Unfortunately, most discussions of novelistic adaptation in film can be summarized by a New Yorker cartoon that Alfred Hitchcock once described to François Truffaut: two goats are eating a pile of film cans and one goat says to the other, “Personally, I liked the book better.” Even when writing on the topic isn’t directly concerned with a given film’s artistic adequacy or fidelity to a beloved source, it tends to be narrow in range and constitutive of a series of binary oppositions that poststructuralist theory has presumably taught us to reject: literature versus cinema, high culture versus mass culture, original versus copy. Such oppositions are the products of what was once the submerged common sense of the average English department, which was composed of a mixture of Kantian aesthetics and Arnoldian ideas about society.
When I use the term “Arnoldian,” I’m referring chiefly to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), which argues that culture is synonymous with great works of art and that the inherited cultural tradition of the Judeo-Christian world, embodied in “the best that has been thought and said,” can have a civilizing influence, transcending class tensions and leading to a more humane society. The study of English literature in American universities owes its very existence to this argument, which was more subtly elaborated by such later figures as T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis; and, until recent years, English professors have been especially suspicious of mass-produced narratives from Hollywood, which seem to threaten or debase the values of both “organic” popular culture and literary culture. When I use the term “Kantian,” I’m speaking of a slightly older, more complex mode of idealist philosophy that emerged toward the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, and that we commonly associate not only with Immanuel Kant but also with Georg Hegel, Johann von Schiller, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing throughout the period of high literary modernism, all art in the European world was theorized under what might be roughly described as a Kantian set of assumptions; that is, both the making and the appreciation of art were conceived as specialized, autonomous, and transcendent activities having chiefly to do with media-specific form (see Eagleton, 17–53). A locus classicus of such theorizing (perhaps even a parody of it) is the fifth chapter of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), in which Stephen Dedalus tells us that art differs from pornography because it does not elicit desire, from propaganda because it does not teach or move to political action, and from market goods because it has no entertainment value or practical utility. The proper effect of art, Dedalus says, is the “luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure,” which can be achieved only through the contemplation of formal matters.
Never mind that Joyce’s own novel problematizes such ideas, and that his next novel, Ulysses, pushes aestheticism beyond its sustainable limits; some variation of aesthetic formalism rightly underpins every modern discipline that claims to be dealing with art. Consider, for example, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s excellent college textbook Film Art, which has long been used in introductory film study courses throughout the United States. Bordwell and Thompson are quite different from the literary dandies and philosophical idealists of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries; their approach is practical and undogmatic, grounded in empirical evidence from an exceptionally wide range of films, and their chief theoretical influences are contemporary narratology and the Russian formalists. Even so, they devote themselves to teaching us how to recognize cinema-specific codes and how to appreciate part-whole relationships within individual movies.
I, too, am something of an aesthete, and I strongly believe that no proper criticism of art can ignore questions of form. I was also an English major, and I don’t think we can dismiss Matthew Arnold or that we should stop reading Great Books and seeing films based on them. It’s nevertheless important to understand that both Arnold’s defense of high culture and the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century are historically situated ideologies, generated largely in response to industrial capitalism and mechanical reproduction. Their culminating or extreme instance, and in one sense their crisis, was the period immediately before and after World War II, when New Criticism was in the ascendency in American universities and modernist intellectuals, including otherwise quite different theorists Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, enunciated an idea of “authentic” art in defense against the culture industries. Greenberg’s famous essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” for example, describes the essential project of modernism as “Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself” (25).
Greenberg’s essay was written in 1939, when Fascism had overtaken Europe, when modern art, which had already been assimilated into bourgeois culture, was being assailed from both the left and the right for its decadence and elitism, and when aestheticism seemed caught in a struggle to survive capitalism and Stalinism. For Greenberg, the only refuge for “authentic” art lay in the realm of the “merely artistic,” or in the radically formal exploration of artistic media. The artistic imitation of the natural or social world, he argued, needed to be replaced by the study of “the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves” (23). Unfortunately, as Juan A. Suarez has observed, the result of this policy was “an exacerbation of formalism and a sort of art in exile from the values of audiences; that is, an art which seeks to remain untainted by reigning mercantilism and instrumental rationality” (6–7).
The capitalist movie industry, especially in Hollywood, operated by a dialectically opposite logic. It recognized from the beginning that it could gain a sort of legitimacy among middle-class viewers by reproducing facsimiles of more respectable art or by adapting literature to another medium. Film scholars William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson have demonstrated that as early as 1908, at the height of the nickelodeon boom and partly in response to the Reform movement in American politics, the Vitagraph film company in New York engaged in an aggressive, concentrated effort to appeal to the middle class by making one-reel adaptions of Shakespeare and Dante. At virtually the same moment, Parisian financiers established the Société Film d’Art, which made quite profitable feature-length films based on the dramas of Rostand and Sardou, as well as silent versions of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Historian David Cook remarks, “For a while it seemed as if everything written, sung, or danced (for photographed ballet and opera formed a large part of the film d’art corpus) in Western Europe between 1900 and the Renaissance, and Greek tragedy as well, found its way into one of these stage-bound and pretentious productions” (53). But uncinematic as the early adaptations may seem today, they were among the first feature films, and their drive for respectability pointed toward the development of the star system, the picture palace, and in one sense Hollywood itself. Equally important were the hugely successful Italian historical pictures of the same period, especially Enrico Guazzoni’s Quo Vadis? (1912), a nine-reel spectacular based on a novel by Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz, which established the market for “blockbuster” movies such as Birth of a Nation (1915), also an adaptation.
The advent of the talkies and the Fordist organization of the major film studios produced a great appetite for literature among Hollywood moguls, who provided a source of major income, if not artistic satisfaction, for every important playwright and author in the United States, including Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner. But here we encounter an important historical irony. At the same time that modernity and capitalism were bringing the movies, the legitimate theater, and the book publishing industry closer together, sophisticated literary artists in general were in active rebellion against bourgeois culture and were intentionally producing work that could not be easily assimilated into mainstream adaptations. Modernism was not only willfully difficult and formally “experimental,” it was also sexually scandalous, critical of progress, and offensive to the Babbitts and the Bovarys who supposedly made up the viewing audience. Thus, at the height of the classic studio system, when Hollywood was