This panel included papers from Alex
Price (York) on ‘”This old lady’s ruffled bed”: Beds and Bedtime Behaviours in Little Red Riding Hood’, Stephen Kenyon
(Glyndwr) on ‘What to do with a severed head? The quest for a voice within The Orpheus Project’ and Philip Holden
(Singapore) on ‘Portraits of the Artist: Maugham, Sexuality, Representation’.
Though their subjects were strikingly varied, each of these papers spoke insightfully
to the idea that objects can transform the ways in which we understand narrative.
Each suggested alternative ways of creating narrative, whether by reinterpreting
a familiar fairy tale around a suggestive central image, generating new works
of art from the impetus of a classical myth, or condensing and complicating
aspects of biographical representation through a series of still images.
Alex
Price discussed
various manifestations of the Little Red Riding Hood story in text and image. He
drew on versions including those by Charles Perrault, Anne Sexton and Gwen
Strauss alongside illustrations from diverse editions of the tale and images
from advertising. The pictures that accompanied this talk ranged from sinister representations
of the wolf with a bulging belly to a Heinz Salad Cream advert showing the archetypally
masculine predator dressed in frills and lace. The subversion and complication of
the wolf’s traditionally masculine image raised interesting questions within
this paper. Alex Price persuasively argued that the bed is at the epicentre of
these various re-readings and re-writings of the Little Red Riding Hood story. This
paper discussed the ways in which the image of the bed has shifted over time and
according to the priorities of successive authors. This paper persuasively
argued that the bed represents a central image in the tale’s “symbolic
vocabulary” as well as being “the axle around which the plot turns”.
Stephen
Kenyon discussed
his involvement with ‘The Orpheus Project’, a collaborative project which
incorporates the work of visual artists, poets and musicians in the
interpretation of the Orpheus myth. Within this context, his paper explained
the suggestive interactions between reworkings of classical myth and the
original text or tale. He suggested that multimedia retelling of a well-known
myth can create a narrative “rhizome” which presents a multifaceted and
branching reimagining of an originally linear tale. We heard spoken word
interpretations by Lyndon Davies and were shown images by Penny Hallas. Kenyon
drew attention to the diversity of possible interpretations within the single
source narrative. Davies, for instance, focused on the tale of Orpheus’s
journey while Hallas principally used the image of the severed head. Kenyon also presented an image
created collaboratively at an earlier event (‘Border/Lines’) which took
Blanchot’s ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’ as its key text. The original image was
created by Hallas and subsequently altered by other participants to create a
palimpsestic series of interpretations around the idea of the Orpheus myth. Kenyon discussed the site
specific elements of this project based in Wales, alongside the technological
opportunities which might make this work accessible to a wider audience. He touched
on the possibilities suggested by augmented reality technologies and pointed to
the ‘enhanced edition’ of The Waste Land
app as a notable precedent for the innovative digitalisation of literary texts
which branch beyond the confines of linear narrative.
Philip
Holden’s paper
explored the biographical significance of W. Somerset Maugham’s late sittings
for artists and photographers including Carl Van Vechten, George Platt Lynes
and Bernard Perlin. These images were considered in the context of Maugham’s
resistance to more formal biographies which, Holden explained, is usually attributed
to the author’s desire to keep his sexuality private. These images, which
ranged from formal compositions to more intimate, explicit or apparently
impromptu shots, reveal the tension between a desire for publicity and the
perceived need to keep certain aspects of his life a secret. These images explore
the clash between celebrity and the suppression of a ‘hidden life’. They
suggest an opportunity for an alternative form of biography which
“complicate[s] simple oppositions between secrecy and revelation, surface and
depth”.
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