Story Adaptation: Part 1

The fur of the arctic hare turns white in winter, the red fox had adapted to living on four continents, and Bactrian camels are able to go without water for weeks and to gulp up to 57 liters at once. They can even drink salt water.  Our world is filled with adaptations—plants, animals, and humans have all acclimated to their surroundings.  Yet living creatures are not the only things that change.  Stories adapt as well.  One only has to look at Shakespearean plays set in another time and place, folklore made into Disney movies, the recent films of The Hobbit and Les Misérables, or fanfiction to see the modification of stories.  By comparing stories with animals, one begins to untangle the ways in which stories adapt, both by nature and necessity.

First, just as there are different types of changes that animals undergo, so there are two main types of story adaptation.  Either a story can change in superficial elements to adapt to environment, or it can change in the fundamentals and thus become a new story.  When a story simply adapts to a new environment in the same way that animals acclimate to changes in their habitats, nothing has altered the core of the story. In other words, a better-camouflaged chameleon is still the same chameleon.  A story that simply adapts its trappings is just a different version of the same story.  On the other hand, when a story changes in some fundamental or thematic way, it has ceased to be the original story--an offspring is born.  A combination of parental genes results in children who are at once similar and different, both in relation to each other and to the parents.  This type of adaptation in stories means changes that alter some part of the core of the story, creating a related yet essentially different story.  

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet provides excellent examples of both of these types of adaptation.  When theatre companies, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Seattle Shakespeare company, take Romeo and Juliet and change the setting to modern Verona or Southern California they are merely adapting the setting to appeal to a modern audience, to a modern environment.  The characters and plot and often even the Early Modern English of Shakespeare’s day are left unchanged.  The core has remained the same.  There are also modern takes on Romeo and Juliet, such as the filmGnomeo and Juliet and the anime Romeo x Juliet, which depart enough from the original to be considered offspring.  It’s not the fact that there are gnomes or flying horses that make these stories offspring rather than adaptations.  The characters could be talking pet rocks or use mechs as transportation and the story could still just be an adaptation to environment.  Rather it is that the core of the story has changed that makes the difference.  In Gnomeo and Juliet the core is also changed in regards to the lack of Mercutio, how the two lovers first meet, the character of Featherstone‘s differences from Friar Laurence, and the happy ending, to name some of the major changes.  For Romeo x Juliet it’s evident at the start that this is an offspring, for the Montagues slaughter all the Capulets save for two-year-old Juliet who is rescued and spends the next 14 years disguised as a boy.  Both of these stories are related to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and both of them are not that story.

Changes to stories, just like changes in animals, occur through various means.  Some of the changes animals undergo to adapt are genetic and others behavioral.  Similarly, there are different ways story adaptations are expressed. Specifically, stories can change through language translation, cross-media transformation, or retelling.

For example, because languages don’t line up neatly with each other in terms of sounds, words, concepts, grammar, etc., it is impossible to make a translation exactly match the original in meaning and style.  The poet of Beowulf uses specific patterns of alliteration to tie together the two halves of each line.  Translating Beowulf from Old English to Modern English often results in that alliteration being lost or in the meanings of the lines being altered to preserve the alliteration.  There are words in languages that are hard to express in other languages without losing some of the nuance or meaning.  Thus the act of translating a story changes the story.  Usually translation belongs to the adaptations-to-environment category, but sometimes it results in offspring.  

Rather than translating between languages, cross-media transformation is a translation between different media, such as film, theatre, prose, poetry, painting, and sculpture, and just like with languages, there is not a neat correspondence between the forms.  Star Wars Episode IV in prose differs from its counterpart in film, both of which differ from their counterpart in comic form.  In the book and comic we read what Luke is thinking, while in the film we can only infer from what he says, how he says it, his body language, and his actions.  This change of point of view is one of many differences between the media.  These differences mean that a story must change when it is translated from one media to another.  Sometimes the changes made to translate a story cross-media don’t affect the core and sometimes they do.  Though, it should be noted that while the usual types of alterations  made to translate prose to film are often seen as producing offspring (“that wasn’t in the book!” “they cut out whom!?!”), translating prose to film need not always result in such core convulsions.  

The last major means is retelling.  Basically retelling arises when a story is retold using the same medium and same language (the diction and authorial style can vary, though).  Foe by J.M. Coetzee does this to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by telling us the story from Susan Barton’s perspective, a character who is not in Defoe’s story, and the aforementioned performances of Romeo and Juliet by the RSC and the Seattle Shakespeare Company also use this means of adaptation.  So again, the means can be used for expressing either of the main types of story alterations. Both offspring and environmental adaptations can come about through translation, cross-media transformation, or retelling.