Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation

Kinds of Narration and their Cinematic Potential

The distinctions to be drawn between various narrational modes as they appear in the novel are difficult to sustain in film narrative. The novels chosen as case-studies in this book exhibit notably different approaches to the question of narrative point of view: for example, first-person, omnis-cient, a mixture of both, the use of 'restricted consciousness'. However, these different approaches are considerably elided in the narrational procedures adopted by the films, a matter to be investigated in detail in Part II of this study. It is sufficient to draw attention at this point to the varying amenability to cinematic practice of these kinds of literary narration.

The first-person narration

There is only a precarious analogy between the attempts at first-person narration offered by films and the novel's first-person narration, comprising the individual discourses of each character surrounded by a continuing (generally past-tense) discourse which is attributed to a known and named narrator who may or may not be an active participant in the events of the novel. These attempts will usually be one of two kinds.

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44 Robin Wood, 'Notes for a Reading of I Walked with a Zombie' , CineAction! , 3-4 ( Winter 1986), 9.

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(a) The subjective cinema The subjective cinema on the scale of The Lady in the Lake (1946) has scarcely been tried since, in mainstream film-making at least, and has the status of a curiosity rather than of a major contribution to screen practice. Of its more localized manifestations (e.g. the point-of-view shot or succession of shots), screen narration has clearly made much use, as in Alan Bridges' film version of Rebecca West's novella The Return of the Soldier (1982), in which the first-person narration of the original is reduced to allowing the novel's narrator a preponderance of point-of-view shots. However, a 'preponderance' is by no means equivalent to the continuing shaping, analysing, directing consciousness of a first-person narrator. Further, as Thomas Elsaesser has noted, 'The subjective perception --what the characters themselves see and how they experience it--is integrated with an objective presentation of these individual points of view and what they signify inside the same narrative movement and the continuous action.'45 While cinema may be more agile and flexible in changing the physical point of view from which an event or object is seen, it is much less amenable to the presentation of a consistent psychological viewpoint derived from one character.

(b) Oral narration or voice-over The device of oral narration, or voice-over, may serve important narrative functions in film (e.g. reinforcing a sense of past tense) but, by virtual necessity, it cannot be more than intermittent as distinct from the continuing nature of the novelistic first-person narration. (Woody Allen Radio Days (1987) is one of the few films that would be incomprehensible without its voice-over.) In usual film practice, the narrating voice-over may be dropped for sequences at a time: in fact, a sustained, non-diegetic oral accompaniment to visually presented action is scarcely feasible in relation to the feature films with which this study (like most cinema audiences) is concerned. Those words spoken in voice-over accompany images which necessarily take on an objective life of their own. One no longer has the sense of everything's being filtered through the consciousness of the protagonist-speaker: even in a film such as David Lean Great Expectations, which goes to unusual lengths to retain the novel's 'first-person' approach, the grotesques who people Pip's world are no longer presented to the viewer as an individual's subjective impressions. One now sees everything the camera 'sees', not just what impressed itself on the hero-narrator's imaginative responsiveness. In relation to those films which employ the voice-over technique, one's sense of the character to whom it is attributed is more likely to be the product of his involvement in the action directly presented than of his occasional comment upon it, whereas this is frequently not the case in the first-person novel.

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45 Thomas Elsaesser, 'Film and the Novel: Reality and Realism of the Cinema' , Twentieth Century Studies' 9 ( Sept 1973), 61.
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The omniscient novel

The narrative in such a novel is conveyed through two kinds of discourses: those attributed to various characters in direct speech (Colin MacCabe's 'object language'46) and that of the narrative (I should prefer 'narrating') prose, the apparently authoritative 'metalanguage' which surrounds them. It is this latter which guides our reading of the direct speech of the characters. MacCabe goes on to construct an analogy between these two kinds of discourse as they appear in the novel and in the film:

The narrative prose achieves its position of dominance because it is in the position of knowledge and this function of knowledge is taken up in the cinema by the narration of events. Through the knowledge we gain from the narrative we can split the discourses of the various characters from their situation and compare what is said in those discourses with what has been revealed to us through narration. The camera shows us what happens--it tells the truth against which we can measure the discourses.47
'The camera shows us what happens . . .'. David Bordwell has taken issue with MacCabe's hierarchy of discourses, both for its oversimplification of the classic realist novel and for the way in which it 'reduce[s] the range of filmic narration'. He particularly challenges MacCabe's 'privileging of camera work . . . over other film techniques', claiming that 'all materials of cinema function narrationally--not only camera but speech, gesture, written language, music, color, optical processes, lighting, costume, even offscreen space and offscreen sound'.48 There is a certain captiousness in Bordwell's response since, it seems to me at least, MacCabe's use of 'the camera' is a shorthand way of referring to all those narrational materials which the camera can show or imply: that is, all from Bordwell's list except those which relate to soundtrack, which can, of course, initiate a tension with the visual image. Clearly, certain functions of the narrating prose, such as establishing setting and physical appearance of characters, can be achieved through the film's mise-en-scčne. Other functions, such as those which enable us, through the writer's tone, to evaluate a character's speech, seem less immediately amenable to the camera's eye. The camera in this sense becomes the narrator by, for instance, focusing on such aspects of mise-en-scčne as the way actors look, move, gesture, or are costumed, or on the ways in which they are positioned in a scene or on how they are photographed: in these ways the camera may catch a 'truth' which comments on and qualifies what the characters actually say.
It is, however, too simple to suggest that the mise-en-scčne, or its deployment by the cinematic codes (notably that of montage), can effortlessly

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46 Colin MacCabe, 'Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses' , Screen 15/2 ( Summer 1974), 10.

47 Ibid.

48 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film ( Methuen: London, 1985), 20.

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appropriate the role of the omniscient, inaudible narrator, or that the camera (to interpret MacCabe more narrowly), by 'show[ing] what happens', replaces such a narrator. For one thing (and a very obvious one) the camera here used metonymically to denote its operator and whoever is telling him what to aim it at, and how--is outside the total discourse of the film, whereas the omniscient narrator is inextricably a part of the novel's. Or perhaps it is truer to say that the omniscient narration is inextricably part of the novel's total discourse, as much so as the spoken words of the characters. (However, whereas the latter--the spoken words--can, if a film-maker wants them to, be rendered word for word by the characters in the film, clearly no such possibility exists for the narration: for that narrational prose to which, in most novels, we allow a privileged position of knowledge about characters, periods, places; knowledge which may in fact be concealed from characters in the novel.) By exercising control over the mise-en-scčne and soundtrack or through the manipulations of editing, the film-maker can adapt some of the functions of this narrational prose. The latter may indicate adverbially the tone of voice in which a remark is made by a character; the camera, on the other hand, may register a similar effect through attention to the actor's facial expression or posture (i.e. aspects of the mise-en-scčne), or by cutting so as to reveal a response to such a remark (i.e. through montage) which will guide the viewer's perception of the remark, as well as through the actor's vocal inflection (i.e. through sound-track).
In regard to rendering on film the descriptive functions of narrating prose, relating to places, objects, activities, there is perhaps a stronger possibility of the new (cinematic) reality at once displacing the earlier (verbally created) reality; in matters relating to character and to the psychological action involving characters, the situation is more complex. There is, in film, no such instantly apparent, instantly available commentary on the action unfolding as the novel's narrating prose habitually offers. In the omniscient novel, in which this prose is not 'suspect' in the sense of belonging to a first-person narrator, the continuing mediation between the reader and the action of the novel is, by virtue of its privileged status as 'knowledge', the reader's guarantee of the 'truth' of the proceedings. In a sense, all films are omniscient: even when they employ a voice-over technique as a means of simulating the first person novelistic approach, the viewer is aware, as indicated earlier, of a level of objectivity in what is shown, which may include what the protagonist sees but cannot help including a great deal else as well.

The mode of 'restricted consciousness'

In broad terms, it appears that neither first-person nor omniscient narration is, of its nature, amenable to cinematic narrative. Both seem always to know too much, or at least to know more than we feel is known in advance by the

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more directly experienced film narrative; and this sense of foreknowledge is no doubt intimately connected to the characteristic past-tense rendering of the prose narrative as opposed to the perceptual immediacy of the film. The novelistic form of the restricted consciousness (as in Daisy Miller) perhaps approximates most closely to the cinematic narrative mode. Cohen, in discussing the techniques of Conrad and James, and making comparisons with impressionist painters, writes:

The indirect approach of these novelists [Conrad and Ford Madox Ford] is not fully comprehensible without reference to their unconventional handling of point of view. . . . The reader, one might say, is constantly forced to pass through several foregrounds before he can make out clearly what is looming in the background. . . . The same basic mechanism is operative with James's 'central reflectors' through whom all or nearly all of the action takes place.49
Such 'central reflectors'--for example, Strether in The Ambassadors, Winterboume in Daisy Miller --provide a point of identification for the reader, not necessarily in the affective sense but as a more or less consistently placed vantage-point from which to observe the action of the narrative. One is conscious always that there is a more comprehensive point of view than that available to such protagonists; that there is, as it were, a narrator looking over their shoulder, in the way that the camera may view an action over the shoulder of a character in the foreground of a shot, giving the viewer both the character's point of view and a slightly wider point of view which includes the character. The Jamesian concept of the 'centre of consciousness', by no means to be confused with narrational omniscience or the latter's obliteration by first-person narration, is perhaps the nearest that film may come in the direction of either first- or third-person narration. Its use will be examined in more detail in the case-study of Daisy Miller.

A Note on Terminology

The foregoing distinctions considered under the headings of 'Narrative Functions' and 'Kinds of Narration' may be summarized as those between a series of events sequentially and consequentially arranged and the modes (more easily distinguishable in literary terms) of their presentation. This distinction between narrative and narration finds rough parallels in that between story and discourse. The latter pair-- histoire and discours in modern French poetic--derives from the Russian Formalist distinction of the 1920s 'between fabula --the story-material as pure chronological sequence--and suzet, the plot as arranged and edited by the shaping of a story-teller, i.e. the finished narrative work as we experience it in a text; no longer pure story but

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49 Cohen, Film and Fiction, 35.

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a selective narrative act',50 in Roger Fowler's words. Histoire and discours he goes on to define as 'story-matter and its manner of delivery'.51 In the proliferating terminology of film theory, a further parallel frequently subsumes the categories referred to above in discussions of enunciated and enunciation. Of these terms, originating with the linguist Émile Benveniste, the former designates the 'utterance' (l'énoncé) as manifested in 'a stretch of text'52 (David Bordwell's phrase), as a coherent set of events enacted in a series of syntagmatic units, as the sum of its narrative functions. The latter, the enunciation (l'énonciation), characterizes the process that creates, releases, shapes (I am aware of groping for exactly the right word) the 'utterance'. Enunciation, that is, refers to the ways in which the utterance is mediated, and, as such, obviously shares common ground with narration, suzet, and discourse. Neither film nor novel is 'transparent', however much either seeks to suppress signs of its enunciation, such 'suppression' being much more marked in the case of film. Film may lack those literary marks of enunciation such as person and tense, but in the ways in which, for example, shots are angled and framed and related to each other (i.e. in matters relating to mise-en-scčne and montage) the enunciatory processes are inscribed. The institutional codes and their often highly individual deployment by different film-makers can either minimize or foreground the processes of cinematic enunciation but they cannot eradicate them, even when, as Metz writes, 'films give us the feeling that we are witnessing almost a real spectacle'.53 Film enunciation, in relation to the transposition of novels to the screen, is a matter of adaptation proper, not of transfer. In the case-studies offered below, it will be considered in relation to how far the films concerned exhibit the interaction of cinema-specific and extra-cinematic codes, and to what extent they provide--or seek to provide--equivalences for the enunciatory procedures of the novels on which they are based. An essential function of this study will be to distinguish between:

i. those elements of the original novel which are transferable because not tied to one or other semiotic system--that is, essentially, narrative ; and

ii. those which involve intricate processes of adaptation because their effects are closely tied to the semiotic system in which they are manifested--that is, enunciation.

I have preferred 'enunciation', finally, to 'narration' because the latter is too often attached, in a limiting way, to matters of person and tense. By enunciation, I mean the whole expressive apparatus that governs the presentation and reception--of the narrative.

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50 Roger Fowler, Linguistic and the Novel ( Methuen: London, 1977), 78-9.

51 Ibid. 79.

52 Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 21.

53 Metz, Imaginary Signifier, 4.

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