Remembrances of things pastiche

[srah]

Defective Yeti did a review of March recently, which is written from the POV of the absent father in Little Women. It actually sounded pretty good.

[Ken Jennings]

D'oh! I knew there was a recent one I was forgetting.

I like how there's even a naming convention growing around these things now. Finn. March. Gotta get the formula down.

[gsong]

Paradise Lost?

[polarea]

Strange how the only ones that I am really familiar with are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Wicked, the book about Oz from the point of view of the wicked witch of the West. It's now a popular musical in Toronto I think, although I haven't nabbed the book from my sister yet, who has it on her beadstead. One of the members of my sailing team said it is a riot, so I'm thinking about stealing it from her soon.

The other thing this makes me think about is my aunt is a playwright, and for two years she has been researching and writing a play of MacBeth from the point of view of the 3 witches: characters close to her heart as she played them often and early in her acting career. For now I think that project has been shelved though, I'll have to ask her if that's because it's an overdone gimick.

[srah]

I hadn't thought of Wicked! Gregory Maguire has several other books along the same lines. You might also throw in The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs.

[DougSundseth]

Simon Hawke did an SF variant of this in his "Time Wars" series (the first book was "The Ivanhoe Gambit"). The conceit was that the protagonists were travelling through time correcting interference in "history", which consisted largely of the events of classical fiction stories. I think this is a bit different, though, since the primary story is that of the time travellers rather than that of the original protagonists (or their supporting characters).

[anonymouscoworker]

In 1971 John Gardner's Grendel was published for the first time, telling the story of Beowulf from the perspective of Grendel. Though, technically, Beowulf wasn't a novel so much as it was an oral folk-tale eventfully written down by a monk.

[kevbot]

I was going to mention The March, which comes out of Little Women. It won the Pulitzer last year, which I found startling. Also Wicked and the other Maguire books. To a degree, I think we can also mention The Hours, though that's stretching it.

I noticed this trend about a year ago, and thought it would be funny to write a book about it. A fiction book, about a guy who takes a minor character from East of Eden and sticks her into a horror/sci-fi story. It's sort of a parody of the whole thing, sort of an homage. That's how I understand the whole trend, actually: sort of an homage. I can't say as if I love the results all the time, but the concept has always struck me as interesting.

[krf100]

This probably doesn't count since it was same author, but OSC's "Bean" books were brilliant in telling the exact same story (Ender's Game, et al.) from another point of view. I still marvel at how well he handled this assignment.

[TheConfessor]

The new trend in retelling stories from a different character's perspective may have been inspired by the rich history of "answer songs," which did the same thing. For example:

Queen Of The House answered King Of The Road
It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels answered Wild Side Of Life
Roll With Me Henry answered Work With Me Annie
I'm The Girl From Wolverton Mountain answered Wolverton Mountain
My Long Black Veil answered Long Black Veil
I'll Save The Last Dance For You answered Save The Last Dance For Me

And many more...

In most cases, the answer song is viewed as a novelty and held in lower regard than the original song. I imagine the same would be true of answer books.

[Ken Jennings]

I was going to mention The March, which comes out of Little Women. It won the Pulitzer last year, which I found startling.

March, the Alcott pastiche, is not The March, the Doctorow book. Though they're both about the Civil War.

Also, Hamlet and Faulkner's The Hamlet are two different books.

[Ken Jennings]

Paradise Lost?

Ho ho ho.

I hadn't even thought of Grendel, but it's probably a better early example than Wide Sargasso Sea, since it more brazenly trades on the whole Wicked turnabout thing.

[bwouns]

Bob Dylan's "Clothesline Saga" off of The Basement Tapes is considered an answer song to Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billy Joe"

[kevomatic]

The new trend in retelling stories from a different character's perspective may have been inspired by the rich history of "answer songs," which did the same thing. For example:

Queen Of The House answered King Of The Road
It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels answered Wild Side Of Life
Roll With Me Henry answered Work With Me Annie
I'm The Girl From Wolverton Mountain answered Wolverton Mountain
My Long Black Veil answered Long Black Veil
I'll Save The Last Dance For You answered Save The Last Dance For Me

And many more...

In most cases, the answer song is viewed as a novelty and held in lower regard than the original song. I imagine the same would be true of answer books.

Was anybody else listening to Dutch Hardcore in 1991?
James Brown Is Dead begat James Brown Is Still Alive begat Who The F*ck Is James Brown?, all lovingly chronicled at Wikipedia, of course.

[Noveltoons]

In most cases, the answer song is viewed as a novelty and held in lower regard than the original song.

One huge exception: Sweet Home Alabama, a retort to Neil Young's Southern Man

[Ken Jennings]

Sweet Home Alabama is definitely held in lower regard than Southern Man by me, at least.

Answer songs are, of course, descended from answer poems, like Walter Raleigh's reply to Christopher Marlowe. Raleigh, Marlowe: quit with the coy poems and just get a room already.

Just to further threadjack the threadjack: I like sequel songs ("Peggy Sue Got Married," "Judy's Turn to Cry") better than answer songs.

[Honeybee]

Sweet Home Alabama is definitely held in lower regard than Southern Man by me, at least.

Oh Ken. I just lost so much respect for you. *shakes head*

[Ken Jennings]

Much as I hate to defend some effete Canadian hippie over a bunch of redneck yahoos...

Oh, wait. I don't hate that at all. Skynyrd sucks.

[Honeybee]

Much as I hate to defend some effete Canadian hippie over a bunch of redneck yahoos...

Oh, wait. I don't hate that at all. Skynyrd sucks.

*is shocked* You are so WRONG!

When I was in high school, I worked at a luggage store. Once I sold a suitcase to the current lead singer of Skynyrd, Johnnie Van Zant.

[ArtVark]

Just to further threadjack the threadjack: I like sequel songs ("Peggy Sue Got Married," "Judy's Turn to Cry") better than answer songs.

Since we're now talking about Sequel songs, how about Harry Chapin's song "Sequel" a follow up ten years later to "Taxi"

[krf100]

And Tom T. Hall's The son of Clayton Delancey which was a sequel to The Year Clayton Delancey Died.

[rkd]

I can't say that I really find this genre (which I didn't realize was a genre) all that objectionable in any way, at least not in principle. I think it can produce some interesting works ... crappy ones too, but interesting ones as well. Consider a story like Borges's The House of Asterion, which was the first Borges story I read (because it's short) -- that's good stuff. While there may be a lot of lazy "commercial" works in this pattern, there can be works which do something new or interesting with the material. Nor do I think original authorial intent is relevant -- a new work might retell the events of Huck Finn from the perspective of Pap, but I don't think that Finn has anything at all to do with Twain's intent.

I'd have to think the tradition goes back much further as well. I remember reading part of an Old English poem called The Dream of the Rood, which is a dream-vision thing largely from the POV of the crucifix. It's not necessarily a great example, but it indicates that similar works have been around for a very long time. Beyond that, many mythologies are built up in the same way. [But I'm drifting off topic.]

--RD, possibly irrelevantly

P.S. Can't agree with you on Skynyrd. I didn't like Skynyrd all that much in my younger and less vulnerable years, but I developed an appreciation for them somewhere in my mid-20s.

[Cynthia]

Just to further threadjack the threadjack: I like sequel songs ("Peggy Sue Got Married," "Judy's Turn to Cry") better than answer songs.

Since we're now talking about Sequel songs, how about Harry Chapin's song "Sequel" a follow up ten years later to "Taxi"

I wanted to love it but just couldn't. In Taxi Harry driving off into the night with Sue's 20 bucks in his pocket was such a powerful denouement the Sequel just fizzled for me. I felt the same about Scarlett. Sometimes "happily ever after" just is not as interesting as "battered but still struggling" I guess.

[sibylla]

This idea of Pastiche has been around for a lot longer than people seem to think. To be honest I consider the books written by the apostles of the New Testament to work in a similar way -- they give different perspectives on Jesus' life, don't they?

Also, although the distaste for these new fictions is pretty clear, it seems that things like Artusroman have been forgotten. People have been drawn to stories like this, that build on an original premise by someone else, for ages. How else does one explain some of the interlinking between stories in Greek mythology?

Just because the current trend may not be considered original doesn't mean it's newly sprung up from outside of historical traditions. People like reading about characters and worlds that they are already familiar with, and it's not somehow disingenuous for an author to want to meet that need.

[Brad Williams]

Wouldn't John Lennon's "How Do You Sleep" also be a more famous answer song than the one that apparently inspired it, "Too Many People" by Paul McCartney?