- Title
- Adapting to loiterly reading: Agatha Christie's original adaptation of "The witness for the prosecution"
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- M/C Journal Vol. 22, Issue 4, p. 1-7
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1545
- Publisher
- Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Sarah Phelps’s screenplay The Witness for the Prosecution (2016) does more than simply rekindle interest in Agatha Christie’s original short story; rather, it points to its salvation. My understanding of adaptation follows Armelle Blin-Rolland’s model, which refuses to privilege either the source or the adapted text, considering both instead to form part of a textual multiplicity. The relationship between the two resembles, for Blin-Rolland, a vortex. Thus, the meanderings of Phelps’s adapted text cause us to take stock and to read the original itself as loiterature (Chambers) and thus as a text that eschews self-coincidence, that offers more to the idle reader than an efficient delivery of truth. Christie’s text, in other words, if I may myself adapt a term from Walter Benjamin, has an inherent adaptability. Rather than simply conjuring its own adaptation in a virtual future, “The Witness for the Prosecution” contains, in an immediate pre-diegetic past, the original source of itself as adaptation. This source text is not an alternative solution, but runs parallel to the actual reading—appealing, almost subliminally, for readers to produce it; it also runs idly, however, and, unlike its hasty corollary, is content to wait to catch a distracted eye.
- Subject
- Agatha Christie; adaptation; fetishism; The Witness for the Prosecution
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1469926
- Identifier
- uon:48344
- Identifier
- ISSN:1441-2616
- Language
- eng
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