house gases into the atmosphere, 和
hence will delay the onset of the kind of
global climate changes that are liable to
turn El Niño into a serious hazard.
Our affair with El Niño is approaching
a critical juncture. Constant El Niño
could soon become ½ckle. Will he grow
more intense? Will his brief visits be-
come prolonged? As yet we have no
de½nite answers. But we have learnt that
much can be done to avoid calamities
by implementing appropriate policies,
even when the available scienti½c infor-
mation has large uncertainties. Above
全部, we need to guard against the tempta-
tion to defer dif½cult political decisions
because of a perceived need for more ac-
curate information. Much more can be
learnt from our affair with El Niño. 我们
need to do so in a hurry, before we suc-
ceed in changing him.
Linda Hutcheon
on the art of
adaptation
Despite the argument implicit in Spike
Jonze’s latest ½lm, Adaptation, every age
can justly claim to be an age of adapta-
的. The desire to transfer a story from
one medium or one genre to another is
neither new nor rare in Western culture.
It is in fact so common that we might
suspect that it is somehow the inclina-
tion of the human imagination–and,
despite the dismissive tone of some crit-
集成电路, not necessarily a secondary or deriv-
ative act. 毕竟, most of Shakespeare’s
plays were adapted from other literary or
historical works, and that does not seem
to have damaged the Bard’s reputation
Linda Hutcheon, 美国科学院院士-
艾米自从 2003, is professor of English and com-
parative literature at the University of Toronto.
Her theoretical works include “Narcissistic Nar-
rative: The Meta½ctional Paradox” (1980),
“The Politics of Postmodernism” (1989), 和
“A Poetics of Postmodernism: 历史, 理论,
Fiction” (1998). Most recently she edited, 和
Mario J. Valdés, “Rethinking Literary History:
A Dialogue on Theory” (2002).
© 2004 由美国艺术学院颁发
& 科学
108
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The art of
adaptation
as an inventor. 但近年来, 这是
true, we have witnessed on our televi-
sions and in our movie theaters enough
adaptations–based on everything from
comic books to the novels of Jane Austen
–to make us wonder if Hollywood has
½nally run out of new stories.
Although our age might well claim to
be the age of adaptation, in part because
of the surfeit of new media now avail-
有能力的, the act of transposition and what
we could call ‘re-functioning’ is as old
as art itself. It may have taken T. S. Eliot
and Northrop Frye to convince me that
all art is derived from other art, 但它
didn’t take those theorists to convince
avid adapters across the centuries of
what for them–on the dramatic, dance,
and operatic stage, and in literature in
general–had always been a truism. 在
this sense, adaptation joins imitation,
allusion, parody, travesty, pastiche, 和
quotation as popular creative ways of
deriving art from art.
If this is so, 为什么, 然后, have so many
people lamented the results of the pro-
cess of moving from the page to the
stage or the screen? So often ½lm’s rela-
tion to literature has been characterized
as a tampering, a deformation, a desecra-
的, an in½delity, a betrayal, a perver-
锡安. The deeply moralistic rhetoric of
such characterizations belies the fact
that what is at stake here is really a ques-
tion of cultural capital. For some people,
as cultural theorist Robert Stam has ar-
gued, literature will always have “axiom-
atic superiority” over any cinematic ad-
aptation of it because of its seniority
as an art form. This hierarchy also has
something to do with what he calls
“iconophobia” (the suspicion of the
visual) and the concomitant “logophil-
ia” (the love of the word as sacred).
从这个角度来看, adaptations are,
by de½nition, “belated, middlebrow, 或者
culturally inferior.” Commenting in 1926
on the fledgling art of cinema, 弗吉尼亚州
Woolf deplored the simpli½cation that
inevitably occurs in the transposition of
literary work to the visual medium, call-
ing ½lm a “parasite,” and literature its
“prey” and “victim.” Still, she conceded
that “cinema has within its grasp innu-
merable symbols for emotions that have
so far failed to ½nd expression.” And so
it did.
Film semiotician Christian Metz has
said about cinema that it “tells us con-
tinuous stories; it ‘says’ things that
could be conveyed also in the language
of words; yet it says them differently.
There is a reason for the possibility as
well as for the necessity of adaptations.”
The same could be said of musicals, op-
eras, ballets, 歌曲, and other narrative
形式. While no medium is inherently
good at doing one thing and not another,
each medium (like each genre) has dif-
ferent means of expression and so can
aim at certain things better than others.
Art theorist E. H. Gombrich offers a use-
ful analogy when he suggests that if an
artist stands before a landscape with a
pencil in hand, he or she will “look for
those aspects which can be rendered in
lines”; if the artist has a paintbrush, 他的
or her vision of the same landscape will
emerge as masses instead. A poet, 由
same analogy, will be attracted to repre-
senting different aspects of a story than
the creator of a musical spectacular; 和
the linear and single-track medium of
language will produce a different version
than the multitrack ½lm, with its amal-
gam of music, 声音, and moving visual
图片.
Perhaps it is the very possibility of
telling the same story in many different
ways that provokes us to make the at-
tempt. When we adapt, we create using
all the tools that creators have always
用过的: we actualize or concretize ideas;
we simplify but we also amplify and ex-
代达罗斯之泉 2004
109
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注释者
Linda
Hutcheon
trapolate; we make analogies; we cri-
tique or show our respect. When we do
all this, does it matter whether the nar-
rative we are working with is ‘new’ or
adapted? Our postromantic valuing of
the originary is, 毕竟, a late addition
to a long history of borrowing and steal-
ing–or, more accurately, of sharing–sto-
里斯.
I am just beginning a new research
project to try to theorize adaptation,
and while my general interest in the
questions of adaptability and adaptation
is wide and includes all those new forms
of ‘remediation’ that information tech-
nology has given us, in this brief note I
want to limit my remarks to the move
from the page to the stage and the
屏幕, 那是, the move from a purely
verbal medium to the embodied, enact-
ed forms intended for performance. 我
would like to focus on how language,
声音, 音乐, and visual images togeth-
er convey a once purely verbal narrative
in a new way.
The shift from looking at black marks
on a white page to perceiving a direct
representation on the stage or the screen
is a fraught move. Since it takes longer
to sing than to speak (much less read)
a line of text, operas and musicals must
necessarily distill, often radically, 这
narrative of a novel or play. This neces-
sary compression means the trimming
of expansive plot lines, the removal of
much psychological analysis, 和
loss of stylistic texture. Characters and
events are omitted; colorful slang and
expletives are deleted. With literature,
we start in the realm of imagination–
which is simultaneously controlled by
the selected, directing words of the text
and unconstrained by the limits of the
visual or aural. We can stop reading at
any point; we can reread or skip ahead;
we can hold the book in our hands and
feel (as well as see) how much of the
story remains to be read. But with ½lm
and stage adaptations, we are caught in
an unrelenting, forward-driving story.
And there we have moved from the
imagination to the realm of direct per-
塞申斯, with its in½nite detail and broad
focus.
The move from stage to screen entails
yet another medium shift. Opera may
have been Richard Wagner’s idea of the
total work of art (the Gesamtkunstwerk)
that unites all the arts of music, 文学-
真实, dance, and the visual, but today it
is cinema that ful½lls this claim. “A com-
posite language by virtue of its diverse
matters of expression–sequential pho-
tography, 音乐, phonetic sound, 和
noise–the cinema,” according to Stam,
“‘inherits’ all the art forms associated
with these matters of expression”–“the
visuals of photography and painting, 这
movement of dance, the decor of archi-
结构, and the performance of theater.”
Film clearly has resources that the stage
can never have: the power of the close-
up that gives the “microdrama of the
human countenance” and the separate
soundtracks of ½lm that permit voice-
overs, 音乐, and the nonvocal to inter-
mingle.
There are clearly many different issues
around medium, 类型, 生产, 和
reception to consider when theorizing
adaptation, including a very basic physi-
cal one. The private and individual expe-
rience of reading is closer to the private
visual and domestic spaces of television,
收音机, dvd, 视频, and computer than it
is to the public and communal viewing
experience in the dark of the theater.
和, when we sit, quiet and still, 在里面
dark watching real live bodies on the
阶段, our kind of identi½cation is differ-
ent from when we sit in front of a screen
and have reality mediated for us by tech-
科学.
当然, new electronic technologies
have made what we might call ‘½delity to
the imagination’ possible in new ways,
110
代达罗斯之泉 2004
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well beyond earlier animation tech-
niques and special effects. The many
new adaptations of fantasy ½ction are,
可以说, the result of these technologi-
cal breakthroughs. One of the central
clichés of ½lm adaptation theory is that
audiences are more demanding of ½deli-
ty when dealing with the classics–with
the work of Shakespeare or Dickens, 为了
实例. But a whole new set of what
we might call cult popular classics–the
classics of fantasy–are now being made
visible and audible in the movie theater.
And the readers of cult classics are likely
to be just as demanding of ½lm adapta-
tions as are the fans of the more tradi-
tional classics.
What happens when these readers see
their favorite books depicted on-screen
according to somebody else’s imagina-
的? The answer can be found some-
where in the audience reactions to the
recent adaptations of The Lord of the
Rings and the Harry Potter novels. 现在,
例如, that I know from the movie
version of The Lord of the Rings what an
orc looks like, I’ll never be able to recap-
ture my ½rst imagined version of it. Is
this good or bad?
Is there a limit ½nally to what we’ll
call an ‘adaptation’? In his ½lm Moulin
Rouge, Baz Luhrmann borrowed Pucci-
ni’s operatic story of the consumptive
heroine and the bohemian artist from
La Bohème, just as he deployed the con-
ventions of ½lm musicals and mtv
music videos. Is his a multiple adapta-
的? And what about spin-offs? Are
dvds an extension or another aspect
of adaptation? What about the toys, t-
shirts, board and video games, 和
websites? Where does what we are will-
ing to call ‘adaptation’ stop?
These are the kinds of questions that
I am asking myself at this early stage of
my research. Of one thing I have already
become convinced: that adaptation is
not necessarily parasitic. 反而, it is a
The art of
adaptation
fundamental operation of the story-
telling imagination. For us in the audi-
恩斯, part of the very real pleasure of
watching adaptations lies in recognition
and remembrance. But it is equally true
that part of the also very real masochis-
tic fear provoked by adaptations lies in
recognition and remembrance. 这是
one of the paradoxes that fascinates me,
that makes me want to take on that re-
ductive, negative rhetoric that sees adap-
tations as inevitably derivative and un-
faithful to the adapted works.
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代达罗斯之泉 2004
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