Adaptation as Interpretation

We used to judge adaptations qualitatively, passing judgment on them on the basis of their “faithfulness” to the “original” (the movie almost inevitably losing out to the book, which was always deemed to be “better”). But this approach has become tired and uninteresting. Scholars also now see this “fidelity model” as naïve and critically unfair. Current approaches to adaptation studies might be described more broadly as intertextual investigation. Today’s scholars are becoming more attentive to the complex network of linguistic, generic, historic, and cultural exchanges that shape and inform any literary text and that determine how and why we read it. In challenging the idea that literary texts are stable, authoritative, and able to make meaning utterly independent of other texts or cultural contexts, scholars have destabilized the very concept of “originary text.” One result of this paradigm shift has been the rejection of traditional notions that direct fidelity to an original text is desirable or even possible. We can, for example, recognize Clueless as a recasting of Austen’s Emma and appreciate the ways in which the novel and film speak to one another. If we understand that You’ve Got Mail and Bridget Jones’s Diary reimagine, update, and variously make use of Pride and Prejudice, we get more than the simple pleasure of intertextual recognition (the delight that comes from smugly proclaiming the intertextual connection to our slower, less critically sophisticated friends); we obtain entrance to new interpretive avenues into both book and film and, moreover, are prompted to consider not only why Austen’s early nineteenth-century novel continues to speak to us in such compelling ways but also how her novel remains available for reinterpretation.  

Every critical reading of a text is an act of adaptation, as readers intervene to render the text coherent or to reshape it using theoretical tools. It is by adapting the novels that we read, refitting them to suit our modern perspectives and cultural needs, that we keep them alive and meaningful. In my own research, I adopt an approach that considers the act of reading as a complex negotiation among reader, text, and the cultural imagination. By focusing on the adaptations, I argue, we see a literary text in its fullest, as we consider how it adapts earlier texts to its own purposes and how imaginative reinvention keeps texts relevant to new audiences over time.

Ultimate Fidelity

As we prepare to discuss fidelity today in light of our first film (the 1951 A Christmas Carol), it seems important to remember that ultimate fidelity is impossible. Thomas Leitch writes that every adaptation must include something "un-Dickensian" simply due to the fact that a different medium requires addition of material. "[C]ontinuous performance" by an actor on screen, for example, requires adding material since Dickens doesn't describe each character's actions during each moment of the story (Leitch 74).

Originary Text

Adaptation

Despite the knowledge that a truly faithful adaptation is impossible, I couldn't help asking myself, What would ultimate fidelity look like?

I was then reminded of Borges's Pierre Menard. The ultimate adapter, Menard sets out to write his own version of Don Quixote, which he thinks is best done by copying out the text itself, as written by Cervantes, word for word.

And yet, this is still an adaptation!

Borges's narrative, posing as a kind of fictional scholarly obituary, addresses the idea of adaptation and fidelity in a hilarious, comparative close reading:

"It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor. 

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic. 

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time."

So, despite its fidelity, Menard's adaptation is still quite different than the original, according to the critic-narrator.

As we discussed during our first class, each time we teach a text, we adapt it to our classroom. Each time we read a text, we are reading only one version. Fidelity is impossible because even the text itself shifts constantly under the changing lenses of time, culture, and context.

Read the entire Pierre Menard story here.