My 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.
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