Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation |
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Author: Heidi Peeters Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation |
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Adaptations, both as a process and as a product, have been omnipresent and growing in importance over the last few decades. The academic world has been gradually acknowledging this tendency, addressing the subject in numerous monographs, conferences and master classes. The ultimate acknowledgement of the academic acceptance of adaptations, however, would be someone like, say, Linda Hutcheon writing a book on the phenomenon. And, lo and behold, that is exactly what has happened.
Linda Hutcheon could be rightfully said to be one of the most prolific thinkers of our time. She has been active and successful within various domains of the humanities, working on Canadian literature, Postmodern theory, Parody, Feminism and Opera, but she is quite new to the field of Adaptations. In response to her impulse to theoretically tackle the phenomenon, one might expect many things: a whole new insight into adaptations, rooted possibly in revelations on the postmodern paradigm, a defence of processes, texts and media that are deemed inferior and secondary (in a post-feminist impulse), and maybe something about opera.
Although there is ample room for "inferior" media and for opera, somewhat disappointingly, A Theory of Adaptation does not offer the Grand Theory we might have been hoping for. As Hutcheon explains in the preface, the Theory is just a theory , in the sense that "Anyone who has ever experienced an adaptation (and who hasn't?) has a theory of adaptation, conscious or not. I am no exception." (Preface xi) Hutcheon is not being rhetorically modest here; there are no great answers in this publication, no paradigm shifts in conceptualizing adaptations. Nevertheless, one does find hundreds of lively examples in this volume, energetically scattered insights mixed with pieces of an overview of what has been said within the adaptational field so far - mainly by Robert Stam and Brian McFarlane, two authors that are relatively traditional in their conceptualisations of the matter. It appears Hutcheon did not write this book because she wished to communicate a 'theory of adaptation'; she wanted to investigate the phenomenon with the help of her broad knowledge of cultural and artistic works, in order to discover some theoretical points, making for an entertaining but dazzling reading experience. "A Personal Introduction to Adaptation", or "Discovering Adaptations" might have been better denominators for the volume.
The book, having been organized under a tabula rasa impulse, is ordered according to the basic journalistic questions: "What?", "Who?", "Why?", "How?", "Where?", "When?", taking the reader along for a ride among medium specificity, adaptational prejudices, auctorial intentions, audience experiences and historical and cultural contexts and limitations. This starting from scratch strategy could be interpreted in two opposite ways: either Hutcheon acknowledges her humble status of a newcomer to the field, or she wants to daringly wipe away the mess that has been made in the field so far, go back to basics and do things properly. Maybe both interpretations are true.
The thesis emerging throughout the volume is that adaptations offer "the pleasure of repetition with variation" (p. 4) and two main ideas keep returning in this respect. The first is that the perception of adaptation should be liberated from pejorative connotations of infidelity, copying, blasphemy and so on. The second is that adaptation should not be conceived as a mere binary exchange between literature and film, but that it is a far more promiscuous process, involving video games, opera, novelizations, stage plays, machinimas, e-literature, radio plays, installations and many other media. These ideas are not very new, but therefore they are no less true, and for that matter, less valuable.
In chapter one, adaptation is being discussed as a general phenomenon, omnipresent and at the same time treated with contempt. We discover there to be three modes of engagement, or modes in which texts engage their audience, namely "telling", "showing" and "interacting". Chapter two uses this tripartite structure to categorize the different forms of adaptation, but contrarily to the triangular structure one might expect ( Telling vs. Showing , Showing vs. Interacting , Interacting vs. Telling ), the adaptational categories Hutcheon distinguishes are Telling vs. Showing , Telling/Showing vs. Interacting and Showing vs. Showing . Although these could be defended for quantitative reasons, the actual inclusion of such a defence might have been useful. Why exclude Telling vs. Telling (as in adaptations from novels into songs or poetry) or Interacting vs. Interacting (a cardboard game into a videogame) in the theoretical scheme? In this chapter the author goes on to investigate and partly undermine different clichéd ideas about adaptation, such as "Interiority is the terrain of the telling mode, exteriority is best handled by showing and especially by interactive modes." All this, again, is not groundbreaking, but quite useful.
Chapter three discusses the adapters and their motives, and it is at this point that Hutcheon proves to be most daring and unconventional. She is not only brave enough to plead for something that might be considered dated and irrelevant in literary discourses (namely the auctorial intentions), she also attributes attention to unexpected 'authors' in the adaptation process, like composers and actors. Another daringly insightful manoeuvre is her use of Richard Dawkins's theory of memetics (although it is done somewhat sketchy and scattered), a theory that has not been fashionable in the humanities, but turns out to be very useful in the field of adaptations. The last three chapters deal with audience expectations and experiences, contexts and some final questions.
Linda Hutcheon in this volume never offers general recipes to unveil adaptation, and neither does she provide major sociological or cultural insights into the phenomenon in relation to Postmodernism. The value of her work does not lie in the general theory it tackles, but in the smaller insights and the numerous examples, familiar and new, low- and high-brow, with which the volume is packed. Although Hutcheon, in A Theory of Adaptation , brings together many insights already heard of somewhere, she does it with wit and originality, providing "the pleasure of repetition with variation", which is exactly what an adaptation-loving audience might be craving for. |
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Heidi Peeters is a research fellow of the FWO Flanders and prepares a PhD on the novelization in Flanders at the Institute for Cultural Studies of the KU Leuven. |
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