Dumas

[poliphilo]

I've been reading about Alexandre Dumas.

Dumas ran a fiction factory- churning out novels in serial form for the popular press. His many collaborators  included  a man called Maquet, who wrote the outlines for  Dumas' most famous works- The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. 

Critics tend to be a bit sniffy about this kind of operation. It subverts the romantic cult of the artist as  creative demi-god and loner.

But popular fiction has always been produced like this. The Iliad and Odyssey are the work of many  hands; so- to a lesser extent- are Shakespeare's plays. And when we come to the modern era, cinema and TV are essentially collaborative .

Dumas was doing much the same thing as a writer-producer like Joss Whedon or Russell T Davies. He is the author of the Three Musketeers just as Davies is the author of Doctor Who. The concept is stamped by  his presiding imagination even though much of the work was done by someone else.

Comments

[baritonejeff.livejournal.com]

Witness also most of the great painters of, say, the Renaissance, who had studios filled with apprentices. Who knows how much of their masterpieces were the product of others hands. What we do know, again, is that it was all supervised, guided by, and approved by the master (well, most of the time!)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The odd- and somewhat silly thing- is that the value of a painting now depends on whether it was painted by the master or not. A painting labelled "school of Rembrandt" vastly increases in value if some expert identifies it as the work of the man himself.