THE PERENNIAL AND PERENNIALLY VEXED QUESTION OF the relation of novels—whoa, the novel—to the film seems to have achieved an uncommon, perhaps even dangerous state of agitation in recent months. If questions can be fruitfully compared to giant apes, one would have to say that the question of the relation of novel and film has reared up like King Kong and begun to beat its chest.
That more people aren’t aware of the dangerous instability of opinion about this question at the present time just goes to show that the public at large doesn’t read the right books. Certainly, if the public at large had come to grips with professor Geoffrey Wagner’s The Novel and the Cinema, or with professor Alan Spiegel’s Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel, it would not have sat there so placidly chewing its cud and awaiting the release of King Kong.
Still, the question of the relationship between the film and the novel is so slippery that perhaps the public at large does well to let it slide. I myself have had it in hand several times since 1957—the year in which George Bluestone (Novels Into Film) dragged it, wriggling and squirming, into the consciousness of graduate students everywhere—although I have never been able to get a good hold. What is the relationship? Are the two arts sister arts, or merely cousins by marriage? Or could it be that something darker is suggested? Perhaps the relationship of film to novel is that of whore to customer, of mortician to cadaver, of cannibal to meal? On the other hand, perhaps the relationship is only that of near neighbors.
Beyond the primary question lies a crucial secondary issue: Namely, who is going to answer the primary question? At the very least, the two arts have been guilty of Peeping Tomism, constantly peering into one another’s bedrooms, drafting rooms, and kitchens. Both have made use of what they have seen, but in a very disorderly fashion. No ground rules were ever drafted, no bylaws passed, no first principles agreed upon. Instead, novelists and filmmakers have simply snitched freely from one another, and, if either actually noticed anything being taken, the theft was usually dismissed as only petty pilfering. But this random pilfering has been going on for three-quarters of a century or more, so that by now the house of fiction and the house of film—adjacent houses, evidently—are heaped with oddments garnered one from another and never returned, the lawn mowers, rakes, and coffee cups of long years of neighboring.
Who is to sort it all out? The novelists? The filmmakers? The reviewers, or the reviewer-critics? Or the professors, the scholar-critics?
It seems to me that a process of elimination brings us in a matter of seconds to the professors. What little we have learned about this vague relationship so far we have learned almost entirely from academics: George Bluestone, Ralph Richardson, Claude-Edmonde Magny, Arnold Hauser, G. W. Linden, Marshall McLuhan, Roger Shattuck, Will Wright, and, of course, Wagner and Spiegel. A few of these studies, notably Bluestone’s and McLuhan’s, have achieved some general popularity, but most of them, including those that are most percipient (G. W. Linden’s Reflections on Screen, 1970, and Claude-Edmonde Magny’s The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two Wars, published in 1948 and finally translated in 1972), are hardly known outside the scholarly community, and not too well known within it.
It is obvious that if we wait for the novelists and filmmakers to settle matters of theory then we will wait forever. In the first place, novelists and filmmakers seldom have the leisure for theory, and even if leisure is forced upon them, they are usually disinclined to spend time upon such subtle pursuits.
Filmmakers, like novelists, tend to put their minds to theory only if an interviewer from Cahiers du Cinéma or Sight and Sound sits them down and forces them to it. Novelists, for their part, tend to wait for the arrival of George Plimpton and the Paris Review tape recorder before tidying up the various vital questions that have littered the floor of their minds for so many years.
There have been, of course, highly sophisticated, self-conscious novelists and filmmakers, men quite capable of playing quoits with the aestheticians. But even these men, when forced by an interviewer to confront an important critical question—like how does the novel relate to the film—are apt to be seized by the devilishness of the creator and blather out the most pompous and preposterous nonsense, half to tease or to irritate the interviewer, half to see if maybe they mean some of it.
John Barth pointed out years ago that, for all their brains, it is not wholly wrong to think of artists as aesthetic athletes; their work, in a given game, can be seen as a complex and always largely instinctual response to the immediate situation. Of course, once the game is played, the novel written, the film edited and released, the artist-athlete may be capable of a brilliant locker-room analysis. Ask him why so much crosscutting, or why he switched so abruptly from first person to third, and he may dazzle you with his understanding of his own intentions. If he is in the mood to hit a few, he may reach for a few critical overheads, and relate his crosscutting or his interior monologues to Spenglerian malaise or Keynesian economics, in which case, woe to the interviewer. He may suspect that it’s only bullshitting, but then, after all, the man doing the talking is the man who shot the film or wrote the book, and, up until recently at least, the artist’s own words have been granted a special indulgence, and have been presumed to carry a special authority.
T. S. Eliot and the New Critics chipped away at the author’s privileged position as a critic of his own work, but it remained for Northrop Frye to utterly destroy this privilege. The Anatomy of Criticism was as devastating an attack on authorial authority as, say, The Origin of Species was on biblical authority. Frye coolly pointed out that it is ridiculous to grant authors or auteurs special privileges in regard to the criticism of their own work. An author who criticizes his own work is merely one of his own critics, not necessarily the best. Authorial comment is seldom descriptive enough to suit Frye; too often if falls off into value judgment, and the Anatomy banishes the old criticism of value judgments, mere footnotes in the history of taste, and replaces it with the study of genres, modes, and structures.
This might seem to have only distant relevance to the situation in film criticism, but in fact it bears on it directly. Gone are the days when Siegfried Kracauer was practically the only professor around to take an interest in film theory. The young scholar-critics of today, of whom Wright and Spiegel are certainly two of the best, are as much students of mid-century critical movements as they are of film. They are the grandchildren of the New Critics, the children of Frye, Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and the Structuralists. Moreover, they are scholars; they have the time for research and reflection.
This occupational fact separates them significantly from those reviewer-critics who are, for better or worse, professional journalists, inextricably tied to the reviewing process. For the most part these reviewer-critics are just as rushed as the filmmakers. Some of them, like John Simon and Andrew Sarris, obviously have the capacity for theory, but they do not have the time. Their profession dictates to them, as all professions do, and in the scramble to get their reviews in, their practical criticism done, they make do with the hand tools of impressionism and hold back what theoretical insights they have for their infrequent books.
There are, of course, scores, if not hundreds, of film reviewers who can’t really be called reviewer-critics. They come in all sizes and shapes, from provincial entertainment editors to somewhat more glorified metropolitan gossip columnists like Rex Reed. These reviewers, whether good or bad, likable or detestable, humble or arrogant, have no concern with theory at all, and no effect on it.
Simon, Sarris, and Pauline Kael could have an effect on it, could even write it, but for the most part they don’t. These three critics have acquired the status of auteurs, whose reviews, good or bad, fair or unfair, get read for their own sakes, not merely for what vagrant scraps of information they may contain. We read them not merely for information, for topical enlightenment, but for entertainment. Like them or not, they are at least attempting to carry on the tradition of the broadly informed public critic—the tradition of William Hazlitt, George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, James Agate, Edmund Wilson. As the films continue to wash over them week after week, year after year, they more and more resemble people attempting to stand against a flood, a tiring stance, one that clearly leads to an ever-increasing neuroticism, but nonetheless a stance not without its gallantry and its value.
Professors are, of course, constantly wet up to the knees by freshets of freshman themes; but freshman themes, chilling as they can be, do not literally sweep one downstream toward the straitjacket and the padded cell, as a decade or so of reviewing might. It is fitting that professors, who are spared both the exhaustion of making films and the nearly equivalent exhaustion of reviewing them, should be given some exhausting tasks of their own, namely that of the close, painstaking study of films, and the examination of their relation, if any, to the other arts.
The public critics have all they can do to maintain their standards of expression in the teeth of the constantly increasing vulgarization of the public media—their energies are going to be mostly consumed in keeping their perceptional equipment in good working order. I think in the next few years we can expect to see the academics acquire a position in film studies and film criticism comparable to what they had in literary studies in the 1950s.
Of the two books mentioned that attempt to deal with the question of the relation of the novel to film, it seems to me that Alan Spiegel’s Fiction and the Camera Eye is by far the more considerable. Geoffrey Wagner is an able critic, who has thought long and seriously about novels and films, but The Novel and the Cinema strains so hard for a thesis that it partially cripples itself. The first part of his study, in which he pulls together and summarizes a great deal of film theory, is more readable and more useful than the last part of the book, in which he attempts to define and illustrate three methods that filmmakers have chosen to use in dealing with novels.
The three methods Wagner settles on are transposition, commentary, and analogy, but he illustrates them, for the most part, with reference to fairly minor films—indeed, in some cases (Catch-22, Lord Jim, The Trial) quite ineffective adaptations—so that, for the most part, his interesting book doesn’t seem to offer a theory with very broad applicability.
Fiction and the Camera Eye, though ostensibly narrower than The Novel and the Cinema, is more intellectually engaging and more satisfying. It is a very stimulating and provocative book, but one whose argument cannot be fairly summarized in a short space. The difference between the two books is the difference between soft and hard focus. Spiegel gives us a reading of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction that concentrates on fiction’s increasing use of pictorial definitions, of what Spiegel calls the “adventitious detail.” He starts his inquiry with Flaubert, who, of course, preceded the cinema, but not the camera, and he demonstrates that Flaubert’s fiction is as full of beautifully composed scenes and fine, frozen details as any photograph is.
Then he discusses what he calls “the oval of vision,” a way of limiting but sharpening one’s looking which applies equally to novelists, photographers, and filmmakers—though, of course, not to all members of these categories equally. What we get is a very precise and detailed study of fictional pictures as compared to cinematographic pictures. Flaubert, Conrad, and Joyce particularly fascinate Spiegel, as do all of the subtle and ambiguous relationships between the modern novel and film.
This book to a degree is an influence study, but Spiegel is sensitive and circumspect when it comes to determining influence. Joyce was interested enough in cinema to become involved in opening the first movie house in Dublin (it failed), but in his correspondence he is all but mute on the subject of movies, and Spiegel doesn’t want to claim that Ulysses was actually influenced by this film or that. At this point in time, as André Bazin once said, the novel was some years ahead of the cinema in refinement of technique.
Fiction and the Camera Eye seldom claims causal influence of the film upon the novel, or vice versa—indeed to this day there has been no more cinematographic novelist than Flaubert, who worked in blissful ignorance of it. What Spiegel does claim is parallel development in the two art forms, at least some of which may be accounted for by the fact that the camera eventually educated and refined our manner of looking at things. This may seem a modest claim, but it is advanced persuasively, with a very wide reference to literature, film, and the literature of film. The book is adventurous in its approach to theory, and is filled with a great deal of excellent close reading—not to mention close watching. It might be argued, and probably will be, that he has not quite done justice to the pictorial detail in some ancient writers, or even some modern ones like Tolstoy, but he has produced, nonetheless, a book which those who want to pursue this King Kong of questions will need to have along, an indispensable item in their gear.