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anghraineMy best friend and I had an interesting, fairly wide-ranging conversation about the distinctions between adaptation, retellings, fanfiction, other forms of directly intertextual storytelling (à la Wide Sargasso Sea, Lavinia etc), covers (as in music), heavily illustrated editions of texts, collage, sampling, novelizations, ekphrasis generally, translation, and inspiration.
The distinctions here are mainly ones that he makes and I do not. For me, all of these things are on a spectrum or scatterplot of something like intertextuality. As I was saying on Tumblr the other day (re: fanfiction), I don’t actually think that most of these kinds of terminology reflect coherently defined art forms at all. They reflect norms, values, and conventions shaped by laws and corporations and other economic/cultural concerns, not any consistent system of understanding intertextuality more broadly.
This is a frequent point of disagreement between him and me, because he prefers to refine terms like these into … philosophical coherence, I guess? So he’ll say, well, I think of the term as more specifically meaning X, not Y, and that lets us examine the different approaches that X and Y take in a more systematic, artistically formal way. (As in the linked post, this is formal in the sense of form not as in propriety.)
And I’m like … it does, yes, but I don’t think that kind of re-definition corresponds to the meanings of those terms in actual usage. Narrowing the definitions imposes a coherence and logic to these distinctions that I don’t think actually exists. It’s more like a grab bag of imprecise, overlapping categories defined by values and customs and legal practice than anything they’re doing artistically.
Him: inconsistent laws and customs are kind of arbitrary and uninteresting in terms of theorizing categories of art, though.
Me: not to me, but anyway, I think the way we theorize art is very profoundly shaped by modern customs and laws to a degree we often can't even see, and words are defined by usage, not philosophical convenience.
(Yeah, we’re super fun at parties. But seriously, this is how we’ve talked since high school.)
Regardless, his theory is that adaptation is actually a narrower category of intertextual art than in casual (or academic) usage. His view is that an adaptation is an attempt to represent the actual source; there may be new material added, and some of the original material may be removed, but there is an effort to preserve not just character outlines or plot structure or elements of setting, but considerable amounts of the original source, usually in a different medium than the original. A re-telling, on the other hand, is a work that re-casts the source material into new language and sometimes generic (as in genre) form.
This is all according to him, not me. I think all storytelling of this kind = re-telling and that there is no hard line separating these approaches, just gradations of variance.
So in his theory, re-tellings that drastically overhaul the source may be creative and brilliantly intertextual, but they are not adaptations as he defines it. Clueless is an intertextual take on Emma but not an adaptation of Emma. O Brother Where Art Thou? is an intertextual take on The Odyssey but not an adaptation of it. Shakespeare’s plays were not adapting his sources, strictly speaking. Wide Sargasso Sea etc aren’t truly a form of adaptation (especially not in a case like WSS, where the source is drastically recontextualized and rewritten in the same fundamental medium as the original). On the other hand, something like Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” is a true adaptation, an illustrated edition of a text is an adaptation, Star Wars novelizations are adaptations (but not other EU novels).
He got a phone call before I could ask him what he thought of the “Shakespearean” Star Wars books, which he himself gave me as a present. The language is clearly meant to closely correspond to the scripts of the films while also evoking Shakespearean patterns of meter and word choice. I’m also not sure where he stands on loose but still direct adaptations that use significant amounts of material from the original, but remove and/or add so much that it’s manifestly its own thing (Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films or Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, say, which I would argue differ not only on a detail level from their sources but in overarching genre and purpose to such a degree that I can’t even get worked up about them).
We also had a detour about what counts as an addition to an adaptation rather than simply interpreting the text (again, especially if it’s in a different medium—the context was whether the navigators in David Lynch’s Dune can be considered an element added by Lynch, given that they work really well with the vague description in the novel, but the specifics are virtually all coming from Lynch et al. rather than Herbert). I personally think that anything not specific to the source is an addition to some degree, and whether these additions cohere with the source text or override some aspect of it or are just sort of there may be relevant to how effective an adaptation it is but not whether it is one.
Also, I don’t think that addition, retention, and subtraction operate in qualitatively different ways in adaptation. That is, I think that what new material you contribute in adaptation, what you retain from the original in adaptation, and what you remove in adaptation are all comparably significant as active artistic decisions in terms of what the adaptation is doing with its source.
For example, he was talking about productions of Shakespeare that stage the plays as written, inevitably removing some things and using the stage or film to add all kinds of elements (like Loncraine’s Richard III) but still relying heavily on Shakespeare’s text, vs retellings of Shakespeare plays that clearly reference the original play but use completely modern language and generally an altered setting, like Ten Things I Hate About You. I get that these feel really different, and they are, but to me the difference is more a matter of being distant points on a shared scatterplot where it’s possible for other points to be much closer.
This all arose out of a discussion of Villeneuve’s Dune, Part 2 and the increasing alignment of the camera’s perspective with Chani’s throughout the film. We both liked the decision to not just give her more focus and re-write her to bring out the critique clearly intended in the text (especially given how underwritten the original character is) but to associate her perspective with the camera’s at significant times. However, we agreed that Dune’s criticism of the white savior narrative is always going to be undercut by its basic structure, which enormously centers Paul and his feelings and motives. One thing that came up was whether Villeneuve’s approach with regard to Chani suffered from this underlying structure, and if an adaptation of Dune could ever escape it without doing a Wide Sargasso Sea or essentially writing fanfic (and if there is ultimately any difference between these two things).
My friendvenndaai had suggested on Tumblr that the issue isn’t that Villeneuve went too far, but that he didn’t go far enough. Their ideal adaptation would be told completely from Chani’s and Irulan’s perspectives. So J (my bff) and I were discussing if it would be possible to make such an adaptation, or to show it entirely through Chani. This would involve jettisoning a lot of the source material, of course (though adaptations do that all the time) and led to a discussion of whether Dune as seen by Chani would still be an adaptation of Dune in any meaningful sense. One of my arguments is that while this would be much more of a Wide Sargasso Sea scenario if done in text (i.e. the same medium as the original), cinema makes it more possible to shift perspectives through visual language while still retaining a significant amount of the source material, and I would consider such a thing to still be a form of adaptation.
Is there a point at which you’re telling a story that’s basically original fiction inspired by Dune (or whatever your source is) rather than an adaptation? Oh, sure. And J and I do agree that “original piece inspired by [other thing]” is distinct from adaptation, given that otherwise all art is adaptation and the whole thing devolves into meaninglessness. But I don’t think this concept would be in that territory (any more than I think my idea of adapting Mansfield Park as a weird tragicomedy with Fanny and Mary as equal co-protagonists would not be an adaptation, though it didn’t come up).
We also discussed part of the reasons our perspectives on adaptation are different. I can be harsher towards individual adaptations than he is, especially ones that represent themselves as faithful but are not particularly faithful in my own judgment (shout-out to my beloathèds, the 1995 P&P and Peter Jackson's LOTR). But I do not tend to deny that even the most aggravating adaptation is an adaptation, where he questions whether looser, more disengaged adaptations should even count as adaptations at all, yet is not particularly concerned with fidelity beyond that.
So we also talked about how we’re impacted by our studies and hobbies. His master’s degree is in creative writing and his interests are very contemporary, while I did creative writing concentrations but have primarily studied literature with a strong focus on pre-1820 British literature, and I'm particularly influenced by my early modernist studies in how I think of adaptation as a broader human activity. In addition, he loves book arts and obviously, I’m deeply entrenched in fandom.
I mean, part of why it feels weird to conceptualize adaptation or intertextuality in this more granular way is because, while obviously fic sub-genres are a thing, it would feel strange to draw a hard formal line between, say, my Borgias modern AU told via excerpts from news reports about the Borgias as a new Democratic political dynasty and my genderswapped retelling of Pride and Prejudice and my Jyn/Cassian and Bodhi escape Scarif only to end up trapped on the Death Star AU and my canon-compliant P&P fic elaborating on the Pemberley scenes in the novel and my Fourth Age book!LOTR fic in which Eldarion has a happy but ultimately tragic arranged marriage to Faramir and Éowyn’s OFC daughter in which she dies of old age before he even becomes king. These do belong to different genres of fanfiction, but I would never say that any of them aren’t really fanfic.
Is it possible for something labeled as fanfiction to feel like it isn’t, really? For sure! This is why I always stop writing Subsequent Connections tbh. There’s a fun story in my head that I had thoroughly outlined, but it drifts so far from P&P that whenever I try to write it, it feels more like original fiction at that point. And not in the way that, say, my headcanon-based fic about OFCs in Númenor does, because while a lot of that is original in some sense, it is absolutely rooted in my reading of Tolkien’s Númenor, even if the characters and a lot of the plot are more stuff that some of my fandom friends and I made up together than derived from Tolkien.
And it’s not that adaptation as a concept should be theorized in exactly the way that I think of fanfiction, given that fanfic as a concept has very little to do with distinct formal qualities and far more to do with which forms of intertextuality and adaptation are culturally legitimized as well as norms within fan cultures and such. But my perspective is deeply influenced by that background in a way that his isn’t, I think.
The distinctions here are mainly ones that he makes and I do not. For me, all of these things are on a spectrum or scatterplot of something like intertextuality. As I was saying on Tumblr the other day (re: fanfiction), I don’t actually think that most of these kinds of terminology reflect coherently defined art forms at all. They reflect norms, values, and conventions shaped by laws and corporations and other economic/cultural concerns, not any consistent system of understanding intertextuality more broadly.
This is a frequent point of disagreement between him and me, because he prefers to refine terms like these into … philosophical coherence, I guess? So he’ll say, well, I think of the term as more specifically meaning X, not Y, and that lets us examine the different approaches that X and Y take in a more systematic, artistically formal way. (As in the linked post, this is formal in the sense of form not as in propriety.)
And I’m like … it does, yes, but I don’t think that kind of re-definition corresponds to the meanings of those terms in actual usage. Narrowing the definitions imposes a coherence and logic to these distinctions that I don’t think actually exists. It’s more like a grab bag of imprecise, overlapping categories defined by values and customs and legal practice than anything they’re doing artistically.
Him: inconsistent laws and customs are kind of arbitrary and uninteresting in terms of theorizing categories of art, though.
Me: not to me, but anyway, I think the way we theorize art is very profoundly shaped by modern customs and laws to a degree we often can't even see, and words are defined by usage, not philosophical convenience.
(Yeah, we’re super fun at parties. But seriously, this is how we’ve talked since high school.)
Regardless, his theory is that adaptation is actually a narrower category of intertextual art than in casual (or academic) usage. His view is that an adaptation is an attempt to represent the actual source; there may be new material added, and some of the original material may be removed, but there is an effort to preserve not just character outlines or plot structure or elements of setting, but considerable amounts of the original source, usually in a different medium than the original. A re-telling, on the other hand, is a work that re-casts the source material into new language and sometimes generic (as in genre) form.
This is all according to him, not me. I think all storytelling of this kind = re-telling and that there is no hard line separating these approaches, just gradations of variance.
So in his theory, re-tellings that drastically overhaul the source may be creative and brilliantly intertextual, but they are not adaptations as he defines it. Clueless is an intertextual take on Emma but not an adaptation of Emma. O Brother Where Art Thou? is an intertextual take on The Odyssey but not an adaptation of it. Shakespeare’s plays were not adapting his sources, strictly speaking. Wide Sargasso Sea etc aren’t truly a form of adaptation (especially not in a case like WSS, where the source is drastically recontextualized and rewritten in the same fundamental medium as the original). On the other hand, something like Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” is a true adaptation, an illustrated edition of a text is an adaptation, Star Wars novelizations are adaptations (but not other EU novels).
He got a phone call before I could ask him what he thought of the “Shakespearean” Star Wars books, which he himself gave me as a present. The language is clearly meant to closely correspond to the scripts of the films while also evoking Shakespearean patterns of meter and word choice. I’m also not sure where he stands on loose but still direct adaptations that use significant amounts of material from the original, but remove and/or add so much that it’s manifestly its own thing (Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films or Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, say, which I would argue differ not only on a detail level from their sources but in overarching genre and purpose to such a degree that I can’t even get worked up about them).
We also had a detour about what counts as an addition to an adaptation rather than simply interpreting the text (again, especially if it’s in a different medium—the context was whether the navigators in David Lynch’s Dune can be considered an element added by Lynch, given that they work really well with the vague description in the novel, but the specifics are virtually all coming from Lynch et al. rather than Herbert). I personally think that anything not specific to the source is an addition to some degree, and whether these additions cohere with the source text or override some aspect of it or are just sort of there may be relevant to how effective an adaptation it is but not whether it is one.
Also, I don’t think that addition, retention, and subtraction operate in qualitatively different ways in adaptation. That is, I think that what new material you contribute in adaptation, what you retain from the original in adaptation, and what you remove in adaptation are all comparably significant as active artistic decisions in terms of what the adaptation is doing with its source.
For example, he was talking about productions of Shakespeare that stage the plays as written, inevitably removing some things and using the stage or film to add all kinds of elements (like Loncraine’s Richard III) but still relying heavily on Shakespeare’s text, vs retellings of Shakespeare plays that clearly reference the original play but use completely modern language and generally an altered setting, like Ten Things I Hate About You. I get that these feel really different, and they are, but to me the difference is more a matter of being distant points on a shared scatterplot where it’s possible for other points to be much closer.
This all arose out of a discussion of Villeneuve’s Dune, Part 2 and the increasing alignment of the camera’s perspective with Chani’s throughout the film. We both liked the decision to not just give her more focus and re-write her to bring out the critique clearly intended in the text (especially given how underwritten the original character is) but to associate her perspective with the camera’s at significant times. However, we agreed that Dune’s criticism of the white savior narrative is always going to be undercut by its basic structure, which enormously centers Paul and his feelings and motives. One thing that came up was whether Villeneuve’s approach with regard to Chani suffered from this underlying structure, and if an adaptation of Dune could ever escape it without doing a Wide Sargasso Sea or essentially writing fanfic (and if there is ultimately any difference between these two things).
My friend
venndaai had suggested on Tumblr that the issue isn’t that Villeneuve went too far, but that he didn’t go far enough. Their ideal adaptation would be told completely from Chani’s and Irulan’s perspectives. So J (my bff) and I were discussing if it would be possible to make such an adaptation, or to show it entirely through Chani. This would involve jettisoning a lot of the source material, of course (though adaptations do that all the time) and led to a discussion of whether Dune as seen by Chani would still be an adaptation of Dune in any meaningful sense. One of my arguments is that while this would be much more of a Wide Sargasso Sea scenario if done in text (i.e. the same medium as the original), cinema makes it more possible to shift perspectives through visual language while still retaining a significant amount of the source material, and I would consider such a thing to still be a form of adaptation.Is there a point at which you’re telling a story that’s basically original fiction inspired by Dune (or whatever your source is) rather than an adaptation? Oh, sure. And J and I do agree that “original piece inspired by [other thing]” is distinct from adaptation, given that otherwise all art is adaptation and the whole thing devolves into meaninglessness. But I don’t think this concept would be in that territory (any more than I think my idea of adapting Mansfield Park as a weird tragicomedy with Fanny and Mary as equal co-protagonists would not be an adaptation, though it didn’t come up).
We also discussed part of the reasons our perspectives on adaptation are different. I can be harsher towards individual adaptations than he is, especially ones that represent themselves as faithful but are not particularly faithful in my own judgment (shout-out to my beloathèds, the 1995 P&P and Peter Jackson's LOTR). But I do not tend to deny that even the most aggravating adaptation is an adaptation, where he questions whether looser, more disengaged adaptations should even count as adaptations at all, yet is not particularly concerned with fidelity beyond that.
So we also talked about how we’re impacted by our studies and hobbies. His master’s degree is in creative writing and his interests are very contemporary, while I did creative writing concentrations but have primarily studied literature with a strong focus on pre-1820 British literature, and I'm particularly influenced by my early modernist studies in how I think of adaptation as a broader human activity. In addition, he loves book arts and obviously, I’m deeply entrenched in fandom.
I mean, part of why it feels weird to conceptualize adaptation or intertextuality in this more granular way is because, while obviously fic sub-genres are a thing, it would feel strange to draw a hard formal line between, say, my Borgias modern AU told via excerpts from news reports about the Borgias as a new Democratic political dynasty and my genderswapped retelling of Pride and Prejudice and my Jyn/Cassian and Bodhi escape Scarif only to end up trapped on the Death Star AU and my canon-compliant P&P fic elaborating on the Pemberley scenes in the novel and my Fourth Age book!LOTR fic in which Eldarion has a happy but ultimately tragic arranged marriage to Faramir and Éowyn’s OFC daughter in which she dies of old age before he even becomes king. These do belong to different genres of fanfiction, but I would never say that any of them aren’t really fanfic.
Is it possible for something labeled as fanfiction to feel like it isn’t, really? For sure! This is why I always stop writing Subsequent Connections tbh. There’s a fun story in my head that I had thoroughly outlined, but it drifts so far from P&P that whenever I try to write it, it feels more like original fiction at that point. And not in the way that, say, my headcanon-based fic about OFCs in Númenor does, because while a lot of that is original in some sense, it is absolutely rooted in my reading of Tolkien’s Númenor, even if the characters and a lot of the plot are more stuff that some of my fandom friends and I made up together than derived from Tolkien.
And it’s not that adaptation as a concept should be theorized in exactly the way that I think of fanfiction, given that fanfic as a concept has very little to do with distinct formal qualities and far more to do with which forms of intertextuality and adaptation are culturally legitimized as well as norms within fan cultures and such. But my perspective is deeply influenced by that background in a way that his isn’t, I think.