Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation

Adaptation: The Phenomenon

As soon as the cinema began to see itself as a narrative entertainment, the idea of ransacking the novel--that already established repository of narrative fiction--for source material got underway, and the process has continued

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13 Bluestone, Novels into Film, 2.

14 Cohen, Film and Fiction, 4.

15 David Bordwell term, in The Classical Hollywood Cinema ( Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 1985), 13.

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more or less unabated for ninety years. Film-makers' reasons for this continuing phenomenon appear to move between the poles of crass commercialism and high-minded respect for literary works. No doubt there is the lure of a pre-sold title, the expectation that respectability or popularity achieved in one medium might infect the work created in another. The notion of a potentially lucrative 'property' has clearly been at least one major influence in the filming of novels, and perhaps film-makers, as Frederic Raphael scathingly claims, 'like known quantities . . . they would sooner buy the rights of an expensive book than develop an original subject'.16 Nevertheless most of the film-makers on record profess loftier attitudes than these. DeWitt Bodeen, co-author of the screenplay for Peter Ustinov Billy Budd (1962), claims that: 'Adapting literary works to film is, without a doubt, a creative undertaking, but the task requires a kind of selective interpretation, along with the ability to recreate and sustain an established mood'.17 That is, the adaptor should see himself as owing allegiance to the source work. Despite Peter Bogdanovich's disclaimer about filming Henry James Daisy Miller ('I don't think it's a great classic story. I don't treat it with that kind of reverence'18), for much of the time the film is a conscientious visual transliteration of the original. One does not find film-makers asserting a bold approach to their source material, any more than announcing crude financial motives.

As to audiences, whatever their complaints about this or that violation of the original, they have continued to want to see what the books 'look like'. Constantly creating their own mental images of the world of a novel and its people, they are interested in comparing their images with those created by the film-maker. But, as Christian Metz says, the reader 'will not always find his film, since what he has before him in the actual film is now somebody else's phantasy'.19 Despite the uncertainty of gratification, of finding audiovisual images that will coincide with their conceptual images, reader-viewers persist in providing audiences for 'somebody else's phantasy'. There is also a curious sense that the verbal account of the people, places, and ideas that make up much of the appeal of novels is simply one rendering of a set of existents which might just as easily be rendered in another. In this regard, one is reminded of Anthony Burgess's cynical view that 'Every best-selling novel has to be turned into a film, the assumption being that the book itself whets an appetite for the true fulfilment--the verbal shadow turned into light, the word made flesh.'20 And perhaps there is a parallel with that late

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16 Frederic Raphael, "'Introduction'", Two for the Road (Jonathan Cape: London, 1967).

17 DeWitt Bodeen, "'The Adapting Art'", Films in Review, 14/6 (June-July 1963), 349.

18 Jan Dawson, "'The Continental Divide: Filming Henry James'", Sight and Sound, 43/1 (Winter 1973-4), 14; repr. in part as 'An Interview with Peter Bogdanovich' in G. Peary and R. Shatzkin (eds.), The Classic American Novel and the Movies (Frederick Ungar Publishing: New York, 1977).

19 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Indiana University Press: Bloomingdale, 1977), 12.

20 Anthony Burgess, "'On the Hopelessness of Turning Good Books into Films'", New York Times, 20 Apr 1975, p. 15.
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nineteenth-century phenomenon, described by Michael Chanan in The Dream that Kicks, of illustrated editions of literary works and illustrated magazines in which great novels first appeared as serials. There is, it seems, an urge to have verbal concepts bodied forth in perceptual concreteness.

Whatever it is that makes film-goers want to see adaptations of novels, and film-makers to produce them, and whatever hazards lie in the path for both, there is no denying the facts. For instance, Morris Beja reports that, since the inception of the Academy Awards in 1927-8, 'more than threefourths of the awards for "best picture" have gone to adaptations . . . [and that] the all-time box-office successes favour novels even more'.21 Given that the novel and the film have been the most popular narrative modes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, it is perhaps not surprising that film-makers have sought to exploit the kinds of response excited by the novel and have seen in it a source of ready-made material, in the crude sense of pre-tested stories and characters, without too much concern for how much of the original's popularity is intransigently tied to its verbal mode.

The Discourse on Adaptation

On being faithful

Is it really 'Jamesian'? Is it 'true to Lawrence'? Does it 'capture the spirit of Dickens'? At every level from newspaper reviews to longer essays in critical anthologies and journals, the adducing of fidelity to the original novel as a major criterion for judging the film adaptation is pervasive. No critical line is in greater need of re-examination--and devaluation.

Discussion of adaptation has been bedevilled by the fidelity issue, no doubt ascribable in part to the novel's coming first, in part to the ingrained sense of literature's greater respectability in traditional critical circles. As long ago as the mid-1940s James Agee complained of a debilitating reverence in even such superior transpositions to the screen as David Lean Great Expectations. It seemed to him that the really serious-minded film-goer's idea of art would be 'a good faithful adaptation of Adam Bede in sepia, with the entire text read offscreen by Herbert Marshall'.22 However, voices such as Agee's, querulously insisting that the cinema make its own art and to hell with tasteful allegiance, have generally cried in the wilderness.
Fidelity criticism depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct 'meaning' which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with. There will often be a distinction between being faithful to the 'letter', an

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21 Morris Beja, Film and Literature ( Longman: New York, 1979), 78.

22 Agee on Film (McDowell Oblonsky: New York, 1958), 216.

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approach which the more sophisticated writer may suggest is no way to ensure a 'successful' adaptation, and to the 'spirit' or 'essence' of the work. The latter is of course very much more difficult to determine since it involves not merely a parallelism between novel and film but between two or more readings of a novel, since any given film version is able only to aim at reproducing the film-maker's reading of the original and to hope that it will coincide with that of many other readers/viewers. Since such coincidence is unlikely, the fidelity approach seems a doomed enterprise and fidelity criticism unilluminating. That is, the critic who quibbles at failures of fidelity is really saying no more than: 'This reading of the original does not tally with mine in these and these ways.'

Few writers on adaptation have specifically questioned the possibility of fidelity; though some have claimed not to embrace it, they still regard it as a viable choice for the film-maker and a criterion for the critic. Beja is one exception. In asking whether there are 'guiding principles' for film-makers adapting literature, he asks: 'What relationship should a film have to the original source? Should it be "faithful"? Can it be? To what?'23
When Beja asks 'To what' should a film-maker be faithful in adapting a novel, one is led to recall those efforts at fidelity to times and places remote from present-day life. In 'period' films, one often senses exhaustive attempts to create an impression of fidelity to, say Dickens's London or to Jane Austen's village life, the result of which, so far from ensuring fidelity to the text, is to produce a distracting quaintness. What was a contemporary work for the author, who could take a good deal relating to time and place for granted, as requiring little or no scene-setting for his readers, has become a period piece for the film-maker. As early as 1928, M. Willson Disher picked up the scent of this misplaced fidelity in writing about a version of Robinson Crusoe: 'Mr Wetherell [director, producer, writer and star] went all the way to Tobago to shoot the right kinds of creeks and caves, but he should have travelled not westwards, but backwards, to reach "the island", and then he would have arrived with the right sort of luggage.’24 Disher is not speaking against fidelity to the original as such but against a misconstrued notion of how it might be achieved. A more recent example is Peter Bogdanovich's use of the thermal baths sequence in his film of Daisy Miller. 'The mixed bathing is authentically of the period', he claims in an interview with Jan Dawson.25 Authentically of the period, perhaps, but not so of Henry James, so that it is only a tangential, possibly irrelevant fidelity that is arrived at. The issue of fidelity is a complex one but it is not too gross a simplification to suggest that critics have encouraged film-makers to see it as a desirable goal in the adaptation of literary works. As Christopher Orr has noted: 'The concern

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23 Beja, Film and Literature. 80.

24 M. Willson Disher, "'Classics into Films'", Fortnightly Review, NS 124 ( Dec 1928), 789.

25 Dawson, 'The Continental Divide' , 14.
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with the fidelity of the adapted film in letter and spirit to its literary source has unquestionably dominated the discourse on adaptation.'26 The issue is inevitably raised in each of the succeeding Case-Studies, and is the object of a Special Focus in the study of Daisy Miller, which offers revealing insights into the limits of fidelity, especially from the film-maker's point of view.

Obscuring other issues

The insistence on fidelity has led to a suppression of potentially more rewarding approaches to the phenomenon of adaptation. It tends to ignore the idea of adaptation as an example of convergence among the arts, perhaps a desirable--even inevitable--process in a rich culture; it fails to take into serious account what may be transferred from novel to film as distinct from what will require more complex processes of adaptation; and it marginalizes those production determinants which have nothing to do with the novel but may be powerfully influential upon the film. Awareness of such issues would be more useful than those many accounts of how films 'reduce' great novels.

Modern critical notions of intertextuality represent a more sophisticated approach, in relation to adaptation, to the idea of the original novel as a 'resource'. As Christopher Orr remarks: 'Within this critical context [i.e. of intertextuality], the issue is not whether the adapted film is faithful to its source, but rather how the choice of a specific source and how the approach to that source serve the film's ideology.'27 When, for instance, MGM filmed James Hilton 1941 bestseller, Random Harvest, in the following year, its images of an unchanging England had as much to do with Hollywood antiisolationism with regard to World War II as with finding visual equivalents for anything in Hilton. The film belongs to a rich context created by notions of Hollywood's England, by MGM's reputation for prestigious literary adaptation and for a glossy 'house style', by the genre of romantic melodrama (cf. Rebecca, 1940, This Above All, 1942), and by the idea of the star vehicle. Hilton's popular but, in truth, undistinguished romance is but one element of the film's intertextuality.
Some writers have proposed strategies which seek to categorize adaptations so that fidelity to the original loses some of its privileged position. Geoffrey Wagner suggests three possible categories which are open to the film-maker and to the critic assessing his adaptation: he calls these ( a ) transposition, 'in which a novel is given directly on the screen with a minimum of apparent interference';28 ( b ) commentary, 'where an original is taken and either purposely or inadvertently altered in some respect . . . when there has

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26 Christopher Orr, "'The Discourse on Adaptation'", Wide Angle, 6/2 (1984),

27 Ibid.

28 Geoffrey Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: Rutherford, NJ, 1975), 222.
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been a different intention on the part of the film-maker, rather than infidelity or outright violation';29 and ( c ) analogy, which must represent a fairly considerable departure for the sake of making another work of art'.30 The critic, he implies, will need to understand which kind of adaptation he is dealing with if his commentary on an individual film is to be valuable. Dudley Andrew also reduces the modes of relation between the film and its source novel to three, which correspond roughly (but in reverse order of adherence to the original) to Wagner's categories: 'Borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation'.31 And there is a third comparable classification system put forward by Michael Klein and Gillian Parker: first, 'fidelity to the main thrust of the narrative'; second, the approach which 'retains the core of the structure of the narrative while significantly reinterpreting or, in some cases, deconstructing the source text'; and, third, regarding 'the source merely as raw material, as simply the occasion for an original work'.32 The parallel with Wagner's categories is clear.

There is nothing definitive about these attempts at classification but at least they represent some heartening challenges to the primacy of fidelity as a critical criterion. Further, they imply that, unless the kind of adaptation is identified, critical evaluation may well be wide of the mark. The faithful adaptation (e.g. Daisy Miller or James Ivory Howard's End, 1992) can certainly be intelligent and attractive, but is not necessarily to be preferred to the film which sees the original as 'raw material' to be reworked, as Hitchcock so persistently did, from, say, Sabotage (1936) to The Birds (1963). Who, indeed, ever thinks of Hitchcock as primarily an adaptor of other people's fictions? At a further extreme, it is possible to think of a film as providing a commentary on a literary text, as Welles does on three Shakespearian plays in Chimes at Midnight (1966), or as Gus Van Sant does in My Own Private Idaho (1992), drawing on both Shakespeare and Welles. There are many kinds of relations which may exist between film and literature, and fidelity is only one--and rarely the most exciting.