Adapting Nineteenth-Century France: Literature in Film, Theatre, Television, Radio and Print

Introduction

KATE GRIFFITHS

The French nineteenth century and its cultural products have long fascinated those who adapt. Adaptation, as a cultural phenomenon, is key to the artistic life of this era, characterised as it is by cross-media/ genre dialogues as novels, plays, operas and paintings nourish each other adaptively. Zola’s Nana (1880) offers a powerful case in point. The novel mocks, in adapted form, the operettas of Offenbach (La Belle Hélène is recalled in Nana’s abysmal La Blonde Vénus). It is comparably indebted to the painting of its heroine done by Edouard Manet in the winter of 1876, based on Nana’s brief appearance in Zola’s previous novel L’Assommoir, a painting it ekphrastically reproduces in its narrative.¹ Having nourished itself on other works of art, it is perhaps then appropriate that Zola’s novel was subsequently adapted into a host of other forms. With Zola’s consent it was adapted into theatre at the hands of William Busnach to mediocre reviews.² Without Zola’s consent, the novel’s heroine and the superimposed identity of the actress playing her on stage (Léontine Massin) were subsequently worked and reworked in a plethora of parodies and pastiches across artistic forms and artefacts.³ The novel triggered further art forms. Alfred de Sirven’s 1880 La Fille de Nana depicted Nana’s offspring rising to respectability in a novelistic rebuttal of both Zola’s novel and the author’s theories of heredity. Moreover, widely translated in translations which themselves deploy adaptive strategies in their composition at times, the novel found its way into a variety of languages. An 1880 version for a North American publishing house, Peterson and Brooks, underlines how often contemporary translations show nothing of this novel with its pretensions precisely to show everything. Thirteen lines describing the sensual, sexual potency of Nana’s body and its ability to bring men to their knees are rendered in the following three curt lines: ‘A murmur ran through the house. Every glass was riveted on Venus. Nana had conquered the public. Bordenave was correct. She had only to show herself as he had said.’⁴ Bordenave may show Nana, but this translation, driven by the commercial, legal and cultural imperatives of its own context, does not. It does, however, gesture towards the adaptive afterlives of the nineteenth-century text, a text translated, transformed and transplanted in the seemingly endless exchanges of its era.

Such adaptive urges in relation to nineteenth-century France are, though, far from the preserve of the century itself. Each of the case study novelists featured in this book, Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo, Maupassant and Verne, was not only adapted and re-adapted in his lifetime, but continues to be reinvented across time, media and nation to the present day. In 2012, the screenwriter of Larkrise to Candleford, Bill Gallagher, transposed Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames into a BBC television series, swapping Paris for Newcastle, the site of the first British department store (Bainbridge’s – now John Lewis).⁵ Adrian Penketh’s adaptation of Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin aired as the Friday play on Radio 4 on 21 January 2011, the adaptor drawing out the resonances between the financial system of the novel and the monetary issues of his own contemporary era.⁶ In 2011 Adam Thorpe offered what he believes is the twentieth English translation of Madame Bovary (Vintage), the previous translation of which had appeared just one year earlier.⁷ Having celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2010, the ever-popular stage musical of Les Misérables was adapted into a film in 2013 under the direction of the Oscar winner Tom Hooper, a piece in which Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe starred. In March 2012 the adaptation by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod of Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, starring teen heart-throb Robert Pattinson, was released in the UK and the USA.⁸ In February 2012 the complete works of Jules Verne, compacted into eighty comic minutes by performers David Furlong and Alex Kanefsky, could be viewed at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre, London. Whatever the media, nation or era, nineteenth-century France has always, it seems, made adaptive sense.

That contemporary media forms continue to adapt across the literary canon is clear. Critical debate as to the motivations for this adaptive interest is ongoing. Robert Giddings, Keith Selby and Chris Wensley suggest that our thirst for adaptations of nineteenth-century works is driven by a complex nostalgia. This era is, Giddings, Selby and Wensley suggest, still recognisable to us, it is ‘a major warehouse of historical commodities and evidence, and a period still almost within living memory in which culture we feel we have strong roots’.⁹ We do not access this past in any true form for adaptations are inevitably something of a ‘fake antique’. Such works can nevertheless serve as something of an antidote, allowing us to travel away from the stresses of our contemporary era, taking us, not back to the past, but to the no-place and no-time of adaptations as they recreate a past which is always simultaneously driven by the production values and social issues of the present. For Giddings et al., the thirst for images of the past and for classic texts in the form of adaptations ‘are all symptomatic of the condition of the national psyche which is shedding layers of modernity and reverting to its own past tones under the stress of contemporary economic, political and social crisis’.¹⁰ The temporal strategies of adaptations which either modernise the source text, bringing it into our present, or go in quest of its heritage, taking us to a mythical past, appear clear cut. Yet, as Andreas Huyssen points out, the ‘temporal status of any act of memory is always the present’.¹¹ Even those heritage adaptations that seek to take us to a mythical past are marked by their contemporary era. Both the 1972 BBC television production of Jane Austen’s Emma, starring Doran Godwin, and its ITV counterpart from 2007, starring Kate Beckinsale, are heritage pieces that seek to reproduce Austen’s era. Yet both testify to the production values and trends of their own times, the Godwin piece being marked in the mind of the modern audience as a 1970s piece by its colours, music and sets. Adaptations, moreover, whatever their approach, inevitably cater for and comment upon their era. It is not for nothing that George Cukor’s 1933 Little Women, for example, emphasising as it does family togetherness and happiness in a time of, in Alcott’s words, ‘the departed days of plenty’, was written as a screenplay during the Great Depression.¹² Literary adaptations have always offered the means to escape the present, even while simultaneously commenting upon it.

Attempts to assess why nineteenth-century France has proved so attractive to those who adapt must vary according to media and era. In the print fiction and musical theatre of the nineteenth century in France, adaptation often made overwhelming commercial sense. David Coward makes clear the era’s growing thirst for ever-greater cultural production. Rising literacy meant that by 1900 83 per cent of French men and women could read and write in some form. Vast changes took place to the nation’s social structure and the cost of books plummeted (in 1838 Charpentier started selling books for 3 francs and in 1855 Michel Lévy reduced this to just 1 franc). These factors, in association with the growing popularity of the cabinets de lecture until 1855 and the serialisation of novels in feuilleton form from 1836, meant that an ever-thirstier mass market for written fiction grew. Book production rose in an attempt to meet this thirst. Between 1812 and 1814 four to five thousand titles were published annually, a figure which rose to seven or eight thousand over the next thirty years, and stabilised at twelve or thirteen thousand between 1855 and 1914.¹³ The new species of publisher, whose rise Christine Haynes charts in her survey of nineteenth-century French publishing, both commissioned and established the circulation of works as artistic commodities, adapting them, when necessary, to meet current tastes and trends.¹⁴ Hetzel, as shall be seen in chapter six, not only modified the texts of Jules Verne to meet public taste, he also purchased manuscripts from other writers for Verne to adapt and rewrite, so as to ensure he could meet the growing public demand for the works of this author. In a century where literary property was seemingly constantly under debate, the laws governing it being assessed and reassessed by successive regimes as they debated the rights of the author and a nation to a specific work once published, publishers took advantage of this lack of fixity to adapt in different ways and forms. Jealous of Hetzel’s success with Verne and his Voyages extraordinaires, his competitors sought to adapt both his publishing format and his key author. Daniel Compère writes:

une véritable concurrence se met en place dans les années 1880, en particulier … les éditeurs Georges Decaux et Maurice Dreyfous tentent de détrôner la maison Hetzel dans le domaine du livre d’étrennes: face à sa ‘Bibliothèque d’éducation et de récréation’, Dreyfous crée la ‘Bibliothèque d’aventures et de voyages’, collection à laquelle Hetzel riposte en créant la série ‘Les romans d’aventures’. Mais, comme le dit Jean-Pierre Ardoin Saint-Armand, ‘pour faire du Hetzel, il leur faut des auteurs qui fassent du Jules Verne’.¹⁵

Enter a series of writers à la Verne, producing works which adapt, to varying degrees, the style, form and titles of Verne’s novels. Jules Gros penned a work entitled Les Secrets de la mer, Louis Boussenard created Le Tour du monde d’un gamin de Paris. Both appeared in Le Journal des voyages. Literary adaptation, whatever its form, is a defining feature of nineteenth-century French literary production.

Adaptation was, as a phenomenon, perhaps even more embedded in the operatic productions of the era. While some librettists created works from scratch, particularly those such as Eugène Scribe who were also celebrated playwrights in their own right, and others might take a legend or a myth and extemporise on the theme, the majority of librettists worked from an existing literary source.¹⁶ Often they made their selections in a commercial sense, basing them on the work’s public success in novel or play form, a success they hoped to replicate in opera. Louise Bertin’s La Esmeralda (1836) is a case in point. Victor Hugo provided the libretto to this grand opera that appeared just five years after his own novel’s publication. The adaptive selections of librettists also served a very practical purpose in terms of the form of the work. If librettists could rely on a large part of the audience having previous knowledge of the story, they could skate over detailed plots which would otherwise take up too much time on the opera stage, contenting themselves with abbreviated character psychology and motivation. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary goes to watch Donizetti’s Lucie de Lammermoor in a Rouen theatre. Emma adapts the plight of Donizetti’s heroine to her own, allowing this tale of a woman torn between the man she loves and the man she must marry to reawaken her own passions and lead her to take a lover.¹⁷ Donizetti’s opera was itself a loose adaptation of Walter Scott’s successful historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor. While the opera was initially written in Italian for an 1835 debut, it was recreated in French in 1839 in a version that toured extensively in France. The libretto, the creation of Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz, has itself to be considered an adaptation as Donizetti altered and removed scenes and characters. Adaptation, in its multiple forms, drives nineteenth-century French opera.

Adaptation, moreover, has driven cinema from its nascent moments. The link between silent cinema and nineteenth-century literature is well established. Each of the case study authors in this book are worked and reworked in silent film as the following noteworthy examples illustrate. Georges Méliès’s 1902 Le Voyage dans la lune used Verne as a means to indulge the director’s interest in trick photography. In 1918, André Antoine, a leading naturalist theatre director turned film director, used Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la mer as a vehicle for the director’s documentary instincts and location filming. In 1902, the year of the author’s death, Ferdinand Zecca’s Les Victimes de l’alcoolisme offered viewers a five-minute adaptation of Zola’s L’Assommoir in five tableaux. The film would be adapted a further three times in France before the outbreak of the First World War. While perhaps less beloved by silent film than his predecessor Balzac, whose prevalence in this art form is underlined by chapter two, Flaubert had still been adapted at least five times before Jean Renoir’s 1933 adaptation of Madame Bovary. The reasons silent cinema turned to literature and to the novel in particular are legion. Successful novels generated audiences. They also provided a degree of cultural legitimacy for the nascent medium as it tried to define itself. The Lumière brothers may have seen film as a new form of science, but for those working in the magic lantern tradition, it offered the possibility of cheap, mass, sensational entertainment. While much has been said about silent film’s adaptation of literature, less has been said on its relationship with theatre. Early film not only borrowed from the nineteenth-century theatre in its acting and stage conventions, but early critics tended to assume that cinema was simply ‘a new form of theatre’. Silent cinema would, though, as Rick Altman points out, gradually efface its relationship with theatre, developing its own more naturalistic acting styles and moving away from its sources. Altman writes:

Take any list of silent films apparently derived from novels, submit it to a few hours research in a serious library and you will have little trouble discovering that a very high proportion of the novels were turned into extremely popular stage shows in the years preceding the film. Yet, systematically, it is the novel that gets the attention, the novel that is mentioned in the end, the novel that draws the screen credit. For by the turn of the century novels were clearly a drawing card, cinema’s tenuous connection with culture.¹⁸

D. W. Griffith’s The Drunkard’s Reformation (1909), offers a striking example of the phenomenon Altman evaluates. Griffith’s film, a version of Zola’s L’Assommoir, stems not from the novel, but from the British/North American theatrical version of Gastineau and Busnach’s French theatrical adaptation of Zola’s successful work.¹⁹ Silent cinema’s adaptive debt to theatre, as much as to literature, forms part of its very lifeblood.

Literature too provided ready-made material. The narrative structure of much realist fiction with its clear chronological progression, emphasis on visual description and character exposition, arguably does much to create an accessible first draft of a script for a screenwriter. Critics have often been tempted to explain the link between silent cinema and, in particular, realist literature, by deeming specific realist writers to be ‘pre-cinematic’. Pointing to the confluence between the realists’ desire to depict reality in intricate detail and the ability of the film camera to meet that aim, such critics situate early cinema as heir to the realist tradition. Sergei Eisenstein, writing of his admiration of Zola’s naturalist novels, considers them to be ‘in the methodological sense the greatest school for a filmmaker (his pages read like complete cue sheets)’.²⁰ Eisenstein claimed to have reread a Zola novel before each of his key films, drawing inspiration from their content and cinematic style. While there are intriguing crossovers between realist fiction and silent cinema as the plethora of realist writers adapted in the early years of film shows, to deem such writers pre-cinematic affords a teleology to artistic relations which is misleading. Art forms cross and recross, influencing and re-influencing each other rather than developing the one into the other. In any case, as Tolstoy pointed out in 1908, there are stark differences between realist writing and nascent film:

You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers. It is a direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary … But I rather like it. The swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience – it is much better than the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, changes and transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness.²¹

Radio, as a cultural institution, has, if anything, an even greater commitment to adaptation as an art form. In its early years, the medium turned to theatre in an attempt to define its cultural practice. Stephen Barnard writes: ‘On both sides of the Atlantic, radio’s institutions initially embraced drama as a demonstration of cultural commitment.’²² As late as 1926 long BBC plays were prefaced with four or five minutes of conventional stage overture and music was always played between acts. Comparably, the Lux Radio Theatre which was produced in Hollywood by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency had its dramas introduced by the mediating presence of Cecil B. De Mille, who introduced each production as if it were live from a theatre.²³ British radio was driven not only by the need for cultural authenticity, but also by a wider mission. The BBC under Lord Reith was early devoted to the belief that radio should be used to educate the mass audience.²⁴ Part of this education was to be a literary one and what were known as the Microphone Serials began in 1938 with the broadcast of twelve episodes adapted from The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas. Val Gielgud writes: ‘It was the first of the classical adaptations which were to settle down as regular features of the English Sunday evening at home; which were to include works by Galsworthy, Dickens, Scott, Hardy and Arnold Bennett.’²⁵ In its mission to define itself in cultural terms and to educate and entertain the public, radio, from its earliest days, turned both to drama and to literature in its adaptive undertakings.

The adaptive undertakings of television, in its early years, in many respects echo those of radio and its cultural mission. Writing on the birth of French television and its associated structures, Jean-Marie Dizol underlines why the new medium was so attracted to canonical literature and its adaptations in a passage which in many respects echoes the pedagogical aims of the BBC under Reith. According to Dizol:

Enfin et surtout, il faut se rappeler que l’ambiance dans laquelle se crée la télévision française participe encore peu ou prou de l’esprit de reconstruction du pays né des années de résistance et de la libération: avec une évidente naïveté, beaucoup de ses premiers artisans pensaient inventer un outil de connaissance destiné à un peuple de citoyens. Cet environnement de la jeune télévision prédisposait donc les réalisateurs à s’y transformer en pédagogues, soucieux de la culture populaire: un Jean Prat expliquera que, malheureusement, bien des œuvres littéraires ne seraient jamais lues par la majorité des citoyens et qu’il se faisait donc une obligation personnelle de révéler notre patrimoine littéraire par le biais d’adaptations. De là à pratiquer une politique systématique de mise à l’écran des grands classiques, il n’y avait qu’un pas.²⁶

Moreover, while in Britain writers such as Harold Pinter were keen to write directly for television, the attitudes of authors to the new medium in France were less open and consequently the systematic adaptation of the literary classics became something of a necessity. Such acts of adaptation offered artistic credibility and often, if one chose wisely, comparatively cheap material. Early French television, like early British radio, found artistic credibility, convenient subject matter and grist for its pedagogical mission in the art of literary adaptation.

Our attempt to underline the varying, if at times overlapping, impulses to adapt which characterise each media is deliberate. Critical writing on adaptation tends to privilege theatre and cinema. While interfictional adaptation is a growing field of study, writing on adaptation for television – a process usually elided, albeit erroneously, with its larger screen counterpart – is comparatively scarce. Writing on adaptation for radio is practically non-existent. Working against the prevalent approach which seems to imply that one adaptive strategy fits all media, Adapting Nineteenth-Century France seeks to focus on the way in which different media adapt differently, their very different aesthetic frameworks and practical requirements authoring adaptations almost as much as the writer penning them and the various creative identities translating them into different creative forms. That these media specific aesthetics and requirements bring some adaptive losses is inevitable. Thus, as chapter one makes clear, radio, a non-visual medium, strips Zola of the colour and detailed panoramas for which he is so renowned. Early film, as chapter two underlines, silences the linguistic exuberance that is the massive Balzacian text. But with such adaptive losses come other adaptive gains. Radio, an intimate, domestic medium, brings the listener closer to the, at times forgotten, intimacy of Zola’s novels as they dissect the lives and motivations of their characters in extreme close-up. Comparably, if early film silences Balzac, it also brings to light the unexpected prevalence and importance of silence as a theme in the seemingly ceaseless words of this writer. We do not seek to evaluate all of our case study authors across all of the media on which this volume focuses. Such a task would be Herculean. Rather, our chapters evaluate the texts of a specific author in relation to a specific medium or art form with which they enjoy a telling affinity. Hence this book assesses Zola in relation to radio adaptation, Balzac on silent film, Flaubert recreated in contemporary fiction, Maupassant as seen on television, Hugo as incarnated in musical theatre and Verne as translated into sound cinema. It does so, first, to attempt to identify the specific adaptive strategies of the media in question and, second, to suggest how, in their affinities with specific media, such adaptations help us better to read the theories, form and content of the authors in question.

Our case study authors have been chosen not only for their affinities with a specific medium, they have also been selected for the resonance of their authorial approach with contemporary debates on adaptation. If fidelity approaches have dominated adaptation studies since their inception, situating adaptations as necessarily inferior copies of a superior textual original, key critical voices have made clear, and continue to make clear, the need for a more intertextual approach to the discipline. Brian McFarlane writes that adaptations are best read with an acknowledgement of the inherent intertextuality of all texts.²⁷ Deborah Cartmell, writing on her co-edited volume with Imelda Whelehan concurs:

Perhaps the search for an ‘original’ or for a single author is no longer relevant in a postmodern world where a belief in a single meaning is seen to be a fruitless quest. Instead of worrying about whether a film is ‘faithful’ to the original literary text (founded in a logocentric belief that there is a single meaning), we read adaptations for their generation of a plurality of meanings. Thus the intertextuality of the adaptation is our primary concern.²⁸

While Adapting Nineteenth-Century France is informed by the persuasive voices of such critics of adaptation and by a series of the theorists who perhaps inspired them (notably, Lacan, Kristeva, Bakhtin, de Certeau and Derrida), this book also seeks to showcase the anticipation of elements of intertextual theory in the work of our case study nineteenth-century French novelists. Adaptations, whatever their form and media, of Zola, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant and Verne, cannot irrevocably be written off as inferior copies of a superior textual original, for these authors, in very different ways, self-consciously borrow from a host of different sources, dramatising their own acts of adaptation and playfully pointing to their multiple points of origin. Such authors find their own literary originality, paradoxically, by showcasing their own borrowing from elsewhere. Furthermore, the adaptations selected of them for this book frequently engage with their source author’s debate on literary originality. Far from being facile, exploitative copies, these adaptations, in their form and content, reflect on their own adaptive act in highly creative ways. They contemplate their derivation from a clearly canonical source, borrowing with a reflexivity comparable to their canonical forebear. While such a claim cannot be made for all adaptations of the authors in question, this book hopes, nevertheless, to throw into relief the profoundly intertextual debate on the nature of authorship itself at play between these key nineteenth-century French writers and some of the best of the adaptations made of them.

Structured around some of the key themes of the adaptive process, sound, image, time, spectacle, space and the question of whether any individual can ultimately sign an adaptation as his/her own, each of the chapters takes on a specific theme. Sound is the central focus of chapter one: ‘Labyrinths of Voices: Emile Zola, Germinal and Radio’. While voices commenting on the work of Emile Zola and its adaptation into film and theatre are numerous, they fall silent in relation to the novelist’s adaptation for radio. The national range and extent of adaptations of Zola for radio is such that this critical silence is not driven by a paucity of output in this medium. Rather, it is part of a more general critical silence on literary adaptation in radio, a silence only in part beginning to be broken. In any case, Zola, the novelist of vast spaces and intricate detail who claimed to translate the visual techniques of the Impressionists into fiction, does not, at first glance, seem suited to the blind, black medium of radio and its dependence on sound alone. This chapter, however, uses two BBC adaptations (from 1982 and 2007 respectively) to make the case for the natural affinity between Zola and radio. These adaptations underscore the particular importance of voice in Zola’s Germinal and also explore, as Zola’s own novel does, the nature and origin of their own creative voice. As both of the BBC adaptations italicise the myriad intertextual threads from which they weave their own existence, pointing to the whispers of earlier texts, authors and moments in their creative voice, so they echo Zola’s reading of authorship as the cumulative retelling of an age-old story in a new context.

As chapter one focuses on Zola and sound or Zola in sound, chapter two, ‘Diamond Thieves and Gold Diggers: Balzac, Silent Cinema and the Spoils of Adaptation’, moves to contemplate the silence of Balzac in early cinema. While critics have not remained silent on the many early reworkings of Balzac in this medium, such reworkings have not always garnered the critical acclaim they merit. Using two case studies, Jean Epstein’s L’Auberge rouge (1923) and Rex Ingram’s Eugénie Grandet, The Conquering Power (1921), this chapter shows that, far from being technically underdeveloped artefacts that abbreviate and undo a great artist, these two films tap into key Balzacian themes. Often viewed in negative terms of theft, exploitation and plundering, these adaptations engage with the presence of such themes in Balzac’s work itself. As Balzac, à la de Certeau, poached the textual property