University of Birmingham Balzac on the BBC Watts, Andrew DOI: 10.1179/1478731814Z.00000000052 Document Version Early version, also known as pre-print Citation for published version (Harvard): Watts, A 2014, 'Balzac on the BBC: Serial breaks and adaptive returns in Père Goriot (1968)', Dix-Neuf, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 180-192. https://doi.org/10.1179/1478731814Z.00000000052 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. 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Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. If you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact [email protected] providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. Download date: 29. Sep. 2021 1 Balzac on the BBC: Serial Breaks and Adaptive Returns in Père Goriot (1968)1 Andrew Watts University of Birmingham Abstract: This article examines the relationship between adaptation and the television serial through an analysis of the BBC version of Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot. First broadcast in May 1968, Père Goriot remains the only adaptation of Balzac’s novel produced for British television. The episodic format of serial drama provides a natural context for Balzac’s work by revealing the author’s sensitivity to narrative breaks and pauses as devices for generating suspense. More importantly, seriality represents a valuable conceptual framework through which to reflect on the adaptive process. As a serial returns to the screen in successive episodes, so adaptation is predicated on the return of its source material in a form that is both distinct from, and intrinsically connected to, what has come before. At the hands of director Paddy Russell and scriptwriter David Turner, Père Goriot contemplates its own returns to an array of earlier sources - visual illustration, theatrical melodrama, and even the vampire horror film - and in so doing invites us to consider adaptation in a more positive light, as an organic, open-ended process in which the source is perpetually nourished and reinvigorated by new artistic undertakings. Keywords: Honoré de Balzac, BBC, Le Père Goriot, television, serial drama, illustration, melodrama, vampirism, Pilkington Report, Paddy Russell Andrew Watts is Lecturer in French at the University of Birmingham. His main research interest is in adaptations of nineteenth-century French prose fiction, with special reference to the work of Honoré de Balzac. He is the author of Preserving the Provinces: Small Town and Countryside in the Work of Honoré de Balzac (Peter Lang, 2007), and co-author (with Kate Griffiths, Cardiff) of Adapting Nineteenth- Century France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio and Print (UWP, 2013). He is the co-editor (with Susan Harrow, Bristol) of Mapping Memory in French Literature and Culture (Rodopi, 2012) and (with Loïc Guyon, Limerick) Aller(s)-Retour(s): Nineteenth-Century France in Motion (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). He has written numerous articles and book chapters on nineteenth- century French literature, and with Michelle Cheyne (University of Massachusetts- Dartmouth) has recently completed a critical translation of Balzac’s early play Le Nègre, due for publication with Liverpool Online Series in Autumn 2013. Postal Address: Dr Andrew Watts Department of Modern Languages University of Birmingham Ashley Building Edgbaston Campus Birmingham B15 2TT United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected] 2 Television keeps coming back to Le Père Goriot. Since 1957, when Jean Vertex recreated passages from the novel in his three-part series, Vautrin, for TF1, there have been at least six television adaptations of Honoré de Balzac’s celebrated work. In France, Jean-Louis Bory’s 1972 television film was long regarded as the most faithful reinterpretation of Le Père Goriot for the small screen, a factor which perhaps explains why French broadcasters did not revisit the novel for almost thirty years. In 2001, the loosely-inspired mini-series Rastignac ou les ambitieux, directed by Alain Tasma, appeared on France 2, drawing on elements of Le Père Goriot, Illusions perdues, and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Two years later, in 2004, the same channel recruited Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe to direct a heritage adaptation of Le Père Goriot in which Charles Aznavour starred as the father destroyed by his obsessive love for his daughters. Outside France, broadcasters have reworked the novel for their own national audiences. In 1971, Spanish television commissioned a five-part mini-series, Papá Goriot, paving the way for a more ambitious twenty-part serial, broadcast under the same title, in 1976. 2 While television has produced numerous versions of Le Père Goriot, this assortment of adaptations has garnered little interest among scholars. According to Sylvie Boulard Bezat, critics have mostly ignored television adaptations of the novel out of a sense of disappointment that none can ever truly capture the realism of Balzac’s text. ‘Le trait commun de ces adaptations du Père Goriot’, she writes, including cinema and theatre in her assessment, ‘semble donc être la médiocrité. [...] Certaines sont fort bien écrites, d’autres très divertissantes, d’autres encore délicieusement démodées, mais elles souffrent toutes de la comparaison avec l’original’ (1987: 177). Such lukewarm appraisals nevertheless fail to engage with the specificity of television as a medium, or the reasons for which Le Père Goriot continues to be 3 adapted for the small screen. Focussing on the BBC’s 1968 version of the novel, Père Goriot, the present article seeks to address this critical lacuna by exploring the ways in which Balzac’s text proves inherently suited to adaptation as a television serial. This four-part mini-series appears as an intriguing case study through which to consider the re-imagining of Le Père Goriot, not least because it illustrates the artistic flexibility and narrative possibilities of the serial format. As a starting point for my analysis, I want to begin by situating Père Goriot within the broader context of BBC serial drama and the vogue for documentary realism that swept through British television during the 1960s. The second part of my discussion proceeds to demonstrate that the concept of seriality, with its connotations of fracture, repetition, and return, presents a valuable framework through which to re-read Le Père Goriot. Adaptation, as Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Henriette Thune argue, is a two-way process in which a novel ‘alters appearance and may be interpreted in new ways, in light of the adaptation’ (2011: 9). The episodic structure of the BBC serial calls attention to Balzac’s sensitivity to narrative breaks and pauses, and reveals in particular the author’s unconventional ‒ and rarely acknowledged ‒ use of these techniques to generate suspense. Finally, and most importantly, I argue that seriality can help to further our understanding of the adaptive process itself by pointing to ways in which adaptors can play on our expectations and knowledge of earlier works of art. As a serial returns to the screen in successive episodes, so adaptation is predicated on the return of its source material in a form that is both distinct from, and intrinsically connected to, what has come before. At the hands of scriptwriter David Turner and director Paddy Russell, Père Goriot contemplates its own returns to an array of sources ‒ visual illustration, theatrical melodrama, even the vampire horror film ‒ and in so doing invites us to conceive of adaptation as an organic process in 4 which the source is perpetually nourished and reinvigorated by new artistic undertakings. First broadcast in the UK in May 1968 ‒ a scheduling that appears to have been unrelated to the social and political turmoil which spread across France during that month ‒ Père Goriot coincided with a period of unprecedented interest in Balzac’s work within BBC Television Drama. Between 1965 and 1971, no fewer than three Balzac adaptations featured on the BBC. At Christmas 1965, a three-part recreation of Eugénie Grandet aired on BBC2. After Père Goriot in 1968, La Cousine Bette also became a five-part mini-series in 1971, starring Helen Mirren as Valérie Marneffe. 3 Balzac’s prominence on television during this six-year period begs the question as to why the BBC turned ‒ and returned ‒ to La Comédie humaine, making it a staple of its serial drama output. Part of the answer lies, first, with the changes that were transforming both British society and the television industry during the 1960s. As John Caughie observes, the 1960s ‘have the reputation of being a decade in which [...] Britain became a little more experimental in its forms’ (2000: 78). Against the backdrop of growing economic affluence and an end to the post-war austerity of the 1950s, a young generation challenged the traditional values espoused by its parents, while British culture became increasingly receptive to new artistic movements from Europe, not least the French nouvelle vague.