Yesterday I looked at the catalysts for Drood studies past and present, the effective application of a scientific method to the mystery of Edwin Drood, and how looking at the spaces of the novel can lead us further away from the solution than when we started.
Today I’ll look at two more themes of the conference…
4) Round up the usual suspects*
Another group of presenting detectives gathered together those ‘persons of interest’ with which any inquiry cannot help but engage.
I mentioned Sven Karsten’s exploration of Sapsea’s historical origins at the end of my last post, and I also contributed to proceedings by looking at three different film interpretations of the most likely suspect, the villainous John Jasper. Across the three screen adaptations that I looked at – the 1935 Universal Studios production, Timothy Forder’s 1993 film, and the BBC’s 2012 bicentenary two-parter – I observed how Jasper was first demonised:
Claude Rains’s “diabolic” Jasper
Then pathologised:
Robert Powell’s “psychological” Jasper
and finally humanised:
Matthew Rhys’s “sympathetic” Jasper
The final body of evidence was presented by literary anatomiser Emma Curry, who sifted through the textual clues surrounding the enigmatic “single buffer” Datchery. Yet after carefully composing an artist’s impression of this “white- haired personage, with black eyebrows”, Emma admitted how readers are forced to accept Datchery’s ‘maddening inscrutability’. Indeed, as with the locations of the novel, a closer inspection of the characters’ appearances leaves us with more questions than answers – Dickens provides us some tantalising glimpses of his characters’ bodies, but seems to evade providing us with the more substantial details that we need to construct a coherent and compelling case.
5) Drood has represented a huge creative opportunity for a wide range of writers
So much for looking at the existing evidence, but what about providing an original solution?
Another strong theme of the conference was the positive creative opportunities that an incomplete Drood represents for writers on page and screen. To share some insight into this, we heard from Gwyneth Hughes (screen-writer for the BBC’s bicentenary Drood):
BBC TV’s 2012 “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”
and David Madden, who offered his own completion in 2012 for Unthank Books:
David Madden’s completion
I was particularly struck by how emotionally close to the novel Gwyneth Hughes was, and how her adaptation (pitched as “Part 1 by Charles Dickens, Part 2 by me”) was a deeply personal project rather than merely a job of work (not that I expect any screenwriter commits to a project they aren’t passionate about in some way). Indeed, Gwyneth painfully related the inevitable compromises that had to be made for TV and the battles that such a collaborative project involves – as Clemence Follea reminded us from the floor, adaptations are not romantic ‘single vision’ projects but committee-led industrial products.
(You can read more about Gwyneth’s experience of adapting Drood here).
For David Madden on the other hand, Drood represented ‘the perfect puzzle’, and as a writer for the page he was able to work with much more freedom. Interestingly, both practitioners declared a distance from previous adaptations, having not watched or read any of them before they began their own; thus rather than writing in reaction to or in sympathy with previous “versions”, they approached the mystery from an entirely fresh perspective. Concerns with plagiarism aside, I was initially quite surprised by this, but then this may be the difference between the artist and the critic …
This conference also paid tribute to other kinds of reincarnations and reinvigorations of Dickens’s text, and looked at Drood’s footprints across culture more widely. As Tom Ue noted, the ending (in particular) of George Gissing’s Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903) seems to be informed by Dickens’s strategies in Drood. Moving forward in time, Clemence Follea explained how ghostly traces and echoes of Dickens’s lines are reimagined by Susan Howe as lines of poetry – another symptom perhaps of the appealing and liberating endlessness, openness and unfinishedness of the novel.
These echoes were also interpreted by Anne-Marie Beller, who looked at Dan Simmons’s Drood “origins” novel, Drood (2009):
“Drood”, by Dan Simmons
Anne-Marie acknowledged that such echoes are not only attractive for those interested in the supernatural, but also culturally important – they propagate and perpetuate the pre-eminence and relevance of Dickens, a practice that we are all more than willing to engage in as literary critics and ‘keepers of the flame’ of Victorian literature.
*Anyone who can tell me the link between this title and “Drood” wins my eternal esteem (which has no cash equivalent).
Victorian is the New Black 