And what sort of strikes me about the way the "old-fashioned" kind of prose was spoken about is that I think often people assume that since the sparser style is modern, every other previous style has been consciously evolving to where we are now. Like, Dickens was talented, but unfortunately he hadn't yet learned that all that description etc. is unnecessary and boring and that we'd all rather just picture things for ourselves, so he's hampered by that. Good for him for having things that make up for that.
Hee, thank you. This idea of constant cultural improvement seems very weird to me but you see people assuming it all the time. And it doesn't work any better than the equally dubious idea that modern stuff is some horrible corruption or degeneration from previous art forms. Artistic styles change over time, that's all, and each aesthetic can be appreciated on its own terms.
I think that today we're almost so used to movies we don't even realize the difference--just listen to Tolkien Purists talk about PJ's movies and you'll see how people can use "they could have just done it like it was in the book" as if they're stating the obvious in situations where they're actually asking the impossible. I think what they often really mean is that they want the movie to be like the movie that plays in their head when they read the book...only that's not really a movie. It's deceptively like a movie, but it's not a movie.
*nods* Yes, for many many reasons. The one that strikes me the most when I think about Tolkien is this: any movie adaptation has this problem of *time* - even if a written scene contains a metric ton of description we can read it much, much faster than it will play out on the screen.
It is so dazzlingly cool that written narrative can suspend our sense of time like that, but time as we experience it in reading is a total illusion, whereas filmmakers have to deal with actual TIME as it passes for people who are sitting in front of a movie screen. You can't include everything from a book in a movie, and you also don't have the option of just cutting from the book and putting in little bits and pieces that happen to fit into the running time, because then the resulting film would have no shape at all. So you have to compress episodes and change their order and even add scenes that contain characterization bits that might be the net result of six or seven scenes from the original book. This is just inevitable, I think; what will make the result seem like a faithful adaptation or not will depend I think on whether not on how closely the movie conforms to the written narrative but on how good the filmakers are at constructing a coherent narrative of their own.
As for Rowling's descriptive style -- yeah, it does seem to me to be a bit compressed. I notice two kinds of details in her stories -- details that are there for comic effect, and details that are there because she's reached a point in the narrative when she's talking about something that is experienced by the POV character as really different from anything he's ever seen or done. The longest passage of pure description that I've noticed in OotP happens when they're flying on the Thestrals, which is, lets face it, a really odd thing to do. It's a place where I can imagine a kid reading the story asking, what did that look like? But the description also serves the purpose there of increasing the suspense as Harry & co travel to rescue (so Harry hopes) Sirius, so even there the description is really in the service of what's going on in the character's head.
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Date: 2006-12-15 03:13 pm (UTC)And what sort of strikes me about the way the "old-fashioned" kind of prose was spoken about is that I think often people assume that since the sparser style is modern, every other previous style has been consciously evolving to where we are now. Like, Dickens was talented, but unfortunately he hadn't yet learned that all that description etc. is unnecessary and boring and that we'd all rather just picture things for ourselves, so he's hampered by that. Good for him for having things that make up for that.
Hee, thank you. This idea of constant cultural improvement seems very weird to me but you see people assuming it all the time. And it doesn't work any better than the equally dubious idea that modern stuff is some horrible corruption or degeneration from previous art forms. Artistic styles change over time, that's all, and each aesthetic can be appreciated on its own terms.
I think that today we're almost so used to movies we don't even realize the difference--just listen to Tolkien Purists talk about PJ's movies and you'll see how people can use "they could have just done it like it was in the book" as if they're stating the obvious in situations where they're actually asking the impossible. I think what they often really mean is that they want the movie to be like the movie that plays in their head when they read the book...only that's not really a movie. It's deceptively like a movie, but it's not a movie.
*nods* Yes, for many many reasons. The one that strikes me the most when I think about Tolkien is this: any movie adaptation has this problem of *time* - even if a written scene contains a metric ton of description we can read it much, much faster than it will play out on the screen.
It is so dazzlingly cool that written narrative can suspend our sense of time like that, but time as we experience it in reading is a total illusion, whereas filmmakers have to deal with actual TIME as it passes for people who are sitting in front of a movie screen. You can't include everything from a book in a movie, and you also don't have the option of just cutting from the book and putting in little bits and pieces that happen to fit into the running time, because then the resulting film would have no shape at all. So you have to compress episodes and change their order and even add scenes that contain characterization bits that might be the net result of six or seven scenes from the original book. This is just inevitable, I think; what will make the result seem like a faithful adaptation or not will depend I think on whether not on how closely the movie conforms to the written narrative but on how good the filmakers are at constructing a coherent narrative of their own.
As for Rowling's descriptive style -- yeah, it does seem to me to be a bit compressed. I notice two kinds of details in her stories -- details that are there for comic effect, and details that are there because she's reached a point in the narrative when she's talking about something that is experienced by the POV character as really different from anything he's ever seen or done. The longest passage of pure description that I've noticed in OotP happens when they're flying on the Thestrals, which is, lets face it, a really odd thing to do. It's a place where I can imagine a kid reading the story asking, what did that look like? But the description also serves the purpose there of increasing the suspense as Harry & co travel to rescue (so Harry hopes) Sirius, so even there the description is really in the service of what's going on in the character's head.