Is Hardy a 'Cinematic Novelist'?: The Problem of Adaptation

Abstract

The adaptation of literary material for the cinema is as old as the cinema itself, but the recent spate of classic works on film has raised once again the issue of what exactly happens to a verbal text when it is translated into a medium which is predominantly visual. In the last decade adaptations from the novels of Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Forster, Lawrence, Waugh, Orwell, and many others have swollen the numbers of classic texts already on film. Each of them inevitably invites comparison with the original from which it is drawn, and the debate continues as to whetherjustice is done to the often rich and allusive texture of the verbal medium. Back in 1926 Virginia Woolf, who at that time had seen only silent movies, expressed doubts about adaptation which are still heard today. With the advent of cinema, she wrote: All the famous novels of the world, with their well-known characters and their famous scenes, only asked, it seemed, to be put on the films. What could be easier and simpler? The cinema fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, and to the moment largely subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim. But the results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples. The eye says 'Here is Anna Karenina.' A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says, 'That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.' For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind her charm, her passion, her despair All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls and her velvet.1