The New Ray Bradbury Review: Number 1 2008

Introduction: Situating Bradbury in the “Reign of Adaptations”

7 Introduction: Situating Bradbury in the “Reign of Adaptations” William F. Touponce “Then, in the Twentieth Century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids…. Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.” Fahrenheit 451 I’mahybridauthor.I’macombinationofLonChaney,CharlesDickens,Norman Corwin and Aldous Huxley; I’m a little of everything. Ray Bradbury Welcome to the first issue of The New Ray Bradbury Review. The title of our journal harkens back to the beginnings of criticism on Ray Bradbury, William F. Nolan’s Ray Bradbury Review, originally published in 1952. That affectionate and charming volume, with hand-drawn illustrations by Nolan and done before he was even a professional writer, seems to inaugurate, with the exception of archival publication, everything we will try to do here annually on an academic level—criticism, reviews, and bibliography. But at the distance of over half a century, how much the study of Bradbury’s authorship has grown since then! Our own work on Bradbury, The Life of Fiction (Kent State University Press, 2004), crossed the finish line at 570 pages and still did not address directly the subject of Bradbury’s adaptation to other media, the theme of this first annual volume. Since 1952 and Nolan’s Review, many of Bradbury’s stories and novels have indeed been adapted to films, radio, television, theater, and comic books. Since we are trying to present new research into Bradbury’s writings, previous commentary on film versions of Bradbury is not much in evidence here. However, Bradbury’s screenplays are surveyed by John C. Tibbetts, and concerning Bradbury’s adaptation of Melville’s Moby Dick we include a section from Jonathan R. Eller’s new book-length study of Bradbury’s early career. Phil Nichols documents the extensive adaptation of Bradbury’s works by the BBC, where radio is still an art form. Our selection from David Mogen’s 1980 free- The New Ray Bradbury Review 8 wheeling interview with Bradbury ranges over the entire topic of adaptation, but focuses especially on his theater and the ‘art of the aside.’ Another major focus of this issue highlights one of the central achievements of his later career. From 1985 to 1992 Bradbury hosted a syndicated anthology television series, The Ray Bradbury Theater, for which he adapted sixty-five of his stories. This is without a doubt unique to American letters (though the films were produced in Canada) and represents a genuine ‘theater of adaptations’ under an author’s control. Bradbury’s work in this area of authorship still needs to be read and understood, for he revised many of his stories in the process of adapting them for the television screen. In addition to two essays about The Ray Bradbury Theater, by Markus A. Carpenter and myself, we present for the first time a comprehensive bibliography, compiled by Jonathan R. Eller, of Bradbury’s adaptations in other media that serves to document the scope and range of that now vast body of work that can be called adaptation of Bradbury. But what exactly is meant by adaptation and what is included in it? Until recently adaptation has been a topic dominated by film theory, but Linda Hutcheon has proposed a general theory of adaptation in culture that considers its many aspects (Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, Routledge, 2006). For Hutcheon, adaptation is the “deliberate, announced, and extended revisitation of prior works.”To understand and take pleasure in something as an adaptation, one has to be aware that there are always at least two texts involved: the adapted (prior) text, and the adapting text. Adaptation is therefore an inherently intertextual process. Hutcheon proposes a series of quasi-sociological questions that should be asked for each act of adaptation: what? (forms), who?, why? (adapters), how? (audiences), where?, when? (contexts); she then combines them with what she calls “modes of engagement,” that is, showing, telling, and engagement, and explains how these must vary across media. The essays and reviews contained in this volume are guided by these questions and categories, but we have also found it necessary to expand Hutcheon’s second category and to evoke the category of authorship as being more important than the question of what and when and how. Who did the adapting has been our main concern. This category can logically be further subdivided into adaptations done by Bradbury of himself, Bradbury adapted by others, and...