Adaptation and Appropriation

Julie Sanders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317572206
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

From the apparently simple adaptation of a text into film, theatre or a new literary work, to the more complex appropriation of style or meaning, it is arguable that all texts are somehow connected to a network of existing texts and art forms. In this new edition Adaptation and Appropriation explores:

• multiple definitions and practices of adaptation and appropriation
• the cultural and aesthetic politics behind the impulse to adapt
• the global and local dimensions of adaptation
• the impact of new digital technologies on ideas of making, originality and customization
• diverse ways in which contemporary literature, theatre, television and film adapt, revise and reimagine other works of art
• the impact on adaptation and appropriation of theoretical movements, including structuralism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, feminism and gender studies
• the appropriation across time and across cultures of specific canonical texts, by Shakespeare, Dickens, and others, but also of literary archetypes such as myth or fairy tale.

Ranging across genres and harnessing concepts from fields as diverse as musicology and the natural sciences, this volume brings clarity to the complex debates around adaptation and appropriation, offering a much-needed resource for those studying literature, film, media or culture.

PART I DEFINING TERMS

DOI: 10.4324/9781315737942-2

1 WHAT IS ADAPTATION?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315737942-3

‘All matter is translated into other matter.’

Kate Atkinson, Not the End of the World

The processes of adaptation and appropriation that are the concern of this book are, as already indicated, strongly linked to work in cognate areas and practices such as intertextuality and translation studies. As mentioned in the Introduction, ideas of intertextuality are most readily associated with Julia Kristeva, who, invoking examples from literature, art and music, made her case, in essays such as ‘The Bounded Text’ (1980) and ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ (1986), that all texts invoke and rework other texts in a rich and ever-evolving cultural mosaic. The impulse towards intertextuality, and the narrative and architectural bricolage that can result, is regarded by many as a central tenet of postmodernism (Allen 2000).

The interleaving of different texts and textual traditions, which is manifest in that intertextual impulse, has also been linked to the now-contested postcolonial theory of ‘hybridity’. Homi Bhabha’s account of hybridity suggests how things and ideas are ‘repeated, relocated, and translated in the name of tradition’ (1995: 207), but also how this process of relocation can stimulate new utterances and creativity. For Bhabha, however, only hybridity that respects essential difference enables innovation, whereas the cultural synthesis or homogenization of multiculturalism proves stifling (208). Science-led notions of hybridization regard cultural artefacts as irrevocably changed by the process of interaction. In the case of colonial cultures this is particularly problematic, since if the scientific notion of dominant and recessive factors (or genes) holds true for cultures, then the colonial or imperial tradition dominates over the indigenous in any hybridized form. This notion of the dominant and the recessive was an idea first posited by Gregor Mendel in the mid-nineteenth century (Tudge 2002), but in the literary field it has been adopted to articulate a debate about dominance and suppression that is crucial for any consideration of intertextual relationships. Studies of adaptation and appropriation intersect in this way not only with scientific idiom, which T. S. Eliot deployed in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ when he wrote of the chemical reaction that takes place between literary inheritance and the artist that creates a wholly new ‘compound’ (Eliot 1984: 41), but also with the critical and cultural movements of postmodernism and postcolonialism; indeed, as a result, the effort to write a history of adaptation necessarily transmutes at various points into a history of critical theory.

Adaptation studies throws up a rich lexicon of terms: version, variation, interpretation, continuation, transformation, imitation, pastiche, parody, forgery, travesty, transposition, revaluation, revision, rewriting, echo. But, as this list suggests, texts that come under this heading can possess starkly different, even opposing, aims and intentions; as a result adaptation studies necessarily favours a kind of ‘open structuralism’ along the lines proposed by Genette in Palimpsests (1997: ix). Readings in this context are invested not in proving a text’s closure to alternatives but rather in exploring, even celebrating, ongoing interactions. Sequels, prequels, compression and amplification all have roles to play at different times in the adaptive mode.

Adaptation can be a transpositional practice, casting a specific genre into another generic mode, an act of re-vision in itself. It can parallel editorial practice in some respects, indulging in the exercise of trimming and pruning: yet it can also be an amplificatory procedure engaged in addition, expansion, accretion and interpolation (compare, for example, Deppman et al. 2004 on ‘genetic criticism’). Adaptation is nevertheless frequently involved in offering commentary on a source text. This is achieved most often by offering a revised point of view from the ‘original’, adding hypothetical motivation or voicing what the text silences or marginalizes. Yet adaptation can also continue a simpler attempt to make texts ‘relevant’ or easily comprehensible to new audiences and readerships via the processes of proximation and updating. This might, for example, be aimed at engaging with youth audiences or, through translation in its broadest sense, linguistic and interpretative, in global, intercultural contexts. This can certainly be seen as an artistic drive in many adaptations of so-called ‘classic’ novels for television and cinema. Shakespeare has also been a particular focus, beneficiary even, of these proximations or updatings. Providing the scaffolding for these approaches is, of course, the role of literature in educational contexts and this introduces the social as well as economic rationales for adaptation, themes and topics to which we will return.

The relevance of particular terms to a specific text and the moment in time when these become active culturally can provide some very focussed clues as to a text’s possible meanings and its cultural impact, intended or otherwise, and the purpose behind an act of adaptation. As Robert Weimann stresses, appropriation as an activity ‘is not closed to the forces of social struggle and political power or to acts of historical consciousness’ (1988: 433). The intention here is to examine in detail these specific impulses and ideologies, personal and historical, at play in various adaptations. It seems useful therefore to begin by unpacking in some detail what we might understand by such umbrella terms as adaptation and appropriation, and to consider the different modes and methodologies involved. This will in turn connect us with a variety of disciplinary engagements behind literary studies, not least film studies, performance studies and translation studies, but also with musicology, computer science and digital humanities, law and economics, not least in the realm of intellectual property and copyright, cultural geography and the natural sciences.

In his richly informative study of ‘hypertextuality’, Genette described the act of writing a text, in whatever genre, with other texts in mind as a ‘transgeneric practice’ (Genette 1997 [1982]: 395). As any reading of this book will make clear, a vast range of genres and sub-genres are regularly involved in the kinds of hypertextual activity Genette interrogates. Adaptation is, however, frequently a highly specific process involving the transition from one genre to another: novels into film; drama into musical; the dramatization of prose narrative and prose fiction; or the inverse movement of making drama into prose narrative. It can also involve the making of computer games or graphic novels or be dispersed into modes such as music or dance.

We have already established that when we discuss adaptation in these pages we are often (though admittedly not always) working with reinterpretations of established (canonical or perhaps just well-known) texts in new generic contexts or perhaps with relocations of an ‘original’ or source text’s cultural and/or temporal setting, which may or may not invoke a generic shift. And it is impossible to avoid the question of value or taste in this context. Modules on higher education programmes which examine the transition of literature into other forms, not least film, are now fairly commonplace and any student engaged in studying and theorizing adaptation is involved in thinking critically about what it means to adapt and appropriate, and sometimes is even engaging in creative work of their own as part of the assessment process or the learning outcomes. Intellectual or scholarly examinations of this kind are quite deliberately not aimed at identifying ‘good’ or ‘bad’ adaptations. On what grounds, after all, should such a judgement be made? Nor are they engaged in identifying where an adaptation has been faithful or unfaithful to its source, at least in the context of any value judgement. As I hope this volume demonstrates, my argument would be that it is at the very point of infidelity or departure that the most creative acts of adaptation take place. The sheer impossibility of testing fidelity in any tangible way comes to mind when we recognize that many of the so-called ‘original’ texts we are handling in such circumstances, Shakespeare’s plays most obviously, are highly labile, adaptive patchworks themselves. Adaptation studies needs to be understood as a field engaged with process, ideology and methodology rather than encouraging polarized value judgements.

Establishing some useful templates for studying cinematic interpretations of well-known novels, Deborah Cartmell argues for three broad categories of adaptation:

1. transposition
2. commentary
3. analogue.

(Cartmell and Whelehan 1999: 24)

On the surface, all screen versions of novels are transpositions in the sense that they take a text from one genre and deliver it into a new modality and potentially to different or additional audiences. But many adaptations, of novels and other generic forms, contain further layers of transposition, relocating their source texts not just generically but in cultural, geographic and temporal terms. Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is a useful example: updating Shakespeare’s early modern Veronese tragedy to a contemporary North American setting, Luhrmann retains the play-text’s sense of urban gang feuding but accords it a troublingly immediate and topical resonance. Famously, the much-mentioned swords and rapiers of Shakespeare’s play-script become in Luhrmann’s vividly realized Verona Beach the engraved monikers for the modern era’s weapon of choice, the handgun. Genette would describe this as ‘movement of proximation’ (1997: 304) and it is extremely common as an approach in screen adaptations of classic novels.

As mentioned, Shakespeare’s oeuvre has proven to be a particularly rich seam to mine for such proximations: in 1999 Kenneth Branagh remade Love’s Labour’s Lost as a 1930s Hollywood film musical, embedding Shakespeare’s competition of courtly wit and sonneteering within a faux-Oxbridge setting. The events of the film unfurl on the eve of the Second World War, providing audiences with a more recent (and therefore perhaps more accessible?) context for conflict than Shakespeare’s late sixteenth-century interactions with the French Wars of Religion. Branagh added a deliberately nostalgic soundtrack of songs by George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter to appeal to those audience members who would share the film’s cultural associations. In a different move, Michael Almereyda’s millennial Hamlet (2000) re-envisioned Elsinore as a Manhattan financial corporation with Claudius as a corrupt CEO. In an interesting twist, the disaffected young prince in this version was an anti-establishment art student, who created his ‘play within a play’ as a video montage to be submitted as a course assignment. There is an interestingly predictive aspect to this since the decade following the release of Almereyda’s film witnessed the creation of YouTube, now home for many thousands of such assignments and short film versions of Shakespeare (Desmet 2014; O’Neill 2014).

The motive or compulsion behind this and many other updatings is fairly self-evident: the ‘movement of proximation’ brings the text closer to the audience’s personal frame of reference, allowing always for variation between local contexts and audiences (cf. Burnett 2013: 11). Not all transpositional adaptations that make temporal shifts move forward towards the present day, however – Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 film Hamlet opted for a Gothic medieval setting – but it is certainly a common approach. In the example of Zeffirelli’s Hamlet it could be argued that his casting was an embedded form of proximation since it brought to bear a self-conscious act of intertextuality with the world of contemporary film by casting Mel Gibson, best known for the Mad Max action movies (dir. George Miller, 1979, 1981, 1985), as a very particular kind of Hamlet, and playing on the associations of Glenn Close as Gertrude with the box office success of the film Fatal Attraction (dir. Adrian Lyne, 1987), with its particular emphasis upon female sexual desire.

Shakespeare is not the sole focus of transpositional adaptation, although, as we will see in Chapter 3, his works do provide a cultural barometer for the historically contingent process of adaptation. In 1998, director Alfonso Cuarón effected a similar shift of setting and context with Charles Dickens’s Bildungsroman Great Expectations, relocating it to contemporary New York, with his Pip (Finn Bell) as a struggling artist. Comparable transpositions can be found being performed on the work of Henrik Ibsen, Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov and Joseph Conrad, among others. There is a case to be made that in some instances the process of adaptation starts to move away from simple proximation towards something more culturally loaded. This constitutes Cartmell’s second category of commentary, or adaptations that comment on the politics of the source text, or those of the new mise-en-scène, or both, usually by means of alteration or addition. Film versions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for example, which bring the Algerian witch Sycorax visibly onscreen, comment by means of this action on her absence from the play. In Shakespeare’s text she is constructed solely by means of Prospero’s negative word-portraits. Derek Jarman’s 1979 film The Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) both featured an onscreen Sycorax. One film version of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (dir. Patricia Rozema, 2000) made explicit that novel’s minimally articulated contextual setting in the history of British colonialism and the practice of slavery on Antiguan plantations. Rozema made visible facts that the novel represses. In both these instances, the absence or gap in the original narrative being commented on in the transpositional films was one that had previously been highlighted by the work of postcolonial critics. Adaptation might in this instance be seen as responding directly to the work of critical theory.

In all these examples it can be argued that the full impact of the film adaptation depends upon an audience’s awareness of an explicit relationship to a source text. In expectation of this the most formal adaptations carry the same title as their source or informing text. Shared titles mobilize complex understandings of similarity and difference and might seem to invite comparative analysis, and it is certainly true that the majority of reviews of a film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd would likely make some direct reference back to the novel and perhaps point out similarities and difference, but an enjoyment of the film is not necessarily dependent upon knowing the novel at all. Indeed, such is the accretive nature of adaptation that reviews of a film adaptation in 2015 of that same novel (dir. Thomas Vinterburg and starring Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene) have more often seized the opportunity to draw comparison with a 1967 film adaptation directed by John Schlesinger and starring Julie Christie as Bathsheba which had become canonical in its own right. So we learn from this example that the notion of the ‘source’ might actually shift over time or might fashion a multi-layered entity rather than a single original.

Knowledge of the adaptational work is not necessary for a satisfying experience of viewing such a film, then, but we might argue that such knowledge brought into play in the process of understanding could enrich the spectator’s experience and may indeed enhance or complicate the pleasures involved. The 2007 adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement, itself a masterful pastiche of the work of Jane Austen, Elizabeth Bowen and twentieth-century wartime memoirs, made some brilliant generic shifts from the book’s knowing and intricate explorations of textuality (and the unreliable nature of the same) to a series of knowing visual effects that drew as much upon the history of cinema (1940s films, war movies, documentary footage) as from direct textual prompts or cues in the book (Geraghty 2009: 107). This particular set of readings or understandings was not necessary to appreciate or even enjoy the film but it certainly made the knowing spectator approach the achievements of director Joe Wright and screenplay writer Christopher Hampton in a different way. Hampton is an established writer in his own right, and here we are introduced to another way in which adaptation can work in an accretive manner as we may start to see an interesting hybrid of both McEwan’s novel and Hampton’s style in the finished screenplay. It also confirms the collaborative work that film constitutes, with writer and director, alongside actors...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editor's preface
• Acknowledgements
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Going on (and on)
• PART I Defining terms
• PART II Literary archetypes
• PART III Alternative perspectives
• Afterword: Different versions
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index