Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 58

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Popular Culture Review

Miracle and mirage, ekphrasis is an “instant’s vision,” an ideal wherein words
create a verbal equivalent of the visual image. In the adaptation of novel into film,
on the other hand, the word has temporal and conceptual priority, as the word
“adaptation” itself confirms. Yet if the adaptation of a novel into film requires
precisely the opposite movement of ekphrasis, it is, too, a “miracle and a mirage.”
For to follow Krieger, in the cinematic adaptation, images aspire precisely to the
“time-ridden and paradox-ridden character of texts” that ekphrasis struggles against
(xv), and the miracle of re-incamating the fictional precursor “in another” is the
celluloid mirage promulgated under the aegis of “fidelity.”
Perhaps because of the ways it thus reverses traditions of image-word
translation, scholarship on the cinematic adaptation of literature tends to concentrate
more on the distinctiveness of the two genres than on the relationship between
them.^ Writers hone in on the problems of point of view and description as the key
sites of conflict in film adaptations of novels. Similarly, they pinpoint the problem
that emerges when the novel is itself about language, as is clearly the case with
Nabokov’s Lolita. The popular appraisals of the cinematic adaptations of Nabokov’s
novel reflect these sentiments, affirming that what is “lost” in the translation to
screen is specific to verbal artistry. More pointedly, however, the popular discourse
echoes the language of fidelity used by scholarship to characterize the relationship
between a literary “precursor” and its cinematic incarnation.
Whether as “faithful” to the “letter,” “spirit,” or “essence” of a novel, the
question of a film’s fidelity has functioned as the paramount issue of academic and
popular debate on the issue of cinematic adaptation. It has dominated the critical
conversation, despite the fact that fidelity arguments are inevitably subjective and
impressionistic, premised as they are on the writer’s own interpretation of the novel.
As Brian McFarlane summarizes.
Fidelity criticism depends on a notion of the text as having and
rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a simple, correct
‘meaning’ which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some
cases violated or tampered w ith....That is, the critic who
quibbles at failures of fidelity is really saying no more than:
‘This reading of the original does not tally with mine and in
these and these ways.’ (8-9)
The dangers of fidelity criticism, McFarlane implies here, lie in its
tendencies to naturalize an interpretation and to sacralize the novelistic text.^ And
yet, while the “near fixation on the issue of fidelity” has certainly “inhibited and
blurred” the study of adaptation (McFarlane 194), it has also remained an under