This… this is a real thing? Really Dali, not just Daliesque? MUST HAVE!
As Austin Dobson wrote:
“Enchanting Alice! Black and white
have made your dreams perennial
And nought save Chaos and old Night
can save you now from Tenniel” - I learnt that from the preface to my edition when I was 8.
As someone says on a harvard.edu page, “While Carroll welcomed books “of the Alice type”, he most likely would have disliked new artists’ interpretations of Alice itself.” And this is surely right. He worked with Tenniel to realise his vision for Alice - he was enormously fussy over the production values of his books, and his publisher hated him till they became wildly successful. It is a pity that people of limited originality (Disney, I am thinking of you) have to take other people’s stories rather than create their own.
Kipling would be horrified by the mess Disney made of his Jungle Books, for instance, which are set in a clearly realised India but which Disney migrates to a vaguely Afro-Indian theme park. Could Disney really not come up with scriptwriters to create their own original stories instead of bastardising Kipling?
It is especially bad when, as in the Alice case or the Just So Stories, the author has defined his vision pictorially, either by working with a gifted illustrator or by himself. It reminds me of a review of a film version of an Austin novel, pointing out that as the theatre was well established in Bath when Jane Austen lived there, had she meant to write a play she could easily have done it.
This reminds me of Ralph Steadman’s work.
Thank G-d you’ve never read that British hack, Shakespeare. Not an original story in the corpus.
Dali reminds you of Ralph Steadman? Shouldn’t that be the other way around?
It depends upon who you were introduced to, first. And if you are not intimately familiar with Dali’s work, these illustrations will appear different from his well-known Melting Clocks et alia.
Don’t forget the influence of T.S. Eliot on Wm. Shakespeare.
The Steadman-esque parts are what’s good about these drawings.
English hack, please.
The big difference is this: Shakespeare took the original plots and made more of them. He increased their psychological depth; he was such a master of language that he imposed an idiom on literary English that has only really died during the 20th century. Disneyfying makes less out of the originals.
To take my own example, the original Jungle Book is about survival under Indian conditions, and the conflict between man and nature. The thread running through it is the importance of law. It isn’t a jolly romp of stuffed toys. If Kipling had turned a children’s story into a dark psychological drama that shed light on the human condition and our relations with the natural world, that would be akin to what Shakespeare did.
Also, the bits of the Bhagavad-Gita that were written by Eliot.
So… it’s okay to not have original stories?
SO CONFUSED WITH ALL OF THESE STANDARDS
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