Difference and Congruence in Film and the Novel

Difference and Congruence in Film and the Novel

At the heart of the difference between the two media is the way ‘signs’ function. In film ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ are closely related whereas in prose fiction they are not (an image of a monkey indicates clearly that to which it refers; the word ‘monkey’ does not).

By its very nature, written/ spoken language analyses. To write the word “rose” is to generalise and abstract the idea of the rose. The real power of the linguistic languages lies not in their denotative ability but in this connotative aspect of language: the wealth of meaning we can attach to a word that surpasses its denotation. (Monaco 180)

If language and film function in such fundamentally different ways how, Kamilla Elliott asks, can adaptation be possible at all? She observes that debates in the fields of semiotics and linguistics imply either that adaptation is a “theoretical impossibility” or that scholars “must find some way to account for what passes between a novel and film in adaptation without committing semiotic heresy.” (Elliott 4)

From a creative writer’s perspective this query prompts a related question: if, form and content are deemed inseparable, at what point does the genesis of a narrative, the seed of an idea, Nabokov’s “throb” (Nabokov 311), Henry James’s “donnée” or germ of a story (James 42) - which could potentially grow into a poem, a novel, a screenplay, a radio drama - become inextricably embedded in form? Is it an incremental process, analogous to an acorn putting down roots, the sapling being easy to pull up, with a full-grown oak tree presenting more of a problem? Or does the ‘seed’ of the idea carry within it the ideal form which it is the artist’s role to seek?⁴

I initially took the pragmatic view that the germ of an idea could grow in more than one medium, and that with experience I would be in a better position to judge which medium to choose: Gideon the Cutpurse was conceived originally as a work of prose fiction but in the early stages I also considered writing it as a radio drama or a screenplay. Keith Cohen, whose work explores exchange and congruence between media, argues that a text might be viewed as the sum of its narrative parts, each of which, at a sufficiently deep level, can find its equivalent in another medium:

From the moment visual and verbal elements are seen as component parts of one global system of meaning, the affinities between the two arts come into focus. […]The modern semiotician [..] with a new vocabulary, goes further than ever before in breaking down the barrier that has existed, in theoretical terms, between the verbal and the visual. (Cohen 3-4)

Linda Hutcheon, on the other hand, declares that to adapt a text is to change a text: there are always gains and losses. Moreover, to adapt a text is to ‘re-mediate’ it, that is to translate it “in the form of intersemiotic transpositions from one sign system (for example words) to another (for example images).” This kind of translation, she asserts, involves a re-coding into a new set of conventions [my italics] as well as signs.” (Hutcheon 16) She also suggests that an adapter’s chosen medium will tend to predispose him to sift through the source text for material that experience has taught him will work well. This is an important point and one which I recognise in my own practice: an artist will instinctively search for lines in the landscape he is sketching, a dramatist will look for moments of emotional and intellectual conflict, a children’s writer will focus on aspects of the narrative that children will enjoy – action, humour, wonder, a child character. Moreover, this tendency is, in itself, capable of skewing the ‘translation’ in unforeseen ways. Hutcheon’s definition of what she terms the ‘adaptive faculty’, which goes far beyond notions of fidelity to the source text, is also noteworthy: “the ability to repeat without copying, to embed difference in similarity, to be at once both self and Other.” (Ibid. 174)

Discussing images found in texts (book illustrations and ‘painting pictures’ in prose) and texts found in visual media (dialogue and the ‘intertitles’ of silent films), Kamilla Elliott argues that the word / image ‘wars’ and interdisciplinary rivalries have often falsified or obscured the complex relationship that exists between films and novels. She highlights the “pervasive neglect” of the study of ‘film words’ by scholars both in terms of the function of dialogue and the ‘denuding’ of the shooting script, reducing it to a mere technical blueprint. She also suggests that cinema has encouraged the modern novel to move away from the ‘prose painting’ of the past and towards writing which resists visual representation: “The novel’s retreat from its own pictorial aspirations is followed by a taunt that film cannot follow.” (Elliott 2004:11)

Brian McFarlane’s rigorous and groundbreaking work on adaptation is of particular interest insofar as he provides a workable method (using structuralist and narratalogical approaches) for identifying what narrative elements the film and the novel respectively can and cannot convey. Both media, he asserts, have a rich propensity for narrative:

And narrative, at certain levels, is undeniably not only the chief factor novels and the films based on them have in common but is the chief transferable [my italics] element. (McFarlane 12)

Drawing on the work of Geoffrey Wagner (1975) and Dudley Andrew, McFarlane goes on to categorise adaptations into three broad types based on how faithful they are to the origin text. Using Wagner’s terminology, these are: a) the transposition (the novel is transposed into the medium of film with a minimum of ‘apparent interference’), b) the commentary (the source text is altered in some respect either deliberately or inadvertently) and c) the analogy (in which source and adapted texts diverge considerably in order to create a second work of art). The principal determinant in selecting into which category an adaptation will fall will be the intention of the adapter. Few screen adaptations would survive the journey from text to screen with a minimum of changes; but if ‘transpositions’ are rare, ‘commentaries’ and ‘analogies’ are commonplace (the reverential costume drama being an example of a ‘commentary’ and a Disney production being an example of an ‘analogy’).

Some changes will depend on medium-specific conventions. For example, the novel easily accommodates a narrative that jumps backwards and forward in time, but the continuous present of the screen narrative is disrupted by it. Screen grammar can, however, convey this if it chooses to do so. On the other hand, some aspects of the novel cannot be translated to screen, or they can only be translated with difficulty (voice, for example). McFarlane’s overarching aim is to define what can be transferred directly and what needs to be adapted. It is important to stress here that McFarlane, as indeed the majority of adaptation scholars, focuses on transfer and exchange from the novel to the film. My own line of enquiry demands that I give equal stress to those aspects of film which cannot be translated to the novel: motion, sound, the power and subtlety of facial expression to convey emotion, and so on (see, in particular, in this regard, my comments on Melvin Burgess’s novelisation of Billy Elliot in Chapter Three).