Books continue each other, part 2

Continuation distinguished from thematic contents and adaptation

To begin, I must confess that I likely overstated my case in the previous post, when I claimed the idea that books continue each other is somehow an “anti-theory.” Though I think the idea is valid and intriguing, it’s not exactly ground-breaking or revelatory. It’s certainly not radical enough to take down the house(s) that literary theory has built.

It’s probably more accurate to say that this comment, which Virginia Woolf made seemingly in passing in A Room of One’s Own, simply struck me as fascinating – so, in my own reading, I’ve kept one mental eye open, looking for ways that books and ideas continue each other. And, lo, I discovered that many books are in conversation with other books, and many writers continue others’ ideas.

I suppose that whole first post was simply an attempt to get this idea a place at the table with other theories. Or, to avoid mixing my metaphors, I should say I was attempting to get the idea its own house in the theory neighborhood. To say that “books continue each other” is, after all, simply providing another lens through which to view literature as a whole.

(And in the interest of full disclosure, I remind you, dear reader, that I teach survey of Western Literature courses at a community college, where a practical, what-can-this-mean-for-me approach is by far the most effective. I may not reside in the Ivory Tower of academe, but I can boast I reside in a more or less comfy RV at its base.)

A handful of short examples

If ever you see a post here with the tag “books continue each other,” then, you’ll know that I’m exploring how one creative mind has borrowed from and adapted the ideas of another. To start us off, here are some short examples: 

Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 Jane Eyre is the story of, you guessed it, Jane Eyre, a perky but plain orphan girl who finds herself a governess in a large, mysterious mansion where the master, a grim man named Rochester, eventually falls in love and wants to marry her despite her humble origins. Jane is reluctant at first, not least because she senses Rochester has a secret – a secret she guesses is somehow connected to the ghostly noises coming from the attic at night. As it turns out, the noises and Rochester’s closed nature are both caused by the fact that his first wife, Bertha, has gone mad and, yes, been locked in the attic.

Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea, written and published over 100 years later in 1966, tells the heartbreaking story of how Bertha, who was born “Antoinette,” came to marry Rochester at her home in the West Indies, and how she slowly went mad when he brought her to England. Rhys’s novel ends with a retelling of the famous house fire scene in Jane Eyre. In the Wide Sargasso Sea version, Antoinette escapes the attic and sets the fire deliberately, to affect her liberation.

Things Fall Apart, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel about the Igbo people and the impact of the arrival of white missionaries, takes its title from a line in W. B. Yeats’ 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” Yeats’ poem was written in the aftermath of the first World War and is an enigmatic and disturbing vision of apocalypse. Lines in the first stanza seem to describe a breakdown of reasonable society: “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” In Achebe’s novel, the things that fall apart are the traditions of the Igbo people and the life of the main character, Okonkwo, a powerful man in his village who loses his influence and, eventually, his life.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, a series of novels about the quest of a knight / gunslinger named Roland, were inspired by the title – and apparently the ominous mood – of Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” (A “childe” is a knight on a quest.)

Alice Randall’s book The Wind Done Gone caused quite a stir by re-imagining the events of Gone With the Wind from the perspective of Scarlett’s half-sister Cynara, a mulatto slave.

Note that a continuation can even cross genres: from poem to novel, novel to poem, book to film or television.

Continuations can be serious, as with Wide Sargasso Sea and Things Fall Apart, or a bit silly, as with the un-dead version of Elizabeth and Darcy’s courtship, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Or continuations can be a bit of both, as with Pride and Prometheus, which weaves together the life of Mary Bennet, a little sister from Pride and Prejudice, with the quest of one Dr. Viktor Frankenstein. (The subtitle of Shelley’s Frankenstein is “a modern Prometheus.”)

Continuation vs. common theme

Allow me to clarify that continuation is not just a matter of similarity in the thematic contents of two books. Take, for example, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and John Grisham’s The Firm. These are books that contain similar themes, but they don’t exactly continue each other.

To Kill a Mockingbird is partly about race and racial prejudice as Atticus Finch, that prototypical Southern lawyer, defends Tom Robinson, a black man, against charges of sexual assault brought by a white woman. The story is told through the voice of Scout, Atticus’s young daughter, and so the novel is also a kind of coming-of-age tale about Scout’s growth and expanding knowledge of the world outside her family.

Beloved also deals powerfully with questions of race and racial prejudice – but Morrison’s novel is told from such a different perspective (a family of escaped and freed slaves) and uses such different literary devices (including the possibility that Beloved is the ghost of a murdered baby) that it could not really be said to “continue” Lee’s. Though the themes are similar, no characters or plot points are repeated.

By the same token, The Firm has thematic threads similar to those in To Kill a Mockingbird – it is set in the South, and the protagonist is an attorney attempting to preserve his integrity – but the book does not exactly pick up where To Kill a Mockingbird left off. Mitch McDeere is no Atticus Finch, and the book is far more concerned with the intricacies of the law than with the culture of the South.

Continuation vs. adaptation

Looked at from a slightly different angle, continuation is also different from adaptation. The film versions of the three novels above, for example, all adjust and adapt to make the transition from one medium to another, but they don’t extend and expand the way a continuation does. The film version of Gone With the Wind is an adaptation – but The Wind Done Gone is a continuation.

To say that a book “continues” another book, then, is to say that one writer has borrowed directly from another, but done a bit of necessary re-invention, lovingly pillaged the original piece to suit her own needs, taken up the torch of the original work and kept running with it.

Coming Soon (Lord willing)

Books continuing each other – isn’t that plagiarism?                                                                The anxiety and the ecstasy of “influence”                                                                     Mash-ups and continuation across different media                                                                     All your meme are belong to us