Great Expectations: Insights from the Impossibility of Adaptation

Abstract

In contrasting verbal and visual make believe, I have said little about the adapting of fiction into movies, even though this has been a major topic in film criticism since the pioneering work of George Bluestone half a century ago. Leading critics now recognize that the key issue is not simple fidelity of movie to written text, but the effectiveness of transformation of forms appropriate to one mode of make believe into another (Naremore, 2001). Exemplary is Shakespeare’s “adaptation” of Homer’s Iliad into Troilus and Cressida, a transformation of Homer’s story so complete that even a literary scholar watching the play scarcely thinks of its relation to the Mycenaean epic. But the idea of movie-adaptation-as-transmutation has had difficulty becoming established because the formal principles of verbal and visual make believe have not been adequately distinguished.