Novelization, A Contamineted Genre?

Novelization, a Contaminated Genre? Author(s): JanBaetens Reviewed work(s): Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No.
1 (Autumn 2005), pp. 43-60 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/498003 . Accessed: 07/02/2013 14:06
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded on Thu, 7 Feb 2013 14:06:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Novelization, a Contaminated Genre?

Jan Baetens
Translated by Pieter Verrmeulen
The Text Writes Back Contemporary culture is a visual culture or, more precisely, a culture marked by the visual turn, the transition from a culture dominated by the model of writing to a culture dominated by a model of the image.1 Whatever the interpretation of this phenomenon, which is still far from being understood in all its implications, the observation is unavoidable that new ways of thinking the image often tend to elude the bilateral relations obtaining between the verbal and the visual order. But although the theory of visual culture quite logically opposes the linguistic imperialism that distorted many traditional theories of the image2 (most obviously in certain kinds of semiotics and art history),3 it cannot simply be equated with an
1. Whatever the pictorial turn is, then, it should be clear that it is not a return to naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial presence: it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and gurality. It is the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or visual literacy might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality. [W. J. T. Mitchell, The Pictorial Turn, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, 1994), p. 16] 2. For a critique of this linguistic imperialism, see Thierry Groensteen, Systeme de la bande ` dessinee (Paris, 1999) and the numerous studies by James Elkins, for instance, What Do We Want Pictures to Be? Reply to Mieke Bal, Critical Inquiry 22 (Spring 1996): 590602. 3. All traditional forms of iconography and iconology are intended here, as criticized in, for instance, Oskar Batschmann, Einfuhrung in die kunstgeschichtliche Hermeneutik (Darmstadt, 1988), and Mieke Bal, Reading Rembrandt (Cambridge, 1991).
Critical Inquiry 32 (Autumn 2005) 2005 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/05/3201-0001$10.00. All rights reserved.
43
44
Jan Baetens / On Novelization
antiverbal or antilinguistic culture. This theory, exemplied most notably in visual semiotics or new iconology, rather positions itself at the intersection of the two systems and emphasizes the interaction of the opposing registers and domains.4 There is, for instance, no shortage of attempts to bridge the gap between the textual domain and that of the image in numerous texts drawing, albeit in diverse ways, on poststructuralism: from Jean-Francois Lyotards seminal Discours gure to the methodological principles proposed in Mieke Bals Travelling Concepts, which elaborates Lyotards overcoming of the opposition between word and image; the visual reading of graphic systems by Anne-Marie Christin, whose screen-theory articulates written language as a form of image; or a work such as David Norman Rodowicks Reading the Figural, which extends the ideas of Lyotard to the domain of digital culture.5 In all these instances, the theoretical analysis while clearly having its roots in the visual turn in no way implies a refusal of the verbal, which is rather integrated in the new semiosphere of the image. From this perspective, the cultural form (in the sense Raymond Williams gave to this term in his studies on television) called novelization appears as an ambiguous anachronism both innovative and monstrous.6 It seems to go counter to the visual mutation now aecting every form of writing. Also, this paradoxical return of writing presents itself unburdened by any false modesty and instead claims some sort of revenge of writing on the image. Paraphrasing an expression that has gained currency in the last decade (the empire writes back),7 it could be said that the rise of novelization is one of the ways in which a previously dominated system (that of writing) manages to counterattack, to appropriate the tools of the dominant system (that of the image) and to aim them against it; the text writes back. These preliminary observations enable us to determine the stakes of a study of novelization. This genre oers simultaneously a very precise, com4. See Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986). 5. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, Discours gure (Paris, 1970); Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto, 2002); Anne-Marie Christin, LImage crite, ou, la deraison e graphique (Paris, 1995) and Poetique du blanc (Louvain, 2002); and David Norman Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham, N.C., 2001). 6. See Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1975; London, 1990). 7. See The Empire Writes Back, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griths, and Helen Tin (London, 1989).
J a n B a e t e n s teaches at the Institute of Cultural Studies of the University of Louvain, Belgium. His most recent books are Romans a contraintes (2005) and a ` novelization in verse of the 1962 lm by Jean-Luc Godard, Vivre sa vie (2005). His email is jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.ac.be. P i e t e r Ve r m e u l e n is research assistant of the Flemish Fund of Scientic Research. He is currently working on his dissertation, a critical description of the work of Georey Hartman.
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2005
45
plex, and varied case that allows us to consider the workings of the visual turn in a domain that seems to escape its grasp without being reduced to a mere site of impotent resistance, a remnant from the past, an anachronistic residue heading for absorption by a triumphant visuality. In this way, novelization could prove symptomatic of the way in which the visual transformation of cultural facts can occur dierently than in the clear cases in which the image directly replaces writing. As we will seeand this is the thesis I want to defend herethe impact of the visual is not necessarily diminished by the apparent return of the verbal. Novelization, in other words, oers a good example of the indirect contamination of one media regime by another. To give some indications of this, I will examine the relationship of three key ideas of contemporary visual turn theories: adaptation, remediation, and specicity. At the end of the analysis, I will attempt to relate the case of novelization to a more general theory of mediological dierences in the era of the hybridization of the work of art in the context of contemporary visual culture.
Novelization as Anti-Adaptation What is novelization? Whereas there are numerous studies available on the interaction between literature and lm, novelization itself has not yet been the object of in-depth research.8 There are many reasons for this silence, but two circumstances seem to play an essential role: rst, the contempt with which the genre is often treated (but one should recall, in comparison, the time and the energy that was expended before the university was willing to accept comics as an object of study);9 second, the structural changes in research programs that force the scholar to study the image rst and to neglect whatever is not valorized in this framework. The institutional shift from literary to cultural studies, however, would seem to
8. For a good synthesis of the situation in France, see Alain and Odette Virmaux, Le Cine-roman (Paris, 1984), and Jeanne-Marie Clerc, Litterature et cinema (Paris, 1993). For the situation in the anglophone world, see the introduction to Adaptations, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (London, 2000). If I am correct, except for the studies by Virmaux and Clerc, only two academic articles have been published thus far on this issue. See Claes-Goran Holmberg, Extraterrestrial Novels, in Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, ed. Ulla Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erick Hedling (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 10914 (which deals especially with Steven Spielberg), and Jan Baetens, La Novellisation: Un Genre impossible? Recherches en communication, no. 17 (2002): 21321 (which also addresses the sensitive but decisive issue of copyright, a topic I will not address here). The publishing industry has shown more interest in the phenomenon, as is indicated by the frequent publication of articles such as JohnMichael Maas, Attack of the NovelizationsStar Wars Dominates a Summer Tie-in Roster Skewed to Young, Male Sci- Fans, Publishers Weekly, 15 Apr. 2002, pp. 2427. 9. On the reasons underlying this reticence, see Groensteen, Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization? in Comics Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, ed. Anna Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen (Copenhagen, 2002), pp. 2941.
46
encourage the serious study of novelization as it connects many of the disciplines favorite aspects, such as popular culture, mass media, and visuality. As a rst excursion into the fairly pristine territory of novelization, let us consider the following denitions (or, more exactly, observations), as diverse in their perspective as they are similar in their approach of the phenomenon: The procedure consists in having a novel written on the basis of a screenplay and subsequently having the publication of the book coincide with the release of the movie. . . . Except for some notable cases . . . these works obtain a guaranteed but ephemeral (a couple of months) audience, and are not reprinted.10 For two decades, American SF has suered from the irresistable rise of fantasy and, more recently, the invasion of sci, an ersatz consisting in literary novelizations and adaptations of SF movies (Star Wars), television series (Star Trek), role-playing games or computer games, which has been a great success with the adolescent public.11 The phrase comes from the back cover of a mass distribution paperback, the kind of book one nds in airport and supermarket stands. . . . Neither a screenplay nor a novel but a novelization, this is a new genre of ction that is itself the product of a new lm-marketing technology.12 What is most striking in these rst approaches (often found in the notes, not even in the body of the text!) is that novelizations are adaptations very dierent from lm adaptations, not only because of their culturally less legitimate status but by dint of the absence of the two characteristics indispensable for a cinematographic adaptation proper. First, novelizations lack the intermediality or, more precisely, the transmedialization essential to the adaptation of a book in a cinematographic process.13 (This absence is of course hypothesized rather than real, as it remains perfectly possible that the lmic images do intervene in the composition.) Most of the novelizations are in fact based on one form or another of screenplay, that is, on a verbal pretext, which entails, among other things, that the problem of the translation from one semiotic system to another is systematically eluded.14 Second, because novelizations are based on an already prenovel10. Virmaux, Le Cine-roman, p. 70 n. 23. 11. Jacques Baudou, La Science-ction (Paris, 2002), p. 41. 12. Teresa de Lauretis, Becoming Inorganic, Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003): 557 n. 24. 13. For more details on the conditional perspective on literary categories (in contrast to the constitutive or realist perpsective), see Gerard Genette, Fiction et diction (Paris, 1991). 14. The screenplay may take the form of a visual scenario or a storyboard. But except for very few cases, this form never mediates between the movie and the book. Below, we will mention the case of visual novelizations (for instance, the so-called photo novella), which no doubt constitute a dierent genre.
47
ized pretext, they also skirt the major challenge of lmic adaptation, that is, the equilibrium (as problematic as it is exciting) between the two forces that Brian McFarlane has termed transfer and adaptation proper.15 The rst term concerns all aspects and mechanisms that let themselves be replicated unproblematically across systems; the second term designates the aspects and mechanisms that resist this transfer and hence require a creative intervention of the adaptor.16 To the extent that novelizations restrict themselves to the textual transposition of an already written screenplay and to the novelistic transposition of an already emphatically narrative structure, the genre can comforatably be an adaptation that skirts almost all the traditional problems of cinematographic adaptation. In this sense, novelization can be called a false adaptation or, even more strongly and again in relation to the traditional model of adaptationthat is, from book to lmit can be called an anti-adaptation. Thus far we have used a prototypical denition of novelization. If we take into account all particular cases, especially from a historical perspective (as the genre is so to speak as old as cinema itself), we can of course give nuance to some of these accepted ideas. Indeed, for every aspect of the denition, one or more counterexamples can be found. First, that novelization is necessarily a literary by-product knocked together by some unassuming hack in the service of the Hollywood merchandizing machine and timed to coincide with the release of the movie is belied by novels such as Tanguy Viels Cinema, which novelized Joseph L. Mankiewiczs Sleuth over three decades after its release,17 or Robert Coovers A Night at the Movies, a highly idiosyncratic novelization of a whole series of generic models, from animation pictures to pornography.18 Second, that novelization is rst and foremost a narrative transcription of a screenplay, purged of all technical indications, does not chime well with novelizations that irt with the (more high-brow, not to say elite) technique of decoupage, such as the cine-romans of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Marguerite Duras,19 and even less with those that explicitly start out from images, such as Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot.20 And, nally,
15. See Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film (New York, 1996). 16. In the terminology of the Mu-group, there are four forms of this adaptation proper: suppression, adjunction, suppression-adjunction, and permutation. See Jean Dubois, Rhetorique generale (Paris, 1970). The best example of a discussion of these aspects is still Francois Truauts polemic against the so-called qualite francaise (Aurenche-Bost) that was precisely founded on a particular interpretation of the adaptation of literary texts. See Francois Truaut, Une Certaine Tendance du cinema francais, Le Plaisir des yeux: Ecrits sur le cinema (1987; Paris, 2000), pp. 293 314. 17. See Tanguy Viel, Cinema (Paris, 1999). Manckiewiczs movie was released in 1966. 18. See Robert Coover, A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This: Fictions (London, 1987). 19. For more details, see Virmaux, Le Cine-roman, and Clerc, Litterature et cinema. 20. See Jean-Claude Carriere, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, dapres le lm de Jacques Tati ` ` (Paris, 1958).
48
that there is always a clear temporal division between the before of the movie and the after of its novelization has been quite uncertain from the very rst instances of the genre. The example of Pier Paolo Pasolinis Teorema, created simultaneously as movie and as book, is well known but far from unique. For instance, when Louis Feuillade lmed his serial The Vampires (1916) in quick succession and without a real screenplay at the same time the novelized serial by Georges Meirs was appearing,21 it became extremely dicult to force the work of the writer into the straitjacket of conventional novelization, given that Meirs was both the movies ocial coscreenwriter and its very liberal novelizer (and add to that all the crossovers the simultaneous publication of a lmic and a written serial allows). A more contemporary example is that of Dr. Strangelove, renovelized by its author, who felt betrayed by Stanley Kubricks adaptation of his novel.22 A more extensive investigation would permit us to nuance the prototypical denition still more drastically. Novelization, for instance, does not necessarily depart from a lm screenplay; there are also novelizations of comics and videogames.23 Also, novelization does not always result in prose; there are, if the categorization is still appropriate, also novelizations in verse or in the form of photo novellas.24 Novelization can also, in an intermingling of dierent forms and genres, present itself in the form of a continuationno longer an adaptation of work A by work B but a prolongation of A by B in an original sequel.25 Finally, we could add the limitless range of reports of movies of an often considerable length.26
21. See Louis Feuillade, ed. Emile Feuillade and Francis Lacassin (Paris, 1964). 22. The author in question is Peter George, whose novel Red Alert was adapted by Kubrick and by the author himself under the title Dr. Strangelove. When this collaboration became increasingly troublesome, George came up with a new written version of the lm. The account of the collaboration of Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke on 2001 is at least as complicated. 23. Max Allan Collins and Richard Rayner, Road to Perdition (New York, 1998), a graphic novel, was adapted for lm by Sam Mendes in 2002. There are of course the famous novelizations of the video game Tomb Raider. 24. See the excellent anthology The Faber Book of Movie Verse, ed. Philip French and Ken Wlaschin (London, 1993). The photo novella based on Chris Markers cult lm The Jetty (1962), produced by Bruce Mau in collaboration with the author, is a masterpiece in this genre; see Chris Marker and Bruce Mau, La Jetee/The Jetty (New York, 1992). 25. For an interesting example, see Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London, 1992), in which he invents a ruby slippers auction. 26. See, for instance, what happens in On Moonlight Bay as Time Machine, chap. 2 of Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 3092. An example that may seem quite exotic to non-Belgian readers is the lmatique of the Flemish author Johan Daisne, by which term he designated a form of literary criticism, amply illustrated by his own work from the fties, which attempted to replace the lm, rst because the writer allegedly had privileged access to the essence of the work and, second, because writing was considered to possess a permanence that lm was supposed to lack in those days when it was hard to resee a movie and when the material fragility of lm reels was all too apparent.
49
Still, however formally and functionally complex and subtle these examples are (at some time in the future they will have to be surveyed less haphazardly), the thesis of novelization as anti-adaptation can be sustained without violating the corpus. In general, the typical aspects of adaptation continue to be downplayed, and their specic diculties and challenges are only rarely thematized or made explicit. A more historical approach to novelization leads to similar conclusions. Roughly, this history ranges from the early novelization-serials to the narrated lms (lms racontes) of the twenties and thirties to the comparable but less mediatized adaptations of the forties and fties,27 and the dierent attempts to revive the genre in the sixties and seventies, to the standardized Hollywood novelizations that have become the norm in the last few decades.28 (It must be noted that like every noncanonical genre, novelization is hardly aware of its own history, hence the inclination, both logical and curious, of many writers on the genre to believe that it is a recent phenomenon.) Anyhow, it is clear that novelization in its contemporary meaning is more drastically separated from other forms of cinematographic writing (such as screenplays, decoupage, and cine-ro mans) than in the rst decades of the medium when there was a real continuum between more experimental forms (such as the virtual screenplay of an as yet nonexistent movie) and more mainstream forms (such as the narrated novel).29 The more one approaches the present in the history of the relation between writing and cinema, the more the most commercial and popular forms of lmic writing stray from the experimental forms and are almost entirely absorbed in the most standardized subnovelistic canons. Here also, then, the thesis of anti-adaptation can be maintained; novelization goes out of its way to adopt a low prole and to avoid marking the semiotic rupture that the change from lm to book entails. This desire for absorption in the literary domain in its most hackneyed forms, on the one hand, and the refusal to create a form of novel writing proper to the cinematographic domain, on the other, can explain the status
27. Less mediatized, because these adaptations were produced by smaller publishing houses and written by writers very much inferior to those writing for the collections of the twenties (such as Cinario, published by Gallimard). 28. Was Delos W. Lovelace, King Kong (New York, 1932) the rst example of a Hollywood novelization? If it was, it was a very exceptional one: King Kong was probably the rst Hollywood lm to generate a novelization, although, curiously, the book appeared the year before the lm. King Kong the novel followed cinematic custom, by having several credits: conceived by Edgar Wallace and Meriam C. Cooper, screen play by James A. Creelman and Ruth Rose; novelized from the Radio picture by Delos W. Lovelace (J. C., NB: What Is an Embargo For? King Kong in Literature, etc., Times Literary Supplement, 29 Aug. 2003, p. 14). 29. This analysis is based mainly on Virmaux, Le Cine-roman, and Clerc, Litterature et cinema. For a short synthesis, see Marc Melon, Cinema, in Dictionnaire des termes litteraires, ed. Paul Aron, Denis Saint-Jacques, and Alain Viala (Paris, 2002).
50
and the form of novelization as well as its persistence as a genre that distinguishes itself in its every detail from more ambitious variants of cinematographic writing. Whereas decoupage, for instance, is accorded all the prestige of the art movie, novelization is demoted to an almost scandalous eect of mass culture. It is constructed along simple and transparent narrative lines, using the image merely as inessential illustration, whereas numerous avant-garde writers have attempted a hybrid of the verbal and the visual in their writings based on cinema. It maintains, nally, despite periods of decline, a prominent place in the book market, whereas more innovative genres come and go without any long-term potential. Common to these prototypical novelizations is the ambition to reduce the tension between media and discursive regimes. Novelization does not so much aspire to become the movies other as it wants to be its double. This strategy of conict avoidance makes it an anti-adaptationdened as an adaptation that strives to deny itself as an adaptation and to deny the ruptures every adaptation necessarily supposes. The imaginary regime novelization fosters for itself is that of a copy (calque), that is, an immediate transfer. All this strongly indicates the indirect but considerable importance of the visual, which implicitly constrains the specic properties of the verbal.
Novelization as Anti-Remediation Both the prototypical denition and the historical survey of novelization as a genre have remained subject to a binary approach. The relation between cinema and book is sketched in bimedial terms (the textual novelization presents itself as the conversion of a cinematographic work), which occasions comparative judgements (the novelization, as the derivative product, is assessed in relation to the original movie). Of course, both of these dimensions are downplayed as much as possible (the novelization does not explicitly wish to compete with the movie because it presents itself as a transformation of the screenplay, not of the images, and because it avoids raising the question of the respective merits of the movie and the book by adopting a low prole), but that does not change the fact that the general horizon of the genre is clearly binary, and this raises further diculties (and hence the need to broaden the canvas). The rst diculty is theoretical. The binary perspective that has long dominated adaptation studies has increasingly been experienced as a straitjacket incapable of accounting for the mobility of the phenomenon as a social and cultural practice. Imelda Whelehan oers an excellent articulation of the problem:
Many commentators have focused on the process of the transference from novel to lm, where often a well-known work of great literature is
51
adapted for the cinema and expectations about the delity of the screen version come to the fore. . . . These commentators have already charted the problems involved in such an exercise and the pitfalls created by the demands of authenticity and delitynot least the intensely subjective criteria which must be applied in order to determine the degree to which the lm is succesful in extracting the essence of the ctional text. What we aim to oer here is an extension of this debate, but one which further destabilizes the tendency to believe that the origin text is of primary importance.30 The second diculty is practical. The binary and teleological perspective on the relations between the objects of media adaptations becomes obsolete in the context of the essentially hybrid character of todays visual culture, in which not only do the relations between, before, and after intermingle but in which the very autonomy of the object tends to disappear: Phenomenologically, the eld of visual images in everyday contemporary Western cultures (and others, such as that of Japan) is heterogeneous and hybrid. The consumer of images ips through endless magazines, channel surfs on waves of TV shows. The integrity of the semantic object is rarely, if ever, respected. Moreover, the boundaries of the object itself are expanded, made permeable or otherwise transformed. For example, a lm may be encountered through posters, blurbs, and other advertisements, such as trailers and television clips; it may be encountered through newspaper reviews, reference work synopses, and theoretical articles (with their lmstrip assemblages of still images); through production photographs, frame enlargements, memorabilia, and so on. Collecting such metonymic fragments in memory, we may come to feel familiar with a lm we have not actually seen.31 In other words, this postmodern property of innite hybridization is a considerably less novel phenomenon than some maintain. In his (admittedly very critical) presentation of Jamesons theses on postmodern culture, John Storey remarks that the phenomena discerned by the author of Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism display a denite analogy with the structures of popular culture as it has functioned since at least the nineteenth century.32 The supposed characteristics of postmodern
30. Whelehan, Adaptations: The Contemporary Dilemmas, in Adaptations, p. 3. 31. Victor Burgin, In/Dierent Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 2223. 32. Storey concludes: There may, therefore, be a certain (postmodern) irony in Jamesons complaint about nostalgia eacing history, given that his own critique is structured by a profound nostalgia for modernist certainty, promoted, as it is, at the expense of detailed historical
52
culture do not so much break with those of the mass culture born with industrialization but rather prolong them. The industrial revolution, infact, is equally a cultural revolution that profoundly alters both the production and the reception of cultural objects. Following, for instance, Dominique Kalifa, it becomes obvious that a mere description as the transformation of the work of art into a cultural commodity is insucient.33 Such a moralizing judgement preempts a detailed analysis of the cultural impact of the changes in the semiotics of the object, which now has to obey the triple law of novelty, seriality, and adaptation. New cultural objects must be circulated continuously for a public in constant search of new stimuli that wants to (or must) consume in order to ll up a leisure time now radically separated from working time; those objects that are well received by the public are serially reproduced for a greater return on investment and to the extent possible exploited in dierent media. Adaptation, in this view, represents the culminating logic of the combination of novelty and seriality; it is a product that is new and serialized at the same time and can be considered protable for just this double reason. Applied to the case of novelization, this frame proves both useful and revealing. As false novelty and true serial repetition, novelization is symptomatic of the mass culture the culture industry dreams for itself. Also, it oers an occasion to critically reassess the debate over the concept of remediation, which in the last couple of years has replaced the larger and vaguer concept of adaptation and now dominates numerous debates on media mutations. According to J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Western media systems all strive for a maximal realism, that is, a system in which the signs erase themselves in order to reveal the things themselves.34 This genuine realist drive propels the West towards systems in which the signs render themselves invisible (transparency) and the referents are increasingly directly present (immediacy). When, then, the transition from one medium to another is no longer thought of along the teleological lines of McLuhan, this transition is never neutral; its ultimate motivation is always remediation, in the double sense of the term (one medium replaces another, one medium improves another). In any case, the fading of the sign and the ununderstanding of the traditions of popular entertainment (John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture [Oxford, 2003], p. 70). 33. See Dominique Kalifa, La Culture de masse en France (Paris, 2001). 34. See J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). The subtitle is a direct allusion to McLuhans Understanding Media, which points to the programmatic intent of the book. For a critical reading of the ideas of Bolter and Grusin, see Baetens, Back to Basics? A Critique of Cyberhybrid-hype, in The Future of Cultural Studies, ed. Baetens and Jose Lambert (Louvain, 2000), pp. 15167.
53
veiling of the referent are always possible only via the aid of signs, which always risk drawing attention to themselves to the detriment of the referents they are supposed to present. Whence the paradox or, rather, the inherent, insolvable, and insurmountable aporia of every representational system; whence, also, the vast dynamic of the mediological system in its totality, incessantly generating systems that are ever more performative (from the point of view of transparency and immediacy) while at the same time allowing outmoded systems to adapt and remedy themselves in order to better compete with new developments. In this respect, Bolter and Grusin propose a distinction between remediation proper, for instance of photography (motionless) by cinema (mobile), and repurposing, the operation that reproduces in a given medium A what is done in a medium B that remedies the former, thus hoping to generate within the older medium eects identical to those active in the more recent one. Bolter gives the example of the printed newspaper, the layout of which increasingly resembles the mosaic pattern of a computer screen.35 Does the conversion of a feature lm into the conventional form of a traditional novel of normal length oer a good example of remediation or, just perhaps, repurposing? Obviously, neither model applies, and it is precisely this disregard for the laws of the remediation/repurposing binary that renders novelization (and perhaps mass culture in general) so fascinating. At a very general level, it seems logical to consider the move from movie to novel a historical anomaly, a regressive movement in a context that in general does not let such a step back go unpunished. As Bolter reminds us, Film, which was often said to be the preeminent popular art form of the twentieth century, refashioned narrative forms and repurposed individual stories that had belonged to the novel and stage play. Because they were such vivid audiovisual experiences, lms seemed to oer greater immediacy and authenticity than novels or plays.36 The same author in no uncertain terms rejects the verbal translation of visual or multimedia signs, which he condemns as so many attempts to recuperate the new in the service of an outmoded ideology and which represents a conservative current in the mediological history of the West.37 Moreover, on a more particular level, novelization, except again for its more
35. See Bolter, Critical Theory and the Challenge of New Media, in Eloquent Images, ed. Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 29. 36. Ibid., p. 19. 37. There is a tradition in humanistic studies of translating other media forms back to the medium of print, and this tradition continues with new media (ibid., p. 24).
54
marginal elite manifestations, does not even aspire to equal the achievement of the movie on which it is based, let alone to outdo it (even if some rare instances point out, however timidly, that they wish to do something different).38 In order to understand and explain the very existence and the success (certainly relative but enduring) of novelizations, we need to abandon the traditional binary approach (which still informs the notion of remediation) for an inscription in a larger cultural context. In mass culture, to which novelization, for all intents and purposes, belongs, remediation is not the (only) crucial factor. Also and primarily at issue is the need to produce constant change right across the interrelated processes of the introduction of the new, the evolution to serialization and intermedial adaptation. Whatever the weaknesses of remediation (and these are no doubt real), the genre of novelization must be granted access to the realm of mass culture. One should always remember Edgar Morins great insight into the spirit of the age: in a society in movement, the important thing is not to be ahead but to be able to follow this movement.39 The impact of the visual is here as strong as it is indirect. Granted that novelization does not wish to compete with cinema, its very existence participates in the dynamic of a mass culture propelled and dominated by visual signs.
Novelization as Antiliterature As soon as we move to the texts of novelizations themselves, that is, to the books that contain them (the distinction is fundamental), we notice the stark opposition between the domain of the text and that of the peritext.40 Considering the latter, the reader is immediately ooded by indices of the cinematographic adaptation. First, many novelizations carry a subtitle that species their relation to the screenplay or the movie on which they are based. Second, this liation is enforced by the often very extensive illustrations (cover picture, illustrated fold-in, stills). As for the text itself, the situation is completely dierent. On the one hand, on a microstylistic level, it
38. A good example is La Banquiere (The Banker), a novelization by Jean Noli of Georges ` Conchons screenplay for a Francis Girod movie. In his preface, the editor writes: the story was too beautiful, too rich in narrative turns, in changes in love, hate, and death, to leave it to only the lmmakers, and not to make a book out of it. That is why we have asked a writer, Jean Noli . . . and an economist, Eric Chanel . . . to tell in their own ways the extraordinary destiny of this woman (editors note to Jean Noli, Georges Conchon, and Erik Chanel, La Banquiere: Recit ` [Paris, 1980], n.p.). 39. See Edgar Morin, LEsprit du temps: Essai sur la culture de masse (Paris, 1962). 40. In Gerard Genettes sense of the term (not to be confused, as often happens, with the paratext); see Genette, Seuils (Paris, 1987). The peritext is constituted by all the elements that surround the text in a book without belonging to it (for instance, the names of the author and the publisher, the title, the illustrations, and so on).
55
has often been pointed out that the writing of a novelization mitigates what one might be led to expect from ita very visual style (and this elimination of the visual, here considered an antiliterary intervention, more than compensates for another, undisputedly literary dimensionthe often emphatic presence of a narrative voice, which grafts all sorts of ideological comments onto the text that are absent in the movie version).41 Novelizations emphasize narration, in the double sense of the term; the level of the story retains the attention and is at the same time often ltered by a narrative device missing in the movie (think of how the cinema is less drawn to voiceover, especially in the case of ctional movies). On the other hand, on a macrostylistic level, there is an almost total eclipse of the ekphrastic nature of novelization.42 Only very rarely, in fact only in the few elite variants of the genre, does the text itself advertise the relation, descriptive or other, that connects it to the movie.43 The text at the inside of the copy carefully dissimulates the relations to the movie to the precise extent that its peritext exhibits them. Of course, the visual repressed asserts itself in many places, even in the most popular forms of novelization, but the explicit deletion of the ekphrasis seems to be inherent in the generic denition. Here, again, we can only properly assess these generic characteristics if we transcend the binary frame of the derivative relation between movie and book. It would, for instance, be wrong to read the anti-ekphrastic status of the novelized text as the revenge of literature on the cinema.44 Such an interpretation must ignore two essential insights. First, the reception of a novelization depends less on the text itself than on the peritext, which inevitably classies the former as a cinematographic adaptation. And while the reader of course retains a certain liberty to read the text dierently than the peritext suggests, the default reading of a novelization is not at all one that valorizes the works literary or aesthetic dimension. Second, and even more important, is the observation that the hypothesis of the revenge of the literary text on its cinematographic pretext fails to take into account the simple fact that literature has lost its longstanding central position in the cultural polysystem. Nowadays, it is clear that this centre is occupied by lm and that the very idea of the revenge of a cultural form reputed to be more elevated (literature) on one judged more vulgar (cinema) is, if not a merely theo41. Clerc stresses this point most clearly in Litterature et cinema. 42. Ekphrasis designates any form of narrative or nonnarrative description of ctional or nonctional works of art. For a historical survey of ekphrasis in Western poetry, see James Heernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, 1993). 43. See, for instance, Viel, Cinema. There is a notable dierence here between poetry and prose, as the poets who write on the basis of movies explicitly signal the ekphrastic nature of their practice; see The Faber Book of Movie Verse. 44. See Virmaux, Le Cine-roman.
56
retical chimera, at least a conception that the evolution of modern society has long since devalued. In contrast, the starting point of a reection on the relations between lm and literature today should be the observation that the strict separation between these domains has been corroded in our media culture and that the internal force relations no longer simply favor the textual culture. We must, in other words, think in terms of systematic adaptations (the focus is no longer the work but the relations obtaining between dierent works) within a mobile system in which power is now on the side of the image (the revenge of the book on the lm is merely a vacuous claim in this context). Rather than with revenge, we are dealing here with resistance. In the words, from a distinctly dierent context, of Joseph Tabbi: Books have been, or they have been made to seem, instances, of a bounded, individuated organization, but they must now link up (again) with a wider, distributed media network. Literature, the most developed form of book culture . . . will continue to resist this incorporation, the way that consciousness resists reduction to the modules that are working hard just to work, automatically and without reection.45 Cultural studies, which can elaborate Tabbis statement on literary studies, has amply demonstrated that resistance does not equal outright opposition, but rather negotiation and reappropriation.46 From this point of view, it is less interesting to investigate the way in which novelizations position themselves in relation to cinema than to note how the contemporary novel tends to be read as itself already a novelization, albeit an imaginary one. Even when we know for a fact that the book precedes the movie (in the case, for instance, of books adapted to the screen), the contemporay literary system will position the text as a novelization. Also, the book is read in relation to the cinema, from which it now derives its status and its legitimation, both in the case of a novel already adapted and in the case of a book that only has the potential of being adapted. In the rst case, the advertisements for the book will present it as if it were a novelization with an aggressively cinematographic peritext that in almost every detail reproduces the novelization conventions (a formula such as the book from the movie is being used more and more to present both novelizations and adaptations). In the second case, the interpenetration of the dierent models goes one step further, as here the cinematographic regime is interiorized by both the producers and the consumers of the novel. The former write less with the intention of being read than with the aim of being adapted to lm;47 the
45. Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions (Minneapolis, 2002), p. xi. 46. See Stuart Hall, Encoding, Decoding, in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York, 1993), pp. 90102. 47. And even, more technically, to acquire the right style and tone for the only thing that really counts: the screenplay and then the lmic realization. A good example is Bruno Dumont,
57
latter no longer read a novel as if it could one day be turned into a lm but as if this had already happened. Such is the impact of the adaptations surrounding us that while reading we already imagine the visual scene, of which the text is a sort of phantasmagoric transposition.48 Such a situation, in which one medium is absorbed by another, is not without historical precedent. In his study of the relations between literature and photography in the nineteenth century, Philippe Ortel poses a similar question: it seems that, as soon as it had taken place, the photographic revolution, as [Victor] Hugo called it in a letter to [Pierre-Jules] Hetzel, saw its impact dwindle, until it was completely forgotten even by those who proted from it. How, then, lacking a sucient number of direct testimonies, can one render visible the literary eects of an invisible revolution?49 Ortel goes on to show how this absence of explicit references to photography in the literary canon at a moment when they where abundantly available in the eld of painting should not disguise the implicit but nonetheless thorough decisive impact of the photographic code on the art of writing. Literature here borrows from photography a new scene of enunciation (the author increasingly starts to consider himself as a photographic lm registering the real), a new frame of reference (the way literature cuts and selects its material owes much to photographic framing techniques) and nally a new interpretant (the interpretation of this material occurs in relation to a larger cultural text conceived in more visual terms). In other words, what is true of photography in the nineteenth century goes for cinema in the twentieth. The presence of scattered references of the cinematographic model should not lead us to conclude that it is absent where no trace of direct inuence or imitation can be found. Novelization, with its opposition between a cinematographic peritext and an anti-ekphrastic text, oers a good illustration of this. Even where the writing seems to distance itself from the lm, as in the style of the novelized text, the impregnation by visuality is complete. Whatever it may happen to think or say about itself, novelization is a typical case of antiliterature.
Second Birth, First Death? We can no longer restrict ourselves to an essentially binary approach to novelization that retains a focus on the comparison between the writing of
LHumanite (Paris, 2001). This text also has great literary merits, which makes it a fascinating case. The phenomenon is obviously not new. See, for instance, the comments on hard-boiled novelists in Andre Bazin, Pour un cinema impur, Quest-ce que le cinema? (Paris, 1987), pp. 8182; this whole text is in fact very relevant to the subject treated here. 48. Admittedly, there is no empirical evidence for this hypothesis, which does not mean it is incorrect (it recurs, at any rate, regularly in informal discussions of the reading process). 49. Philippe Ortel, La Litterature a lere de la photographie: Enquete sur une revolution invisible ` ` (Nmes, 2002), pp. 78, 9.
58
the book and that of the lm. The extension of the research to the totality of the mediological landscape is a necessity that the problem of the passage from lm to book allows us to consider in unexpected ways. Novelization, indeed, oers a real challenge to media theory rst because it so obviously goes against the currents diagnosed by media theorists from McLuhan and Debray to Bolter and Grusin, but also because the strange interaction between verbal and visual logic occurs precisely in a genre so distant from gural postmodernism. Structurally, novelization is a monster, simultaneously anachronistic and innovative, both cinematographic and antiekphrastic. In The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell has developed a media theory (it is worth noting that for him the notions media and genre are interchangeable) based on the interaction of three elements: a material host-medium, a class of signs, and a type of content. For Cavell, one can speak of a medium or a genre as soon as there is an automatic coincidence of a material substrate, a type of sign and a certain content.50 The sudden emergence of one of these elements in a certain work that will go on to function as a norm of what can and cannot be done within a medium does not automatically entail the introduction of a new element in one of the other domains. The new hostmedia do not immediately nd the new signs and contents that they need in order for a new medium to come into existence, and the same goes for the use of new signs or the discovery of a new content. This phenomenon, also analyzed in the technological domain by media historian Brian Winston, is central to the research of two lm historians, Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Marion.51 They have termed it the second birth of media, which designates the moment when, after a latency period or a series of immature developments in which the medium has not yet gained recognition, it establishes a technically stable and institutionally acknowledged xed form that persists until other innovations or new developments either modify or suppress its structure.52 The example of novelization also allows a new perspective on an aspect of this problematic that has received little attentionthe perspective of the impure after the second (and denitive) birth of a genre or medium. In this context, novelization appears as an unorthodox artifact, which seems to look for its specicity precisely by avoiding what could fortify it. It as50. For more on the notion of automatism, see Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 1018, and Baetens, Le Roman-photo: Media singulier, media au singulier? Societes et Representations, no. 9 (Apr. 2000): 5160. 51. See Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society: A History (London, 1998). 52. See Andre Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, Un Media nat toujours deux fois . . . , Societes et Representations, no. 9 (Apr. 2000): 2136.
59
pires to the new by eeing it; it aspires to innovation without looking for what has not been tried before either in terms of isolated mediatic elements or their possible combinations. And if the case of novelization nuances the theory of double birth, its real interest no doubt lies elsewhere. Indeed, novelization suggests that the passage from the rst to the second birth of a mediumthe passage from a state in which the medium has not yet come to acknowledge itself to the state in which it discovers and assumes its specicityoften hinders our perception of the persistence of the impure, of the nonspecic within the triumphant phase of the medium, in which the part played by these remainders is surprisingly more real and denitely more relevant because useful and eective. In this respect, the example of novelization allows us to reframe the historian Livio Bellos important observations on early cinema.53 In the contemporary conception of the cinema, we often simply assume a discontinuity between two periods and two types of images: rst, premodern or early cinema, with its own type of images and its own logic (a type of lm said to be less focused on the narration of a ctional story than on the display of images with the goal of surprising or entertaining the spectator, whence the name cinema of attractions); then modern lm (to simplify things, born in the revolutions of Porter and Grith), also characterized by its proper images and its own logic (that of ctional narration). Trying to reread the key moment in the transition between both types of lm, Bello is forced to problematize this opposition in two ways. First, on a temporal plane, he shows how early cinema already crucially anticipated many of the later forms and functions of modern cinema and, conversely, how the properly narrative modern cinema retains many of the characteristics of early cinema. Second, on the level of the images themselves, early cinema is not merely the domain of imagistic attractions, just as modern cinema does not monopolize that of narrative images. Bello thus categorically rejects the equation of periods with types of images. Early cinema is not the cinema of attractions but the cinema in which attractive images dominate other medial virtualities; similarly, modern cinema is not narrative cinema but rather the cinema in which the mere attractive image is dominated by other virtualities, especially by the narrative dimension. It now seems fair to say that, on the basis of the temporal and mediatic distortions that novelization, as a cultural form, has revealed, the adoption of a historical model based on the restless and total mutation of genres and media becomes untenable. Whatever claims to purity a cultural form may entertain along its historical trajectory, the creative presence of residues has
53. See Livio Bello, Le Regard retourne: Aspects du cinema des premiers temps (Montreal, 2002).
60
an incontestable and productive mediatic and generic reality. The second birth of a genre or a medium can thus equally be considered the moment of its death, that is, the moment at which the medium or the genre must condemn or deny its own heterogeneity. Banned from the genre, however, this heterogeneity does not so much disappear as reappear with a vengeance. It takes the form of anachronisms, of more or less exotic nostalgia, or of practices perceived as external and often dismissed as being old-fashioned or too commercial. It is then, I claim, the case of novelization that shows the diculty of thinking of these anachronisms or commercial setbacks in purely teleological terms. Novelization and, more generally, all that resists purity is not therefore reactionary but rather a signal of vitality.

Novelization, A Contamineted Genre?

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Novelization, A Contamineted Genre?

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Novelization, a Contaminated Genre? Author(s): JanBaetens Reviewed work(s): Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No.

Novelization, a Contaminated Genre?

Jan Baetens / On Novelization

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2005

Jan Baetens / On Novelization

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2005

Jan Baetens / On Novelization

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2005

Jan Baetens / On Novelization

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2005

Jan Baetens / On Novelization

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2005

Jan Baetens / On Novelization

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2005

Jan Baetens / On Novelization

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2005

Jan Baetens / On Novelization

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2005

Jan Baetens / On Novelization

Вам также может понравиться