A flowering branch of medlar (Mespilus germanica) with butterfly, chrysalis and caterpillar of a Papilio species. Coloured engraving by J. Pass, c. 1816.
The adaptation of a literary work into film presents an opportunity for the conceptual content of the source material to be transfigured, and conveyed with particular efficacy to an audience. The form of film offers a degree of accessibility and immediate aesthetic affection that can be more easily undermined in the realm of literature. In her 1966 essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag lauds cinema as “the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms” at that time; she praises the ability of a film to “elude the interpreters” through its “momentum," which allows it to be “just what it is.”1 Films can, for a given audience, communicate content in a more direct, unimpeded manner relative to written works.
Certain interpretive practices conceive of form and content in a way that subordinates one to the other; rather, the relationship should be one of coordination. Literary forms, e.g., poetry, novels, etc., are more susceptible to such types of interpretation, and rendered “rudimentary, uninspired, and stagnate” by the critics’ ilk peddling the “distinction between form and content which is, ultimately, an illusion.”2 Breaking from this false conception, original content gracefully guides – though does not despotically govern – an adaptive form to allow important conceptual elements of the work to be communicated in a new and independent way.
Making fidelity paramount in adapting the content of piece of literature to film devalues the particular artistic tools of the latter form; contributions such as costumes, acting, decor, space and setting, are often overlooked – with meaningful consequences from an aesthetic perspective.3 Such idiosyncrasies embody a content of their own which enhances the conceptual raw material, as it were. Sontag clarifies her critique; she is not claiming that “works of art are infallible, that they cannot be described or paraphrased.” Rather, she insists that in conducting criticism one ought to “serve the work of art, not usurp it.”4
Thus, faithfulness to essence should be maintained while permitting varied existence – the new form to which the original's content is adapted is as a child with its own identity and unique characteristics that honors his or her parent, not a slave that serves a tyrannical master.
Prioritizing particularity in form at the expense of universality in content or vice versa disembodies content and leaves form uninspired. This “old duality,” related to understandings of metaphor derived from Greek philosophy – and arguably the metaphysical dualism of body and mind/spirit – lends logical justification to the aforementioned ways of interpreting and adapting literature and film.5 However, an amiable reunion of form and content is necessary for aesthetic affection in art. An essentialism, rather than fundamentalism, permits the original's offspring to retain its individualism all the while remaining faithful to its father, as it were.
Adaptation methods guided by a fundamentalist notion of fidelity restrict the actualization of aesthetic experiences potentially given to an audience; the qualities of film as a particular form allow for an augmentation, rather than an undermining, of source literature. This is shown by Christine Geraghty in her analysis of filmmakers’ takes on Pride and Prejudice; she regards these adaptations as “explorations and celebrations of femininity that actually depend on the transformation of Austen's novel into a conventional romance.”6 Were such a creative license revoked and rigid standards of adaptation employed, the effect would be an arbitrary limitation on expression and experience.
Film adaptation presents an opportunity for literature to reach audiences through aesthetic experiences unique to the former form. Viewing a film in the shadow of its literary relative, through the heavily-tinted lens of a false form/content dichotomy, one is blinded – “We no longer see the [work of art], only its reproduction.”7 Given the inexorability of content and form along with the especial aesthetic qualities that particular forms incarnate and convey, adapting literature to film properly involves an inalienable creative liberty that is to be exercised so as to enchant, enrich, entertain, inform, etc. – all in the spirit of the original work.8
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Picador, 1966, 10-11.
Ibid., 12.
Cartmell, Deborah. “Now A Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama Authorship in Film Adaptation,” in Screen, vol. 50, no. 4, 2009, 463.
Sontag, 12.
Ibid., 14.
Cartmell, 463.
Kuspit, Donald. The End of Art. Cambridge UP, 2004, 9.
Sontag, 12.