W-I-P presentation of the opening chapter of
With Great Diversity: Iconotextual Configurations of Plays by William Shakespeare By Svenn-Arve Myklebost, English lit.
This paper contains most of the second chapter of my PhD thesis. This represents an early stage of my work; hence it is not just a beginning, but an unfinished beginning. I plan to divide my thesis into three sections. The first one addresses the act of adaptation through looking at how Shakespeare worked as an adapter. The second section will investigate how Shakespeare has been “shaped” through performance, by commentary and in print, by scholars, commentators and theatre practitioners over the past four hundred years. The last section, which will be longer that the two first ones put together, will address the adaptation of plays by Shakespeare into comic books.
What I present here, then, is the second chapter of the first section. The first chapter, still unwritten, will present examples of Shakespeare comic books as a gateway into the key issues of the thesis. The first chapter is bound to replace some of the introductory remarks of the second.
2. What Does it Mean to Adapt?
This project sets out to investigate, through a number of approaches and sometimes in roundabout ways, the relationship between originals and adaptations, something which is so conceptually complex that it becomes difficult even to identify the primary literature of this study. Let me demonstrate what I mean: the British publishing house Self Made Hero has since 2007 published a series of manga adaptations of William Shakespeare’s plays. The series is known as “Manga Shakespeare” and consists of ca. 200-page black and white paperback comic books influenced by or in direct imitation of Japanese manga style. So far, 14 plays have been published in manga form: Hamlet, The Tempest, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, Richard III, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, as one play per book. The texts are abbreviated but not rewritten to be easier to understand, even if they are, at least in part, geared towards schools and young readers.
I set out to make these books the primary object of my study. However, one might say that, since I am studying adaptation, the plays as originally conceived by Shakespeare should take primacy, because they are anterior to, or sources of, the adaptations, and they do present more detailed and richer texts. From one perspective, the adaptations are not so much art
works in themselves as they are interpretations and comments on those extant texts. Some will no doubt see them as deeply inferior to the older versions. The “originals” on their hand, are difficult to read as primary literature, since their status of originality is unstable, conceptually as well as practically speaking. As any student of Shakespeare will know, there exist no original manuscripts in Shakespeare’s hand (except for the much contested “Hand D” in the never-published Sir Thomas Moore.) What we have are Quartos and Folios that are several stages removed from their original conception, and which present textual versions often incommensurably at variance with one another. More conventional, however, is to read these plays in modern scholarly versions, such as the Arden, Cambridge, Oxford/Norton or
Riverside editions, individually or in collections. But if I were to read the third Arden edition of Hamlet today, what would I be reading? Hamlet is an especially illustrative example of the difficulty involved in “reading Shakespeare” since the third Arden edition (A3) is published in two volumes, one presenting the Second Quarto of 1604-5, and the other the 1603 Quarto together with the 1623 Folio. Am I to pick and mix?
As a consequence of all of this, the identity of the material that I study remains somewhat elusive. What follows is as much an attempt of defining my actual object of study as it is an endeavour to explore the theory of adaptation in general, two sides of the same coin.
In the context of adaptation one must know the original work, but it is also necessary that one analyses the principles, ideology and theoretical stances that underlie adaptation. To do this I devote one section of this thesis to investigating the history of adapting, reading and
understanding Shakespeare. It is also vital that one understands the art form at the receiving end of the transfer. Hence, the third and most extensive section of the thesis will focus its attention on the formal attributes of iconotexts, that is, art forms which rely on the
simultaneous presentation and integration of words and images. The most advanced type of iconotext in existence today is the medium of the comic book.
A more prosaic and less specific definition of my primary object of study is this: my investigations will be exemplified by, and lead up to a discussion of, four plays by
Shakespeare, in verbal as well as verbal-textual (iconotextual) forms, that is printed play-texts and mangas, respectively. I have chosen The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear and Othello for a set of reasons. One is the variety of styles and formal inventiveness detectable in the manga versions of these plays. Another reason is the variation of genre. Lear and Othello are tragedies, The Tempest is a particular type of romance play and Dream is a fantastical comedy. I also glance at history plays such as Richard III and Henry VIII, but these are in fact less successful adaptations, and are interesting only for that reason, that is to say, why are the plays I have selected more successful than the others, and what does it mean for an adaptation to be successful at any rate?
The problem of accurately defining my object of study demonstrates the need to discuss the matter of adaptation in some depth. The central questions of this first section of the dissertation are as follows: How does adaptation take place? What is adapted? What is the purpose of adapting? Before responding to those questions I must ask in a more general sense:
“what does it mean to adapt?”
Adopt, Adept, Adapt, Appropriate
Out of these four words, three differ only by a vowel sound, and their connotations and denotations are strangely related (etymologically, but mostly by association) and relevant for the ensuing discussions. What can the meanings of these words tell us about the mechanisms involved in basing art works upon art works?
The word “adopt” was, as registered by the OED first used in 1548, in the meaning of choosing someone for an heir, and then in 1604 in the currently most common usage of to
“take as one’s own child, conferring all the rights and privileges of childship, or such of them
as the law permits to be thus conferred”.1 It has other meanings, such as adopting a cause (of a political prisoner; 1961) or, of an authority, “to take over (from private ownership, etc.) responsibility for a road, etc.”; 1862. The word implies hierarchy: someone in a position of some power, parental or governmental, bestows rights, privileges and duties on someone junior to themselves. To “adopt” is to care for, but also in most cases to rule over something or someone.
The earliest instance of “adept” as an adjective, meaning “completely versed (in);
thoroughly proficient; well-skilled” stems from 1691, whereas the noun form of the word, one
“that has attained to proficiency in anything,” is first seen in print in 1663. The original usage of these words is strongly connected with alchemy and magic, or more generally, with a higher form of learning.
To “adapt” can mean “to fit (a person or thing to another, to or for a purpose), to suit, or make suitable,” and appears in print with that meaning in 1611. A slightly different usage appears in 1774: “to alter or modify so as to fit for a new use.” This word is quite instrumental and general, and has been used in countless contexts since its first appearances in print
(naturally, the OED cannot say anything about how long a word has existed in verbal use, since that is quite unrecordable). From it stems “adaptation,” a noun with complex
connotations for the purposes of this discussion.
Before exploring the etymology and implications of “adaptation” I should address the related but significantly different term “appropriation.” This is, again according to the OED, to make “a thing private property, whether another’s or (as now commonly) one’s own; taking as one’s own or to one’s own use” or the noun: “concr. the thing so appropriated or taken possession of.” The first appearance of this meaning in print is registered as early as 1393.
Another sense of the word is the “assignment of anything to a special purpose” (1789). Like
1 All word definitions in this chapter are from the OED: <http://dictionary.oed.com/>
in the case of “adopt” this word implies a notion of hierarchy: that something becomes controlled by someone and taken into use for whatever purpose they see fit. Incidentally, this may not be what the thing in question was designed for in the first place.
In the Latin, from which these terms have come into the English language, (often via French) to adopt is ad-optare (to-choose), adept is ad-ap (to-get) and adapt is ad-apt (to-fit).
Cf. “opt,” “apprehend” and “apt,” respectively, or choosing, understanding and making fit. In sum, these words imply a respectful treatment of their objects, where insight and skill is required in order to fulfil whatever purpose one attains to. To appropriate, in contrast, implies the use of force, to take the edges of in order that a square peg may fit a round hole, as it were.
There is little etymological logic in grouping adapt, adept and adopt together in opposition to appropriation. The suffix “ad” means “to” (it can be read as both an infinitive marker and a preposition, “moving towards”) and the roots of the words are entirely different words: “fit,” “get” and “choose”. Their near-homonymity is nevertheless quite illuminating with regards to the mechanisms of the most interesting of the three: “adapt.”
What is adaptation? There are three possible approaches to addressing that particular question. One may speak of adaptation of art works in an everyday sense, in a conceptual way, or one may wish to find a more accurately descriptive term for the processes involved. The latter may be tempting, but it cannot be done before reviewing the everyday and scholarly implications of the term.
The everyday and scholarly senses of the word are quite simple, even in the context of art. To adapt something is to take it and change it so it fits a different mode of production, usually in the form of a transmediation, for instance from stage play to feature film, from novel to stage play, from comic book to computer game, or across other genres or media in countless possible directions of transfer. In the academe “adaptation” denotes a whole field of study. Conceptually speaking, however, one needs to think of the act of adaptation in a very
different way, because of one inescapable, oxymoronic fact: one does not in fact change the object of art that is being adapted. Instead one creates a second work of art that may to a greater or smaller degree be similar to the first artwork, but designed (by different means) to function within a different context (such as, but not necessarily, another medium or genre).
Thus,
1) an adaptation is an individual, but not isolated, work of art that relates primarily to one “original” or source, which is usually itself a work of art.
2) The adaptation does not change the original; to “adapt” is not to adapt or appropriate.
3) In this study of adaptation a “work of art” is usually a narrative of some sort; a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Other art works are excluded; a painting of Hamlet is not an adaptation of Hamlet.
4) A source may itself be an adaptation (some say it is bound to be).
Note that these definitions are contingent and they have certain problems which will be negotiated in due course, in their meetings with the texts. One exception is the most insistent (hypothetical) objection which I should address immediately: At this juncture one may protest that by suggesting that “original” and adaptation be seen as separate, individual works, I make things unnecessarily complicated, when they are really quite simple. Is not the everyday understanding of “adaptation” sufficient and accurate? I will endeavour to explain why I conceptualise the acts and results of adaptation in the following and I will return to this four- pronged definition at intervals, where its practicability and integrity will be evaluated and questioned.
The above definition of adaptation has several implications. For one, it tends to
liberate the adaptation from its “original”, circumventing to a greater degree the persistent but
not very fruitful question of fidelity. Robert Stam’s introduction to Literature and Film deals with the idea that film has done a “disservice” to literature. According to Stam, terms “like
‘infidelity,’ ‘betrayal,’ ‘deformation,’ ‘violation,’ ‘bastardization,’ ‘vulgarization,’ and
‘desecration’ proliferate in adaptation discourse” (3). Further, he notes, critics tend to lament
“what has been ‘lost’ in the transition from novel to film, while ignoring what has been
‘gained’” (3). I suggested above that adaptation could be aligned with adoption, that its relationship to an original is one of authority (I can decide what should be done to you) and care (but I will do it with great consideration). Stam suggests that it has been construed rather differently, as subaltern. Although he discusses this in a context of literature-to-film, there is no reason to think that matters should be different in the context of literature-to-comic book.
Stam suggests a number of reasons why the status of adaptation has been inferior to that of original works2, but suffice it to say that in the present circumstance asserting the conceptual artistic individuality of adaptations should enable us to move on to more fruitful discussions.
Indeed it has long since been established in structuralist and post-structuralist discourses that hierarchies and dichotomies of the ilk that has denigrated adaptation have become arbitrated. Post-structuralist thinking reminds us that originals would be nothing without their copies. “In a Derridean perspective,” Stam writes, “the auratic prestige of the original does not run counter to the copy; rather, the prestige of the original is created by the copies, without which the very idea of originality has no meaning” (8). Stam also notes how the Derridean critique of origins is “literally true” in the context of adaptation, since every original tends to be “partially ‘copied’ from something earlier: The Odyssey goes back to anonymous oral formulaic stories, Don Quixote goes back to chivalric romances, Robinson Crusoe goes back to travel journalism, and so on ad infinitum” (8). It seems to me that Stam concludes a little bit too quickly about this chain of signification, because partial copying is
2 The list includes terms and notions such as “rivalry,” “iconophobia,” and the myth that films are easier to make than literature. See Literature and Film, 3-8.
not the same as adaptation. To be fair, he does not claim that it is, but for the present purposes this needs to be addressed. Here enters into the discussion concepts such as allegory, intertext, allusion, appropriation, pastiche and burlesque.3 Of course Don Quixote has its roots in
chivalric romances, but its relation to these romances appears in the novel as a self-conscious and fragmented parody. As has often been remarked Don Quixote has a lot in common with the post-modern novel, and it is in no way a straightforward adaptation or copy of a single previous work. The reason one cannot simply talk about “originals” and “copies” is not just that the deconstruction of the opposition (the two are, as I have shown, in fact mutually interdependent rather than opposed), but because in a particular way one cannot truly tell where intertextuality ends and adaptation begins (I return to the serviceability and problems of intertextuality in adaptation studies later in this chapter). It is perfectly imaginable that a story be constructed from several sources, and it would in theory be possible to gauge how much of each source has ended up in the adaptation. One could also define categories such that if there is a small degree (according to some imagined scale) of story X present in the adaptation, it may be seen as an allusion, a larger degree and it is a “source” and so on. I think the reader will agree that such an endeavour would be practically pointless and rather difficult to
perform. A framework of sorts is still required, albeit a less mechanical one. But first: another modification.
There is a certain danger that this chapter describes an ideal rather than a truthful idea about what adaptation is. The reason why I claim that the borders between adaptation,
appropriation, allusion and allegory become fuzzy is that an adaptation, ideal or not, involves more than a cut-down, reshaped rehash of another piece of art. Adaptations also add
numerous elements (plot, characters, names, ideas, voices), supplying a range of allusion not detectable in the original, and it is not only the “ideal” (that is, the creative and imaginative
3 Burlesque has a special position in Shakespeare scholarship. The second section of the thesis investigates the stage history of burlesques of Shakespearean plays, wherein the plays are made funny, without being made fun of.
type of) adaptation that does this. It will happen regardless, despite itself, through influences inherent in the processes of transmediation, transculturation and transhistorisation, processes which can never be avoided upon adapting. Then, in addition to these unavoidable differences (what Harold Bloom calls “misprision” MORE ON THIS) come whatever range of allusions and (say) intertextual ironies the adapter may deliberately choose to include.
Treating an adapted work as conceptually separate from its “original” (following the Derridean precept of putting “original” in inverted commas for now seems the only viable option), amounts to a status of creative freedom for the adapter and an opportunity for the critic to appreciate this freedom. It also enables one to discuss and explore the texts in question on equal terms, addressing what is unique about each text as well as what they have in common without prejudice, or at least without the wrong type of prejudice.
Another consequence of defining adaptation in this way is that it tends to dissolve another binary, one of adaptation versus appropriation. This opposition, I should note, is not an invention made for the sole purpose of being deconstructed here; rather, it is a common opinion among critics that adaptations are generally faithful and in the unfortunate
terminology of Stanley Wells, can be “straight”, whereas appropriations are less respectful. A few examples should suffice to demonstrate this. In her Shakespeare’s Names, Laurie
Maguire mentions Thomas Drant’s 1566 translation of Horace, A Medicinable Moral, that is, the two bookes of Horace his Satyres. Drant unashamedly set out to rewrite Horace “(to remove his obscuritie, and sometymes to better his matter) much of myne owne devysinge”
(qtd. in Maguire; 60). According to Maguire this is what “the Restoration called ‘adaptation’
and what we call ‘(re)appropriation’” (60). Implicitly, adaptation is something less intrusive than appropriation.4 Drant, on his hand, calls this “translation,” since “for his age, translation
4 Further proof that “appropriation” is a negative term for scholars and critics may be gleaned from Brian Vickers’ Appropriating Shakespeare, where, according to Vickers, “appropriating Shakespeare” equates to writing badly about Shakespeare from within a modern-day theoretical paradigm like psychoanalysis, feminism or deconstruction.
was a creative act, a dialogue between the past and the present, a cultural linking, an
intertextual moment” (60). As we will see later, this view on translation might elucidate some of Shakespeare’s practice as an adapter of extant works.
More explicitly Julie Sanders defines appropriation as the assertive sibling of adaptation. To Sanders, an appropriation is likely to affect “a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain” (26). For
convenience’s sake she designates two types of appropriation, one which is “embedded” and one which is “sustained” (26). The first can be exemplified by the backstage drama, say, a film in which we follow actors playing actors that are to perform a play, more often than not by Shakespeare, for some reason. The second would be something like James Joyce’s Ulysses, which stands in consistent relation to Homer’s Odyssey without being bound to it. Sanders’
approach has many merits, but ultimately it is one that I cannot adhere to. Neat as her allocation of adaptation and appropriation may be, it does not reflect reality, neither of how scholars actually use these terms, or how the processes of adaptation and appropriation function.
As I have pointed out, the borders between translation, adaptation, intertext, allusion, allegory and appropriation are rather unstable (even if they may seem clear to Maguire and Sanders), and methodologically spurious, since they are often coloured by matters of taste and tradition. Shakespeare’s use of his sources is often described as “adaptation,” but in reality it is more often what many present-day scholars would call “appropriation”. When Maguire discusses The Comedy of Errors, she claims that it has been adapted from at least two plays by Plautus, while blending in a Pauline type of spirituality (152-3). But is not this
appropriation? Even if this term is probably more apt than “adaptation” for describing the actual mechanisms of this type of art production, its mentioned negative implications renders it unusable. It is also questionable how essential appropriation is as a theoretical denominator.
Is it not sufficient to talk of allusion, reference and allegory? It is probably more fruitful, methodologically speaking, to address the different functions inherent in the processes of artistic relation on more equal and basic terms.
According to Stam there are (at least) two types of nomenclature present in adaptation theory. On the one hand there are terms such as transmutation, transvocalization,
transfiguration, translation, transmediation; on the other there is reinvisioning, recreation, reaccentuation, resuscitation. Stam explains that the “words with the prefix ‘trans’ emphasize the changes brought about in the adaptation, while those beginning with the prefix ‘re’
emphasize the recombinant function” (25). Both “change” and “recombination,” however, are fallacies: inaccurate in describing the mechanics of adaptation, as I will attempt to make clear.
Configuration
To “configure” is, according to the OED, to “fashion according to something else as a model”. My usage of this term is inspired by the international group of Shakespeare scholars, loosely organised as the “Configuring Shakespeare” network. This group convenes once a year to present and discuss advances in the field which may be described as Shakespeare Configuration, and its satellites. Papers have been presented on marginal notes in the Folios, extra-illustrated editions of Shakespeare (where the buyer would pick and place more or less relevant illustrations before the volume is bound), the cryptographic tradition of what we may politely call “alternative” Shakespeare scholarship, silent film Shakespeare adaptations, extra- illustrated bibles, and Shakespeare Mangas, just to name a small selection.5 Apparently, key members of the group suffered over what to call it before settling on “Configuring
5 It should be noted that my admiration of this group or network of scholars is not wholly divorced from the fact that I myself am a member of it.
Shakespeare”. Picking “configuration” over “adaptation” or “transmediation” was the right choice, and I will explain why I think it was so.6
Firstly, we talk of “configuration” rather than “reconfiguration,” since the latter term again tends to privilege the “original,” which is unfortunate in the light of the conviction that it is more fruitful to discuss the different versions on equal terms. Henceforth, “adaptation”
will be used in the everyday sense of the word and for the academic field in general, whereas
“configuration” will more precisely denote the practice of gathering and arranging of intertextual, allusive, allegorical, topical, materials into new works of art.
Always, and especially conspicuous if the configuration is also a transmediation, it will present a work which consists of different “materials” than the other work. By this I mean different medial limitations and possibilities, such as the presence or absence of sound,
moving or static images, interactive technologies, and so on. But it needs not be medium- specific. The matter of style is crucial here: style in itself, if one accepts that it is inseparable from content (as I do, emphatically), proves beyond a doubt the imperative of treating
“original” and “adaptation” as basically separate entities. To claim that we are dealing with the same content expressed differently is a grave misconception, because this is in itself an obvious impossibility. A quick experiment to validate my claim: even if it is clear that a poem changes profoundly if its style is changed (because a poem to a great extent is its style), it may be less clear that this should be so with collaborative art forms such as film or comic books.
What would happen if, for instance, a comic book writer were to send his manuscript to two different illustrators for them to produce each their version of some story? Would this not be precisely “the same content expressed differently”? In a word: no. Drawing style, panel rhythm, narrative flow, placement of speech balloons; all these things are deep-set aspects of the language of comics, to such a degree that differences of visual presentational style will
6 Some of the ideas I present in this section are further developments of discussions from the Configuring Shakespeare conferences, as well as the Bergen Shakespeare and Drama Network, which shares several members with the CS group.
dictate that these too are individual works of art, albeit quite similar ones. Tempting and intuitive as it might feel to think of this in any other way, one simply must adhere to the concept: the copy is not a lesser offspring of the original; the original does not own the content such that the copy only expresses this content in a different way; the copy does not change the original. What it does do, however, is to change the reader’s or audiences’
perception of the original, and that is a wholly different matter.
I should point out that I do not intend for “configuration” to be a theoretical term, per se. It will not be capitalized or conceptualised in a specific way. I use it simply because it is more precise (according to its dictionary definition and commonplace denotation) and less tainted by usage than the other terms I mention. Indeed it is already commonly applied by an international community of Shakespeare scholars. It does, however, present an idea of
relationships between works that is more basic and radical than adaptation and appropriation, and this fact comes with its own set of problems.
It could be argued that “configuration” avoids the specific pitfalls of the other suggested terms at the cost of being too imprecise. Admittedly it is a fairly general and inclusive term. For instance, one could talk of a painting of Hamlet as a configuration of (an element out of) Hamlet, even if it would not be an adaptation of the same play, and it does nothing for the sort of practical distinctions employed by Sanders. Even if configuration is more precise than adaptation and appropriation it remains somewhat too vacuous to stand on its own in the ensuing discussions. The term is still preferable to the others suggested because there is no single term that will cover all the nuances of the processes I discuss in any case, but “configuration” is the closest and least prejudiced option. To recap my argument:
“adaptation” can and will function as a term that denotes that a work of art be produced in relation to a source work. It may denote this (because it is the established name of the field of study, something I cannot hope, nor do I wish, to change), but it is not an accurate description
of what takes place in the process. “Appropriation” will in many cases be more appropriate (pun intended), but it still shares the same inexactitude that “adaptation” has (i.e. implied change) and it is rendered unnecessary by terms such as “allusion” and “allegory”. Moreover,
“appropriation” is too often construed in negative terms, even if this negativity is not entirely fair. Hence, “configuration”: if you build something according to a blueprint, the blueprint and the building will manifest themselves in profoundly different ways as things in the world, no matter to what degree you adhere to the blueprint.
Transmediation
I apply numerous terms that are prefixed “trans-”, such as “transculturation”, “transformation”,
“transhistorisation”, “translation” and “transmediation”. All these terms carry with them the notion of change – that something like a work of literature has metamorphosed, by transfer across genres, media, history or languages, and become something else. This is still wrong. To explain via analogy, again, if one were, for instance, to paint in expressionistic style a portrait from a photograph, the photograph itself would not change, despite the transmediation. What is important here, it bears repeating, is that the way we perceive the photograph is likely to change after having seen the expressionist transmediation/configuration of it. At the same time, the original photograph is likely to exert a type of pressure or influence on the
transmediated “copy” (which is not a copy). This mutual influence and play is what this thesis is about.
“Trans-” means “across (from)”. This is a horizontal rather than a hierarchic
movement. I will therefore continue using terms prefixed “trans-”, but with the caveat that it is our perception of the art works involved that has transformed, not the art works themselves.
Configuration versus Intertextuality
It may sound brash to say so, but intertextuality has become a profoundly misunderstood concept (at least in certain milieus). In the words of Julie Sanders, intertextuality has “come to refer to a far more textual as opposed to utterance-driven notion of how texts encompass and respond to other texts” (2). Sanders herself identifies adaptation and interpretation as subsets of intertextual practice, which, in her context, makes perfect sense. A common, somewhat literal-minded understanding of “intertextuality” is precisely that it describes allusion, quotation, adaptation, pastiche and so on. There is some truth in that, but the notion is far from precise. Or maybe it is too precise, that is, too narrow. If we go back to what Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes actually say about intertextuality in their initial writings about the concept, a different idea of what the term entails becomes visible.
Upon engaging with the ideas of French theorists one should always be aware of the serious playfulness of their approaches. French Theory of the nineteen sixties, seventies and onwards often manifests itself in a language game, which is both creative and “literary” – by which I mean that it often relies more on tropes that on scientific exactitude (even if it does that too: Kristeva and Barthes are sometimes polar opposites in the realm of style). Therefore it can be reductive to paraphrase texts by theorists such as, say, Derrida, unless one pays heed to the ludic dimension of their idiom. Apparently, much of this playfulness has been lost in translation and academic transculturation. In order to adequately make clear what Kristeva and Barthes meant by “intertextuality” (and “Text,” for that matter) I beg pardon that I present a rather lengthy quotation from Barthes’ “From Work to Text” (in which the experimental literariness about which I speak should be apparent).
The reader of the text may be compared to someone at a loose end (someone slackened off from any imaginary); this passably empty subject strolls – it is what happened to the author of these lines, then it was that he had a vivid idea of the Text –
on the side of a valley, a oued flowing down below (oued is there to bear witness to a certain feeling of unfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds,
children’s voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half-identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, founds the stroll in a difference repeatable only as difference. So the Text: it can be it only in its difference (which does not mean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive (this rendering illusory any inductive- deductive science of texts – no ‘grammar’ of the text) and nevertheless woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?),
antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text- between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the ‘sources’, the ‘influences’ of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation: the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read:
they are quotations without inverted commas. (1472-3)
The last sentence has become a moot point, too often taken literally: the “citations” about which Barthes speaks are not citations, but ways of thinking, seeing, understanding, writing:
modes of language. Intertextuality, then, does denote a work of literature in which allusions to other works are subtly masked by the author (as opposed to direct, explicit citations, popular for instance in nineteenth century novels), but rather formulates an idea where Text exists as a transhistorical, synchronic, weave of ways to write and things to write about, a weave that stretches across multiple works in a mode which is linguistic (but not reducible to a grammar)
and which consists of multiple voices, perspectives and approaches. Allusion and adaptation are conceptually related to intertextuality, but they are not identical, they cannot be defined as parts of a hierarchy: that which can be named, reference, citation, echo, configuration, these things are surface symptoms and symbols of intertextuality, but they are not the thing itself.
Citation (to pick one of many terms with similar meanings) makes explicit what
intertextuality is about, because it exemplifies and demonstrates how a work adopts an idea and a way of addressing that idea from another work.
Further, if reading is “semelfactive”, to produce signs, then adaptation/configuration must be too. To configure a play by Shakespeare into an adaptation is to read it and write it at the same time. When Sanders and the author of this thesis claim that adaptations can have adaptations as their source texts, this does not contradict Barthes’ claim that one should not search for sources. The intertext may not have a source (intertextuality is a synchronic rather than diachronic aspect of language and literature), but adaptations do, even if the relationship between source and configuration may be problematic, as I have discussed. Another
difference is that sign production is an activity of the reader, whereas allusion and
configuration are activities of the author: this definition is practical, not philosophical and it would seem to indicate that there are two different types of relationships between texts: one that is deliberate, including allusion, reference, citation, allegory, etc., etc; and another which is “half-identifiable,” omnipresent, structural and semiological.
Sanders is correct in pointing out that Kristeva’s account of the intertextual concentrates on utterances rather than on text, but that is primarily, I believe, because the novel with which Kristeva engages in “The Bounded Text”, Antoine de la Sale’s Jehan de Saintré, is one that is “structured as dual space: it is both phonetic utterance and scriptural level, overwhelmingly dominated by discursive (phonetic) order” (55). In the year the novel (Kristeva calls it a possible earliest novel) was written, 1456, the laudative description known
as the blazon was still shouted from squares and market places. Kristeva identifies this as the primary intertextual presence in the novel. More generally, intertextuality, with Kristeva (in
“Word, Dialogue and Novel”), describes a set of codes of utterances that explain how texts shape one another. Nevertheless, when she writes that Bakhtin discovered that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations” (66) she emphasises this discovery through its relation to the “word” (65). This does not mean that literary texts are made up out of quotations such as “the centre cannot hold,” but quotations such as “the,” “centre,” “cannot” and “hold.” If I were to write “we need our commodities: the shopping centre cannot close down!” this may demonstrate how the text is double. I may or may not have meant to allude to Yeats; the reader may or may not recognise the allusion. I did, of course, intend this allusion, as the reader no doubt will have realised: the example is hypothetical. In another way, however, intertextuality is a form of stream (Barthes’ oued), mode or genre trait. Shakespeare’s intertextual play can be detected in his mixing and twisting of dramatic, and other, genres, where commedia d’ellarte aspects rub shoulders with Corpus Christi cycles, farce and
classical tragedy. Intertextuality denotes the single word as well as larger modes or nexuses of words, but is should never be used as a straightforward synonym for citation or allusion. But how can the literary investigator handle this unwieldy concept? According to Kristeva, any
“description of a word’s specific operation within different literary genres or texts” will require “a translinguistic procedure” (66), one that is capable of handling the inherent duplicity of texts as well as the multiplicity of different texts or languages that may go into a work of art; this is a procedure that she later identifies as semiotics.
The above is an attempt at exploring what Kristeva and Barthes meant by
intertextuality rather than an attempt at assimilating their ideas into my method; hence it is a reminder and a corrective rather than something I wish to adopt and adhere to. Its being there, however, presents me (and the field of source studies) with some potential problems: can one
tell what is deliberate and what is not? If one identifies a common topos or common approaches to an idea in two texts (one antecedent to the other), how does one negotiate between intertext and configuration? If all texts are already intertexts, then the problem will be void, because there is nothing more to say about the matter. Nevertheless, Barthes and Kristeva do not define intertext as completely universal: there may be nothing outside the Text (to paraphrase Derrida), but not all Text is intertext. If one accepts that there is such a thing as intertextuality and that it is a concept which goes beyond configuration, how does one tell the one from the other?
Who Adapts?
This subchapter addresses the author/adaptor-function, but has been cut from this presentation.
(Is an adapter an author? Yes, because all authors are adapters.)
Since I have already exceeded the allotted length for this presentation, you may stop reading at this point, unless you are curious about what comes next.
The Vocabulary of Adaptation
It is fit that I pause here to review the theoretical and methodological concerns hitherto discussed. So far the following seems clear: that I have reduced the terminology of adaptation down to one basic term, configuration; that appropriation is an unnecessary term; that it is the perception of the work rather than the work itself that changes; that I have demonstrated how configuration and intertextuality are not exactly identical, but related, perspectives on the relationships between texts; that the author-function […]; that a translinguistic approach is required to illuminate things further. The latter is an especially salient necessity in a project that aims to investigate comic books and manga.
So, how does one develop a terminology that can reconcile the mentioned problems with dynamic readings of the plays? Sanders suggest that, in the interest of establishing a
“kinetic vocabulary” (38) one may look, by analogy, to music and musicology. I will explain, now, why that is not the way to go.
Sanders proposes three different examples from the music world as possible
(overlapping) analogies and reservoirs of vocabulary. From classical music, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations (first published in 1741) provides Sanders with an “invaluable set of terms for rethinking the process of adaptation, moving away from a static or purely linear standpoint. Unfoldings, recyclings, mutations, repetitions, evolutions, variations: the possibilities are endless and exciting” (40). Exciting, no doubt, but the Goldberg Variations (originally Aria mit verscheidenen Veraenderungen) is for the most part variations upon itself, through the use of, among other things, multiple canons. The exception is the final canon, which is not actually a canon but a quodlibet (a piece combing several melodies), based on numerous German folk songs.7 The variations of this aria follow the same bass line and chord progression, but the bass line is abandoned a couple of bars into the quodlibet, which is to be regarded as a something of a musical joke. Its light-heartedness is no grounds for eschewing Sanders’ analogy, but the Variations’ dominant mode of self-reflexivity makes it a misleading example. If this is configuration, then it is mainly self-configuring, which is exactly the type of configuring I am not interested in. Even more damaging to Sanders’ argument is the fact that upon searching for a “kinetic,” forward-pointing vocabulary, she has identified words such as “recyclings, mutations, repetitions, evolutions” and “variations” as “invaluable” (40).
In light of what I have suggested earlier it should be clear that these terms (with the possible exception of “variations”) are nothing of the sort. To some extent they all point backwards.
7 See Something < http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Articles/BWV988-Quodlibet%5BBraatz%5D.htm.>
“Recycling” in particular strikes me as a heartlessly un-kinetic notion of what adaptation is supposed to entail.
As such, her suggestion to borrow from Jazz music terms such as “improvisation” and
“riffing” makes for a much more convincing argument. Any expert in Jazz musicology will tell you that the famous Jazz musicians of the 1950s and 60s would play the same
“improvisations” night after night, but that does not take away from their status as more vital and forward-pointing terms; on the contrary this very strongly tends to align Jazz terminology with the idea of configuration that I have in mind. What is less successful about this metaphor is how it separates the “ground” (in Jazz that would be the bass and the drums, mainly) from the “top note or improvisation that is the new creative act or cultural production” (39), as Sanders puts it. This muddles up the analogy, because if the “ground” is “intertext(s)”, then it too becomes a composite form, already “a new creative act” through its configurative nature.
This does not mean that the Jazz analogy does not work. We just need to keep in mind that the
“ground” melds together the old and the new, and so does the soloist (there are drum and bass solos too) It is oversimplifying to say that the bass line is old and the solo is new; literature (novels, plays, poems) certainly do not work this way.
Thirdly, Sanders speaks of sampling. This could be the one example that disproves my notion that “to claim that we are dealing with the same content expressed differently is a grave misconception, because this is in itself an obvious impossibility.” When one samples a piece of music, say two bars of 1970s funk, and inserts it into a different context, say a modern hip-hop tune, one does indeed end up with a new cultural product assembled from anterior parts;8 which is exactly how it is not done in any literary genre, except perhaps from the “cut-and-paste” technique of the beat poets, a genre of poetry that has a lot to do with
8 That is, unless one chooses to pitch the sample up or down, reverse it, cut it up and rearrange the melody, add effects such as “chorus,” “flanger,” “phaser” or “distortion” to it. This is so common in modern music
production that you would be extremely hard pressed to find a lifting of a sample that has not been through at least one of these processes.
intertextuality, but hardly anything at all to do with adaptation. Out of all the musical analogies, sampling is the least appropriate one.
The only apposite words that have come out of the rummaging of musicology are
“improvisation” and “riff”, both of which have the advantage over “configuration” that they connote spontaneous human creativity. “Improvisation” may sound somewhat too random, however (even if it is not always as random as people assume), and we can gain the same insights that the Jazz vocabulary lends us by expanding “configuration” into “creative
configuration”. This is especially apt, since it is possible to imagine that both types of textual relationship may exist: some configurations may be more inventive and innovative than others.
“Improvisation” and “riffing” are temporal activities (when they are inscribed on a record they cease to be one-offs, but in a way they also cease to be improvisations), that may germanely relate to the performance of plays upon the stage. For signs (letters, drawing, symbols) made out of ink, carefully and deliberately placed on paper by authors and
illustrators, the similarity seems scant. It is impossible to quickly jot down a 200-page comic book, no matter how creative your mood. Musical terms may help us see the act of adaptation in a light of creative fertility, but it is of little use in describing the mechanisms involved in what are primarily acts of language. We need to look elsewhere for our vocabulary, but we need not look far. Literary theory, narratology, art history and other disciplines relevant to literature and images have in fact long since developed vocabularies that are more than sufficient for exploring the way texts relate to other texts, art works to art works. It is all a matter of how it is applied and in what kind of framework this takes place. Semiotics, iconography and iconology are among the approaches that supply the tools we need to
understand how art works relate to one another, to the world and to readers. As I will no doubt have overemphasised by now, the need for a translinguistic approach such as semiotics is pressing when one explores verbal-visual art form, which is, lest we forget, the ultimate
concern of this dissertation. Semiotics, however, is a problematical discipline, abused, misunderstood and misused for decades. If we look at a couple of plays by Shakespeare, in the light of what I have discussed up to this point, we may be able to discern more clearly where the path ahead lies.
In the next chapter I will explore configuration first as a linguistic phenomenon, then increasingly in translinguistic terms, as the semiotics of images comes into play. More specifically, I will investigate the relationship of Shakespeare’s plays to readily identifiable printed primary sources, before moving on to take in a broader spectrum of material, from marginal written sources to possible visual influences.
Apologies for going on too long!
Bibliography
Works by William Shakespeare, adapted, edited or otherwise configured:
William Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Adapt. Richard Appignanesi. Illus. Kate Brown. New York: Amulet-Abrams, 2008.
---. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (1979) Ed. Harold F. Brooks. London: Arden-Thomson, 2003.
---. King Lear. Adapt. Richard Appignanesi. Illus. Ilya. London: Self Made Hero, 2009.
---. Othello. Adapt. Richard Appignanesi. Illus. Ryuta Osada. London: Self Made Hero, 2008.
--. The Tempest. Adapt. Richard Appignanesi. Illus. Paul Duffield. London: Self Made Hero, 2007.
…
Secondary Literature:
“Adapt” Oxford English Dictionary.
“Adept” OED
“Adopt” OED
“Appropriate” OED
Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed.
Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001.
Parker, Patricia and Geoffrey, H. Hartman. Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. New York: Methuen, 1985.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Kristeva, Julia. “The Bounded Text” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.
---. “Word, Dialogue and Novel” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.
Maguire, Laurie. Shakespeare’s Names. Oxford: OUP, 2007.
McCloud, Scott. Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels.
New York: Harper, 2006.
---. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. (1993) New York: Harper, 200?.
Neill, Michael. Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia UP, 2000.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. (2006) London: Routledge, 2009.
Stam, Robert and Allesandra Raegno (eds.) Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.
Vickers, Brian. Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels. (1993) New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.