Twelve fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory

Criticism, Spring, 2003 by Thomas Leitch

Nor will the argument that cinema's characters are limited by its inability to present thought directly stand up to analysis. When Bluestone notes that "the film, having only arrangements of space to work with, cannot render thought, for the moment thought is externalized it is no longer thought," (27) his observation is equally apt to drama as to film. Yet no one questions the ability of playwrights from Euripides to Chekhov to create complex characters. It is true, of course, that Shakespeare's dramaturgy allows him soliloquies and asides that make it easier to dramatize thought, but Hamlet's thoughts are still necessarily externalized. The conclusion that follows is not that externalized thought is no longer thought, but that the pleasures of many non-novelistic media are based to a large extent in the invitation they extend to audiences to infer what characters are thinking on the basis of their speech and behavior, and that thoughts that are inferred can be just as subtle and profound as thoughts that are presented directly.

This last point deserves closer consideration. Novels, plays, and movies can each hardly help leaving out many details from their discourse. Wolfgang Iser, calling these omissions "gaps" or "blanks," has analyzed at length the processes by which readers are encouraged to fill them in, the freedom they have in choosing from among alternative possibilities, and the limitations on that freedom that define "failure" as "filling the blank exclusively with one's own projections." (28) What Iser does not consider is the necessity of gaps, not as an inevitable corollary of a given story's incompleteness, but as the very basis of its appeal. For it is precisely the business of fictional narratives to create a field in which audiences are invited to make inferences about what the characters are feeling or planning, where the story is going, what particular details will mean, and how everything will turn out. Such inferences are the product of the same increasingly educated guesswork that derives concepts from percepts. These inferences confer both the sense of intimacy with fictional characters that makes them more memorable than most real people and the assurance that the fictional field at hand comprises a world more satisfyingly coherent than the world outside. Novels and plays and movies might be said paradoxically to display their gaps in the sense that they depend for the pleasures they provide on audiences noticing and choosing to fill some of them but not others. (29)

The importance of this invitation to the audience is confirmed by the fact that few moviegoers read screenplays for pleasure--not because screenplays have no gaps (they specify many fewer details than either the literary texts they are based on or the movies that are based on them), but because their gaps are designed to he filled once and for all by the cast and crew, not displayed as an invitation to nonprofessional audiences' active participation. It is one of Shakespeare's most underappreciated gifts that the plays generations of readers have revered are nothing more than performance texts whose verbal texture happens to support an incomparably richer sense of reality than that of any screenplay to date.