Live action Tanyuu is...live action?

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

• 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

The genetic model of adaptation

• 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 decomposing/recomposing model of adaptation

• 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)

The trumping model of adaptation

• 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.

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/

Responding to my last post, IKnight pointed me in the direction of an interesting little theory, and, since I haven’t been able to muster the concentration required to watch Ouran High School Host Club for long periods of time like I’d planned, I figured I may as well see what I could make of mouvance. Come to find out, I can at least ramble on the topic for a little while; this began as a pontif.us post, but quickly outgrew those humble origins.

In short, mouvance was introduced by Paul Zumthor as an explanation of the variability of medieval texts.

Zumthor noted the contrast between the relatively fixed texts found in manuscripts of the works of some named late-medieval French poets…and the much more common medieval combination of authorial anonymity (or near-anonymity) and a high level of textual variation, which might involve not only modifications of dialect and wording but more substantial rewriting and the loss, replacement, or rearrangement of whole sections of a work. He used the term mouvance to describe this textual mobility.

Simple enough, right? Think Arthurian legend. Zumthor describes a relationship between the “work,” which is (I think) at once a combination of the skeins of story that tie adaptations together and a sum of all adaptations, and the derivative manuscripts based on that work (which are in fact parts of the work): the manuscripts are individual texts, which is what I’ve been suspecting; the work, it seems, is something else entirely.

The ‘work’ was not static, a chronological starting-point for the process of manuscript transmission, but dynamic, passing in the course of its transmission through phases of growth, transformation, and decline.

Whether you prefer the Toradora! novels or the Toradora! anime, then, the work that is Toradora! consists of both. I concluded before that it’s quite difficult to keep adaptations from “contaminating” one another during reading, and that it may be futile to really try to do so; perhaps that’s simply the nature of the work, huge mass of signifiers and their sometimes-contradictory signifieds that it is. A multi-adaptation character is always more than it appears to be in any one adaptation (reminds me of Sartre) — while we don’t really need to worry about that when examining one adaptation as a text, or while reading, it’s worth remembering if we ever intend to examine the work as a…whatever it is (and I don’t know if I do intend to do so; I suppose I’ve started to on a few occasions, but I still have to convince myself it’s worth doing).

I wonder, though, how similar the adaptation-rich world of otaku media really is to medieval European literature — and why it’s as similar as it is, for that matter.

Zumthor explained mouvance as a product of the oral culture of the Middle Ages, an ‘intervocal’ (as opposed to ‘intertextual’) network offering access to a variety of possible resources for poetic composition; the different realizations of a ‘work’ reflected a continuing interaction between written and oral culture at each stage of transmission…

Anime, manga, light novels et al. do not, by and large, constitute an oral culture. But texts, it could be argued, interact in much the same way.

Jerome J. McGann, for instance, argued in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (McGann (1983)) that even modern literary works ‘are fundamentally social rather than personal or psychological products’ (p. 43). ‘The fully authoritative text is . . . always one which has been socially produced; as a result, the critical standard for what constitutes authoritativeness cannot rest with the author and his intentions alone’ (p. 75). The role of printers, editors, even friends, in the production of successive stages of a literary work needs to be taken into account; and the printed version of an author’s draft may offer opportunities not only for contamination but for decontamination (‘Authors’ works are are typically clearer and more accessible when they appear in print’, p. 41).

I maintain that even novels, written as they are most often by individual writers, are effectively authored by social constructs — the writer is a translator for a body of knowledge and experience (and that’s not even considering the subsequent influence of editors and such that McGann mentions). Consider that, and then imagine the kind of social dynamic behind a work that is 1. created by a team, such as an animation studio’s production staff and contracted labor, and 2. an adaptation of an earlier work, which itself may have been a team effort. Anime and manga are not products of an oral culture, but they are products of a network of creators and fans kept in contact by high-speed long-distance communication technology — a very vocal network, as I’m sure you know.

Authorial anonymity remains a major difference between medieval oral poetry and anime/manga/etc. — we know for certain who is responsible for the art we consume, probably because it ultimately matters when determining who gets paid what. But considering the sheer sizes of the teams attached to certain anime productions, we can probably say that it’s difficult to figure out precisely who exerts precisely what creative influence precisely where — all the more so when the work in question is an adaptation, as is so often the case — which amounts to a kind of…if not anonymity, then certainly authorial obscurity. Credit rolls notwithstanding, perhaps the nature of the work is such that it actively obscures the authorship of its derivatives/components.

I realize that this post amounts to a few quick observations, but I really haven’t delved into the idea of mouvance beyond the source of all those blockquotes (which you should certainly read if you’re interested). I do, however, intend to use all this as a springboard for later analysis — I’d really like to work Frye in somehow (I have some cursory thoughts about the modes, anyway), but Frye tends to require a fair bit of mental preparation.

Remember me? It’s Pontifus, that guy who has successfully ignored the blog he created for about a month! Why, you may or may not ask? Because I’m embroiled in another of my regularly scheduled methodological crises, and those are well and truly crippling. But that’s boring, so let’s move on.

I realized recently that Baka-Tsuki and its cadre of rogue translators are working their way through the Toradora light novels, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to indulge. Normally I would resist; I don’t like to be in the middle of more than one adaptation at a time. But I’m willing to make exceptions when I’m far enough in one that I’m well past the beginning of the other, and when I really like the franchise in question.

In retrospect, I almost wish I’d exercised some restraint.

I really like the Toradora anime, and I mean really like it. A lot of people do, it seems. It reminds me so much of my own high school and college years that it’s painful to watch¹ at times, which is, come to find out, a good thing by my reckoning. I suppose this means I’m even more predisposed than I normally am by pure literary douchebaggery alone to find flaws in the Toradora light novels.

And that’s all well and good, but why is it so? I have a few guesses, several of which may apply. There are, by my reckoning, two repeat offenders: disparity of written imagery and visual images, and disparity of narrative techniques. These differences are not in themselves bad things, but they go a long way in rendering my response to the Toradora light novels less positive than my response to the show.

Join me, if you will, as I examine a few lines from the first chapter of the first Toradora novel² and try to explain what in God’s name I’m talking about (with the help of plenty of spoilers from the show, so if you haven’t seen much of it, turn back!).

A frustrated hand wiped the mist from the mirror. The run-down bathroom was foggy due to an early morning shower. So after wiping the mirror, it returned to being cloudy. It was pointless to take anger out on the mirror no matter how frustrated one was…

Make yourself gentle with floating bangs — That slogan was seen in the latest men’s fashion magazine. Takasu Ryuuji’s bangs were now “floating”. As the article instructed, he pulled his bangs at length, blow-dried them until they stood up, and then gently rubbed them sideways with some hair gel. He specifically woke up a half-hour early in order to make his hair resemble that of the model’s and have his wish granted.

Even though he had always wiped the steam off, even after spending a whole day last week cleaning out the mold in the kitchen and bathroom… All his effort had gone to waste in that horribly humid room. Biting his lips begrudgingly, Ryuuji tried to see if he could wipe off the mold with some tissues. Of course, it was never going to be that easy, and he ended up tearing the tissues to shreds.

Ah, right, this scene — you know, I barely recognized it at first as the same scene with which the anime opens. This is one of those narrative technique issues I mentioned. In the show, it’s a very kinetic scene, all movement and very little language, and it’s entertaining for that reason; we begin to get a feel for Ryuuji without any need for straightforward exposition. But, here, that movement is slowed by the explanation (maybe necessary, maybe not) of certain minutiae: we’re told that the bathroom is foggy in the aftermath of a shower, for example, and that Ryuuji has a habit of cleaning things. We could probably figure out the cause of the fogginess for ourselves, and the obsessive cleanliness could just as easily be shown later on — we can see it when Ryuuji attacks the mold immediately with whatever cleaning implements he has on hand. Note that this is not a criticism; the novel’s way of doing things isn’t necessarily bad, as it does serve the purpose of situating us more thoroughly in Ryuuji’s thoughts. It’s probably safe to say that film is better at conveying movement while literature excels at conveying thoughts and emotions, and the writers of the respective adaptations may have been playing to the strengths of their media. In this case, though, I prefer the movement, and while this may be the fault of bias set in place by my having seen the show first, I suspect it may have more to do with general personal preference; I like movement and physical response in novels more than long, unbroken tracts of description. I wouldn’t describe the above excerpts as long, unbroken tracts of description, mind you, but they certainly aren’t as active as the corresponding animated scenes, and again, maybe it’s a constraint of the medium.

Last year, just a few meters from the south side of this house, a ten-story luxury apartment building was built. As a result, the sun no longer shone through. This had driven Ryuuji to the brink of madness and frustration countless times already — the laundry could no longer dry; the tatami now expanded due to the humidity, curled at the corners and grew moldy; and sometimes it would even get frosty. The wallpaper was starting to peel, which must have had something to do with the humidity as well. It doesn’t matter since this is just a rented apartment, Ryuuji wanted to tell himself. Yet being extremely sensitive about keeping a place tidy and clean, Ryuuji just could not get himself to tolerate and compromise on such a thing. Looking up towards the white-tiled high-class condo, there was nothing those two poor people could do but stand shoulder to shoulder with their mouths open.

There’s something to be said for well-placed exposition, though. As someone who knows what’s coming, I like this description of Taiga’s apartment as a shadow over Ryuuji’s home and a blight upon his tatami mats — he’ll be tossed out of his comfort zone, and whether that’s a good thing is a matter of reader opinion, but it’s certainly a thing that happens to most (if not all) teenagers at some point. I wonder if first-time readers would find this passage tedious — the lead-up to the above paragraph seems to make it obvious enough to me that the apartment will be important later, but then, I knew that much from the beginning.

In order to give birth to Ryuuji, Yasuko dropped out of high school when she was still a first year, so she was not familiar with what life as a second year was like. Ryuuji felt a sense of sadness for a moment.

Wait, wait, wait…did they just make Yasuko tragic? I always wanted the show to give her more depth — single mothers are characters for whom I can muster a lot of sympathy — but I imagine it may have been hard for the writers to balance sympathy with her visual portrayal as altogether ridiculous. In animation (and probably any film, really), I suspect a character’s layers of depth will always be seen through the shadow of their physical form. Surely some film critic has written about that, but I don’t really know film criticism. It reminds me of literary mind-body dualism (which Cuchlann mentions toward the bottom of this post, if you’re curious), but unavoidable insofar as making judgments at first sight, however cursory, is unavoidable³. We might say that the dualism, if there is dualism, is an end rather than a means.

…[Ryuuji's reputation] could be partly blamed on his rough personality. He spoke in quite an unrefined way, which had something to do with his extreme sensitivity. This was why he rarely joked around or said anything foolish.

Interesting; I didn’t get “rough” or “unrefined” out of the show’s characterization of Ryuuji. Where social class is concerned, though, I suppose he isn’t exactly at the top of the pecking order. If anyone could give me this paragraph in the original Japanese, I’d appreciate it, as certain connotations of whatever words Takemiya used may have been lost when they became the English “rough” and “unrefined,” and I’d like to try to puzzle through it myself.

To use soccer as a metaphor, Ryuuji would be a center defender who hardly ever had any chance of participating in offense.

OH LOL, for lack of a better term. Ryuuji is a professional wingman, of course, a groundskeeper of the friend zone, and it caught me off guard when the novel came right out and said so. Maybe it shouldn’t have; it’s funny, I suppose, but Ryuuji’s unfortunate predicament is pretty obvious anyway.

Her various cheerful expressions.

Her delicate body and exaggerated movements.

Her innocent smiles and clear voice.

Despite his intimidating appearance, she still managed to keep her usual cheerfulness in his presence, even to this day.

That’s Kushieda Minori for you.

As I read, I found myself trying to poke holes in this description of Minorin in spite of better judgment, which tells me it’s best to consider adaptations as independent entities, at least during the initial reading of each. I wonder now if that’s even wholly possible — it may be possible for someone, but my record is perhaps suspect, and it’s not as if I don’t know better. Is it related to my broader inclination to compare things with other things often and at length? Is it possible that those who disparage the Toradora anime for not being more like the novels (just as I feel inclined to disparage the first chapter, if not vocally or with any belief in the objective rightness of doing so, for not being more like the anime, or perhaps for not being the anime) aren’t consciously at fault? Perhaps we’re dealing with some mechanism of reading here, some attribute of the body of narrative art. Or — and this is of course an implicit corollary of all artistic interpretation, analysis, and such — maybe it’s just me.

For my part, my impression of Minorin does include some of the novel’s descriptors, but is best summed up by the three particular incidents from the show which come to mind when I think of her — the first, representing her genki girl craziness, which rubs off on her friends once or twice…or thrice:

The second, representing her dedication and dauntlessness:

And the third and most recent, in which Ami throws all her flaws in her face (and for great justice):

These are the images which really stick with me, and pull the most weight in determining Minorin’s character for me — the first because it made me laugh for five minutes, the second because Minorin is fucking gar, and the third because I still feel anxious just thinking about it (for about an hour prior to the writing of this sentence, I’ve been jittery at the prospect of having to watch that scene again for the sake of grabbing the screencap). Regardless of their taking place later in the…not shared narrative, as the two adaptations give us two different narratives, but maybe the Toradora proto-narrative…I can’t help bringing these and other scenes with me when I read the novel. Perhaps they’re confounding influences, mere distractions, but even if they are, they exist; when the novel cues me with “Kushieda Minori,” I need to mentally construct a character to attach to that name, and if I’ve already done so for an alternate adaptation, I don’t know how I could completely and utterly disallow that Kushieda Minori from lending qualities to this one, considering the importance of prior knowledge and experience in reading.

Specifically, expressiveness, physical exaggeration, and cheerfulness are all things I associate with Minorin, and so I didn’t have trouble accepting those traits when the novel handed them to me. But “delicate body” gave me pause — maybe she looks delicate, but she’s proven her ability to hold up under physical duress more than once in the show, rendering half the connotations of “delicate” inapplicable. Granted, that may be attributable to a translation nuance, but “innocent smiles?” We viewers all know what lurks beneath that presumed innocence by now. Of course, there’s no way the novel could convey all that in one chapter, and Ryuuji doesn’t know Minorin well enough at that point to judge her accurately. I comprehend that on a conscious, logical, intellectual level, just as I comprehend that the two Minorins are not practically one and probably should not be considered as such, but that isn’t going to stop impatience and jadedness from being emotional byproducts of reading, and it isn’t going to stop my mind from being hypersensitive to possible “inaccuracies” against my will. Knowledge of the one version affects the experience of the other, and there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it (and I try, believe me).

Oh, and let’s not forget that the light novel offers its own visual depiction of Minorin…

…which isn’t wholly analogous to the Minorin I’m used to lately, who is prone to romantic dilemmas and hitting people who point out her flaws. These alternate depictions and their discrepancies inform and perhaps confound one another, especially when the adaptations in question are fairly similar; I’m starting to suspect that whether they should or not is of little consequence.

Her long straight hair softly fluttered and covered the tiny body of the Palmtop Tiger.

Speaking of those illustrations present in light novels, I wonder if we should consider them separate in terms of characterizing influences from the descriptions of the characters they represent, and, if so, to what degree. I mention this because this…

…is not “straight hair.” Is this a minor discrepancy? Yes, but it illustrates that different creators bring different agencies to different depictions of the same character, and this isn’t mitigated by the two depictions coexisting in the same physical text. I don’t know how much this matters, but it could certainly lead to situations in which the reader must contend with differing adaptations in deciding, consciously or not, what to include in their mental image of the text.

At the end of the day, I’d maintain that adaptations of the same “proto-narrative” should be considered separate texts, and that “I like this less because it isn’t like the other thing” shouldn’t be considered an objective basis for making a value judgment. As Cuchlann more pithily suggests, we should at least try to appreciate varying adaptations on their own merits rather than simply throwing them against one another. But personal preference is a shifty bastard, and if knowledge from one adaptation creeps into the experience of another, I don’t suppose there’s a whole lot we can do to keep the resultant webs of influence from becoming significant and often complex.

Of course, much of what I’m talking about here depends heavily upon my own reading nuances, as those are the only reading nuances about which I can speak accurately. Maybe you can erect impenetrable walls between adaptations, in which case I’m curious to know what that’s like.

Endnotes

¹See also Casshern Sins and Clannad ~After Story~. Damn this season is deliciously painful. Damn that last sentence sounds creepy in retrospect.

²You can find the chapter in question here, though, due to the wiki nature of Baka-Tsuki, the wording of the translation may have changed since I quoted it.

³See this recent article from New Scientist for more on that. I’m not so sure about “new physiognomy,” but I suspect that the idea of judging by appearances and the inevitability thereof carries over to fictional characters with visual representations. Even in the case of Ryuuji, whose fierce appearance is deliberately mismatched with his gentle personality, that sense of being mismatched is a ubiquitous element of his character, as we’re reminded of it by his physical form, central as that form is to the depiction of his thought, speech, and action.