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Letter from the Editors:

Understanding Adaptation, Without Bounds

 (Full Text)

by Elsie M. Walker, Salisbury University

Volume 37, Number 4

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This past May I was fortunate enough to participate in the annual Music and the Moving Image (MaMI) conference at New York University. This is a conference series which, like the journal of the same name, is devoted to exploring relationships among “the entire universe of music and moving images (film, television, music videos, computer games, performance art, and web-based media).”¹ At the latest MaMI conference, concepts of adaptation often arose. For instance, in a paper about the music used for three Bush-Cheney television advertisements from the 2004 election cycle, Paul Christiansen selected one example featuring the use of open fifths: in the context of an especially patriotic advertisement focused on Bush’s loyalty to the troops in Iraq, the recurring musical interval immediately (though perhaps subliminally and surreptitiously) called to mind the work of Aaron Copeland and, in turn, the quintessential American buoyancy and mythology associated with his music.² Along with the (uncredited) music’s reassuring tonal cadences and conventional harmonic structures, the implicit aural connection with Copeland’s work did much to bolster the advertisement’s emotionally manipulative power. In a different paper about forms of intertextual echoing, Matthew MacDonald demonstrated the uncanny synchronicity of visual and editing patterns in the openings of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and No Country for Old Men (2007). I was skeptical about such connections until MacDonald literally played both film openings simultaneously: the visual, rhythmic coherence between the two films (particularly in terms of editing) was especially remarkable, paving the way for some fascinating discussion of what the synchronicity between such seemingly disparate representations of (final) frontier life might mean. As I listened to such papers, I was newly aware of the malleability and open-endedness of adaptation studies. After all, these papers were concerned with fragments passed from one context to another, formal minutiae connecting disparate “texts” through calculated processes of adaptation. If the echoing of a single musical interval or a singular editing rhythm can mean so much, we may begin to comprehend the endless possibilities when a whole text is adapted from one medium to another.

   This issue of Literature/Film Quarterly is, therefore, suitably representative of adaptation studies as a broadening field. The essays deal with adaptations in numerous forms: adaptations of specific works of literature on film (and vice versa), of particular histories (both individual and cultural), of genres, of psychological studies and philosophical principles, of approaches to music, and of theoretical approaches to film, narrative, and poetry.

   First, Dale T. Adams provides an analysis of Richard Brooks’s film In Cold Blood (1967), a relatively faithful adaptation of Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel.” Capote’s novel, far from representing journalistic accuracy, is a literary achievement based on a true crime story. Indeed, Capote is famous for having selected and manipulated true life events, as Brooks in turn selected and manipulated aspects of Capote’s book. For Adams, the interest of the book is in its power as a work of literary naturalism, and the parallel interest of Brooks’s film is in its emphasis on “naturalistic tragedy” (247). Adams draws on a wide intertext for defining literary naturalism: he mentions concepts associated with Newton, Freud, Marx, Taine, Comte (with reference to the work of C. Hugh Holman), as well as the work of Emile Zola and Thomas Hardy. Adams also broadens our understanding of Brooks’s film through his analysis of its “stark psychological realism” (246), an aspect of it that anticipates much more contemporary films such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991) (which is in itself, of course, another relatively direct adaptation of text to film). Brooks’s film, released long before the days of easy access to film through VHS and DVD, was itself adapted for an American educational film on the theme of “Crime and the Criminal”: in this production, extracts from the film were framed by comments from Orson Welles who raised questions about why the murders of In Cold Blood actually happened. Welles’s comments are, for Adams, in keeping with the film’s emphasis on the process of trying to understand brutal, real-life tragedy—a process which, as he argues, is ultimately much more important than the condemnation of “senseless” killing without further thought.

   In the next essay, Thomas L. Cooksey begins by noting that the western epic is a genre about the absolute past, and about depicting a time that is separated from both contemporary reality and the projected future. Conversely, Cooksey explains that the West African tradition of the epic “orients the past toward the future” (262), as is especially evident in Dani Kouyaté’s Keita! The Heritage of the Griot (1994). More specifically, Cooksey analyzes the Sundiata—the West African epic of Mali—in terms of how it adapts to changes within the culture from which it springs (in turn reflected by Kouyaté’s adaptation of the generic form). The Sundiata as a form is, as Cooksey explains, focused on recounting the triumphs of Sundiata Keita, “the legendary and historical founder of the West African Empire of Mali” (262). This epic form primarily exists in oral performances or recitations (each given by a griot), many of which have been recorded and transcribed by various authors—the notion of definitive versions and single authors is thus redundant in relation to this form of creation. Not only is the Sundiata borne of such unfixed origins, the form is also necessarily in a constant state of regeneration since the griot will often insert contemporary, deliberately anachronistic references within their renditions of it. Kouyaté is himself a kind of griot who adapted the Sundiata for his own generation. His film, through two parallel storylines, weaves “the mythic past with the present in order to make his African audience think about possible futures” (264). The film itself features stories of the hero of the Sundiata that are told and retold/passed on by various characters, and these are interspersed with representations of iconic episodes from the Sundiata. Through these different representations/tellings/adaptations of the epic narrative, the film represents conflict between “the traditional [Mandian] world and the modern world of postcolonial Africa” (265). Interestingly, the film does not play out the full epic narrative in past or present terms, thereby inviting the audience to complete its future in terms of multiple narratives—thus, we might say, the film invites its audience to complete a process of adaptation.

   In “Reading Carnival into Notting Hill” (1999), Antony Johae provides the first serious criticism of the film. He approaches the film first as romantic comedy, then in terms of archetypal interpretation (drawing on Northrop Frye’s definition of comedy in Anatomy of Criticism), and then as a dialogic text (drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin). Johae connects the “classical” comedy of the film with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (since both narratives focus on lovers encountering obstacles, unfortunate circumstances that threaten the fulfillment of love, and love that flourishes best in the context of natural surroundings). There are also, as he points out, many leitmotifs, narrative structures, and themes that connect the film with a whole host of other contemporary romantic films. However, Johae finds the richest possibilities in applying Bakhtin’s ideas on the carnivalization of literature to Notting Hill (those ideas which were originally applied to Dostoevsky’s novels). In applying the work of Bakhtin to Notting Hill, Johae is implicitly overturning a conventional hierarchy between high literary theory and populist film: “As carnival presents us with an upside down world in which all normal everyday hierarchies are dissolved, so too from a Bakhtinian perspective, a traditionally centred interpretation of Notting Hill will be stood on its head” (272). Johae ingeniously explores how Notting Hill plays out specific Bakhtinian concepts of the carnivalesque: in particular, he writes of how boundaries between art and life (actors and spectators) are dismantled, and distinctions between the serious and the comedy are often destabilized in the metacinematic form of the film “as would have been the case during folk carnival” (276).

   Next, in “‘For Once, Then, Something’: Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique [1991] and the Apophatic Beyond,” Christopher J. Knight explores how the director created a film that reaches even beyond itself. The film focuses on the inter-related stories of two women (the Polish Weronika and the French Véronique), characters who are themselves intuitively connected. It is a film, in the director’s words, “about sensibility, presentiments and relationships which are difficult to name, which are irrational” (285). As Knight’s analysis reveals, the film balances structural ambition, scope, and clarity with the kind of thematic density that exceeds words. (In such a context the score by Zbigniew Preisner becomes especially important in its suggestiveness.) The film’s thematic concerns with different forms of faith and belief are reflective of what might be called the director’s paradoxical embracement of both agnosticism and spirituality. In this fascinating and open-ended exploration of Kieślowski’s film, Knight’s frames of reference range from T. S. Eliot to Dante to Liszt to Kierkegaard. The Double Life of Véronique clearly transcends single origins or linear lines of logic: thus, for Knight, the film is “best understood as an unfinished exploration of a world both here and elsewhere” (291).

   In the following essay, Eric Paul Meljac analyzes James Joyce’s “The Dead” and John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation of the story as “aesthetic rivals” (295). More specifically, and with particular reference to the ending of the original story, Meljac analyzes the “textual music” of Joyce’s prose (295). Not only do Joyce’s works include references to works of music, the very form of such stories as “The Dead” (which features patterns of structural repetition, along with reverberations of sound and meaning) might be called musical. Huston evidently wanted to echo the musicality of Joyce’s text but the different mediums obviously disallow a straight correlation (by the same token, as Meljac argues, Huston himself uses powerful techniques of cinema–cinematography in particular—that are beyond the original sourcetext). For Meljac, the closing of Joyce’s story is analogous to that moment right after a musical performance when the conductor moves the baton back to his side and reverberations melt into air, before applause has erupted. The final period of “The Dead” follows a sonorous description of the snow with “absolute stillness” (301), forcing the reader to comprehend and interpret the meaning of its “silence.” For Meljac, such impact is not echoed by Huston’s ending even though, on a literal level, the film represents what is described at the end of “The Dead” (snow falling). This article is not simply about the cliché that “the book is always better than the movie” (302): rather, it is focused upon understanding the musicality of James’s text in relation to one specific example of adaptation.

   In the final essay, “The Commercial Novelization: Research, History, Differentiation,” Thomas Van Parys provides an invaluable account of an underexplored area within adaptation studies. The novelization, as he points out, is often regarded as a “hack job” created after the fact of the original film (305). However, as Van Parys shows, novelization has a rich history in itself, dating back to the early cinema of France and America. He surveys the history of novelization in both France and America, going behind the scenes of this so-called “lowbrow” phenomenon to illuminate its various forms and historical points of origin: from French “protonovelizations” that were used to promote early films to serial (newspaper-printed) novelizations of films timed in synch with theatrical releases; from early Hollywood novelizations inspired by photoplay editions and movie story magazines to paperback tie-ins; from “TV novelizations” or “telenovelizations” (314) to contemporary novelizations that exist within the superstructures of blockbuster promotion. In this fascinating introduction to the roots of novelization, Van Parys cites numerous illustrative examples as well as musing on the various purposes of the practice—though early examples of novelization fulfilled purely explanatory and promotional functions, they also revealed loftier aims at legitimizing the medium of cinema. Van Parys’s essay reminds us that processes of adaptation from film-to-text (as well as text-to-film) date back to the early stages of cinema itself—and we in adaptation studies are only beginning to catch up.

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