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On the art of adaptation.

Article Excerpt
Despite the argument implicit in Spike Jonze's latest film, Adaptation, every age can justly claim to be an age of adaptation. The desire to transfer a story from one medium or one genre to another is neither new nor rare in Western culture. It is in fact so common that we might suspect that it is somehow the inclination of the human imagination--and, despite the dismissive tone of some critics, not necessarily a secondary or derivative act. After all, most of Shakespeare's plays were adapted from other literary or historical works, and that does not seem to have damaged the Bard's reputation as an inventor. But in recent years, it is true, we have witnessed on our televisions and in our movie theaters enough adaptations--based on everything from comic books to the novels of Jane Austen--to make us wonder if Hollywood has finally run out of new stories.

Although our age might well claim to be the age of adaptation, in part because of the surfeit of new media now available, the act of transposition and what we could call 're-functioning' is as old as art itself. It may have taken T. S. Eliot and Northrop Frye to convince me that all art is derived from other art, but it didn't take those theorists to convince avid adapters across the centuries of what for them--on the dramatic, dance, and operatic stage, and in literature in general--had always been a truism. In this sense, adaptation joins imitation, allusion, parody, travesty, pastiche, and quotation as popular creative ways of deriving art from art.

If this is so,...

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