To Honor an Old Story, Tell It Anew
Some people talk about old stories like they’re fragile antiques.
Don’t touch them. Don’t move them, reinterpret them. The only thing one can do with an old story, they say, is to tell it exactly as it was the first time, or as close to it as we can get. Anything less than maximal “authenticity” is disrespectful.
Parents and teachers alike ought to avoid this trap. The dogma of static stories stifles our kids’ creativity. Believing that those who have gone before are only able to speak in their own voices, in their own time, separates our children from their cultural heritage.
Films, books, retellings—these should not be things we run from, but leaping-off points for telling the same good old stories.
Culture Is Flesh, Not Marble
There are two instincts that lead to the stories-as-antiques attitude.
We fear a good old story cheapened or told badly. There are a million and one examples. Robin Hood and King Arthur seem to account for half of them alone. When a bad film wears the skinsuit of a good old story, it is a tragic thing to see. Everyone who has read a book and seen it torn to shreds on the big screen knows that feeling.
We also fear that the fundamental message of those good old stories will be ruined. If contemporary flanderizations are well-made enough or popular enough, they can derail or even totally invert the message of the source material. Animal Farm’s latest film adaptation turned a warning about socialist revolutions into a critique of capitalism. Robin Hood is flattened from a yeoman/crusader battling a usurper’s tyrannical tax policies into someone who “robs from the rich to give to the poor.”
Shallow, poor, ideologically warped adaptations are a real problem. The answer, though, cannot be to put our great epics and folk tales and cultural inheritance in a box, never to be touched. Doing so might save us from some bad tellings. It will also rob us of new greatness.
If “honoring the source material” means that nothing new can be made of it, then most of the Western canon would have to be jettisoned as subversion.
William Shakespeare did not create his stories from thin air. His history plays were drawn from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles. Romeo and Juliet was based on Arthur Brooke’s 1562 poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. Brooke himself was inspired by earlier versions of the story, too. And so on. Nor did Shakespeare follow the historical record, or his narrative forebears, with careful precision! Ancient history was made to remark on then-contemporary concerns. The true Macbeth would likely be appalled to watch the play that bears his name.
It is in that same tradition that arguably the greatest of the Disney Renaissance films was created: The Lion King. Sometimes people joke about The Lion King being “unoriginal.” In one sense, that is true—Hamlet’s plots, characters, and themes are all manifest influences on the tale of Simba. That does not undermine the movie any more than Brooke’s work undermines Romeo and Juliet. I would happily tolerate the existence of a hundred bad adaptations if it meant that we get another one like The Lion King.
Shakespeare was not alone. Adapting and building on others’ ideas is a long-standing Western tradition. Dante, whose Divine Comedy has shaped the Western imagination and our ideas of Hell, justice, and redemption for centuries, did not invent his world ex nihilo; he had to build on centuries of Christian tradition. By his own admission, Dante was greatly inspired by the ancient Roman poet Virgil and even made Virgil a character in his story.
Does the fact that Dante took considerable inspiration from his ancestors diminish him? Do the ways they considerably differ mean his project dishonors those ancestors? No. Inspiration enlarges Dante. It carries forward the old and builds something new.
Marble statues are one of my favorite things to see at a museum. The vision and the craftsmanship always astound me in the ways they can represent reality in stone. Yet culture is not a marble thing: still, unmoving. It is made by people who live and breathe, and it is made to be appreciated by people, too.
Even this analogy is not as simple as we might expect.
Ancient statues now appear pristine, white, pure stone and form. For centuries, that quality of marble shaped the way that people imagined antiquity. Despite that expectation, Greek and Roman statues were often originally painted. And while we can recover the base layer of paint, the ancient surfaces were likely exemplars of the same refined painting techniques that we have recovered through modern archaeology.
The Renaissance masters tried to recover the ancient world. Limited by their technology and their time, they missed something that would have been fundamental to the ancients’ experience of their statues. Yet in their efforts, they captured something both old and new, created great works of their own, and enriched the Western world.
In the same way, we today cannot perfectly recreate the experience of the ancients. This is not a reality that we can escape, despite our best efforts. We will always be limited by the knowledge, technology, and assumptions that govern our age. We cannot receive the past in a vacuum. We can look back with reverence and appreciate the greatness that we do understand.
Like ancient art, the old stories are valuable because they point to the human and the beautiful and the true. We should preserve the marble statues—but without losing our vision of the things those statues represent.
Adapting Honorably
Adaptation is not inherently dishonorable. It is one of the central habits by which we honor old stories. But there are a few do’s and don’ts for adapting honorably and dishonorably.
Don’t adapt with contempt. If the writers see the work solely as a problem that needs to be corrected, the resulting work is almost always not just bad or forgettable, but terrible in a unique way. The hero must be punished, exposed, embarrassed. No one likes a scold.
Don’t adapt superficially. Keeping the names, costumes and props, or some plot machinery is not enough to make a good adaptation. The deeper meaning should be the core that is carried forward, not just the surface appearance. This is the problem with most modern Robin Hood retellings, for example—the character might shoot a bow and have a big friend, but the spirit is gone.
Don’t adapt for nostalgia alone. Unlike the other two options, this is one pitfall that usually tricks the writer into thinking they are actually defending the tradition and the original. Loving the old thing so much that creativity is stifled in pursuit of mere repetition—this is a major reason the “live-action” (really just 3D animated) version of The Lion King fell flat.
A living tradition can’t survive adapting old stories this way. Fear of those pitfalls is natural. But we can create things that are good and true and honor the old stories.
Do adapt with love. Even if the old stories need to be updated for modern audiences or a new medium, the audience should feel that the changes are made from love, not hatred. This is why the Lord of the Rings film franchise, despite considerable changes in adaptation, is still beloved.
Do adapt the core messages and eternal truths. Costumes and names can fall to the wayside if the central message lasts. Especially in new formats and media, a great adaptation can do things that the original could not as long as it carries forward the inspiration. This is why O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Ulysses—a film set in the American South and an Irish novel—can both live as two great adaptations of the original Odyssey.
Do adapt with greatness in mind. A cheap or quick adaptation doesn’t do anyone any good. All of the great adaptations take their craft seriously, whatever the medium. Inspiration does not negate the need for true artistic expression and expertise.
There are also different approaches to an adaptation that can change how we interpret its quality. The new creator can try to recreate the original closely, only adapting to a new medium or for a new audience. This is what most people seem to expect from an adaptation. It directly invites comparison. In failed book-to-film adaptations, for example, “the book was better” or “it’s not a faithful adaptation” are common reactions because we expect that the adaptation, bearing the name and the surface of the original, will hew closely to it in as many ways as possible.
Or the new creator can try to diverge from the original in substantive ways, but carry forward the spirit. The further the divergence, the better it is to change the setting, names, and so on. The Lion King doesn’t make its main character literally named Hamlet. O Brother, Where Art Thou? has a one-eyed Ku Klux Klan member rather than a literal cyclops. But these are quality adaptations, too. The spirits of the old stories are in those newer movies.
A disconnect comes when we might expect the first style of adaptation and get the other. But if the core principles are followed — the do’s and the don’ts — both styles can be great.
Bringing the Ancient to the Next Generation
We need the original stories. Without Hamlet, we cannot create The Lion King. Ignorance of the originals is how we end up with a terrible feedback loop: adaptations of adaptations of adaptations, as my colleague Sean wrote. It would be a tragedy if we lost Shakespeare, Dante, or Tolkien. Yet there is an opposite flaw—refusing to create the next The Lion King because we hold Shakespeare too precious.
Inspiration and adaptation should never cheapen or replace the good old stories. Rather, handled well, they are one way the next generation can rediscover them. Preservation is not enough. A copy of the Odyssey that sits dusty on a shelf, unread, cannot transmit its greatness by itself. A history narrative never told is only a useless record. By inspiration and adaptation, we can break through to students who might otherwise remain ignorant of their cultural heritage. The only girl I knew in high school who watched a production of Hamlet on her own, unprompted by any assignments, was the one who had grown up loving The Lion King.
The value of adaptation is not only true of myths, plays, novels, or epic poems.
At Lexandria, we have a full copy of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. We are also working with the Adam Smith Institute to have a wide variety of resources that adapt that content for people who are not going to sit down and read the full text of Smith’s work. From a graphic novel version that makes his ideas visible, to an abridged version and classroom-ready resources, The Wealth of Nations’ arguments that have shaped the modern world are more accessible than ever. A good adaptation, whether of a story or an argument, serves as an invitation to the greatness of the original.
Lexandria is working to make the good old stories available. Teachers and parents will make sure they are intelligible. Adaptations can make them accessible to everyone, from the beginners to the experts.
