A Theory of Adaptation (review)

Linda Hutcheon opens her new book provocatively: ‘If you think adaptation can be understood by using novels and films alone, you’re wrong.’ And so she proceeds to theorize adaptation in a variety of media, including as her texts poems, novels, plays, operas, radio, and computer games. Her method, she says, is to ‘identify a text-based issue that extends across a variety of media,’ study it ‘comparatively,’ and ‘tease out the theoretical implications.’ Rather than follow a case-study model, then, she examines not only the ‘formal entity’ or adaptational product but the ‘process of creation’ involved in adaptation; she also scrutinizes the ‘process of reception,’ or how audiences take pleasure in consuming cultural remediations. Because so little work has been done on reception, she focuses on the ‘modes of engagement’ audiences experience when being told or shown – or when they interact with – adaptations; on what happens to an audience when a text moves from telling to showing, from one performance medium to another, or from either into a participatory mode, such as that of interactive video games. She looks at how stories ‘travel,’ in chapters on the adaptors and their motivations – economic lures and legal constraints, acquisition of cultural capital, and political commitments – and on the pleasures of consumption – the experience of ‘knowingness,’ the sense of being immersed or ‘transported,’ the ‘comfort of ritual and recognition with the delight of surprise and novelty.’ She considers, as well, the social and political, transcultural, indigenizing contexts the critic must investigate when writing about adaptation.

Like other recent critics of adaptation, such as Brian McFarlane, Robert Stam, Thomas Leitch, and Julie Sanders, Hutcheon concentrates on overturning the notion of fidelity aesthetics that once governed the discussion about a remediation and its ‘adapted text,’ a term she prefers to the usual ‘original’ or ‘source’ text. In fidelity’s place, she puts culture, and so theorizes a story’s ‘process of mutation or adjustment, through adaptation, to a particular cultural environment.’ Borrowing a model from the biological sciences, then, she posits ‘cultural transmission’ as ‘analogous to genetic transmission,’ but, instead of genes, ‘memes,’ that, like genes, are ‘replicators’ and enable a text to compete for ‘survival in the “meme pool.”’ The fittest stories undergo ‘cultural selection’ and not only survive but also ‘flourish’; the qualities necessary for ‘high survival value’ are ‘longevity,’ ‘fecundity,’ and ‘copying-fidelity.’ Here, Hutcheon smuggles back into her theory the notion of fidelity that she had promised to discount, for ‘copying-fidelity’ is, as she defines it, a replication that ‘chang[es] with each repetition, whether deliberate or not.’ She admits, then, that ‘some copying-fidelity is needed’ as a result of ‘changes across media and contexts.’ Yet she brackets the historical forces and cultural changes that constitute the contexts in which consumers demand certain cultural documents in particular historical moments and geopolitical locations; likewise, the industrial and economic structures that affect media production and reproduction and the choices corporations make about both, which are notoriously difficult to assess.

Such issues, of course, more fittingly suit the case-study model Hutcheon eschews in favour of theoretical investigation. And Hutcheon’s book is clearly a foundational text for anyone studying theories of adaptation, in any medium. The book’s careful, intelligent theorizing of the field – without having deployed the often useless categories that many novel-to-film studies spawn – means that scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, and general readers will find it extremely valuable as they think about the kinds, values, and uses of cultural rewritings and remediations. Moreover, Hutcheon’s inclusion of texts and media often excluded from such studies – opera, computer games, and so forth – makes this a particularly useful book. It will be a basic text for adaptation studies, an area just being constituted as a field.