Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film

Introduction

1 Introduction Whether adapting fiction into film is an art or a science,Chinese directors are good at it. Since 1995 all eight of Ang Lee’s films have been adaptations, and his results have been nothing short of spectacular:CrouchingTiger,Hidden Dragon (2000), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Lust, Caution (2007), to name just three. ZhangYimou’s best movies are also adaptations: Red Sorghum (1987), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and To Live (1994). In 2002, Dai Sijie took the art of Chinese self-adaptation to new heights when he remade his own award-winning novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress into a film.Chen Kaige,Ann Hui, Stanley Kwan, and Hou Xiaoxian (Hou Hsiao-hsien) are a few more brilliant lights in this area. In spite of this record of achievement,however,there are few comparative studies of Chinese fiction and film. It is easy to find books that offer detailed,sensitive interpretations of film or literature as separate texts,but not ones that put the two together.Why are Chinese literature and cinema still routinely treated as parallel disciplines with distinct aesthetic boundaries? Over the course of writing this book, I have come to appreciate two reasons why the scarcity of such comparative studies cannot all be attributed to a lack of scholarly interest or academic overspecialization.The first has to do with the inherent difficulty of studying cross-media adaptation of any kind.As theorists of translation and ekphrasis can attest, it is difficult for an observer to establish general principles,rules of thumb,or even minimal best practices for any inter-arts discipline. Besides having many different formal attributes, fiction and film have distinct methods of production (usually an individual writer vs.a collective filming crew),modes of distribution (usually a bookseller vs. a theater), and circumstances of reception (usually solitary 2 Introduction reading vs. public viewing.)The more scientific or universally valid a theory of adaptation seeks to be,the more individual cases it must account for across these fields, and the more it must seek a platonic solution to the question of the commensurability of media.This explains why from the 1940s on the Western canon of adaptation theorists—André Bazin (2000, 2005), George Bluestone (1957), Keith Cohen (1979), Dudley Andrew (1984, 1998), James Naremore (2000), Kamilla Elliot (2003), Robert Stam (2005), Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (2005),and Linda Hutcheon (2006)—drew so heavily on the theoretical resources of hermeneutics, semiotics, structuralism, translation, and narratology.1 They were eager to discover an analytical paradigm , a grammar, a nuanced yet neutral vocabulary that could describe the origin and transmission of both literary language and cinematic moving images.They were often frustrated,but their impressive insights on how film directors adapt literary phenomena such as narrative, character, style, and mood have left a lasting impression on me and on this book. A second reason has less to do with medium per se than with the rich, allusive texture of Chinese cultural traditions. Even when understood to be rigorously distinct from each other, modern Chinese literature and cinema are self-evident examples of what Mikhail Bakhtin would call cannibalistic forms: each devours and remixes a wealth of antecedent culture (1992: 33–34). Or, in the structuralist terminology of Gérard Genette, each is transtextual because it always already exists in relationships with a vast horizon of other texts (1997:1).This presents adaptation studies with a serious problem, for if a work of fiction or a film is understood to be embedded in an inexhaustible “formal” tradition of its own—not to mention in other political, historical, artistic, or personal contexts—then it is an infinitely rich artifact of culture long before it reaches the transformative dialectics of being “adapted.” Thus studies of Chinese adaptation will always run the perilous risk of mixing two infinities. Given the fact that the cross-fertilization of Chinese film and fiction has radically transformed both fields,however, I believe this is a risk more critics should take. Indeed, an initial attempt or pragmatic primer of some kind, a defense and illustration of at least a few strategies for studying adaptation, is not only warranted but overdue. Here, then, in Table 1 are the examples on which this book is based. These seven sites, moments, or events of adaptation could be organized and analyzed in many different ways,each with its own integrity and implied assumptions about how cultural materials influence one another or otherwise belong together.A table like...