Revising Tolstoy

Chapter 32 opens with this line: "The first person to meet Anna at home was her son."

How clever, I thought, for Tolstoy to give Anna a son instead of a daughter. How different the story, even Anna, would be if her child was a daughter, instead of another male character to whom Anna is drawn. And for those of you who know the story, the child who comes later adds another dimension of possibility to the story. I had a writing teacher once who told me that one way to get through my writer's block was to change the protaganist from a male to a female. And how easy it was, on my computer, to replace one name with another, to order up new pronouns. Fiction writers, unlike the rest of us, have this luxury.

I had lunch last week with a friend who is a minister. We were discussing the impact of gender-based language in religious texts. She told me that her father, who was also a minister, preached that man meant all humankind, until his daughter becamed ordained, and the use of he and she became very personal. She told me, and this is where the limits of my knowledge reveal themselves, that one of her favorite scriptures involves Jesus recognizing that he is limited, by his phyical form, to being a man. His maleness limits him.

Not true for Tolstoy and other fiction writers who are do not tell the "truth," as we call the facts of a story that has happened in real life. We fiction writers can turn everything on its head, making Abraham Lincoln, rather convincingly if you ask me, into a Vampire Hunter as Seth Grahame-Smith does. We can even take already written stories, and by changing less than one-fourth of the original text, turn a classic into Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I personally love these new versions of the classics. I believe that if we gave Literature teachers the freedom to use them in class, their students would enjoy the reading and still have an understanding of the original story. On the bookshelves in my home, you will find Alice in Zombieland, Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (a curious case that allows us to talk about language that dehumanizes without using the words from the plantation era that are offensive), and of course, my favorite, Android Karenina.

These new versions embrace something that many writers fear: Revision.

What we fear, writers and perhaps all of us, is change. We don't want to give up that which we hold dear. We allow ourselves to believe that the way it is, the way it has always been, is the best and right and maybe even the only way. What if Willingness to change is the only way to stay alive? In the case of literature, allowing these stories to change and transform keeps them alive in the imagination of a new generation of readers.

We live in a time when books have been abundant and readily available to the masses. When Beatrix Potter was publishing Peter Rabbit, she did the unthinkable, as a respectable lady, and went into the factory to demand that her book be printed on smaller pages and with fewer ink colors to make it less expensive, and thereby more accessible to readers. And in the novel Seabiscuit, the young jockey carries a burlap bag of books with him for most of his life, a small stack that he reads and rereads. And as I am writing the words of Anna Karenina, I wonder what new discoveries Sophia made on subsequent passes through the novel. What did she glean that we miss when we read it once, as young college students, never to return to it again. What would we gain if instead of having a constant stream of new books at our disposal, we had only four or five books to read again and again for the whole of our lives? When a book becomes ours, when we read it again and again, could we be allowing ourselves to reimagine the world of the story in a way that the orginal author never did?

 

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