Introduction to Metaphor: The Death of the Literary Work

To assign a metaphorical meaning to a work of literature is a matter of arrogance. One has the gall to read a literary work of art and then declare that the author did not mean what they have written, as it was written. Rather, one declares, the author meant something else entirely. Of course, authors have written metaphorical works and done so meticulously, in order to make some point that they felt might be better expressed in symbol rather than literally. The metaphor is intended to add something to the work – to express something that either can’t be expressed or is less effectively expressed literally. We’re all familiar with metaphorical works that, if written without the metaphor, would be reduced to triviality. The metaphor works to draw out a thesis over the course of hundreds of pages that enforce the thesis by providing a narrative – and narrative appeals to us.

Kafka does not write such metaphors. Gregor Samsa is not metaphorically a bug in the Metamorphosis; he’s very much a vermin, and the fact that he is so isn’t a metaphor either. Kafka does not use language to accomplish some task external to the text and only accomplished through a procedural encounter with it. This mechanical concept of the function of literature is dead. The ontology of the work of art as a living thing, as described by the early phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, supports the becoming-animal of the work of art for Deleuze and Guattari (to be discussed in the final section of this paper). The death of the work of art results from our rendering it ontologically static and axiologically neutral – something that no longer speaks to us, because it is no longer open to alteration through the living symbolic relation between text and interpretation. To quote Daniel W. Smith, ‘A philosophical concept is not a metaphor but a metamorphosis’ (2019: 61).

Part of the fault rests in our concept of reference – that is, the concept of reference as a relation between two discrete entities, a word and a thing, one of which symbolises the other. (This definition, which I in no way endorse, renders all language symbolic, and only emboldens the sophists.

Deleuze famously describes his generation as ‘more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy’.1 His means of escaping this stifling atmosphere is infamous: ‘The main way I coped with it’, Deleuze writes, ‘was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery … I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous’ (1995: 5–6). This provocative image makes it unsurprising if scholars working within the philosophical tradition tend to neglect Deleuze’s readings of other philosophers. Respectable historians of philosophy seldom fraternise with monsters. But even if one adopts this dismissive view of Deleuze’s historical commentaries, an exception would need to be made for his Nietzsche and Philosophy. For, in the same ‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’, Deleuze goes on to state: ‘It was Nietzsche … who extricated me from all this. Because you can’t just deal with him in the same sort of way. He gets up to all sorts of things behind your back. He gives you a perverse taste for … saying simple things in your own way.’ Here, Deleuze indicates that his study of Nietzsche is not an instance of interpretive ‘buggery’. In fact, reading Nietzsche relieves Deleuze’s need for such an approach by enabling him to write in his ‘own name’ (6). Yet, there is a cost for attributing this catalytic function to Nietzsche. If we take Deleuze at his word when he describes Nietzsche and Philosophy as an attempt to pay his ‘debts’ to the history of philosophy (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 16), then this early work seems vulnerable to the stifling interpretative demands that Deleuze otherwise seeks to abjure.

Deleuze’s encounter with Nietzsche occurs at the boundary between the burdens of traditional interpretation and unabashed concept creation. This is perhaps best illustrated by Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return. Nietzsche reveals the idea in a demonic declaration: ‘This life as you live it now and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it’ (GS 341).

A: 1266 AND ALL THAT?

1266 is not as famous a year as 1066 in the history of the British Isles. Nonetheless, it is one useful point of departure for any attempt to compare the legal and political histories of Scotland and Norway. In that year, a long-running conflict between Scotland and Norway came to an end. This culminated in the Treaty of Perth, which was agreed between the representatives of the respective kings of the two countries – Magnus VI of Norway (r. 1263–1280) and Alexander III of Scotland (r. 1249–1286). Both kings shared certain assumptions about what it meant to exercise kingship. Both wanted to articulate the territorial boundaries of their realms – something that the Treaty of Perth helped to achieve. Within their territorial boundaries, they sought to articulate their kingship in similar ways. For example, they both reformed the coinage, in Alexander III's case by establishing a remarkable number of mints across the kingdom during the 1250s, and in Magnus VI's case during the two succeeding decades. In addition, they both cultivated the idea that their realms possessed unitary laws. In the Treaty of Perth, it was provided that the people living in islands ceded by Norway to Scotland would thereafter be governed by the “laws and customs of the kingdom of Scotland and be dealt with and judged according to them from now into the future”. This indicates that Alexander III and his advisers could at least appeal to a unitary law of the realm as an ideal. In Norway, Magnus VI's political efforts after the Treaty of Perth were directed towards unifying the law of the realm, including the law in the Northern Isles and the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland. This reinforced the older idea that the king might issue law for the whole of the realm, and simultaneously created a standard of unified law for the whole kingdom.

Considering these points about Alexander III and Magnus VI together is a helpful way to introduce the present volume, which is concerned with comparative legal history, and specifically comparing the legal histories of Norway and Scotland. The stories of their reigns illustrate that some of the elements essential for any effective comparison are present. Ostensibly, there are similarities in the historical developments of both kingdoms as their rulers sought to forge political and legal identities within their territorial realms.

While Brunel navigated the fraught production of Blighty with relative success, the film's positive reception did not improve his situation at Gainsborough. His next two films were assigned to him by the studio under conditions even less favourable than the first, since both were adaptations of valuable properties rather than original stories. The reliance of producers on existing works brought several issues that further complicated a director's struggle for control. Censorship was a problem and canny authors could wield considerable power over the adaptation and production process; these issues were to affect Brunel's two subsequent productions for Gainsborough.

Adaptation and Silent Cinema

Up to and including Blighty, all Brunel's directorial projects had been based on original screen stories, though this was contrary to the general trend in British silent cinema. For producers, the attraction of successful novels and plays as source material was obvious; a popular title possessed inherent marketing value as well as, hopefully, a well-crafted narrative on which to base their films. Stoll Picture Productions had so much faith in the strategy that it launched its filmmaking activities by acquiring the rights to a raft of literary works, branding its output the ‘Eminent British Authors series’ and promoting its films on the back of the success of the books. According to Jon Burrows, 118 of the 128 titles Stoll made between 1919 and 1928 were based on contemporary English novels, and the approach served the company well for several years (2009: 157). The Ideal Film Company, a distributor which branched out into production in 1915, had rarely strayed from tried-and-tested sources, while British & Colonial's 1923 series ‘Gems of Literature’ reduced works by Shakespeare, Dickens and Sheridan to one reel for easy digestion. Even a young, innovative producer like Michael Balcon failed to buck this trend: of the twenty-two features he produced between 1923 and 1929, only six were from original screen stories.

Rachael Low complained that ‘every possible or impossible play and novel, historical, classical, pot-boiling and contemporary, was wrung into service’ by the film industry, only to be ‘changed about and made uniform by the script department’ (1971: 240–1). Producers were often more interested in such titles for their inbuilt publicity value than their intrinsic quality as material for the screen.

The relationship between Italian culture and the Gothic in the years 1764–1827 – the years of Horace Walpole and E. T. A. Hoffmann, of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley – is a history of reciprocal misconstructions, determining the perception of an alleged Italian ‘delay’, generally stated by scholars without any substantial historical problematisation.

Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Italy is not a nation, but the laboratory of a nation, primarily defining its own identity by means of exclusion. Through a narrative formalised in the Renaissance by Giorgio Vasari, and reiterated by the eighteenth-century reaction against the Baroque, the Italian ‘mode’ in the arts (and by extension in literature) is localised in Italian culture's un-mediated continuity with Classical antiquity, expelling as other-than-self whatever does not fall within the organic cycle of sleep and rebirth of the ‘Classic’: primarily, the ‘maniera tedesca’ [German style] characterising the art of those centuries when the memory of antiquity seemed to be forgotten (Belting 73). It is immediately clear that, as a term derived from the architectural jargon, Horace Walpole's use of the adjective ‘Gothic’ perfectly matches Vasari's definition of ‘maniera tedesca’. From this viewpoint, the act of labelling The Castle of Otranto as a ‘Gothic’ novel does not only mean setting it in the ‘long period of barbarism, superstition, and anarchy dimly stretching from the fifth century […] to the Renaissance’ (Clery 21), but also proposing a deeply anti-Classicist image of Italy, directly challenging the primacy of Classicism as the dominant aesthetics of eighteenth-century Europe (Scianatico 16–22).

Hence the discrepancy between the image of Italy featuring in Gothic novels, from Walpole to Radcliffe and beyond – a ‘Meridionist’ (Pfister 3), Baroque and papist theatre of miracles (Pezzini) – and the actual country, where, in the absence of a unified nation and in a context of linguistic de-territorialisation, literate élites conceptualise Italianness as the un-mediated legacy of Classical tradition in the name of ‘reason’. Established as a keyword in Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina's influential treatise Della ragion poetica (1708), ‘ragione’ (‘reason’, but also ‘rationale’) is employed, throughout the long eighteenth century, as a remarkably open term, progressively constructed as the pivot of philosophical, conceptual, ideological and aesthetic normativity (Aloisi and Camilletti 3–4).

The experiences of war and armed conflicts often impose new roles and identities upon individuals and give rise to new ontological and epistemological discourses that speak to the complexity of political crises and their effects on personal and collective subjectivities. Such experiences tend to affect conventional forms of autobiographical writing. Novel and creative modes of narrating life stories emerge to capture and reflect upon the newly imposed, and often dangerous, circumstances and the way they transform and shape individual and collective everyday lives. In their introduction to Writing War, Writing Lives (2017), Kate McLoughlin, Lara Feigel and Nancy Martin explain that during contexts of war and political unrest, standard forms of life writing tend to be ‘manipulated, stretched, broken and eschewed’ as ‘form-breaking, rebellious tendencies of writing lives are released’ (1, 5). Indeed, as I maintain throughout this book, contemporary life writing subgenres from war-torn contexts tend to be formally experimental in a way that reflects the conditions of trauma, tempo-spatial fragmentation, identity fraction, (neo)colonial oppression and material dispossession – to name a few – surrounding the narratives’ construction and production. However, literary autobiographical accounts emerging from contexts of armed conflicts and national struggles very often sustain a standard, serious register and mode of expression. They are predominantly characterised by the depiction of human suffering and tragedy which are intrinsic to the experience of war; the texts examined in McLoughlin’s et al.’s volume are no exception. However, what would certainly strike us as ‘rebellious’ is the comedic portrayal of such experiences, particularly from the side of the victims. War and national struggles are not inherently funny yet representing them in a humorous frame evokes the interplay between the tragic and the comic. It draws attention to the intersection of the two paradigms – national struggles and comedy – while highlighting the potential significance of humour as a narrative of resistance.

This chapter examines the strategic functions of humour in diaries that record national struggles by contemporary Arab women, namely Palestinian author Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries (2006), and Egyptian novelist and activist Mona Prince’s Revolution is My Name: an Egyptian Woman’s Diary from Eighteen Days in Tahrir (2014).

A: INTRODUCTION

In 1317, a court of the burgh of Aberdeen had regard to what it called the leges burgorum Scocie – the laws of the burghs of Scotland – in determining the outcome of a particular legal process. The leges were used in part to identify the procedures that had to be followed when transferring claims to lands within the burgh from one person to another. Yet what did the court mean when it referred to the leges burgorum Scocie? In essence, that is the central question that will be considered throughout this chapter.

Those familiar with the history of the laws of the medieval Scottish kingdom might quite reasonably assume that when the court considered the leges burgorum Scocie, it was in fact referring to a text that survives in several manuscript witnesses dateable to the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The earliest manuscript witness bar one to the surviving text – the Ayr MS, dateable to 1323–1346 – refers to it as the “captiula legis burgorum Scocie” (i.e. the chapters of the law of the burghs of Scotland), whilst what may be the next earliest witness – the Bute MS, dateable to the final years of the fourteenth century – labels a Scots translation of it the “leges burgorum Scocie facte apud nouvm castrum super Tynam per Dauid regem Scotorum illustrisimum” (i.e. the laws of the burghs of Scotland made at Newcastle upon Tyne by David, most illustrious king of the Scots). This text may itself have owed something – or nothing, or a great deal, it is impossible to know for certain – to lost texts of burgh laws once contained in two rolls in the Scottish royal treasury in Edinburgh Castle in 1292. The rolls were labelled “de legibus assisis regni Scocie et de legibus et consuetudinibus Burgorum Scocie et de quibusdam statutis editis per reges Scocie” (i.e. concerning the laws and assizes of the kingdom of Scotland and concerning the laws and customs of the burghs of Scotland and concerning certain statutes brought forth by the kings of Scotland). Of course, anyone assuming that the court of the burgh of Aberdeen must have had the text attested in the Ayr MS and the Bute MS in mind when it referred to the leges burgorum Scocie might pause to reflect on the fact that the earliest witness to that text is labelled rather differently.

On 4 May 1929, Adrian Brunel attended a gala evening at London's Marble Arch Pavilion. In front of a packed auditorium, he was presented with a Certificate of Merit for directing The Constant Nymph, which had been voted Best British Film of 1928 by the readers of Film Weekly magazine. On the surface, this was the most triumphant moment of his career: the feature had not only been hailed as a fine example of British film art but had also been a massive box office success for Gainsborough Pictures. Yet behind the gloss of the occasion lay deep divisions between the main players in the film's production. Studio head Michael Balcon refused to go on stage, so the film's star, Mabel Poulton, accepted the award on his behalf. Balcon and Brunel were not on speaking terms since Brunel had launched a legal battle against the studio over its apparent breach of his contract, and was suing them for unpaid fees. Brunel's ‘supervisory director’ on the film, Basil Dean, did not attend the ceremony; their working relationship had been extremely strained and, as an experienced filmmaker, Brunel's pride had been dented at having to deputise for a novice.

This event serves to highlight some of the contradictions in Brunel's turbulent film career. Each success emerged from a challenging production history and tells a story of conflict and compromise. Each also preceded a period of intense frustration and unemployment. The acclaim he received for The Constant Nymph from both the press and audiences appeared to vindicate his long-held conviction that art and popularity in the cinema were not mutually exclusive. But, by 1929, silent film was effectively dead, his methods seemed outdated and his career as a director of ‘A’ pictures was over.

This book sets out to examine and assess Adrian Brunel's film career during the 1920s through a consideration of his films and the industrial context in which they were produced, supported by detailed research into his personal papers and other contemporary sources. The intention is to bring new insights into his films by anatomising their production context and history. Each film, or group of films, is examined in relation to a particular issue or debate preoccupying the industry at the time, taking account of the difficulties posed by the unstable environment in which Brunel was at work.

Introduction: I watched it, but I swear it didn't turn me on …

The affective experience shares strong affinities with the pornographic. After-all, if something is geared toward the body and its sensations, “porn” is often affixed as a suffix: food porn, poverty porn, war porn, and so on. Nonetheless, in the (sub)discipline of porn studies (within media studies), the affective experience has often been strangely overlooked, or even disavowed. In many cases, the porn genre is subject to some version of content analysis. From queer theory and post-colonial theory to feminist film theory, porn studies has largely directed its attention to reading porn content in order to situate it within a cultural environment. And there is a near paradox in the analysis of pornography, because whereas “[p]ornography aims to create proximities between viewers and images,” Susanna Paasonen observes, “content analysis is efficient in obscuring these proximities. Both content analysis and studies of representation can be critiqued for being based on and giving rise to a distance between the images studied and the one doing the study.” The discourse of analysis, and the paradigms of content analysis and studies of representation, places a safe distance between the scholar and their subject of analysis. “When studying pornography, such a distance may create a comforting sense of safety as the imaginary line keeps the body genre and the carnal reactions that it evokes at bay.” However, this distance comes at a price, because “the distance may keep the researcher from asking some crucial questions concerning the genre and its affective force.”

Often studies of representation or content analysis attempt to either “redeem” pornographic material because of its progressive potential, or to critique it as a manifestation of regressive political representations. Lover or Hater. While I have no intention of dismissing these important socio-political interventions, and I do my fair share of content analysis, I nevertheless want to honestly engage with what is often left at the front door: the affective experience. Regardless of the ideological implications of the pornographic material, the object of the genre is nearly singular in its intention: sexual arousal.

Mahatma Gandhi has inspired various political activists, writers and filmmakers across the world. Mark Robson’s Nine Hours to Rama (1963), Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), Shyam Benegal’s The Making of the Mahatma (1996) and Feroz Abbas Khan’s Gandhi, My Father (2007) are all well-known films about Gandhi, and Rachel Dwyer lists a few short films and documentaries as well. These constitute a list of cinematic works through which different aspects of Gandhi’s personality have been explored. Likewise, Louis Fischer and Joseph Lelyveld have authored books on Mahatma Gandhi, and various visual artists have paid tribute to him through their art. However, in our patriarchal world, artistic representations of Mahatma’s wife, Kasturba Gandhi, are few and far between. She, who had participated in the freedom struggle along with Mahatma Gandhi, has been under-explored and under-represented to the extent of neglect. Except for a couple of plays and books on Kasturba Gandhi, for example, Neelima Dalmia Adhar’s The Secret Diary of Kasturba (2016), Arun Gandhi’s The Forgotten Woman: The Untold Story of Kastur, Wife of Mahatma Gandhi (1981) and N. C. Beohar’s Kasturba Gandhi: The Silent Sufferer (2018), few books about her exist. Vinod Ganatra proposed to make a documentary about Kasturba Gandhi’s life, but his proposal was rejected by the Films Division of India. This rejection was unequivocally criticised by the filmmaker and by Tushar Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grandson. Kasturba Gandhi suffers from a serious intellectual and creative neglect by Indian society. Arun Gandhi, the son of Manilal Gandhi, Kasturba’s second son, depended upon oral histories to reconstruct his mother’s narrative for the book he wrote about her. With few historical or literary works available, Kasturba Gandhi, as a historical figure, stands marginalised in historiography and cultural studies. The present chapter looks at the representation of Kasturba Gandhi in Benegal’s film The Making of the Mahatma (1996) and through it attempts to compensate for her intellectual neglect.

Acknowledging cinema as an influential art form, the Indian state intervened in its production by establishing the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) and the National Film Development Corporation (NDFC) to promote cinema in the country.

After decades of theorising intertextuality and authorship, the notion of fidelity would seem to have lost all currency as an appropriate criterion for analysing film adaptations. With films often based on literary texts that themselves tend to be adaptations of some other source material, simply comparing a film version to its literary original is considered an unproductive and theoretically flawed operation. Instead of assuming that a film adaptation adapts ‘exactly one text a piece’, or necessarily seeks to reproduce, on its own terms, some deeper essence of the source text, we are urged to conceive of adaptations in terms of intertextual dialogism, that is as artistic texts that, just like the literary sources on which they are nominally based, are situated in the ‘entire matrix of communicative utterances’.

Paradoxically, however, attacks on the fidelity criterion have never stopped, as if the study of film adaptations continues to adhere to a narrowly one-to-one comparative model. Thomas Leitch, for example, lists fidelity as one of the most stubborn fallacies in adaptation studies and explains its persistence as a corollary of the ‘appeal to anteriority’. Classical texts are valued more than modern texts, Leitch explains, especially among scholars who received their training in literary studies, and this invites comparisons between film and book in which the former is always found wanting. For this reason even Robert Stam, a proponent of the intertextual approach to film adaptation, has been accused of relapsing into the fidelity argument. According to Leitch, Stam ‘fetishises novelists and novels’ because he ‘wants to use film to look at literature’. Similar comments have been made about Brian MacFarlane’s influential study Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (1996) and George Bluestone’s pioneering Novels into Film (1957) even if these authors themselves were highly suspicious of the fidelity criterion.

Perhaps the repetitiveness of this anti-fidelity rhetoric demonstrates that the concept of fidelity itself is not entirely useless. After all, comparing a film adaptation to its literary original is an intuitive thing to do and, as long as we remain alert to other factors that may have shaped the end product and its reception (political context, commercial interests, cultural sensitivities), the (one-to-one) comparative model still has much to offer.