Emile Zola and the Artistry of Adaptation (review)

While reminding us of the generally lukewarm response to most of the adaptations of Zola's novels, this is not a book measuring them in terms of fidelity to the originals. Its comparative perspective is angled instead towards the specificities of five texts, each of which is the subject of a chapter-length essay, often illuminated by looking at them anew through the lens afforded by generations of stage and screen directors. The exception, in this respect, is the chapter devoted to L'Œuvre, in which Kate Griffiths's argument in relation to generic transposition is stretched to the 'translation' effected between pictorial and novelistic modes. That central argument is grounded in the reflexive turn that identifies within the texts themselves a concern with adaptation in a larger sense, located in the dramatization of origins and originality at the level of character and narrative shape. Although La Terre, for example, was staged in 1904 and given cinematic form by André Antoine in 1921, Griffiths's reading is primarily lodged between its thematics of inheritance and Zola's self-effacing reworking of King Lear, an approach simultaneously developed by Andrew J. Counter in his recent Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture (Legenda, 2010). Given Griffiths's scrupulous and constructive engagement with modern Zola scholarship, perhaps the only surprising omission in her study of L'Œuvre is any reference to William Berg's The Visual Novel: Emile Zola and the Art of his Times (1992), in which the lexicon and syntax of the writer's 'impressionist' modulations are analysed in greater detail. Positioned between Offenbach's La Belle Hélène and both Jean Renoir's silent film version (1926) and Edouard Molinaro's television adaptation (2001), Griffiths's chapter on Nana returns us, in exemplary manner, to theatricalization in its own right. With its doubles, authorial surrogates, anticipatory critical reflections, and performative mirrors, the text's self-reflexivity is confirmed in Renoir's camera-work and Molinaro's refraction of successive adaptations, including his own, 'which refuses to naturalize itself as a textual artefact' (p. 79). La Curée, in analogous fashion, is situated in relation to its conception (in the preparatory dossier) as a 'nouvelle Phèdre', the stage version created from it under the title of Renée (finally performed in 1887), and Roger Vadim's 1965 film, perhaps the most notorious of all the eighty or so cinematic adaptations of Zola's novels. Here again, however, Griffiths is interested in the polemical debate provoked by Vadim's 'reading' only to the extent that his departures from, and variations on, the original alert us to the text's embedded mimetic instabilities and problematic visual encounters at odds with the 'all-seeing eye' of militant Naturalism. A final chapter, devoted to La Bête humaine, is more firmly organized as a contribution to cinema studies in its closely focused commentary on Renoir's justly praised 1938 version and Fritz Lang's 1954 Hollywood remake; but in its emphasis on literal and metaphorical authorship (of crimes, scenarios, actions), transformations (of identities, versions, textual ancestors, the future), and writing (of letters, messages, stories), it successfully returns us to the novel itself. This is a book that refreshingly refuses to subscribe to clichés about Zola's 'pre-cinematic technique'. And in reading adaptations (both forward and back) against her selected texts, Griffiths provides for each of them an intelligent contribution to the thinking of students and specialists alike.