Not Adaptation but "Drifting": Patrick Keiller, Daniel Defoe, and the Relationship between Film and Literature

Not Adaptation but "Drifting": Patrick Keiller, Daniel Defoe, and the Relationship between Film and Literature Robert Mayer Two recent films by British filmmaker Patrick Keiller—London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997)—are mindful of and indebted to two works by Daniel Defoe—Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Tour through the Whole Island ofGreat Britain (1724-26). The films raise important questions about Defoe's texts and the link between film and literature. In the twentieth century, that relationship has further intricated the always complex borderline status ofthe novel,1 and while some filmmakers and theorists have argued against any kind of continuity between literature and film, more have linked 1 In die seventeendi and eighteenth centuries, die borderline diat die new fictional form uiat would become die novel most frequendy straddled was between fiction and history; die seventeendi-centuryand eighteendvcenturyview ofuiatterrain is examined in LennardJ. Davis, FactualFictions: The Origins oftheEnglish Novel (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1983); Michael McKeon, The Origins oftheEnglish Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Robert Mayer, History and the Early English NovelMatters ofFactfrom Bacon and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The history-fiction problematic, furthermore, informs die whole history ofdie form. Recendy, the work ofW.G. Sebald, widi its treatment of die catastrophic history of Europe in the twentieth century, its autobiographical aspect, and, perhaps most remarkably, its photographs ofuncertain provenance, has reminded us ofdie way in which die novel as a form seemingly inevitably challenges classificatory systems and crosses borders. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 4,JuIy 2004 804 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION them in avariety ofways.2 The intersection offilm and literaryprose, fictional orotherwise, has often been discussed in terms ofadaptation theory, a form ofinquiry once characterized byJ. Dudley Andrew as "frequently the most narrow and provincial area of film theory."3 Relying on literary models (the film as a translation or as a reading of a text), commentators on adaptation have often seemed to privilege the literary over the cinematic work.4 The presentarticle, however, is not a discussion of the adaptation of literary texts to film. Instead, it examines particular films and texts that reveal important points of kinship but that are also different in so manyways that Keiller's films often seem like outright rejections ofDefoe. This inquiry proceeds, then, somewhat in the spirit of Brian McFarlane, who has asserted that "there are many kinds ofrelations which may exist between film and literature, and fidelityis only one—and rarely the most exciting."5 Keiller's London and Robinson in Space are like Defoe's Tour in detailingjourneys that aim to represent the current state ofthe land through which the travellers move. Both text and films also evince a sense ofEngland as a political and moral space that is constructed by the observers themselves. Nevertheless, the Tour, with its triumphalist air, is very different from Keiller's films, which envision England as a late twentieth-century, Thatcherite desert island. Both Defoe's novel and Keiller's films, furthermore, focus on their own particular Robinson, a characterwho is in each case, in very differentways to be sure, shipwrecked in an alien world. At the same time, finally, the 2 Ingmar Bergman and Béla Balázs have made die case againstany continuity between film and literature; see Bergman, "Introduction," Four Screenplays, trans. Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), pp. 17, 19; Balázs, Theory ofFilm (New York: Amo Press; New York Times, 1972), p. 260. Sergei Eisenstein argued diat crosscutting, one ofdie most basic and important aspects offilm technique, was derived by D.W. Griffith from Dickens's novels, and Siegfried Kracauer declared that film, as a photographic art, is, like die novel itself according to many dieorists of that form, an essentially realistic medium: "films may claim aesthetic validity ifthey build from their basic properties; like photographs, uiat is, diey must record and reveal physical reality.'FiZm Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5di ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 426, 179. 3 J. DudleyAndrew, "The Well-Worn Muse:Adaptation in Film History and Theory," Narrative Strategies: OriginalEssays in BIm andProseFiction, ed. Syndy...