A Theory of Adaptation

Linda Hutcheon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136210914
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

A Theory of Adaptation explores the continuous development of creative adaptation, and argues that the practice of adapting is central to the story-telling imagination. Linda Hutcheon develops a theory of adaptation through a range of media, from film and opera, to video games, pop music and theme parks, analysing the breadth, scope and creative possibilities within each.

This new edition is supplemented by a new preface from the author, discussing both new adaptive forms/platforms and recent critical developments in the study of adaptation. It also features an illuminating new epilogue from Siobhan O'Flynn, focusing on adaptation in the context of digital media. She considers the impact of transmedia practices and properties on the form and practice of adaptation, as well as studying the extension of game narrative across media platforms, fan-based adaptation (from Twitter and Facebook to home movies), and the adaptation of books to digital formats.

A Theory of Adaptation is the ideal guide to this ever evolving field of study and is essential reading for anyone interested in adaptation in the context of literary and media studies.

1

BEGINNING TO THEORIZE ADAPTATION:

What? Who? Why? How? Where? When?

[C]inema is still playing second fiddle to literature.

—Rabindranath Tagore (1929)

Writing a screenplay based on a great novel [George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda] is foremost a labor of simplification. I don’t mean only the plot, although particularly in the case of a Victorian novel teeming with secondary characters and subplots, severe pruning is required, but also the intellectual content. A film has to convey its message by images and relatively few words; it has little tolerance for complexity or irony or tergiversations. I found the work exceedingly difficult, beyond anything I had anticipated. And, I should add, depressing: I care about words more than images, and yet I was constantly sacrificing words and their connotations. You might tell me that through images film conveys a vast amount of information that words can only attempt to approximate, and you would be right, but approximation is precious in itself, because it bears the author’s stamp. All in all, it seemed to me that my screenplay was worth much less than the book, and that the same would be true of the film.

—Novelist John North in Louis Begley’s novel, Shipwreck (2003)

Familiarity and Contempt

Adaptations are everywhere today: on the television and movie screen, on the musical and dramatic stage, on the Internet, in novels and comic books, in your nearest theme park and video arcade. A certain level of self-consciousness about—and perhaps even acceptance of—their ubiquity is suggested by the fact that films have been made about the process itself, such as Spike Jonze’s Adaptation or Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha, both in 2002. Television series have also explored the act of adaptation, like the eleven-part BRAVO documentary “Page to Screen.” Adaptations are obviously not new to our time, however; Shakespeare transferred his culture’s stories from page to stage and made them available to a whole new audience. Aeschylus and Racine and Goethe and da Ponte also retold familiar stories in new forms. Adaptations are so much a part of Western culture that they appear to affirm Walter Benjamin’s insight that “storytelling is always the art of repeating stories” (1992: 90). The critical pronouncements of T.S. Eliot or Northrop Frye were certainly not needed to convince avid adapters across the centuries of what, for them, has always been a truism: art is derived from other art; stories are born of other stories.

Nevertheless, in both academic criticism and journalistic reviewing, contemporary popular adaptations are most often put down as secondary, derivative, “belated, middlebrow, or culturally inferior” (as noted by Naremore 2002b: 6). This is what Louis Begley’s novelist-adapter is expressing in the epigraph; but there are more strong and decidedly moralistic words used to attack film adaptations of literature: “tampering,” “interference,” “violation” (listed in McFarlane 1996: 12), “betrayal,” “deformation,” “perversion,” “infidelity,” and “desecration” (found by Stam 2000: 54). The move from the literary to the filmic or televisual has even been called a move to “a willfully inferior form of cognition” (Newman 1985: 129). Although adaptation’s detractors argue that “all the directorial Scheherazades of the world cannot add up to one Dostoevsky” (Peary and Shatzkin 1977: 2), it does seem to be more or less acceptable to adapt Romeo and Juliet into a respected high art form, like an opera or a ballet, but not to make it into a movie, especially an updated one like Baz Luhrmann’s (1996) William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. If an adaptation is perceived as “lowering” a story (according to some imagined hierarchy of medium or genre), response is likely to be negative. Residual suspicion remains even in the admiration expressed for something like Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999), her critically successful film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Even in our postmodern age of cultural recycling, something—perhaps the commercial success of adaptations—would appear to make us uneasy.

As early as 1926, Virginia Woolf, commenting on the fledgling art of cinema, deplored the simplification of the literary work that inevitably occurred in its transposition to the new visual medium and called film a “parasite” and literature its “prey” and “victim” (1926: 309). Yet she also foresaw that film had the potential to develop its own independent idiom: “cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression” in words (309). And so it does. In the view of film semiotician Christian Metz, cinema “tells us continuous stories; it ‘says’ things that could be conveyed also in the language of words; yet it says them differently. There is a reason for the possibility as well as for the necessity of adaptations” (1974: 44). However, the same could be said of adaptations in the form of musicals, operas, ballets, or songs. All these adapters relate stories in their different ways. They use the same tools that storytellers have always used: they actualize or concretize ideas; they make simplifying selections, but also amplify and extrapolate; they make analogies; they critique or show their respect, and so on. But the stories they relate are taken from elsewhere, not invented anew. Like parodies, adaptations have an overt and defining relationship to prior texts, usually revealingly called “sources.” Unlike parodies, however, adaptations usually openly announce this relationship. It is the (post-) Romantic valuing of the original creation and of the originating creative genius that is clearly one source of the denigration of adapters and adaptations. Yet this negative view is actually a late addition to Western culture’s long and happy history of borrowing and stealing or, more accurately, sharing stories.

For some, as Robert Stam argues, literature will always have axiomatic superiority over any adaptation of it because of its seniority as an art form. But this hierarchy also involves what he calls iconophobia (a suspicion of the visual) and logophilia (love of the word as sacred) (2000: 58). Of course, a negative view of adaptation might simply be the product of thwarted expectations on the part of a fan desiring fidelity to a beloved adapted text or on the part of someone teaching literature and therefore needing proximity to the text and perhaps some entertainment value to do so.

If adaptations are, by this definition, such inferior and secondary creations, why then are they so omnipresent in our culture and, indeed, increasing steadily in numbers? Why, even according to 1992 statistics, are 85 percent of all Oscar-winning Best Pictures adaptations? Why do adaptations make up 95 percent of all the miniseries and 70 percent of all the TV movies of the week that win Emmy Awards? Part of the answer no doubt has to do with the constant appearance of new media and new channels of mass diffusion (Groensteen 1998b: 9). These have clearly fueled an enormous demand for all kinds of stories. Nonetheless, there must be something particularly appealing about adaptations as adaptations.

Part of this pleasure, I want to argue, comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise. Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change. Thematic and narrative persistence combines with material variation (Ropars-Wuilleumier 1998: 131), with the result that adaptations are never simply reproductions that lose the Benjaminian aura. Rather, they carry that aura with them. But as John Ellis suggests, there is something counterintuitive about this desire for persistence within a post-Romantic and capitalist world that values novelty primarily: the “process of adaptation should thus be seen as a massive investment (financial and psychic) in the desire to repeat particular acts of consumption within a form of representation [film, in this case] that discourages such a repetition” (1982: 4–5).

As Ellis’ commercial rhetoric suggests, there is an obvious financial appeal to adaptation as well. It is not just at times of economic downturn that adapters turn to safe bets: nineteenth-century Italian composers of that notoriously expensive art form, opera, usually chose to adapt reliable—that is, already financially successful—stage plays or novels in order to avoid financial risks, as well as trouble with the censors (see Trowell 1992: 1198, 1219). Hollywood films of the classical period relied on adaptations from popular novels, what Ellis calls the “tried and tested” (1982: 3), while British television has specialized in adapting the culturally accredited eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, or Ellis’ “tried and trusted.” However, it is not simply a matter of risk-avoidance; there is money to be made. A best-selling book may reach a million readers; a successful Broadway play will be seen by 1 to 8 million people; but a movie or television adaptation will find an audience of many million more (Seger 1992: 5).

The recent phenomenon of films being “musicalized” for the stage is obviously economically driven. The movies of The Lion King or The Producers offer ready-made name recognition for audiences, thereby relieving some of the anxiety for Broadway producers of expensive musicals. Like sequels and prequels, “director’s cut” DVDs and spin-offs, videogame adaptations based on films are yet another way of taking one “property” in a “franchise” and reusing it in another medium. Not only will audiences already familiar with the “franchise” be attracted to the new “repurposing” (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 45), but new consumers will also be created. The multinationals who own film studios today often already own the rights to stories in other media, so they can be recycled for videogames, for example, and then marketed by the television stations they also own (Thompson 2003: 81–82).

Does the manifest commercial success of adaptations help us understand why the 2002 film The Royal Tenenbaums (directed by Wes Anderson with a script by Owen Wilson) opens with a book being checked out of a library—the book upon which the film implicitly claims to be based? Echoing movies like David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), which begins with a shot of the Dickens novel opened to Chapter 1, scene changes in Anderson’s movie are marked by a shot of the Tenenbaums’ “book” opened to the next chapter, the first lines of which describe what we then see on screen. Because, to my knowledge, this film is not adapted from any literary text, the use of this device is a direct and even parodic recall of its use in earlier films, but with a difference: the authority of literature as an institution and thus also of the act of adapting it seems to be what is being invoked and emphasized. But why would a film want to be seen as an adaptation? And what do we mean by a work being seen as an adaptation?

Treating Adaptations as Adaptations

To deal with adaptations as adaptations is to think of them as, to use Scottish poet and scholar Michael Alexander’s great term (Ermarth 2001: 47), inherently “palimpsestuous” works, haunted at all times by their adapted texts. If we know that prior text, we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly. When we call a work an adaptation, we openly announce its overt relationship to another work or works. It is what Gérard Genette would call a text in the “second degree” (1982: 5), created and then received in relation to a prior text. This is why adaptation studies are so often comparative studies (cf. Cardwell 2002: 9). This is not to say that adaptations are not also autonomous works that can be interpreted and valued as such; as many theorists have insisted, they obviously are (see, for example, Bluestone 1957/1971; Ropars 1970). This is one reason why an adaptation has its own aura, its own “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Benjamin 1968: 214). I take such a position as axiomatic, but not as my theoretical focus. To interpret an adaptation as an adaptation is, in a sense, to treat it as what Roland Barthes called, not a “work,” but a “text,” a plural “stereophony of echoes, citations, references” (1977: 160). Although adaptations are also aesthetic objects in their own right, it is only as inherently double or multilaminated works that they can be theorized as adaptations.

An adaptation’s double nature does not mean, however, that proximity or fidelity to the adapted text should be the criterion of judgment or the focus of analysis. For a long time, “fidelity criticism,” as it came to be known, was the critical orthodoxy in adaptation studies, especially when dealing with canonical works such as those of Pushkin or Dante. Today that dominance has been challenged from a variety of perspectives (e.g., McFarlane 1996: 194; Cardwell 2002: 19) and with a range of results. And, as George Bluestone pointed out early on, when a film becomes a financial or critical success, the question of its faithfulness is given hardly any thought (1957/1971: 114). My decision not to concentrate on this particular aspect of the relationship between adapted text and adaptation means that there appears to be little need to engage directly in the constant debate over degrees of proximity to the “original” that has generated those many typologies of adaptation processes: borrowing versus intersection versus transformation (Andrew 1980: 10–12); analogy versus commentary versus transposition (Wagner 1975: 222–31); using the source as raw material versus reinterpretation of only the core narrative structure versus a literal translation (Klein and Parker 1981: 10).

Of more interest to me is the fact that the morally loaded discourse of fidelity is based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text (e.g., Orr 1984: 73). Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication. And there are manifestly many different possible intentions behind the act of adaptation: the urge to consume and erase the memory of the adapted text or to call it into question is as likely as the desire to pay tribute by copying. Adaptations such as film remakes can even be seen as mixed in intent: “contested homage” (Greenberg 1998: 115), Oedipally envious and worshipful at the same time (Horton and McDougal 1998b: 8).

If the idea of fidelity should not frame any theorizing of adaptation today, what should? According to its dictionary meaning, “to adapt” is to adjust, to alter, to make suitable. This can be done in any number of ways. As the next section will explore in more depth, the phenomenon of adaptation can be defined from three distinct but interrelated perspectives, for I take it as no accident that we use the same word—adaptation—to refer to the process and the product.

First, seen as a formal entity or product, an adaptation is an announced and extensive transposition of a particular work or works. This “transcoding” can involve a shift of medium (a poem to a film) or genre (an epic to a novel), or a change of frame and therefore context: telling the same story from a different point of view, for instance, can create a manifestly different interpretation. Transposition can also mean a shift in ontology from the real to the fictional, from a historical account or biography to a fictionalized narrative or drama. Sister Helen Prejean’s 1994 book, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, became first a fictionalized film (directed by Tim Robbins, 1995) and then, a few years later, an opera (written by Terrence McNally and Jake Heggie).

Second, as a process of creation, the act of adaptation always involves both (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation; this has been called both appropriation and salvaging, depending on your perspective. For every aggressive appropriator outed by a political opponent, there is a patient salvager. Priscilla Galloway, an adapter of mythic and historical narratives for children and young adults, has said that she is motivated by a desire to preserve stories that are worth knowing but will not necessarily speak to a new audience without creative “reanimation” (2004), and that is her task. African film adaptations of traditional oral legends are also seen as a way of preserving a rich heritage in an aural and visual mode (Cham 2005: 300).

Third, seen from the perspective of its process of reception, adaptation is a form of intertextuality: we experience adaptations (as adaptations) as palimpsests through our memory of other works that resonate through repetition with variation. For the right audience, then, the novelization by Yvonne Navarro of a film like Hellboy (2004) may echo not only with Guillermo del Toro’s film but also with the Dark Horse Comics series from which the latter was adapted. Paul Anderson’s 2002 film Resident Evil will be experienced differently by those who have played the videogame of the same name, from which the movie was adapted, than by those who have not.

In short, adaptation can be described as the following:

• An acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works
• A creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging
• An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work

Therefore, an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing.

There is some apparent validity to the general statement that adaptation “as a concept can expand or contract. Writ large, adaptation includes almost any act of alteration performed upon specific cultural works of the past and dovetails with a general process of cultural recreation” (Fischlin and Fortier 2000: 4). But, from a pragmatic point of view, such vast definition would clearly make adaptation rather difficult to theorize. My more restricted double definition of adaptation as process and product is closer to the common usage of the word and is broad enough to allow me to treat not just films and stage productions, but also musical arrangements and song covers, visual art revisitations of prior works and comic book versions of history, poems put to music and remakes of films, and videogames and interactive art. It also permits me to draw distinctions; for instance, allusions to and brief echoes of other works would not qualify as extended engagements, nor do most examples of musical sampling, because they recontextualize only short fragments of music. Plagiarisms are not acknowledged appropriations, and sequels and prequels are not really adaptations either, nor is fan fiction. There is a difference between never wanting a story to end—the reason behind sequels and prequels, according to Marjorie Garber (2003: 73–74)—and wanting to retell the same story over and over in different ways. With adaptations, we seem to desire the repetition as much as the change. Maybe this is why, in the eyes of the law, adaptation is a “derivative work”—that is, one based on one or more preexisting works, but “recast, transformed” (17 USC §101). That seemingly simple definition, however, is also a theoretical can of worms.

Exactly What Gets Adapted? How?

What precisely is “recast” and “transformed”? In law, ideas themselves cannot be copyrighted; only their expression can be defended in court. And herein lies the whole problem. As Kamilla Elliott has astutely noted, adaptation commits the heresy of showing that form (expression) can be separated from content (ideas)—something both mainstream aesthetic and semiotic theories have resisted or denied (2003: 133), even as legal theory has embraced it. The form changes with adaptation (thus...