Twelve fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory

Criticism, Spring, 2003 by Thomas Leitch

WHAT COULD BE MORE AUDACIOUS than to argue that the study of moving images as adaptations of literary works, one of the very first shelters under which cinema studies originally entered the academy, has been neglected? Yet that is exactly what this essay will argue: that despite its venerable history, widespread practice, and apparent influence, adaptation theory has remained tangential to the thrust of film study because it has never been undertaken with conviction and theoretical rigor. By examining a dozen interlinked fallacies that have kept adaptation theory from fulfilling its analytical promise, I hope to claim for adaptation theory more of the power it deserves.

1. There is such a thing as contemporary adaptation theory. This is the founding fallacy of adaptation studies, and the most important reason they have been so largely ineffectual--because they have been practiced in a theoretical vacuum, without the benefit of what Robert B. Ray has called "a presiding poetics." (1) There is, as the preceding sentence acknowledges, such a thing as adaptation studies. It is pursued in dozens of books and hundreds of articles in Literature/Film Quarterly and in classrooms across the country, from high school to graduate school, in courses with names like "Dickens and Film" and "From Page to Screen." But this flood of study of individual adaptations proceeds on the whole without the support of any more general theoretical account of what actually happens, or what ought to happen, when a group of filmmakers set out to adapt a literary text. As Brian McFarlane has recently observed: "In view of the nearly sixty years of writing about the adaptation of novels into film ... it is depressing to find at what a limited, tentative stage the discourse has remained." (2) Despite the appearance of more recent methodologies from the empiricism of Morris Beja to the neo-Aristotelianism of James Griffith, the most influential general account of cinema's relation to literature continues to be George Bluestone's tendentious Novels into Film, now nearly half a century old. Bluestone's categorical and essentialist treatment of the relations between movies and the books they are based on neglects or begs many crucial questions, and more recent commentators, even when they are as sharp as McFarlane (who will therefore claim particularly close attention in this essay) in taking exception to Bluestone, have largely allowed him to frame the terms of the debate.

Hence several fundamental questions in adaptation theory remain unasked, let alone unanswered. Everyone knows, for example, that movies are a collaborative medium, but is adaptation similarly collaborative, or is it the work of a single agent--the screenwriter or director--with the cast and crew behaving the same way as if their film were based on an original screenplay? Since virtually all feature films work from a pre-existing written text, the screenplay, how is a film's relation to its literary source different from its relation to its screenplay? Why has the novel, rather than the stage play or the short story, come to serve as the paradigm for cinematic adaptations of every kind? Given the myriad differences, not only between literary and cinematic texts, but between successive cinematic adaptations of a given literary text, or for that matter between different versions of a given story in the same medium, what exactly is it that film adaptations adapt, or are supposed to adapt? Finally, how does the relation between an adaptation and the text it is explicitly adapting compare to its intertextual relationships with scores of other precursor texts?

The institutional matrix of adaptation study--the fact that movies are so often used in courses like "Shakespeare and Film" as heuristic intertexts, the spoonful of sugar that helps the Bard's own text go down; the fact that studies of particular literary texts and their cinematic adaptations greatly outnumber more general considerations of what is at stake in adapting a text from one medium to another; the fact that even most general studies of adaptation are shaped by the case studies they seem designed mainly to illuminate--guarantees the operation of adaptation studies on a severe economy of theoretical principles which have ossified into a series of unvoiced and fallacious bromides most often taking the form of "binary oppositions that poststructuralist theory has taught us to deconstruct: literature versus cinema, high culture versus mass culture, original versus copy." (3) Precisely because these bromides are rarely articulated, they have retained the insidious power of Ibsen's ghosts: the power to direct discussion even among analysts who ought to know better.

2. Differences between literary and cinematic texts are rooted in essential properties of their respective media. This fallacy was first promulgated by Bluestone and by Siegfried Kracauer's roughly contemporaneous Theory of Film, which opens with the sweeping statement, "This study rests upon the assumption that each medium has a specific nature which invites certain kinds of communications while obstructing others." (4) More recently, it has been one of the rare articles of faith that has actually come under such general debate that few theorists would probably admit to subscribing to it these days. Nonetheless, it has been given new impetus in the past ten years by the reprinting in the last two editions of the Oxford anthology Film Theory and Criticism of Seymour Chatman's accurately but fallaciously entitled essay, "What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and Vice Versa)." (5) The most influential attacks on the essentialist view that novels and films are suited to fundamentally different tasks--in Chatman's view, assertion and depiction respectively--because of the features specific to their media have taken two forms. One is the empirical argument advanced by F. E. Sparshott and V. F. Perkins (6) that many films and not a few novels break the rules the essential qualities of their media apparently prescribe. The other is the more general attack Noel Carroll has mounted against what he calls Rudolf Amheim's "specificity thesis" on the grounds of its philosophical gratuitousness: "There is no rationale for the system [of arts], for in truth it is only a collection. Thus, we have no need for the specificity thesis, for the question it answers--'Why is there a system of different arts?'--is not really an admissible question at all." (7) But these attacks can be usefully supplemented by a closer consideration of the alleged specifics of film and fiction.