Faith in the Faithless: An Inter(re)view with Linda Hutcheon

Linda Hutcheon is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto and is arguably one of the most prolific of Canadian scholars. A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006) is her ninth solo effort.

A Theory of Adaptation points out the pervasiveness of adaptation in the current multimedia climate but also shows how the practice has had long and deep connections to literary and cultural practices long before the present. As with elements of the postmodern, the new is not so new after all. Hutcheon is at pains to point out that "there are many and varied motives behind adaptation and few involve faithfulness" (xiii). "Faithfulness" assumes a singular origin, a stable source from which anything that follows must flow. The notion of being faithful has guided many earlier studies of the relations between, say, fiction and film, comics and video games. Her premise is not so much that of Borges or Eliot, where the present re-writes the past but, rather, that the adapted text "challeng[es] the authority of any notion of priority. Multiple versions exist laterally, not vertically" (xiii). Fidelity to the text being adapted is, then, not the issue here.

There is an interesting double movement in this book, perhaps linked to Hutcheon's ongoing love of such "mixed" media as opera. Opera, as anyone who experiences this form in any way knows very well, is often a vexing thing. Its "problem" is that it resembles nothing so much as the bad puppet show in Don Quixote. There, the Don knows the story being told so much better than the marionettes; he sees through the bad staging and faulty illusion, the exaggerated emotion. Yet, when the fair damsel is finally at risk, he draws his sword and rushes the stage. In other words, representations of all kinds seem to possess this unaccountable quality, this perhaps all-too-human dimension so resistant to theorization or to "reason."

Hutcheon, then, continues her career-long struggle to understand the powerful relationship between the human and the representational. Hence, she points out that the "'intertextual' or the dialogic relations among texts" are never strictly a "formal issue" (xii). Rather, "[w]orks in any medium are both created by and received by people, and it is this human, experiential context that allows for the study of the politics of intertextuality" (emphasis in original). For many who work cross-disciplinarily, the interesting moment here is Hutcheon's need to go further than the notion of the intertext has formerly taken us.

The following interview took place over several months during the spring and summer of 2006. On the English Studies in Canada website ,readers can find a recorded interview with Linda Hutcheon. (Just follow the links to ESC Radio).

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BB How did you come up with the idea of working on adaptations?

LH Anyone interested in postmodernism and parody likely can't ignore adaptation for long. What I realized was that most people worked on literature to film and most did case studies. I like to tackle things across media and across genres, so I thought there might be room for a "theory of adaptation."

BB It strikes me that almost all of your work takes a very optimistic view of things. You continually accentuate the positive. In the present book, for instance, you make it clear from the start that one of your main purposes is to force your readers to recognize the prevalence of adaptations. You also note the almost endless stream of negative descriptors used in regard to adaptations (2–3). Your purpose often seems to be to rehabilitate those forms or cultural/aesthetic practices which for whatever reason are often sneered at.

LH It's either my postmodern de-hierarchalizing impulse or my Pollyanna personality defect, I suppose.

Maybe both? I can't do much about the latter, but I will confess to a real pleasure in trying to make the culturally denigrated newly appreciated. I enjoyed taking on postmodernism when "pomo-bashing" was the name of the game; ditto for adaptations. Have you...