Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory
Author(s): THOMAS LEITCH
Source: Criticism , Spring 2003, Vol. 45, No. 2, Special Film Issue Part Two: New and/or
Neglected Approaches To Understanding Moving Images (Spring 2003), pp. 149-171
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23126342
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THOMAS LEITCH
Twelve Fallacies in
Contemporary Adaptation Theory
What could be more audacious than to argue that the study of moving images
as adaptations of literary works, one of the very first shelters under which cin
ema studies originally entered the academy, has been neglected? Yet that is ex
actly what this essay will argue: that despite its venerable history, widespread
practice, and apparent influence, adaptation theory has remained tangential to
the thrust of film study because it has never been undertaken with conviction
and theoretical rigor. By examining a dozen interlinked fallacies that have kept
adaptation theory from fulfilling its analytical promise, I hope to claim for ad
aptation theory more of the power it deserves.
1. There is such a thing as contemporary adaptation theory. This is the found
ing fallacy of adaptation studies, and the most important reason they have
been so largely ineffectual—because they have been practiced in a theoretical
vacuum, without the benefit of what Robert B. Ray has called "a presiding po
etics."1 There is, as the preceding sentence acknowledges, such a thing as ad
aptation studies. It is pursued in dozens of books and hundreds of articles in
Literature/Film Quarterly and in classrooms across the country, from high
school to graduate school, in courses with names like "Dickens and Film" and
"From Page to Screen." But this flood of study of individual adaptations pro
ceeds on the whole without the support of any more general theoretical ac
count of what actually happens, or what ought to happen, when a group of
filmmakers set out to adapt a literary text. As Brian McFarlane has recently
observed: "In view of the nearly sixty years of writing about the adaptation of
novels into film ... it is depressing to find at what a limited, tentative stage
the discourse has remained."2 Despite the appearance of more recent method
ologies from the empiricism of Morris Beja to the neo-Aristotelianism of James
Griffith, the most influential general account of cinema's relation to literature
continues to be George Bluestone's tendentious Novels into Film, now nearly
half a century old. Bluestone's categorical and essentialist treatment of the rela
tions between movies and the books they are based on neglects or begs many
Criticism, Spring 2003, Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 149-71
Copyright © 2003 Wayne State University Press, Deroit, MI 48201
149
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150 Thomas Leitch
crucial questions, and more recent commentators, even when they are as sharp
as McFarlane (who will therefore claim particularly close attention in this
essay) in taking exception to Bluestone, have largely allowed him to frame the
terms of the debate.
Hence several fundamental questions in adaptation theory remain un
asked, let alone unanswered. Everyone knows, for example, that movies are a
collaborative medium, but is adaptation similarly collaborative, or is it the work
of a single agent—the screenwriter or director—with the cast and crew behav
ing the same way as if their film were based on an original screenplay? Since
virtually all feature films work from a pre-existing written text, the screenplay,
how is a film's relation to its literary source different from its relation to its
screenplay? Why has the novel, rather than the stage play or the short story,
come to serve as the paradigm for cinematic adaptations of every kind? Given
the myriad differences, not only between literary and cinematic texts, but be
tween successive cinematic adaptations of a given literary text, or for that matter
between different versions of a given story in the same medium, what exactly
is it that film adaptations adapt, or are supposed to adapt? Finally, how does
the relation between an adaptation and the text it is explicitly adapting compare
to its intertextual relationships with scores of other precursor texts?
The institutional matrix of adaptation study—the fact that movies are so
often used in courses like "Shakespeare and Film" as heuristic intertexts,
the spoonful of sugar that helps the Bard's own text go down; the fact that
studies of particular literary texts and their cinematic adaptations greatly out
number more general considerations of what is at stake in adapting a text from
one medium to another; the fact that even most general studies of adaptation
are shaped by the case studies they seem designed mainly to illuminate—
guarantees the operation of adaptation studies on a severe economy of theoret
ical principles which have ossified into a series of unvoiced and fallacious
bromides most often taking the form of "binary oppositions that poststructur
alist theory has taught us to deconstruct: literature versus cinema, high culture
versus mass culture, original versus copy."3 Precisely because these bromides
are rarely articulated, they have retained the insidious power of Ibsen's ghosts:
the power to direct discussion even among analysts who ought to know better.
2. Differences between literary and cinematic texts are rooted in essential prop
erties of their respective media. This fallacy was first promulgated by Bluestone
and by Siegfried Kracauer's roughly contemporaneous Theory of Film, which
opens with the sweeping statement, "This study rests upon the assumption
that each medium has a specific nature which invites certain kinds of commu
nications while obstructing others."4 More recently, it has been one of the rare
articles of faith that has actually come under such general debate that few the
orists would probably admit to subscribing to it these days. Nonetheless, it has
been given new impetus in the past ten years by the reprinting in the last two
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Adaptation Theory 151
editions of the Oxford anthology Film Theory and Critic
man's accurately but fallaciously entitled essay, "What
Films Can't (and Vice Versa)."5 The most influential atta
view that novels and films are suited to fundamentally
Chatman's view, assertion and depiction respectively—be
specific to their media have taken two forms. One is th
advanced by F. E. Sparshott and V. F. Perkins6 that man
novels break the rules the essential qualities of their m
scribe. The other is the more general attack Noel Carrol
what he calls Rudolf Arnheim's "specificity thesis" on th
sophical gratuitousness: "There is no rationale for the sy
truth it is only a collection. Thus, we have no need for
for the question it answers—'Why is there a system of d
really an admissible question at all."7 But these attacks c
mented by a closer consideration of the alleged specifics
Chatman, for instance, dismisses explicitly descript
mentary in movies as uncinematic on the grounds that
scription but merely description by literary assertion t
Would anybody writing today argue that the highly ass
voiceover commentary by the murdered Joe Gillis in Su
not adapted from a literary source, was inessential to th
as McFarlane notes, voiceover narration by its nature "
intermittent as distinct from the continuing nature o
person narration"—or, in Chatman's terms, that it was
was literary?9 Chatman argues that such "arguably des
Professor Jordan's amputated finger in The 39 Steps, th
in Notorious, and Marion Crane's staring dead eye in Psy
neutic rather than descriptive because "for all their capacit
tion, these close-ups in no way invite aesthetic con
generation of Hitchcock commentary has disagreed. The
thetic contemplation because they are descriptive and as
In arguing from the other side that the camera's esse
picting without describing is confirmed by the use of t
eye style"11 to characterize passages of neutral, Hemingw
els that approach the condition of cinema, Chatman is
essentialism into mistaking how both novels and films w
Consider one the most famous "camera eye" passages
scription of Sam Spade awakened in The Maltese Falcon b
Archer, his partner, has been shot to death:
Spade's thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate
measured quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper
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152 Thomas Leitch
flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the
middle, thumbs rolling the paper's inner edge down and up under the
outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to
the paper cylinder's ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap,
left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and
thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting
their end and lifting the other to Spade's mouth.12
According to Chatman, this depiction of Spade rolling a cigarette should be
utterly neutral rather than assertive. But it is not only not neutral; it is much
less neutral, much more assertive, than it would be if it had been included,
for instance, in John Huston's 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon, which
substitutes a brief but highly revealing telephone call Spade makes to his sec
retary Effie Perrine ("You'll have to break the news to Iva. I'd fry first") before
dissolving to Spade's arrival at Bush and Stockton Streets. The perspective of
aesthetic history has offered several ways to read this passage. It is first of all
a stylistic tour de force, an imitation of the dogged routines Nick Adams fol
lows in pitching camp and making pancakes in Hemingway's "Big Two
Hearted River." In addition, its apparent neutrality can be read as a commen
tary on Spade's mechanical coldness, the emotional detachment from his part
ner's murder that will make him Archer's ironically perfect avenger. What it
figures most powerfully, however, is Spade's remoteness, not from Archer, but
from us. Like Nick Adams, Spade is presumably in the grip of powerful emo
tions during this scene. Not only are the emotions not described; the resolute
eschewing of psychological description makes the suppression of these emo
tions, whether it is Spade's or Dashiell Hammett's, the scene's leading issue.
Pauline Kael once remarked that "Huston was a good enough screenwriter to
see that Hammett had already written the scenario."13 But Hammett's novel,
though it suppresses any explicit indication of Spade's thoughts or feelings as
completely as Huston's film, is much more disturbing, and most disturbing in
its most apparently 'cinematic' passages, because readers of novels, unlike
viewers of movies, expect a certain amount of psychological description and
are troubled, even if they do not know why, if it is suppressed.
This line of reasoning might seem to substitute one essentialist argument
for another. Novels are not assertive and descriptive, as Chatman claims, in
contradistinction to films; instead novels are the medium that gravitates
toward psychological analysis, so that the absence of such analysis becomes a
highly marked, non-novelistic or cinematic device. It would be more accurate,
however, to consider all Chatman's arguments together and conclude that they
apply not to essential properties of novels and films, but to specific reading
habits that are grounded in the history of fashion, taste, and analysis rather
than in any specific technical properties of novels and films.
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Adaptation Theory 153
Hence voiceover commentary has come to seem less
of the perceptive analysis of its salient effects by J. P. Tel
Hitchcock's closeups seem more worthy of aesthetic co
commentators have refashioned Hitchcock the storytell
artist. Hammett's silence about Sam Spade's thought seem
least in part because Huston's film has shown by contr
can be naturalized instead of emphasized. Contemporar
much more likely to mine movies for assertions, from
gender politics, as if they were novels, but that only me
not films themselves, has become, as Chatman might say
to be fair, more effective. Though novels and films may
ment in the history of narrative theory to have essentia
ties, those properties are functions of their historical m
media themselves.
3. Literary texts are verbal, films visual. Of all the explicitly stated fallacies
that have substituted for theoretical principles in adaptation study, this is the
most enduring and pernicious. Although the more general principle that liter
ature and film are distinguished by essential properties of their presentational
media has at least come in for lively debate by theorists ever since Sparshott
and Perkins, film scholars have been much less inclined to reconsider the im
plications of this more specific bromide. Yet it is obviously untrue, not because
literary texts are not verbal, but because films are not strictly speaking visual.
At least they have not been purely visual for at least seventy-five years—most
of film history. Films since the coming of synchronized sound, and perhaps
even before, have been audio-visual, not visual, depending as they do on
soundtracks as well as image tracks for their effects. Commentators who con
tinue to brush aside synchronized sound as a mere appendage to the visual
essence of cinema are overlooking several powerful developments in film his
tory. Movies like Citizen Kane have introduced sound-driven radio aesthetics
into cinema; even stripped of its spectacular visuals, Orson Welles's landmark
film makes perfect sense because of the radio-shaped continuity of its sound
track. More recent filmmaking has overlapped increasingly with television, a
medium whose narratives are so largely driven by their soundtracks rather
than their image tracks that Welles called television "illustrated radio."14 In an
even more recent move toward greater synergy, movies have been marketed
through their musical soundtracks as well as vice-versa.
Cinema since the silent era has been an audio-visual medium that de
pends on engaging exactly two of its audience's five senses as if they were suf
ficient to constitute the sensory envelope of an entire world. It would make
more sense to define cinema as a non-olfactory medium—that is, a medium
that has the technological capacity to incorporate smells but chooses not to do
so—than to define it as a visual medium. Anyone who doubts the dependence
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154 Thomas Leitch
of contemporary cinema on the complex interrelations of visual and auditory
stimulation should teach a course on silent melodrama, whose visual track re
quires viewing habits quite as foreign as those of Sanskrit interpreters from
modern audiences' acculturated dependence on a finely-calculated series of
combinations of sounds and images. But movies as we know them are not sim
ply an audio-visual medium, since, as McFarlane observes, "the novel draws
on a wholly verbal sign system, the film variously, and sometimes simultane
ously, on visual, aural, and verbal signifiers."15 Fifty years ago, Laurence Olivier
recognized that in bringing Henry V and Hamlet to the screen, he was not
merely responsible for translating Shakespeare's poetry into cinematic images;
he was equally responsible for staging poetic set-pieces his audience would
have come to the movies specifically to hear, speeches like "To be or not to be"
and "Once more into the breach, my friends." Movies cannot therefore legiti
mately be contrasted with literary texts on the grounds of their visual signify
ing system, because their actual signifying system, combining images and
sounds and excluding information that might be processed by the other three
senses, is a great deal more subtle and complex than visual iconicity.
Instead of saying that literary texts are verbal and movies aren't, it would
be more accurate to say that movies depend on prescribed, unalterable visual
and verbal performances in a way literary texts don't.16 Cary Grant, James Stew
art, John Wayne, even Marilyn Monroe are as well-remembered for their dis
tinctive voices as for their distinctive looks. This is not necessarily a good
thing. An audience watching a film version of The Importance of Being Earnest
is constrained to hear Oscar Wilde's epigrams in exactly the way the perform
ers are delivering them, whereas the audience reading Wilde's play can imag
ine them paced and inflected any way they like. One of the often-remarked
differences between movies and plays, in fact, is that the iterative, interactive
nature of dramatic performance allows performers to adjust their perform
ances from night to night so that there will never be a single definitive per
formance of Everybody Comes to Rick's in the way there is a definitive
performance of Casablanca, at least in the absence of a film remake that might
threaten the original's primacy.
Because films depend on screenplays which in turn often depend on liter
ary source material, in fact, they are doubly performative. Actors and actresses
are translating into performance a written script which is itself an adaptation
of a prior literary source, with the important difference that the script is a per
formance text—a text that requires interpretation first by its performers and
then by its audience for completion—whereas a literary text requires only in
terpretation by its readers.
4. Novels are better than films. I have specified novels rather than literary
texts here for two reasons. Using the term "literary texts" instead would al
ready beg the question because "literature" carries an honorific charge "cin
ema" does not. Since even the term "classic cinema" is a long way from having
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Adaptation Theory 155
the same implication as "literary classic," written text
films, would seem to fall into two distinct orders, and a
adapt a work of literature could only hope to fall into a
does not yet have a name. Although theater critics have
to the canned nature of cinema, which freezes a single
ever instead of allowing retakes every night, the more g
literary texts are richer, subtler, or more sophisticated
confined largely to the novel. No critic to my knowled
short stories are better than movies.
The tenacity of the prejudice in favor of novels and ag
doubt in part to the impossibility of refuting it. Though
most audiences to sit through most feature films than it
most novels, films, as many commentators realized long
as many telling details as novels. If their stories are unli
they can register behavioral traits and background detai
ing their more limited running time they are capable o
attention from a mass audience, even though they will s
to less attentive viewers. The old saw that movies can be r
ways than novels because their critical history is shorter
worse less relevant every year, as the flood of Internet co
tion and Memento does its best to make up for the hun
that has made "The Turn of the Screw" a classic of inter
Since there is no prima facie reason why novels shou
better than movies, the question to ask is not why this
but why it is so stoutly, albeit tacitly, maintained. Entre
forms have always greeted new rivals with a suspicion a
especially if economic power is at stake, as it was in the
predominant mode of entertainment for the rising mid
ago. So the snobbery opera lovers feel for devotees of
echoed by the snobbery with which fans of Rodgers and
their cinematic incarnations. It is possible, in addition
"once there may have been little debate about the fact tha
ance of Shakespeare was far superior to a filmic reprodu
in the bad old days before Olivier and Welles, movies w
In these more enlightened times, however, "the cinem
time and attention when we argue the relative value an
and literature"17 because the arguments against cinem
was" under the Hollywood moguls, the star system, and
target audience rather than "film-as-it-is"18 in the age
production and niche marketing. Even now, of course, m
ously a mass medium that seeks as broad an audience a
Titanic is disdained because it tries to provide some
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156 Thomas Leitch
historical re-creation, epic sweep, class warfare, adolescent romance, hissable
villains, state-of-the-art visual effects, broken china—even though Shake
speare is praised for the corresponding reason. And of course cinema is a
capital-intensive, publicity-intensive medium whose overhyped failures, un
like the failed novels that sink in merciful silence, become negative media
events in their own right. How could a medium that produced Heaven's Gate,
Ishtar, and Mom and Dad Save the World ever compete with the great tradition
of the novel, the vast majority of whose exemplars have long faded from mem
ory? Beyond all these prejudices, however, there is one final fallacious assump
tion that must be examined in closer detail.
5. Novels deal in concepts, films in percepts. These terms are derived from
Bluestone's observation that "where the moving image comes to us directly
through perception, language must be filtered through the screen of concep
tual apprehension. And the conceptual process, though allied to and often tak
ing its point of departure from the precept, represents a different mode of
experience, a different way of apprehending the universe."19 On its own terms
this observation seems unexceptionable. The visual markers films use for dogs,
for instance, including such different markers as Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, and
Huckleberry Hound, are all iconic rather than indexical, like the words dog,
hound, and pooch. The auditory markers films uses for dogs—barking, whin
ing, growling—are so much more obviously iconic that most audiences cannot
distinguish these recorded sounds from their sources. Fallacies enter only
when the conceptual is defined in contradistinction to the perceptual, as an
exclusive property of verbal texts, and the pleasures movies offer their audi
ences are defined in terms that privilege the perceptual.
Such steps have often been taken both by ontologists and apologists for
movies. In reserving the notion of "conceptual process"20 for readers of prose
fiction, for example, Gerald Mast evidently assumes that the kind of compe
tence required to make sense of a fictional film is non-conceptual and that
moviegoers watch films only for their kinesthetic images, not for their concep
tual implications. But this argument overlooks the fact that virtually all films
screened for the purpose of entertainment are fictional narratives which in
voke not only visual codes but auditory codes, narrative codes, fictional codes,
and a rhetoric of figuration. Interpreting and integrating these codes into the
single signifying system of a given film surely requires as much conceptual ini
tiative and agility as interpreting the verbal (and narrative and fictional and
figural) signifying system of a given novel. Images may be percepts, but the
fictional narratives that overwhelmingly draw audiences into movie theaters
are not.
Nor are cinematic images as neutral and innocent as Bluestone and Mast
assume. In "A Future for the Novel" (1956), Alain Robbe-Grillet contrasted
novels and their film adaptations by arguing that
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Adaptation Theory
in the initial novel, the objects and gestures forming the very fabric
of the plot disappeared completely, leaving behind only their signifi
cations: the empty chair became only absence or expectation, the
hand placed on a shoulder became a sign of friendliness, the bars on
the window became only the impossibility of leaving. . . . But in the
cinema, one sees the chair, the movement of the hand, the shape of
the bars. What they signify remains obvious, but instead of monopo
lizing our attention, it becomes something added, even something in
excess . . . because what affects us . . . are the gestures themselves . . .
to which the cinema has suddenly (and unintentionally) restored
their reality.21
But it would be impossible to maintain such a distinction today in view not
only of novels like Robbe-Grillet's own, which seeks to restore the "reality" to
objects and gestures by frustrating any definitive account of their significa
tions, but of the digitized dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and the impossible acro
batics of Spider-Man and Minority Report, which depend not on their intimacy
with the pre-existing physical reality they misleadingly imply but on produc
ing a reality effect quite as loaded as Robbe-Grillet's empty chair.
Even though "concept" versus 'percept,'" as James Griffith has pointed
out, "offers critical certainty and shuts off discussion,"22 the dichotomy has
proved lamentably tenacious. Brian McFarlane, in the most acute recent gen
eral study of adaptation, follows Bluestone in arguing that "the verbal sign,
with its low iconicity and high symbolic function, works conceptually, whereas
the cinematic sign, with its high iconicity and uncertain symbolic function,
works directly, sensuously, perceptually."23 The implication McFarlane draws
from this contrast is that adaptation study should not rest content with "im
pressionistic" comparisons that emphasize films' alleged "fail[ure] to find satis
factory visual representations of key verbal signs," but should "consider to
what extent the film-maker has picked up visual suggestions from the novel
in his representations of key verbal signs—and how the visual representation
affects one's 'reading' of the film text."24 McFarlane goes on to argue that at
several crucial points in the 1946 Great Expectations, David Lean succeeds not
only in capturing a sense of Pip's first-person narrative voice but in grounding
symbolic functions in a realistic mise-en-scene rather than imposing them by
fiat. The result is that "the realistic meaning of the action seems to me to melt
into the symbolic. . . . The symbolic is a function of the mise-en-scene, inextri
cably interwoven into the realist texture."25 McFarlane acknowledges, how
ever, that "as one very familiar with the film, I find it hard to be sure how far
on a single or first viewing a spectator might be aware of the symbolic func
tions I now discern"26 in Magwitch's floundering in the mud, Jagger's towering
over Pip and Estella, and the stormy night sky that heralds Magwitch's return.
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158 Thomas Leitch
The difference between percept and concept may well be more properly a
function of rereading, and of a specifically analytical kind of rereading, than of
a difference between movies, which are commonly assumed against mounting
evidence to be watched only once, and novels, which are assumed to be end
lessly rereadable, with each rereading converting more percepts to concepts.
6. Novels create more complex characters than movies because they offer more
immediate and complete access to characters' psychological states. The ability to
enter the minds of fictional characters directly is of course one of the glories,
as it is one of the constitutive distinctions, of prose fiction—the only medium
whose conventions allow third-person sentences beginning "she thought"—
and it is indeed hard for movies to compete with novels in this regard. But it
is just as hard for other media whose representation of complex characters has
long been accepted. Since most novels take longer to read than two hours, it
stands to reason that they have more leisure to develop characters who change
over time. But I have never read an argument that long novels create more
compelling characters than shorter novels, or even than short stories. The
stricture against brevity seems to condemn movies alone.
Nor will the argument that cinema's characters are limited by its inability
to present thought directly stand up to analysis. When Bluest one notes that
"the film, having only arrangements of space to work with, cannot render
thought, for the moment thought is externalized it is no longer thought,"27 his
observation is equally apt to drama as to film. Yet no one questions the ability
of playwrights from Euripides to Chekhov to create complex characters, ft is
true, of course, that Shakespeare's dramaturgy allows him soliloquies and
asides that make it easier to dramatize thought, but Hamlet's thoughts are still
necessarily externalized. The conclusion that follows is not that externalized
thought is no longer thought, but that the pleasures of many non-novelistic
media are based to a large extent in the invitation they extend to audiences to
infer what characters are thinking on the basis of their speech and behavior,
and that thoughts that are inferred can be just as subtle and profound as
thoughts that are presented directly.
This last point deserves closer consideration. Novels, plays, and movies
can each hardly help leaving out many details from their discourse. Wolfgang
Iser, calling these omissions "gaps" or "blanks," has analyzed at length the
processes by which readers are encouraged to fill them in, the freedom they
have in choosing from among alternative possibilities, and the limitations on
that freedom that define "failure" as "filling the blank exclusively with one's
own projections."28 What Iser does not consider is the necessity of gaps, not
as an inevitable corollary of a given story's incompleteness, but as the very
basis of its appeal. For it is precisely the business of fictional narratives to cre
ate a field in which audiences are invited to make inferences about what the
characters are feeling or planning, where the story is going, what particular
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Adaptation Theory 159
details will mean, and how everything will turn out. Such
product of the same increasingly educated guesswork tha
from percepts. These inferences confer both the sense of
tional characters that makes them more memorable than m
the assurance that the fictional field at hand comprises a w
ingly coherent than the world outside. Novels and plays an
said paradoxically to display their gaps in the sense that th
pleasures they provide on audiences noticing and choosing
them but not others.29
The importance of this invitation to the audience is conf
that few moviegoers read screenplays for pleasure—not b
have no gaps (they specify many fewer details than either th
are based on or the movies that are based on them), but be
designed to be filled once and for all by the cast and crew,
invitation to nonprofessional audiences' active partici
Shakespeare's most underappreciated gifts that the plays g
ers have revered are nothing more than performance text
ture happens to support an incomparably richer sense of r
any screenplay to date.
Novels and movies, to stick with the two media most of
this regard, typically depend for their effects on differen
cause Jane Austen's novels, for example, though exceptio
vealing the thoughts of each of their fictional heroines, li
exactly one such heroine per novel, cinematic adaptations
cally narrow the gap between the intimacy viewers feel wi
the corresponding lack of intimacy they feel with other ch
has contended that "the basic nature of character in film is omission. . . . Film
character achieves complexity by its emphasis on incomplete knowledge, by
its conscious play with the limits a physical, external medium imposes upon
it."30 But Sam Spade's disturbingly unreadable rolling of a cigarette in Ham
mett's novel raises the possibility that the basis of all character may well be
incompleteness and omission—that characters are by definition figures whose
gaps allow readers or viewers to project for them a life that seems more vivid,
realistic, and complex than their explicitly specified thoughts and actions. At
the very least, it does not follow either that novels and movies are condemned
to certain kinds of gaps that are specific to their media, or that one sort of gap
is better than another. What determines the success of a given work is neither
the decision to withhold nor the decision to specify a character's thoughts, but
the subtlety, maturity, and fullness of the pattern that emerges from thoughts
and actions specified or inferred. These are not criteria on which any particu
lar medium has a monopoly.
7. Cinema's visual specification usurps its audience's imagination. Perhaps
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160 Thomas Leitch
dismayed that television has killed the novel-reading tastes of a generation of
students who lack the patience to appreciate psychological fiction or to wait
for a slow payoff, commentators like McFarlane have often concluded more
generally that "because of its high iconicity, the cinema has left no scope for
the imaginative activity necessary to the reader's visualization of what he
reads."31 This assumption amusingly manages to invert the assumption that
novels' ability to present thought directly makes their characters potentially
deeper and richer than movie characters while still condemning movies as in
ferior. In fact, the argument often urged against cinema's overspecification
would make more sense if it were directed against novelists like Henry James,
since the details movies are compelled to specify—the shape of the settee on
which two lovers are sitting, the distance between them, the color of the wall
paper behind them—are often inconsequential, whereas the thoughts going
through their minds, which novels are much more likely than films to specify
with great precision, are crucial.
Despite this logical contradiction, the argument against cinema's over
specification is in important ways consistent with the argument against its lack
of direct access to characters' minds. The basis of the charge in both cases is
that films are incapable of translating the unique properties of verbal texts
without transforming, diminishing, or otherwise betraying them. Hence
McFarlane notes the impossibility of translating Dickens's descriptions to the
screen despite their apparent wealth of visual detail, as in Pip's first description
of Wemmick as
a dry man, rather short in stature, with a square wooden face whose
expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull
edged chisel. There were some marks in it that might have been dim
ples, if the material had been softer and the instrument finer, but
which, as it was, were only dints. The chisel had made three or four
of these attempts at embellishment over his nose, but had given them
up without any effort to smooth them off.32
McFarlane aptly notes that such a passage, which "may seem like a rich visual
invitation to a film-maker," in truth "offer[s] little in the way of actual physical
detail and a good deal of purely verbal energy working toward a sense of the
grotesque."33 The fallacy lies in two assumptions about the nature of imagery
in prose fiction, the first of which McFarlane partly identifies himself. When
Dickens describes Wemmick's face as carved out of wood, or when he de
scribes Scrooge's home in A Christmas Carol as "a gloomy suite of rooms, in a
lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that
one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young
house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way
out again,"34 his imagery depends more on fanciful ideas and rhythmically
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Adaptation Theory 161
stylized rhetoric than on any set of images. It is not the r
such passages into visually realized or narrativized image
under the chisel (how broad a chisel, and how long did
or Scrooge's house playing hide-and-seek with other hou
houses? was Scrooge's house the smallest? how long did t
for it before they gave up?) but to enjoy them as conce
peal is at least as much to the ear as to the eye. The daun
of films does not inhibit viewers' imagination, because i
has pointed out, cannot legitimately be reduced to "pict
The deeper fallacy, which McFarlane does not identif
that it would be an advantage to a film adaptation if Dic
Wemmick's visual reality more closely because the few
leaves, the easier it is to fill them without transgressing
would be a hopeless endeavor to adapt Austen's novels t
visual texture is so remarkably thin that adapters are
ancillary historical accounts to dress all the characters and
Austen's novels would be much better suited to radio, w
her subtlety in distinguishing her characters' voices wit
supplying extraneous visual details. But even the most d
ers commonly approach such gaps not with trepidation
opportunity to supply their own details because they a
differ from their sources in myriad ways and are eager
ever the novel's discourse gives them leave to do so. Just
of narrative engagement for the audience, they are the l
filmmaking inventions that elevate adaptations above s
Even to talk of the inventiveness of deferential adapters
the next fallacy.
8. Fidelity is the most appropriate criterion to use in an
McFarlane's restive description of "the near-fixation with
that has "inhibited and blurred" adaptation study since
accurate.37 Fidelity to its source text—whether it is co
re-creating specific textual details or the effect of the
fallacious measure of a given adaptation's value because
desirable, and theoretically possible only in a trivial sens
a new language, adaptations will always reveal their sou
cause whatever their faults, the source texts will alway
themselves. Even if the adaptations are remakes in the
most conscientious attempts to replicate the original wi
ences, and thus their inferiority, all the more plainly—
larly clear in the critical discourse on Gus Van Sant's in
of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Van Sant's film prompted
try to complain not only that Vince Vaughn and Anne H
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162 Thomas Leitch
substitutes for Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh but that it didn't matter that
Julianne Moore was a better actress than Vera Miles because her performance
was different, and every departure from Hitchcock's text, which Van Sant had
promised to follow line by line and shot by shot, was by definition a betrayal.
The only remake that would have maintained perfect fidelity to the original
text would have been a re-release of that text. But as McFarlane broadly im
plies in his discussion of Martin Scorses's Cape Fear (1991) as a remake and
commentary on J. Lee-Thompson's 1961 version, even a re-release of the origi
nal film might well have a profoundly different effect on audiences influenced
by thirty years of changes in social mores, generic prestige, family values, and
industry self-censorship.38
Given the indefensibility of fidelity as a criterion for the analysis of adap
tations, why has it maintained such a stifling grip on adaptation study? The
likely reasons seem less theoretical than institutional. The assumption of fidel
ity is really an appeal to anteriority, the primacy of classic over modern texts
which are likely to come under suspicion by exactly the teachers trained in
literary studies—for example, the Shakespeareans giving courses in "Shake
speare on Film" or using the Kenneth Branagh and Mel Gibson Hamlets as
classroom anodynes—who are most likely to be interested in adaptations.39 At
least until the infant study of novelizations adapted from cinematic originals
becomes a full-fledged discipline, the valorization of fidelity amounts to a val
orization of literature as such in the face of the insurgent challenge of cinema
studies. And the theoretical poverty of fidelity as a touchstone of value, which
begs analytical questions that might bedevil other approaches, is no stumbling
block to commentators who are suspicious of theory in the first place.
These explanations, however, still leave unquestioned the more general
assumption that the main business of commentators who are considering film
adaptations is evaluating them, whether vis-a-vis their source texts or on their
own merits. The peculiarity of this assumption can hardly be overstated. Eval
uation may well be "one of the most venerable, central, theoretically signifi
cant, and pragmatically inescapable set of problems" in criticism.40 Yet the
whole tendency of cinema studies since universities first took it up thirty years
ago has been away from evaluation as a critical project—except in the area of
adaptation study. The Top Ten lists that so roiled readers of Sight and Sound in
the years before cinema studies made it into the academy have now lost the
headlines to newspaper reviewers' annual roundups and the American Film
Institute, freeing film scholars to focus on analytical and theoretical problems.
Only adaptation study, whether or not it uses the source text as a touchstone,
remains obsessed with asking whether a given film is any good as a prelimi
nary, a precondition, or a substitute for asking how it works.
9. Source texts are more original than adaptations. A primary reason that
adaptation study remains obsessed with fidelity as a criterion for evaluation is
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Adaptation Theory 163
that adaptations raise questions about the nature of auth
difficult to answer without the bulwark of fidelity. It is m
adaptations as inevitably blurred mechanical reproductio
of art than to grapple with the thorny questions of just
nality and in what sense Robert James Waller's phenom
are themselves less mechanically reproduced than Clint
sion of The Bridges of Madison County.
The basis for the assumption that literary texts are
originality that adaptations lack is clarified by consider
ceptional case of William Shakespeare, nearly all of wh
tions, often to a new medium, of earlier material from
Holinshed's Chronicles and Greene's Pandosto. The origin
his defenders asseverate, depends precisely on his seeing
of inert source materials; he is an alchemist, not an ada
comparing any of his plays with its base original. But
strates only that some adaptations are better than other
aptations aren't really adaptations at all. Nor does it de
writers can escape the label of adapter, since there are se
ers sanctified by the name of auteur. Orson Welles wr
screenplays, typically based on earlier source material. S
all of them similarly adaptations of literary source texts
nized as distinctively his. Perhaps most startling of all
mated versions of children's classics (Alice in Wonderlan
White and the Seven Dwarfs), demi-classics (Bambi), and
mations), in which the producer continues his successful
forty years after his death.
Perhaps the best illustration of the slippery nature of
tion is the critical reception of Hitchcock, who emerged
in the 1950s and in America ten years later precisely t
champions were able to make a case for thematic affin
films that ran deeper than recycled genre formulas. Th
star rose as the only begetter of his films, the less "a fil
directors" was "concerned to follow up Hitchcock's sta
edness to English literary figures,"41 even though only
films—The Ring, Champagne, Saboteur, North by Northwe
based on original screenplays.42 Only with the decline of
framework did critics like Charles Barr turn to a closer
cock's sources.
The moral implicit in the shifting fortunes of writers and directors as cre
ative artists seems to be the enduring appeal of someone's originality as an artis
tic value and the need commentators continually feel to identify a single
shaping intelligence as a given work's creator. The reason that originality
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164 Thomas Leitch
maintains a central position in adaptation study but not cinema studies gener
ally is that cinema studies has long rejected aesthetics as its leading methodol
ogy in favor of analytical and theoretical critique. The antipathetic tendencies
of cinema studies and adaptation study have so exacerbated each other that
adaptation study is now the safest refuge for film scholars unsympathetic to
the prevailing currents in cinema studies today, whose discourse, if it took any
notice of adaptation at all, would no doubt dismiss it with the observation that
all texts are intertexts. That is, all texts quote or embed fragments of earlier
texts, in Mikhail Bakhtin's terms, typically without explicit acknowledgment,
often without conscious intention, and never with any attempt at straightfor
ward replication of the original's force. Indeed, the novel, which Bakhtin
hailed as the dialogic mode par excellence because in "the rich soil of novelis
tic prose," the "internally dialogized discourse" Bakhtin describes as double
voiced or heteroglot "sinks its roots deep into a fundamental, socio-linguistic
speech diversity and multi-languaged-ness,"43 has long been eclipsed by the
junkyard aesthetics of the cinema. Movies are a mode whose elastic form, by
turns comic, ironic, and parodic, can tolerate heteroglossia that would wreck
more narrowly defined forms. Indeed, movies themselves may already in turn
have been eclipsed by television series like The Simpsons, surely the most carni
valistic work of fiction enjoyed by a large contemporary audience—except of
course for the World Wide Web in its entirety.
10. Adaptations are adapting exactly one text apiece. It might seem com
monsensical to assume a one-to-one correspondence between film adaptations
and their literary sources. But just as a novel like Frankenstein may serve as the
vehicle for over a hundred adaptations, each individual adaptation invokes
many precursor texts besides the one whose title it usually borrows. When
McFarlane begins his disapproving discussion of the criterion of fidelity by
asking satirically, "Is it really 'Jamesian'? Is it 'true to Lawrence? Does it 'cap
ture the spirit of Dickens'?",44 he is invoking authorial intention as a possible
regulatory function. But the phrases he chooses, especially "Jamesian'' and
"capture the spirit of Dickens," are reminders that adaptations of the works of
famous and prolific novelists are customarily measured not only against the
novels they explicitly adapt but against the distinctive world or style or tone
associated with the author in general. Adaptations of Great Expectations invoke
not only textual particulars of Dickens's novel but more general conventions of
the Dickens world: genial satire, sentimental benevolence, comically grotesque
minor characters, happy endings. Hence the "more buoyant ending" tacked
onto David Lean's Great Expectations, an ending McFarlane finds so charm
ingly redolent of British aspirations at the end of World War II that "one is led
to have more in mind than the famous novel whose title Lean's film bears,"45
is arguably more Dickensian than the uncharacteristically downbeat ending
Dickens himself supplied.
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Adaptation Theory 165
Nor is the world or style or career of the author the
that competes with the particular novel or play or stor
wood adaptations of foreign novels invariably foregroun
tionalities and historical moments in ways their sou
American adaptations make much more of the Surrey
don of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the innumerable
Christie beginning with Murder on the Orient Express m
riod more emphatically than their forerunners do. Doze
open with screens showing copies of the books on which
A Christmas Carol to The Postman Always Rings Twice,
specific precursor texts but the aura of literature as su
authority. And as McFarlane himself points out, films as
pectations and Cape Fear inevitably comment on their ow
cal contexts. Nor will it do to argue that the author, a
characteristics or historical periods, or the institution
tural history themselves are not textualized in the same
are, since even if they were not textualized before their
tions confer a specifically textual status on them by th
ence, which can borrow only the authority it grants its
Whelehan has observed that "when ... we study a text
has been subjected to countless adaptations . . . [we] rec
gling one adaptation from another, we have recourse to
both the play and subsequent films."46
Commentators on adaptations like McFarlane often r
ness of their heteroglossia but rarely pursue its leadin
intertextual model, however careful, can be adequate t
tion if it limits each intertext to a single precursor. As
novel:
The real task of stylistic analysis consists in uncover
able orchestrating languages in the composition of t
ing the precise degree of distancing that separates eac
its most immediate semantic instantiation in the work
the varying angles of refraction of intentions within it
their dialogic interrelationship and—finally—if there
rial discourse, determining the heteroglot backgrou
work that dialogizes it.47
Adaptation study requires as sensitive and rigorous att
possible array of a film's precursor texts as McFarlane
the films he considers adapt.
11. Adaptations are intertexts, their precursor texts sim
assumption that underlies the last two assumptions abou
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166 Thomas Leitch
one-to-one congruence adaptations are widely held to betray. An adaptation is
assumed to be a window into a text on which it depends for its authority, and
the business of viewers and analysts is to look through the window for signs
of the original text. But texts themselves are assumed to be not windows but
paintings that invite readers to look at or into them than through them. This
assumption vitiates even so perceptive an analysis as Seymour Chatman's dis
cussion of Harold Pinter's adaptation of John Fowles's novel The French Lieu
tenant's Woman for Karel Reisz's 1981 film, which focuses on a single question:
"How do intelligent film adaptations grapple with the overtly prominent nar
rator, the expositor, describer, investigator of characters' states of mind, com
mentator, philosophizer?"48 His answer is that despite the film's much more
narrow and limited focus—its "only real theme is love" compared to the nov
el's broadly discursive treatment of its exotic Victorian "panorama"—and its
"simpler and less determinate" treatment of its characters' psychology, it dou
bles the novel's Victorian narrative with a highly original modem frame tale of
the relationship between a pair of contemporary actors who are filming the
story that "attempts to dramatize the novel's commentary,49
Chatman's analysis is so sensitive and acute that it is easy to overlook the
reductive terms that frame it. Since he is considering Reisz's film strictly as a
case study in the successful adaptation of a highly resistant text, he naturally
measures its success against the success of the novel, which plays the text to
the film's intertext. This parasitism does not require the film to stick to the
novel's thematic material any more than it requires the film to stick to the ac
tions the novel represents. Indeed Chatman, who is warmly appreciative of the
film's presentation of "the impossible search for a fictional woman out of a
bygone era ... not a subject proposed by the novel, which handles the modern
repercussions of Victorian thought only in the expository-argumentative
mode," notes approvingly that "the film is less sanguine than the novel about
the progress of evolution in the emotional sphere."50 But his project requires
him to accept the novel as establishing a criterion of value for the film. Hence
he dismisses Joy Gould Boyum's attack on the "coyness" of Fowles's often tire
somely "chatty" narrator as "a narrow Lubbockian view"51 because if the narra
tor's ruminative commentary were in any way flawed, there would be no
toilsome need to find a cinematic equivalent for it. When adapters approach
source texts, he seems to suggest, they should assume that whatever is, is right.
More generally, Chatman contends that "film cannot reproduce many of
the pleasures of reading novels, but it can produce other experiences of paral
lel value."52 The key word here is "parallel," which absolves the adaptation
from the responsibility of slavish imitation to its source even as it invokes the
source's regulatory function in setting the standard for those parallel experi
ences. My point is not to ask whether a film labeled The French Lieutenant's
Woman has an intertextual responsibility to its source novel, but to ask why
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Adaptation Theory 167
the novel itself should be treated so uncritically as a cri
aptations seek to create non-parallel experiences at their
certainly true that adaptations are intertexts, it is equally
sors are intertexts, because every text is an intertext th
pretation on shared assumptions about language, culture
presentational conventions.
Chatman might well object here that the constitutive
adaptations and their originals is that adaptations invite
single precursor text as primary whereas their original
ences into a new synthesis that does not privilege any
tions imitate novels, novels imitate life, or at least Victori
distinction cannot be seriously maintained in an age th
ironic, parodic, or heteroglot adaptations as The Birds,
(and The Four Musketeers), Batman, Clueless, and Everythi
to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). The most c
extent that they choose subjects more specific than life—
the intrigue Cardinal Richelieu provoked at the court of
of Napoleon's campaign against Russia—take on the res
nating those particular subjects. Even the Aeneid, who
arms and the man, and Tom Jones, whose subject Fieldi
as "human nature,"53 approach their forbiddingly gener
far more specific historical narratives and behavioral ty
mell points out, "instead of worrying about whether a f
original literary text (founded in the logocentric belief
meaning), we read adaptations for their generation of a
Thus the intertextuality of the adaptation is our primar
12. Adaptation study is a marginal enterprise. This is
twelve fallacies that is actually true. Adaptation study
years been marginal to the study of moving images in g
to be marginal? Dudley Andrew, describing adaptation st
most narrow and provincial area of film theory," called
adaptation study into cinema studies by noting that "its
matching of the cinematic sign system to prior achievem
tem, can be shown to be distinctive of all representatio
called for a generalizing of adaptation study to cover al
fication, quotation, and reference that make cinema p
of connotation and a sociology of adaptation to comple
sumptions about fidelity. Nothing like this has happene
since Andrew wrote. Even acute contemporary analyst
Chatman who have deplored the crippling dependence o
concepts like fidelity and monistic claims of literature's
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168 Thomas Leitch
vice versa) have retained an unhelpful emphasis on notions of essentialism,
originality, and cinematic equivalents to literary techniques.
The broad implication of this essay is that adaptation study has sought a
separate peace less for aesthetic or theoretical than for institutional reasons: to
defend literary works and literature against the mass popularity of cinema, to
valorize authorial agency and originality in a critical climate increasingly op
posed to either, and to escape from the current orientation of film theory and
from theoretical problems in general. In other words, adaptation study has
been marginalized because it wishes to be. Just as the apparently essential
properties of novels and films stipulated by Chatman turn out on closer analy
sis to be functions of specific historical contexts, however, institutional battles
can be resolved in the same ways they arose, by changing the way the institu
tion does business. Adaptation study will emerge from its ghetto not when cin
ema studies accepts the institutional claims that would make cinema a poor
relation of literature or succeeds in refashioning analysts of adaptation into
loyal citizens of cinema studies, but in some larger synthesis that might well
be called Textual Studies—-a discipline incorporating adaptation study, cinema
studies in general, and literary studies, now housed in departments of English,
and much of cultural studies as well.
This is not to suggest that this omnivorous new field would take its
marching orders from adaptation study. The question adaptation study has
most persistently asked—in what ways does and should an intertext resemble
its precursor text in another medium?—could more usefully be configured in
dialogic terms: How and why does any one particular precursor text or set of
texts come to be privileged above all others in the analysis of a given intertext?
What gives some intertexts but not others the aura of texts? More generally, in
what ways are precursor texts rewritten, as they always are whenever they are
read? Such questions, though not subsuming dialogism to adaptation, would
extend both dialogism and adaptation study in vitally important ways. If they
don't watch out, analysts of adaptation who are willing to trade their historical
valorization of literature for broader theoretical range and greater theoretical
rigor are apt to find themselves in a most unlikely place: at the very center of
intertextual—that is, of textual—studies.
Notes
1. Robert B. Ray, "The Field of 'Literature and Films,'" in James Naremore, ed., Film
Adaptation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 44.
2. Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory ojAdaptation (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1996), 194.
3. James Naremore, Introduction to Film Adaptation, 2.
University of Delaware
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Adaptation Theory 169
4. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (London: Ox
ford University Press, 1960), 1. For a later version of the essentialist argument, see
Geoffrey Wager, The Novel and the Cinema (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1975): "Language is a completion, an entelechy, and film is not.
By its nature it cannot be. Film is a diffusion" (12).
5. See Seymour Chatman, "What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and Vice Versa),"
Critical Inquiry 7 (1980-81): 121-40. Chatman's view of adaptation is better rep
resented by his more recent and subtle discussion of the topic in Coming to Terms:
The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1990), about which I will have more to say later on.
6. See F. E. Sparshott, "Basic Film Aesthetics," in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen,
eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 3rd edition (New York: Ox
ford University Press, 1985), 286-87, and V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understand
ing and Judging Movies (1972; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 59. For more
recent empirically based attacks on the essentialist argument, see Morris Beja, Film
and Literature: An Introduction (New York: Longman, 1979), 54-59, and James
Griffith, Adaptations as Imitations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997),
30-35.
7. Noel Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 88.
8. Chatman, "What Novels Can Do," 128.
9. McFarlane, 16. In "Jane Campion and the Limits of Literary Cinema," Ken Gelder
has attacked this essentialist argument by noting that commentators on Jane Cam
pion and Kate Pullinger's novelization of Campion's film The Piano have consis
tently identified it "as somehow less literary than the film: as if the film was more
of a novel than the novel itself" (Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, eds.,
Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text [London: Routledge, 1999], 157).
10. Chatman, "What Novels Can Do," 128-29.
11. Ibid., 128.
12. Dashiell Hammett, Complete Novels (New York: Library of America, 1999), 398.
13. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1982), 355.
14. Andre Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View, trans. Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York:
Harper & Row, 1978), 133.
15. McFarlane, 26.
16. In Made into Movies: From Literature to Film (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Win
ston, 1985), James Y. McDougal, who is practically alone among analysts of adap
tation in noting that "casting . . . considerably shapes the process of adaptation,"
avers that casting is "extrinsic to the medium of film" (6).
17. Timothy Corrigan, Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (Upper Saddle
River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999), 3.
18. Joy Gould Boyum, Double Exposure: Fiction into Film (New York: New American
Library, 1985), 21.
19. George Bluestone, Novels into Film (1957; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer
sity of California Press, 1971), 20.
20. Gerald Mast, Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience (New York: Harper &
Row, 1977), 64.
21. Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Grove, 1965), 20.
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170 Thomas Leitch
22. Griffith, 229, 230.
23. McFarlane, 26-27.
24. Ibid., 27.
25. Ibid., 132.
26. Idem.
27. Bluestone, 47-48.
28. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), 167.
29. Boyum goes so far as to argue that since readers cannot read novels without visual
izing them as films, they "inevitably expect ... the movie projected on the screen
to be a shadow reflection of the movie . . . [they] have imagined" (60).
30. Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Garden City: Anchor/
Doubleday, 1976), 184.
31. McFarlane, 27.
32. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 161.
33. McFarlane, 133.
34. Dickens, Christmas Novels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 14.
35. Chatman, Coming to Terms, 162.
36. Compare Chatman: "The central problem for film adapters is to transform narra
tive features that come easily to language but hard to a medium that operates in
'real time' and whose natural focus is the surface appearance of things" (Coming to
Terms, 162). The fallacy is not only in the explicitly stated essentialist assumption
that film has "a natural focus" but also in the implied assumption that exemplary
narratives in any medium concentrate on exploiting the features that "come easily"
to that medium, marginalizing departures from those features as a "problem."
Hence Chatman, in continuing his general rejection of voiceover commentary, ob
serves that "historically, the best filmmakers have preferred purely visual solu
tions" to the problems of narratorial commentary (163).
37. McFarlane, 194.
38. See McFarlane, 187-93.
39. Imelda Whelehan has suggested that "it is possibly the 'literariness' of the fictional
text which itself appears to give credence to the study of adaptations at all" (Cart
mell and Whelehan, 17).
40. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical
Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 17. For a contrasting
view, see for example Northrop Frye, who asserts in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Es
says (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) that "the demonstrable value
judgment is the donkey's carrot of literary criticism" (20).
41. Charles Barr, English Hitchcock (Moffat: Cameron & Hollis, 1999), 8.
42. To be sure, Shadow of a Doubt and Lifeboat are based on unpublished stories, and
many other Hitchcock films, from The Man Who Knew Too Much to Foreign Corre
spondent, Spellbound, and The Birds, have only a nominal connection to the sources
they credit.
43. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Mi
chael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 324, 325-36.
44. McFarlane, 8.
45. McFarlane, 111.
46. Cartmell and Whelehan, 16.
47. Bakhtin, 416.
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Adaptation Theory
48. Chatman, Coming to Terms, 163-64.
49. Ibid., 169, 168, 173, 174.
50. Ibid., 180.
51. Ibid., 172. See Boyum, 107.
52. Ibid., 163.
53. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. Fredson Bowers (Middle
town, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 32.
54. Cartmell and Whelehan, 28.
55. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984),
96.
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