The Evolving Status of the Adaptation

The Evolving Status of the Adaptation

Stories do get retold in different ways in new material and cultural environments; like genes, they adapt to those new environments by virtue of mutation – in their offspring or their adaptations. And the fittest do more than survive; they flourish. (Ibid. 32)

From the creative writing perspective, this notion can be applied to parallel adaptations, an approach which I will pursue in Chapter Four where I discuss the advantages of cross-media narrative development. I now need to turn away from debates in adaptation theory and towards creative writing practice. Through a series of analyses that compare narrative techniques in the novel and the screenplay, I will explore the extent of their difference and congruence.

CHAPTER TWO

The Techniques of Artifice I: A Discussion of Point of View in the Novel and the Screenplay

One of the problems in discussing fictional point of view is that it is difficult, as James Wood argues, to extricate it from the other components of the narrative ‘engine’ which work in unison to create meaning. A second difficulty is that the term ‘point of view’ commonly refers both to narrative voice and to that which is focalised. In other words, it raises the questions: ‘who is telling the story?’ and ‘whose story is it?’ I would argue that while it is always appropriate to ask both questions of the novel (because of the way point of view functions in that medium), this is not the case for the screenplay. Because film is a medium which is ‘transparent’ and therefore does not need a narrative voice to intercede between the story and the audience, to ask of the screenplay ‘who is telling the story?’ is generally inappropriate. It is true that many films do have ‘narrators’, typically introducing the story in voiceover as, for instance, in Sunset Boulevard (1950), Blade Runner (1982) and American Beauty (1999). ¹ However, I would argue that although this indicates point of view it equates to an ‘effect’ rather than a true narrative device. The novel requires a narrative voice, film does not. For example, ten years after its first release (in 1992) Ridley Scott removed all voiceovers from his ‘director’s cut’ of Blade Runner. That the newly edited film still tells the story from the point of view of Deckard, the eponymous ‘blade runner’, is never in doubt.

The vast body of critical work generated by this subject in the field of literary theory should not be surprising. David Lodge argues that point of view is: “[…] arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions.” (Lodge 26) Indeed, point of view in the novel defines the relationship or ‘contract’ between writer, text and reader and thus contributes to a definition of what fiction is and how it functions.

The metaphor of the camera is frequently employed when discussing narrative perspective and will be a useful starting point in this context. Philip Pullman, for example, comments that the filmmaker’s question ‘Where do I put the camera?’ is “a very rich metaphor for the first big problem you have to solve when you start to tell a story: where am I seeing this from?” (Pullman 2008:42) Thus, we can begin by asking, as Pullman does, where, in relation to the story, is the camera placed? Of course, we can also ask: Where is the camera pointing? What can it ‘see’ from this position? What is its narrative ‘depth of field’: is the camera ‘zooming’ in on its object or surveying it from a wide angle? As Pullman suggests, posing such metaphorical questions can be helpful when establishing the narrative scope of a novel as well as when planning individual scenes, a technique I employ in my own writing practice. However, I would argue that the camera metaphor can quickly mislead. This is principally because viewpoint in prose fiction relates to the character or characters who propel the narrative and tends to be concerned with internal considerations such as perception, emotion and understanding. With regard to the novel, therefore, the question ‘where am I seeing this from?’ is inaedquate. The novelist must address other questions: from which character(s) point(s) of view am I seeing this from?’, who is narrating the story?’ and ‘is (are) the narrator(s) privileged with the consciousness of any or all of the characters in the story?’ Philip Pullman favours omniscient narration, a voice which is closest to functioning like a camera insofar as the narrator can move through the landscape of the story at will. Crucially, of course, the omniscient narrator also has potential access to the consciousness of any or all characters. The metaphor works less well for that potent vehicle of character, first-person narration, given that in this instance the camera would need to focus ‘on’ itself and ‘through’ itself, be subject and object simultaneously.

The French term for lens is objectif, and objectivity is a characteristic of the camera though not usually of literary viewpoint. There are exceptions: Christopher Isherwood expressed the desire to be objective in the opening of his short story, A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930) (Isherwood 9): “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” Yet objectivity and viewpoint are terms which do not sit well together: point a camera at a crowd and the eye behind the camera might be drawn to a particular face within it; the lens, conversely, will record every face with equal emphasis. Arguably of greater significance than directionality is the fact that point of view it is both selective and subjective. Even in the medium of film, which places the lens at its creative centre, point of view springs not from camera position (which is a consequence of point of view) but from the screenplay, from the characters and themes which the writer chooses to focalise. It is the presence or absence of characters in a scene (or sequence of scenes) that determines point of view in film. As I discuss presently, it is the focalisation of Billy in the opening scenes of Lee Hall’s Billy Elliot which establishes viewpoint.

As I have argued, above, the metaphor of the camera holds up best with regard to the omniscient narrator. Yet even here, in an age where such a god-like authorial position is sometimes perceived to be a sham, and the ‘reliability’ and ‘impartiality’ of the narrator questionable, the aptness of the image is suspect. As Paul Magrs observes:

Every piece of writing comes from a particular point of view. […] One of the things to be clear about, from the very start, is that you are adopting a specific and consistent point of view and that you are doing it for a reason. (Magrs 135)

Effective writing uses the bias of a particular viewpoint to its own advantage and uses it in different ways according to the medium in which the writer is working. In the following section I reflect on how Lee Hall and Melvin Burgess create point of view in the screenplay (Hall 2000) and subsequent novelisation (Burgess 2001) of Billy Elliot. As a practising children’s writer I have a particular interest in how other writers use narrative techniques when creating works for or about children and this has guided my choice of texts in Chapters Two and Three of this commentary. However, the comments I make about point of view, character and dialogue are related to medium rather than genre.