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"It wasn't like that in the book"
Literature Film Quarterly, 2000 by McFarlane, Brian
The idea for this paper grew out of a discussion with a colleague in a Victorian univer sity English Department on the 1993 film version of The Age of Innocence. This colleague had enjoyed the film, had found it attractive but added "Of course it's not nearly as complex or subtle as the book." I'd thought the film was a masterpiece and had actually-and, I felt, daringly-said so in print; I'd also admired the novel for many years, though perhaps not so extravagantly. I'm not setting my judgement up as being more accurate (whatever that may mean) than my colleague's, but the exchange led me to reflect, not just on the matter of adaptation from literature to film but also on the adequacy of a training in literature for dealing with film and, from the other corner, the adequacy of a training in film for dealing with literature. In Victoria where I come from, at least, it is now common for Year 12 secondary school Literature courses to offer one or more films as texts to be taught by trained English teachers. To the best of my knowledge, no comparable Cinema Studies course throws in a novel to be taught by trained teachers of film. I think "convergence among the arts" (in Keith Cohen's memorable and resonant 1979 phrase in Film and Fiction ) is a desirable ideal, but that it probably involves a kind of training different from what has been common hitherto.
On a related point, the other impetus for this paper came from Australian novelist Helen Garner's review of the latest film version of Anna Karenina, which she began by referring to "a class of literature that, by its very nature, is not adaptable to the screen." What, I wondered, did she mean? That, in this case, it won't be Tolstoy's Anna Karenina? Or her idea of Tolstoy's Anna? Or that such a classic, by its very nature, is beyond the resources of film? Filmmakers, in such cases, are out of their league, she asserted. Her claim that a great novel's "central energy source" is its "narrative voice" may be unexceptionable, but she goes on to insist that "Nothing available to mainstream cinema ... can translate the authority of that voice," and here she is simply ignoring-or ignorant of-the nature of film narration, to which this paper will return, and its capacity for asserting its own authoritative voice, The review reminded me of a good deal of middle-class, middle-brow criticism, even from someone as distinguished as Dilys Powell who wrote of David Leans Oliver Twist that it is "careful in the preservation of the skeleton of Dickens's book (since skeleton is all a film has time for)" (The Dilys Powell Reader 334). There is at work here little sense that film may have at its command narrational strategies as potentially subtle and complex as those of any other narrative or dramatic mode, and such thinking has led to the perpetuation of such myths as "second-rate" fiction is easier to adapt to the screen.
Forty years ago, in his pioneering work Novels into Film (and the titles of such books, my own included, are depressingly similar), George Bluestone wrote of the overt compatibility but secret hostility between novel and film; in the intervening decades nothing has happened radically to challenge this perception. And when I talk to colleagues about film versions of novels, or read the sort of criticism I've just been quoting, I am sometimes reminded of the late James Agee who wrote in 1946 that he had the idea that many seriousminded people wanted movies to offer more elevated themes or "a good faithful adaptation of Adam Bede in sepia, with the entire text read offscreen by Herbert Marshall" (he of the mellifluous tones). It's as if they want film to be more like literature, and are oblivious to what might make film cinematically exciting. In this way, I suspect that a training in literature doesn't simply fail to provide an understanding of how a film is working. I think it goes further, and more damagingly, to set up a sort of Leavisite evaluative judgment, a high culture/popular culture hierarchy, in which film inevitably comes below/behind the literary text. For such evaluations, the film is only really valuable as it approximates the precursor literary text.
I have to say that my experience is that those of us with a literary training are far more likely to hold forth about film, especially in relation to adaptation, than are the film-trained to lay down the law about literature. Most notorious, perhaps, among the former-the literary-trained-was F.R.Leavis, who described the idea of filming Women in Love as "an obscene undertaking." He was of course speaking sight unseen. It's partly, perhaps, a matter of the older discipline's being wary about according equal status to the newer one; it may also be something to do with the huge popularity of cinema which perhaps makes it seem dubious as a basis for study comparable with literature. On that matter, incidentally, it has always seemed to me curious to hold the belief that it is easier to produce a work of art which pleases many than it is to produce one which will please only the few. At the risk of this paper's containing something to offend everyone, I'd add that, as for the film-trained of today, they are often quite ignorant about literature, and indeed about the other arts in general, but, apart from, say, the reviewers whose favorite novel has been filmed in ways displeasing to them, they tend to limit themselves to the area in which their training has equipped them to recognize such qualities as complexity and subtlety. There are, though, younger film reviewers sometimes ready to court favor by expressing a hip impatience with, say, Shakespeare or Jane Austen, which leads them, almost as a reflex action, to prefer Baz Luhrmann's film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet or Amy Heckerling's Clueless to more orthodox adaptations of classic literature.
