Reading journal 1

500 words+

1. Summarize the article’s argument. What is the main argument? What are

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important sub-points? Your summary should be one paragraph long.(this part at least 300 words)

2. Answer the following questions. (this part at least 200 words)

A. What questions do you have after reading the article (questions can about the article, or inspired by the article?

B. What iterested you about the article? What new information or insight did it give you?

C. Why do you think I assigned this article?

1
Beginning to Theorize

Adaptation:
What? Who? Why? How? Where? When?

[C]inema is still playing second fi ddle to literature.

—Rabindranath Tagore (1929)

Writing a screenplay based on a great novel [George Eliot’s
Daniel Deronda] is foremost a labor of simplifi cation. I don’t mean
only the plot, although particularly in the case of a Victorian novel
teeming with secondary characters and subplots, severe pruning is
required, but also the intellectual content. A fi lm has to convey its
message by images and relatively few words; it has little tolerance
for complexity or irony or tergiversations. I found the work exceed-
ingly diffi cult, beyond anything I had anticipated. And, I should
add, depressing: I care about words more than images, and yet I was

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation, Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uconn/detail.action?docID=1016075.
Created from uconn on 2018-06-28 07:05:46.

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2 A Theory of Adaptation

constantly sacrifi cing words and their connotations. You might tell
me that through images fi lm conveys a vast amount of information
that words can only attempt to approximate, and you would be right,
but approximation is precious in itself, because it bears the author’s
stamp. All in all, it seemed to me that my screenplay was worth much
less than the book, and that the same would be true of the fi lm.

—Novelist John North in Louis Begley’s novel, Shipwreck (2003)

Familiarity and Contempt

Adaptations are everywhere today: on the television and movie screen,
on the musical and dramatic stage, on the Internet, in novels and comic
books, in your nearest theme park and video arcade. A certain level
of self-consciousness about—and perhaps even acceptance of—their
ubiquity is suggested by the fact that fi lms have been made about the
process itself, such as Spike Jonze’s Adaptation or Terry Gilliam’s Lost
in La Mancha, both in 2002. Television series have also explored the
act of adaptation, like the eleven-part BRAVO documentary “Page
to Screen.” Adaptations are obviously not new to our time, however;
Shakespeare transferred his culture’s stories from page to stage and
made them available to a whole new audience. Aeschylus and Racine
and Goethe and da Ponte also retold familiar stories in new forms.
Adaptations are so much a part of Western culture that they appear to
affi rm Walter Benjamin’s insight that “storytelling is always the art of
repeating stories” (1992: 90). Th e critical pronouncements of T.S. Eliot
or Northrop Frye were certainly not needed to convince avid adapters
across the centuries of what, for them, has always been a truism: art is
derived from other art; stories are born of other stories.

Nevertheless, in both academic criticism and journalistic reviewing,
contemporary popular adaptations are most often put down as second-
ary, derivative, “belated, middlebrow, or culturally inferior” (as noted
by Naremore 2002b: 6). Th is is what Louis Begley’s novelist-adapter
is expressing in the epigraph; but there are more strong and decidedly
moralistic words used to attack fi lm adaptations of literature: “tam-
pering,” “interference,” “violation” (listed in McFarlane 1996: 12),
“betrayal,” “deformation,” “perversion,” “infi delity,” and “desecration”

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation, Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uconn/detail.action?docID=1016075.
Created from uconn on 2018-06-28 07:05:46.
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Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 3

(found by Stam 2000: 54). Th e move from the literary to the fi lmic
or televisual has even been called a move to “a willfully inferior form
of cognition” (Newman 1985: 129). Although adaptation’s detractors
argue that “all the directorial Scheherazades of the world cannot add
up to one Dostoevsky” (Peary and Shatzkin 1977: 2), it does seem to
be more or less acceptable to adapt Romeo and Juliet into a respected
high art form, like an opera or a ballet, but not to make it into a movie,
especially an updated one like Baz Luhrmann’s (1996) William Shake-
speare’s Romeo + Juliet. If an adaptation is perceived as “lowering” a story
(according to some imagined hierarchy of medium or genre), response
is likely to be negative. Residual suspicion remains even in the admira-
tion expressed for something like Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999), her criti-
cally successful fi lm version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Even
in our postmodern age of cultural recycling, something—perhaps the
commercial success of adaptations—would appear to make us uneasy.

As early as 1926, Virginia Woolf, commenting on the fl edgling art
of cinema, deplored the simplifi cation of the literary work that inevita-
bly occurred in its transposition to the new visual medium and called
fi lm a “parasite” and literature its “prey” and “victim” (1926: 309). Yet
she also foresaw that fi lm had the potential to develop its own indepen-
dent idiom: “cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emo-
tions that have so far failed to fi nd expression” in words (309). And so
it does. In the view of fi lm semiotician Christian Metz, cinema “tells
us continuous stories; it ‘says’ things that could be conveyed also in the
language of words; yet it says them diff erently. Th ere is a reason for
the possibility as well as for the necessity of adaptations” (1974: 44).
However, the same could be said of adaptations in the form of musi-
cals, operas, ballets, or songs. All these adapters relate stories in their
diff erent ways. Th ey use the same tools that storytellers have always
used: they actualize or concretize ideas; they make simplifying selec-
tions, but also amplify and extrapolate; they make analogies; they cri-
tique or show their respect, and so on. But the stories they relate are
taken from elsewhere, not invented anew. Like parodies, adaptations
have an overt and defi ning relationship to prior texts, usually reveal-
ingly called “sources.” Unlike parodies, however, adaptations usually
openly announce this relationship. It is the (post-) Romantic valuing

4 A Theory of Adaptation

of the original creation and of the originating creative genius that is
clearly one source of the denigration of adapters and adaptations. Yet
this negative view is actually a late addition to Western culture’s long
and happy history of borrowing and stealing or, more accurately, shar-
ing stories.

For some, as Robert Stam argues, literature will always have axi-
omatic superiority over any adaptation of it because of its seniority as
an art form. But this hierarchy also involves what he calls iconophobia
(a suspicion of the visual) and logophilia (love of the word as sacred)
(2000: 58). Of course, a negative view of adaptation might simply be
the product of thwarted expectations on the part of a fan desiring fi del-
ity to a beloved adapted text or on the part of someone teaching lit-
erature and therefore needing proximity to the text and perhaps some
entertainment value to do so.

If adaptations are, by this defi nition, such inferior and secondary
creations, why then are they so omnipresent in our culture and, indeed,
increasing steadily in numbers? Why, even according to 1992 statistics,
are 85 percent of all Oscar-winning Best Pictures adaptations? Why
do adaptations make up 95 percent of all the miniseries and 70 percent
of all the TV movies of the week that win Emmy Awards? Part of the
answer no doubt has to do with the constant appearance of new media
and new channels of mass diff usion (Groensteen 1998b: 9). Th ese have
clearly fueled an enormous demand for all kinds of stories. Nonethe-
less, there must be something particularly appealing about adaptations
as adaptations.

Part of this pleasure, I want to argue, comes simply from repetition
with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy
of surprise. Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and
risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change. Th ematic and
narrative persistence combines with material variation (Ropars-
Wuilleumier 1998: 131), with the result that adaptations are never
simply reproductions that lose the Benjaminian aura. Rather, they
carry that aura with them. But as John Ellis suggests, there is
something counterintuitive about this desire for persistence within a
post-Romantic and capitalist world that values novelty primarily: the
“process of adaptation should thus be seen as a massive investment

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 5

(fi nancial and psychic) in the desire to repeat particular acts of
consumption within a form of representation [fi lm, in this case] that
discourages such a repetition” (1982: 4–5).

As Ellis’ commercial rhetoric suggests, there is an obvious fi nan-
cial appeal to adaptation as well. It is not just at times of economic
downturn that adapters turn to safe bets: nineteenth-century Italian
composers of that notoriously expensive art form, opera, usually chose
to adapt reliable—that is, already fi nancially successful—stage plays or
novels in order to avoid fi nancial risks, as well as trouble with the cen-
sors (see Trowell 1992: 1198, 1219). Hollywood fi lms of the classical
period relied on adaptations from popular novels, what Ellis calls the
“tried and tested” (1982: 3), while British television has specialized in
adapting the culturally accredited eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
novel, or Ellis’ “tried and trusted.” However, it is not simply a matter
of risk-avoidance; there is money to be made. A best-selling book may
reach a million readers; a successful Broadway play will be seen by 1 to
8 million people; but a movie or television adaptation will fi nd an audi-
ence of many million more (Seger 1992: 5).

Th e recent phenomenon of fi lms being “musicalized” for the stage is
obviously economically driven. Th e movies of Th e Lion King or Th e Pro-
ducers off er ready-made name recognition for audiences, thereby reliev-
ing some of the anxiety for Broadway producers of expensive musicals.
Like sequels and prequels, “director’s cut” DVDs and spin-off s,
videogame adaptations based on fi lms are yet another way of taking
one “property” in a “franchise” and reusing it in another medium. Not
only will audiences already familiar with the “franchise” be attracted to
the new “repurposing” (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 45), but new consum-
ers will also be created. Th e multinationals who own fi lm studios today
often already own the rights to stories in other media, so they can be
recycled for videogames, for example, and then marketed by the televi-
sion stations they also own (Th ompson 2003: 81–82).

Does the manifest commercial success of adaptations help us under-
stand why the 2002 fi lm Th e Royal Tenenbaums (directed by Wes Ander-
son with a script by Owen Wilson) opens with a book being checked
out of a library—the book upon which the fi lm implicitly claims to
be based? Echoing movies like David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946),

6 A Theory of Adaptation

which begins with a shot of the Dickens novel opened to Chapter 1,
scene changes in Anderson’s movie are marked by a shot of the Tenen-
baums’ “book” opened to the next chapter, the fi rst lines of which
describe what we then see on screen. Because, to my knowledge, this
fi lm is not adapted from any literary text, the use of this device is a
direct and even parodic recall of its use in earlier fi lms, but with a dif-
ference: the authority of literature as an institution and thus also of the
act of adapting it seems to be what is being invoked and emphasized.
But why would a fi lm want to be seen as an adaptation? And what do
we mean by a work being seen as an adaptation?

Treating Adaptations as Adaptations

To deal with adaptations as adaptations is to think of them as, to use
Scottish poet and scholar Michael Alexander’s great term (Ermarth
2001: 47), inherently “palimpsestuous” works, haunted at all times
by their adapted texts. If we know that prior text, we always feel its
presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly. When we
call a work an adaptation, we openly announce its overt relationship
to another work or works. It is what Gérard Genette would call a text
in the “second degree” (1982: 5), created and then received in relation
to a prior text. Th is is why adaptation studies are so often comparative
studies (cf. Cardwell 2002: 9). Th is is not to say that adaptations are
not also autonomous works that can be interpreted and valued as such;
as many theorists have insisted, they obviously are (see, for example,
Bluestone 1957/1971; Ropars 1970). Th is is one reason why an adapta-
tion has its own aura, its own “presence in time and space, its unique
existence at the place where it happens to be” (Benjamin 1968: 214). I
take such a position as axiomatic, but not as my theoretical focus. To
interpret an adaptation as an adaptation is, in a sense, to treat it as what
Roland Barthes called, not a “work,” but a “text,” a plural “stereophony
of echoes, citations, references” (1977: 160). Although adaptations are
also aesthetic objects in their own right, it is only as inherently double-
or multilaminated works that they can be theorized as adaptations.

An adaptation’s double nature does not mean, however, that proxim-
ity or fi delity to the adapted text should be the criterion of judgment or
the focus of analysis. For a long time, “fi delity criticism,” as it came to

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 7

be known, was the critical orthodoxy in adaptation studies, especially
when dealing with canonical works such as those of Pushkin or Dante.
Today that dominance has been challenged from a variety of perspec-
tives (e.g., McFarlane 1996: 194; Cardwell 2002: 19) and with a range
of results. And, as George Bluestone pointed out early on, when a fi lm
becomes a fi nancial or critical success, the question of its faithfulness
is given hardly any thought (1957/1971: 114). My decision not to con-
centrate on this particular aspect of the relationship between adapted
text and adaptation means that there appears to be little need to engage
directly in the constant debate over degrees of proximity to the “origi-
nal” that has generated those many typologies of adaptation processes:
borrowing versus intersection versus transformation (Andrew 1980:
10–12); analogy versus commentary versus transposition (Wagner
1975: 222–31); using the source as raw material versus reinterpretation
of only the core narrative structure versus a literal translation (Klein
and Parker 1981: 10).

Of more interest to me is the fact that the morally loaded discourse
of fi delity is based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply
to reproduce the adapted text (e.g., Orr 1984: 73). Adaptation is repeti-
tion, but repetition without replication. And there are manifestly many
diff erent possible intentions behind the act of adaptation: the urge to
consume and erase the memory of the adapted text or to call it into
question is as likely as the desire to pay tribute by copying. Adaptations
such as fi lm remakes can even be seen as mixed in intent: “contested
homage” (Greenberg 1998: 115), Oedipally envious and worshipful at
the same time (Horton and McDougal 1998b: 8).

If the idea of fi delity should not frame any theorizing of adaptation
today, what should? According to its dictionary meaning, “to adapt” is
to adjust, to alter, to make suitable. Th is can be done in any number of
ways. As the next section will explore in more depth, the phenomenon
of adaptation can be defi ned from three distinct but interrelated per-
spectives, for I take it as no accident that we use the same word—adap-
tation—to refer to the process and the product.

First, seen as a formal entity or product, an adaptation is an announced
and extensive transposition of a particular work or works. Th is
“transcoding” can involve a shift of medium (a poem to a fi lm) or genre

8 A Theory of Adaptation

(an epic to a novel), or a change of frame and therefore context: telling
the same story from a diff erent point of view, for instance, can create a
manifestly diff erent interpretation. Transposition can also mean a shift
in ontology from the real to the fi ctional, from a historical account or
biography to a fi ctionalized narrative or drama. Sister Helen Prejean’s
1994 book, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Pen-
alty in the United States, became fi rst a fi ctionalized fi lm (directed by
Tim Robbins, 1995) and then, a few years later, an opera (written by
Terrence McNally and Jake Heggie).

Second, as a process of creation, the act of adaptation always involves
both (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation; this has been called
both appropriation and salvaging, depending on your perspective. For
every aggressive appropriator outed by a political opponent, there is a
patient salvager. Priscilla Galloway, an adapter of mythic and historical
narratives for children and young adults, has said that she is motivated
by a desire to preserve stories that are worth knowing but will not nec-
essarily speak to a new audience without creative “reanimation” (2004),
and that is her task. African fi lm adaptations of traditional oral legends
are also seen as a way of preserving a rich heritage in an aural and
visual mode (Cham 2005: 300).

Th ird, seen from the perspective of its process of reception, adaptation
is a form of intertextuality: we experience adaptations (as adaptations) as
palimpsests through our memory of other works that resonate through
repetition with variation. For the right audience, then, the novelization
by Yvonne Navarro of a fi lm like Hellboy (2004) may echo not only
with Guillermo del Toro’s fi lm but also with the Dark Horse Comics
series from which the latter was adapted. Paul Anderson’s 2002 fi lm
Resident Evil will be experienced diff erently by those who have played
the videogame of the same name, from which the movie was adapted,
than by those who have not.

In short, adaptation can be described as the following:

• An acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or
works

• A creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging
• An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 9

Th erefore, an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative—a work
that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic
thing.

Th ere is some apparent validity to the general statement that adapta-
tion “as a concept can expand or contract. Writ large, adaptation
includes almost any act of alteration performed upon specifi c cultural
works of the past and dovetails with a general process of cultural re-
creation” (Fischlin and Fortier 2000: 4). But, from a pragmatic point of
view, such vast defi nition would clearly make adaptation rather diffi cult
to theorize. My more restricted double defi nition of adaptation as pro-
cess and product is closer to the common usage of the word and is broad
enough to allow me to treat not just fi lms and stage productions, but
also musical arrangements and song covers, visual art revisitations of
prior works and comic book versions of history, poems put to music and
remakes of fi lms, and videogames and interactive art. It also permits me
to draw distinctions; for instance, allusions to and brief echoes of other
works would not qualify as extended engagements, nor do most exam-
ples of musical sampling, because they recontextualize only short frag-
ments of music. Plagiarisms are not acknowledged appropriations, and
sequels and prequels are not really adaptations either, nor is fan
fi ction. Th ere is a diff erence between never wanting a story to end—the
reason behind sequels and prequels, according to Marjorie Garber
(2003: 73–74)—and wanting to retell the same story over and over in
diff erent ways. With adaptations, we seem to desire the repetition as
much as the change. Maybe this is why, in the eyes of the law, adapta-
tion is a “derivative work”—that is, one based on one or more preexist-
ing works, but “recast, transformed” (17 USC §101). Th at seemingly
simple defi nition, however, is also a theoretical can of worms.

Exactly What Gets Adapted? How?

What precisely is “recast” and “transformed”? In law, ideas themselves
cannot be copyrighted; only their expression can be defended in court.
And herein lies the whole problem. As Kamilla Elliott has astutely
noted, adaptation commits the heresy of showing that form (expression)
can be separated from content (ideas)—something both mainstream
aesthetic and semiotic theories have resisted or denied (2003: 133),

10 A Theory of Adaptation

even as legal theory has embraced it. Th e form changes with adaptation
(thus evading most legal prosecution); the content persists. But what
exactly constitutes that transferred and transmuted “content”?

Many professional reviewers and audience members alike resort to
the elusive notion of the “spirit” of a work or an artist that has to be cap-
tured and conveyed in the adaptation for it to be a success. Th e “spirit”
of Dickens or Wagner is invoked, often to justify radical changes in the
“letter” or form. Sometimes it is “tone” that is deemed central, though
rarely defi ned (e.g., Linden 1971: 158, 163); at other times it is “style”
(Seger 1992: 157). But all three are arguably equally subjective and, it
would appear, diffi cult to discuss, much less theorize.

Most theories of adaptation assume, however, that the story is the
common denominator, the core of what is transposed across diff er-
ent media and genres, each of which deals with that story in formally
diff erent ways and, I would add, through diff erent modes of engage-
ment—narrating, performing, or interacting. In adapting, the story-
argument goes, “equivalences” are sought in diff erent sign systems for
the various elements of the story: its themes, events, world, characters,
motivations, points of view, consequences, contexts, symbols, imagery,
and so on. As Millicent Marcus has explained, however, there are two
opposing theoretical schools of thought on this point: either a story
can exist independently of any embodiment in any particular signify-
ing system or, on the contrary, it cannot be considered separately from
its material mode of mediation (1993: 14). What the phenomenon
of adaptation suggests, however, is that, although the latter is obvi-
ously true for the audience, whose members experience the story in a
particular material form, the various elements of the story can be and
are considered separately by adapters and by theorists, if only because
technical constraints of diff erent media will inevitably highlight diff er-
ent aspects of that story (Gaudreault and Marion 1998: 45).

Th emes are perhaps the easiest story elements to see as adaptable
across media and even genres or framing contexts. As author Louis
Begley said about the themes of his 1996 novel About Schmidt when
the work was transcribed to the screen by Alexander Payne and Jim
Taylor: “I was able to hear them rather like melodies transposed into
a diff erent key” (2003: 1). Many Romantic ballets were derived from

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 11

Hans Christian Andersen’s stories simply, some say, because of their
traditional and easily accessible themes, such as quests, magical tasks,
disguise and revelation, and innocence versus evil (Mackrell 2004).
Composer Alexander Zemlinsky wrote a “symphonic fantasy” adap-
tation of Andersen’s famous “Th e Little Mermaid” (1836) called Die
Seejungfrau (1905) that includes musical programmatic descriptions of
such elements as the storm and musical leitmotifs that tell the story and
its themes of love, pain, and nature, as well as music that evokes emo-
tions and atmosphere befi tting the story. A modern manual for adapt-
ers explains, however, that themes are, in fact, of most importance to
novels and plays; in TV and fi lms, themes must always serve the story
action and “reinforce or dimensionalize” it, for in these forms, story-
line is supreme—except in European “art” fi lms (Seger 1992: 14).

Characters, too, can obviously be transported from one text to
another, and indeed, as Murray Smith has argued, characters are cru-
cial to the rhetorical and aesthetic eff ects of both narrative and perfor-
mance texts because they engage receivers’ imaginations through what
he calls recognition, alignment, and allegiance (1995: 4–6). Th e theater
and the novel are usually considered the forms in which the human
subject is central. Psychological development (and thus receiver empa-
thy) is part of the narrative and dramatic arc when characters are the
focus of adaptations. Yet, in playing videogame adaptations of fi lms,
we can actually “become” one of the characters and act in their fi c-
tional world.

Th e separate units of the story (or the fabula) can also be transme-
diated—just as they can be summarized in digest versions or trans-
lated into another language (Hamon 1977: 264). But they may well
change—often radically—in the process of adaptation, and not only
(but most obviously) in terms of their plot ordering. Pacing can be
transformed, time compressed or expanded. Shifts in the focaliza-
tion or point of view of the adapted story may lead to major diff er-
ences. When David Lean wrote, directed, and edited the fi lm version
of E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel Passage to India in 1984, he altered the
novel’s focalization on the two men, Fielding and Aziz, and their cross-
cultural interrelations. Instead, the fi lm tells Adela’s story, add-
ing scenes to establish her character and make it more complex and

12 A Theory of Adaptation

interesting than it arguably is in the novel. More radically, Miss
Havisham’s Fire (1979/revised 1996), Dominick Argento and John
Olon-Scrymgeour’s operatic adaptation of Dickens’ Great Expectations
(1860/1861), all but ignored the story of the protagonist Pip to tell that
of the eccentric Miss Havisham.

In other cases, it might be the point of departure or conclusion that
is totally transfi gured in adaptation. For instance, in off ering a diff er-
ent ending in the fi lm version of Michael Ondaatje’s novel Th e English
Patient, Anthony Minghella, in his fi lm script and in his directing,
removed the postcolonial politics of the Indian Kip’s response to the
bombing of Hiroshima, substituting instead another smaller, earlier
bomb that kills his co-worker and friend. In other words, a personal
crisis is made to replace a political one. As the movie’s editor Walter
Murch articulated the decision: “Th e fi lm [unlike the novel] was so
much about those fi ve individual people: the Patient, Hana, Kip, Kath-
arine, Caravaggio—that to suddenly open it up near the end and ask the
audience to imagine the death of hundreds of thousands of unknown
people … . It was too abstract. So the bomb of Hiroshima became the
bomb that killed Hardy, someone you knew” (qtd. in Ondaatje 2002:
213). And, in the movie version (but not in the novel), the nurse Hana
actually gives her patient the fatal morphine shot at the end, undoubt-
edly so that she can be seen to merge with his lover Katharine in the
patient’s memory, as in ours. On the soundtrack, their voices merge
as well. Th e focus of the fi lm is on the doomed love aff air alone. Th is
change of ending may not be quite the same as Nahum Tate’s mak-
ing Cordelia survive and marry Edgar in his infamous 1681 version of
King Lear, but it is a major shift of emphasis nonetheless.

If we move from considering only the medium in this way to consid-
ering changes in the more general manner of story presentation, how-
ever, other diff erences in what gets adapted begin to appear. Th is is
because each manner involves a diff erent mode of engagement on the
part of both audience and adapter. As we shall see in more detail shortly,
being shown a story is not the same as being told it—and neither is the
same as participating in it or interacting with it, that is, experiencing
a story directly and kinesthetically. With each mode, diff erent things
get adapted and in diff erent ways. As my examples so far suggest, to

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 13

tell a story, as in novels, short stories, and even historical accounts, is to
describe, explain, summarize, expand; the narrator has a point of view
and great power to leap through time and space and sometimes to ven-
ture inside the minds of characters. To show a story, as in movies, bal-
lets, radio and stage plays, musicals and operas, involves a direct aural
and usually visual performance experienced in real time.

Although neither telling nor showing renders its audience passive
in the least, they also do not engage people as immediately and viscer-
ally as do virtual environments, videogames (played on any platform),
or even theme-park rides that are, in their own ways, adaptations or
“remediations” (Bolter and Grusin 1999). Th e interactive, physical
nature of this kind of engagement entails changes both in the story
and even in the importance of story itself. If a fi lm can be said to have
a three-act structure—a beginning in which a confl ict is established; a
middle in which the implications of the confl ict are played out; an end
where the confl ict is resolved—then a videogame adaptation of a fi lm
can be argued to have a diff erent three-act structure. Th e introductory
material, often presented in what are called “movie cut-scenes,” is the
fi rst act; the second is the core gameplay experience; the third is the
climax, again often in fi lmed cut-scenes (Lindley 2002: 206). Acts one
and three obviously do the narrative work—through showing—and
set up the story frame, but both are in fact peripheral to the core: the
second-act gameplay, with its intensity of cognitive and physi-
cal engagement, moves the narrative along through visual spectacle
and audio eff ects (including music) and through problem-solving
challenges. As Marie-Laure Ryan has pointed out: “Th e secret
to the narrative success of games is their ability to exploit the most
fundamental of the forces that move a plot forward: the solving of
problems” (2004c: 349). Story, in this case, is no longer central or at
least no longer an end in itself, although it is still present as a means
toward a goal (King 2002: 51).

Although there has been a long debate recently about whether inter-
activity and storytelling are at odds with one another (see Ryan 2001:
244; Ryan 2004c: 337), what is more relevant in a game adaptation
is the fact that players can inhabit a known fi ctional, often striking,
visual world of digital animation. Nintendo’s 3-D world of Zelda, for

14 A Theory of Adaptation

instance, has been described as “a highly intricate environment, with
a complicated economics, an awesome cast of creatures, a broad range
of landscapes and indoor scenarios, and an elaborated chemistry, biol-
ogy, geology and ecology so that its world can almost be studied like an
alternative version of nature” (Weinbren 2002: 180). Th ough Zelda is
not an adaptation, this description of its world fi ts so many games that
are adaptations. Similarly, Disney World visitors who go on the Alad-
din ride can enter and physically navigate a universe originally pre-
sented as a linear experience through fi lm.

What gets adapted here is a heterocosm, literally an “other world”
or cosmos, complete, of course, with the stuff of a story—settings,
characters, events, and situations. To be more precise, it is the “res
extensa”—to use Descartes’ terminology—of that world, its material,
physical dimension, which is transposed and then experienced through
multisensorial interactivity (Grau 2003: 3). Th is heterocosm possesses
what theorists call “truth-of-coherence” (Ruthven 1979: 11)—here,
plausibility and consistency of movement and graphics within the
context of the game (Ward 2002: 129)—just as do narrated and per-
formed worlds, but this world also has a particular kind of “truth-of-
correspondence”—not to any “real world” but to the universe of a
particular adapted text. Th e videogame of Th e Godfather uses the voices
and physical images of some of the fi lm’s actors, including Marlon
Brando, but the linear structure of the movie is transmuted into that
of a fl exible game model in which the player becomes a nameless mafi a
henchman, trying to win the respect of the main characters by taking
over businesses, killing people, and so on. In other words, the point
of view has been changed from that of the mafi a bosses to that of the
underlings, who allow us to see familiar scenes from the fi lm’s world
from a diff erent perspective and possibly create a diff erent resolution.

What videogames, like virtual reality experiments, cannot easily
adapt is what novels can portray so well: the “res cogitans,” the space
of the mind. Even screen and stage media have diffi culty with this
dimension, because when psychic reality is shown rather than told
about, it has to be made manifest in the material realm to be perceived
by the audience. However, expanding the idea of what can be adapted
to include this idea of a heterocosm or visual world as well as other

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 15

aspects of the story opens up the possibility of considering, for instance,
Aubrey Beardsley’s famous illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé
as a possible adaptation or even Picasso’s cubist recodings of some of
the canonical paintings of Velásquez.

Are some kinds of stories and their worlds more easily adaptable
than others? Susan Orlean’s book, Th e Orchid Th ief, proved intrac-
table to screenwriter “Charlie Kaufman” in the movie Adaptation. Or
did it? Linear realist novels, it would appear, are more easily adapted
for the screen than experimental ones, or so we might assume from
the evidence: the works of Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, and Agatha
Christie are more often adapted than those of Samuel Beckett, James
Joyce, or Robert Coover. “Radical” texts, it is said, are “reduced to a
kind of cinematic homogenization” (Axelrod 1996: 204) when they
are adapted. But Dickens’ novels have been called “theatrical” in their
lively dialogue and their individualized, if broadly drawn, characters,
complete with idiosyncratic speech patterns. Th eir strongly pictorial
descriptions and potential for scenes of spectacle also make them read-
ily adaptable or at least “adaptogenic” (Groensteen 1998a: 270) to the
stage and screen. Historically, it is melodramatic worlds and stories that
have lent themselves to adaptation to the form of opera and musical
dramas, where music can reinforce the stark emotional oppositions and
tensions created by the requisite generic compression (because it takes
longer to sing than to speak a line). Today, spectacular special eff ects
fi lms like the various Th e Matrix or Star Wars movies are the ones likely
to spawn popular videogames whose players can enjoy entering and
manipulating the cinematic fantasy world.

Double Vision: Defi ning Adaptation

Given this complexity of what can be adapted and of the means of
adaptation, people keep trying to coin new words to replace the con-
fusing simplicity of the word “adaptation” (e.g., Gaudreault 1998: 268).
But most end up admitting defeat: the word has stuck for a reason.
Yet, however straightforward the idea of adaptation may appear on
the surface, it is actually very diffi cult to defi ne, in part, as we have
seen, because we use the same word for the process and the product.
As a product, an adaptation can be given a formal defi nition, but as

16 A Theory of Adaptation

a process—of creation and of reception—other aspects have to be
considered. Th is is why those diff erent perspectives touched on earlier
are needed to discuss and defi ne adaptation.

Adaptation as Product: Announced, Extensive, Specifi c Transcoding
As openly acknowledged and extended reworkings of particular other
texts, adaptations are often compared to translations. Just as there is
no such thing as a literal translation, there can be no literal adapta-
tion. Nevertheless, the study of both has suff ered from domination
by “normative and source-oriented approaches” (Hermans 1985: 9).
Transposition to another medium, or even moving within the same
one, always means change or, in the language of the new media,
“reformatting.” And there will always be both gains and losses (Stam
2000: 62). Although this seems commonsensical enough, it is impor-
tant to remember that, in most concepts of translation, the source text
is granted an axiomatic primacy and authority, and the rhetoric of
comparison has most often been that of faithfulness and equivalence.
Walter Benjamin did alter this frame of reference when he argued, in
“Th e Task of the Translator,” that translation is not a rendering of some
fi xed nontextual meaning to be copied or paraphrased or reproduced;
rather, it is an engagement with the original text that makes us see that
text in diff erent ways (1992: 77). Recent translation theory argues that
translation involves a transaction between texts and between languages
and is thus “an act of both inter-cultural and inter-temporal communi-
cation” (Bassnett 2002: 9).

Th is newer sense of translation comes closer to defi ning adaptation
as well. In many cases, because adaptations are to a diff erent medium,
they are re-mediations, that is, specifi cally translations in the form of
intersemiotic transpositions from one sign system (for example, words)
to another (for example, images). Th is is translation but in a very specifi c
sense: as transmutation or transcoding, that is, as necessarily a recod-
ing into a new set of conventions as well as signs. For example, Harold
Pinter’s screenplay for Karel Reisz’s fi lm Th e French Lieutenant’s Woman
(1981) transposed the narrative of John Fowles’ novel (1969) into a
totally cinematic code. Th e novel juxtaposed a modern narrator and a
Victorian story; in the equally self-refl exive movie, we have, instead, a

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 17

Victorian scenario within a modern fi lm that is itself a movie about the
fi lming of the nineteenth-century story. Th e self-consciousness of the
novel’s narrator was translated into cinematic mirroring, as the actors
who play the Victorian characters live out the scripted romance in their
own lives. Th e role-playing motif of fi lm acting eff ectively echoed the
hypocrisy and the schizoid morality of the Victorian world of the novel
(see Sinyard 1986: 135–40).

Th e idea of paraphrase (Bluestone 1957/1971: 62) is an alternative
frequently off ered to this translation analogy. Etymologically, a para-
phrase is a mode of telling “beside” (para) and, according to the Oxford
English Dictionary, one of its fi rst meanings is “a free rendering or
amplifi cation of a passage” that is verbal but, by extension, musical as
well. John Dryden is quoted as defi ning paraphrase as “translation with
latitude, where the author is kept in view …, but his words are not so
strictly followed as his sense; and that too is admitted to be amplifi ed.”
Perhaps this describes best what scriptwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs and
director Lasse Hallstrom did in their 2001 cinematic adaptation of E.
Annie Proulx’s novel Th e Shipping News (1993). Th e novel protagonist’s
psychic world, which is amply explored, thanks to the omniscient nar-
ration, is freely rendered in the fi lm by having him think in visualized
headlines—a realistic device for a newspaperman. In a sense, even the
novel’s metaphoric writing style is paraphrased in the recurring visual
imagery derived from his fear of drowning. Similarly, Virginia Woolf ’s
densely rich associative language in Mrs. Dalloway is rendered or para-
phrased in “associative visual imagery” in the 1998 fi lm directed by
Marleen Gorris (see Cuddy-Keane 1998: 173–74).

Paraphrase and translation analogies can also be useful in consider-
ing what I earlier called the ontological shift that can happen in adap-
tations of an historical event or an actual person’s life into a reimagined,
fi ctional form. Th e adapted text may be an authoritative historical
rendering or a more indefi nite archive (see Andrew 2004: 200), and
the form can range from “biopics” to “heritage” fi lms, from television
docudramas to videogames, such as JFK Reloaded (by Traffi c Games
in Scotland), based on the Kennedy assassination. Sometimes the text
being paraphrased or translated is very immediate and available. For
example, the German television movie called Wannseekonferenz (Th e

18 A Theory of Adaptation

Wannsee Conference) was an 85-minute fi lm adaptation scripted from
the actual minutes of the 85-minute meeting held in 1942 and chaired
by Reinhard Heydrich, the Chief of the German State Police, in which
the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was decided. In 2001,
Loring Mandel did a further adaptation in English for BBC and HBO
called Conspiracy.

At other times, the adapted text is more complex or even multiple:
Sidney Lumet’s 1975 fi lm Dog Day Afternoon was a fi ctionalized adap-
tation of an actual 1972 bank robbery and hostage situation in Brook-
lyn that was covered live on television and was much discussed in the
media. In fact, a Life magazine article by P.F. Kluge was the basis of
the fi lm’s screenplay. But in 2002 artist Pierre Huyghe asked the real
robber, John Wojtowicz, to reenact and narrate—in eff ect, to trans-
late or paraphrase—the original event for his camera. In the process,
a second-level adaptation occurred: as the perpetrator relived his own
past, what became clear was that he could not do so except through the
lenses of the subsequent movie version. In eff ect, the fi lm became, for
him, as much the text to be adapted as was the lived event preserved in
either his memory or the media coverage. In ontological shifts, it makes
little sense to talk about adaptations as “historically accurate” or “his-
torically inaccurate” in the usual sense. Schindler’s List is not Shoah (see
Hansen 2001) in part because it is an adaptation of a novel by Th omas
Keneally, which is itself based on survivor testimony. In other words,
it is a paraphrase or translation of a particular other text, a particular
interpretation of history. Th e seeming simplicity of the familiar label,
“based on a true story,” is a ruse: in reality, such historical adaptations
are as complex as historiography itself.

Adaptation as Process

Th e Adapter’s Creative Interpretation/Interpretive Creation Early in the
fi lm Adaptation, screenwriter “Charlie Kaufman” faces an anguished
dilemma: he worries about his responsibility as an adapter to an author
and a book he respects. As he senses, what is involved in adapting can
be a process of appropriation, of taking possession of another’s story,
and fi ltering it, in a sense, through one’s own sensibility, interests, and
talents. Th erefore, adapters are fi rst interpreters and then creators. Th is

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 19

is one reason why Morte a Venezia, Luchino Visconti’s 1971 Italian fi lm
version of Th omas Mann’s 1911 novella Der Tod in Venedig, is so diff er-
ent in focus and impact from Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper’s
English opera Death in Venice, which premiered only a few years later
in 1973. Th e other reason, of course, is the adapter’s choice of medium.
E.H. Gombrich off ers a useful analogy when he suggests that if an art-
ist stands before a landscape with a pencil in hand, he or she will “look
for those aspects which can be rendered in lines”; if it is a paintbrush
that the hand holds, the artist’s vision of the very same landscape will
be in terms of masses, not lines (1961: 65). Th erefore, an adapter com-
ing to a story with the idea of adapting it for a fi lm would be attracted
to diff erent aspects of it than an opera librettist would be.

Usually adaptations, especially from long novels, mean that the
adapter’s job is one of subtraction or contraction; this is called “a sur-
gical art” (Abbott 2002: 108) for a good reason. In adapting Philip
Pullman’s trilogy of novels, His Dark Materials, from 1,300 print pages
to two three-hour plays, Nicholas Wright had to cut major characters
(for example, the Oxford scientist Mary Malone) and therefore whole
worlds they inhabit (for example, the land of the mulefas); he had to
speed up the action and involve the Church right from the start. Of
course, he also had to fi nd two major narrative climaxes to replace the
three of the trilogy. He also found he had to explain certain themes and
even plot details, for there was not as much time for the play’s audience
to piece things together as there was for those reading the novels.

Obviously, not all adaptations involve simply cutting. Short stories,
in particular, have often inspired movies; for example, John M. Cun-
ningham’s 1947 “Th e Tin Star” became Fred Zinneman and Carl For-
man’s 1952 fi lm High Noon. Short story adaptations have had to expand
their source material considerably. When fi lmmaker Neil Jordan and
Angela Carter adapted Carter’s story “Th e Company of Wolves” in
1984, they added details from two other related tales in Carter’s Th e
Bloody Chamber (1979): “Th e Werewolf ” and “Wolf-Alice.” Th ey took
a contemporary prologue from Carter’s own earlier radio play adapta-
tion to set up the dream logic of the piece. Screenwriter Noel Baker
similarly described his attempt to take “a whisper of a movie idea” and
make it into a feature fi lm. He had been asked to adapt not a short

20 A Theory of Adaptation

story but, in fact, Michael Turner’s book Hard Core Logo (1993), but
this book is a fragmentary narrative about the reunion of a 1980s punk
band that is made up of letters, songs, answering machine messages,
invoices, photos, hand-written notes, diary entries, contracts, and so
on. Baker said that he fi rst felt the challenge of the fragmentation itself
and then of the fact that it was “lean and spare, full of gaps and silences,
the eloquence of things left unsaid” (1997: 10). In the end, he noted
in his diary that this latter point was what made the task more fun,
more creative: “Must thank Turner for writing so little yet suggesting
so much” (14).

Of course, there is a wide range of reasons why adapters might
choose a particular story and then transcode it into a particular medium
or genre. As noted earlier, their aim might well be to economically and
artistically supplant the prior works. Th ey are just as likely to want to
contest the aesthetic or political values of the adapted text as to pay
homage. Th is, of course, is one of the reasons why the rhetoric of “fi del-
ity” is less than adequate to discuss the process of adaptation. What-
ever the motive, from the adapter’s perspective, adaptation is an act
of appropriating or salvaging, and this is always a double process of
interpreting and then creating something new.

If this sounds somewhat familiar, there is good reason, given the
long history in the West of imitatio or mimesis—imitation—as what
Aristotle saw as part of the instinctive behavior of humans and the
source of their pleasure in art (Wittkower 1965: 143). Imitation of
great works of art, in particular, was not intended only to capitalize on
the prestige and authority of the ancients or even to off er a pedagogi-
cal model (as the Rhetorica ad Herennium argued [I.ii.3 and IV.i.2]),
though it did both. It was also a form of creativity: “Imitatio is nei-
ther plagiarism nor a fl aw in the constitution of Latin literature. It is
a dynamic law of its existence” (West and Woodman 1979: ix). Like
classical imitation, adaptation also is not slavish copying; it is a process
of making the adapted material one’s own. In both, the novelty is in
what one does with the other text. Indeed, for “Longinus,” imitatio went
together with aemulatio, linking imitation and creativity (Russell 1979:
10). Perhaps one way to think about unsuccessful adaptations is not in

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 21

terms of infi delity to a prior text, but in terms of a lack of the creativity
and skill to make the text one’s own and thus autonomous.

For the reader, spectator, or listener, adaptation as adaptation is
unavoidably a kind of intertextuality if the receiver is acquainted with the
adapted text. It is an ongoing dialogical process, as Mikhail Bakhtin
would have said, in which we compare the work we already know with
the one we are experiencing (Stam 2000: 64). By stressing the relation
of individual works to other works and to an entire cultural system,
French semiotic and post-structuralist theorizing of intertextuality
(e.g., by Barthes 1971/1977; Kristeva 1969/1986) has been important
in its challenges to dominant post-Romantic notions of originality,
uniqueness, and autonomy. Instead, texts are said to be mosaics of cita-
tions that are visible and invisible, heard and silent; they are always
already written and read. So, too, are adaptations, but with the added
proviso that they are also acknowledged as adaptations of specifi c texts.
Often, the audience will recognize that a work is an adaptation of more
than one specifi c text. For instance, when later writers reworked—for
radio, stage, and even screen—John Buchan’s 1914 novel, Th e Th irty-
Nine Steps, they often adapted Alfred Hitchcock’s dark and cynical
1935 fi lm adaptation along with the novel (Glancy 2003: 99–100). And
fi lms about Dracula today are as often seen as adaptations of other ear-
lier fi lms as they are of Bram Stoker’s novel.

Th e Audience’s “Palimpsestuous” Intertextuality For audiences, such
adaptations are obviously “multilaminated”; they are directly and
openly connected to recognizable other works, and that connection is
part of their formal identity, but also of what we might call their her-
meneutic identity. Th is is what keeps under control the “background
noise” (Hinds 1998: 19) of all the other intertextual parallels to the
work the audience might make that are due to similar artistic and
social conventions, rather than specifi c works. In all cases, the engage-
ments with these other works in adaptations are extended ones, not
passing allusions.

Part of both the pleasure and the frustration of experiencing an
adaptation is the familiarity bred through repetition and memory.
Depending on our relationship with any of the traditionally choreo-
graphed versions of Tchaikovsky’s 1877 ballet, Swan Lake (and there

22 A Theory of Adaptation

are many of these, from the Petipa/Ivanov one to its reworkings by
Ashton and Dowell), we will be either delighted or irritated by
Matthew Bourne’s adaptation, with its updating and queer ironizing of
the popular classical ballet. His muscular male swans and their homo-
erotic, violent, and sexually charged choreography allow, among many
other things, the traditional pas de deux between the prince and the
swan to be a dance of equals—perhaps for the fi rst time. Th is prince
is no athletic assistant to a ballerina star. Not everyone in the audi-
ence will enjoy this transgression of and critical commentary upon the
sexual politics of the balletic tradition. But no matter what our response,
our intertextual expectations about medium and genre, as well as about
this specifi c work, are brought to the forefront of our attention. Th e
same will be true of experiencing the Australian Dance Th eatre’s
version, entitled Birdbrain (2001), with its hyperspeed edgy choreogra-
phy, fi lm clips, and mechanized music. As audience members, we need
memory in order to experience diff erence as well as similarity.

Modes of Engagement

A doubled defi nition of adaptation as a product (as extensive, particular
transcoding) and as a process (as creative reinterpretation and palimpses-
tic intertextuality) is one way to address the various dimensions of the
broader phenomenon of adaptation. An emphasis on process allows us to
expand the traditional focus of adaptation studies on medium-specifi city
and individual comparative case studies in order to consider as well rela-
tions among the major modes of engagement: that is, it permits us to
think about how adaptations allow people to tell, show, or interact with
stories. We can be told or shown a story, each in a range of diff erent
media. However, the perspective, and thus the grammar, changes with
the third mode of engagement; as audience members, we interact with
stories in, for instance, the new media, from virtual reality to machin-
ima. All three modes are arguably “immersive,” though to diff erent
degrees and in diff erent ways: for example, the telling mode (a novel)
immerses us through imagination in a fi ctional world; the showing mode
(plays and fi lms) immerses us through the perception of the aural and the
visual—the latter in a way related to that of Renaissance perspective
painting and Baroque trompe l’oeil (Ryan 2001: 3); the participatory

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 23

mode (videogames) immerses us physically and kinesthetically. But if all
are, in some sense of the word, “immersive,” only the last of them is usu-
ally called “interactive.” Neither the act of looking at and interpreting
black marks—words or notes—on a white page nor that of perceiving
and interpreting a direct representation of a story on the stage or screen is
in any way passive; both are imaginatively, cognitively, and emotionally
active. But the move to participatory modes in which we also engage
physically with the story and its world—whether it be in a violent action
game or a role-playing or puzzle/skill testing one—is not more active but
certainly active in a diff erent way.

In the telling mode—in narrative literature, for example—our
engagement begins in the realm of imagination, which is simultane-
ously controlled by the selected, directing words of the text and liber-
ated—that is, unconstrained by the limits of the visual or aural. We
can stop reading at any point; we can re-read or skip ahead; we hold
the book in our hands and feel, as well as see, how much of the story
remains to be read. But with the move to the mode of showing, as in
fi lm and stage adaptations, we are caught in an unrelenting, forward-
driving story. And we have moved from the imagination to the realm
of direct perception—with its mix of both detail and broad focus.
Th e performance mode teaches us that language is not the only way
to express meaning or to relate stories. Visual and gestural representa-
tions are rich in complex associations; music off ers aural “equivalents”
for characters’ emotions and, in turn, provokes aff ective responses in
the audience; sound, in general, can enhance, reinforce, or even con-
tradict the visual and verbal aspects. On the other hand, however, a
shown dramatization cannot approximate the complicated verbal play
of told poetry or the interlinking of description, narration, and expla-
nation that is so easy for prose narrative to accomplish. Telling a story
in words, either orally or on paper, is never the same as showing it visu-
ally and aurally in any of the many performance media available.

Some theorists argue that, at a basic level, there is no signifi cant
diff erence between a verbal text and visual images, that, as W.J.T.
Mitchell outlines this position, “communicative, expressive acts, narra-
tion, argument, description, exposition and other so-called ‘speech acts’
are not medium-specifi c, are not ‘proper’ to some medium or another”

24 A Theory of Adaptation

(1994: 160). (See also Cohen 1991b.) A consideration of the diff erences
between the modes of engagement of telling and showing, however,
suggests quite the contrary: each mode, like each medium, has its own
specifi city, if not its own essence. In other words, no one mode is inher-
ently good at doing one thing and not another; but each has at its dis-
posal diff erent means of expression—media and genres—and so can
aim at and achieve certain things better than others.

Consider, for example, the interesting technical task the British nov-
elist E. M. Forster set himself at one point in his 1910 novel Howards
End: how to represent in told words the eff ect and the meaning of per-
formed music—music that his readers would have to imagine, of course,
and not hear. He begins the novel’s fi fth chapter with these words: “It
will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the
most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man” (For-
ster 1910/1941: 31). Forster goes on to describe the eff ect on each mem-
ber of the Schlegel family, whose ears this “sublime noise” penetrates.
In a telling mode, a novel can do this: it can take us into the minds
and feelings of characters at will. However, the focus of this episode,
in which the family attends a symphony concert in Queen’s Hall in
London together, is specifi cally on one character, Helen Schlegel—
young, newly hurt in love, and therefore someone whose response to
the music is intensely personal and deeply tied to her emotional trou-
bles at the time.

As the orchestra plays the third movement, we are told that she
hears “a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end”
(32). In the fi rst movement, she had heard “heroes and shipwrecks,” but
here it is terrible goblins she hears, and an “interlude of elephants danc-
ing” (32). Th ese creatures are frightening because of what Helen sees as
their casualness: they “observed in passing that there was no such thing
as splendour or heroism in the world” (32). Forster continues, telling
us that: “Helen could not contradict them, for, once at all events, she
had felt the same, and had seen the reliable walls of youth collapse.
Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Th e goblins were right”
(33). Totally moved, not to mention upset, by the end of the piece, she
fi nds she has to leave her family and be alone. As the novel puts it: “Th e
music had summed up to her all that had happened or could happen

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 25

in her career. She read it as a tangible statement, which could never be
superceded” (34). She leaves the hall, taking by mistake the umbrella
of a stranger, one Leonard Bast, who will play an important part in the
rest of her life and, indeed, in the rest of the novel.

What happens when this told scene is transposed to the show-
ing mode—in this case, to fi lm—in the Merchant/Ivory production
adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala? Th e concert, in a sense, remains,
but Helen attends alone. It is not a full orchestral concert this time,
but a four-handed piano performance, accompanying a lecture on
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. A few of Forster’s own words remain,
but very few. Because we can only see Helen on fi lm and not get into
her head, we can only guess at her thoughts. So in the shown version,
it is not she who experiences the “panic and emptiness” of the goblins;
it is simply the lecturer who uses this as an image in his explanation
of the piece in response to a question from a member of the audience.
In fact, Helen, from what we can see, seems rather more bored than
upset by the whole experience. We do get to hear the full orchestral
version of the symphony on the soundtrack (nondiegetically), but only
after she leaves the hall, pursued by the young man whose umbrella she
has taken by mistake.

Although Forster uses this scene to tell us about the imaginative and
emotional world of Helen Schlegel, the fi lm makes it the occasion to
show us Helen meeting Leonard Bast in an appropriately culturally
loaded context. In terms of plot action, that is indeed what happens
in this scene, and so this is what the fi lm aims to achieve. Interest-
ingly, what the showing mode can do that the telling one cannot is
to let us actually hear Beethoven’s music. We cannot, however, get at
the interior of the characters’ minds as they listen; they must visibly,
physically embody their responses for the camera to record, or they
must talk about their reactions. Of course, this fi lm contains lots of
performed talk about music, art, and many other things, and not only
in this rather overt lecture form.

Interacting with a story is diff erent again from being shown or told
it—and not only because of the more immediate kind of immersion it
allows. As in a play or fi lm, in virtual reality or a videogame, language
alone does not have to conjure up a world; that world is present before

26 A Theory of Adaptation

our eyes and ears. But in the showing mode we do not physically enter
that world and proceed to act within it. Because of its visceral impact,
a scripted paintball war game would be considered by some to be a
diff erent kind of adaptation of a war story than, say, even the graphic
violence of a fi lm like Saving Private Ryan (1998). Civil War battle
reenactments may involve role-playing, and new narrative media works
may require database “combinatorics,” but, in both cases, the audience’s
engagement is diff erent in kind than when we are told or shown the
same story.

Stories, however, do not consist only of the material means of their
transmission (media) or the rules that structure them (genres). Th ose
means and those rules permit and then channel narrative expectations
and communicate narrative meaning to someone in some context, and
they are created by someone with that intent. Th ere is, in short, a wider
communicative context that any theory of adaptation would do well
to consider. Th at context will change with the mode of presentation
or engagement: the telling mode can use a variety of material media,
as can the live or mediated showing mode, just as each medium can
support a variety of genres. But media distinctions alone will not nec-
essarily allow the kind of diff erentiations that adaptations call to our
attention. For instance, “machinima” is a form of fi lmmaking that uses
computer game technology to make fi lms within the virtual reality of
a game engine. As such, it’s a hybrid form, but basically the medium is
electronic. Th e machinima adaptation of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1817
poem “Ozymandias” (by Hugh Hancock for Strange Company) is
indeed a digitalized visualization of the poem’s “story” about a man
walking across a solitary desert and fi nding a ruined statue of a king
inscribed with a chillingly ironic message about worldly glory and the
power of time. Even if the fi gure of the man on screen creates suspense
by having to wipe the sand off the fi nal line of the inscription (“Look
upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair”), we experience little in the
digital version of the frisson we feel reading the poem’s devastating
irony. Considering medium alone would not be useful to getting at the
success (or failure) of this adaptation: although this machinima is in a
digital medium, it is not interactive. If anything, the act of interpreting

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 27

what is really a shown story here is even less actively engaging than
reading the told version.

Th is is not to say that we do not engage diff erently with diff erent
media, but the lines of diff erentiation are not as clear as we might
expect. Th e private and individual experience of reading is, in fact,
closer to the private visual and domestic spaces of television, radio,
DVD, video, and computer than it is to the public and communal
viewing experience in a dark theater of any kind. And when we sit in
the dark, quiet and still, being shown real live bodies speaking or sing-
ing on stage, our level and kind of engagement are diff erent than when
we sit in front of a screen and technology mediates “reality” for us.
When we play a fi rst-person shooter videogame and become an active
character in a narrative world and viscerally experience the action,
our response is diff erent again. Medium alone cannot explain what
happens when an interactive videogame is adapted into a museum-
displayed digital work of art, for it becomes a way to show, rather than
interact with, a story. For instance, in a piece by Israeli American video
artist Eddo Stern called Vietnam Romance (2003), the viewer fi nds that
the game’s enemies have already been taken out by the artist-shooter,
leaving us to watch—in other words, to be shown—only a series of
empty sets that have been manipulated to recall classic shots from war
fi lms, from M*A*S*H to Apocalypse Now. In reversing the intended out-
come by breaking all the rules of game action, the artist has ensured
that the audience cannot and does not engage in the same manner as it
would with the interactive game. Likewise, Stern’s Fort Paladin: Amer-
ica’s Army presents a scale model of a medieval castle within which a
video screen reveals—again—the fi nal results of the artist’s mastery of
the U.S. military’s game used for recruiting, also called America’s Army.
Th e work and the pleasure of the observing audience here are diff erent
from the kinetic and cognitive involvement of the interactive gamer.

Framing Adaptation

Keeping these three modes of engagement—telling, showing, and inter-
acting with stories—in the forefront can allow for certain precisions
and distinctions that a focus on medium alone cannot. It also allows
for linkages across media that a concentration on medium-specifi city

28 A Theory of Adaptation

can eff ace, and thus moves us away from just the formal defi nitions of
adaptation to consider the process. Th ese ways of engaging with stories
do not, of course, ever take place in a vacuum. We engage in time and
space, within a particular society and a general culture. Th e contexts
of creation and reception are material, public, and economic as much
as they are cultural, personal, and aesthetic. Th is explains why, even in
today’s globalized world, major shifts in a story’s context—that is, for
example, in a national setting or time period—can change radically
how the transposed story is interpreted, ideologically and literally. How
do we react today, for instance, when a male director adapts a woman’s
novel or when an American director adapts a British novel, or both—as
in Neil LaBute’s fi lm version of A.S. Byatt’s 1991 novel, Possession? In
shifting cultures and therefore sometimes shifting languages, adapta-
tions make alterations that reveal much about the larger contexts of
reception and production. Adapters often “indigenize” stories, to use
an anthropological term (Friedman 2004). In Germany, for instance,
Shakespeare’s works were appropriated through Romantic transla-
tions and, through an assertion of the Bard’s Germanic affi nity, used to
generate a German national literature. However strange it may seem,
this is why the plays of an enemy-culture’s major dramatist continued
to be performed—with major variations that could be called adapta-
tions—throughout the two World Wars. Th e National Socialists, in
fact, made these works both political, with private values stressed as
being subordinated to public ones in the tragedies, and heroic, with
leadership themes dominating (Habicht 1989: 110–15).

Even a shift of time frame can reveal much about when a work is
created and received. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel, Th e Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, has been adapted many times for the
stage and for the movie and television screens. (To get a sense of the
whole range, see Geduld 1983.) Th e showing mode entails embody-
ing and enacting, and thereby often ends up spelling out important
ambiguities that are central to the told version—especially, in this case,
Hyde’s undefi ned and unspecifi ed evil. Because of mode change, these
various versions have had to show—and thus to “fi gure”—that evil
physically, and the means they have chosen to do so are revealing of
the historical and political moments of their production. In 1920, at the

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 29

start of Prohibition, we witness a sexual fall through alcohol in John
Robertson’s silent fi lm; in the 1971 Hammer fi lm, Dr. Jekyll and Sister
Hyde (directed by Roy Ward Baker), we see instead Britain’s confused
responses to feminism after the 1960s (see McCracken-Flesher 1994:
183–94). For economic reasons, adapters often rely on selecting works to
adapt that are well known and that have proved popular over time; for
legal reasons, they often choose works that are no longer copyrighted.

Technology, too, has probably always framed, not to mention driven,
adaptation, in that new media have constantly opened the door for new
possibilities for all three modes of engagement. Lately, new electronic
technologies have made what we might call fi delity to the imagina-
tion—rather than a more obvious fi delity to reality—possible in new
ways, well beyond earlier animation techniques and special eff ects.
We can now enter and act within those worlds, through 3-D digital
technology. One of the central beliefs of fi lm adaptation theory is that
audiences are more demanding of fi delity when dealing with classics,
such as the work of Dickens or Austen. But a whole new set of cult
popular classics, especially the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, Philip Pullman,
and J.K. Rowling, are now being made visible and audible on stage, in
the movie theater, on the video and computer screens, and in multiple
gaming formats, and their readers are proving to be just as demanding.
Although our imaginative visualizations of literary worlds are always
highly individual, the variance among readers is likely even greater in
fantasy fi ction than in realist fi ction. What does this mean when these
fans see one particular version on screen that comes from the direc-
tor’s imagination rather their own (see Boyum 1985)? Th e answer(s), of
course, can be found in the reviews and the audience reactions to the
recent adaptations of Th e Lord of the Rings stories and the Harry Potter
novels. Now that I know what an enemy orc or a game of Quidditch
(can) look like (from the movies), I suspect I will never be able to recap-
ture my fi rst imagined versions again. Palimpsests make for permanent
change.

Nicholas Wright’s dramatic adaptation of Pullman’s His Dark Materi-
als trilogy had to cope with the fact that the books had sold three million
copies and had been translated into thirty-six languages. Th e adapter
had to fi nd a way to visualize and then bring to physical life on stage—

30 A Theory of Adaptation

without the technological advantages of fi lm—important elements that
the fans would demand be done well: things like the novels’ multiple
parallel worlds, the windows cut to move characters into each world,
and especially the wondrous creatures known as “daemons”—animals
of the opposite sex that embody the inner soul of characters. Th ese were
technical issues as well as imaginative ones, because Wright knew the
novels’ fans would be a demanding audience. Th e two plays that were
fi nally seen in London at the National Th eatre in 2003 and revised in
2004 were set within an elaborate “paratextual” context in order to pre-
pare the audience and perhaps forestall any objections: the program was
larger and much more informative than most, off ering photos, inter-
views with the novelist and the adapter, maps, a glossary of places, peo-
ple, things, and “other beings,” and a list of literary intertexts.

As this suggests, a further framing of adaptation across all modes of
engagement is economic. Broadway adapts from Hollywood; noveliza-
tions are timed to coincide with the release of a fi lm. November 2001
saw the infamous simultaneous international release of the fi lm and
multiplatform videogame versions of the fi rst installment of the story of
Harry Potter. Book publishers produce new editions of adapted literary
works to coincide with the fi lm version and invariably put photos of the
movie’s actors or scenes on the cover. General economic issues, such as
the fi nancing and distribution of diff erent media and art forms, must
be considered in any general theorizing of adaptation. To appeal to a
global market or even a very particular one, a television series or a stage
musical may have to alter the cultural, regional, or historical specifi cs
of the text being adapted. A bitingly satiric novel of social pretense
and pressure may be transformed into a benign comedy of manners in
which the focus of attention is on the triumph of the individual, as has
happened in most American television and fi lm versions of Th ackeray’s
Vanity Fair (1848). Videogames derived from popular fi lms and vice
versa are clearly ways to capitalize on a “franchise” and extend its mar-
ket. But how diff erent is this from Shakespeare’s decision to write a
play for his theater based on that familiar story about two teenage lov-
ers or, for that matter, from Charles Gounod’s choice to compose what
he hoped would be a hit opera about them? In their diff erent ways,
Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner were both deeply involved in the

Beginning to Theorize Adaptation 31

fi nancial aspects of their operatic adaptations, yet we tend to reserve
our negatively judgmental rhetoric for popular culture, as if it is more
tainted with capitalism than is high art.

In beginning to explore this wide range of theoretical issues surround-
ing adaptation, I have been struck by the unproductive nature of both
that negative evaluation of popular cultural adaptations as derivative and
secondary and that morally loaded rhetoric of fi delity and infi delity used
in comparing adaptations to “source” texts. Like others, I have found
myself asking whether we could use any less compromised image to
think about adaptation as both process and product. Robert Stam, too,
has seen one intriguing possibility in the fi lm Adaptation, despite all its
ironies; because his focus is specifi cally on novel to fi lm adaptation, he
fi nds an analogy between these two media and the fi lm’s dichotomous
screenwriting twins (or split personality). He is also attracted to the
metaphor of adaptations as hybrid forms, as “meeting places of diff erent
‘species,’” like the orchid (Stam 2005b: 2). For Stam, mutations—fi lmic
adaptations—can help their “source novel ‘survive’” (3).

Because my focus is on modes of engagement rather than on two
specifi c media or on “sources,” diff erent things have caught my atten-
tion. I was struck by the other obvious analogy to adaptation suggested
in the fi lm by Darwin’s theory of evolution, where genetic adaptation
is presented as the biological process by which something is fi tted to a
given environment. To think of narrative adaptation in terms of a story’s
fi t and its process of mutation or adjustment, through adaptation, to a
particular cultural environment is something I fi nd suggestive. Stories
also evolve by adaptation and are not immutable over time. Sometimes,
like biological adaptation, cultural adaptation involves migration to
favorable conditions: stories travel to diff erent cultures and diff erent
media. In short, stories adapt just as they are adapted.

In his 1976 book on Darwinian theory called Th e Selfi sh Gene,
Richard Dawkins bravely suggested the existence of a cultural paral-
lel to Darwin’s biological theory: “Cultural transmission is analogous
to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can
give rise to a form of evolution” (1976/1989: 189). Language, fashions,
technology, and the arts, he argued, “all evolve in historical time in a
way that looks like highly speeded up genetic evolution, but has really

32 A Theory of Adaptation

nothing to do with genetic evolution” (190). Nonetheless, he posits the
parallel existence of what he calls “memes”—units of cultural transmis-
sion or units of imitation—that, like genes, are “replicators” (191–92).
But unlike genetic transmission, when memes are transmitted, they
always change, for they are subject to “continuous mutation, and also
to blending” (195), in part to adapt for survival in the “meme pool.”
Although Dawkins is thinking about ideas when he writes of memes,
stories also are ideas and could be said to function in this same way.
Some have great fi tness through survival (persistence in a culture) or
reproduction (number of adaptations). Adaptation, like evolution, is a
transgenerational phenomenon. Some stories obviously have more “sta-
bility and penetrance in the cultural environment,” as Dawkins would
put it (193). Stories do get retold in diff erent ways in new material and
cultural environments; like genes, they adapt to those new environ-
ments by virtue of mutation—in their “off spring” or their adaptations.
And the fi ttest do more than survive; they fl ourish.

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