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.

Dickens Forever

Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel A Handful of Dust follows "civilized man" Tony Last deep into the Amazon jungle, where he falls ill, loses his guide, and is "saved" by Mr Todd, an illiterate man with a deep and abiding passion for Dickens. In this clip, from the 1988 film, Tony Last (played by James Wilby) comes to understand his new position in Mr Todd's (Alec Guiness) world.

Sorry for Repeating Myself: Link to Vrettos and Between Schwartz

Here is a link to the article that I mentioned in our seminar meeting on Monday as something that I felt connected to Hillel Schwartz's um...interesting, broad, and unique take on the power of repetition:

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_studies/v042/42.3vrettos.html

The html link is through Project MUSE, and the article is called "Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology of Repetition," Victorian Studies 42.3 (2000): 399-426.

I think that, overall, Vrettos's discussion of habit provides an interesting point of intersection in relation to Schwartz's discussion of Tourette Syndrome and the importance of repetition in linguistic acquisition and retention (Schwartz 303).  Similarly, Vrettos's exploration of habit in Victorian characterizations (especially in Dickens) focuses on the psychological, discussing "obsessive behaviors" (Vrettos 413) that sound very similar to Tourette Syndrome or even Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in Dickensian characters.  And as I mentioned on Monday, another interesting Dickensian context of the Vrettos and Schwartz pieces is the frequent criticism of Dickens over the years that he often depicted similarly quirky characters in his works, rendering him guilty of character repetition or recycling.  Also, the Vrettos article specifically discusses Great Expectations (Vrettos 409-411).

But on a broader scale, Schwartz's emphasis on the value and importance of repetition, and Vrettos's emphasis on the extent to which repetition is essential to character identity in Dickens's works, reveals even further the psychological complications that Pip and Scrooge must endure as they experience their changes of character and representation in their respective texts.  So, maybe this issue will come up a few more times in our seminar as we discuss those texts more specifically.

Adaptation and the Survival of the Literary Species

Adaptation is a nineteenth-century concept, popularized by Darwin, who adapted (borrowed, stole) it from Herbert Spencer. It’s the process that drives the evolution of species, the concept that shook the Victorian world by challenging the conventional view of the divine ordering of the universe. At its best moments, adaptation does just that: it offers us a completely new and game-changing point of view. It insists on an organic, evolving, intertextual and multi-media perspective. It is a dynamic concept with potential to open up exciting new avenues of critical textual investigation. Adaptation suggests an engaged and constructive form of reading, which can empower our students and yield an understanding of literature as a dynamic cultural form.

Thoughts on Adaptation, Cultural Relevance, and Critical Reading

Our students are already engaging with adaptations, are already reading what we assign to them through an adaptive lens. Before we have assigned the texts, our students have encountered A Christmas Carol, Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet, and Dracula (to name but a few) via their adaptations. They have already formed an idea of the text before they even open the book. But rather than frantically insisting on the primacy of the originary text, it may well be worthwhile to consider how and why these texts are adapted in particular ways at particular times for particular audiences and via particular media. And these are questions that will take students to the very heart of the originary texts as they also think about why it us that we continue to read texts written a century—or more—ago.

I read and study and teach adaptations because adaptations read and interpret and keep in circulation the literature that seems to speak most profoundly to the human condition or to issues that naggingly remain with us across time and cultural boundaries. Adaptations remind us that culture matters: literature and art help us to understand ourselves and our world. “Classic” texts aren’t dated and dusty: their adaptability proves their continued relevance. And there’s something, too, to be said for our cultural hunger for those texts: why is it that every generation reinvents Frankenstein or Romeo and Juliet (as, for example, a zombie tale in the recent film Warm Bodies)?

Adaptations say something about how readers—in a given historical moment and in a particular cultural context—read literary texts but also why those texts might be relevant to different generations of readers, not simply because they contain “timeless” truths but because they (can) address—perhaps with some interpretive effort or representational acrobatics—timely issues, matters of the (to)day. Learning to approach adaptations critically encourages us to read and understand ourselves and our world critically, as thinking beings who can reflect upon and understand the things that we encounter as we move through life. And that seems to me, in the final analysis, to be the unchanging, essential point of it all: life is richer when we know how to comprehend and interpret and communicate, and adaptations are really useful tools for sharpening those skills. 

Approaching the Seminar

The Great Adaptations seminar begins in just under a week! As everyone is packing fort he move to Santa Cruz and preparing for a month of intensive immersion in Dickens, I thought I might post some musings on the general concepts of the seminar to everyone thinking in advance of our first meetings together.

Our goal in this seminar is to find new ways of teaching Dickens, the nineteenth-century novel, and fiction more generally via adaptation. We’ll talk about what adaptation is and is not, or rather, what it can be, what it can mean, and what it can do—for us as readers and as teachers—and for our students. I don’t cling to a restrictive definition of “adaptation,” but rather embrace it as a rather commodious term that can signify a wide range of intertextual connections as they inform interpretive acts of artistic production. We'll talk more terminology in our first few sessions.

In designing this seminar, I selected texts (novels and plays) and films that engage with their originary novels in interesting and provocative ways. I selected scholarship that would introduce participants to ideas that were engaging or fresh. As a participant in the seminar you won’t like everything we read or watch, but I hope that everything we read (or watch) and discuss will help you to read and think in some new ways. In the end, I hope that the seminar will affect in some way how and what you teach, as you find ways to bring the lessons of the seminar to your own classrooms. This will happen in lots of different ways, and I hope that you will all share with one another your evolving lesson plans as well as your successes and failures in teaching (with, through) adaptations and in getting your students to read (and think) adaptively.  

The biggest requirement for this seminar is an open mind. Skepticism can be a useful tool in the critical thinking arsenal, but it can also be obstacle to discovery and growth. You may be suspicious of some of scholarship we read or unconvinced by some of the arguments I’ll make, and that is absolutely fine. I only ask that you consider where those hesitations are coming from, to interrogate the sources of your suspicions, and to try to remain open to the ideas and approaches we’ll be considering. You may not “buy” it all, but at least kick the ideas around a bit—look at them from all angles—before you decide they’re not for you. At the same time, please do engage with all the primary and secondary materials critically. Ask them hard questions. Challenge them. The seminar can’t do anything for you unless you engage very actively with it.