Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006) is a book about the art of adaptation. She asks: why do playwrights, novelists, film-makers and others choose to adapt old stories rather than writing new ones? And why do audiences enjoy such stories?
Part of this pleasure...comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise. Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change (4).
Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication. And there are manifestly many different possible intentions behind the act of adaptation: the urge to consume and erase the memory of the adapted text or call it into question is as likely as the desire to pay tribute by copying (7).
Adaptation is repetition, but repetition without replication. And there are manifestly many different possible intentions behind the act of adaptation: the urge to consume and erase the memory of the adapted text or call it into question is as likely as the desire to pay tribute by copying (7).
In a very real sense, every live staging of a printed play could theoretically be considered an adaptation in its performance. The text of a play does not necessarily tell an actor about such matters as the gestures, expressions, and tones of voices to use in converting words on a page into a convincing performance...; it's up to the director and actors to actualize the text and to interpret and then recreate it, thereby in a sense adapting it for the stage (39).
Because adaptation is a form of repetition without replication, change is inevitable, even without any conscious updating or alteration of setting. And with change come corresponding modifications in the political valence and even the meaning of stories. An extended analysis of a selection of the many different adaptations of one particular story-- that of a gypsy called Carmen-- suggests that, with what I call transculturation or indigenization across cultures, languages and history, the meaning and impact of stories can change radically (xvi).
Here's an interesting way in which Hutcheon's argument about Adaptation connects with Aristotle's point about Mimesis (that people like to imitate) and also Zeitlin's point about "Playing the Other" (that male actors in the Greek tradition play women in order to learn more about how to be men):
On an experiential level as well, the conservative comfort of familiarity is countered by the unpredictable pleasure in difference-- for both creator and audience. Building upon Walter Benjamin's 1933 essay "On the Mimetic Fallacy," Michael Taussig has argued that the human compulsion to behave like something or someone else marks a paradoxical capacity to be Other (1993: 19). His anthropological study of the power of replication is focused on how a society can maintain sameness through alterity (129). He defines the mimetic faculty as "the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other" (xiii).
What we might, by analogy, call the adaptive faculty is the ability to repeat without copying, to embed difference in similarity, to be at once both self and Other. Adapters choose to use this ability for any number of complicated reasons...(174).
We have seen that adaptations disrupt elements like priority and authority (e.g., if we experience the adapted text after the adaptation). But they can also destabilize both formal and cultural identity and thereby shift power relations. Could that subversive potential also be part of the appeal of adapting for adapters and audience alike? (174)
