Novel Images

Literature in Performance

Peter Reynolds, Peter Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135984045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Written specifically with the student in mind and focusing on a number of well-known texts, including Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Nicholas Nickleby, Nice Work and The Color Purple, the contributions in this book demonstrate how we can look critically at literary adaptations and learn to distinguish between mythical images and the reality of the process that constructed them. They argue that adaptations should not be seen as secondary or marginal, because through them we can enter into an exciting debate with the literary text itself. Originally published in 1993.

1

DANGEROUS LES’S LIAISONS

Graham Holderness

My title is possibly the one remaining permutation of this phrase, whose changing fortunes, from Les Liaisons dangereuses (via Fatal Attraction) to Dangerous Liaisons, register a peculiarly rich and illuminating process of cultural reproduction. It began in 1782 with the publication of what we now confidently recognize as a novel, but which was originally printed, if only in jest, as a collection of private correspondence – Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, subtitled Letters Collected in One Section of Society and Published for the Edification of Others.¹ In 1985, under the same main title, appeared a dramatized version, Les Liaisons Dangereuses: A Play by Christopher Hampton, Based on the Novel by Choderlos de Laclos. The performance text corresponding to this printed adaptation was a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which opened at the Other Place in Stratford in 1985, shifted to The Pit in London’s Barbican Centre in January 1986, and later that year, by way of a commercial transfer, moved to the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End. The production then transferred to Broadway, opening at the Music Box Theatre in April 1987. The published text represents ‘the text of the play as it stood on the first day of rehearsal; and the various minor cuts and abrasions (and improvements) sustained and effected during rehearsals are therefore not included’.²

In 1989 Hampton published a screenplay from the film version released in the previous year, the printed text now bearing the title Dangerous Liaisons. This text was designed to correspond exactly to the completed film-text: Hampton wanted it to ‘resemble the final cut as closely as possible’.³ Penguin Books, who had published a translation of Laclos’s novel in 1961, promptly re-issued the book, with a re-designed cover carrying an illustration from the film, and bearing a multiplicity of titles, a practice reminiscent of the title pages of Elizabethan plays:

Choderlos de Laclos

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Now a superb film starring

Glenn Close · John Malkovich

Michelle Pfeiffer

Dangerous

Liaisons

What’s in a name? The objective of this chapter is to examine the relationship between these various written and performance texts; to analyse the process of cultural production entailed in the various transformations of a single narrative source; and to throw some light on the relations between the internal structures of ‘narrative’ and the conditions of cultural production.⁴

NOVEL

Published in 1782, Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses appeared only a few years before the French Revolution. Laclos was a soldier and amateur intellectual who attempted writing in various different kinds – comic opera, poetry, sociological treatises, including one on the education of women – but wrote only the one novel. Laclos was a man of the Enlightenment, and in politics a Jacobin. His political affiliations seem a source of embarrassment to one of his English translators, who glances casually at Laclos’s political career, defined as a matter of ‘chicanery’ and ‘intrigue’, and concludes that ‘there is no room here to explore some of the obscurer passages and back-alleys of history’.⁵ In fact, Laclos was an active Jacobin, in the service of the Due d’Orléans (the king’s liberal cousin, known as ‘Phillippe-l’Egalité’), a speech-writer for Danton, and imprisoned twice for political reasons. This would seem in retrospect to constitute a rather closer connection to the central political currents of the age than a bit of chicanery in a back-alley.

It is certainly as such an Enlightenment liberal, sympathetic to the Revolution, that Laclos appeared to Christopher Hampton:

In the Revolution he was a Jacobin, not prominent but assiduous, a friend of Danton and the associate and secretary of the Due d’Orléans … ⁶

At the time of Danton’s execution he was in jail at the very same prison and expected to die, even wrote farewell letters.… Nobody knows to this day how he escaped death, but extraordinarily he did, and ended up as a general in Napoleon’s army.⁷

Les Liaisons Dangereuses is an ‘epistolary’ novel, in the same genre as Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse or the novels of Samuel Richardson. Constructed entirely of letters written from one of the characters to another, it displays a completely impersonal narrative, with no overt or explicit indication of an authorial point-of-view. Laclos appears in the guise of an ‘editor’, earnestly protesting the veracity of his sources; and in the persona of a ‘publisher’, ironically questioning the authenticity of the book’s contents.⁸ Of course, the ‘Publisher’s Note’ and ‘Editor’s Preface’ are exercises in ironic imitation, typical eighteenth-century spoofs, like those prefaces of Defoe and Fielding which assure the reader of the morally unexceptionable character of the novel he or she is about to read. That point in the narrative where the author, through a particularly sharp ironic mode, manifests his presence with greatest clarity, is paradoxically the point where the double-ness of his ironic style defeats any effort on the reader’s part to make connections between Laclos’s life and his novel. Ultimately, the novel must, like a play, speak for itself.

The chief critical problem raised by the novel is precisely this question of authorial perspective. What sort of attitude towards its protagonists does the novel appear to encourage? Is it an Enlightenment critique of the frivolity and corruption of the French aristocracy, as they appeared to a detached observer’s eye shortly before the Revolution that destroyed them? Or is it rather a piece of ‘high pornography’, a genre much favoured by writers of the time, designed to provoke voyeuristic fascination rather than moral outrage at the sexual intrigues depicted? The novel could certainly be read in the latter way earlier in its history, and there is little doubt that in its new manifestation as Dangerous Liaisons it is offered, at least in terms of media representation, as a narrative of sexual adventure.⁹ Its subtitle – Letters Collected in One Section of Society, and Published for the Edification of Others – suggests the detached moral stance of an outsider, comprehending in a clearly defined moral perspective the corruption of the ruling class. The novel was certainly viewed in the nineteenth century as a particularly dangerous book, defended by Baudelaire, condemned to destruction in 1824 by the cour royale de Paris, and feared as much (perhaps) for the subversiveness of its class analysis as for the salaciousness of its sexual intrigues.

Christopher Hampton was clearly confident in his understanding of the relationship between author and novel (his view here expressed by Jason Best, in a published interview with the dramatist):

The bourgeois Laclos, contrary to what many readers may have imagined, was writing a condemnation of the ancien régime’s depravity, not a celebration of its erotic Machiavellianism. Beneath the architectonic brilliance of the novel’s design, the almost mathematical precision of its pointing, there was, for those readers prepared to look between the lines, an excoriating attack on the codes and values of the upper class.¹⁰

Hampton suggests that the author’s bourgeois viewpoint emerges in the novel through the character of Mme de Tourvel: ‘I do think Madame de Tourvel is the repository of decent feelings in the story, the character that was most sympathised with by Laclos himself.’¹¹ That bourgeois consciousness, condemning the aristocratic code of mariage de convenance and extramarital adultery, constitutes for Hampton a kind of proto-feminism:

I think Laclos was certainly a feminist. At the time of the Revolution he said there can be no revolution without a proper education for women. The fact that these poor girls are stuffed away in convents and then brought out at the age of 15 to be sold to the highest bidder is something he disapproved of very strongly.¹²

There, of course, Hampton is able to invoke Laclos’s published views on the education of women in support of his own attempt to construct a distinct authorial viewpoint, which in turn appears as a mixture of the moral and the political: Laclos’s ‘disapproval’ of the objects of his artistic representation takes the form, it is assumed, of a self-evidently critical perspective, linked with a continual predictive adumbration (made explicit at the end of the play) of the shadow of revolution (‘You can’t read the novel without thinking all this has got to stop’¹³). That sense of an imperative need to arrest the process of decadence and corruption is both an articulation of moral outrage, and a retrospective confidence in the almost providential pattern of history, taking revenge through the Revolution on the effete and luxury-loving aristocracy. Hampton used a comment from André Malraux as epigraph to his play:

Comme devant tant d’oeuvres de notre temps – pas seulement littéraires – le lecteur des Liaisons eut pu dire: ‘Ça ne peut pas durer ainsi.’¹⁴

More than so many works of our own age – and not just literary works – the reader of Liaisons has to say: ‘This can’t go on.’

However, in the absence of any explicit authorial commentary within the novel, this (or any other) interpretation of its ideological perspective must emerge formally, from the significant interaction of the items of epistolary correspondence. Each letter is written by one character, to another, and concerns third parties connected with both: each act of communication ramifies in various directions, and performs a number of different functions – to express, to impress, to persuade, to challenge, to cause an action or provoke a reaction. Each letter tells us as much about the writer as it does about the correspondent or the other characters to whom it alludes. It is worth remembering that at this time prose fiction had not by any means reached that great generic consensus known as ‘realism’ and had not established any of its manifold narrative possibilities as dominant: it was a highly experimental and volatile form. The epistolary novel was, at one level, one of the means by which the novel pretended to a naturalistic imitation of life: such texts always purported (fictionally) to be actual documentary records of discovered correspondence. When read as fiction, of course, such texts operated at the furthest remove from naturalism, calling attention to their own artifice in rhetorical, typographical and narrative ways.

STAGING

The epistolary novel could in some ways be described as a particularly dramatic form, since the utterances of the characters, like the speeches of actors on stage, are offered directly to the reader, rather than mediated through some form of fictional narrative. In other ways the epistolary novel is not dramatic, or at least not like a play, at all. The basic convention of epistolary fiction presupposes distance: you would not (except in very exceptional circumstances) write a letter to someone who was actually next to you. The basic convention of stage drama is physical proximity: dramatic action needs people on stage together to secure its most characteristic effects. Proximity in representational space (on stage, on screen) need not, of course, necessarily signify proximity in space and time within the ‘real-life’ space represented (compare, for example, the use of split-screen techniques in television and film). In a theatre where anti-naturalistic conventions are possible on stage, there is no reason why simultaneity and physical proximity should not be read as distance in time and space, from the cosmic figures of the medieval mystery-play who converse across a stage spanning Heaven and Hell, to the stock-market whizz-kids of Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money who communicate with one another by telephone from opposite sides of the stage. In Laclos’s Liaisons Dangereuses Valmont and Merteuil meet only once. If Christopher Hampton had attempted in his adaptation to imitate that narrative detail, he would have had to start from a much more anti-naturalistic basis than any he did actually in practice countenance.

For reasons of this kind, the letters largely disappear from the stage version (though they re-appear, interestingly, in the film).

Laclos’ novel is composed of letters and one of the difficulties of adapting it for the theatre is that, in the course of it, Valmont and Merteuil meet only once. In tackling this problem, I lost almost all trace of the novel’s letter-technique … ¹⁵

In the novel, as we shall see, the epistolary technique makes possible narrative devices of simultaneity, montage and superim-position, which are lost from the stage play. In the novel whatever controlling ideological attitude or governing moral perspective there may be must necessarily be formulated in the meaningful interaction of the letters. Yet Hampton did not think these devices necessary in order to sustain, in a stage adaptation, the novel’s moral critique. Even more surprisingly, Hampton obviously intended that the stage production should be a much more natural istic production than the one that actually emerged in the Other Place. Earlier I quoted the dra...