“How can you edit the classics? I’m afraid reading some of these books is hard work, which is why you have to develop as a reader. If people don’t have time to read Anna Karenina, then fine. But don’t read a shortened version and kid yourself it’s the real thing.”There's no point in editing a classic work for time, whether it's a book, a film, a piece of music, or whatever. What do you take out? Most likely, anything not immediately relevant to the main theme, which is pointless because we're all familiar with the main themes of the classics -- so familiar in fact that many of the classics have become caricatures of themselves in most people's minds.
Michael Slater is Professor of Victorian Literature at Birkbeck College in the University of London. He was editor of The Dickensian (1968-77) and President of the International Dickens Fellowship (1988-90). He has published many books and articles on Dickens.There can be few better qualified to edit Dickens. I would love to read Slater's commentary on Bleak House. But I wouldn't want him to cut the bits that he thinks might bore us.
Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count 'em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?(But go ahead, Ray, tell us how you really feel.)
Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito - out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron's mouth twitch - gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer - lost!
Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like - in the finale - Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant's attention - shot dead.
Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?
To be without a feeling for art is no disaster. A person can live in peace without reading Proust or listening to Schubert. But the misomusist does not live in peace. He feels humiliated by the existence of something that is beyond him, and he hates it. There is a popular misomusy just as there is a popular anti-Semitism. The fascist and Communist regimes made use of it when they declared war on modern art. But there is an intellectual, sophisticated misomusy as well: it takes revenge on art by forcing it to a purpose beyond the aesthetic. The doctrine of engage art: art as an instrument of politics. The professors for whom a work of art is merely the pretext for deploying a method (psychoanalytic, semiological, sociological, etc.). The apocalypse of art: the misomusists will themselves take on the making of art; thus will their historic vengeance be done.posted by pracowity at 2:22 PM on May 8, 2007 [3 favorites]
To start with, I’ll mention that I’m an open-minded sort of person when it comes to judgements of worth—any cog that fits into the machine of existence definitely serves some purpose, after all. When it comes to human creations, I can easily be pursuaded to see the expressive or stimulative value in things that I’ve classified as pedestrian, plain or even abject rubbish. There is beauty in any stirring of the soul, however primal the reaction; “your favourite band sucks” or “your favourite newspaper sucks” is not the sort of claim I’d defend in a contemplative mode.I may be mixing up your opinion with grumblebee's; I suppose I'm still responding to grumblebee here with my 'personal ranking vs. objective ranking' dichotomy.
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Oh, wait.
posted by YamwotIam at 9:17 PM on May 7, 2007