Vooys. Jaargang 26
(2008)– [tijdschrift] Vooys–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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Whoever said we stopped reading?
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‘The’ novelisationAs previously mentioned, the genre of the novelisation itself is quite eclectic - both in its types of sources and in the forms of the novelisations themselves. There are novelisations based on movies, comicbooks, and games, which mostly appear in the form of a novel. The products that are collected under the genre of ‘the novelisation’ also differ in their relationship towards the work that has inspired or instigated their existence. Therefore, I would like to distinguish two general types of novelisation: on the one hand those that novelise the story of the original and expand it (the low-brow | |||||||||||||||||||||
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or commercial novelisation), and on the other hand those that rewrite, rework, or re-something the original (the high-brow or literary novelisation). This latter type somehow reinterprets the final product from its medial source and attempts to mirror the complete viewing experience in the book format - which does not happen with a simple novel version of the screenplay. Rewriting a screenplay is much more than a mere translation of the actions into words; a sentence on a page is significantly different from an action on a screen and subsequently leads to an inherently different experience. The first type of novelisation would not want to call too much attention to the materiality of its medium, since its aim is to evoke the reader's memories of the movie. The second subset of novelisations, on the other hand, is more conscious of its own mediality and of what it can and cannot do in relation to the original medium. Some movies have inspired novelisations long after they were shown in cinemas, thus allowing for novelisations that were far more creative than a ‘mere’ rewriting of a screenplay. This tendency of writing a literary novelisation long after the movie's release is a characteristic of the high-brow type of novelisation, accordingly acknowledged by Baetens. (Baetens 2007: 233) In some of these cases, the screenplay was seemingly irrelevant. An example is Onno Kosters' 2004 poetry series entitled Callahan en andere gedaanten (Callahan and other figures). In these poems Kosters reworks Harry Callahan, the main character in the dirty harry movies, into his anti-hero and narrates many of his activities through poetic dialogue. He regularly cites the filmic protagonist and seems to rewrite his own world through the Dirty Harry films:
Another novelisation that can illustrate the medial materiality of the novelisation is Christopher Priest's adaptation of the movie existenz (1999). What makes this novelisation interesting is that the author attempted to mirror the intricacies of the movie in the novel. However, since a novel is a different medium than film, instead of filmic tricks and tools, the writer had to find solace in the use of literary aspects. As Van Parys et al. put it in their article on this novelisation: eXistenZ can be considered as a more highbrow science fiction novel in that Priest created a hybrid novelization which incorporates science fiction as well as literary elements; he has attempted to stretch the commercial limitations inherent in this kind of novelization as far as possible. (Van Parys et al. 2004) Baetens makes an equal (although more implicit) distinction in his 2007 article on novelisations and stresses that the difference consists of a novelisation's self- | |||||||||||||||||||||
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consciousness. (Baetens 2007: 233) However, the distinction between the two kinds of novelisation should not be regarded as a strict dichotomy, nor should it in any way define the genre of the novelisation. The novelisation is much more than this opposition - it is a genre that illustrates beyond any other that reading is still alive. How else do we justify the desire to purchase a book after we have already seen the movie? We could just as well buy the DVD. An interesting illustration of a novelisation's relationship with its source medium is Francis Ford Coppola's film bram stoker's dracula (1992). The film is based on Bram Stoker's novel Dracula as the title indicates explicitly. In her essay on the journey from novel to film, Margaret Montalbano mentions that even though Coppola made strong claims of fidelity to Stoker's original (not only in his title, but in interviews as well), the movie itself was in turn novelised. This novelisation was clearly very different from the original novel, even adding a disclaimer that ‘what follows here is not Bram Stoker's 1897 novel [...] but Fred Saberhagen's retelling of the motion picture called bram stoker's dracula [...] based on the screen adaptation of that classic story’. (Cited in Montalbano 2004: 386) The novelisation is an interesting genre wherein some confusing dynamics are at work. | |||||||||||||||||||||
Materiality and the MediumOur point of departure into the realm of novelisation is the area of general media theory, specifically texts on the materiality of the media, which illustrate the potential value of the genre of the novelisation. As Marshall McLuhan already points out in his 1964 publication Understanding Media, ‘the medium is the message’. (McLuhan 1964: 7) This sentence, often (wrongly) cited,Ga naar voetnoot1 refers to what Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin call remediation, as will be examined later. The crux of this concept is the role of the medium itself - which, before 1964, had never been regarded as a possibly influential agent. McLuhan argues that the medium itself is part of the content that it carries: ‘[...] the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology’. (McLuhan 1964: 7) Thus it is not just the message that is of importance, but it is the medium that somehow defines, influences and possibly even dominates it. Before the McLuhanian probe describing media as humanity's extensions, the medium was ‘just’ the messenger. What follows is that the medium defines - in some way or another - its message and thereby our perception of it. He also argues that the ‘characteristic of all media means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium’. (McLuhan 1964: 8) Thus new media are composed of older media - for instance, television is a combination of radio and film. The novelisation as ‘the book of the film’ is an illustration of the idea that the medium matters. Especially in the commercial novelisation, in which the subject matter does not differ significantly from its source, the medium seems to be the pivotal issue that defines its content. In their seminal 1999 book Remediation and subsequent essays on remediation and premedation, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin use McLuhan's ‘old’ concept as a backbone for their own term ‘remediation’. They explicitly argue that the content of every medium | |||||||||||||||||||||
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is that of another - the medium is literally the message. Remediation is the usurpage or usage of an older medium in that of a new variety, a ‘double logic according to which media [...] refashion prior media forms’. (Grusin 2004: 17) That what makes a medium a ‘new’ medium is merely the way in which it refashions previous media. A very interesting point that they make is the so-called ‘inseparability of mediation and reality’, emphasizing that mediations themselves are real and that ‘all that media produce is real’. (Bolter & Grusin 1996: 344) However since media are always mediations, and therefore dependent on other media, it is not this relationship that determines their value but the medial product itself. Remediation hinges on the double logic of hypermediacy and immediacy. Immediacy entails that awareness of the medium itself is as low as possible and the focus lies on a transparent experience of its content. Hypermediacy does exactly the opposite, emphasizing the medium - which most often entails some degree of self-consciousness or reflection on the medium's part. (Bolter & Grusin 1996: 345) Friedrich Kittler, a media theorist dealing with the materiality of media, focuses more on the notion of power involved with media. For him, technology influences its content whether we like it or not. The information that the medium transports first has to be fabricated and subsequently transposed by the medium. In other words, media ‘define what really is; they are always already beyond aesthetics’. (Kittler 1999: 3) The history and origin of a medium are vital to the ways in which it functions. Interestingly, Kittler also incorporates the work of Walter Benjamin, who observed that ‘every historical era shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard’ (Kittler 1999: 237). In short, ‘media determine our situation, but [...] our situation, in turn, can do its share to determine our media’. (Winthrop-Young 1999: xxxv) Kittler emphasizes that we should be conscious of the technology behind the media we use and experience since they determine and structure these operations themselves. The notion of power in media, and the consciousness linked to the origin of the medium that Kittler expresses, is also found in the work of Paul Virilio. He claims that a new medial form - a new technology - will lead to new phenomena. (Winthrop-Young 1999: xxxvi) The practice of novelisation works in exactly the opposite way to a medium refashioning our understanding. It ‘old-fashions’ our understanding of a medium by rewriting the content of a visual medium into the shape of a novel, thereby reversing the effect of a baffling new medium by re-making sense of it through an old medium. | |||||||||||||||||||||
Writing the VisualNow that it has been elucidated that the nature of the medium is of great importance to the content and experience of the medial product, our focus can shift to this medial product itself. Since a novelisation is some sort of adaptation, it is essential to take adaptation studies into account. Most discourse in adaptation studies seems to revolve around the pivotal question of whether there is an inherent difference between word and image (most often taking the shape of the ‘novel vs. film’ debate) and if so, what this difference consists of. (See e.g. Elliot 2004) Irregardless of this, there is still the difference in the medium that is at work in these two worlds and that is where the notion of adaptation comes into play. Adaptation, apart from a noun gathering many different kinds of adaptations, is also a process of adapting - of reworking one medium's content into that of another. Unfortunately these intricate dynamics are devalued by academia | |||||||||||||||||||||
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and adaptations themselves are seen as mere derivatives of other works. (Stam 2005: 3-4; Hutcheon 2006: 2-3) Adaptations are generally treated with the same disgust as novelisations - they are not ‘originals’ and therefore not as worthy as their literary counterparts. Even though many literary theorists would generally object to the notion of the original, this comparative approach is still at the heart of adaptation studies. (See e.g. the corpus of Stam 2005) Thus the ‘first’ medium (in the case of the novelisation often the film) is regarded as the ‘original’, and the adaptation is only valued from the perspective of its fidelity to this ‘original’. But, as Hutcheon points out, that which is the original for one may be someone else's adaptation, since it all depends on when the viewer/reader experiences the product. (Hutcheon 2006: xiii) She defines a remediating experience as that moment when one (e.g.) sees a film which is an adaptation of a book one knows, creating a ‘constant oscillation between [the original] and the adaptation we are experiencing’. (Hutcheon 2006: xv) However, the work in itself will already be a remediated product, even if its consumer will not actually experience it as remediating due to lack of knowledge. Especially in the case of the commercial novelisation, the cover will make sure the reader is aware of the source text for the novel that they are reading, in an attempt to make sure that eventually both source and adaptation will be consumed. In his introduction to one of the many books he edited on the relationship between film and literature, Robert Stam remarks on the hierarchical status of film and literature. According to him, literature - the written form with which the reader has to somehow actively engage to create meaning - is still regarded as the ‘high’ medium, whereas the mainstream (Hollywood) film - the visual, the ‘ready-made’ - is in a completely different league to that to which literature belongs. (Stam 2007: 3) The commercial novelisation is a genre that shatters this opposition of the ‘low’ film and the ‘high’ novel. This high/low division can mainly be blamed on simple historical causes - literature predates cinema. (Stam 2007: 4) On the other hand, one could argue that visual media were born long before humankind started writing. However, Mitchell already spoke of the struggle between the ‘pictorial and linguistic signs’, thereby pointing to a fear of the dominance of the visual over the written. (Mitchell 1987: 1) It is this same fear that makes us weary of the visual medium - literature is, in a way, safe. Even though the notion of fidelity should not be used as ‘the’ meaningful referent to an adaptation, it is interesting to look at the problematic issues that this practice brings forth and apply them to the novelisation. When adapting from novel to film, the idea that a film adaptation will destroy the fantasy a reader might have of the original novel is one of the main causes of loss and devaluation of the adaptation. (Stam 2007: 15) A writer can describe his character in intricate detail, but the reader still draws up his own mental images. When he watches the film adaptation of this book, it is more than possible that the characters look nothing like he imagined them. This unpleasant effect has absolutely no bearing on the case of the novelisation. Quite the opposite, since the novelisation is the place where a movie's characters can really come to life - where the reader can imagine and see everything how he wants to see it. In this respect, a novelisation is only one step away from the genre of fan fiction, in which fans write their own ‘novelisations’ of books, films, games or comics. They literally fictionalise the (already fictional) world of their heroes. This has strong connections to the type of novelisation Baetens calls ‘continuative’, in which the novelisation continues the original story. Fan fiction goes | |||||||||||||||||||||
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slightly further: there is both continuation as well as rewriting at work. (2007: 231) Another very interesting term that Stam adds to the adaptation debate is ‘mutation’. (Stam 2007: 40) He argues that we could regard adaptations as processes of Darwinian survival methods that enable texts to continue to exist, even if they have to mutate into another form. This would suggest that the future of literature itself is novelisation - that the only books we will read in a couple of decades will be written versions of our favourite games or films - or, more provocatively, that the only way that the new visual media will survive their technologies is through the novel. Still, an adaptation does more than merely ‘save’ the content of one medium into that of another - it is a completely different product altogether. Walter Benjamin claims that ‘storytelling is always the art of repeating stories’ and adaptation is in a way just repeating stories. (Benjamin 1968: 237) Adaptations repeat the forms in which they come and rework these into a new, different story - through repeating, they rewrite. Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia, which revolves around ‘context over text’ can also add a dimension to the process of adaptation. (Bakhtin 1981: 71) It implicates that every text is determined by its context, the social and historical situations in which it is produced and in which it is received. The interesting hypothesis that this theory denotes is that a text, even if copied literally, would not ever mean the same - since the context will always differ. Every repetition, then, is a rewriting. Adaptation is always to some degree a case of repetition. But then again, all writing is in a certain sense a repetition, an intertext. A source text is somehow reworked into the product of a written medium. This recognition is part of the pleasure of re-experiencing something we liked the first time around, but at the same time is risky since we have expectations. Michael Alexander called adaptations ‘inherently “palimpsestuous” works, haunted at all times by their adapted texts.’ (Cited in Hutcheon 2006: 6) This neologism combining ‘palimpsest’ and ‘incestuous’ suggests that where the traces of history can be found, these traces are simultaneously partially erased (read: suppressed) whilst also remaining an intimately close relationship to these traces. However, it should be emphasized that the adaptation does remain an autonomous work. Hutcheon also mentions the importance of this, citing Benjamin who argues that the adaptation is its own ‘presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’, which resonates with Bakhtin's heteroglossia once more. (Hutcheon 2006: 6) What summarises the contemporary consensus of adaptation studies beautifully is that Hutecheon calls ‘adaptation [...] repetition, but [its] repetition is not replication’. (Hutcheon 2006: 7) | |||||||||||||||||||||
Adapting the Anti-IntermedialThe essays that Jan Baetens wrote on the novelisation are insightful in many ways, but they are unfortunately also very limited in their perspective. For instance, Baetens never takes the framework of adaptation theory into account in his own definition and valuation of the novelisation. One of the great claims he makes in his essay ‘The Text Writes Back’ (as well as in ‘From Screen to Text’) is that novelisations are anti-intermedial. In my view, all media are somehow intermedial (‘the medium is the message’), and this is definitely the case for the novelisation. It is an adaptation in the strictest sense of the word and the only reason for adaptation studies not to be involved in novelisation studies is the fact that it is still mainly centred around the written-to-visual (novel- | |||||||||||||||||||||
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to-film) adaptations. Baetens claims that novelisations ‘lack the intermediality [...] essential to the adaptation of a book in a cinematographic process’, (Baetens 2005: 45) and compares the process of (novel-to-film) adaptation to that of (film-to-)novelisation. Baetens argues that since most novelisations are based on a screenplay they do not cross the visual-to-written boundary and therefore lack intermediality. He states that the novelisation does not comply with the necessary ‘media change’ that is needed to be regarded as a remediating art form. (Baetens 2007: 235) Not only does Baetens ignore hypermedial forms of novelisations and the fact that movies are visual products (even if one only looks at the screenplay it is based on), he also ignores the experience of novelisation and disregards the possibility that a movie in itself can already be a remediating, intermedial product that - if novelised - will retain these qualities. The double logic of remediation mentioned before can also be applied here. Even though a novelisation writer may not write ‘intermedially’ (meaning that he reads the screenplay and makes literary sentences and chapters out of the scenes), the experience that the reader has while reading a novelisation after viewing the movie is intermedial. The presence of the source text will continue to loom over the novelisation, especially in the commercial variety. The novelisation is very clearly and almost bluntly inspired by its visual (and often well-known) source. Intermediality arises within the dialogue between the different media, within the space where they intersect and influence each other. Additionally, in the remainder of his essays, Baetens cannot stress enough the power of the visual and the pictorial era in which we live. Why, then, would he not grant this importance to the visuals of cinema, instead of the text of the screenplay? After viewing a movie, writing its novelisation can never be a mere copy-paste of the screenplay into a literary form. Subsequently, Baetens calls the novelisation ‘a false adaptation’ and even ‘anti-adaptation’ and ‘anti-remediation’. (Baetens 2005: 45, 46, 50) Dudley Andrew calls adaptation a process revolving around ‘reproducing something essential about an original text’ (Andrew 1998: 453) and it is exactly this more broad definition of adaptation and remediation that is lacking in Baetens' approach to the novelisation. According to Baetens, going from one medium to another is always remediation: ‘one medium improving the other’. (Baetens 2005: 53) But is ‘improving’ not the wrong terminology here; is it not simply the inherent practice of change? Rewriting one medium in the materiality of another will always change and this change will only add to the intermediality of the medium. The novelisation exists on its own, but has somehow re-evaluated the content and the medium of its source product. Its effect, it seems, is simply always remediation since if one medium is somehow adapted, its effect will always be remediating. Although remediation is never a one-sided process - as Grusin wrote ‘[e] ach medium seems to follow this pattern of borrowing and refashioning other media, and rivalry as well as homage seem always to be at work’ (Grusin 2004: 17-8) - it is there, at work within the novelisation. A novelisation cannot not be remediating. Its ‘dynamics of exchange’ only deepen the already existing flourish of intermediality and adaptation. (Andrew 1998: 459) | |||||||||||||||||||||
ConclusionAlthough the world of academia does not yet seem ready to tackle the novelisation, this attempt has hopefully illustrated the possibilities that the genre of the novelisation has to | |||||||||||||||||||||
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offer. Because of its subversive qualities within the discipline of adaptation studies, it is a potentially highly interesting object of study. Not only within media or literary studies, but also within the reception studies area. The fact that the written undermines the visual in these days of ultimate visuality illustrates our apparent craving for words, for writing. Are not all medial products adaptations in one way or another? Is not everything a rewriting, a remaking of something? Adaptation is not ‘bad’ or derivative by definition; it is merely one very transparent form of using and re-using the already existing products of media. If only the novelisation would be regarded as the intermedial, remediating medium that it is (and, in a sense, all media are); as the real medium that it is, that should not be looked at merely from the perspective of its relationships with other media, as proposed by Bolter and Grusin: ‘all that media produce is real’. (Bolter & Grusin 1996: 344) The novelisation is real. In this time of new, inter-, multi-, hyper- and cybermedia, all we want is to sit in our armchairs and read a book. We novelise all that we see and experience into something we can grasp, something we have been using for centuries to understand our own consciousness and the world around us: a book - a novelisation. | |||||||||||||||||||||
References
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