ABSTRACT
Orson Welles's adaptation of Victor Hugo's nineteenth-century novel Les Miserables for American radio in the summer of 1937 is an illustrative case in point. This radio drama performs what Lawrence Venuti might call an "interpretive operation" upon Les Miserables that draws attention to the formal, thematic, and biographical contexts not only of Welles's own practice but also of Hugo's source novel. The novel's sizeable digressions had to be removed, however, due to these constraints. Too many character voices risked confusing the audience and losing their attention, so further edits were needed as well. The immediacy of the expressive voices and the pitiless regularity of the bracing pounding oblige the audience's consciousness to undergo this recall of the past with a sense of both proximity and anxiety. Consequently, radio's intimacy as a 'theatre of the mind' requires theoretical strategies that respect its specificity as a narrative mode and therefore do not unquestioningly borrow the grammar of literary or screen analysis.
