There is a word game, to which the title of this chapter partly alludes, in which the participants are required, by changing only one letter in each move, to transform an original word into a new, predetermined one of the same number of characters. Setting aside the question of whether it is indeed possible thus to transform ‘wizard’ into ‘wicked’ (and if so, in how many moves), this game serves as a useful metaphor when considering the nature of textual adaptation, since the continuing transformations (for which, read ‘adaptations’) of the word require one to bear in mind its prior transformations as well as the initiating word that functioned as the starting point. Without such recollection, each word in the process becomes simply an independent lexical item – with its own meaning, to be sure. However, what is lost is the sense not only of transformation but also of the transmission of elements in a series which in itself constitutes part of the meaning of each word. We may call this the principle of antecedent seriality.
In academic circles and among the general public, critical discussion and debate have often centred on the use of previous works to create new ones, whether in the same medium or genre, as well as about the merits of such adaptation. Frequently, therefore, that discussion turns on the issue of whether those adaptations are accurate re-presentations of the original, or are always-already inferior reworkings. However, the more generalized theorization of adaptation as a practice is comparatively recent. Below I consider two works, Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation and Julie Sanders’ Adaptation and Appropriation, both published in 2006 and both addressing the issues raised by the practice of adaptation as well as surveying some of the key theorizations of adaptation in relation to specific texts, media, and genres.
The sense of antecedent seriality is an essential component in the understanding of adaptation of texts: unless we are aware of the presence of an originary text,1 even if we have never read or viewed it, we cannot read and understand the text before us as an adaptation. Thus, to take as an example Tim Burton’s 2010 film Alice in Wonderland, a viewer unfamiliar with Carroll’s originary work is likely to treat the film hermeneutically, as a sort of closed system of meaning, rather like the single lexical item in the word game described above. By contrast, a viewer who knows the Carroll narrative will understand Burton’s film as a more open text, possessing points of convergence with, but also of departures from, the novel. The question of which viewer would arrive at a more complex reading of the film is thus distinct from that of the evaluation of the film as an accurate rendering of the originary text.
Adaptation, especially of literary texts, has not traditionally enjoyed a good press. It has often been seen as belated, secondary, and inferior to the original. ‘The movie isn’t as good as the book’, is the sort of comment frequently heard about adaptation; and while it may be true that, for any number of reasons, one’s response to an adaptation may be less enthusiastic than one’s recollection of the text that has been adapted, there are two key assumptions in such a statement that need to be teased out and addressed.
In the first place, our fetishization of originality has comparatively recent beginnings, dating back to the Romantics and their adulation of the rustic, the primitive, and the nonurban as articulating more primal truths than were offered by an increasingly sophisticated, industrialized, and urbanized culture. At the same time, the falling away, from the late seventeenth century, of patronage as a way for artists (including writers) to dedicate themselves to their work without needing to worry about day-to-day necessities such as accommodation or food necessarily meant that artists began to sell their work in order to keep body and soul together. One effect of this was the identification of a work of art as the intellectual property of the artist, which in turn brought about an emphasis on originality in works of art.
As a result, the adaptation of an originary text is quite often treated as only a step away from plagiarism. However, much of the literary output of classical Greek culture, for instance, consisted of reworkings of already familiar narratives, as, for example, in the dramatic work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Even a prominent writer in English literature such as Shakespeare borrowed most if not, indeed, all of his plots from other writers, appropriating from classical antecedents as well as English, French, and Italian contemporaries and near-contemporaries. Such adaptations were often regarded as testifying to the quality of the source material; but it was also how that material was reinflected and reoriented that attracted attention. That is, the ‘originality’ of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, and many others lay in what they made of the material they borrowed, not necessarily in the invention of narratives to tell.
In the second place, as the example of Shakespeare illustrates, the identification of adaptations as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in principle, not in execution, is often highly idiosyncratic and selective. For instance, Shakespeare fashioned his tragedy about youthful star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet – a text often set on the literature syllabus in high schools – out of material deriving ultimately from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD), via a number of workings and reworkings of the story ranging from Masuccio Salernitano’s tale of Mariotto and Gianozza, in novel 33 of Il Novellino (1476) to the Romeo and Juliet story in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1582). Yet one does not usually hear Shakespeare accused of being a plagiarist or as a mere adapter of others’ works; on the contrary, an entire scholarly industry has grown up around the study of Shakespeare’s sources. Moreover, Romeo and Juliet itself has given rise to further adaptations, including the musical West Side Story, with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and music by Leonard Bernstein (first staged in 1957 and made into a film in 1961), which reset the action in New York City and transformed the feuding Montague and Capulet families into the rival gangs of the Jets and the Sharks, divided by their ethnicity; or Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), which likewise reset the action in the USA, and transformed the family feud of the originary play into a corporate battleground. We may include here also Diana Wynne Jones’ 1980 children’s fantasy The Magicians of Caprona, part of her Chrestomanci series. As in Shakespeare’s play, whose action takes place chiefly in the dukedom and city of Verona, Jones sets the action in the dukedom and city of Caprona (whose name echoes that of Verona); and, again, as in Romeo and Juliet, the peace and welfare of the city are threatened by the warring of two houses or families, here the Montana and the Petrocchi. Only through the friendship and combined efforts of young Tonino Montana and Angela Petrocchi are peace restored and the feuding brought to an end. Unlike Shakespeare’s tragedy, Jones’ narrative ends happily. However, a reader of this novel unfamiliar with either Shakespeare’s play or at least the narrative outline of Romeo and Juliet would fail to notice not only that Jones’ work was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s but that the endings of each diverged significantly.2
An ‘adaptation of’ implies a strong fidelity to the originary text. Hutcheon points out that there may be many reasons why an adaptation is undertaken, and several of the subheadings of her third chapter, ‘Who? Why? (Adapters)’, are broadly indicative: ‘The Economic Lures’, ‘The Legal Constraints’, ‘Cultural Capital’, and ‘Personal and Political Motives’ (Hutcheon, 2006: pp. 79–111). The question of the degree of an adaptation’s fidelity to the originary text, therefore, is partly linked to the reason that particular adaptation is produced. However, she points out that ‘One lesson [to be learned about adaptation] is that to be second is not to be secondary or inferior; likewise, to be first is not to be originary or authoritative’ (Hutcheon, 2006: p. xiii). Hutcheon observes that ‘adaptation is a form of repetition without replication’, and therefore ‘change is inevitable, even without any conscious updating or alteration of setting. And with change come corresponding modifications in the political valence and even meaning of stories’ (Hutcheon, 2006: p. xvi).
Indeed, she argues that adaptation is always-already built into the culture’s understanding of narrative and narratives. Citing Walter Benjamin, T.S. Eliot, and Northrop Frye, she remarks that it is a ‘truism’ that ‘art is derived from other art; stories are born of other stories’ (Hutcheon, 2006: p. 2). One should, however, be cautious here: though intertextual reference from one text to another may well alter the signification of material referred to—and in that sense adapt it—adaptation proper exceeds individual, local quotation from and/or alteration of a source text. That is, adaptation transposes the originary text into a new mode and/or context (even when it is the adaptation of one literary text into another literary text); and that transposition necessarily creates shifts of meaning and understanding for the reader or viewer.
The transposition of a work from one medium, genre, or context into another is capable of generating pleasure and, Hutcheon suggests, ‘Part of this pleasure ... comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’. She continues: ‘Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change’ (Hutcheon, 2006: p. 4). Accordingly, when we are aware that an adaptation is an adaptation, we engage with what Hutcheon calls, borrowing the term from Michael Alexander, the ‘palimpsestuousness’ of the relationship between originary text and adaptation; that is, adaptations are ‘haunted at all times by their adapted texts’ (Hutcheon, 2006: p. 6). The term ‘palimpsestuous’ neatly encapsulates both the idea of an earlier document making its presence felt literally – that is, remaining legible – through the writing over it of a later text,3 and that of a close, even intimate, yet somehow improper (‘incestuous’) relationship between the originary and adapted texts. As Hutcheon points out, ‘there are manifestly many different possible intentions behind the act of adaptation: the urge to consume and erase the memory of the adapted text or to call it into question is as likely as the desire to pay tribute by copying’ (Hutcheon, 2006: p. 7).
The term ‘adaptation’, as Hutcheon notes, may refer either to the process or the product of adaptation (Hutcheon, 2006: pp. 7–8); and much of the book is given over to distinguishing between the two and exploring each, while at the same time avoiding both too broad and too narrow a conception of adaptation. For example, seeing the adaptation of a work simply as intertextual is too broad: it denies the specificity, in terms of medium, transcoding, audience, and so on, of the adaptation itself. On the other hand, to view the adaptation of a work as a sort of literal translation is to limit radically the possibilities in terms of a new understanding of the originary work as well as the creation of an independent set of meanings in the adaptation itself. (Such an approach, of course, is also to invite judgment of an adaptation on those grounds alone.) Hutcheon cites John Dryden’s definition of paraphrase, in his Examen poeticum (first published in 1693), as ‘translation with latitude’ (Hutcheon, 2006: p. 17). Perhaps adaptation, in its most positive aspect, should be understood rather as translation with attitude. It is for this reason that, in the closing chapter of the book, Hutcheon remarks:
An adaptation is not vampiric: it does not draw the life-blood from its source and leave it dying or dead, nor is it paler than the adapted work. It may, on the contrary, keep that prior work alive, giving it an afterlife it would never have had otherwise. (Hutcheon, 2006: p. 176)
Like Hutcheon, Julie Sanders foregrounds the fact that texts exist in a relationship to one another, both borrowing and changing material; and she too cites T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), in which Eliot argues, ‘not blind adherence to precursor texts or ages, an action that would after all be little more than literary plagiarism; his notion of the “individual talent” was that it created new material upon the surface and foundation of the literary past’ (Sanders, 2006: p. 8). As the title of Sanders’s book suggests, Adaptation and Appropriation draws a distinction between adaptation proper and the appropriation of material. She defines adaptation as ‘a transpositional practice, casting a specific genre into another generic mode, and act of re-vision in itself’. She continues:
It can parallel editorial practice in some respects, indulging in the exercise of trimming and pruning; yet it can also be an amplificatory procedure engaged in addition, expansion, accretion, and interpolation. ... Adaptation is frequently involved in offering commentary on a sourcetext. This is achieved most often by offering a revised point of view from the ‘original,’ adding a hypothetical motivation, or voicing the silenced and marginalized. Yet adaptation can also constitute a simpler attempt to make texts ‘relevant’ or easily comprehensible to new audiences and readerships by the processes of approximation and updating. (Sanders, 2006: pp. 18–19)
Accordingly, she invokes the three categories of adaptation indicated by Deborah Cartmell: transposition, commentary, and analogue. Transposition includes not merely the relocation of a narrative from one genre to another but also potentially the repositioning of that narrative in terms of culture, geography, and temporality/history. The second category, commentary, is ‘more culturally loaded,’ in that such adaptations ‘comment on the politics of the source text, or those of the new mise-en-scène, or both, usually by means of alteration or addition’. The final category, analogue, is considerably distanced from the first: ‘While it may enrich and deepen our understanding of the new cultural products to be aware of its shaping intertext, it may not be entirely necessary to enjoy the work independently’. She goes on to exemplify ‘stand-alone works that are nevertheless deepened when their status as analogue is revealed’ by citing the movies Clueless (1995; based on Jane Austen’s Emma), Apocalypse Now (1979; based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), and The Claim (2001; based on Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge) (Sanders, 2006: pp. 20–23).
While ‘An adaptation signals a relationship with an informing sourcetext or original’, according to Sanders:
appropriation frequently affects [sic] a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain. This may or may not involve a generic shift, and it may still require the intellectual juxtaposition of (at least) one text against another that we have suggested is central to the reading and spectating experience of adaptations. But the appropriate contextual texts are not always as clearly signalled or acknowledged as in the adaptive process. (p. 26)
Sanders proposes two categories: embedded texts and sustained appropriations (p. 26). As examples of embedded texts she offers the musicals West Side Story and Kiss Me Kate, each of which reworks its originary text – Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew, respectively – so that the action is set in modern times, with other issues foregrounded. For example, in West Side Story, questions of ethnicity arise which do not play a part in the original Shakespeare play, while in Kiss Me Kate – which Sanders describes as both adaptation (the musicalized stage play) and appropriation (the offstage/backstage goings-on) (Sanders, 2006: p. 29) – the chief focus rests on the backstage stories of, and relationships among, performers, with the admixture of a gangster narrative in the presence of two Mafia-like thugs.
Sanders’ section on the category of sustained appropriation is subtitled ‘Homage or Plagiarism?’ (Sanders, 2006: p. 32). Illustrating her argument with a discussion of the relationship between Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders (1996) and its close relationship to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), and the accusation that Swift had plagiarized Faulkner’s novel, Sanders argues for a ‘kinetic vocabulary ... that would be dynamic, moving forward rather than conducting the purely backward-looking search for source or origin’ (Sanders, 2006: p. 38). This is also what Hutcheon argues for in relation to adaptation, although she does not discuss appropriation as a form distinct from adaptation. It may be, indeed, that the distinction between these terms is chiefly heuristic; that is, it is an analytic device that may help us to understand subtle discriminations among types of adaptation, but which may not always work in practice with as much clarity as Sanders’ argument might suggest.
A recent example that exposes the difficulty of distinguishing neatly between adaptation and appropriation comes from Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith who author jointly (according to the title page) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: the classic regency romance – now with violent zombie mayhem (2009). Grahame-Smith retains the general narrative trajectory of Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, together with a considerable quantity of the original prose. However, without prior knowledge of the originary text, the reader is unlikely to get most of the jokes in this parody, in which the Bennet daughters have been trained in Ninja-style fighting in the Shaolin Temple in China in order to do battle with the plague of zombies that has infested Britain. (Their Chinese training becomes for Lady Catherine De Bourgh a matter of scorn and contempt, since she is a leading warrior in the fight against the zombies and was herself trained in Japan.) Indeed, the very opening sentence of this novel – ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains’ (p. 7) – makes little sense beyond the purely descriptive unless one is aware of the famous opening statement of Austen’s novel: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ (Austen, 1972: p. 51). Even the cover design of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is reminiscent of the classic 1972 Penguin English Library edition of Austen’s novel.
The question to ask here is whether Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is an adaptation or an appropriation of Austen’s original novel. On one hand, the outline of the adapted text (to use Hutcheon’s term) remains quite visible through Grahame-Smith’s treatment of it; moreover, his use of a good deal of Austen’s prose likewise links it ‘palimpsestuously’ to Pride and Prejudice. These two aspects of the more recent novel suggest that we are in the presence of an adaptation. However, the introduction of a plague of zombies into the decorous lives of respectable women living in a small town clearly does something to Austen’s original. While it is true that this may allow Grahame-Smith to provide a voice or voices different from those heard in Austen’s text, and to foreground and rework certain aspects of the latter that Sanders, as we have seen, identifies with adaptation (here, for example, the well-bred helplessness of middle-and upper-class women), the sheer absurdity of this narrative of the Bennet daughters searching for love and marriage in a zombie-infested Regency England might suggest the novel is in fact an appropriation. Nevertheless, it is difficult to determine here where adaptation ceases and appropriation begins.
Grahame-Smith’s reworking and send-up of Pride and Prejudice may be understood as aimed at a male readership who might dismiss the original novel as ‘old’ ‘chick lit’ since it is in essence a romantic narrative. By introducing zombies and Ninja-style fighting, and sexualizing a number of the characters, especially Elizabeth Bennet and her aunt Mrs Phillips, as well as maintaining a tongue-in-cheek tone, Grahame-Smith ostensibly makes Pride and Prejudice both accessible and attractive to male, and especially young male, readers. However, as noted above, by retaining so much of the original prose, he also requires the reader to keep in mind Austen’s novel, without which much of the humour becomes puerile. Like the film 10 Things I Hate about You, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies falls into at least two of Hutcheon’s categories, namely, ‘The Economic Lures’ and ‘Cultural Capital’.
Parody, then, may be thought of as a form of ‘adaptation from’ an originary text if it is to work as parody. Ironically, therefore, it retains a high level of fidelity to that originary text. In the case of Grahame-Smith’s iconoclastic work, the transformation has been from print text to print text; and the parodying of Austen’s novel has required a minimal level of transcoding in order to capture a particular readership, namely, one familiar with the original text, or possibly male readers who may be unfamiliar with the original. However, adaptations from one medium to another require more elaborate and complex transcodings, not only in order to transfer the originary text from one medium to another – say, novel into film – but also to identify and target a particular audience. A film or TV miniseries of Pride and Prejudice (and there have been several of each) will in general be aimed at an audience familiar with and presumably respectful of the novel. Were a film to be made of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, its audience might well be familiar with Austen’s novel but would in all likelihood maintain a rather different attitude towards it, an attitude presumably conditioned by differences of age as well as taste. Such a film would no doubt invoke the codes of horror movies, especially those involving zombies, both because the audience would already be familiar with such codes and because, like the book, the film would target those codes for the purpose of parody.
Grahame-Smith’s novel clearly indicates that it is not always possible to distinguish adaptation from appropriation. In his novel Witches Abroad (1998), part of his Discworld fantasy series, Terry Pratchett raises the interesting question of the possibility for an adaptation to cease to be an adaptation and become something else entirely – that ‘more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain’ which Sanders, as we have seen above, identifies as the trajectory of appropriation. In Witches Abroad, narrative is described narrative – ‘stories’ – as ‘great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time’ which
etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.
This, says the narrator, ‘is called the theory of narrative causality, and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been’ (Pratchett, 1998: pp. 8–9). The plot of this novel turns around the question of adaptation itself. The witches of the title, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick, travel to Genua from their home in Lancre. Upon arriving in the vicinity of Genua, the three witches discover that someone – as it turns out, Granny Weatherwax’s sister, Lily – is twisting traditional fairy tales so that they become something different. In effect, Lily adapts the narratives to suit her own ends. Lily Weatherwax can be said, therefore, to have attempted the radical appropriation and transformation of the plots of the various fairy tales that she has distorted; and this is clearly marked in the narrative as immoral, both because those tales are – or should be – inviolate, and because Lily’s goal has been the accumulation of power for herself. However, that assumption about the inviolability of an original and originary text is precisely what underlies the negative criticism of adaptations of texts and characterizes them as belated and inferior.
An understanding of the adaptation of an originary text, therefore, requires us to compare what each sets out to signify and whether each achieves its goal. A radical difference between these goals does not necessarily mean that the adaptation is inferior to its originary text, though of course it might raise questions as to why the adaptation was undertaken rather than a completely fresh and original text produced. Indeed, it might be useful to think of adaptations as falling into one of two categories: ‘adaptations of’ an originary text and ‘adaptations from’ such a text (the latter idea sometimes phrased, in film credits, as ‘based on’ or ‘inspired by’ an originary text). As the above instances suggest, the business of adaptation has a long and complex history: it is certainly not a simple matter of a novel-into-film transformation, as many today seem to assume. For example, whereas, the protagonist in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) encounters the inhabitants of Wonderland for the first time, Burton’s film Alice in Wonderland (2010) reworks Alice’s adventure so that she in fact revisits Wonderland, though she has forgotten that experience, recalling it only toward the end of the film narrative. In the film, the Red Queen is a combination (Humpty Dumpty, in Carroll’s narrative, might have called it a ‘portmanteau’ [Carroll, 1971: p. 164]) of the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass (1871); and the sibling rivalry between the Red and White Queens (played, respectively, by Helena Bonham-Carter and Anne Hathaway) is entirely Burton’s invention, as is the representation of the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) as a melancholic individual who becomes Alice’s love interest. There are, as Hutcheon notes in her book, adaptations from, to, and among print (novel, drama, poem, or comic book, for example), film, television, and electronic game. Such adaptations should not be judged a priori as inferior because they are belated and dependent upon an earlier, primary, and ‘original’ work.
However, the adaptation, especially into film or television, but also into graphic novel or even comic-book form, of a standard literary text represents a point of ethical as well as pedagogical ambivalence or dilemma for many. Nevertheless, there remains the sense of an imperative that young people ought to be familiar with the literary texts that form part of ‘their’ cultural inheritance and, importantly, form a significant part of the cultural capital available to them. However, the idea of a shared cultural inheritance is part of the dilemma and ambivalence that encircle these texts and potential readers. The adaptation of such texts into television programmes or films, therefore, meets – but maybe only partially satisfies – this need for awareness of that cultural heritage and capital. Such reworkings may be thought to acquaint those unfamiliar with the original texts at least with the latter’s bare narrative outlines and their casts of characters. However, as we have seen in the case of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, identity (or near-identity) of title does not always guarantee identity of narrative. Those charged with the function of cultural gate-keeper – parents, educators, governments, and the like – nevertheless often remain concerned that members of the culture gain some exposure also to more subtle and nuanced aspects of the originary texts – the latter’s uses of language, deployment of narrative devices, historical context, and so on. Perhaps inevitably, therefore, teachers especially will tend to see adaptations as pedagogical short-cuts and therefore as always-already secondary and inferior to the literary text; a necessary evil only, to be invoked chiefly in order to ensure that students at least know the story line. And of course students themselves have often resorted to visual, filmic adaptations of set texts as short-cuts of their own, without necessarily paying attention to the probability that these are adaptations, not simple one-to-one transpositions from one medium into another. They therefore may remain unaware of any antecedent seriality and the shifts of meaning and interpretation that this might produce.
It would, therefore, be a better strategy, not only for teachers and students but also for consumers of texts in general, if the adaptation of an originary text into whatever medium were considered first on the merit of what it sets out to do as a text in its own right, rather than being viewed simply as always-already a poor imitation of a better original. Equally important is an understanding of the historical tradition and contextual nature of adaptation. As we have seen in the examples of the Greek dramatists and of Shakespeare, originality of material has not always been a prime requisite of quality work; rather, in certain contexts originality of treatment of familiar material has often served as the basis for critical evaluation.
We cannot have a sense of the ways in which the adapted text is different from the originary one without an awareness of antecedent seriality, whether the latter spans merely the originary text and a single adaptation or, as we saw in the case of Romeo and Juliet, a long genealogy of textual antecedents. And that difference between originary text and adaptation can be not only substantial, in terms of changes to the dramatis personae, the plot, the setting and other aspects of the text, but also significant, in that the focus as well as central motifs or themes may have changed with the adaptation, as indeed also the intended readership or audience. Consider, for example, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, a play about the improbable relationship of the shrew, Katharina – shrewish in part because her father appears to favour her younger sister, Bianca, who has a retinue of suitors while Kate has none – and Petruchio, who pays court to Kate initially only because she comes from a wealthy house. Without our engaging in a detailed history of adaptations of this play, we can infer from several of its transformations – the 1948 Cole Porter stage musical and later, in 1953, the film musical Kiss Me Kate; Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 film of the play; and the 1997 Heath Ledger vehicle 10 Things I Hate About You – not only three different renditions of the original play but also three very different audiences and, speaking in commercial terms, therefore also different markets.
The Zeffirelli film remains close to the original text, though it drops the framing Christopher Sly plot of the originary Shakespeare play, in which a nobleman and his company play a trick on the unfortunate Sly, leading him to believe that he is in fact a lord before whom a company of players enact the comedy that takes up most of the duration of this play. The film Kiss Me Kate directs its audience to its originary text by representing its principals as performers in a production of The Taming of the Shrew which is, we are informed by the composer ‘Cole Porter’ (a character who does not appear in the stage version of Kiss Me, Kate),4 a musical version of the original play. The Sly plot is replaced by another concerning the difficult offstage relationship of Lilli Vanessi (the Katharina of the production) and her ex-husband Frederick Graham (the Petruchio), a relationship that bears such strong resemblance to the Kate-Petruchio plot onstage that frequently the performers appear to act out their marital conflicts in the guise of the Shakespeare play. The staged play in this musical adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew retains a good deal of the Shakespearean dialogue, though of course much abbreviated. The film 10 Things I Hate About You provides plenty of cues to the audience about the fact that it is an adaptation of the Shakespearean play, again omitting the Sly subplot. These include not only quotations from The Taming of the Shrew and other dramatic works in the Shakespeare corpus, but also other broad hints: such as the name of the high school in which it is set, Padua High, the Petruchio character (played by Heath Ledger) called Patrick Verona, and the two sisters (played by Julia Stiles and Larisa Oleynik) who are named Kat and Bianca Stratford. Nevertheless, despite these winks in the direction of the Shakespeare play, if the intended audience – which is likely to be youthful, given the appeal of the male lead, Heath Ledger, and the resetting of the action in a high school – remained uninformed and unaware of the original text, despite the acknowledgment of the originary Shakespearean play in the credits, its members might well have understood the film as simply a variation on the typical teen ‘flick’, which typically tells the tale of a difficult relationship between a young man and a young woman.
The absence of the Sly subplot in these adaptations of the Shakespeare play changes the meaning significantly. Its presence raises questions of metatheatrical import – about, for instance, the relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘the stage’, as well as who views and who is viewed; or whether behaviour is culturally formed or innate. Has Kate merely been playing the part of a shrew, or is she one in reality? After all, Petruchio’s brutal behaviour as husband, in order to ‘tame’ Kate, is avowedly a performance only. And is her public submission at the end of the play to him as her husband simply another role that she plays, or does she mean it? Are both husband and wife complicit in staging a spectacle that they know will amaze and confound the rest of the company present? These questions remain in the Porter musical but are considerably mediated and modified by the onstage/offstage relationship of Fred and Lilli, which limits the questions about metatheatricality to domestic, marital matters. In 10 Things I Hate About You, issues of performance and the performativity of social roles are constrained still further, in the absence of the Sly subplot or, as in Kiss Me Kate, the approximation of one. Those issues are instead centred on other concerns, such as adolescent love and desire, the fear of rejection and ridicule at both the personal and intimate level, and the more general social one.
It might be argued, consequently, that while the movie 10 Things I Hate About You is undoubtedly intended to capture a particular market and make money from it, it is also an attempt to preserve the cultural capital of Shakespeare’s play at a time when Shakespeare’s works have come to be viewed as high culture and therefore consumable only by a cultivated elite; when those works are dismissed by younger generations as irrelevant to their own understanding of their lives and cultural context; and when theatre competes bravely but not always successfully with other forms of performance, such as film, television, and electronic games. By situating their adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew in a contemporary context and appealing to young viewers especially, the film’s makers have avoided the traditional temptation to make a Shakespeare play ‘relevant’ to a contemporary audience by simply dressing it up in modern costume and embellishing it with such devices as popular music. Rather, this film constructs a narrative that parallels the plot of the originary play – much as does the double plot of Kiss Me Kate – without attempting to replicate it exactly. Intertextual allusions to and quotations from the Shakespeare play function then as anchoring hawsers to prevent this adaptation from becoming a different text entirely.5
Not only the plots of narratives but also the (sub-)genres in which narratives are written may become subject to adaptation. Greg Bear’s sciencefiction novel Blood Music (first published as an award-winning short story in 1983) offers an instance of such an appropriative transformation of a generic model of narrative (Bear, 2007). Bear’s work is a version or adaptation of the mad scientist story beloved of many makers of horror films, whose ancestor is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818). Typically in such narratives, the scientist in question must be neutralized or killed; alternatively, as in Shelley’s novel, the scientist realizes his folly and seeks to make redress. In Bear’s novel, however, the twist is that Vergil Ulam, despite his monomania regarding his ‘noocytes’ (genetically rearranged lymphocytes that initially show simple intelligence but gradually develop complex and independent ways of thinking and acting) and his self-absorption, actually creates a better world for humans, always provided, of course, that the latter are willing to surrender their present, limited physical existence; in other words, their humanity. In one sense, then, Bear’s novel may be understood as seeking to rehabilitate science and the scientist in a culture which has become sceptical, even openly and deeply suspicious, of science’s (and scientists’) claims not only to know the universe intimately but also to be able to change it for the better. Such scepticism and suspicion are hardly unexpected: after a century of epidemics and science’s inability to prevent these, being able only belatedly to find inoculations and cures; a century of wars and the invention of more and more horrifying means of killing people, including the atomic bomb; and a century of science’s acting the willing handmaiden to industry and commerce, and with them contributing to the increasing pollution and profound spoliation of the planet in a number of ways. We should not forget, either, that 1983, the original date of the publication of Blood Music as a short story, also saw the world reeling in disbelief at the uncovering of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the implications of this disease for the world. The promise of a healthier, immortal life, such as Vergil’s noocytes offer, a life unencumbered and unendangered by viral attack, no doubt seemed an attractive fantasy at the time; and no doubt it still seems so. We might therefore draw from this the important inference that adaptations are not only of originary texts but also adaptations to the circumstances and conditions obtaining in the culture at the time that the adaptation is produced.
Bear’s novel has an idiosyncratic structure: the first part focuses on Vergil’s development of the noocytes and the consequences of that development upon him, while the second deals with the global consequences of his work. Vergil himself vanishes to all intents and purposes in the second part, reappearing only as a sort of ghost. The titles of each section – for example, ‘Interphase’, ‘Anaphase’, ‘Prophase’ – refer to the different stages of mitosis, the process by which cells divide and multiply. The terms are therefore significant to the theme of Bear’s novel, of which one could argue that its peculiar structure actually imitates mitosis, in the process producing an evolutionarily different kind of narrative that nonetheless retains a ‘genetic’ coherence with its original parent (DNA) story. The narrative strands of the latter part of the novel are not subplots in any conventional sense. Albeit, in a more limited way, they represent new narrative trajectories, rather as recombinations of DNA that produce new strands that in turn produce new life forms. In this sense, then, Blood Music may be described as a work that starts out as the adaptation of a particular subgenre of narrative, that of the mad scientist, but concludes as an appropriation of that subgenre, not only in its transformation of the typical narrative trajectory of this type of story but also in its revision of traditional narrative structure itself.
Other adaptations, however, while announcing their originary texts and thereby laying claim to some fidelity to those texts, may be subject to criticism on precisely the grounds of fidelity to an original. A case in point is Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Chronicles. The original trilogy, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore (Le Guin, 1968; 1972; 1973), was first published between 1968 and 1973, and was followed in 1990 by Tehanu (Le Guin, 1990). Despite the latter’s subtitle, The Last Book of Earthsea, 2001, saw the publication of Tales from Earthsea, a collection of five short stories, and The Other Wind (Le Guin, 2001). Set in the Earthsea world of archipelagos and other islands, the entire series traces the story of Sparrowhawk from his days as a goatherd boy on the island of Gont, where he displays a significant talent for magic, to his training at the school for wizards on the island of Roke, to his ascension to Archmage and thence to his old age back on Gont, after he has lost his magic.
There have been two transformations of the Earthsea series into film. The first of these, Earthsea (originally titled Legend of Earthsea) (Lieberman, 2004), first screened as a television series, draws on the first two volumes, but, in addition to telescoping events radically, kills off Vetch (played by Chris Gauthier), Sparrowhawk’s friend from Roke and his companion on his voyage to deal with an evil entity called a gebbeth; and inconsistently calls the young Sparrowhawk (Shawn Ashmore) ‘Ged’ (his everyday name, as opposed to ‘Sparrowhawk,’ his secret, true name) but retains Vetch’s ordinary name (his true name is Estarriol). Further, the film makes Tenar (Kristin Kreuk) a novice priestess caught up in a power struggle between the high priestess Thar (in the novel one of Tenar’s tutors, played by Isabella Rossellini) and the priestess Kossil (another less congenial tutor in the novel, played here by Jennifer Calvert). The latter in the film is the lover of the Kargad king Tygath (Sebastian Roché), who seeks eternal life from the Nameless Ones and therefore requires control of the Temple of Atuan. The film ends with Ged and Tenar (who have each had prophetic dreams about one another prior to meeting in person) emerging as potential lovers from the temple.
The film, more of an appropriation than an adaptation of the Earthsea narratives, substitutes for Le Guin’s careful delineation of different cultures and the delicate political and social ecology that this implies an adventure-cum-love story with a lot of special effects. While the film was not a great success with audiences, its rendering of Le Guin’s originary text implies a good deal about the intended audience and its expectations. For one thing, there appears to be no assumption that the audience – presumably a young one – would be familiar with the Earthsea Chronicles, whose first three volumes appeared from 1968 to 1973. To all intents and purposes, then, for such an audience this is not an adaptation of an originary text but rather an independent text entirely. For another, the film appears to assume, perhaps not entirely incorrectly, that what a young audience desires to see is a story of derring-do and love – after all, these have been a staple of Western narrative from at least as early as the medieval cycle of narratives about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
The second film is an animated feature-length movie from Japan. Tales from Earthsea (Gedo Senki) is directed by Goro Miyazaki (Miyazaki, 2006), the son of the renowned anime animator Hayao Miyazaki. Visually stunning, this animated film draws on The Farthest Shore, Tehanu and, to a lesser degree, The Other Wind. The narrative begins with Prince Arren killing his father (a deed without foundation in the originary text) and taking flight, meeting on his way with the Archmage Ged (in this film a man of mature years, signalled by his beard and greying temples) and accompanying him in his investigation into why magic-wielders seem to be losing their powers. The renegade wizard Cob, who appears in The Farthest Shore, the third of the novel series, is responsible for that loss; however, rather than living in the shadowlands of death as in the novel, the evil wizard instead inhabits a Gothic castle. The film ends with Arren returning to Enlad to face the consequences of his parricide.
There are no doubt important cultural differences inscribed in this Japanese rendition of the American Le Guin’s work, though it is not the task of this chapter – and is beyond the competence of its author – to investigate them. It is also quite likely that the younger Miyazaki shares, at least to some degree, the moral concerns with which his father inscribes his own animated feature films. These can be seen in Tales from Earthsea in Ged’s concern to maintain the Equilibrium, and in the pastoral nature of life on Tenar’s farm, as well as in Cob’s overweening self-interest and ambition. By contrast, the Ged of Earthsea is represented, when a boy, as chafing against his destiny to become a blacksmith like his father, rejoicing in discovering his talent for magic, and irritated with his mage mentor Ogion, whose teaching about nature does not seem at all to be about wielding magic. That is, the Ged in the American-made film is ambitious both for power and for adventure, and no doubt reflects a different ideological stance from that of the Japanese-made movie. Both of these films, then, can be described not so much as adaptations of Le Guin’s work than as appropriations of it – indeed, the cover for the DVD copy of Earthsea proclaims that it is ‘Based on the stunning Earthsea cycle by legendary fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin’ (Lieberman, 2004), a formula that, as I have suggested above, often indicates a significant departure from an originary text.
A more interesting series of adaptations/appropriations of an originary text is to be found in the novels by Gregory Maguire grouped together under the rubric The Wicked Years. At least in his young adult/adult fiction, Maguire is less a teller than a reteller of tales. For example, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is a reworking of the Cinderella tale, setting it in seventeenth-century Holland and telling the story from the perspective of one of the ‘ugly stepsisters’, giving the story a very different twist from the traditional tale that many readers would be familiar with (Maguire, 1999). Likewise, Mirror, Mirror: A Novel retells the story of Snow White, setting it in sixteenth-century Tuscany, with Lucrezia Borgia as the wicked Queen, though not married to this Snow White’s father (Maguire, 2003).
‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White’ can be ascribed to various authors: for example, the familiar version of ‘Cinderella’ derives from Perrault’s collection of tales Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697) (Opie & Opie, 1980: p. 152), while ‘Snow White’ (or ‘Snow Drop’) can be traced back to German Popular Stories. Translated from the Kinder-und Haus-Märchen, Collected by MM Grimm, from Oral Tradition (1823) (Opie & Opie, 1980: p. 228); but there are even older antecedents of both stories. The familiar versions, however, have taken on the status of folktales, a status which implies a lack of any author. Maguire’s renditions are therefore adaptations not so much of a fixed key originary text as of a familiar childhood tale which one might have heard in various versions. Perhaps, therefore, it would be more accurate to describe these novels as paraphrases of those tales, retaining a high degree of fidelity to the original stories, even though a good deal of the marvellous – such as fairy godmothers – has been rationalized and explained, while the social and historical context of the story lines has been rendered more detailed and is itself situated within an extra-diegetical historical and cultural frame.
In 1995 Maguire embarked on the retelling of a different narrative or set of narratives, this time choosing L. Frank Baum’s children’s novels about the Land of Oz (Baum, 2005), of which the best known is surely The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900); and here we return to the title of the present chapter. This is, of course, not the first time this novel has been adapted: Baum himself reworked it and other novels from the series in various media; and there were several film versions of it before the famous 1939 MGM movie, starring the 17-year-old Judy Garland (Fleming, 1939). In 1978 the film adaptation of a stage musical version, The Wiz, appeared with an all-black cast (Lumet, 1978).6 The first of Maguire’s novels, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, tells the story of Elphaba, the wicked witch of the title (Maguire, 1995). (Her name is derived from the sounds of the initial letters of L. Frank Baum’s name.) Initially an unsympathetic character, with her green skin and sharp teeth, Elphaba gradually wins the reader over. A loner who is an intellectual of a scientific bent, a political radical, and a feminist, Elphaba questions authority, especially that of the oppressive Emperor. Her encounter with Dorothy and her companions, the dog Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion, is by no means charged with the hostility and vengefulness of her avatar in the MGM film. In Son of a Witch (Maguire, 2005), the second in Maguire’s series, we learn that Elphaba has had a son – or at least the birth of a boy has been attributed to her – who forges his own life in the shadow of his mother, now a notorious and almost mythical figure in Oz. And in A Lion Among Men (Maguire, 2008) we follow the story of the Lion, one of the intelligent talking animals of Oz who have been persecuted by the Emperor. (It is unclear whether Maguire plans any further volumes in this series.) Thus, we may say that while Wicked is a clear adaptation of an originary text, the two subsequent novels are more properly appropriations of that same text.
Though Maguire refers intertextually to, and quotes from, both the 1939 Wizard of Oz and Baum’s Oz novels (for example, in Maguire’s narratives there are references to tik-toks, a species of domestic robots, which are absent from the film but certainly appear in the novels – there is even one called The Tik-Tok Man [Baum, 2005]), his Wicked Years narratives highlight ideological and cultural gaps and weaknesses in both the original novels and the famous MGM film. For example, Elphaba’s green skin in the 1939 film marks her envious, evil nature, instead in Wicked it signals her difference and otherness, and provides the ground for her marginalization and persecution. (The all-black cast of The Wiz likewise foregrounds the whiteness of the 1939 movie, the version of Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with which most people are familiar.) In Son of a Witch and A Lion Among Men, Liir, Elphaba’s putative son, and Brr, the lion of the title, are both represented as queer, in that both have relations with members of both sexes, something that could not have been treated in a serious fashion either by Baum or by the makers of the 1939 movie, although the latter’s Cowardly Lion, played by Bert Lahr, is fairly camp. In other words, Maguire demands that his readers rethink at least the film of The Wizard of Oz, despite its ingrained familiarity fostered by frequent reruns both on television and in the cinema, in terms of what it fails to say or what it says only elliptically.
Hutcheon remarks, in connection with what she calls ‘the showing mode’, that is, texts in performance, that
[i]n a very real sense, every live staging of a printed play could theoretically be considered an adaptation in its performance. The text of the play does not necessarily tell an actor about such matters as the gestures, expressions, and tones of voice to use in converting words on a page into a convincing performance ... it is up to the director and actors to actualize the text and to interpret and then recreate it, thereby in a sense adapting it for the stage. (Hutcheon, 2006: p. 39)
We may add to this the idea that the actors themselves also adapt the text through their individual understandings of their roles and their performances of these. Moreover, since in live theatre each performance of a play is different, even if only infinitesimally, from all others of the same production – because of factors like audience reaction, the general mood of both audience and actors, the physical conditions of the space in which the performance takes place, and the like – we may conclude that each performance is not only an adaptation of a printed text but also of the director’s interpretation of the text.
This raises interesting questions about adaptation and interpretation – that is, textual readings – in general. These questions are particularly relevant in a culture in which ‘sampling’ in popular music (the excerpting of one or more passages of existing recordings in order to resituate them in an entirely separate new work) is now commonplace, as is the cutting and pasting of text, often accomplished electronically, from one document to another. Whether such practices count as inventive post-modern forms of intertextual reference or merely as plagiarism would depend, one assumes, on the nature of the text into which the excerpted material is relocated and how the latter is repurposed. Are those practices adaptations or appropriations? As I have argued with regard to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, they can be both: Grahame-Smith has, in a sense, ‘sampled’ Austen’s novel, but has also reworked the excerpts to create a different kind of text. Perhaps the answer to the question resides in the manner in which the principle of antecedent seriality is foregrounded in the adapted work, as well as the degree to which that principle functions in the reader’s or viewer’s perception and understanding, which in turn depends on the nature of her or his cultural capital.
Other key questions follow in relation to the matter of adaptation. To what degree is each reader’s understanding of a text, even in the case of a rereading of it, an adaptation of the text? What then might be the relationship between the interpretation of a text and its adaptation? What elements of a text might serve to anchor understandings of that text, in order to prevent it from meaning anything at all, like a sort of Rorschach inkblot, to a reader? What criteria can we invoke, in adjudicating among understandings of a text, that permit us to qualify some readings as legitimate and others as not, or as eccentric adaptations or even appropriations of that text? It is among these questions about meaning and understanding, about what constraints and permissions govern interpretation and – perhaps above all – who controls those constraints and permissions that we may find a partial answer to the question of why adaptation has so consistently been regarded as inferior to the originary text, and why it has been so vociferously dismissed and even condemned. For, if the very notion of adaptation is broadened to include all understandings of a text, dominant and official ideologies and discourses may well come to be undermined, ignored, or attacked. That is, approaching the question of adaptation as more than a secondary and probably inferior reworking of an originary text can bring us to important interrogations of the nature of textual understanding itself.
Cardwell, S. 2002. Adaptation revisited: television and the classic novel. Manchester University Press, Manchester. Addresses key issues of the adaptation of novels, with a particular focus on their transformation into television serials.
Cartmell, D. & Whelehan, I. (eds) 1999. Adaptations: from text to screen, screen to text. Routledge, London. Considers the difficulties of adaptations from print texts into film, and the reverse: the novelization of filmic texts.
Stam, R. & Raengo, A. (eds) 2005. Literature and film: a guide to the theory and practice of film adaptation. Blackwell, Oxford. A collection of essays on the relationship of literature and film, exploring international and independent films as well as Hollywood movies.
1In order to avoid reproducing in my discussion a hierarchy of value in which ‘original text’ dominates as the only positive term, in what follows I will use instead the term ‘originary text’ – Hutcheon prefers ‘adapted text’ (Hutcheon, 2006: p. xiii) – which, unlike ‘original’, with its connotations of an unassailable and unchangeable quality, suggests the generative power of a text to inspire emulation and adaptation.
2One might add here also such musical adaptations of the Shakespeare play as the Roméo et Juliette operas by Hector Berlioz (1839) and Charles Gounod (1867), or the music composed by Sergei Prokofiev in 1935 for the ballet Romeo and Juliet, commissioned by the Kirov Ballet, which in its original form had a happy ending. However, consideration of these works lies somewhat outside the scope of the present chapter.
3The term ‘palimpsest’ technically refers to a mediaeval manuscript written on parchment or vellum, which has been, to use the contemporary term, recycled by removing earlier inscription by means of a sharp or abrasive implement. However, in a palimpsest a faint trace of the original inscription may still be discerned, whether because vestiges of the original ink remain on the page, or because the quill or other writing instrument used has scored the surface of the page.
4The title of the stage play correctly and grammatically inserts a comma before ‘Kate’, whereas the title of the film omits it.
5It is worth noting that the film 10 Things I hate about you itself generated in 2009 a spin-off in the form of a TV sitcom series with the same title. A viewer of the series ignorant of the relevant antecedent seriality would see only the connection with the film, making the genealogical connection to The taming of the shrew more tenuous and remote.
6Wikipedia has an entire entry on adaptations of this novel and others in Baum’s Oz series –see bibliography.