From Text to Screen: Assessing SHREK through the lens of Barthes’ Narrative Functionalities and Eckart Voigt’s Metadaption

Abstract

The debate between fidelity discourse and cinematic interpretation has been a long one, wherein critics of each side have battled over the question of rightful ownership over adaptation studies since its time of inception. The production and reception of adapted films have always suffered an anxiety of influence: their merit was often judged through hierarchical comparisons with the source-text. Of late, critics like Thomas Leitch, Eckart Voigts-Virchow and Linda Hutcheon have pointed towards the prospect of adaptedscreenplay being considered as an intermedial, intertextual work that claim artistic merit quite independently of its source text. Drawing upon the concept of narrative functionalities of Roland Barthes, Brian MacFarlene has argued that the on-screen narrative must re-invent the source-text to ply along the multimodal media of cinema. In fact, the prospect of multimodal representation itself gestates a feature of metadaptation—a term coined by Eckart Voigts, wherein the onscreen narrative has to draw upon intertextual and intermedial references, alongside self-reflexivity and subversion, to overcome the anxiety of influence and become a heuristic success among the audience. The present paper seeks to discuss the movie Shrek (2001) vis-à-vis its namesake source-text Shrek! (1990) by William Steig, in terms of narrative functionalities and metadaptive features, which, arguably, has contributed to it becoming a landmark in the tradition of fairy-tale cinema.