Abstract
The twenty-first century is shaping up to become the age of adaptation. From Hollywood’s addiction to remaking classics and rebooting franchises, to YouTube’s vast repository of videos featuring a panoply of adaptational practices (homage, re-enactment, parody, pastiche, mash-up), to the explosion of fan fiction on the internet, contemporary culture seems increasingly to be driven by a vision of universal reversioning, a never-ending quest to ensure that every text is hypertextually transformed, transmediated, recreated and reimagined. It is therefore unsurprising that adaptation studies should be a burgeoning area of academic enquiry, with learned societies (such as the Association for Adaptation Studies), journals (Adaptation) and research clusters (the Centre for Adaptation Studies at de Montfort University) having sprung up in the last decade, dedicated to combating the old prejudices against adaptation as a symptom of cultural exhaustion and demonstrating instead that it is a generative and creative endeavour. Kate Griffiths and Andrew Watts’ lively and stimulating new volume, Adapting the Nineteenth-Century, a study of transmedia adaptations of canonical writers, is a welcome addition to this field of scholarly enquiry.
The book is divided into six chapters, each of which provides a case study in adaptation into a specific medium: Zola into radio, Balzac into silent film, Madame Bovary into different literary genres (detective fiction and graphic novel), Les Misérables into theatre, Maupassant into television, and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours into cinema. As Griffiths explains in her lucidly written introduction, the aim was to examine the way specific authors have been adapted into a medium with which they have a ‘telling affinity’ (p. 9). Accordingly the first chapter examines British radio adaptations of Germinal, arguing that reading the original text alongside those adaptations sheds new light on a hitherto neglected aspect of the novel, namely the extent to which it is centrally concerned with the voice, a fact obscured by the critical emphasis on the visual dimension of Zola’s writing. This chapter sets the pattern for those that follow, each of which is structured by a double critical move which involves identifying those characteristics specific to the medium of the adaptation, and using this as a conceptual framework through which to re-examine the original texts. Thus Griffiths’ study of France 2’s series, Chez Maupassant, argues that the spatial aesthetic of television as the ‘small-screen’ is particularly well-adapted (no pun intended) to render the claustrophobic atmosphere of Maupassant’s short stories. In an analogous move, Andrew Watts, in his chapter on two silent film adaptations of Balzac’s work (Jean Epstein’s L’Auberge rouge and Rex Ingrams’ The Conquering Power, based on Eugénie Grandet) finds in the idea of silence a useful conceptual tool for exploring aspects of Balzac’s fiction. This approach, as well as yielding deft readings, also enables the authors to bring together texts that would not immediately invite a comparative reading. Watts, for example, uses the idea of excess as both aesthetic principle and thematic concern to articulate a discussion of two very different theatrical adaptations of Hugo’s Les Misérables: Boubil and Schönberg’s blockbuster mega-musical and the contemporary Benin-born playwright José Pliya’s 2001 Le Complexe de Thénardier, an exploration of the psychological effects of genocide.
The relationship between adaptation and original as conceptualized by Griffiths and Watts is, therefore, a two-way one, as each is examined through the optic of the other. This process allows one particularly significant aspect of the nineteenth-century texts under consideration to emerge, which is the extent to which they themselves are the products of adaptational textual practices. Thus Griffiths’ study of two film versions of Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (directed by Michael Todd and Frank Coraci) explores how all three texts are examples of a ‘spectropoetics’, Verne’s original novel, with its myriad borrowings from an extraordinary range of anterior texts, as much a haunted text as the subsequent adaptations. Watts’ exploration of Madame Bovary, Philippe Doumenc’s recent detective novel, Contre-enquête sur la mort d’Emma Bovary, and Posy Simmonds’ Gemma Bovary likewise suggests that if Flaubert’s novel has proved so susceptible to hypertextual transformation it is because it is itself centrally concerned with adaptation, both at the level of representational content (Emma’s tragedy is a failure to adapt to her surroundings) and that of poetics, as the novel is distinguished by a strongly intertextual dimension, rewriting a wide range of earlier works from Balzac’s Un curé de village to Perrault’s fairytales. Griffiths and Watts thus succeed in demonstrating that adaptation, far from being a marginal and slightly disreputable fringe practice, is of absolutely central importance in modern literary history and a key part of the textual practices of many canonical writers, even those who loudly promoted the idea of original genius.
Although Griffiths and Watts touch on a number of theoretical paradigms – Griffiths, for example, harnesses Lawrence Venuti’s work on translation to explore those television adaptations of Maupassant that reflect on their own status as adaptations – this book wears its learning lightly, eschewing abstractions for close reading and a sensitivity to specificities: the specificities of the medium under consideration and of the context in which the adaptations were produced (for example Griffiths considers the extent to which British radio adaptations of Germinal produced in the 1980s evoke the spectre of Arthur Scargill). Undergraduates studying any of the texts discussed here will find sophisticated but accessible analyses. At the same time Adapting Nineteenth-Century France will be of interest to scholars working in the fields both of nineteenth-century French studies and adaptation studies. If the latter is still often synonymous with literature on screen studies, this book demonstrates that media such as radio and graphic novels are rich seams still waiting to be mined.