What kind of work goes into adapting an existing creative work as a play? How, as a playwright, do you make it yours?
I only gravitate to material that moves me in some visceral, absolute way. I have to see myself in it (in a particular character, or in the central human truth the work espouses) before I agree to adapt it. I don’t take the assignment and then try to locate myself in it. I have to be there from the start.
In a related question, how transformative would you say it is to rework a short story or novel, say, as a play? (Or a documentary film to a musical?) Does the change in genre always make a big difference, or does the degree of difference greatly depend on the approach of the playwright?
Different forms follow different rules; Broadway musicals, for example, require strong storytelling in a way that cinema verité, psychologically driven documentaries (like Grey Gardens) do not. You have to meet the demands of the form you’ve chosen, even if it means reinventing the source material to a certain degree. A good adaptation is rarely a slavishly fidelitous one.
Creatively speaking, do you find a great difference in working from fictional or creative sources and working from “real person” sources?
A source is a source, and the adaptation process is largely the same. And you have to show the same sensitivity to any living person who is impacted by your work. A novelist may take just as much umbrage with you if you distort his fiction as a historical figure may take if you distort his or her life.
Do you find it changes your process or your attitude to your work when you are writing based on a well-known, iconic (but long-dead) figure like Sade, as opposed to someone like Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, whom you actually knew?
Absolutely. Thanks to other writers like Yukio Mishima and Peter Weiss, Sade is both a historical figure and a literary icon. You can employ him in either way. There are a myriad of biographies about Sade—many of them exquisitely researched and written—which inform the historical record. And if you take liberties with his life, there are plenty of nonfictional works available to the general reader to reposition your inspirational flights of fancy. And an audience is (for the most part) ready to experience Sade as a symbol; they don’t really expect straightforward biography. He’s already appeared as a semifictionalized character in countless other books, plays, and movies. But Charlotte was largely unknown; I knew audiences would be meeting her for the first time. As such, I felt a heightened obligation not to reinvent the facts of her life, but to represent them as faithfully as I could. She has yet to enter the pantheon of literary devices!
Could you talk about the process of adapting the real people who were the subjects of Hands on a Hardbody, but who were (as I understand it) combined and otherwise adapted to suit dramatic purposes? How did you seek their permission? How did they react to the process and the end result?
When we initially approached the original contestants from Robb Bindler’s 1997 [documentary] film, we were unequivocally clear with them: we said that our characterizations would endeavor to be true to their essential spirit as people, but that we would take liberties with the raw data of their lives. They understood that we would heighten certain character traits or invent certain biographical details in order to more fully serve our drama. They all gave us permission, and when we flew them first to La Jolla to see the original run of the show, and later to its Broadway opening, they were uniformly pleased. While they acknowledged that we’d taken creative license, no one felt violated or misrepresented in any fundamental ways. Obviously, that was a great relief to me!
Would you have qualms about basing a character (very recognizably) on a living person? Would you feel differently basing such a character on a public figure as opposed to, say, someone you know socially?
It was much easier to write about Sade than Charlotte von Mahlsdorf for that very reason. As a writer, you certainly have moral obligations, but they remain abstract. With a friend, they become intensely personal and you violate them at your peril.
When writing about a historical figure or “real person,” how do you balance the demands of the play (dramatically or thematically) with concerns about historical accuracy or being “true to life”?
It depends on the intention that motivates your work. If your primary aim is to provide a biographical but dramatic portrait of a life, then you should do so with close attention to the historical record. If your aim is to create a parable or an allegory that uses the person in question in a metaphorical or symbolic way, then you should feel free to do so, I think, within reason. Obviously, you shouldn’t engage in gross distortion or misrepresentation. And the play itself should alert the audience to your authorial intent, so they can experience it accordingly. I’m a great fan of disclaimers in programs (“the play is inspired by but not wholly true to actual events”), but I’m even more heartened when the play’s style and tone contextualizes its treatment of real people. For example, given its absurdist style and antic word play, it would be very hard to mistake Tom Stoppard’s Travesties for a real-life account of the lives of James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin. Similarly (I hope), the arch, Grand Guignol style of my play Quills—written with all the breathless ghoulishness of a penny dreadful—signals to the audience that they should take its events with a grain of sand.
Would you be concerned about being a recognizable character in someone else’s play or novel? What about a character in slash fanfiction?
Since real people have entrusted me to integrate them into my work, I suppose I shouldn’t be coy and ask fellow authors to refrain from doing the same to me! That would be more than a tad hypocritical, wouldn’t it? :)
Are you aware of Quills-based fanfiction? (I found about forty-five stories online.) How do you feel about people writing in and out of characters and settings you created?
I had no idea! As long as the fiction doesn’t raise any possibility of plagiarism or copyright infringement, then I think it’s the highest form of flattery!
To my knowledge, all of the Quills-based fanfiction is offered freely on the internet in the traditional spirit of fanfiction—others “playing in your sandbox” with no intent to profit. BUT, if someone were suddenly to write a fantastically popular Quills-based fanfiction but decide to make it all set on, say, Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, and then change all the names and publish or produce it . . . would that bother you?
Again, as long as they didn’t plagiarize me, I don’t think I could take issue with it. As I said in my opening answer, no writer writes free of influence. I owe a great deal of Quills to the works of the late Charles Ludlam, and I Am My Own Wife was born of documentary theater pioneered by Emily Mann, Anna Deveare Smith, and Moises Kaufman.
Given all this discussion of creative use, writing from sources, and writers earning money from work based on other writers’ work, is there anything you’d like to clarify about your stance on copyright protection or the relationship between creative use and infringement?
Copyright is a moral imperative for all artists, living or dead, and should be treated with the utmost care. In the age of information sharing, it is imperiled. We must strive to maintain it. It provides the basis for our livelihood and makes our craft an economically tenable one. Writers should be inspired by one another and should be open to artistic influence from our colleagues. But we should never steal one another’s work.
An Interview with Jonathan Lethem
JONATHAN LETHEM IS AN AUTHOR, editor, critic, essayist, and MacArthur Fellowship recipient. He’s written the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning novel Motherless Brooklyn, the New York Times bestseller Fortress of Solitude, and an entire book on the Talking Heads album Fear of Music. He’s mixed detective fiction with science fiction; he’s edited Philip K. Dick. And for all that, I fangirl in his general direction.
Lethem also hosts the Promiscuous Materials Project, an archive of his own stories that he makes available for adaptation by playwrights and screenwriters. He’s not exactly saying “Fic me for fun
and profit”—he confers certain rights but not others for his dollar fee, and he does not want to see his fiction republished as fiction by someone else. (He has expressed some interest in being slashed, but that’s another story. Or at least a promising prompt.)
Lethem explains his motivation on the Promiscuous Materials website like this:
I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing my stories adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced in other voices, and I’m a fan of adaptations, ap[p]ropriations, collage, and sampling.
I recently explored some of these ideas in an essay [“The Ecstasy of Influence”] for Harper’s Magazine.168 As I researched that essay I came more and more to believe that artists should ideally find ways to make material free and available for reuse. This project is a (first) attempt to make my own art practice reflect that belief.
I absolutely recommend the essay he mentions. It sparked some further questions in my mind about how Lethem might see fanfiction and its relationship to other kinds of creative borrowing and reworking, and how we judged them. I was really curious about how he’d answer them. So I asked him.
In your essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” originally for Harper’s, you argue that “appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.” Do you notice a difference in how people react to similar strategies in different areas of cultural production?
Yes, I absolutely notice a difference. It’s why I’m so interested in writing across media and discipline, to help people reframe their resistance to quotation. Because it strikes me as so peculiar that things like sampling and quoting seem so natural in one area, but seem inapplicable or unacceptable in another. Much of it has to do with the setting of reception experience—whether it sets up expectations of purity or high culture, and therefore expectations of “originality.”
You mention high culture as giving us high expectations of originality, but some of the very artists that most suggest high culture and purity to a lot of people—such as what is known as High Modernism, writers like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot—were huge practitioners of quotation and appropriation.
Yes, that’s one reason I get irked with those who try to quarantine postmodernism. They really need to subject T. S. Eliot to that test. And the history of visual art in the twentieth century is a procession of collage, appropriation, et cetera, a constant shackling of low vernacular. Virtually every major art movement in the twentieth century has been implicated in appropriation with the possible exception of pure abstract expressionism.
It’s everywhere, basic, a native gesture, so for me, I try to universalize these techniques as much as possible. Not that the experience of the new isn’t important—the experience of the new is very important—but the truth of it is probably that the artifact or gesture arousing that sensation is not new. We are not the first people to arrive at self-reflexivity or intertextuality. The Greeks had a chorus.
So I get irked at the oppressive self-congratulation of the present in congratulating itself for self-reflexivity and mashup. Or decrying the same things. Because in all sorts of folk traditions, self-reflexivity and mashup have always been here, especially in those traditions closest to fanfiction. Oral storytellers, for example, were always working with a tapestry of borrowing, references, stories. Like hip-hop, their stories made mosaics, sampled riffs, borrowed extensively.
It’s when economies of money or prestige come into it that we see people putting up the fences, balkanizing the territory, and selling what they have done as “defensibly original.” Almost always art gestures almost always are borrowing. We live in a common language of culture.
But doesn’t plagiarism exist?
Yes, at the extreme margins, there’s something pathetic. That’s when someone takes something that’s nearly everything that makes someone’s work interesting, disguises the origin, and presents it. That sucks. But everything short of that is much more complicated to talk about. A work derives energy from the way it transforms a source or many sources, the way it combines this material with elements that are native to the teller. This kind of work comprises the enormous preponderance of what we mean by “culture.” A tiny wedge of plagiarism, and a vast field of culture. It won’t do us any good to suggest the exalted, excused practices are in some way unrelated to what we call plagiarism. Stuff doesn’t come out of the vacuum; it comes out of other stuff.
Once you’ve accepted that, you can get into the fascinating region of what is actually before you. Then we can talk about reception feeling. What kind of reference makes you feel good, and what makes you feel like something unfair has occurred?
I often go to music to discuss these reactions. Like, what about Paul Simon’s Graceland? If you know anything about African music, you know the album is African music, with Paul Simon’s reedy tenor and lyrics stuck onto it. Some people felt surprise and discomfort when they listened to the album and then went and listened to African music and realized how much the album relied on that music. But on the other hand, Paul Simon never made any secret of it. He named it, made it explicit. If we think of a scale, on the degree of transformation, I’d say Graceland gets about 15/100. It’s not very transformed. But on transparency? 99/100. Paul Simon showered gratitude and exposure and money on his sources. He performed with them. So in his case, if we have these two scales, Paul Simon did so great on one of them that we excuse the other.
Let’s take a different example. Led Zeppelin. They stole songs from Willie Dixon. The biggest monster of a white British band stole music from this more-or-less unknown black guy, put their name to it, and had to be sued to do anything about it, to give any credit or compensation. They scored a 3 on the scale of acknowledgment and transparency. But on the other hand, their music doesn’t sound like Willie Dixon. The transformation is extremely vital. Led Zeppelin not only made a new, arresting sound out of these songs, they invented a whole new genre of music. They got heavy metal out of Willie Dixon. So they get a 99 on level of transformation. They made something so utterly new, that you have to give it up to the transformative gesture, and it’s hard to want them not to have done it from a musical point of view—even if the way they did it was immoral.
Do you think how much money is involved influences how people react to appropriation—including how they react in the legal arena?
In general, I’m not interested in law; I’m interested in art—but money has everything to do with how people react. If there’s no money being made, people don’t usually care as much.
Why do you think these practices of appropriation are so much less acceptable to people in terms of the written word? Why is it a much bigger deal to plagiarize writing? Have literary critics (of contemporary literature, I mean—book critics) ceded what should be judgments about aesthetics and effect to the interests of the publishing industry?
I do think that’s true [that book critics have ceded those judgments to the publishing industry], but I’d add another diagnosis: literary criticism is too closely intertwined with newspaper journalism. So whereas other fields of art reception are successfully partitioned from ethos of journalists, book reviewers are usually newspapermen who fancy themselves book reviewers. The field of book reviewing so totally overwhelms academic literary criticism in terms of influence, and journalists are of course obsessed with journalistic notions of plagiarism, sources, and inaccuracy. These standards migrate far too much in the realm of literary writing.
Imagine the Ian McEwan scandal in the [visual] arts—it’s insane, it would never happen. [McEwan was accused of borrowing too heavily in his novel Atonement from Lucilla Andrews’ wartime hospital memoir, No Time for Romance. McEwan consistently acknowledged he’d used the memoir as source.] But journalists love that stuff. Since they write from sources, sometimes very minimally transformed, they need to become police. But their own degree of trans
formation is pathetically tiny compared to Ian McEwan[’s]. It’s the narcissism of minor difference; it’s overcompensation.
Speaking of differences, how is it different—creatively—when we base a character on someone else’s story or character, as opposed to basing that character on someone else’s life or personality?
There’s no difference. Legally, I know it’s totally different ranges, but from the creative standpoint that distinction poses a meaningless quarantine between sources. Because many people—myself included—are largely themselves based on literary characters.
My characters were always based on someone real and also resonated with a literary character. That’s what it’s all about. Fantasies, archetypes. In Motherless Brooklyn, it was Raymond Chandler’s detective, the Tourette’s guy I saw [on] a bus, case studies I read in Oliver Sacks’ work—and me, he’s based on me, too. And Elliot Gould, in Altman’s Long Goodbye! How could anyone think it’s any less complicated (apart from lawyers)? The dream that this complexity could be neatly sorted out is a very typical American, pragmatist, anti-intellectual fantasy, based on suspicion of the artist or intellectual.
When someone tells a fanfiction writer that they’re “not a real writer,” I say to that that person, “You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.” I do think there’s an innocent bravery to saying, “I’m going to write another Sherlock Holmes story,” but of course it’s already a new Sherlock Holmes the moment you start writing it. It’s not Doyle’s. It’s yours.
One of the ways avant-gardes and their critics have theorized collage, appropriation, and cut-up is as a disruption of narrative, and even of (an ideologically constructed) self. How can these same strategies work toward narrative, and toward the construction of (fictional) selves?
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Page 43
