New Literary History, 2007, 38: 443–458
On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity
Discourse and “Success”—Biologically*
Gary R. Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon
Adaptation is a profound process, which means
you try and figure out how to thrive in the
world.
—The “Orchid Thief” in
Spike Jonze’s film Adaptation
I. The Need for New Models
C
ontrary to the negative opinion of both current academic
and journalistic discourse on the topic of narrative adaptation, the
“orchid thief” in Spike Jonze’s film would like us to believe that
adaptation is, in fact, a “profound process.” In the immediate context,
he means biological adaptation, of course, but in a metacinematic film
about the process of adapting a book to the screen, the cultural implications
of his positive remark should not be dismissed, despite its evident
irony.1
The manifest ubiquity of narrative adaptations in contemporary
culture notwithstanding, the critical tendency has been to denigrate them
as secondary and derivative in relation to what is usually (and tellingly)
referred to as the “original.” Adaptation theory has rarely challenged
this dismissive evaluation. Despite the theoretical sophistication of recent
literary critical discourse, adaptation studies have remained stubbornly
rooted in often unexamined values and practices. Although it seems
self-evident that the insights of such theories as Bakhtinian dialogism,
intertextuality, deconstruction, reception theory, cultural studies, narratology,
or performance theory might have relevance to adaptation studies,
these connections have only begun to be made.2
In a way, therefore,
* In keeping with scientific practice, we should note that the authors contributed equally
to this article. We would like to thank Len Findlay, Germaine Warkentin, Juan Negro,
Sophie Mayer, Siobhan O’Flynn, Shannon Brownlee, W. B. Watt, and Peter Stoicheff for
their constructive critical comments on various versions of this article, and our mother for
teaching us the value of cooperation. G. R. B. thanks the Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada and L. H. thanks the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada for financial support of their research programs over the years.
new literary history444
cultural adaptation studies today find themselves in the same quandary
as early evolutionary biology, as it was trying to comprehend descent
with modification before the mechanism of inheritance was discovered
by Mendel, or trying to understand variation among organisms before
Darwin.3
Like that early evolutionary theory (though unlike Darwin
himself), much work in adaptation today thinks only in terms of higher
and lower forms. In biology, it was only when this sort of evaluative discourse
was discarded that new questions could be asked and therefore
new answers offered.4
As a biologist and a literary theorist, we decided to look to the possibility
of new questions—and answers—for narrative adaptation theory
by investigating the relevance to cultural adaptation of the insights about
adaptation in post-Darwinian biology. Therefore, we would like to propose
for the sake of argument and the purposes of debate a homology—not
an analogy, not a metaphoric association—but a homology between
biological and cultural adaptation.5
By homology, we mean a similarity
in structure that is indicative of a common origin: that is, both kinds of
adaptation are understandable as processes of replication. Stories, in a
manner parallel to genes, replicate; the adaptations of both evolve with
changing environments. Our hope is that biological thinking may help
move us beyond the theoretical impasse in narrative adaptation studies
represented by the continuing dominance of what is usually referred to as
“fidelity discourse.” This common determination to judge an adaptation’s
“success” only in relation to its faithfulness or closeness to the “original”
or “source” text threatens to reinforce the current low estimation (in
terms of cultural capital) of what is, in fact, a common and persistent
way humans have always told and retold stories.6
Shakespeare transferred
his culture’s narratives from page to stage and made them available to a
whole new audience; we did not begrudge him his creative borrowing.
Baz Luhrmann transferred one of these, Romeo and Juliet, from page to
screen, updating it in the process and arguably making it available to a
whole new teen audience; the critics excoriated him for his irreverence
and nerve. His film, Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, was deemed unfaithful
to its source, despite using most of the text and action. Our starting
point, therefore, is the question: how useful is this kind of reductive
judgmental discourse in determining either the artistic significance of
a work or its cultural impact or even its vitality?
While we acknowledge that part of the manifest pleasure (and risk) of
adaptations lies in their relation of proximity to (or distance from) their
adapted texts, in order to provoke discussion we want to take a strong
stand here and suggest that fidelity to the “original” could, in fact, be seen
as irrelevant to the actual evaluation of the “success” of an adaptation
for two very different reasons. On the one hand, an adaptation stands
445on the origin of adaptations
on its own as an independent work, separate from the “source,” and can
be judged accordingly; this would be true no matter what the critical
perspective of the assessor might be—feminist, Marxist, postcolonial,
and so on—and whether context (as opposed to source) were deemed
relevant or not.7
In this instance, then, fidelity becomes a less than useful
evaluative aesthetic criterion. On the other hand, the impact of an
adaptation can far exceed anything measurable only by its degree of
proximity to the adapted work. The story it retells is clearly significant,
but not in this sense. We will argue that, in relation to the adapted story,
what we might consider the “success” of an adaptation can be thought
of in very different ways. It is obviously important to the understanding
of an adaptation as an adaptation that we investigate where it has come
from (in other words, what biologists would call its phylogeny or evolutionary
history). When we shift from “fidelity” concerns to undertaking
this related but different kind of study, new analytic opportunities present
themselves. By revealing lineages of descent, not similarities of form
alone, we can understand how a specific narrative changes over time. If
we take this history into consideration, suddenly it is the success of the
narrative itself, as well as that of its adaptations, that can be considered
in a new light. Thinking in terms of this biological homology therefore
offers another—in this case, we hope, productive or at least less reductive—way
to think about what constitutes an adaptation’s success than
does the misleadingly evaluative discourse of fidelity. But it also gives us
a way to think anew about the broader questions of why and how certain
stories are told and retold in our culture. (We should also add that, to
avoid confusion between adaptation as a narrative product and the process
of adaptation in biology or culture, from here on we will signal the
former, the product, in bold as an adaptation.)
As the language of “original” and “source” so treasured by fidelity
discourse suggests, the (post-)Romantic (and capitalist) valuing of the
originating creative artist-genius explains in part the denigration of
adaptations: specifically, the relegation of the adapter to journeyman
status in Hollywood (and elsewhere) and of the adaptation itself to the
trash heap of the secondary and imitative in critical evaluative discourse.
The results of this denigration can be seen in the defensive tone of adaptation
criticism, but even more seriously, in its limitation to the close
reading of specific adaptations—most often of novel to film.8
This is a
critical practice that implicitly or explicitly gives cultural and aesthetic
precedence to the “source” to which the adaptation is then judged either
faithful or unfaithful—that is, good or bad. In contrast, biology does not
judge adaptations in terms of fidelity to the “original”; indeed, that is not
the point at all. Biology can celebrate the diversity of life forms, yet at
the same time recognize that they come from a common origin. No one
new literary history446
would argue that humans are not unique or special, even though they
share 98 percent of their DNA with the chimpanzee—proof that both
are, in a sense, adaptations of an ape ancestor. The kind of descriptive
rather than evaluative thinking that biology potentially provides in this
instance suggests new ways of thinking about cultural adaptation theory
and, beyond that, about the reason for the continuing importance of
certain narratives in a given culture.
The basic question to be answered in biology has been: why does life
exist in such a dazzling array of forms? This is, in fact, what prompted
Darwin’s investigation into the “origin of species.” The cultural equivalent
might be: why do the same stories exist in such a startling array of
forms?9
Just as the discovery of genetics allowed for the quantification
of evolutionary change in biology, so perhaps can a more descriptive
approach to the elements of cultural adaptation allow us a different way
of thinking about why we choose to retell stories and how those retellings
function within a culture.10
Biologists do not evaluate the merit of
organisms relative to their ancestors; all have equal biological validity.
So too, we will argue, do cultural adaptations have equal cultural validity,
and not only those by Shakespeare. We are not saying that cultural
adaptation is biological; our claim is more modest. It is simply that both
organisms and stories “evolve”— that is, replicate and change.11
We are aware of the ideological/epistemological/methodological
critiques of science in general and biology in particular; nevertheless
we see significant benefits to using this homology heuristically to open
up the discourse of adaptation studies to new perspectives. Like literary
theory, evolutionary theory is not a natural “given,” but as human
constructions, perhaps together they can help us make sense of a shared
interest in repetition and change. What biologists call “systematists” study
the patterns of variation with regard to the geography and environment
that a “species” occupies and, beyond that, investigate the evolutionary
processes that cause the variation; it is in this spirit that we seek to study
narrative variation.12
What the recognition of the homology between
cultural and biological evolution can provide is an alternative means
of deciding what we could consider the success of an adaptation—that
is, not as simply faithful or unfaithful (aka good or bad) in relation to
a “source.”13
Instead, the “source” could perhaps be more productively
viewed as the “ancestor” from which adaptations derive directly by descent.
As in biological evolution, descent with modification is essential.
II. Replication and Adaptation
In his 1976 study The Selfish Gene, biologist Richard Dawkins bravely
(and some say, foolishly) introduced the concept of “meme” as the cul-
447on the origin of adaptations
tural equivalent of the biological gene and launched a much-debated
new discipline called memetics.14
The Oxford English Dictionary now
contains a definition of meme (as “a self-replicating element of culture,
passed on by imitation”). For Dawkins, cultural transmission, like genetic
transmission, is “basically conservative” but “can give rise to a form of
evolution.” Language, fashions, technology, and the arts, he argues,
“all evolve in historical time in a way that looks like highly speeded up
genetic evolution, but has really nothing to do with genetic evolution.”15
We would like to adapt, rather than adopt, Dawkins’s meme concept,
in part because of the many trenchant critiques of it from a biological
as well as cultural standpoint.16
Instead of Dawkins’s general concept of
memes as ideas, we want to substitute narratives, because of the ubiquity
and persistence of their adaptations. Like the idea of the meme, a story
too can be thought of as a fundamental unit of cultural transmission: “a
basic unit of inheritance allowing the accumulations of adaptations.”17
As our culture has added new media and new means of mass diffusion
to our communications repertoire, we have needed (or desired) more
stories. What we have in fact often done, however, is to retell the same
stories, over and over again—on film and television, in videogames and
theme parks.18
Like genes, narratives are “replicators,” defined by Dawkins as “anything
in the universe of which copies are made.”19
Replication is about
survival over time. High survival, argues Dawkins, depends on obvious
things like longevity and fecundity, but also on what he calls “copy-
ing-fidelity.”20
However, contrary to the fidelity discourse of adaptation
theory, in a cultural context, copying actually means changing with each
replication—most often, changing medium. Nevertheless, it is obviously
also the case that for an adaptation to be experienced as an adaptation,
recognition of the narrative has to be possible: some copying-fidelity is
needed, precisely because of the changes across media and contexts.
There is a popular misconception in the lay understanding of biology
today (and, in fact, this is what plagued early evolutionary biology) of
whose survival adaptations are for. They are to ensure not the survival of
the group or the individual organisms, but instead the “relevant replicators
themselves.”21
This is why it is important to define the replicator as
a distinct and discrete entity, for this is the unit of selection by which
we can understand change over time. For our purposes in discussing
the process of cultural adaptation, then, Dawkins’s replicator would be
a core narrative idea (or in short, a narrative).22
However, a replicator requires a vehicle, that is, an “integrated and
coherent ‘instrument of replicator preservation.’”23
Organisms act as
vehicles for genes; the literary texts or the stage performances we call
adaptations are the vehicles of narrative ideas—that is, their physical
embodiment in some medium.24
From the point of view of the replica-
new literary history448
tor (narrative), when a vehicle is no longer adequate (because, as in
biology, vehicles have varying lifespans or the environment has changed
sufficiently), a new vehicle is necessary to propagate the story. In refashioning
Shakespeare’s play, The Taming of the Shrew, for the screen in 1967,
Franco Zeffirelli cast two of the hottest actors of the day—Elizabeth Taylor
and Richard Burton—to displace the earlier film version, dethroning
its stars, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. The narrative could be
said to have undergone an appropriate transformation to the change in
environment, that is, an adaptation.
III. Mutation and Selection
As we have seen, replication is not repetition without change, and
this is a crucial point in both biology and culture. At what level does
change occur, however? A distinction is needed here: in classical biology,
phenotypes are distinguished from genotypes. The latter are the underlying
blueprints, if you like; the former are what we actually see in the
context that produces them. Another way to think of this is: genotype
+ environment = the phenotype we see and experience. So the parallel
structure for a narrative phenotype would be: narrative idea + cultural
environment = adaptation. Or, to translate: “love-death” plot + westernEuropean
culture = Romeo and Juliet, eventually: Shakespeare adapted
Arthur Brooke’s versification of Matteo Bandello’s adaptation of Luigi
da Porto’s version of Masuccio Salernitano’s story of two very young,
star-crossed Italian lovers—who changed names and places of birth along
the way. Romeo and Juliet in its turn became an independent narrative
with its own adaptations. In both biological and cultural terms, then,
what exists today is the result of successful replication.
Changes in the environment often bring about changes in the phenotype,
whether that environment be biological or cultural. Is it surprising
that Otomar Krejca in Prague (1963) or Tamás Major in Hungary (1971)
used their particular national politics to frame their versions of the feuding
opposition to the love of Romeo and Juliet? Or that the Québécois
Robert Lepage set his adaptation in bilingually conflicted Canada, with
francophone Capulets and anglophone Montagues? In the opinion of
the play’s recent editor, Jill Levenson: “Versions of the Romeo and Juliet
narrative continue to proliferate, and there is no reason to expect
a slackening of momentum any time soon. From Brazilian chapbook to
Bosnian documentary, from comic strip to soft-pornographic video, the
story dramatized by Shakespeare is reshaped to fit the preoccupations
and tastes of modern cultures.”25
Or in Dawkins’s terms, “some memes are
more successful in the meme-pool than others”;26
success is the product
of the process of selection.
449on the origin of adaptations
Cultural selection, like natural selection, involves differential survival
through a process of replicating into future generations. We would posit
that, like its biological homologue, cultural selection is therefore both
conservative and dynamic. As in biology, there can be directional or
stabilizing selection. When an environment changes in one particular
identifiable direction, then we expect the former, as adaptations move
toward a new cultural norm: for example, what was a minor terrorist
subplot might shift to center stage after 9/11. But when an environment
is stable we can predict that adaptations will differ little from the previous
generation. The latter evidently was the case when director Christopher
Columbus adapted the first Harry Potter novel to the screen.27
Because
the film came out soon after the immensely popular book, the fan culture
was arguably not expecting or desiring a reinterpretation of the story,
but simply a retelling of it in a new medium.
Mutation is the raw material of evolution. Despite some of its nonscientific
connotations, mutation is not a negative term in biology where
it is judged as beneficial, neutral, or deleterious in the context of its
environment. In cultural terms, we could think of mutation, that is, any
change in a narrative, in exactly these terms: if a musical theater adaptation
of a film were to change the protagonist’s nationality from Italian to
French, the change might be viewed as beneficial in one culture (perhaps,
French) but deleterious in another (Italian); yet it might not matter at
all in yet another (Chinese). Not all mutations or changes over time are
adaptive, because not all are meaningful with respect to allowing a better
fit to an environment. For instance, the musical might also change the
color of the protagonist’s shoes. When that color is without symbolic or
narrative value, the change is not adaptive; in biological terminology, it is
neutral with respect to selection. But if we are adapting the movie called
The Red Shoes, any such change is significant in that it has the potential
to be selected for or against. What we then end up with is the product of
cultural selection; what have survived are mutations that allow the story
to better fit (adapt to) its culture or environment. A potential problem
in the study of adaptation (and adaptations) is not realizing that what
we end up seeing are the survivors. Failed attempts are eliminated in
both biology and culture.28
There are still other ways in which things can mutate over time but
not be adaptations—in biology as in culture. For example, in biology,
what is called mutation pressure as an evolutionary force is the accumulation
of errors in DNA replication over time. The equivalent for a
narrative would be translating or editing errors or loss of details through
copying. Another nonadaptive explanation for changes over time is
what biologists call random (or genetic) drift.29
It, too, has its cultural
homologue, for random events are sometimes the only explanations for
narrative changes. For example, when a four-volume novel is damaged
new literary history450
in a fire so that today we have only one volume, that truncated version
of the narrative is not an adaptation. However, if those lost volumes were
deliberately suppressed, then we might well consider it an adaptation
in the sense that there would have been a deliberate political intent to
alter the narrative. Understanding these distinctions helps us address the
issue of what is, and what is not, an adaptation per se in cultural terms
as well as biological.
IV. Redefining “Success”
In the study of adaptation in both biology and culture, a significant
concern is the identifying of attributes that are essential to the propagation
of the replicator. Replicators compete for limited space, time, and
attention in a culture.30
“Success” in this context means “thriving.”31
The
second part of the epigraph from the film Adaptation makes this clear:
“Adaptation is a profound process, which means you try and figure out
how to thrive in the world.” The concept of “survival of the fittest” was a
problem for Darwinism because of the obvious tautology it implied.32
The
idea of “thriving” is closer to what Darwin meant, however. In cultural
terms the kinds of new questions this redefinition of success as thriving
permits us to ask would include: What has made a narrative successful—that
is, what has made it thrive in occupying a particular cultural
space? What roles have adaptations played in this propagation? In other
words, what makes an adaptation successful? Are there quantitative ways
to determine success defined in this way?
In trying to answer the latter question, work in memetics has focused
on numbers of copies: in a parallel with population size in animals, we
could look, for example, at how many people are aware of a narrative.
But there are at least two other important dimensions to consider when
determining a narrative’s success. The first is persistence and involves
evaluation over the long term. In biology, for instance, it remains to be
seen if humans are successful relative to dinosaurs. Our meager 6-millionyear
existence does not yet compare well to their 150-million-year reign.
In culture, as Dawkins put it, the time is “highly speeded up,” compared
to this, but stories can stick around for a long time and still be current;
so we could say that the Romeo and Juliet narrative is successful in these
terms. Of course not all stories have such temporal stamina, and in fact
may go extinct; like museums with fossil collections, libraries contain
books with stories in them that are never read, much less adapted.
The second consideration in determining success, besides persistence,
is diversity. If a narrative is adapted into many different media, we might
use this proliferation of forms as a measure of success. These new ver-
451on the origin of adaptations
sions would in turn allow other opportunities for future adaptations and
thus insure longevity because of the medium change: people in a culture
may stop attending musicals, but they may still watch television. Another
way to think about diversity is in terms of the range of environments
exploited. Even if all the other measures of success are equal, the one
that flourishes in a wider range of cultural contexts could be considered
more successful than the one that exists in only a few. If for no other
reason, diversity equates with success because it reduces the probability
of chance or other events causing the demise of the narrative. So transculturation
or cross-cultural indigenization would be a sign of the success
of a narrative. Some stories do indeed migrate across cultures as well
as media.33
A good example is the narrative of the stereotypical femme
fatale, the woman who is both alluring and terrifying to men. There are
many versions of her story,34
but let us take just one of them as a brief
example: that of a Spanish gypsy called Carmen.
In 1845, the French writer Prosper Mérimée published a travel tale that
retold a story of Carmen’s life, loves, and death that had been recounted
to him by a friend. Within a few years Marius Petipa had choreographed
a ballet about her. But her cultural replication was insured with the next
major adaptation undertaken by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy for
Georges Bizet’s opera (1875). From here Carmen’s story migrated across
media (to film, more ballets, hip-hop musicals, even figure skating shows)
and, even more interestingly perhaps, across national boundaries. Otto
Preminger’s 1954 Americanization, called Carmen Jones, translated the
operatic narrative into a popular stage (and then film) musical, set in
the Second World War and with an all-black cast. Spanish director Carlos
Saura could be said to have “re-hispanized” and even “re-gypsified” Carmen
in a flamenco idiom and in a postmodern, self-reflexive manner in
his 1983 film adaptation of both the Mérimée text and the Bizet opera.
Karmen Geï (2001), by African film director Joseph Gai Ramaka, was set
to indigenous Senegalese music and choreography, but the story of the
dangerous but alluring woman remained legible, despite the cultural
transposition. Carmen’s narrative has indeed adapted successfully to new
and different cultural environments.35
Emerging technologies, of course, have always allowed for new possible
adaptations of narratives. The biological concept of adaptive
radiation has a cultural homologue in this context. When species find
themselves in a novel environment—and if it is one where there are
few competitors and many opportunities—they may further diversify
and adapt to novel ecological roles. For example, the many species of
Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos proliferated from a single, ancestral
species that colonized the islands and evolved new lifestyles.36
In a like
manner a narrative can proliferate when it finds novel opportunities in
new literary history452
new media.37
This can lead to a diversifying of the narrative unit into
different narratives eventually. We need only think of the many versions
of the familiar story of the journey of the hero, changing and modifying
to fit different environments. These range from the classical epic narratives
of Aeneas and Odysseus to the operatic ones of Wagner’s Siegfried
to those of the Lord of the Rings in the form of books, movies and, most
recently, musical theater. One might argue that the cinematic version
of Tolkein’s stories was waiting for particular technologies in order to
adapt the books’ fantasy world to the screen.
As this discussion implies, in both biology and culture, the success of
the replicator is not the same as the success of the vehicle. The replicator’s
(narrative’s) success is measured by its survival in the form of long-lived
copies and versions of itself: that is, by its persistence, abundance, and
diversity. The vehicle’s (adaptation’s) success is measured by its capacity
to propagate the replicator that rides inside it, so to speak.38
Therefore,
in order to determine what constitutes the success of an adaptation, we
might ask different questions than usual, such as: how many people saw
the musical or played the videogame, and therefore now know the narrative?
What is striking here is that the degree of fidelity to the “original” is
no longer an issue. What determines an adaptation’s success is its efficacy
in propagating the narrative for which it is a vehicle.
That said, we repeat that we take it as axiomatic that adaptations also
stand alone as independent works that cannot rely on reference to the
one they adapt. But we are trying here to find new ways of talking about
adaptations as adaptations—without using that misleadingly evaluative
discourse of fidelity. The biological homology allows us to ask new and
perhaps newly appropriate questions (beyond the ones about qualitative
criteria with which the humanities usually concern themselves). For
instance, to discover whether a videogame is successful as an adaptation
of a movie, we might ask not about how faithful it was but instead about
perhaps strange-sounding issues such as how and why the adaptation
helped to propagate the core narrative idea. While, admittedly, it may
be difficult to ascertain how many people “know” a story, we can use
surrogate measures: if book sales go up after a television adaptation of
a novel, that would be one way to gauge the success of the adaptation
(and, of course, the narrative). So, too, would be the number of movie or
play tickets sold—seen as a measure of attendance, rather than of financial
gain. Other related and more specific questions can now be posed:
what is the adaptive significance of the choice of actors, for example, or
of setting the television version in a different country or time than the
novel does? Or to take the case of the decision to film a movie version
on location or in a studio, the on-location set may be more realistic in
the context of the novel setting, but studio filming might be consider-
453on the origin of adaptations
ably less costly. Therefore, if more money is left to spend on advertising,
more people may ultimately see the film. So the studio version might
well be more successful numerically in propagating the narrative and
making it known to more people.
Biology offers yet another concept that is suggestive in a homologous
manner for cultural adaptation: the phenotype of the replicator can
exist beyond the body of the vehicle. This is known as the extended
phenotype.39
The impact of that phenotype on the world at large affects
the survival of the replicator. For nature, think of beaver dams.
They are structures external to the beavers themselves, but that have a
profound impact on the subsequent success of the beavers. For stories,
think of how things like CDs of soundtracks, posters, advertising, free
toys distributed with meals at fast food outlets, magazine articles, and
interviews with actors on television all function to help the narrative
become popular—that is, to enhance the probability of the propagation
of the replicator—for more people will see the film and thus know the
narrative. This is one of the mechanisms of adaptation.40
VI. The Usefulness and Limits of
the Biological/Cultural Homology
The natural environment cannot induce the changes necessary for
biological adaptation: mutations are random with respect to the direction
of adaptation required for the environment. Some fail and some succeed.
But culture, on the contrary, at least potentially, directs changes. This fact
introduces a level of complexity in identifying causality that clearly has
no parallel in biology: in a cultural context, adaptations influence culture
and culture influences the nature of adaptations. As L. L. Cavalli-Sforza
and M. W. Feldman point out, in culture, unlike biology, changes “are
not truly random, but are designed to solve specific problems” and so
are “purposive and intelligent.”41
In other words, it is people who change
stories and do so with particular intentions. Biology cannot help us here.
Or perhaps we should say that biological discourse cannot help us here;
it is the discourse of culture (as constructed in opposition to “nature”)
that foregrounds intentionality rather than pure randomness.
Nevertheless, despite this significant difference, the homology we are
offering here does allow a different perspective on some of the theoretical
problems around adaptation, especially the issue of fidelity as the major
criterion of evaluation. In moving us out of an evaluative discourse and
into a descriptive one, it also permits us to ask new questions, such as:
when does an adaptation (as Romeo and Juliet was, once upon a time)
change enough to be considered another story? Could we turn to some
new literary history454
of the tools that exist to study evolutionary relationships among organisms
to answer this question? For instance, what is called cladistics is the
phylogenetic (evolutionary) analysis in biology where the use of shared
derived characteristics (where two organisms are similar because they
are related) allows us to map patterns of descent. The relationships are
illustrated by means of evolutionary trees known as dendrograms (specifically
cladograms) that offer a tracking technique that has already
been applied to study the evolution of languages and the success of
ideas in novels.42
A phylogenetic model for thinking about the evolution
of narrative might allow us to identify exactly which of many potential
vehicles of the narrative is in fact the ancestral form and therefore what
process (and products) eventually led to any particular adaptation. One
could easily make a film “adaptation” of Romeo and Juliet today without
ever reading the Shakespearean play. Therefore, in trying to determine
why certain scenes were omitted, for instance, we would have to identify
whether it was the decision of the immediate adapter or a predecessor.
This, however, is only a suggestion for future work. What the biological
homologue we are suggesting most obviously does is to allow us a new
way to think about the success of an adaptation as an adaptation, and,
beyond that, to consider the success of the adapted narrative. In our attempt
to determine and understand what might constitute that success
from a biological perspective, we want to repeat that what we are here
calling the “success” of an adaptation could and should be different from
its artistic evaluation (which is another way to define success, we agree).
Cultural impact and aesthetic value have rarely been synonymous; the
same is true for artistic merit and economic success. Our principal aim
has been to use biological concepts in a heuristic manner to help free narrative
adaptation theory from the conceptual restrictions of a misleading
evaluative fidelity discourse and thus to open up a new way of thinking
about the human desire to tell and retell certain stories, resetting them
in wildly different times and places, and using a wide diversity of media
to do so. For the half-century following the publication of the Origin of
Species, biology was considered “the most flexible and suggestive of the
sciences, its concepts were malleable, ready to plasticise under pressure
and ready to fill every cranny of whatever mould had been prepared to
receive them.”43
Perhaps the time has come to let at least evolutionary
biology be flexible (and helpful) once again. As Terry Pratchett has reminded
us: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have
been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of
time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest
have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.”44
University of Saskatchewan
University of Toronto
455on the origin of adaptations
NOTES
1	 We are not alone in being inspired by this self-reflexive film. See Robert Stam, “Introduction:
The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” in Literature and Film: A Guide to the
Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 1–2. But, since he is working
on film and literature alone, his interest in the movie’s biological message is considerably
different from our own, given his focus on the parasitic dimension of adaptation.
2	 Robert Stam’s recent work has been exemplary in this regard: see “Introduction,” 8–12
especially.
3	 Gregor Mendel effectively discovered that parents pass on their traits to offspring
through genes, and Darwin proposed natural selection as a major force in evolutionary
change.
4	 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, in Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical
Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), reminds us that “[a]ll value is radically
contingent, being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, or an objective property of
things but, rather, an effect of multiple, continuously changing, and continuously interacting
variables” (30).
5	 In doing so, we also avoid the problems outlined by Gillian Beer in Darwin’s Plots:
Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1983), 96, when she accuses Robert Young (in his essay “Darwin’s
Metaphor: Does Nature Select?”) of taking one single metaphor in isolation.
6	 In response to decades of adaptation criticism, witness Stam’s list of negative terms
used to describe adaptations: “Terms like ‘infidelity,’ ‘betrayal,’ ‘deformation,’ ‘violation,’
‘bastardization,’ ‘vulgarization,’ and ‘desecration’ proliferate in adaptation discourse, each
word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. ‘Infidelity’ carries overtones of Victorian
prudishness; ‘betrayal’ evokes ethical perfidy; ‘bastardization’ connotes illegitimacy; ‘deformation’
implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; ‘violation’ calls to mind sexual violence;
‘vulgarization’ conjures up class degradation; and ‘desecration’ intimates religious sacrilege
and blasphemy.” Stam, Literature and Film, 3.
7	 This is one way of defining “success,” of course, but as shall become clear, it is not our
focus here.
8	 For a broader theorization of adaptation in general, see Linda Hutcheon, A Theory
of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006) and Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation
(New York: Routledge, 2005).
9	 Just as Gavin asked “Why ask why?” to stimulate applied biologists to consider evolutionary
questions, we believe the study of the evolution of narratives is potentially a way
for everyone from film critics to marketing analysts to understand better the power and
the broader function of narrative in their work. See T. A. Gavin, “Why Ask ‘Why’: The
Importance of Evolutionary Biology in Wildlife Science,” Journal of Wildlife Management 55
(1991): 760–66.
10	 We are not suggesting, however, that human involvement with stories is a “cross-culturally
universal, species-typical phenomenon,” as do John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in
“Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction
and the Arts,” Substance 94–95 (2001): 7.
11	 We are therefore not arguing, as do David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash in Madame
Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature (New York: Delacorte, 2005) from evolutionary
psychology, that certain stories remain popular because they narrate biological
imperatives: Othello’s jealousy stems from male-male competition, for instance. For an
amusing critique of this perspective, see Mark Lawson, “Books for the Beagle-eyed,” The
Guardian, November 11, 2005. Nor are we arguing the biological “adaptiveness of cultural
transmission” as do Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson in Culture and the Evolutionary Process
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 117 or that culture is an evolutionary process in
new literary history456
its own right, as the “gene-culture co-evolutionists” argue (see Derek Gatherer, “Cultural
Evolution: The Biological Perspective,” Parallax 12, no. 1 [2006]: 58). For a critique of
this position, see Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin
(New York: Harmony Books, 1997), 219–20.
12	 We therefore are also more restricted in our focus and interest than are L. L. CavalliSforza
and M. W. Feldman, in Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), with their very large-scale parallel between genetic
transmission and cultural transmission and their mathematical modeling.
13	 In our deliberate limitation, we clearly differ here in our aim and our scope from the
more expansive claims of what have been called “literary Darwinists”: see the work of Joseph
Carroll, especially his book Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New
York: Routledge, 2004) where he argues that literary works reflect and articulate the vital
interests of humans as living organisms. This vast claim is not our concern or focus. Nor
are we interested in pursuing the equally large question of the role of culture and biology
in human behavior. For a summary of these latter approaches, see Boyd and Richerson,
Culture and Evolutionary Process, 281.
14	 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976). For summaries
and analyses of memetics, see Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1999); Kate Distin, The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2005), and Robert Aunger’s “Conclusion,” in Darwinizing Culture: The Status
of Memetics as a Science, ed. Robert Aunger (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 205–32.
Memeticists have been accused of not developing any empirically grounded theories of
the mechanisms responsible for cultural transmission or for the generation of new cultural
variants. See Matteo Mameli, review of Distin, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, September
16, 2005, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=4001; Gatherer, “Cultural Evolution,”
65–66.
15	 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 204.
16	 For a balanced analysis of these objections, see Robert Aunger, “What’s the Matter
with Memes?” in Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, ed. Alan Grafen
and Mark Ridley (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), 176–88. Michael Ruse, in Darwinism
and its Discontents (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006) calls the meme a “loose
analogy” (241) only. There are other reasons the meme concept is difficult to work with,
including the infection/parasite model that memetic theorists have used, suggesting that
memes are exogenous. See Paul Bouissac, “Editorial: Memes Matter,” The Semiotic Review
of Books 5, no. 2 (1994): 1–2; and his paper to the DARPA symposium in Arlington, VA,
April 4–5, 2006, entitled “To Catch a Meme: Biological and Psychological Perspectives on
Memetics.”
17	 Aunger, “What’s the Matter with Memes?” 176.
18	 See Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, passim. Not only stories are adapted, of course;
conventions of genres, etc. can be as well, but our focus here is specifically on narrative.
19	 Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of Selection (Oxford: Freeman,
1982), 83.
20	 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 209. The degree of copying-fidelity necessary for memes to
be good replicators has been a matter of much debate.
21	 Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 84.
22	 Even in biology, it should be noted that there is a continuing debate about whether
genes or organisms are the unit of selection. Not surprisingly, the discussion of what constitutes
a unit of replication in culture as a whole is a matter of considerable debate in
memetic circles as well (see Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype), but in our
more limited context of adaptations, the replicator is easier to define.
23	 Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 114.
457on the origin of adaptations
24	 David Hull discusses Dawkins’s idea that the human brain is the actual vehicle for
memes and suggests the plausibility of computers in this role as well. Our more limited
homology makes it easier to identify the parallel to biological vehicles. See David Hull and
John S. Wilkins, “Replication,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2005 Edition),
ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2005/entries/replication/.
See Liane Gabora, “Ideas Are Not Replicators but Minds Are,” Biology and Philosophy 19,
no. 1 (2004): 127–43 for an argument that minds are not vehicles but replicators.
25	 Jill Levenson, introduction to Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2000), 95. See also James N. Loehlin, introduction to Romeo and Juliet,
ed. Loehlin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 85: “The latest appropriations of
Romeo and Juliet are part of a long history of reinvention, whereby successive cultures have
used the play to figure their own civil brawls and death-marked loves.”
26	 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 208.
27	 Quoted in Glenn Whipp, “Director Remains Faithful to Harry,” Toronto Star, September
21, 2002.
28	 We may marvel at the mutations that produce cold-hardiness like warm fur on animals
in the Arctic, but let us not forget that similar mutations presumably appeared in some
unfortunates living in the tropics! As a result, at least in biology, adaptations can appear to
be optimally, even exquisitely, designed when they are not. Such is the product of natural
selection; nonetheless, historically, or to some extent even today, such an observation can,
for some people, only be logically explained by the action of a divine power.
29	 As an example of random or genetic drift, imagine that some seeds from a palm tree
floating on the ocean get lucky and wash up on shore, where they establish themselves as
a new population. Only a few seeds are what are called colonizers, and they contain only
a small portion of the total variation in the genetic material that comprised the original
population. The genetic makeup of the new population is thus a random sample of the
original, and as a result the new plants may be on average taller, shorter, thicker, etc. than
the parental stock by chance alone.
30	 As Franco Moretti has argued about the literary canon, “very few books, occupying a
very large space.” Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly
61, no. 1 (March 2000): 211.
31	 Again we stress that determining the success of an adaptation as an independent work
of art is different from determining its success as an adaptation—our concern here.
32	 Darwin did not coin this term and only used it in later editions of On the Origin of
Species.
33	 For more discussion of biological and cultural “migration,” see Cavalli-Sforza and
Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution, 68.
34	 See Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986).
35	 W. B. Watt, in fact, defines biological adaptation in similar terms as the degree of
suitedness between organisms and their environments. See his “Adaptation, Fitness and
Evolution,” in the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J.
Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004), 66–72, http://sciencedirect.
com/science/referenceworks/0080430767.
36	 These conditions are uncommon and so it is not surprising that most examples of
adaptive radiation involve organisms accidentally colonizing islands with few other spe-
cies.
37	 For proliferation to be adaptation, this means new forms (book to film) not just copying
formats (video to DVD).
38	 Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 114.
39	 See Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, passim.
new literary history458
40	 Mechanisms differ from functions, however, as we have seen: the function of adapting
from novel to film may be to reach people who don’t read novels anymore; the story must
now be told in a more culturally acceptable and accessible way.
41	 Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution, 66.
42	 See Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso,
2005), where he uses not cladograms but rather phenograms. For a critique of this model
in science, see W. Ford Doolittle, “Uprooting the Tree of Life,” Scientific American 282, no.
2 (2000): 90–95.
43	 Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1984), 224.
44	 Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (1991; repr., New York: HarperTorch, 2002), 8.