The Epigraph

Waugh chose this as the epigraph for Vile Bodies, taken from Through the Looking Glass,

'Well in our country,' said Alice , still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'

'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'

'If I wasn't real,' Alice said - half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous - 'I shouldn't be able to cry.'

'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt. 

So, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing perhaps? A world running to stand still certainly. But signifying nothing? As I reread Vile Bodies yet again I come more and more to be chilled. It is frenetic and consistently funny (this, I think is what I got out of it when I first read it in my teens) but resolutely bleak. The episode of Adam and Nina's tryst in Arundel (Chapter Five) is typical. Within a page the deflowered Nina both casually damns physical love, 'My dear, I never hated anything so much in my life ... still, as long as you enjoyed it that's something' (VB p69) and yet wistfully and sweetly hints at a genuine affection neither is programmed to accommodate - 'It's awful to think that I shall probably never, as long as I live, see you dancing like that again all by yourself.' (p70). This bleakness does signify. It matters and although the particular milieu which produced it is long gone, it is possible to detect modern resonance. Take for example the centrality to the plot of the gossip columnists (one of whom poignantly, but of course comically, kills himself at the book's turn) who half fabricate their news and yet have a symbiotic relationship with their prey. The bright young things really have nothing but their hedonistic celebrity. Sound familiar? 

The frenzy and the comedy are a gift to adaptation.There is a lot of good dialogue with potential for transplant straight to the stage. The underlying darkness is more challenging. Should it be hammered home or  do we trust the consumer to work it out? The latter I think, but what to do about that difficult final chapter? More to follow.

Problems. I mention the abundance of great dialogue. This is good. It is put in the mouths of a vast army of characters. This is bad. I count twenty-four characters in the first dozen pages. So the first big decision is a a practical one. Severe pruning of the number of characters will have to be done but I am considering giving supporting players multiple roles. This device would be openly acknowledged, in fact I favour the mutation being in full view on occasions. A feature of the characters is that many of them are cast from similar moulds and when they talk to each other they might very well be conversing with themselves. A conversation between the two impecunious aristocratic gossip writers conducted through the medium of a single actor might be intriguing. This line of thought dictates that I will need a very large expanse of paper on which to plan. I can't run to a whiteboard so the plan is to take down the family pictures on the far wall of my study and to tack up rolls of lining paper. This is how I am accustomed to working. As much material in single sight as possible, lines connecting disparate elements, Post It stickers everywhere. That is how I used to run a company sale. That and lots of coffee. Good stuff mind, none of your instant. Oh and bananas. You need bananas.

Finally a defence of adaptation which I have found reassuring as I seek to interfere with an established cultural artefact,

an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative - a work that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing.

(Hutcheon p9)