Adaptation Theory and Criticism

Postmodern Literature and Cinema in the USA

Gordon E. Slethaug

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623562014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Traditional critics of film adaptation generally assumed a) that the written text is better than the film adaptation because the plot is more intricate and the language richer when pictorial images do not intrude; b) that films are better when particularly faithful to the original; c) that authors do not make good script writers and should not sully their imagination by writing film scripts; d) and often that American films lack the complexity of authored texts because they are sourced out of Hollywood. The 'faithfulness' view has by and large disappeared, and intertextuality is now a generally received notion, but the field still lacks studies with a postmodern methodology and lens.Exploring Hollywood feature films as well as small studio productions, Adaptation Theory and Criticism explores the intertextuality of a dozen films through a series of case studies introduced through discussions of postmodern methodology and practice. Providing the reader with informative background on theories of film adaptation as well as carefully articulated postmodern methodology and issues, Gordon Slethaug includes several case studies of major Hollywood productions and small studio films, some of which have been discussed before ( Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, and Do the Right Thing ) and some that have received lesser consideration ( Six Degrees of Separation, Smoke, Smoke Signals, Broken Flowers, and various Snow White narratives including Enchanted, Mirror Mirror, and Snow White and the Huntsman ). Useful for both film and literary studies students, Adaptation Theory and Criticism cogently combines the existing scholarship and uses previous theories to engage readers to think about the current state of American literature and film.

1

Modernism/postmodernism and origin/intertextual play in adaptation theory

Modernism: High culture, poetic genius, and influence

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot set out to discover what creates a literary mind and a community of critics. He found the answer in what he called the “historical sense” connecting writers and their predecessors:

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. (Eliot 1989, 26–27)

Eliot added, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone” (1989, 27). By this definition, every work of art bears within it the DNA of other works, and, even if a work claims to be a self-conscious repudiation of previous works, that repudiation is situated in, and indebted to, knowledge of the past and the immediate cultural context.

Arguably, then, the interplay of short stories, novels, poems, dramas, films, and performances (including those on the Internet) forms the basis of all art, either implicitly or explicitly, and Eliot’s own poem “The Wasteland” is evidence of this theory at work as his explanatory footnotes anchor the poem in the various literary, mythical, and historical traditions from which it draws and in which it is situated.

Eliot’s position is, however, even more specific and qualified than that. He not only argues for the interplay of art as such but for the view that artists are obligated to read widely in the history and literature of their culture, so that they have the broadest and deepest knowledge of the rich resources and various alternatives culture has to offer. Artists first of all must be learned, and second are required to construct ways that knowledge can be transmitted and transmuted to some new and highly original work.

Eliot is by no means alone in his view, but is part of a practice of referencing the past, if not exactly kowtowing to it before undertaking artistic creativity. Victorian critics such as Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, who were his predecessors, did assume that tradition was richer and more valuable than individual modern counterparts, thus establishing a firm hierarchy in the production of literature and literary criticism. The best artists and critics, according to Pater, were those who immersed themselves in this rich tradition—the golden age, so that they had a basis for understanding modern pieces and could establish their place and contribute to the value of that tradition. This regard for tradition had implications not only for writers but society as a whole, as evidenced by Arnold who in Culture and Anarchy expressed the belief that the study of culture—“the best which has been thought and said in the world”—could develop the individual, restore balance to society, and help achieve “harmonious perfection” (1869, viii, xxiii). According to Leitch, this credo lasted more than a century and ruled American universities through the 1960s (2007, 4).

In asserting the rich “impersonality” of this tradition, Eliot also may have believed in some golden age of writing that forms the foundation for later works (as the twentieth-century critic Northrop Frye later claimed in The Anatomy of Criticism), but he does not state that anterior sources (if they could be identified fully) were necessarily superior to their modern descendants. Though he was talking mainly about high literature, not popular culture and film, he accords dignity to both the new work and sources of inspiration that lie behind it, and this, to a great extent, is what defines literary modernism.

What is important in Eliot’s matrix is that authors are to be truly steeped in their tradition and learning, so that they are able to create interesting, challenging, and unique pieces of art that bear the imprint, however faint and delicate, of that earlier tradition. The audience who responds to this work of art must also be fully educated and grounded in that tradition and in theories of art in order to ensure that writing and reading art are of the highest, most creative, and most significant sorts. In high modernism of which Eliot was a part something special historically was required of the artist, the specialized critic, and the general audience because all art has to be perceived in relation to its cultural matrix.

The anxiety of adaptation

Because poetic genius and cultural and historical background were so closely linked in modernism and also because of “an idolatry of form” (Bazin 2000, 22), it became important in twentieth-century criticism to show to what extent an artistic work was grounded in, and influenced by, an original or was part of a significant tradition and, at the same time, independent and itself “original.” This process demonstrated the value of the modern piece of art while maintaining the integrity and primacy of the founding documents and their special importance for inspiration and literary creativity. Homer, the Bible, and Shakespeare were clearly integral to this process but, because they were considered unsurpassable and unassailable in their poetry, spirituality, and wonder, they were viewed as works of genius that stood in a class by themselves—and altogether lacking precedent. Other documents were simultaneously important for themselves and their place in the tradition.

At the heart of this practice was the anxiety that the modern work should draw from the tradition but stand on its own poetically. This “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom calls it (1973), arises from the Romantic notion that works of genius come directly from the poet’s soul—and beyond that the soul of God, rather than derivation from other texts—coupled with the poet’s need to be especially learned in the great cultural traditions. Reconciling independent genius and the influence of tradition created this anxiety.

Often considered the best of the high modernist poets, Eliot and Pound did not suffer so much from this anxiety because they personally received high acclaim for their writing and had indisputable claim to rich and varied cultural sources, but others found the tension between creativity and historical consciousness an intellectual burden. This was true in many genres, but film, especially, an artistic form that was born and reached maturity during this age of anxiety, did suffer from this tension because it was believed to sidestep the issue of genius and influence for adapting one text to another was considered a “mere” updating or mutation of an original and therefore falling short of artistic genius.

Adaptation’s double use in art and science may have reinforced the negativity inherent in this view for, apart from referring to one form of artistic representation morphing into another, the term “adaptation” is commonly used in physiology to mean a sense organ adjusting to varying conditions or in biology to the species’ mutations in coping with changing circumstances as part of the evolutionary process. Thus, whether in art, physiology, or biology, adaptation does not bear the stamp of originality, but of mutation and permutation of a preexisting original. While scientists could talk positively (though many conservatives were also horrified) about the importance of adaptation in the production of various species, those in arts preferred to talk about the reification of historical tradition, poetic imagination, and genius. Although the artists’ reaching into God’s mind was no longer the central governing concept for modernists as it had been for the Romantics, true artists were thought to draw from the treasure trove of past literature and art and also plumb the depths of their conscious and, with the advent of Freud, unconscious to shed light on their own and others’ special humanity.

Consequently, the nineteenth-century intersection of the Romantic conception of art with Darwin’s theory of evolution described in On the Origin of Species (1859) magnified the ongoing concern about the abandonment of originality and specter of adaptation. While the former was about art and the latter biology, the original in relation to the adapted form was on everyone’s mind, and it stayed there with the advent of the motion-picture industry (1888) and the adaptation of literature—first drama and then fiction (Corrigan 1999, 16)—to this new, technologized media.

To many, this process of film adaptation was an example not of God’s hand at work, the surprise of genius, or the survival of the best and fittest but of a challenge to the integrity of tradition and historical consciousness because great themes, complex language, and nuanced plots were reduced to fit small-time frames, limited formats, and the visual specificities of motion pictures. The rapid development of technology and a belief in an increasing chasm between genuine creativity (with respect for tradition) and technological reproduction, and even between art and science marked the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Although there was not necessarily a link to popular culture because of the invention of film, the process of adaptation became closely identified with the rise of popular culture in the early twentieth century and the movement away from high art. Popular culture posed a special problem for the prophets and patriarchs of high culture because it did not require knowledge of the great artistic traditions of Western culture and indeed seemed to hollow out the richness and integrity of the traditional ways of apprehending the artistic process, cultural institutions, and reality itself. This was equally true in all forms of the mass media—film, music, and radio broadcasting. According to Cartmell, Corrigan, and Whelehan, certain critics (e.g., William Hunter) and novelists (e.g., Virginia Woolf) thought films were geared to the “lowest possible denominator” and watching them made “savages” of the viewers (2008, 1). Then, too, as Martin Halliwell points out, the commercial enterprise involved in film making and film’s tendency toward “seamless worlds, linear narratives, a stable hierarchy of characters, humanist ideology, and tidy resolutions” went against the view of great artists as isolated and not-for-profit geniuses and the modernist repertory of “unreliable narrators, psychologically complex characters, fragmented perceptions, and mythical allusions” (2007, 90–91). Even when film adaptations were seen as classics in their own right, the modernistic primacy of the original written word was maintained over the spoken word, visual embodiment, or technologically engendered product in both high culture and popular culture.

To ensure the legitimacy of the written, some who adapted fiction looked principally at the literary aspects that made the originals so successful—themes, narrative action, plot and scene structures, characterization, imagery, and dialogue itself (Sobchack 2005, 112). Anything less was a compromise, so Timothy Corrigan identifies the questions needed to be answered concerning serious, faithful adaptations:

(1) To what extent are the details of the settings and plot accurately retained or recreated? (2) To what extent do the nuance and complexity of the characters survive the adaptation? (3) To what extent are the themes and ideas of the source communicated in the adaptation? (4) To what extent has a different historical or cultural context altered the original? (5) To what extent has the change in the material or mode of communication (a printed page, a stage, 35 mm film) changed the meaning of the work for a reader or viewer? (1999, 20)

If Corrigan’s questions 1–3 (concerning the transfer of plot, characterization, and theme) could all be answered “to a considerable extent,” then Linda Cahir would call this a faithful “literal” interpretation with authorial integrity. If, in addition to the first three responses, questions 4 and 5 were answered “to a considerable extent” (i.e., concerning the addition or deletion of material in order to make the film interesting in itself, stay within budget, and please the audience (2006, 21, 106)), then Cahir would call the film a “traditional interpretation” or adaptation of the “novel’s integral meaning” but not quite so faithful. Of course, as James O’Brien and Ned Borden find, many critics still assume that a fine and successful literary work is inherently compromised when adapted as a film for the latter, even when it tries to be serious art, and can only succeed through simplified plots, glamorized characters, optimized basic premises, and romanticized endings (1997, 114–115).

There is a whole range of modernistic assumptions contributing to this view of more-or-less faithful adaptation (whether strictly literal or loosely traditional) that goes more deeply into culture than the previously discussed status of tradition would suggest. As Frederic Jameson notes, modernism contained a “depth model” hermeneutic based on a binary structure, with the first term (e.g., the “original”) in the privileged position and the other (e.g., the “copy”) in the inferior position: in addition to the original and copy, these artistic binaries consisted of the “center” and the “margins,” the “inside” and “outside” of culture, the “authenticity” and “inauthenticity” of execution, and others as well (1993, 318ff). Jameson draws these distinctions from Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the ways in which Western ontology was built upon systemic binary oppositions. Within this paradigm of binary oppositions, adaptation, not being original or unique, is outside, on the margin, inauthentic, and absent—akin to a copy as opposed to an original. As Jameson—who supports this modernist construct—remarks, “What we must now stress…is the degree to which the high-modernist conception of a unique style (along with the accompanying collective ideals of an artist or political vanguard or avant-garde), themselves stand or fall along with the older notion (or experience) of the so-called centered subject” (1993, 319). His is the view that the “authors” occupy a center themselves, an “authority” that allows them to create works of originality and importance in a style that is manifestly their own and conscious of their place in history. A centered subject and a centered work in a unique and individual style go hand in hand with artistic authority and historical centeredness, a view to which Arnold, Pater, and Eliot could subscribe.

In keeping with these modernist perspectives, many others who write about adaptation, says Naremore, tend “to be narrow in range, inherently respectful of the ‘precursor text,’ and constitutive of a series of binary oppositions that poststructuralist theory has taught us to deconstruct: literature versus cinema, high culture versus mass culture, original versus copy” (2000, 2). In a similar vein, Linda Hutcheon argues that this modernist conception continues with the critiques of...