Apples to Apples: A Book-History Approach to Film Adaptations in the Classroom

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: two goats break into an abandoned movie theater and one of them starts eating a roll of film. His companion turns to him and asks, “How is it?” He replies, “Ehh, the book was better.” (The joke dates back to an old New Yorker cartoon, reportedly quoted by Alfred Hitchcock to Francois Truffaut) (Naremore 2). At any rate, it goes without saying that our approaches to teaching film adaptation in the literature classroom have progressed well beyond what Dudley Andrew calls a “tiresome” preoccupation with “fidelity and transformation” (31) and what Robert B. Ray calls the “unproductive layman’s question (How does the film compare with the book?)”—leading us to repeatedly pronounce, like the goat, “Ehh, the book was better.”

Nevertheless, the sense of film and literature as materially incommensurate media is difficult to surmount. Thus, André Bazin has called a novel “a unique synthesis whose molecular equilibrium is automatically affected when you tamper with its form” (19). In his seminal Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema, George Bluestone suggests, “It is as fruitless to say that film A is better or worse than novel B as it is to pronounce Wright Johnson’s Wax Building better or worse than Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake” (5–6) and quotes Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture (1915) in noting that comparing a literary work against its filmed adaptation “may be like trying to see a perfume or listen to a taste” (19n39). Indeed, one of my professors in graduate school maintained that the film adaptation course amounted to nothing more than repeatedly (re) demonstrating “that this apple is not like this orange.”

In this paper, I propose a book-history lens for teaching adaptation. Such an approach, I have found, brings literature and film together in productive ways, all the while suggesting that film and literature may be more of an “apples-to-apples” comparison than initially supposed. Distinguished by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery as “an interest in classifying, codifying, and studying print culture objects” (8, emphasis added), book history insists on the materiality of literary texts, their status as “physical objects” (2): indeed, as a former MIT Dean of Architecture colorfully reminds us, books are “tree flakes encased in dead cow” (qtd. in Finkelstein and McCleery 2). As such, George Bornstein notes, the “physical features of the [literary] text” themselves “carry semantic weight” (1). From a book historian’s perspective, a “book is a medium,” and literary texts may have already been adapted into material, visual instantiations. As Walter Ong has famously noted, “[W]riting ‘reconstituted the originally oral, spoken word in visual space,’ while print ‘embedded the word in space more definitively’” (qtd. in Finkelstein and McCleery 17).

As a field, book history itself has moved away from an idea of literature as a stable, originary, and transcendent essence. Thus, the early textual scholarship practiced by the so-called New Bibliographers relied on what Finkelstein and McCleery describe as “studying texts and books as physical objects” but in the interest of arriving at “the most complete and least corrupted version of a text possible” (8). Such an approach posited an authoritative text as coeval with the author’s germinal intention, or what Leah Marcus calls “that originary brilliance in the mind of its author” (146). The tendency was also, Marcus explains, “to view mediating institutions like the printing house, the playhouse, or the schools as agents of corruption” (145). Indeed, implicit in such beliefs is the same set of assumptions that have long undergirded adaptation studies, the privileging of an intangible literary ideal over its sublunary, material instantiation. New Bibliography encountered its first formidable challenge in D. F. McKenzie’s call to refute the notion of a literary essence that is more and more corrupted the further it passes from its author.

In what follows, I discuss my experiences in upper-level undergraduate courses on Victorian literature and film teaching Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights alongside their...