Like Cuchlann, I find myself mired in schoolwork and related things. It’s Thanksgiving break, yes, but it’s still difficult to blog when I know I should be writing an essay about Darwinian rhetoric in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, or researching transversal poetics and presentism. But fortunately, my research interests being what they are, schoolwork and blog-work overlap from time to time. More often than not, maybe.

What follows is the list of notes (and a few visuals) I used to give a presentation on adaptation and all it entails — or, rather, as much of what it entails as I could fit in twenty minutes or so. My research has centered on the novel-to-film variety, but most of it seems more broadly relevant. These being personal notes more than anything, I make no guarantees as to their cohesiveness, but they should at least be legible — and, with any luck, somewhat interesting.

• I’m trying to figure out how adaptation across media works in terms of narratology and phenomenology, which sounds highly theoretical and irrelevant to actual consumers of media, but I’m trying to approach it in a way that brings in cultural factors.
• Provisionally I’ve thought of writing about Ulysses and its film adaptations, mostly because of the obvious formal changes required in adapting Ulysses to film, and also because I’ve worked with Ulysses before, but that may change, especially given that I want to come up with ideas that are applicable to adaptations of all kinds — including novel and film, but also theater, sequential art, video games, and other media gaining popularity as vehicles for adaptation (it seems like any TV show that reaches moderate popularity gets its own board game now) — so most of my research at this point has been on adaptation in general.
• Mouvance, introduced by medievalist Paul Zumthor, specifically regarding medieval oral tradition [which I've discussed previously; thanks again IKnight]
• Zumthor uses the term “author” to refer to writers, reciters, and scribes, considering medieval authorial anonymity; the text is, in one sense, a representation of the “author’s relationships to the world;” what matters to Zumthor is not the “extratextual” author, but the author as “textual persona,” and thus he is concerned primarily with the relationship between author and world as represented in the text
• If we understand the text in the usual way as one instance or representation of the work, the “work” with which Zumthor is concerned is not the hypothesized archetype of a stemma [in other words, the imaginary ideal manuscript -- an author's draft or fair copy, perhaps -- that each text tries or purports to reproduce]; it’s instead the composite of all related texts, and it changes with each text produced; the text achieves a degree of independence from the archetype, rather than being simply a corrupt representation thereof

• Mouvance is problematic as a way of dealing with medieval texts; the process of compositing texts into a work can only take place in the mind of the reader, and while this may function for contemporary readers with access to multiple manuscripts, medieval texts were often highly local, and readers would have had access to one or few; with that said, mouvance may be useful as a way of dealing with contemporary narrative production, particularly regarding adaptations of a core plot produced within a relatively short period of time for similar audiences
• I’m appropriating mouvance as a way of thinking about how a franchise or intellectual property works as a composite of its texts, particularly in terms of consumption
• Probably my central concern here is how consumers value the texts of a franchise relative to one another.
• One popular idea is “adaptation decay,” the notion that, in the transition from original text to derivative, something will almost unavoidably be lost; this may or may not result in a perceived loss in quality [see TV Tropes]
• There may be some merit to this; critical writing on adaptation has generally focused on the concept of fidelity to an original, whether as a means of determining the value of a derivative or in a reactionary way as a concept that critics should not weight too heavily, if at all; it depends in large part on how we conceive of form and content, but, whether we’re poststructural about it and concern ourselves mostly with form, or believe that there is some tangible transfer of “content” between related texts regardless of form, differences in form will certainly result in differences in reading
• I’ve looked at several models of the transition from source to derivative, and I’m interested in three in particular:
• The narratological or “genetic” model describes the thing transferred as a “deep structure,” a basic relative arrangement of signifiers; these signifiers will certainly be altered individually during the shift from one medium to another, but their relationship to one another will be recognizable from the source narrative, though rarely identical, if ever; I’m interested in this model simply as a way of describing how adaptations are made

• This is related (I think) to the question of whether an adaptation is (or should attempt to be) an imitation or an entirely faithful copy of its source; the genetic model leans toward imitation, if we define “imitation” as the act of drawing enough but not too much from the source material; this seems reasonable, considering that formal differences essentially render copying impossible
• The decomposing or recomposing model describes the process by which, once consumed, adaptations are decomposed into a common pool of signs, and the boundaries between them become uncertain; essentially I’m using mouvance to suggest that, for the purposes of reading, the franchise functions as this mass of indistinct signs, to be drawn from and added to when reading any text of the franchise

• The trumping model is concerned with which adaptation is “best;” investigating this model may reveal insight into how consumers value adaptations (a contrast to valuing fidelity to the source above all)

• As I research, I’ll look for evidence of these three models operating simultaneously, as they don’t seem mutually exclusive.
• I’m also interested in how various media happen — how they’re read or consumed. So far I’ve only looked at novels and film [during this bout of research, anyway; otherwise I've had some ideas].
• I’ve come across a few possibilities: that film and novels are both essentially visual media (which I don’t buy); that film and novels share the medium of the human consciousness, and differences in physical mechanics are of little importance (which discounts the importance of form relative to content too much, as far as I’m concerned); that, despite the apparent relative immediacy of film, the film and the novel both take place in the “present tense” during consumption (I more or less agree)
• Any similarities in the reading process between two or more media may help me determine how one text affects another
• Ultimately, the only way to get a clear sense of how adaptations function within a franchise is to consult the responses of consumers — both academic consumers and the “lay” audience.
• The case of Ulysses (1967)
• Before its release, it achieved publicity as a rallying point for the cause of free speech (likening it to the novel); director Joseph Strick maintained publicly that he would not pollute Joyce’s vision with his own (possibly as an appeal to viewers who valued fidelity)
• Film reviewers expressed concern as to whether an audience with no experience with the novel could appreciate the film (the film was, perhaps, less an autonomous adaptation than a directorial “reading” [implying a spectrum with reading at one end and adaptation at the other?])
• Critics who valued fidelity considered the film a failure [but it's rated 6.4 on IMDb, which could certainly be worse]
• It’s probable that the relative function of related adaptations in the reading of a given consumer — that is, how great an impact each previously-experienced adaptation has on further reading in the franchise — is related closely to how the consumer assigns value to individual texts. By consulting individual consumers, we might be able to draw conclusions about the social factors associated with various ways of reading, and, with any luck, patterns indicating the underlying interaction of adaptations will make themselves evident.

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References

Elliott, Kamilla. “Literary Film Adaptation and the Form/Content Dilemma.” Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004: 220-243.

Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008.

Griffith, James. “Introduction.” Adaptations as Imitations: Films from Novels. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997: 15-75.

Zumthor, Paul. Toward a Medieval Poetics. Trans. Philip Bennett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Images

First edition Ulysses — http://www.theworldsgreatbooks.com/ulysses_wraps.htm

Ulysses (1967) film — http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Barbara-Jefford/dp/B00004W1A9/

Tags: adaptation, narratology, paul zumthor, phenomenology, reader-response, ulysses

Thus spake Pontifus on Tuesday, 24 November 2009 at 1:45 am, and Art and Culture, Literature expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.