ADAPTATIONS

What happens to popular texts, both novels and movies, when they are trans-
formed into an entirely different medium? Adaptations considers the theoretical
and practical issues surrounding the adaptation of a text into a film, and also looks
at the reverse process: the novelization of movies.
Adaptations surveys the key approaches and debates surrounding adaptation,
and explores why adaptations of both 'hlgh' and 'low' cultural texts have become
increasingly popular. Beginning with the hlstory of Shakespeare on film, from
Olivier's Hamlet to Branagh's Hamlet, contributors examine screen versions of
literary classics, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Louisa May
Alcott's Little Women, to Thomas Keneally's Schindler)s List and Irvine Welsh's
Trainspotting.
Adaptations goes on to consider adaptation in reverse, explaining how
writers like Virginia Woolf incorporated cinematic elements into their work, and
why there had to be a novel ofJane Campion's The Piano. Contributors examine
adaptations from comics to film, such as the Batman movies, Star Trek's incarna-
tions as a long-running television series, and then as a sequence of movies, and
101 Dalmatians' move from children's novel to cartoon to live-action film.

Contributors: Roger Bromley, Will Brooker, Deborah Cartmell, Ken Gelder,

Ina Rae Hark, Pat Kirkham, Julian North, Sharon Ouditt, Derek Paget, Mark
Rawlinson, Esther Sonnet, Sarah Warren, Paul Wells, Imelda Whelehan,
Nicholas Zurbrugg.

Deborah Cartmell is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Humanities at

De Montfort University, Leicester.

Imelda Whelehan is Principal Lecturer in English and Women's Studies at De

Montfort University, Leicester.
 ADAPTATIONS
From text to screen, screen to text

Edited by Deborah Cartmell

and Imelda Whelehan

London and New York

 First published 1999
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OXI4 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Transferred to Digital Printing 2005
Selection and editorial matter © 1999 Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan
Individual chapters © 1999 individual contributors
Typeset in Galliard by Routledge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Adaptations: from text to screen, screen to text / edited by Deborah Cartmell and
Imelda Whelehan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0--41S-16737-X (hardcover: alk. paper). - ISBN
0--41S-16738-8 (pbk: alk. paper)
1. Film adaptations. 2. Motion pictures and literature.
PNI997.8S.A32 1999
791.43'6--dc21 98--49S76
CIP
ISBN 0--41S-16737-X (hbk)
ISBN 0--41S-16738-8 (pbk)
 TO JAKE BRADLEY,
MIRIAM SADLER, HESTER BRADLEY
AND LAURENCE SADLER
 CONTENTS

List of illustrations Xl
Notes on contributors xiii
Acknowledgements xvii

PART I
An overview 1

1 Adaptations: The contemporary dilemmas 3

IMELDA W HELEHAN

PART II
From text to screen 21

2 Introduction 23
DEBORAH CARTMELL

3 The Shakespeare on screen industry 29

D E BORAH CARTME LL

4 Conservative Austen, radical Austen: Sense and Sensibility

from text to screen 38
J U LI AN NORTH

5 From Emma to Clueless: Taste, pleasure and the scene of history 51

ESTHER SONNET

vii
 CONTENTS

6 Imagining the Puritan body: The 1995 cinematic version of

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter 63
ROGER BROMLEY

7 Four Little Women: Three ftlms and a novel 81

PAT KIRKHAM AND SARAH WARREN

8 Will Hollywood never learn? David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch 98

NICHOLAS ZURBRUGG

9 Adapting the Holocaust: SchindlerJs List, intellectuals

and public knowledge 113
MARK RAWLINSON

10 Speaking out: The transformations of Trainspotting 128

DEREK PAGET

PART III
From screen to text and multiple adaptations 141

11 Introduction 143
DEBORAH CARTMELL

12 Orlando: Coming across the divide 146

SHARON OUDITT

13 Jane Campion and the limits of literary cinema 157

KEN GELDER

14 The wrath of the original cast: Translating embodied television

characters to other media 172
INA RAE HARK

15 Batman: One life, many faces 185

WILL BROOKER

Vlll
 CONTENTS

16 'Thou art translated': Analysing animated adaptation 199

PAUL WELLS

17 'A doggy fairy tale': The film metamorphoses of

The Hundred and One Dalmatians 214
IMELDA WHELEHAN

Bibliography 226
Index 239

ix
 ILLUSTRATIONS

3.1 Hamlet (1990), with Mel Gibson in the lead role and Glenn Close
playing Gertrude 35
6.1 The Scarlet Letter (1995), starring Demi Moore as Hester Prynne 73
7.1 Little Women (1949). The March family gathered at the piano 87
7.2 Little Women (1994). Marmee and her daughters read a letter
from their father 91
10.1 Trainspotting (1996). Renton (Ewan McGregor) surfaces in the
notorious toilet scene 138
15.1 The 1960s series of Batman, with Adam West as Batman and
Burt Ward playing his trusty companion Robin 190
15.2 Batman and Robin (1997), directed by Joel Schumacher with
George Clooney and Chris O'Donnell in the title roles 195
17.1 Glenn Close as Cruella de Vii in 101 Dalmatians (1996) 223

Xl
 CONTRIBUTORS

Roger Bromley is Director of the Humanities School of Graduate Studies and

Research at Nottingham Trent University. He has written extensively on
popular culture, is the author of numerous scholarly articles, and has
contributed chapters to twenty books. He was the co-editor of A Cultural
Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice (Longman, 1996) and the author of
Lost Narratives (Routledge, 1988) and Narratives for a New Belonging
(forthcoming).
Will Brooker is co-editor, with Peter Brooker, of Postmodern After-Images:
A Reader in Film, Television and Video (Arnold, 1997). He is currently
engaged on PhD work on Batman at the Tom Hopkinson Centre for Media
Research, University of Wales, Cardiff.
Deborah Cartmell is Senior Lecturer in English at De Montfort University,
Leicester. She is presently working on a book on Shakespeare on screen, is
co-editor of the Film/Fiction annual journal (Pluto Press, 1996- ) and has
written on Spenser, Shakespeare and Afro-American literature.
Ken Gelder is Associate Professor and Reader in English at the University of
Melbourne, Australia. His previous books include Reading the Vampire
(Routledge, 1994) and - with Jane M. Jacobs - Uncanny Australia:
Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne University
Press, 1998).
Ina Rae Hark is Director of the Film Studies Program and Associate Dean of
the College of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. Her film
scholarship includes two edited volumes of essays, Screening the Male
(Routledge, 1993) and The Road Movie Book (Routledge, 1997), as well as
articles in Cinema Journal, Literature/Film Quarterly, Film History, South
Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of Popular Film and Hitchcock's Re-Released
Films.
Pat Kirkham (formerly of De Montfort University) is Professor at The Bard
Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York, where she
teaches and is director of a major research, exhibition and publishing project

xiii
 CONTRIBUTORS

related to women designers working in the USA 1990-2000. She has written
and lectured widely on gender, design and film.
Julian North is Senior Lecturer in English at De Montfort University,
Leicester. She has published on De Quincey and on Victorian drug culture.
Her book, De Quincey Reviewed (Camden House, 1997), is a study of De
Quincey's critical reception from the 1820s to the 1990s. She is currently
working on the construction of Romantic reputation and on nineteenth-
century representations of the drug experience.
Sharon Ouditt is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Media
Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is author of Fighting Forces)
Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (Routledge, 1994)
and has published essays and articles on women's writing, autobiography and
feminist theory.
Derek Paget is Reader in Drama at University College, Worcester. He is the
author of True Stories? Documentary Drama on Radio) Screen and Stage
(Manchester University Press, 1990) and No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/
Docudrama on Television (Manchester University Press, 1998).
Mark Rawlinson teaches at the University of Leicester. He has written on the
Holocaust and post-war British culture. His book, British Writers of the
Second World War, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Esther Sonnet is Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow in the Faculty of Media
Arts at Southampton Institute. She has published widely on postmodernism
and cinema, with a specific interest in feminist and postfeminist theory.
Her current research is on women's erotica within the contemporary cultural
production and consumption of popular fictional genres.
Sarah Warren read English and Media Studies at De Montfort University. She
recently obtained her PGCE at Leicester University and now teaches recep-
tion class at Forest Lodge Primary School, Leicester. Her interests include
issues of class and gender, literature for children, and early-years education.
Paul Wells is Subject Leader for Media Studies at De Montfort University in
Leicester. He is author of Art and Animation (John Wiley/Academy Group,
1997) and Understanding Animation (Routledge, 1998), and is currently
preparing books on British and American animation and its relationship to
cultural history.
Imelda Whelehan is Principal Lecturer in English and Women's Studies at De
Montfort University, Leicester. Her publications include Modern Feminist
Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 1995) and she is co-editor of the
Film/ Fiction annual journal (Pluto Press, 1996- ). She is currently writing a
book examining the re-emergence of anti-feminist thought in politics and
popular culture.

xiv
 CONTRIB UTORS

Nicholas Zurhrugg is Professor of English and Cultural Studies and Director

of the Centre for Contemporary Arts in the Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences at De Montfort University, Leicester. His books include Beckett and
Proust (New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1988), The Parameters of Post-
modernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), Jean Baudrillard:
Art and Artefact (London: Sage, 1997) and Critical Vices: The Myths of
Postmodern Theory (New York: G + B Arts, forthcoming).

xv
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are indebted to the people and archives below for permission to reproduce
the following stills. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, and
any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions.

3.1 Hamlet (1990) © Paramount, courtesy of the Kobal Collection.

6.1 The Scarlet Letter (1995) © Cinergi, courtesy of the Kobal Collection.
7.1 Little Women (1949) © MGM, courtesy of the Kobal Collection.
7.2 Little Women (1994) © Di Novi/Columbia, courtesy of the Kobal
Collection.
10.1 Trainspotting(1996) © PolyGram/Pictorial Press.
15.1 Batman, © Twentieth Century Fox Television/ABC, courtesy of the
Kobal Collection.
15.2 Batman and Robin (1997) © Warner Bros, courtesy of the Kobal
Collection.
17.1 101 Dalmatians (1996) © Walt Disney, courtesy of the Kobal
Collection.

The editors wish to acknowledge De Montfort University for giving us the time
to complete this project and Stephen Gamble and John Mackintosh for their
expert computing advice. Special thanks to David Sadler and Ian Bradley.

xvii
 Part I

AN OVERVIEW
 1

ADAPTATIONS
The contemporary dilemmas

Imelda Whelehan

Although the study of literary adaptations on film and TV is becoming more

common and indeed more 'acceptable' as a feature of English and/or Media
Studies in higher education, it is still surrounded by knee-jerk prejudice about
the skills such study affords, its impact on the value and place of the literary
'original' and the kind of critical approach it demands. Apart from analytical
work on narratological perspectives, auteur theory and genre, there is little that
unites the study of visual and written narratives in academic work - even though
there are clearly shared processes in the study of both. Studying both fictional
and filmic sources can be fraught with problems - particularly in making deci-
sions about giving the 'appropriate' amount of attention to each medium, and
fostering the skills specific to each form; but perhaps the chief problem lies in
teasing out our own and others' conscious and unconscious prejudices about
this kind of 'hybrid' study.
This book picks up on an interest in the process of adaptation from text to
screen which has increased in the past two decades, but in a sense emerged with
the popularity of films based on works of fiction and particularly the develop-
ment of the Hollywood film industry. Many commentators l have focused on
the process of the transference from novel to film, where often a well-known
work of great literature is adapted for the cinema and expectations about the
'fidelity' of the screen version come to the fore. For many people the compar-
ison of a novel and its film version results in an almost unconscious prioritizing
of the fictional origin over the resulting film, and so the main purpose of
comparison becomes the measurement of the success of the film in its capacity
to realize what are held to be the core meanings and values of the originary
text. These commentators have already charted the problems involved in such
an exercise and the pitfalls created by the demands of authenticity and fidelity -
not least the intensely subjective criteria which must be applied in order to
determine the degree to which the film is 'successful' in extracting the 'essence'
of the fictional text. What we aim to offer here is an extension of this debate,
but one which further destabilizes the tendency to believe that the origin text is
of primary importance. To do this we move from a consideration of 'literary'
adaptations (where the text is so well known that a potential cinema audience

3
 IMELDA WHELEHAN

would have an idea of the 'authentic' version regardless of whether they'd ever
actually read it) to a focus on adaptations more broadly.
We may expect to recognize the 'essential' Dorothea in the BBC TV
adaptation of Middiemarch (1994), to find our two-dimensional heroine
metamorphosed into celluloid intact and judge the version accordingly, but
what of the graphic narrative, such as Batman, made film? Or the film which
generates a novel? Or the novelist who attempts the methods of the director on
the page? Even when a literary text is the subject of an adaptation it may not
be a text that many potential viewers are familiar with: it may be a misremem-
bered children's story or an obscure work of fiction that only became widely
known through the process of realization on screen. In any case, the potential
cinema audience of even the most widely read classic will be largely made up of
individuals who haven't read the text, and any critical consideration of an adap-
tation's reception might benefit from recognizing some of the practical realities
involved in producing a commercially successful film - such as pruning culturally
anachronistic features, trimming sophisticated narrative strategies into a recog-
nizable popular film genre which is, in turn, an adaptation of other films, with
intertextuallinks with its contemporary filmic counterparts.

Critics on adaptations
The critical literature on adaptations is not extensive, but there has been a steady
stream of publications since the 1960s which have been devoted to this 'hybrid'
study. Caught between literary criticism and film studies, such work has not,
even now, reached a happy compromise in its approach to the two media -
despite the fact that, as early as 1969, Robert Richardson was arguing that
'literary criticism and film criticism can each benefit from the other' (Richardson
1969: 3). However, most critics seem to want to assert some congruence
between the two narrative forms, which may explain the popularity of compar-
isons between authors and auteurs, most notably in the linkage between Joseph
Conrad and D.W. Griffith. Conrad claimed in his 1897 preface to The Nigger
of the Narcissus that above all his aim was to make the reader 'see', and
D.W. Griffith asserted that 'the task I'm trying to achieve is above all to make
you see' (quoted in Spiegel 1976: 4) . The attempt to inspire the visual responses
of the reading audience is therefore held up as the key link between late realist
and modernist novelists and the film-maker. This parallel has been so often cited
in works of this nature that Giddings et al. cannily observe in their opening to
the chapter on 'The literature/screen debate' that: 'it has become traditional in
books concerned with screening the novel to open with the statements by
Joseph Conrad, the novelist, and D.W. Griffith, the film-maker, which seem
almost to echo one another' (Giddings et ai. 1990: 1). Earlier, Sergei Eisenstein
drew a parallel between Dickens and Griffith in his 'Dickens, Griffith and the
film today', asserting that Griffith had been led to the technique of montage
through Dickens' use of the device of parallel action (see Richardson 1969: 17).

4
 ADAPTATIONS: THE CONTEMPORARY DILEMMAS

The link between Conrad and Griffith and Griffith's work on Dickens
adaptation obviously serves to confer some respectability on an art-form which
in its earlier years was regarded as lacking. Perhaps more interestingly, Alan
Spiegel cites a statement by Leo Tolstoy made in 1908 that suggests a genuine
respect for the opportunities that film technology offers:

You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving
handle will make a revolution in our life - in the life of writers. It is a
direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt
ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form
of writing will be necessary.... But I rather like it. This swift change of
scene, this blending of emotion and experience - it is much better than
the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accus-
tomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, changes and transitions flash by
before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The
cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness.
(Quoted in Spiegel 1976: 162)

Tolstoy sees the advantage of the film medium lying in the more enhanced
representation of reality - the speed by which mood and action can be commu-
nicated. Just as Tolstoy's remarks suggest a respect, even awe, for this
developing technological medium, other writers such as Virginia Woolf reflected
on the impact of the cinema (see Ouditt, Chapter 12 in this volume), and some
critics have been keen to demonstrate that modernist writers in the early part of
this century were actually experimenting with 'cinematic' techniques in their
prose fiction. While accepting that the two media operate within different
constraints, some argue that the two forms are becoming more and more inter-
dependent through the course of the twentieth century. Keith Cohen, for
example, argues that the novel had itself developed 'cinematic' tendencies at a
point when the form seemed to have exhausted itself - 'our century has put
more rigorously into practice than ever before certain theories concerning the
interrelatedness of the arts which were formulated in the nineteenth century, in
an effort precisely to strengthen the specific effects of single arts' (Cohen 1979:
1). Here Cohen is primarily concerned with the modernist tradition and its real-
ization in the avant-garde cinematic tradition, but Geoffrey Wagner also picks
up Cohen's point that modernist writers used the 'cinematic' in their writing
and argues that novelistic trends can tell us much about film: 'cinema is at its
most convincing when it declines to be a dramatic mode and leans, rather, on
its immediate antecedents in the aesthetic representation of reality (or irreality)
- namely the novel' (Wagner 1975: 26). Wagner also picks up on another effect
of the success of the literary adaptation and that is the drive to concretize
successful films into print and notes that the 'first screenplay to be commercially
published in America was All About Eve (1950)' (Wagner 1975: 29). The busi-
ness in published screenplays has expanded and in contemporary times is most

5
 IMELDA WHELEHAN

evident in the best-selling scripts of Quentin Tarantino; even the existence of a

work of literature which engendered a film does not prevent the production of a
screenplay, film diary or further film spin-offs about the making of the adaptation.
Gabriel Miller controversially states that 'the novels' characters undergo a
simplification process when transferred to the screen, for film is not very
successful in dealing either with complex psychological states or with dream or
memory, nor can it render thought' (Miller 1980: xiii). This position demon-
strates both an ignorance of film narrative strategies and an assumption that
fiction deals with psychological dramas, thought, dream and memory in a trans-
parent way that needs no artificial mediation. The assumption that fiction is
more 'complex' than film is another way of privileging 'art' in fiction and
undermines the possibility of serious study of the verbal, visual and audio regis-
ters of the film, as well as suggesting that film is incapable of metaphor or
symbolism. While other critics aren't quite so obviously prejudiced against film,
they tend to begin with the observation that the novel is a linguistic medium,
whereas film is a primarily visual mode of communication, and that both are
subject to differences in production and circulation:

The reputable novel, generally speaking, has been supported by a

small, literate audience, has been produced by an individual writer, and
has remained relatively free of rigid censorship. The film, on the other
hand, has been supported by a mass audience, produced co-operatively
under industrial conditions, and restricted by a self-imposed Production
Code. These developments have reinforced rather than vitiated the
autonomy of each medium.
(Bluestone 1957: viii)

As Bluestone notes, the differences between the novel and film extend from
formal considerations to their very conditions of production - which themselves
have quite distinct meanings attached to them. There is still the preconception
that the novelist produces a work of quality, of 'high' art as it emerges from the
solitary efforts of the individual to express their distinct vision, untrammelled by
concerns about the commercial value of the product which is deemed subsidiary
to aesthetic value. A film is, conversely, produced and packaged under a
company logo, the high price of production necessitating the guarantee of box-
office success. Somewhere between these two polarized views, of course, lies the
recognition that the literary market is overwhelmingly guided by market forces
(and what better boost can there be to a book's sales than a TV or film tie-in?)
and the film industry has auteur-directors who rise to the challenge of classic
adaptation in order to realize ambitions of producing the most compelling,
truthful and authentic version - or a radical revisioning - of a particular text
(we need only think of Kenneth Branagh's project with Henry V(1989), Mary
Shellels Frankenstein (1994) and Hamlet (1996), or the work of Laurence
Olivier and Orson Welles before him).

6
 ADAPTATIONS : THE CONTEMPORARY DILEMMAS

Bluestone asserts that the relationship between novel and film has been
'overtly compatible, secretly hostile' (Bluestone 1957: 2) : the most readily
detectable hostility lies in the responses to adaptations which are deemed to
' betray' the original in some way, although a more interesting manifestation of
hostility might be apparent in many adaptations' resistance to the idea of them
as inferior or shadowy copies of the original. Commercially it is obvious that a
popular film adaptation of a novel can transform the text's value, from esoteric
object to object of mass consumption, but while a guiding concern remains
with the privileging of the literary text other issues are evaded or marginalized
to the extent that 'the novel is a norm and the film deviates at its peril'
(Bluestone 1957: 5) even though the necessity of transference across the two
media is universally acknowledged as inevitable. Hortense Powdermaker, in her
anthropological investigation of Hollywood, gives clear reasons why the popular
movie adaptation simply must deviate:

The original source may be a novel or play the studio has purchased,
and the writer is employed to do an adaptation from it. He makes the
changes necessary for dramatic effect in another medium, those
required to conform to the producer's personal fantasies and his
notions of what the public wants, and to meet the taboos of the
Production Code, and tailors it all to the screen personalities of the
actors who will play the star roles. Sometimes only the title of the orig-
inal novel or play is left.
This 'adaptation' then becomes the source for the 'screen play' -
probably done by another writer.
(Powdermaker 1951: 153)

Interestingly, although what Powdermaker points to are the conflicting

demands of the producer or director/ auteur, censorship and social mores and
the personalities of the actors, there are echoes of the processes of literary criti-
cism in transforming the meanings available to the reader of the classic novel or
the Shakespeare play. As our opening chapters on classic adaptation show, the
adaptation process in these instances is already burdened by the weight of inter-
pretations which surround the text in question, and which may provide the key
to central decisions made in a film's production (see Cartmell, Chapter 3;
Kirkham and Warren, Chapter 7; and North, Chapter 4, all in this volume).
What is clear is that certain features of novelistic expression must be retained
in order to guarantee a 'successful' adaptation, but clearly the markers of success
vary depending largely on which features of the literary narrative are deemed
essential to a reproduction of its core meaning. In the case of the Shakespeare
film, interpretation, awareness of academic critical debates and imaginative
filmic translation of stagey scenes is essential; classic nineteenth-century novel
film adaptation or TV serialization require historical veracity and authenticity of
location and costume - to the extent that central characters may seem lost in

7
 IMELDA WHELEHAN

the 'background', which assumes a pivotal role in the drama itself. Bluestone
observes that:

The film-makers still talk about 'faithful' and 'unfaithful' adaptations

without ever realizing that they are really talking about successful and
unsuccessful films. Whenever a film becomes a financial or even a critical
success the question of "faithfulness" is given hardly any thought. If
the film succeeds on its own merits, it ceases to be problematic.
(Bluestone 1957: 114)

The question is left open, however, as to how successful films are determined,
but it raises the issues of the relationship of box office success, target audience,
and how, in particular, 'high' literature becomes popular culture with a corre-
sponding effect on book sales and the perception of literary value and 'high'
cultural tastes in the eyes of the mass viewing audience.
It is clear that the impetus for most adaptations rests with the relationship
between characters rather than the overarching themes of the novel in question,
and that those characters, taken from their original context, may to some extent
carve out a separate destiny.

What happens, therefore, when the filmist undertakes the adaptation of

a novel, given the inevitable mutation, is that he does not convert the
novel at all. What he adapts is a kind of paraphrase of the novel - the
novel viewed as raw material. He looks not to the organic novel, whose
language is inseparable from its theme, but to characters and incidents
which have somehow detached themselves from language and, like the
heroes of folk legends, have achieved a mythic life of their own.
(Bluestone 1957: 62)

This can be witnessed in the 'Darcy' effect after the production of the BBC's
Pride and Prejudice (1995) (see Sonnet, Chapter 5 in this volume), but is actu-
ally more obvious when we move into the realms of popular culture with the
figures of Batman and the original cast of Star Trek (see Hark and Brooker,
Chapters 14 and 15 in this volume).
Wagner is perhaps one of the first commentators to identify three types of
adaptation: transposition - a novel 'directly given on screen' (Wagner 1975:
222); commentary - 'where an original is taken and either purposely or inadver-
tently altered in some respect' (Wagner 1975: 223); and analogy (e.g. a film
that shifts the action of the fiction forward in time or otherwise changes its
essential context; analogy goes further than shifting a scene or playing with the
end, and must transplant the whole scenario so that little of the original is iden-
tifiable). In his following examples of the different types of adaptation, Wagner
seems to associate transposition with the 'classic' adaptation, for example

8
 ADAPTATIONS: THE CONTEMPORARY DILEMMAS

Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939). He observes that all such 'classic' adapta-
tions are made into heightened love stories on film.

Apart from the advantage of being able to flourish CLASSIC on the

hoardings, and lure in some unsuspecting souls who will have the
vague feeling that they have experienced Wuthering Heights by seeing
it on the screen, the perennial answer [to the question why bother to
adapt Wuthering Heights] seems to be that a love interest is held to
construe to audience interest almost exclusively.
(Wagner 1975: 234)

The example of Wuthering Heights as a transposition suggests some problems

attached to these categories since, as Wagner himself notes, half the book is
immediately chopped. Judgements about transposition seem as subjective as past
determinants of success - here Wuthering Heights is condensed to 'a love story'.
Robert Giddings, Keith Selby and Chris Wensley in Screening the Novel (1990)
are more interested in the interdependency of film and the literary tradition -
'Film may have been a non-verbal experience, but it based its narrative on the
Western European cultural experience of literature' (Giddings et at. 1990: x).
They identifY the fact that film emerged at the height of realist traditions in the
novel and in drama, and claim that there has been a perhaps unconscious tendency
to attempt to translate classic realist texts into 'authentic' historical realism.

The narratological approach to adaptation

While the act of judging authenticity or textual fidelity may become an inexact
science, dogged by value judgements about the relative artistic worth of litera-
ture and film (particularly when a classic is being translated for the popular
cinema audience), the practice of comparing narrative strategies in order to
better establish what key shifts are made in the process of transition may be
quite comforting. After all, the process of presenting a literary text on film is
one in which the stock formal devices of narrative - point of view, focalization,
tense, voice, metaphor - must be realized by quite other means, and this is
where the creative mettle of the adapter is put supremely to the test. Brian
McFarlane's work in Novel to Film (1996) is the most complete example of the
implementation of such an approach. As McFarlane notes, there needs to be a
critical distinction made between those narrative features that can be transferred
from one medium to another and those that can't. To clarifY this distinction
McFarlane returns to Barthes's classic essay, 'The structural analysis of narra-
tives' (1966; reproduced in Barthes 1977: 79-124). Barthes's assertion that
'narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life
itself' (Barthes 1977: 79) reminds us of his key role in establishing a form of
structural analysis which was able to embrace fiction, cinema, history, painting
and so forth as narrative. Following in the footsteps of the Russian formalists,

9
 IMELDA WHELEHAN

structural anthropology and linguistics, Barthes aimed to produce a 'scientific'

ordering principle by which the basic features of all narrative could be classified.
With this in mind he broke down the segments of narrative into 'units', with
the view that all units of narrative - the form and the content - are functional.
Narrative units are further divided into distributional (functional) and integra-
tional (or indices) - the former can be extracted as the 'story' in terms of
actions, causes and effects, and the latter refers to psychological states, attribu-
tions of character, descriptions of location and so forth. Distributional functions
are subdivided into cardinal functions (nuclei) and catalysers, with cardinal
functions denoting those actions which are of direct consequence of the devel-
opment of the story - '[a] nucleus cannot be deleted without altering the story'
(Barthes 1977: 95). A catalyser on the other hand 'fills in' between key narra-
tive events and is less pivotal: 'it accelerates, delays, gives fresh impetus to the
discourse, it summarizes, anticipates and sometimes even leads astray' (Barthes
1977: 95) - any shifts, even if they did not alter the basic 'story" would
certainly affect the narrative discourse.
In his preface, McFarlane states his clear intention to marginalize areas of
analysis such as those which focus on the question of authorship and the influ-
ence of the industrial and cultural contexts on the process of adaptation, in
favour of focusing on the structural effects of exchange and translation from
one narrative form to another. As will rapidly become apparent to the reader of
this volume, 'discussion of adaptation has been bedevilled by the fidelity issue'
(McFarlane 1996: 8); the advantages of a narratological approach to the
problem is a recognition that the differing conditions within which fiction and
film narrative are situated depend upon the necessity of 'violating' the originary
text. As McFarlane goes on to argue, a clear distinction needs to be made
between those narrative features that can be readily transferred from one medium
to another and those that require 'adaptation'. Returning us to Barthes's cate-
gories, he asserts that distributional functions can be to some extent transferred
from one medium to the other, since they denote 'story' content and can be
depicted audiovisually or verbally - indeed, to change a nucleus (he gives the
example of changing a sombre ending to a happy one) would be to warrant the
charge of tampering with the original and 'the film-maker bent on "faithful"
adaptation must, as a basis for such an enterprise, seek to preserve the major
cardinal functions' (McFarlane 1996: 14). Indices on the other hand - the
means by which character information, atmosphere and location are presented -
require adaptation since their verbal or audiovisual depiction requires quite
different means of representation.
Important narrative features that produce 'atmosphere' and are essential to
the shaping of the text would include the portrayal of point of view and focal-
ization - yet it is of course much more difficult to signify ownership of the gaze
through the camera lens than it is through first- or third-person narrative. As
McFarlane admits,

10
 ADAPTATIONS : THE CONTEMPORARY DILEMMAS

In a sense, all films are omniscient: even when they employ a voice-over
technique as a means of simulating the first-person novelistic approach,
the viewer is aware ...of a level of objectivity in what is shown, which
may include what the protagonist sees but cannot help including a
great deal else as well.
(McFarlane 1996: 18)

Similarly Bluestone notes that ' the novel has three tenses, the film has only one'
(Bluestone 1957: 48), and here he earmarks a major distinction between the
two forms: there is no past tense in the film. In the case of point of view, we move
from narrative focalization to mise en scene and arguably the less discriminate 'eye'
of the camera, which cannot help but afford us a sense of an omniscient
perspective, even while it is depicting the viewpoint of single character. For
Giddings et at. it is point of view which is particularly crucial in the shift from
fiction to film: 'first-person novel point of view is not the same as seeing the
action from the camera; in the novel, the narrator tells and the reader listens,
but there is not equivalence, rather a warm intimate relationship' (Giddings et
at. 1990: 14).
Implementing the kinds of narrative comparison between text and film that
McFarlane undertakes in his case-studies can yield some interesting insights into
both the liberating and repressive features of the processes of adaptation, as well
as usefully side-stepping the temptation to be seen to prioritize the literary text
(as in discussions about the role of the author and questions of fidelity). One
problem that might be anticipated with such an approach could be witnessed in
Barthes's project in S/Z (1970), which in its detailed focus on one short story
serves to illustrate the obstacles preventing the same intimate analysis of a large
piece of work - let alone a comparison across two narrative forms. Some of the
'codes' that McFarlane lists as part of the extra-cinematic fabric of the film are,
like Barthes's own codes in S/Z, problematic in their actual interpretation and
application. Most notably the 'cultural code' defined in McFarlane's taxonomy
as 'involving all that information which has to do with how people live, or lived,
at particular times and places' (McFarlane 1996: 29) raises issues about specta-
torial relationship to the film, period in which it is being screened, the film's
own possible changing status in film history (it may be revered as a classic in its
own right some time later, or it may be cult viewing) and other broader factors
which threaten to render the system unwieldy to the point of meaninglessness.

History, nostalgia, ideology

One aspect of the audience's relationship to the text that is of particular interest
is their historical relationship - particularly in the case of the ever-popular
costume drama, for which the nineteenth-century novel remains such a popular
choice for adaptation:

11
 IMELDA WHELEHAN

It can be no accident that the 'past' with which our media seemed
particularly concerned, certainly as far as classic novels are concerned,
is the nineteenth century - a major warehouse of historical commodi-
ties and evidence, and a period still almost within living memory in
which culture we feel we have strong roots.
(Giddings et al. 1990: 31)

Clearly the developing heritage industry itself revivifies our interest in the
previous century and our past in general, but of course just as politicians are
referring to an idea of the past when they talk of returning to 'Victorian values',
so the past reproduced in the movies is a contemporary, even aspirational one:

We look back to the past as travellers on a journey look back to the

way they have come. If we modernize those staging-posts along our
journey to our own way of thinking, it is in a sense a way of admitting
they are no longer appropriate or relevant in their original form to
speak to us of the twentieth century. If we slavishly endeavour to
recreate them as we think they might have appeared in their own time
we produce a fake antique.
(Giddings et al. 1990: 34)

Giddings et al. note that this craving for recapturing the past is not necessarily a
new thing - citing the early nineteenth-century Gothic Revival as one example
and a later craze for pageants as another. This craving is firmly identified as an
intense moment of nostalgia where greed for images of the past, even fictional-
ized ones through the vehicle of adaptations 'are all symptomatic of the
condition of the national psyche which is shedding layers of modernity and
reverting to its own past tones under the stress of contemporary economic,
political and social crisis' (Giddings et al. 1990: 38). As is clear from these
remarks, an examination of the investment in an idea of the past which certain
adaptations foreground, allows a critical perspective which moves away from
questions of fidelity and historical verisimilitude, and enables the criticism of the
processes of ideology as a dominant shaping force in the production of popular
adaptations. As Peter Reynolds observes:

Animated images of literature in performance are seldom produced by

accident or chance, nor are they natural and ideologically neutral. They
have been designed and built (consciously or unconsciously) by their
author( s) in order to project a specific agenda and to encourage a
particular set of responses.
(Reynolds 1993: 1)

Moving slightly away from the perspective that suggests the mise en scene in film
cannot be as controlling as the focus of the omniscient narrator in fiction and

12
 ADAPTATIONS : THE CONTEMPORARY DILEMMAS

therefore the viewer is more anarchic or liberated from desired readings, Reynolds
asserts that 'what the spectator sees and hears is what he or she is allowed to see,
and to set the agenda by foregrounding one issue or set of issues is to marginalize
others' (Reynolds 1993: 1). In the case of television serializations, as Reynolds
observes, the decisions about scheduling and timing enable a certain infusion of
moral values.
Gender, class and other social differences are inevitably ideologically recon-
structed in our own image more often than with reference to values of the past
- one good example is that of the use of regional accents for the 'working
classes', whereas the bourgeoisie and aristocracy are assumed to speak in received
(modern southern) English. With adaptations of classic texts from earlier periods,
therefore, it is not only a question of filling in the visual 'gaps' that appear to be
suggested by the adapter's interpretation of the original. There is often the
temptation to portray a scene from a late twentieth-century perspective in
order, ironically, to sustain the adapter's sense of what is authentic to the text.
Such decisions are often made on the basis of being faithful to what the author
would have expressed had they possessed the freedoms to discuss certain
subjects, or if they had had access to the same technology - one example of this
kind of justification for certain production choices may lie in Laurence Olivier's
claim that Shakespeare 'in a way "wrote for the films"' (preface to Olivier
1984). Recent examples of the adapter's decision to 'add' something in terms
of tone are in the BBC's recent version of Pride and Prejudice (the character of
Darcy is overtly sexualized, a clear object of the female gaze, culminating in the
famous scene where Darcy strips to the waist to swim the lake at Pemberley) or
the 'feminist' context of Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995) (see North,
Chapter 4 in this volume). When seeking the adapter's moral or political view of
the text, we often have to seek its manifestations in other production choices
such as casting and choice of setting.
The question of the audience's historical relationship to the literary/filmic
text is an interesting one, particularly if we take the 1990s as a case-study and
note the rash of high-budget TV and film adaptations of nineteenth-century
novels. It is legitimate to ask whether the preference for the nineteenth century
emerges from the public interest in this period of British history, the growing
dominance of the novel as a respectable and morally responsible literary form
during this period, or the ideological and moral qualities of the texts themselves
- particularly represented by their closure, and depiction of personal relation-
ships and of history itself. It might be asserted that the nineteenth-century
setting allows for the greater likelihood of some familiarity with a broader
historical context on the part of the audience - not to mention the greater avail-
ability of 'authentic' settings in which to visualize the period. But is the choice
of favoured authors itself telling? Have those writers whose subject matter can
be deemed more 'lightweight' and digestible been selected - in preference to
the more ponderous, complex or heavyweight - as being peculiarly compatible with
commercial adaptation? This in itself raises questions about whether particular

13
 IMELDA WHELEHAN

types of literary form appear to lend themselves to particular cinematic/televisual

treatments. If adaptations of nineteenth-century novels have as part of their
concern the bringing of the period 'to life', what choices are made about the
depiction of the past in the will to produce 'authenticity'?
There is clearly a case for investigating the extent to which an idea of the past
is what a classic adaptation seeks to capture, and how that idea of the past
coalesces with the period in which the adaptation is made. In some cases, the
will for historical veracity may overtake the will to realize a particular work of
fiction - cleansing the narrative of features which might be actually historically
anachronistic. In the case of films such as Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993),
there is a danger that the Hollywood focus on spectacle and heroism replaces a
sense of history altogether (see Rawlinson, Chapter 9 in this volume). It is
apparent that adaptations also age, and even a classic 1980s television serial can
seem anachronistic and dated because of the changing approaches to set design,
costume, textual fidelity and production values which make the adaptation seem
very much of its own time. Just as it is common to encourage students of litera-
ture to consider their own historical vantage point as readers of texts from an
earlier period, it is fascinating to study the effect that the period in which a text
is adapted has upon the representation of that text. Shakespeare adaptations
tend to be much more heterogeneous in their uses of history and setting than
novel adaptations - for obvious reasons. However, production choices seem to
tie into 'trends' for performing the plays in certain ways - e.g. bringing them
into the present - and although issues of historical fidelity may seem less rele-
vant to Shakespeare adaptations, the choice of setting may often offer an insight
into what the director wishes to tell us about the 'Shakespeare' effect in general
- e.g. Branagh's realist Henry V (1989), or the Tuscan idyll as a backdrop to
Much Ado About Nothing (1993). In the case ofliterary works that are repeat-
edly adapted - such as Hamlet - technological advances, shifting cinematic
styles, changing critical responses are all legitimate areas of interest for the
student of adaptations, in addition to the commonplace observation that subse-
quent adaptations often refer to earlier versions (either critically or as a homage)
as much as they 'return' to the original..
In the case of classic serials of the 1990s at least, the past is not only
'brought to life', but the artefacts of the adaptation's production themselves
also serve as links to a previous era - the costumes for Lee's Sense and Sensibility
and the BBC's Pride and Prejudice have been touring stately homes and
museums in Britain side by side with the 'genuine article', as if they stand as
testimony to their historical accuracy. The settings for classic serials - particu-
larly stately homes - have themselves become objects of nostalgic homage for
the cinema/TV audience, improving their contemporary fortunes considerably.
Lyme Hall in Cheshire, used to represent Pemberley in the 1995 adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice, is a National Trust property accustomed to around 800
visitors a week late in the season; yet, in the autumn of 1995, 5,500 visitors
arrived during the final two days of opening (Ward 1995: 10). The National

14
 ADAPTATIONS: THE CONTEMPORARY DILEMMAS

Trust, itself an organization concerned with capturing, preserving and restoring

the 'past' in terms of authenticity and fidelity to period, contributes to its contin-
uing livelihood by capitalizing on the use of its properties to celebrate the lives
and loves of those who never existed. Lyme sells maps which enable visitors to
trace the sites of key scenes from the television dramatization, so that part of
the fascination merges with engagement in returning to the origins of the serial
- rather than the text; this is borne out by the increasing trend for spin-off
materials which 'dramatize' the making of serials and films themselves. The
BBC's adaptation of Middlemarch managed to locate the majority of its scenes
in Stamford and in doing so to have created a theme town, which further
conflates past and present, fiction and the real, and allows visiting Middlemarch
TV aficionados to produce an excess of 'readings' of a cultural site which is
extra-textual and is ruled by no authorial or directorial intentions.

Audience, pleasure and intertextuality

In the quest to find a mode of expression that explains the point of collision
between the two media, one alternative angle of investigation might lie in the
area of research seeking explanations for the success with audiences (in partic-
ular) of classic adaptations, and to speculate on the ways that the interface
between a literary text and its film tribute(s) is interpreted and used by its audi-
ence. Henry Jenkins' work on fandom might provide a point of access that
throws up altogether different issues, considering the role of fan (following the
work of Michel de Certeau) as poacher - a wilful appropriator of meanings for
ends which could not be anticipated by a film's or television serial's producers.
While the 'fan' is usually depicted as an extreme version of the average cultural
consumer - someone who has a more than anorakish interest in rather trivial
and debased productions - Jenkins reviews the work of fan cultures as more
than bizarre subcultural formations, casting fans as active cultural critics who
use the tools of academic investigation under a different guise and who are also
often producers themselves of artwork, fanzines and other elements which point
to their role as innovators as much as consumers. According to Jenkins,
'[ r leading practices (close scrutiny, elaborate exegesis, repeated and prolonged
rereading, etc.) acceptable in confronting a work of "serious merit" seem
perversely misapplied to the more "disposable" texts of mass culture' (Jenkins
1992: 17). Fans of the 'Trekker' variety seem to have nothing in common with
the classic adaptation viewer who (if one can generalize) may have little engage-
ment with popular film outside of this 'genre', and whose choices may earn
some kind of seal of 'value'; yet, as Jenkins remarks, 'taste is always in crisis;
taste can never remain stable, because it is challenged by the existence of other
tastes that often seem just as "natural" to their proponents' (Jenkins 1992: 16).
For the fan, then, matters of 'value' extend far beyond the high/low cultural
divide and - in opposition to the assumed pleasures of individual consumption
accorded the literary reader - the fan produces communities of readers. What is

15
 IMELDA WHELEHAN

clear from this, ironically, is that the original production which sparked off such
adulation is perceived as lacking in some crucial way - 'Because popular narra-
tives often fail to satisfy, fans must struggle with them, to try to articulate
themselves and other unrealized possibilities within the original works' (Jenkins
1992: 23). Clearly the adapter 'poaches' from the original in most crucial ways,
but perhaps the seasoned consumer of adaptations begins to find the process
itself equally participatory, welcoming the opportunity to recapture the experi-
ence of a first encounter with the original text in a different formulation.
Alternatively, perhaps there are pleasures to be found in first encountering a
'version' which appears to iconoclastically demolish the 'literary' shaping of its
original. There is clearly room for an ethnographic study of consumers that
would be well beyond the scope of this text.
Meanwhile, by looking at the conclusions of works which focus on the
reader and the consumer group, we might begin to further unseat the primacy
of focus which has been traditionally applied to author/authority and fidelity.
Rather than a tendency to see the film/TV adaptation of a literary text as neces-
sarily lacking some of the force and substance of its original, it might be more
fruitful to regard this and subsequent adaptations of a novel in terms of excess
rather than lack. Research into fandom in cultural studies documents the way
that fan communities constantly produce new narratives about favourite charac-
ters or authors, as if what they find in the original text frustrates a quest for
wholeness and completeness which can only be satisfied by the creation and
dispersal of narratives which somehow fill in the 'gaps'. This feature of fan
communities reminds us - among other things - of Shakespeare film versions,
where the most successful and memorable filmic event simply does not and
could not appear in the dramatic text. As Giddings observes,

the memorable moments in Olivier's film [Henry V (1944)] are the

lowering of the Constable of France on to his steed, the charge of the
French cavalry and the exciting 'Whoooosh!!' as the English bowmen's
arrows wing their deadly way on to the galloping French horsemen.
(Giddings et al. 1990: xv)

The aCtIVity of fans in relation to cult texts reminds us that these

readers/viewers automatically set themselves up as critics who feel that part of
their critical activity is best expressed in a rewriting or reframing of the 'orig-
inal'. In this they mimic the function of scholarly critics who always find more
to add to their analyses of the text, until our academic understanding of a classic
literary work becomes in more ways than one the sum of its commentaries. This
view becomes crucial when, for example, we study a text such as Hamlet which
has been subjected to countless adaptations, and recognize that in untangling
one adaptation from another, we have recourse to many sources outside both
the play and subsequent films. Fans may alight on a particular actor or style which
they pursue across other films and TV serials and are therefore, in addition,

16
 ADAPTATIONS : THE CONTEMPORARY DILEMMAS

sophisticated intertextual readers. Some adaptations - such as Clueless (1995), a

free 'rewriting' of Emma - capitalize on the pleasures to be found in the recog-
nition of intertextual citation; this film is also interesting because it was
marketed to two quite separate audiences: the teen film-goer and the Austen
reader (see Sonnet, Chapter 5 in this volume). Derek Paget, looking at 1995,
divides audiences into two dominant types of British fan: 'Trainspotters' and
'Janespotters' (see Paget, Chapter 10 in this volume).
Readers of adaptations, in common with mass-media fans, can become more
conscious of their active role as critics by evaluating both literary text and its
adaptation, looking beyond issues of success or failure and considering, among
other things, the choices made by the adapter, the conditions of those choices,
other possible options and their possible effects. As well as considering their
own historical vantage point, the adaptation's audience need to consider the
historical context and technological constraints within which the adaptation is
produced. It also may be fruitful to investigate how the historical 'authenticity'
of the period represented by the literary text's setting is approached, and
whether the ideological perspectives offered seem to echo those of the literary
narratorial perspective - this investigation may extend to evidence of how schol-
arly criticism of the text is used by adapters. It is clear that various adaptations
(of a single author or of one historical period) may be compared synchronically
to some effect, particularly in the light of the current rash of Austen versions,
and this allows the student of adaptations to look at the purposes and function
of nostalgia, and the possibility of identifYing trends in adaptation practices.

Conclusions
The field of adaptations has in the past been dominated by scholars working
primarily from an 'English lit.' perspective, who may be inclined to privilege the
originary literary text above its adaptations, thus favouring the slow individual-
ized process of reading/interpretation above the 'immediate' short-term and
often shared pleasures of visual spectatorship - despite a recognition that
neither account of the process of reading/viewing, and more particularly of
analysis, is accurate or enlightening. Cultural assumptions about the relative
worth of the literary versus the film medium are still deeply entrenched enough
to be likely to influence our approach to adaptation, and it might be worth
considering as an intrinsic part of our study of the adaptation process what may
seem on face value to be the most naive and obvious of preconceptions. To
begin, it is possibly the 'literariness' of the fictional text which itself appears to
give credence to the study of adaptations at all. This view - implied or other-
wise - is clearly going to influence our approach to the analysis of the
adaptation to the point where the outcome of analysis might be best summed
up as the judgement of the 'success' or 'failure' of the film or TV version. To
approach adaptations in this fashion does not simply throw us back into the
speculative realms of authorial intention and 'appropriate' textual readings, it

17
 IMELDA WHELEHAN

also raises the question of readerly intention and homogenizes the identities and
desires of both film- and fiction-consumers, who may each experience their
narrative pleasures quite differently.
The fear that the film medium could 'steal' the constituency of readers of liter-
ature has long proved unfounded, and indeed there is enough research on the
consumption of film and TV tie-in titles to demonstrate that a successful film or
TV interpretation of a literary text can bolster the sales of a novel substantially.
It is well documented that more people who have enjoyed a film/TV adapta-
tion will buy the literary version than will actually read it, but there is little
research on how this potential new readerly community treat the novel or why
they often never finish it. Another largely uninterrogated assumption is that
film-goers seek out the authenticity of the original, recognizing that the visual
interpretation cannot do justice to the depth and substance of the novel. But
what if they find in the experience of reading the novel a sense that it is merely a
failed 'version', or a pale shadow of the film/TV series? If we hold on to the
'literary' model of reading as the 'norm' in these cases, we are unable to
account for those thousands of unfinished copies of Middlemarch, unless we
take the pragmatic view that people have more problems finding the time and
leisure to read a novel than they do to view one. If there were ethnographic
studies of how spectators approach the novel version of a favourite film/TV
series, we might also gauge the extent to which such an audience is also influ-
enced by preconceptions of the nature of a high/low cultural divide between
the consumption of films and of literature, and discover that the business of
acquiring the literary original is part of the process of acquiring cultural 'capital'
described by Bourdieu (see Gelder, Chapter 13 in this volume).
If the fear is that '[ w ]hat are now called departments of English will be
renamed departments of "cultural studies" where Batman comics, Mormon
theme parks, television movies and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens' (Harold Bloom, quoted in Porter
1996: 2), there still needs to be further scrutiny about what we think the 'loss'
of English to cultural studies would mean, or whether it is in any case within
our power to stop the 'rot'. Since the 'crisis' in English studies emerged as a
lively debate in the late 1970s, no one has been able to provide a convincing
definition of what 'doing' English entails and where its boundaries lie. In this
sense the practices of media and cultural studies have always been more self-
reflective, more able to absorb seeming contradictions primarily because such
studies rarely emanate from a sense of fidelity to a 'text'. A cultural studies
approach foregrounds the activities of reception and consumption, and shelves
- forever perhaps - considerations of the aesthetic or cultural worthiness of the
object of study.
It is inevitable that with an increase in popularity of the study of the literary
adaptation, there will be increasing laments about the 'dumbing down' (to use
a debased Americanism) of culture expressing the fear that people will experience
their literature at a 'baser' level. It is of course worth pointing out that effective

18
 ADAPTATIONS : THE CONTEMPORARY DILEMMAS

textual comparisons across the literature/media divide demand acute skills of

close reading and narrative analysis, as well as a good acquaintance with the
general debates about the interface between 'high' and 'low' culture. Such a study
allows us to acknowledge our actual reading practices in a postmodern cultural
context, and inserts the reading of literary texts into the same critical sphere as
the consumption of more explicitly commercial products. Perhaps encouraging
more flexibility in analyses of literary texts through the study of adaptations will
enable the audience to be more self-conscious about their role as critics and
about the activities of reading/viewing that they bring to bear in an academic
environment.

Note
1 See Bluestone 1957, Richardson 1969, Wagner 1975, Spiegel 1976, Cohen 1979,
Miller 1980, Giddings etal. 1990 and Reynolds 1993.

19
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>Mrmunterworldonline.nl= (1997) >Re: First Contact = dejanews.com [Downloaded 12 June]
Brown, J. (1991) >The Addams Family = washingtonpost.com [Downloaded 21 November]
Iannicca, D. (1997) >Re: Star Trek: First Contact = rec.arts.startrek.current [Downloaded 12
June]
Johnson, B. (1992) >The Addams Family =rec.arts.movies.reviews [Downloaded 15 April]
Maloney, F. (1991) > The Addams Family=rec.arts.movies.reviews [Downloaded 15 April]