Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace

Chapter Twelve Copycat-and-Mouse

chapter twel ve Copycat-and-Mouse The Printed Screenplay and the Literary Field in France m at th ij s e ng el be rt s One of the many effects that the birth of a medium is liable to produce in its medial environment is (predictably, for once) new competition. In the arts, this has especially been the case, in the last century or so, for film and literature; it did not take long before the relations between these two art media, or at least between film and the novel, became fraught with rivalry. Even today, in an almost entirely different setting, they continue to be so more often than might be expected after more than a century of competition, but also expansion of both these art media as well as of cooperation and transmediation. Criticism on the relationship between film and literature has, surprisingly, for a long time taken over this competitive stance in describing the relations between the two arts. Analyses of one of the aspects of this question, the connections (or absence thereof) between the film script and literature , for instance, consist usually, as we will see shortly, of succinctly argued, normatively oriented positions about the screenplay in general, cast in a combative terms pro or contra the literary aspect of the film text, that leave little space for research on specific questions or a particular corpus that could, presumably, lead to less general and perhaps less dogmatic stands. This still tends to be the case today. In what is certainly one of the best books published on the film/literature issue in recent years, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, Kamilla Elliott admirably dissects the topics and strategies in the field; however, even here the rivalry 216 The Printed Screenplay and the Literary Field in France 217 implicitly resurfaces in the way some stances are described—albeit far less blatantly than has happened elsewhere. When the author writes, in a section on proponents of ‘‘Film Words as Literature,’’ that ‘‘the filmwords -as-literature analogy disowns film’s actual language as literary other,’’ she accurately describes one of the strategies in the field, which claims the dialogue, the screenplay, or even film itself as literature.1 However, in opposing the terms ‘‘film’s actual language’’ and ‘‘literary other,’’ and in claiming that a literary stance toward film texts ‘‘disowns ’’ the film’s ‘‘actual’’ language, she nevertheless discredits the idea that film words can ever be considered as literary, in whatever sense.2 This amounts to a more or less implicit ban on considering the literary aspects of film texts, a ban that contradicts the author’s later, explicit and in my view convincing wish to recognize the ‘‘more complex word and image engagements both within and between . . . media.’’3 Such recognition indeed seems not very frequent in comments and studies on the screenplay and its relations to literature. The long debate on this issue is largely a general debate on ‘‘the’’ film script in which two positions dominate and usually lead to a normative stance: The movie screenplay should, or should not, be considered as a literary text. Since the question of publishing screenplays in print plays an important role in the debate,4 it should be interesting to take a close look at the institutional production side of the printed film text. How often have screenplays in fact been launched on the book market by publishing houses, in a particular culture? Furthermore, since we are interested in the literary orientation of the screenplay, the second question would be to what extent the published scripts have been produced by houses that are equipped to position screenplays as literary texts. This empirical and institutional approach to the relationship between the screenplay and literature will, hopefully, contribute to shift the basis of the argument over the supposed (non)literary nature of the screenplay and perhaps , more generally, help to establish a different view on the relations between literature and film, or between media as such. reflections on the screenplay Before taking a close look at a particular situation and its quantitative particulars, it is useful to look at some of the more or less authoritative positions on the vexed question whether the screenplay can be literature , in order to gauge the history of the debate and to identify in more 218 Matthijs Engelberts detail one of the aspects that could be fruitfully worked out so as...