Fiction, Film, and Faulkner: The Art of Adaptation by Gene D. Phillips (review)

124Reviews only did Anderson's associations with other writers in Chicago provide impetus if not inspiration for his work, just as the city provided a clear understanding of the values of his time, but the city became for Anderson not only a place to work at the same time that he earned a living but also a place in which his work, as memoirs by Floyd Dell, Margaret Anderson, Ben Hecht, and others make clear, was appreciated and admired for its own sake as a substantial literary achievement. It was this recognition that gave an uncertain middleaged man the determination to go on, even as it contributed to his discovery of the voice that he made his own in the stories, largely written in Chicago, that were to become Winesburg, Ohio. Williams limits the scope of her study of Anderson to what she calls his "urban cycle," focusing rightly on those works, particularly Windy McPherson's Son (1916), Marching Men (1917), Poor White (1920), and the stories and poems that reflect the relationship between Anderson and the city of which he had become, at least temporarily, a part. As Anderson attempts to determine and define, even to celebrate the individual in a society that had become an urban industrial mass, as he seeks in his work for an individuality and identity denied by the new society, as his people search in the works of this cycle for elusive fulfillment, the Storyteller, Sherwood Anderson, and the City, Chicago, combine to produce , nor a literary footnote, much less a movement, but in Williams' words, "an impressive urban voice" (p. 273). Williams knows Chicago thoroughly; she understands Anderson profoundly; and she combines the two to produce one of the most valuable works yet published in the continuing attempt to understand this most provocative and original writer as he grapples with (in his own words, "gropes" for) the meaning of his time and ours. For this "incurable small town man," the experience of Chicago provided an important insight into the reality that his works transmute into a significant phase of the enduring American myth. That myth began with Benjamin Franklin, and it continues as we enter a third American century, and Williams contributes the details and insight that bring us closer to an understanding of the man, the city, and the continuing mythical search to which both have substantially contributed . Michigan State UniversityDavid D. Anderson Phillips, Gene D. Fiction, Film, and Faulkner: The Art of Adaptation. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1988. 217 pp. Cloth: $24.95. The problem for writers of books devoted to film adaptations of fiction is to realize that the comparison is inevitably unfair. The audience for commercial films demands resolvable conflicts and flat characters because entertainment is its only concern. Good readers, on the other hand, are entertained by whatever is demanded of them that leads to an understanding of the author's vision oí the human condition. Even the best screenwriters cannot make these two ideas compatible, and one wonders why so many of them try. Adaptation, after all, demands modification in order to fit new conditions to a new environment. Gene Phillips states that his purpose in Fiction, Film, and Faulkner is "to determine to what degree the films of Faulkner's fiction . . . are worthy renditions of the stories from which they were derived" (pp. 1—2). What the book accomplishes, however, is far more important than mere value judgments of how close the films get to their original sources. The reason Phillips' book is so superb, in fact, so much better than most books on film adaptations, is that the author takes such intricate care in explaining the differences between the original Faulkner source and its film adaptation that one is caught up more in the art of both forms than in how well the film adapts. The end result is that one wants to both read the source and see the movie, a certain indicator of a successful study. Studies in American Fiction125 As if to emphasize the point about the differences between the two art forms, the first part of the book is devoted to "Faulkner as Screenwriter," especially the six films for which...