Enough about adaptation: Let's talk about adapting

Any eyebrows that are raised by the authorship of the volume that inaugurates Palgrave Macmillan's new series on Adaptation and Visual Culture, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Julie Grossman, should immediately be lowered because Grossman's approach to the subject of adaptation is novel, illuminating, and provocative. A brief perusal of the table of contents might suggest that this is just another collection of case studies ranging from the latter-day quasi-human creations of Gods and Monsters and Hugo to the intertextual daisy chain running from Cape Fear to the "Cape Feare" episode of The Simpsons to Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play. But Grossman's case studies are so inventively conceived, intelligently organized, and imaginatively analyzed that together they mount a formidable challenge to received wisdom about adaptation.

A writer seeking material or inspired by earlier reading produces an adaptation of that earlier material. The two texts—books or plays or comics or movies or television shows—are alike in some ways, different in others. Knowing audiences, in Linda Hutcheon's resonant phrase,¹ are invited to enjoy both the similarities and the differences, and critics are invited to compare and contrast the two texts and the two experiences of encountering them. Grossman does not reject this model, but she complicates it by emphasizing the agency of the adapted and adapting texts over that of their adapters. These texts, "hideous progenies" like Frankenstein's Creature whose births are difficult and often "monstrous," are marked by " elasTEXTity," a "state of being for sources and adaptations that are indivisibly connected" (2).

The central insight that drives Grossman's analysis is the scandalously intimate connection between these two seemingly opposite qualities. On the one hand, adaptations are deformed monstrosities, often delivered under considerable stress, that the authors of the original texts may well regard as parodies rather than duplicates. On the other, their very existence demonstrates the tropism of the original texts toward replication, rejuvenation, and renewal, all qualities that emphasize their chameleon fluidity and call their very status as originals into question.

Adaptation studies has grappled with this problem before, most notably in the model Kamilla Elliott has derived from Lewis Carroll of "verbal/visual looking glass analogies . . . predicated on the reciprocal power of words and of pictures to evoke verbal figures in cognition" (153)² and in Robert Stam's application of an intertextual model derived from Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva to discuss adaptation as one of a legion of processes by which texts are inevitably produced, inflected, deformed, and recreated by other texts in an "ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation" (186).³ What Grossman adds is a shift in emphasis from adaptations as a series of texts variously participating in these intertextual revels to adapting as an often monstrous practice of textual generation, degeneration, and regeneration. The "state of being" of elasTEXTity turns out to be indistinguishable from a state of becoming, whereby texts are most truly themselves when they spawn unholy offspring that challenge their primacy, integrity, and identity.

Grossman has chosen a series of case studies that dramatize this process and arranged them to mount an increasingly sweeping series of challenges to models of textual integrity that have long served as a basis for Western aesthetics, more general models of identity that continue to anchor theories of selfhood and humanity, and the canons and methodologies of adaptation studies itself. Beginning with the Frankenstein's Creature and Hugo's Automaton, mechanical creations who paradoxically "illuminate the importance of human bonds and creativity" (32), she considers the transformative journeys, sometimes adaptive, sometimes anti-adaptive, undertaken by both the heroes and the creators of Apocalypse Now and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Next she turns to the anatomies of marginal identity in the two film versions of Imitation of Life, "The Yellow Wallpaper," and [Safe], and films like Dogfight, Far From Heaven, and Kinky Boots whose hideous progeny include Broadway...