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Miscellaneous / Verschiedenes » alt.fan.james-bond » The Nature of Writing Bond
| The Nature of Writing Bond [message #298468] |
Di, 11 Juli 2006 06:41 |
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Continuing more or less a banter I was having with Phil
on the merits and demerits of the Bond trailers, it was in
the course of that banter that I included a dialogue extract
from Fleming's Casino Royale to illustrate how poorly he
had written it compared to Phil's claims that the lines
mouthed by Connery's narration in the DN trailer were more
pathetic by comparison. Personally, I thought the
Connery narration lines were just fine.
Anyway, as a bit of a writing exercise, I thought I'd tinker
with Fleming's original prose to make it read as I believe it
should've been written by him in terms of how Bond
would've actually spoken those lines in the dialogue
extract. Of course, anyone is welcome to join in with their
own rewritten version and there are no limits as to how
many rewrites you want to add if you think you can still do
it better. The trick is to try to keep within the Flemingian
writing style but rewrite or edit the lines in a way that you
think Bond should've really said it while retaining as much
of Fleming's wording as possible and keeping the same
rhythmic pace of dialogue intact between the lead-in and
the extract, which is lost in Fleming's version once he gets
into the extract.
Ok, so here's my go at it. But first, the original extract is
preceded by its lead-in for a fuller contextual/grammatical
understanding of how one should try to redo the extract.
"It's all very fine," said Bond, "but I've been thinking
about
these things and wondering whose side I ought to be on.
I am getting very sorry for the Devil and all his disciples
such as the good Le Chiffre. The Devil has a rotten time
and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We
don't give the poor chap a chance. There's a Good Book
about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but
there's no Evil Book about evil and how to be bad. The
Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments
and no team of authors to write his biography. His case
has gone completely by default. We know nothing about
him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and
schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn
the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil
people, proverbs about evil people, folk-lore about evil
people. All we have is the living example of people who
are least good, or our own intuition."
Fleming [extract]:
"So," continued Bond, warming to his argument, "Le
Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital
purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By
his evil existence, which I have foolishly helped to destroy,
he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by
which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist.
We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see
and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the
acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men."
Mine:
"So," continued Bond, warming to his argument, "Le
Chiffre was serving a most vital and noble purpose. By his
evil existence, which I have foolishly helped to destroy, he
was creating a norm of badness against which solely an
opposite norm of goodness could exist. In our short
encounter with him, we were privileged to see and
estimate his wickedness, and from that engagement we
emerge as the better and more righteous men."
So, as I see it, I think I've pretty well stuck to the gist of
what Fleming was trying to get across in his extract
with a little more economy and a lot less verbosity, while
at the same time also trying to make Bond's conversation
pattern more normal sounding and in tune with the lead-in
than the sudden deviation into what reads as a somewhat
foreign and exalted tone for Bond in Fleming's version.
I get the feeling that when Fleming got to the extract part,
or conclusion of the nature of evil speech, he may've been
at a loss for the right words to use in the most concise
manner to get that gist across and nobody really seemed
to care, neither he nor his editor nor the publisher,
explaining why it went through as is - a little out of whack.
Who could blame him, though? Spending any more time
on it would've interfered with his morning swim at his
GoldenEye retreat. If you haven't read the Fleming
interview of how he normally spent his days while writing
Bond, you should. It's borderline hilarious.
So, any other wannabe Flemings out there willing to give it
a shot?
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| Re: The Nature of Writing Bond [message #298469 ] |
Di, 11 Juli 2006 07:15 |
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At 9:41pm -0700, 07/10/06, wq [at] email.com wrote:
>Ok, so here's my go at it. But first, the original extract is
>preceded by its lead-in for a fuller contextual/grammatical
>understanding of how one should try to redo the extract.
>"It's all very fine," said Bond, "but I've been thinking about these things
>and wondering whose side I ought to be on. I am getting very sorry for the
>Devil and all his disciples such as the good Le Chiffre. The Devil has a
>rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don't
>give the poor chap a chance. There's a Good Book about goodness and how to
>be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about evil and how to be
>bad. The Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team
>of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by
>default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our
>parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the
>nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs
>about evil people, folk-lore about evil people. All we have is the living
>example of people who are least good, or our own intuition."
>Fleming [extract]:
>"So," continued Bond, warming to his argument, "Le
>Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital
>purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By
>his evil existence, which I have foolishly helped to destroy,
>he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by
>which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist.
>We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see
>and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the
>acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men."
>Mine:
>"So," continued Bond, warming to his argument, "Le
>Chiffre was serving a most vital and noble purpose. By his
>evil existence, which I have foolishly helped to destroy, he
>was creating a norm of badness against which solely an
>opposite norm of goodness could exist. In our short
>encounter with him, we were privileged to see and
>estimate his wickedness, and from that engagement we
>emerge as the better and more righteous men."
>So, as I see it, I think I've pretty well stuck to the gist of
>what Fleming was trying to get across in his extract
>with a little more economy and a lot less verbosity, while
>at the same time also trying to make Bond's conversation
>pattern more normal sounding and in tune with the lead-in
>than the sudden deviation into what reads as a somewhat
>foreign and exalted tone for Bond in Fleming's version.
It's not meant to sound like a real conversation, but a lecture. Yours
doesn't either. The prose is deliberately purple! Fleming isn't Hemmingway.
I found it to be a humorous passage.
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| Re: The Nature of Writing Bond [message #298476 ] |
Di, 11 Juli 2006 14:36 |
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Adam wrote:
> It's not meant to sound like a real conversation, but a lecture. Yours
> doesn't either. The prose is deliberately purple! Fleming isn't Hemmingway.
>
> I found it to be a humorous passage.
I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as to call it humourous, but there's
another issue here, which is that I think Fleming *intends* Bond to
sound a little pompous and overblown at this point, for two reasons:
firstly to give Mathis all the more reason to mock Bond gently, and
secondly so that when Bond is punished for his hubris at the end of CR
it hits harder.
"How soon Mathis had been proved right and how soon his own little
sophistries had been exploded in his face!"
High literary art? No. Better and a bit more sophisticated than the
hand-me-down Spillane-isms spouted by Connery in the DN trailer? Yes.
In any case, WQ, you've gone out of your way to pick what you think is
a particularly bad piece of Fleming's writing for the purposes of
comparison, but can you really deny that Fleming's books are for the
most part *far* better written than the narration for the DN trailer?
Best
Phil
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| Re: The Nature of Writing Bond [message #298477 ] |
Di, 11 Juli 2006 16:11 |
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phil.gerrard [at] ntlworld.com wrote:
> Adam wrote:
>
> > It's not meant to sound like a real conversation, but a lecture. Yours
> > doesn't either. The prose is deliberately purple! Fleming isn't Hemmingway.
> >
> > I found it to be a humorous passage.
>
> I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as to call it humourous, but there's
> another issue here, which is that I think Fleming *intends* Bond to
> sound a little pompous and overblown at this point, for two reasons:
> firstly to give Mathis all the more reason to mock Bond gently, and
> secondly so that when Bond is punished for his hubris at the end of CR
> it hits harder.
>
> "How soon Mathis had been proved right and how soon his own little
> sophistries had been exploded in his face!"
>
> High literary art? No. Better and a bit more sophisticated than the
> hand-me-down Spillane-isms spouted by Connery in the DN trailer? Yes.
>
> In any case, WQ, you've gone out of your way to pick what you think is
> a particularly bad piece of Fleming's writing for the purposes of
> comparison, but can you really deny that Fleming's books are for the
> most part *far* better written than the narration for the DN trailer?
--- The later he got into his books, the better Fleming became in
writing them, with OHMSS perhaps being his apex in the series, seeming
to have finally perfected his style with that work. But I wasn't
making a comparison between his books and the DN narration, it was
merely between one of the weakest written passages in the first book
and the narration in the first movie, with the word count in each more
or less amounting to about the same number. That's where the
comparison is on level ground and fair, especially when both are also
first works, one as a book, the other as a film, and are trying to
introduce a new hero.
But I pooh-pooh the notion that the speech was intended to be humourous
or make Bond sound pompous or overblown. He's a bit too reflective in
that chapter to be either and maintains that reflective state right up
until that conclusion he makes, when his speech takes a jarring left
turn into ludcirous sounding dialogue. This makes no sense and can
only be explained as Fleming simply having gotten lazy in his thoughts
as to how to wrap it up. It's something that has always struck me
about Fleming in his earlier books especially, which is he'd be writing
just fine and then suddenly these sloppy bits would appear out of
nowhere and for no seeming reason.
>
> Best
>
> Phil
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| Re: The Nature of Writing Bond [message #298478 ] |
Di, 11 Juli 2006 16:48 |
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I should have highlighted the words 'a little' in the phrase 'a little
pompous and overblown': Bond's prose is slightly rather than way
over-ther-top. However, I would maintain that his words are intended
to have a touch of pretension and self-importance about them, and that
this is, of course, part of what prompts Mathis' amused and mildly
incredulous reaction.
Best
Phil
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| Re: The Nature of Writing Bond [message #298479 ] |
Di, 11 Juli 2006 17:18 |
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phil.gerrard [at] ntlworld.com wrote:
> I should have highlighted the words 'a little' in the phrase 'a little
> pompous and overblown': Bond's prose is slightly rather than way
> over-ther-top. However, I would maintain that his words are intended
> to have a touch of pretension and self-importance about them, and that
> this is, of course, part of what prompts Mathis' amused and mildly
> incredulous reaction.
--- That's understood and I'd say that Mathis was responding more in
mocking fashion to what Bond said. But before we begin to stray way
off topic here, let's understand what this is all really about: a
single, brief passage that in its own right, excluding what precedes it
or follows it, is written rather imperfectly, and comparing that
passage with the DN narration, excluding everything else about that
film. This is essentially a discussion of the grammatical structure of
that single CR passage vs. the grammatical construct of the DN
narration in order to determine which one delivers its effect more
successfully. The CR passage is, in and of itself, not only awkward
[in your words] but also somewhat ludicrously written [in my words].
The DN narration may come across as some sort of MAD magazine spoof
that lamely mimics a pulp approach [in your words], but I find that
within the era it was done it's tone and delivery was spot on and
succeeded in separating itself as a trailer different from others of
that time [in my words]. It should also be noted that DN was a much
"drier" film than all the other Connerys that followed even with its
outlandish plot, so again the tone and delivery matched that of the
film itself, but it's a tone and delivery that may've not weathered
time well. Basically, you just had to be there.
>
> Best
>
> Phil
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