Rethinking a Discipline: Kamilla Elliott's Novel/Film Debate

Rethinking a Discipline: Kamilla Elliott's Novel/Film Debate Kamilla Elliott. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 314 pp. $55.20 hardcover.

In his essay "Film and Literature," Robert B. Ray uses the analogy of "pre-Newtonian physics" (120) to describe the way that contemporary film studies (in this analogy, modern science) has responded to literature and film books (notably, George Bluestone's Novels into Film and Robert Richardson's Literature and Film). Like modern science, contemporary film studies has all but dismissed these books, the greater implication being that film studies, proper, does not have a need for literature and film studies. Why this is so-and what might be done about it-are what drive Ray's treatment. On the one hand, this essay and others like it should provoke a strong reaction from literature and film scholars. But rather than go on the defensive, perhaps we should ask ourselves the question that Ray and others are asking of us: namely, why do adaptation studies matter?

I can think of no better, recent book to answer this call as directly as Kamilla Elliott's Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. The book is necessary reading for any literature and film scholar, since it is not merely a series of adaptation analyses (though there are insightful analyses within). Rather, the book theorizes the whole notion of adaptation, giving it an historical context that stretches back to Horace's ut pictura poesis ("as is painting so is poetry" [9]) and citing critiques such as Ray's as a backdrop for her ambitious project. Elliott breaks down assumptions endemic to both literary studies (here, the notion that the illustrations from nineteenth century novels do not matter) and film studies (here, the notion that silent film had less and less to do with language as it developed). She also discusses the term "cinematic novel" and the ways in which it has obscured our understandings of the cinema and the novel. Most provocatively of all, she offers several new ways of thinking about-and articulating-adaptation. Here, in the final two chapters of her study, Elliott presents her conceptual models through a single text: in Chapter 5, Wuthering Heights, and in Chapter 6, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (two texts that make a larger whole). At this point, her methodology takes an innovative turn: not only do these texts and their adaptations demonstrate concepts, but they also seem to generate them. Aesthetic theory explains aesthetic practice, which itself helps to explain the theory. If this sounds like a circular logic, it may be, but it is no less captivating-or effective-when Elliott makes it work.

Elliott begins her study by placing the literature and film debate within a larger distinction between "Analogy and Category," the title of her first chapter. Historically, intellectuals have argued either for an analogical approach to adaptation (with an emphasis on what the arts share among one another-for instance, the idea of "imagery" in painting as well as poetry) or for a categorical approach (with an emphasis on the distinctions among mediums-what painting does that poetry does not, for example, and vice-versa). Among the heroes of categorical approaches would be, from the eighteenth century, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry), and from the twentieth, Irving Babbitt (The New Laocoön); the two figures bookend the nineteenth century, wherein romanticism and organicist notions of science gave rise to interart analogies. Lessing is an important link for literature and film studies, since George Bluestone ("unilaterally designated the father of novel and film studies," as Elliott notes [11]) titled the first chapter of his Novels into Film after Lessing's subtitle: "The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of Film." Since that time, while scholars may have re-examined certain aspects of Bluestone's arguments, they have not challenged the fundamental idea of category in favor of analogy. Elliott intends to do just that, though clearly her arguments for analogy are as much a tribute to Bluestone as a polemic (she dedicates the book to him, "forerunner and mentor, with respect and gratitude").

In Chapters 2 and 3, "Prose Pictures" and "Film Language," Elliott investigates the separate fields of literature and film, respectively. She does so, however, through the lens of literature and film combined, which allows her to debunk major assumptions in both fields. In the case of literary studies, Elliott shows, through an investigation of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, how nineteenth-century novel illustrations were crucial to the experience of reading a novel. Given how few contemporary versions of nineteenth-century novels print the illustrations, the implications of her argument go beyond scholarship to the very practice of publishing (and show how the two are interrelated). In the case of film studies, Elliott debunks an equally, if not more seductive idea in that field-namely, that silent film became less and less reliant on language as it developed. Once sound arrived, the old argument goes, film became constricted by language, no longer able to express itself visually (implicitly, a better way to express itself-an assumption Elliott wisely skewers). Comparing three different film adaptations of Vanity Fair as well as other examples, Elliott shows how silent film became more, not less, reliant on language as it developed-and how book illustrations (not only the text) inflected silent film form. The advent of sound, in this model, is simply an outgrowth of rather than a break from silent film, which had always generated a productive-not limiting-tension through its reliance on language. Throughout Chapters 2 and 3, Elliott undermines a fundamental duality that categorists frequently invoke: the idea that a novel is the "word," while a film is the "image." She shows, quite convincingly, how confining either medium to only one term can be reductive and, ultimately, misleading.