BMCR 2009.03.60, Ruth Scodel, Whither Quo Vadis?: Sienkiewicz's Novel

Ruth Scodel, Anja Bettenworth, Whither Quo Vadis?: Sienkiewicz's Novel
in Film and Television.  Chichester/Malden, MA:  Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
Pp. x, 292.  ISBN 9781405183857.  $100.00.

Reviewed by Simon Goldhill, King's College, Cambridge
([email protected])
Word count:  1876 words
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It is a remarkable fact that there were more than 200 novels in English
about the ancient world published in the eighty years from
Bulwer-Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii of 1838 to the end of the First
World War. The vast majority of these were focused on religion -- the
development of Christianity, the destruction of the Temple, the end of
Druids. Lew Wallace's Ben Hur -- subtitled "A Story of the Christ"--
was the best-selling novel in America until  Gone with the Wind, and as
a play and film has gone on to define the genre. There were, however, a
string of best-sellers now less well-known, as well as some frankly
terrible books, where cruel pagans are instantly converted to the new
religion by a plucky Christian's honest face and brave resistance to
torture. This genre of novels was part of the battle for hearts and
minds in Victorian Britain, where religion was debated with an
intensity and earnestness unparalleled since the Reformation. Catholics
and Protestants (and many other groups) clashed specifically over the
early Church and its significance for modern religion, and these
historical novels were a prime means of spreading a specific religious
agenda about history and its role in the present.

Henryk Sienkiewicz published Quo Vadis? in Polish in serial form in
1895, and shortly afterwards the novel appeared. It tells an epic story
of the early Christians and their persecution by Nero. Its first
English translation was as soon as 1897, and it has never been out of
print since (with a new translation as recently as 1993). In 1905,
Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his
contribution to epic writing, and, as the award speech emphasized, his
international fame rested on Quo Vadis?, which had already been
translated into 30 languages, and sold more than 2,000,000 copies in
Germany and Poland alone, as well as 800,000 in a single year in the
U.S.A. It was a book which was regarded as sufficiently serious to lead
to the Nobel Prize, but sufficiently popular to be a household name the
world over.

In many ways, Quo Vadis? is a perfect example of the genre of the
classical historical novel. It is obsessed with scholarship about the
ancient world and about Christianity, with lengthy excurses on
historical and archaeological details. It is peopled with characters
from history interlaced with fictional figures -- one of the most
distinctive features of what Roland Barthes called "the reality effect"
of the nineteenth-century novel. It fleshes out characters who are
familiar to the classically trained reader, but who are often only
briefly mentioned in classical sources: so one of its heroes is
Petronius, the "arbiter elegentiarum" of Nero's intimate circle and
probable author of the Satyricon. It has an easy anti-Semitism, and a
passionate support for the early Christians. Unlike most novels of this
genre written in English, however, the author is Catholic rather than
Protestant; and, although by the end of the nineteenth century, the
fierceness of the anti-Catholic (and pro-Catholic) rhetoric of earlier
novels had been tempered, there is a clear Catholic agenda to the
novel's portrayal of Peter and Paul.

The novel Quo Vadis? is, I suspect, not as widely known today, barely
read even by classical students, and it may even be the case that the
majority of  our own graduate students would not be able to recognize
the source and significance of the quotation enshrined in the title.
This, despite the fact that the book has had a remarkable after-life in
the world of film and television. There have been five full-scale
adaptations for screen. The first was a silent Italian version made in
1912 by Guazonni; the most recent, a lavish Polish production issued in
2001 -- the most expensive Polish film ever made. The 1925 Italian film
(started by d'Annunzio but finished by a German team) is famous for the
performance of Nero by Emil Jannings, a landmark in the iconography of
the mad emperor. The 1951 Hollywood extravaganza is best remembered for
Peter Ustinov's Nero, but, with Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr as
stars, it is also highly significant as the first major Hollywood epic
after the Second World War. In 1985 there was also a miniseries for
Italian T.V. As with Ben Hur, the novel has been overtaken by its
screen adaptations, with the films of ancient epics from the 1950s in
turn overtaken in the popular imagination by more recent productions
such as "Gladiator" and "Troy". Quo Vadis? is a wonderful place to
explore not just the reception of classical sources across a century of
adaptation, but also the relation of classics and popular culture.

Ruth Scodel, well-known for her studies of Homeric poetry, and Anja
Bettenworth, who teaches Latin at Muenster, and also works on ancient
epic, have set out to investigate these five filmic adaptations of Quo
Vadis? in their nicely titled study Whither Quo Vadis?. They offer a
very brief and rather thin introduction on the theoretical issue of how
novels are transformed into films, along with an equally brief and
rather thin discussion of Sienkiewicz's book. The focus of their book,
however, is firmly on the films and on how they respond to the novel.
There are five central chapters. The first looks at how the narrative
of the novel is adapted in the five versions. This is a
narratologically informed study of what scenes are included or
excluded, of who focalizes the narrative, and of how the city appears
within the films. The second chapter looks at gender and ethnicity. In
Quo Vadis?, the central love story is between a Roman general and a
Christian girl called Lygia, who comes from a region now in Poland and
who escapes from any suggestion of barbarian values by quoting Homer,
becoming Christian, and mixing purity and beauty in full confirmation
of the stereotypes of Victorian heroism. Sienkiewicz was a Polish
nationalist, and his ideological commitments are not hard to decipher.
The secondary love story is between Petronius and his slave Eunice.
Love across the races, across the classes, and across religions, is
inevitably differently understood and differently represented across
the twentieth century, where race, class, and religion have provided
the frameworks for most of the conflicts that have scarred the era.
Epic is always about the present understanding of nation, power and
history, and the ancient world provides a particularly layered and
engaging alibi for debating such issues.

The third chapter, thus, turns to political institutions and the
political subtexts of the five different adaptations. There are some
particularly interesting suggestions about the connections between
Italian politics and the 1985 Italian miniseries, which also helps
explain the surprisingly free adaptation of the book. The fourth
chapter looks at the people of Rome: how are the masses depicted? This
is a question not just of a Marxist bent, but also and more precisely
of how any Marxist understanding relates to the Christian obsession
with the crowd as the baying voyeurs of martyrdom and the setting for
the greatest of conversion stories. The final discussion focuses on
religion and religious authority, perhaps the most pressing of the
intellectual agendas of the novel -- but which takes on a quite
different set of colours as the twentieth century pursues its less
earnest engagement with Christianity, at least in popular art.

There is much to admire in this book. It has a clear focus and a good
set of questions. It knows its way round the five films and around the
classical sources, and is prepared to look at broader issues in
relation to the close reading of the films. It does not bang its own
drum loudly, but it should be emphasized how few books do succeed in
bringing together a detailed appreciation of films as artistically
constructed narratives with wider questions of politics and history,
especially across such a time frame. There is a huge advantage to being
able to see how a single novel is re-worked across a range of contexts:
different countries, histories, languages, and ideological frameworks.
As such, it makes a genuine contribution to reception studies, and will
be used as such, as well as in the more narrowly circumscribed world of
film studies.

It would have been more intellectually persuasive if the conclusions of
the chapters had been more developed: they tend to fizzle out with the
claim that different films produce different Romes, a claim which is of
no great surprise and of little analytical purchase. It also
desperately needs a broader sense of how each film was received in its
own cultural context. There are barely any contemporary reviews or
other material discussed, and what there is, is relegated to footnotes.
How a film means needs a broader gaze than this book allows. Indeed, my
main concern was precisely about what sort of reception studies this
book offers. For each of the films is read very much as if it were
engaging with previous films and with Sienkweciz's book in an enclosed
"literary" world. That is, the formal analyses of what scenes are
included or excluded, of how the crowd is represented, who focalizes
the scene and so forth, are conducted as formal analyses. Like
discussing Apollonius of Rhodes re-working a Homeric type scene. There
is much less of an attempt to appreciate any film as an event: who saw
it, who said what about it when, how it entered and contributed to a
cultural debate. This strategy starts from the beginning of the study:
there is no awareness of how Sienkiewicz is contributing to and formed
by the genre in which he is writing. He is influenced by Ben Hur, the
authors correctly note, but they do not explore what this influence is,
or the impact of other novels of the genre, or why this book was so
successful as a novel: who it spoke to and how. Each film takes place
too within a rich cultural context which needs exploring, with some
solid archival history -- as Maria Wyke, for example, has looked in
detail at how films about Caesar are constructed as events -- with
marketing, reviews, intellectual discussions, all playing a role. There
is simply not enough cultural history here to make sense of the
cultural event of a film. It leaves us with too thin a historical sense
of each film.

Scodel and Bettenworth, as one might expect from their distinguished
work in classics, do not utilize the most sophisticated (and sometimes
highly pretentious) theoretical work on film; nor are they trained in
technical analysis of the production of visual images. They do well
here what they do well elsewhere: a careful and largely intelligent
analysis of how a film's narrative reworks both earlier film
narratives, and also the book from which they all are derived -- which
in turn re-works a set of classical sources into a fictional account.
It is no straightforward task to tease out these layers of adaptation,
and there is much to enjoy here in such analysis. What is missing
finally, however, from their formal approach is the cultural history
which explains why film matters as a cultural event. And this is a big
question for contemporary reception studies: how should reception
studies and cultural history interact?