Adaptation
Reflecting on theoretical debates in the field of adaptation studies has informed and enriched this practice-based study. Of particular interest is how discourse surrounding the criteria for a successful adaptation (namely the ‘fidelity to the source text’ debate) dovetails with my own aims in using adaptation as a narrative tool, in other words using adaptation to progress a source text as opposed to interpret or re-interpret it in another medium.
Approaches to the nature of adaptation are multifarious and continue to evolve, moving away from the conventional ‘post hoc’ model and adapting to an age of multimedia. Post-publication or post-broadcast, creative works are removed from their original context and from the intentions of their creator: they gain ‘a life of their own’, connecting with an anonymous audience, in ways over which the author has little or no control. Adaptation is one response to engaging with a creative text. In a sense one might perceive it as a kind of ‘appropriation’, a claiming of a narrative for one’s own purposes. This desire to adapt could include reclaiming the story for a new age, or for a different demographic. While fidelity and authenticity in transposing a narrative into another medium is a primary aim for some, another response is the desire to re-interpret, or to develop, or to satirise. Gurinder Chadha’s Bollywood-style reworking of Austen, Bride and Prejudice (2004) falls into the latter category, as does Comic Strip’s subversive, televisual interpretation of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five (entitled Five Go Mad in Dorset (1982)). From the audience’s perspective the attraction of a new adaptation might principally be curiosity about what an adapter might bring to a classic text. The Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit (2011) will doubtless attract an audience whose demographic will not only be made up fans of the Western. Similarly, it may be Danny Boyle’s reputation as a film director (Trainspotting (1996) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008)) that will attract interest in his 2011 production of Frankenstein at the National (adapted by Nick Dear) rather than an appetite to see one more adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic narrative. Indeed, some narratives seem to spawn adaptations in such quantities (the novels of Dickens, for example have always been at the top of this list1) that in a sense the stories themselves might be viewed as narrative ‘vehicles’ or ‘meta-stories’.
Chapter One included a discussion of the rhetoric of vilification used by critics when discussing adaptations, yet these ‘bastardisations’ of source texts do, at the very least, perform a function of alternative ‘dissemination’. Charlie Kaufman’s film, Adaptation (2002), is itself an adaptation and is also about adaptation, both in the Darwinian sense (it is an adaptation of a book about the evolution of orchids) and also about the process of screen adaptation. It is a clever and witty screenwork, rich in metaphor and comment on the place and function of the adaptation. It even includes a guest appearance by the neo-Aristotelian Robert McKee, author of Story, whose theories on screenwriting Kaufman constantly challenges in his screenplay. Here, the theorist Robert Stam unpicks some of the film’s principal tropes:
[…]What could be more Darwinian than the dog-eat-dog ethos of Hollywood? The block-buster aesthetic, in this sense, forms the end-point of the commercial “survival of the fittest.” Yet if mutation is the means by which the evolutionary process advances, then we can also see filmic adaptations as “mutations” that help their source novel “survive.” Do not adaptations “adapt to” changing environments and changing tastes, as well as to a new medium, with its distinct industrial demands, commercial pressures, censorship taboos, and aesthetic norms? And are adaptations not a hybrid form like the orchid, the meeting place of different “species?” […]La Roche […] invokes the metaphor of the parasite, a trope typically deployed against adaptations, seen as parasitical on their source texts and on the A-list prestige of literature. […] Even the metaphor of murder is invoked. “We have to kill him,” the Susan Orlean character says of her adapter, “before he murders my book.” (Stam 3)
It is not difficult to perceive a causal relation between the growing ‘mania’ for adaptations (in an ever-increasing variety of forms) and an era that is marked by notions of fragmentation, of the dissolving of boundaries, of the ‘death’ of the author, of intertextuality, of cultural ‘cut and paste’. The trope of ‘evolution’ is also appropriate in this context, and one might usefully cite again Richard Dawkins’s concept of ‘memes’: ideas which adapt and survive. (Hutcheon 31-32) Such ‘units of narrative’ are dislocated from medium and authorial intention, floating in a sea of new media, narratives in search of form.
Discussing Roland Barthes’ influential essay, ‘The Death of an Author’, David Lodge describes the consequences of doubting the “centrality of the concept of an author”:
[…]recourse to authorial intention becomes an unnecessary curtailment of free enquiry, an effect of the market […] from Barthes’s perspective, we do not find a ‘single “theological” meaning’ but rather ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’. The Author is thus a mere conduit for such bricolage. (Lodge and Woods 10)
As Lodge comments, “Exit Author and Enter Critic” (and, of course, Reader and Adapter). It is not my intention, here, to enter a theoretical debate. Nevertheless, if, in general terms, one accepts that writers write and readers read texts for their own purposes, that each brings to the text social, gender and other attributes2, and that the text itself is ‘a multidimensional space’ where other texts ‘blend and clash’, then the boundaries between authorial intention and interpretation begin to break down and the concept of ‘originality’ is challenged. Debates around authorship and intertextuality continue to influence adaptation theory and, in conjunction with emerging new media, will undoubtedly open the way to the evolution of new forms.3
The Writing Process
Certain lessons gleaned from my experiment in parallel adaptation will continue to inform my writing process. Firstly, imposing a dramatic structure on the novel helped me to contain and shape a large fictional narrative. Then, the permanent imperative of narrative economy in the screenplay is a discipline that, when transposed to the novel, is appropriate when writing fiction which foregrounds story.4 When writing in novel form, I also found it effective to think of scenes in terms of the filmic technique of montage: perhaps in order to create meaning from juxtaposition, or to create an effect of time passing, or to cover much ground quickly, or perhaps to inject narrative energy and texture.
The screenplay is reductive in the sense that it requires the pre-existence of a wealth of material - well-developed themes, convincing characters, a strong and meaningful story – which it will distil and shape. In the process of screen adaptation the writer ‘cherry-picks’ the novel, teasing out the telling detail or moment and dramatising it in order to re-interpret the narrative for the screen. I would argue that the screenplay is not an exploratory medium. From the perspective of the creative writer one might reasonably consider the script as the tip of a narrative iceberg. Conversely, I found writing the novel (the novel itself as opposed to any kind of preparative ‘treatment’) could be both preparation and process. I see prose fiction as a more generous medium than the script when, for example, creating fictional worlds and exploring character.
Working in two media is a dialectical process. It is an invaluable way of injecting energy and new ideas during story development, but it is also helpful during the crucial stage of editing and rewriting. The rewrite demands a degree of distance: the ability to look at a previous draft with ‘a fresh eye’. Parallel and sequential adaptation both proved helpful in this respect, sometimes opening up unexpected narrative vistas which I do not believe would have come to the fore when rewriting within the same medium.
Form and Content
In my introduction to this commentary I admitted to a degree of pragmatism when broaching adaptation: following Elliott, Cohen and Hutcheon, I took the view that form and content can be separated, that some (though not all) components of narrative can cross the boundaries of media. The opposite view, taken to its logical conclusion, would render adaptation (and, arguably, treatments and other preparative documents) at best problematic and at worst impossible. John Gardner’s description of his own writing practice, for instance, to which I referred in my introduction, involves an acceptance that you might spend many months writing and polishing scenes which you may well reject later on, Gardener’s implication being that the narrative will only properly emerge in the creative text itself and cannot be ‘forced’ in a preparative document. Robert McKee’s approach, by contrast, encourages the development of a thorough treatment which attempts to overcome structural, plot, character and other issues before a word of the final creative text is written. At the heart of these opposing approaches is the question: are form and content inseparable? How writers respond to this question will have a significant bearing on their practice.
What was not obvious to me when writing sequential adaptations of Pearls in the Tate became apparent when writing parallel adaptations of The Gideon Trilogy, a narrative on a much larger scale. It persuaded me that form does mould the narrative, and that to think in terms of a narrative growing from a ‘germ of an idea’ (or going back to the trope of evolution, the story having a basic DNA) is misleading. Rather, these ‘units of narrative’ are not necessarily ‘stable’; they have a tendency to ‘mutate’ in another medium.5 I have described in Chapter Four how parallel adaptation confused the opening scenes of The Tar Man and, to an even greater extent, those of Lord Luxon. Equally I noticed that the character of Lord Luxon pulled me in one direction in the screenplay but that he became a much darker personality when I explored him in the novels. While it is inappropriate to draw firm conclusions from such subjective and contextual ‘evidence’, nevertheless, developing parallel adaptations of segments of The Gideon Trilogy has modified my views with regard to the nature of form and has affected my practice. With regard to an incomplete narrative, it seems to me that the medium is not passive, in the same way that languages are not passive: making definitive narrative and linguistic ‘transpositions’ and ‘translations’ an impossibility.
Working in Different Forms
Andrew Pettie’s review of William Boyd’s serialisation for television of his novel, Any Human Heart, was very positive. Nevertheless he concluded:
[…] it still wasn’t a patch on the book. This wasn’t Boyd’s fault. It’s just that what grabs you by the lapels from the opening sentence of his novel is Logan’s voice – that crisp, funny, slightly self-regarding narrator’s voice which addresses the reader with an intimacy and directness that television, despite all its visual advantages, cannot recreate. (Pettie 22 Nov. 2010)
This kind of belittlement of the screen adaptation is a familiar motif and, as I have noted in Chapter One, fuels much theoretical debate. It is well-trodden territory, yet I would suggest that to complain, in effect, that a screen adaptation is not a novel is scarcely a tenable position. Of course the screen version cannot recreate authorial voice, any more than the novel can recreate the intimate potency of the close-up or the howl of despair of an accomplished actor interpreting a character’s reaction to a beloved wife’s death. Jonathan Miller has commented that stage plays will translate to screen without destroying their identity whereas “most novels are irreversibly damaged [my italics] by being dramatised as they were written without any sort of performance in mind.” (qtd. in Hutcheon 36) I would argue that no screen adaptation by definition leaves the novel ‘intact’: the narrative has been transposed into another medium. Screenplays are made and viewed because the medium of film can add to as well as ‘subtract’ from the source text. Boyd the novelist portrayed the long life of one man and in so doing wanted to demonstrate how we become different people with the passing years. Boyd the screenwriter dramatised this same story and searched for an image to embed his theme in the drama. In a recurring shot – which portrays the young protagonist on the banks of a flowing river flanked by himself as a child, a man in middle years and also as an old man – Boyd found a powerful visual narrative equivalent. His screenplay, I would argue, both stands on its own and complements the novel, adding new insights but also drawing viewers back to the original text.
The central place of story in our culture (and in our psychological makeup) guarantees that the strongest narratives will ‘adapt and survive’ in different forms. Richard Kearney asserts:
Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living. There will always be someone there to say, ‘tell me a story’, and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human. (Kearney 2002:156)
One of the consequences (or perhaps one could say functions) of this layering of interpretations and adaptations of ‘dominant’ narratives is that each adds meaning to and helps to reveal the heart of that story. As Kearny notes, storytelling is never ‘neutral’ and each version carries with it some evaluative charge. (Ibid. 155)
If film was the medium that dominated, and in many ways defined, the twentieth century, it is already clear, as we leave this first decade of the new millennium, that we no longer live in an age of cinema but one of multi-media. “We find ourselves on the verge of a new phase in the history of media. The languages which we invented to represent reality are merging. Film is no longer separate from print. Books can include movies; movies, books.” (Monaco 578)
Coming after more than a one hundred and fifty years of photography and a century of audio recording, Monaco expresses a sense of ‘rightness’ with regard to the advent of ‘multimedia’. After all, he asks, if it had been possible, would not Daniel Defoe have included an interactive database of historical statistics with his Journal of the Plague Year? Would not Sir Walter Scott have added a slide show to his novels, or Jean Luc Godard have written a book that was also a movie? (Ibid. 607)
In every field, society is responding to the digitisation of knowledge and to the freely available technological tools to manipulate data, sound and images. It is reasonable to assume that the impact on the arts will only escalate: it is a time of excitement about the newly possible and uncertainty about what we could lose. Social networking, digitised newspapers, the ‘blogosphere’, virtual publishing will all feed into the evolution of current and the development of new forms. For those writing for a generation who have known nothing other than a digitised, multimedia age, a broad grounding in the constraints and potentials of diverse media and an openness to new form would seem to be desirable attributes.
For me, parallel adaptation was a modest experiment in using media to develop an extended narrative which also promoted an understanding of difference and congruence in the novel and the screenplay. Did it, in the end, help me to develop a narrative? Overall, I found ‘sequential’ adaptation to be more helpful (and less frustrating) than ‘parallel’ adaptation, although contributory factors (of scale and timing) undoubtedly impacted on the case study. Among the valuable outcomes I take from the experience is a certain cast of mind, nurtured as I moved between one medium and the other, altering narrative perspectives and techniques, which has opened up my writing practice to the dialectical benefits and the rich potential afforded by working in different media.
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