Back in 1992, when I started writing the shorter dissertation in our doctoral programme (the equivalent of an MA dissertation, since we didn’t have yet MA programmes in Spain), I truly thought that my main field of research would be Adaptation Studies. My short dissertation dealt with the film adaptation of the novel by John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), directed by Karel Reisz in 1981, and scripted by the illustrious playwright Harold Pinter. I found Pinter’s script extremely clever, and I defended in my dissertation the thesis that screen writers are unfairly overlooked, both in the study of adaptation and of films in general. More than 30 years later, reviewers still fail to include the names of the writers in their articles and few members of the audience (myself included) can name a favourite screen writer. Well, I’ll name Charlie Kaufman.
Back to my academic biography, I decided next, in 1993, to focus my PhD dissertation on the film adaptations of Frankenstein, but got carried away by the superb characterization of the creature in the novel and ended up producing a study of monstrosity between 1979 (Alien) and 1995 (I submitted my dissertation in 1996). I did not, however, abandon Adaptation Studies. I’ve published articles and book chapters on The Silence of the Lambs; Orson Scott Card’s novelization of James Cameron’s film The Abyss; the adaptation of novelised biographical material in Schindler’s List, Heaven and Earth and Not without my Daughter; the films based on cult novels Dune and The Naked Lunch; Pygmalion and My Fair Lady; the adaptation of Pat Barker’s WWI novel Regeneration (for the Literature/Film Quarterly); Corman’s take on Aldiss’ novel Frankenstein Unbound; Final Fantasy (a film that adapts a videogame); Spielberg’s The War of the Worlds; and Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice.
I’m very proud to have contributed a chapter to two key edited volumes: “Classic Shakespeare for All: Forbidden Planet and Prospero’s Books, Two Screen Adaptations of The Tempest” (in Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye & Imelda Whelelan’s Classics in Film and Fiction, 2000) and “What Does Heathcliff Look Like? Performance in Peter Kosminsky’s Version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights” (in Mireia Aragay’s Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship, 2005). In 2006 I published the short story collection Siete relatos góticos: del papel a la pantalla, with my translation of key gothic short fiction accompanied by a comment on their film adaptations; this book had a second version, Ocho cuentos góticos: entre el papel y la pantalla (2019).
The answer to the question of why I didn’t finally pursue a career in Adaptation Studies, preferring to focus instead on Gender Studies and genres like gothic and science fiction is complicated. It took time for the field to be consolidated: the Association of Adaptation Studies was founded in 2006; its journal, Adaptation, appeared in 2008. By then, I was pursuing other research lines, with the added difficulty that in Spain Cultural Studies and Film Studies had (and still have) scant weight within English Studies. The key participants in Films Studies, in the University of Zaragoza, were never too interested in adaptations. Here at UAB, I did include film adaptations in some subjects, but I’ve never taught adaptation as such in any subject. Other areas of research, in short, offered wider avenues and I took them, though as a consumer of adapted films and series I have found much to enjoy, including many books discovered thanks to their screen versions.
There is another factor affecting Adaptation Studies, which is both positive and negative. Each case study is unique, which means, as I learnt with my short dissertation, that it’s almost impossible to map all the correspondences between a source and the final product. This is a very engaging type of research that can be expanded in many directions; as you have seen, I have looked, for instance, into novelizations, videogames and even the intertextuality of actors. Yet, after working on more than a dozen adaptations, I began to have the impression that there was no way to find a common denominator to make sense of the practice of adapting. My work on gender, in contrast, has led me to assume far more solid theoretical positions. I have quite clear ideas about how masculinity and patriarchy interact and diverge, expressed in several books. I can’t say with the same certainty how the kind of adaptation that most interests me, that of print literary texts onto films and TV series, works generally, except that screen writers are still woefully overlooked.
I had, however, two years ago, an idea for a book on adaptations after being invited to discuss the film versions of the novels by Shirley Jackson in Barcelona’s 42, a truly great genre fiction festival. It occurred to me then, comparing the two films called The Haunting (1963, 1999), both adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House (1959), that another element has been neglected in the study of adaptation: production design. I wrote then a couple of posts here (this one and that one) and opened a Word document with a list of literary works that have been adapted at least twice. I’ve been extra busy in the last two years, with my monograph on men in SF and two co-edited volumes, and although I revisited that Word file now and then, I simply had no time to start a new project.
When this Summer these three books reached the end of the long process of writing, I embarked on my monograph about secondary characters and it became clear to me that any volume of mine on production design would have to be a collective endeavour. So, I have recruited seven authors I have already worked with, and have found three more through CFPs, and I’m currently waiting for them to send me their abstracts. The proposal will include eleven chapters, including mine on Hill House, comparing a speculative fiction text with two screen adaptations. The chapters will discuss how the ‘production design’ of the original source has been transferred onto the screen in each adaptation. By comparing two adaptations, we will insist on the idea that adaptations are specific readings, and as such, potentially infinite.
Since I have not worked for years on Adaptation Studies, and none of my collaborators are specialists (but they do know about speculative fiction a lot…), I have a bit of impostor syndrome. For that reason, I have updated my lists of bibliography and started my re-education by reading Kamilla Elliott’s Theorizing Adaptation (Oxford UP, 2020). I must praise this volume for the astonishing feat that writing such a lucid text is, and for Elliott’s handling of theory with a dexterity that I truly envy. Her bibliography is both exhaustive and exhausting; no wonder she often despaired, as the introduction declares, of ever finishing her book. Theorizing Adaptation addresses many issues, but, of course, the main one is the one that worried me in my early days as a wannabe specialist: can the exploration of the case studies ever lead to a theory of adaptation? What Elliott does, very cleverly, is to expose the “dysfunctional relationship between theorization and adaptation in the humanities,” which makes it “impossible to find the ‘right’ theories” (5). Step by step, she ends up criticizing the generalized acceptance of the “so-called theoretical turn in the humanities” (22) as a sort of one-size-fits-all garment. Boldly, she ends up announcing that: “As a process resistant to theorization, adaptation refuses to conform to theorization’s definitions, taxonomies, principles, epistemologies, and methodologies. As a rival process to theorization, it is at work on everything addressed by humanities scholars, and much more: it is also at work upon theorization, adapting it. The problem of theorizing adaptation, therefore, is a relational one between rival processes” (305). What is theorization, after all, if not an endless process of adapting previous thought?
Among the long list of the principles of adaptation which Elliott offers, apart from her recommendation to respond to art with more art rather than with abstract thought (what she calls ‘creative-critical practice’), I found these two: “Study adaptations of a single work over a long period of time to create longer genealogies of adaptation. Set multiple adaptations of a single work in dialogue with each other to learn more about the adaptation of adaptation” (237). These principles articulate the collective volume I’m putting together, which begins with adaptations of Frankenstein (1818, 1831) and ends with adaptations of The Shining (1977).
I find from my previous co-edited books, and from Hélice, the journal I co-edit, that, generally, the academics in my field(s) enjoy textual analysis much more than they enjoy theory, but feel obliged to use it. I myself have a very bad head for abstractions but love finding unexpected connections among texts and working with large corpus, an approach that for its opponents is mere belletrism. Reading Elliott’s book, however, I was relieved to learn that my colleagues and I can be described as postmodern Cultural Studies practitioners, which for me is good enough (and lessens a bit the burden of my impostor syndrome).
For me, what spoils the current, post-1990, work we do in the Humanities is the imposition by force of a style of theorization that, as Elliott notes, does not fit what the artists we study actually do. She worries about adaptation, I worry about literature and audiovisual texts in general. I have always believed in the traditional function of the academic cultural critic as a specialist who illuminates a text for others. By this I mean that I love best the kind of criticism that helps me to dig deeper into a text and that is mainly focused on that text. This traditional style, however, was deemed to be too subjective starting in the 1960s, hence the gradual imposition of external theorization from philosophy, the social sciences, psychology and so on. This created a sort of inferiority complex in us, cultural, literary or film critics, that led us to legitimate our task with an overdose of theory, to the extent that its application dominates any other consideration and even displaces the texts we study to the margins. As a consequence, the pragmatic reality of how writers write and how films and series are made has been neglected to a ridiculous extent.
With the book I’m planning with my colleagues, then, I want to cut the gordian knot of theory to reveal, using a totally empirical methodology, how the imagination of the speculative fiction author and the creativity of the production designer engage in the process of giving material reality to stories outside the mundane. By foregrounding design, filmmaking takes centre stage as opposed to the type of Adaptation Studies which mainly explores plot (while still managing to ignore screen writers!). Of course, other aspects of filmmaking can be explored in adaptation, such as the role of photography or, as I tried to do back in 2005, the intertextuality of actors, whose bodies lend material reality to the characters imagined by authors. Yet, as happens, I’m now interested in production design. Perhaps I was first interested as long ago as 1999, when I wrote my chapter on how The Tempest had inspired the SF pop classic Forbidden Planet, but also Peter Greenaway’s art film Prospero’s Books, both films that I admire passionately.
The task that I love less about this projected book (apart from writing the index!) is penning the introduction. I wish this post could be the introduction, together with the description of the chapters, but the fact is that, as it is customary now, I must prove that I know the theory of Adaptation Studies before we proceed to discuss the practice. This means hours and hours of reading theory I’m not interested in at all, though I must thank Elliott for making this process much easier for me. I totally second her call to change the way we discuss adaptations, but also all types of narrative. We need to stop borrowing abstract thought from other disciplines because our subject are the products of the human imagination in the narrative arts and, anyway, these other disciplines ignore us. We can still use theorization, indeed, but always as a tool to explain the art of telling stories, never as a priority in our scholarship. This lack of self-confidence truly needs to end.
About production design, here’s your homework: next time you watch a film or a series consider the choice of location, the sets and their decoration, the props, the costumes, the make-up, the physical and the digital effects, and remember that there was a team headed by the production designer creating all of this. If it is an adaptation, consider how what you imagine as you read, on the basis of description, matches or not what you see on the screen, beyond plot. This what my co-authors and I will be exploring, and I can’t begin to say how exciting our task is!