1.7 Re-Reading and Re-Writing Texts
When we first read a story, we submit to the narrative, constructing a story that follows narrative conventions. Often the first read is pleasurable, one where we follow the beginning, middle, and end of the story to know the setting, plot and characters. This is a process of reading comprehension. But pleasure and purpose-driven reading intersect when a text is re-read over and over. At this point, the reader’s aim is to spark creativity with less attention to structure. Artist, Rinde Eckert, created a staged operatic version of Moby-Dick, moving the story into a more contemporary setting.
His comments offer some interesting insights into what it is like to read Moby-Dick as a creative artist looking for material to inform your next project:
Seek out an example of a close reading of a single scene from a fan forum devoted to a work you care about. Are there moments in the close reading that seem especially interesting or telling, even if that portion of the text does not receive much attention in the original text? If so, how can you expand upon that moment, making it the focus of a short vignette or scene in a play?
Recognition of unrealized potential can become the basis for new kinds of creative expression. This is what fans seek when they look for a starting point for fan fiction. They find a line, a gesture, or a facial expression they think requires further reflection and elaboration. They use that moment as inspiration for an original story.
His comments offer some interesting insights into what it is like to read Moby-Dick as a creative artist looking for material to inform your next project:
I describe my research as hunting, which means I'm looking for a thread, I'm looking for my spine, the thing that's going to serve like the king-post in the whaleboat. My first reading was, I suppose, what everyone's first reading is: you just submit as you go through it. This confirmed my assumptions about the work.—Rinde EckertHere, Eckert discusses first-time reading as opposed to subsequent rereading.
On the third reading, one particular point jumped out at me. It's Ahab pacing on the deck. He's smoking his pipe, and it's not satisfying. Melville writes, "He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks." I thought this is masterful. This emblem of bourgeois life, even the intent to recover that bourgeois life in the pipe, he [Ahab] finally gives that up. At that moment he's dedicated to his path; now there's no turning back, and at that moment we have the image of the pipe sinking and the bubbles coming up. We have that vertical thing, the fire sinking and the air coming up in the form of bubbles. At the same time he [Melville] takes us right into the straightforward motion of that ship.
The same instant the ship shot by the bubble the pipe made... So you have this cross, one thing that's going vertically down, and the vector that's going across. Then, as the coup de grace, he reinforces that with, "With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks." He creates a second cross, so we have this juxtaposition of vectors that creates two crosses. I thought, this is just so simple, but it's complex. I went on to the fourth reading, and I was saying, it just keeps on going, I don't think there's any end to it. —Rinde EckertHere, Eckert describes what he discovered on his third reading of the book, singling out moments that might have seemed insignificant before but inspired him to think about the story from a different perspective. Can we compare his experience with students who have identified what they discovered in favorite films or television programs after watching them for a third or fourth time?
Seek out an example of a close reading of a single scene from a fan forum devoted to a work you care about. Are there moments in the close reading that seem especially interesting or telling, even if that portion of the text does not receive much attention in the original text? If so, how can you expand upon that moment, making it the focus of a short vignette or scene in a play?
Recognition of unrealized potential can become the basis for new kinds of creative expression. This is what fans seek when they look for a starting point for fan fiction. They find a line, a gesture, or a facial expression they think requires further reflection and elaboration. They use that moment as inspiration for an original story.
You have this image of years' worth of goods stowed in. Everything is completely meaningful. A ship can't afford anything that doesn't belong. Everything has to be used. Everything has to have double uses. Melville's whole novel is like the ship, packed with all this stuff. You need everything. You need the practical stuff. You need the provisions. You need to know.—Rinde Eckert.Having read Moby-Dick many times now, Eckert comes away with a greater respect for the structure of the whole: he has discovered why every detail is there, what each adds to the narrative, and how the narrative gives subsequent artists more to work with. Some contemporary writers have talked about the encyclopedic quality of many contemporary long-form stories—book series, film franchises, or television series—which may extend over many installments and which give a sense of having more information than any one reader can absorb.
Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the author of Moby-Dick: Then and Now, describes his reading process with a focus on the appropriation and transformation of Melville's materials: “In a sense you go through a process of trying to make your idea fall apart. Every step of the way you say, I want to put up barriers; I'm going to see how many barriers the novel will present to me, so that this project will fail before we get to the end of it.”
Pitts-Wiley starts with a set of ideas he wants to explore in his play, and he reads the novel against those themes, trying to see if his interpretation holds up in the face of Melville's own writing. Pitts-Wiley describes the process as a struggle between reader and writer, each trying to assert his own control over the material.
How might we compare this with other common ways of thinking about the adaptation process where we are told to be "faithful" to the "spirit" of the original work or to try to preserve as many of the details as possible? What does this say about our own experiences as readers? Is our task only to understand what the author intended or are we freer to engage the work with our imaginations, our insights about the world, or our own purposes?
Pitts-Wiley describes how he converted Melville's novel into a stage play: "I downloaded the entire novel and went through page by page and took out everything that wasn't in quotes. That's the way I started. Okay, now I had a seventeen-hour script. Now you go back through, and you say, what's important? When is it active? Where are the verbs? Okay, here is a strong verb sequence; I need it. Then you go back through, and you say, “What's the duplicate scene? How do I replicate this scene for today?"
As a reader in the process of becoming an author, Pitts-Wiley asks very pragmatic questions. He finds lines his actors can speak and actions they can perform. He looks for moments in the novel that offer parallels to contemporary concerns. You might compare this process of reading through the novel with a pen in hand to the kinds of notes your students take as they read the novel. Ask them to establish a goal for taking notes. They now have to make decisions about what elements of the novel matter to them and why. They have to decide which passages to underline and which passages to skip over.
Pitts-Wiley starts with a set of ideas he wants to explore in his play, and he reads the novel against those themes, trying to see if his interpretation holds up in the face of Melville's own writing. Pitts-Wiley describes the process as a struggle between reader and writer, each trying to assert his own control over the material.
How might we compare this with other common ways of thinking about the adaptation process where we are told to be "faithful" to the "spirit" of the original work or to try to preserve as many of the details as possible? What does this say about our own experiences as readers? Is our task only to understand what the author intended or are we freer to engage the work with our imaginations, our insights about the world, or our own purposes?
Pitts-Wiley describes how he converted Melville's novel into a stage play: "I downloaded the entire novel and went through page by page and took out everything that wasn't in quotes. That's the way I started. Okay, now I had a seventeen-hour script. Now you go back through, and you say, what's important? When is it active? Where are the verbs? Okay, here is a strong verb sequence; I need it. Then you go back through, and you say, “What's the duplicate scene? How do I replicate this scene for today?"
As a reader in the process of becoming an author, Pitts-Wiley asks very pragmatic questions. He finds lines his actors can speak and actions they can perform. He looks for moments in the novel that offer parallels to contemporary concerns. You might compare this process of reading through the novel with a pen in hand to the kinds of notes your students take as they read the novel. Ask them to establish a goal for taking notes. They now have to make decisions about what elements of the novel matter to them and why. They have to decide which passages to underline and which passages to skip over.
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