I am going to start this tumblr swap week with “Sounds”! It’s a piece by Andrew White which is based off of a Vladimir Nabokov short story by the same name. And that is the reason I want to start off with it, because in an adaptation the tiny little choices you make are illuminated, and it’s much easier to find yourself asking “why this way, instead of that way?”
This adaptation is mostly of the beginning and end of the Nabokov original, which contain the core emotional decision of the narrator. In the original the start of the book is filled with florid fervor, a sort of fast paced and hedonistic pleasure in description that does a lot to describe the love and the freedom the characters feel. In White’s drawings there is an energetic scribbling which seems intended to get across that same energy. But White’s lines always carry a sort of boxy softness to them, a sort of innocent plainness. Which leads it away from it’s source material. And this is what is interesting to me!
There is a moment at the end of both stories, where the character watches a sunset, and there is silence. And it reads differently in the different versions! In both versions he has made the decision to leave the woman, that he simply can let go. But in White’s version the line “it was delicious losing you” comes across as more arbitrary, more of a perverse pleasure in the ability to let go. We are shown the back of the main character’s head as he looks into the sunset and it feels like the sublime is evoked. That the main character’s pleasure is in giving himself away to some unsettling greater power, as an act of freedom and self destruction. In the Nabokov work, he gives himself to a greater power as well, but it is an act of connection and love, of generosity of spirit.
Yes, White cuts out the middle which does account for much of the difference. But I think something can be gleaned about the impact of his art and choices, the way they are interpreted by an audience, in this difference. That boxy softness of his art that lends a sense of unpretentiousness at the same time that it leads to a sort of impenetrability. The figure at the end, and really any time the main character is shown, there is some strange sense of looking at a statue. So in that last moment, we see his head, his head, his head, and then the sun. And it leaves you with a feeling of blotting it out. That this plain figure has more permanence than the sun. That the silence at the end is a matter of resolve over nature.