon of Athens", and "Henry VIII"? *** Okay, so "Two Gentlemen of Verona" got an award-winning smash hit Broadway musical, and there's an understandably awful Ethan Hawke biker-gang vs dirty cops movie updating on "Cymbeline" that next to nobody has seen, but if your theory were true, then all the plays and all the novels would get roughly equal treatment.

And not just English teachers say that Fleming's books remain in print only because of the films. Lots of people say it, myself included. Because it's true.

And no English teacher in his - or her - right mind will ever claim "that the only books which stay the distance are the ones which are designated classics." From time to time gems slip through the cracks. And there's no shortage of academic and scholarly forums where well-read and well-educated people will happily list the most overrated "classics".

 

Though I like Dickens and do believe his work has lived on due to merit, it's also due to name recognition which comes from TV and film adaptation. This is more true of Austen, perhaps. This is largely, in my view, because the regency period is more aesthetically pleasing on film than the grubbiness of Dickens' Victorian era, and so gets remade more often. Austen has remained in the public psyche due to these endless adaptations: Sense and Sensibility has been made in 1971, 1981, 1995 and 2008 while Pride and Prejudice has been made in 1958, 1967, 1980, 1995 and 2005.

 

The reason such author's lesser works are filmed less is because the name - or, rather, title - recognition is not there.

 

These authors, among others like Shakespeare, are embraced by academia and therefore are placed on syllabuses around the world. As such, it's impossible to claim with any certainty if they would have enjoyed the same status had this not been the case.

 

The Bond books may have been in print without the films: look at Chandler and Hammet. They're still in print, and it's been decades still anyone made a film of their work.

 

We could look at Fleming's contemporaries and notice their mixed fortunes: Graham Greene is perhaps Fleming's most famous contemporary thriller writer, though this may also be due to his more literary works; Eric Ambler and Nevil Shute remained in popularity for a while, but have faded through the decades, though both, I think, are just about hanging in there. Other literary spies and their authors, such as Desmond Cory and his Johnny Fedora novels, and Manning Coles and his Tommy Hambledon series, have disappeared altogether.

 

All these 'classics' and Bond have been kept in the public eye. It's an endless cycle that can only be broken when films of those books stop getting made.

Edited by DavidJones, 09 February 2016 - 02:36 PM.

[Dustin]

Not that I disagree with the opinions given; I just would like to add a detail of my own here. We're talking about THE classics here and assume that they are actually still read. Evidently this is true for many - but there is also the odd case of the classic everybody has on their shelves, sometimes even talks about, but few do actually bother to read (syllabuses notwithstanding*).

To illustrate what I mean just think of FRANKENSTEIN, it's a cornerstone of the horror genre, famous and lauded far beyond the circle of horror fans all over the world. But even among hardcore fans you will find remarkably few who actually did read Mary Shelley's novel. Although it's of course still in print and selling, too, in spite of various ways to read it for free or next to nothing.

I suppose what we have to distinguish here is the mere belonging of a work to 'the classical canon' and the actual relevance of a work for the condition of the contemporary reader. Not every classic can lay claim to both qualities. And sometimes not even that can prevent a body of work from slowly fading into obscurity. Purely on their merit as works of entertainment Fleming's novels can for the most part still satisfy. And surely he is one of the writers in the English hemisphere who have shaped the genre with their works and their particular way to tackle 'modern' fiction. But without the constant reminder to Western pop culture that 'Bond is back' there would be a great deal less fuss about the books. There'd fans and fora and perhaps discussion about who would be fitting for a possible adaptation - but largely on the level of Matt Helm or Travis McGee i.e. an obscure pastime for hardcore fans. And both John D. MacDonald and Donald Hamilton had a much larger output than Fleming and ended their respective careers decades after Fleming.

*The thing with syllabuses is that students are expected to read the stuff on the list but most of course turn to the Internet to get the reader's digest condensed summary. And before the Internet pupils - if they were lazy and bright enough - just borrowed the teachers textbook from the library, with all the things they were expected to learn from their reading given in a handy chapter. I sometimes wonder when was the last time Nathan the Wise was actually read, instead of just the summary of its parable...

[AMC Hornet]

I've read Frankenstein at least twice, and I'm sure I'm not the only Bond fan who owns multiple copies of each 007 novel.

 

If Frankenstein is not being read as much today as it was in the more genteel 19th century, it's because modern audiences demand films that are more visual, violent and frightening (read: not "boring"). Only those genuinely interested in the quality of the prose can slog their way through the novel. The same can be said for Fleming et al.

 

There are plenty of novels I've read only after seeing the film adaptations, and have often been surprised how the screenwriter/director's vision has differed from the original author's. I'm even more surprised when a film uses the same ending as the literary work.

 

I will concede that if Eon decided to go ahead and adapt John Gardner's 007 stories, they too would see reprint more frequently than they do.

[DavidJones]

When I consider classics - and as English student at uni, I had to consider them a lot - I always put aside the 'classic' status and just look at them in terms of quality. Therefore, I'm able to make my own mind up about something without the salivating that the lecturers always did. This non-conformist attitude has led me to dismiss Shakespeare repeatedly. His work may be good - he may be expressing an observation about human nature, but I cannot hear it as I don't understand the language. I've always thought that it should be performed in modern language. If something as hallowed as the Bible can do it, than so can a few plays. That's the only way it can reach a modern audience who aren't pretentiously forcing themselves to watch it/read it so they can say they have. 

[Dustin]

I picked FRANKENSTEIN here also for its subtitle, The Modern Prometheus. It's a novel thematically highly topical to our day and age; there goes nary a newsday without the odd headline that relates to its theme. You might say Shelley updated a myth not only deeply ingrained in our common subconscious, it's an element or a quality of mankind's progress itself. So I think there is no need for a long and winding search of its relevance for readers.

So why isn't it - more, much more - read?

Because the second quality you mentioned, the prose is starting to become more and more unrelatable. Prose in itself is a quality that's gradually losing its value on a larger scale. There are works today that shine with elegance, but have little actual message to carry, l'art pour l'art, beautifully written perhaps but only interesting up to a point. Fleming's main success was to marry the - relatively speaking - undemanding plots of adventure entertainment with prose that rivalled literature. He set out to write thrillers as if they were literature; obviously a thought not many thriller writers had back then.

Today we still rate these books highly, no doubt. But part of the praise is also due to the observation that not many books are written any more with this kind of aspiration.

[DavidJones]

I think Frankenstein suffers slightly from not having its Monster like the Universal version, so it's not what people expect. On the other hand, maybe people think they know the story already, not knowing that the book differs violently from their general idea.

[Dustin]

Definitely, there is a powerful magic behind the normative force of images; that's why we are discussing largely works of a visual medium here. They shape our daily life perhaps to a greater extent - and ultimately more directly - than the ideas and thoughts underlying these images. It's no coincidence Fleming was often praised for writing so descriptive and visual*.

*Though personally I don't think he was exceptionally descriptive or even 'cinematic'; he just knew how to get the imagination of his readers going. If he had described everything there would be no room left for our 'inner cinema' to work its magic.

[AMC Hornet]

Indeed.

 

There were no graphic descriptions of violence in Frankenstein, nor did there need to be; in the 18th century the word 'murder' was horrible enough to spark the unwilling imagination. Today, the printed word cannot compete with what the lazy, hedonistic eye wants to see without having to engage the brain (my brother would never watch Red Dwarf because of its "low-budget, Doctor Who-quality BBC special effects" - well, if he wants to miss out on some brilliant writing, that's his choice).

 

Fleming kept his love scenes brief and coy. Just as well, considering how much flak Benson has taken for his - if not graphic, then at best clinical - attempts at the same.

 

I enjoy a good turn of phrase at least as much as a well-photographed film sequence. Leslie Charteris could describe a brawl like it was comic ballet, and Terry Pratchett could spend a whole chapter working up to a brilliantly lame punchline (read The Saint's Getaway and Soul Music for prime examples).

 

As a teacher I despair not so much how little interest some students have in reading, but how even interested readers can plow through series like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games and still not be able to reproduce decent paragraph structure.

 

I hope in vain for a renaissance wherein reading and writing will again be considered pleasures and skills worth developing.