May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essyas on the Drama of August Wilson

“The Crookeds with the Straights”: Fences, Race, and the Politics of Adaptation

MICHAEL AWKWARD "The Crookeds with the Straights": Fences, Race, and the Politics of Adaptation A co-incidence ofcontingencies among individual subjects who interact as members ofsome community will operate for them as noncontingency and be interpreted by them accordingly. -Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies ofValue ~ must remember that ideology also functions overtly, censoring and editing in the name ofmoral, economic, andpolitical righteousness. -Donald F. Larsson, "Novel into Film: Some Preliminary Considerations" How can a whole people share a single subjectivity? - Vincent Crapanzano, "Hermes'Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description" In his suggestion in "I Want a Black Director" that racial positionality largely determines the nature of a white director's interpretive and, ultimately, filmic response to black authored texts, playwright August Wilson calls attention to the potential impact of ideological and cultural difference on filmic 206 " THE C ROO Ie E D S WIT H THE S T R Ii. I G H T S " adaptations ofliterary sources. Wilson's insistence to executives of Paramount Pictures, the studio which in 1987 purchased the film rights to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences, that a black person be found to direct the film version ofthis play startled many observers inside and outside of the Hollywood community because it represents "the kind of thorny racial issue that Hollywood, with its long-standing concern for the bottom line, is typically reluctant to address." 1 Among the forces of resistance with which the playwright must contend are the views offilm and literature scholars which, almost without exception , are unsympathetic to claims that movie adaptations need necessarily position themselves as pictorial or even thematic realizations of their originary sources. Although film criticism over the last decade especially has become generally much more attentive to the impact ofideology on narrative, theories ofadaptation have not moved radically away from the positions first espoused in 1957 by George Bluestone, who, in a seminal study of adaptation, Novels into Film, argues that the filmist need be only minimally concerned with reproducing significant aspects of the prompting textual event. For Bluestone, those who expect more from films possess naive views of the relationship between films and their literary sources, because the filmed adaptation "becomes a different thing in the same sense that a historical painting becomes a different thing from the historical event it illustrates.... In the last analysis, each is autonomous, and each is characterized by unique and specific. properties."2 What happens, therefore, when the filmist undertakes the adaptation of a novel, given the inevitable mutation, is that he does not convert the novel at all. What he adapts is a kind of paraphrase of the novel-the novel viewed as raw material. Following Bluestone's example, contemporary studies of film adaptation have focused generally on the formal and aesthetic similarities and differences between these diverse modes ofstorytelling, assuming that calls for investigation of the motivations for specific alterations reflect, in the words of Neil Sinyard, either "ignorance" about film's responsibilities to originary texts or "a tone of academic superiority and condescension towards the newer art form."3 Thus, despite narrative criticism's recent focus on the ways in which ideologies are reproduced and reinforced in filmic and other representations, theories ofadaptation continue to insist that to examine in a potentially critical way the trajectory of film's appropriation of the "raw material" even of works which may be said to represent challenges to hegemonic points ofview is to participate in a retrograde and hopelessly naive interpretive endeavor. As .. THE C ROO KED S WIT H THE S T R A I G H T S .. 207 a consequence, discussions like Wilson's (or, for that matter, the hotly contested debates about Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's black feminist novel, The Color Purple4 ) enter the national consciousness without the sound theoretical interventionist possibilities that leftist academics are prepared to contribute to, say, debates about Clarence Thomas's fitness for Supreme Court ascendance; such debates centered on complex-but, for many of us, quite familiar-issues such as sexual politics, racial identity, the consequences of ideological predisposition, and, perhaps most perplexing for the diverse groups for whom Thomas's nomination hearings were watershed events, autobiographical narrative's limitations as an indisputable truthtelling device. In part, the silence about difference and filmic adaptation-a process which Bluestone and virtually every scholar who has written on the subject equates with critical interpretation-might reflect our...