Screened Writers

Screened writers Kamilla Elliott Much literature‐film criticism has focused on the adaptation of canonical British literature to film; this essay considers the adaptation of canonical British literary authors to film. Writers have been screened in many forms, media, and genres; this essay concentrates on representations of authors in films that adapt their writings. In so doing, it probes a rhetorical tradition that conflates author names and works—one that has intriguingly persisted across Romantic, psychoanalytic, formalist, structuralist, poststructuralist, and New Historicist theories of authorship; one that extends from literary criticism to adaptation studies. Indeed, when nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century critics write of “reading Dickens” (Powell 1849: 300), “reading Miss Austen” (Richardson 1877: 254), or “reading Shakespeare” (Scott 1909: 143), they do not refer to reading their biographies, letters, or diaries biographies; they refer to reading their fictional literary works. Such conflations derive in part from Romantic theories of expressive authorship. In 1883, Algernon Swinburne insisted that Wuthering Heights “is what it is because the author was what she was; this is the main and central fact to be remembered” (762‐3). Yet conflations of author names and literary writings have persisted across psychoanalytic, formalist, structuralist, poststructuralist, and New Historicist literary criticism and are thus not reducible to Romantic theories. For example, book titles bearing the phrase “reading Shakespeare” appear in almost every decade from the 1870s to the 2010s; Google Books attests that in January 2011, 20,100 books carry the term within their pages. 1 Although the rhetorical tradition has persisted across critical movements, its uses have varied. Psychoanalytic critics and biographers perceive that literary works manifest the latent content of author psyches; formalist, structuralist, and poststructuralist traditions conflate author names and works to express a displacement of authors by their works, whether claiming works to be organic forms with independent lives, or independent manifestations of intertextuality, or markers of writing, deemed “a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears” (Foucault 1988: 283). Roland Barthes, who announced the death of the Romantic author and the birth of the poststructuralist reader (1977a), maintains the rhetorical conflation of author name and works in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977b); Michel Foucault cemented the link by locating “the author function” in the author’s proper name (1988: 292). The conflation of author names and writings extends from literary criticism and theory to adaptation studies. Dickens on Screen (2003), Jane Austen on Screen (2003), and A History of Shakespeare on Screen (2004) do not refer to filmic representations of these authors, but to films of their fictive writings, as the publishers’ descriptions attest: “Dickens on Screen is a broad ranging investigation of over a century of film adaptations of Dickens’s works”; “Jane Austen on Screen is a collection of essays exploring the literary and cinematic implications of translating Austen’s prose into film”; “A History of Shakespeare on Screen chronicles how film‐makers have re‐imagined Shakespeare’s plays from the earliest exhibitions in music halls and nickelodeons to today’s multi‐million dollar productions show in megaplexes.” Yet some of these adaptations screen the writers as well as their works, positing new concepts of how authors relate to their works, as well as to readers, film audiences, and their own narrators and 2 fictional characters. More broadly, these representations illuminate relations between literature and film. Screened writers do not conform neatly to philosophical paradigms or theoretical schools. Few films subscribe to a single theory of authorship; most support, contest, undermine, and parody various theories simultaneously. My account therefore subscribes to an intertextuality in which philosophical theories of authorship are intertexts rather than master narratives through which screened writers must be read or to which they must conform. Far too much cultural information would be suppressed, distorted, ignored, and lost were philosophy to be the dominant discourse of this essay; moreover, such an approach allows screened writers to challenge and demonstrate the limitations of philosophy in accounting for cultural practice. That said, theories of authorship remain crucial intertexts for screened writers. Histories of author theory (e.g. Bennett 2005) identify a major paradigm shift with Barthes’s “The death of the author,” published in 1967. This resounding obituary for Romantic theories of transcendent, original, individual, expressive authorship reconfigures relations among authors, texts and readers: [W]riting is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin … the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, [when] writing begins … [There is] no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins … it is language which speaks, not the author … [A] text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author‐God) but a multi‐ dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash … a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many 3 cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not … the author. (1977a: 142, 143, 146, 148) Such claims have resounding implications for theories of literary‐film adaptation as well as authorship, deposing literary authors as sole points of origin for film adaptations of their works, positioning them as always already adapters of other texts and their adaptations as always already adapters of other texts besides their literary sources. Conversely, the cultural practice of adaptation has implications for Barthes’s dichotomy of readers and authors. Although the rhetorical tradition of “reading” Shakespeare, Dickens, or Austen continues in accounts of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Austen “on screen,” adaptations are not exactly readings; they occupy a liminal position as both readings and (re)writings. As writings growing out of readings, as writings that are interpretive readings, they complicate and deconstruct distinctions made by philosophers and theorists among authors, readers, and texts and between the production and consumption of texts. The second greatest paradigm shift in theories of authorship came in 1969, with Michel Foucault’s “What is an author?” Foucault partially resurrected Barthes’s dead author, but only as language—as proper name: [T]he author's name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. 4 (1988: 285). For Foucault, the author function is located in the proper name, which subjects it to discourses, beliefs, and practices that surround and attach to that proper name, governing the production, circulation, classification, and consumption of texts. Yet to locate the author function in his or her name is itself a discourse of authorship that expresses beliefs about authorship that are too narrowly linguistic, literary, and discursive and do not sufficiently account for some cultural practices. For millennia, the author function has manifested in images of authorial bodies as well as proper names—in portraits, statues, photographs, film, television, and digital media. Images of authorial bodies in early cinema grew out of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century print media. In his preface to Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain (1823), a highly popular, widely reprinted, multi‐ volume publication, Edmund Lodge explains why “illustrious personages” require representation by images as well as discourses: As in contemplating the portrait of an eminent person we long to be instructed in his history, so in reading of his actions we are anxious to behold his countenance. So earnest is this desire, that the imagination is ready to coin a set of features, or to conceive a character, to supply the painful absence of the one or the other. (2) For Lodge, words and images are incomplete separately: so much so, that they create reciprocal, inextricable consumer desire. His volumes, he claims, give “to biography and portraits, by uniting them, what may very properly be called their natural and best moral direction” (2). While we are skeptical of claims to nature and morality today, our most common forms of social identification globally— 5 picture IDs—still combine proper names and images of bodies. Representation does not live by the word alone. Authors not only joined other “illustrious personages” as named faces in nineteenth‐century print galleries, their named portraits also began to displace illustration conventions that privileged fictional protagonists. In 1838, a portrait of Charles Dickens usurped the expected frontispiece of Nicholas Nickleby’s protagonist (Patten 2001: 32). The displacement ties the novel’s title to the image of its author rather than to the image of the protagonist it names; it grounds the text in the author’s picture identification rather than the titular character’s. Images of authors thus may have played a part in tying author names to their works in cultural perception. By mid‐century, the images of authors circulated apart from books in the “steady demand for [their] carte‐de‐visite portraits” (Matthews 1974: 54). Silent cinema and the dead canonical author Early cinema built upon print media practices, co‐opting the author function manifested in pictures (not just proper names and verbal discourses) for cinematic purposes. The 1922 British film of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, produced in the Tense Moments with Great Authors series, opens with a few moments with the “Great Author.” Its establishing shot, depicting the novel’s first‐edition title page (1848), ties the author name to the novel’s title. The author name functions to establish the film in keeping with Foucault’s author function. But the next shot presents the image of the author, his face carved out in filmic close‐up from the three‐quarter‐length portrait that forms the frontispiece to the 1898 edition of his collected works. Together, they form a 6 filmic picture‐ID, identifying not only the author by his works and the works by their author, but also the name of the author by the face of the author. The author is picture‐identified not so much to authenticate his own literary authorial identity as to confer it on the film. The film thus engages in identity theft, using Thackeray’s picture identification to identify and legitimate itself. The first edition copyright page, for all its claims of authorial authority and textual origin, blazons a copyright that has expired, swallowed up by the film’s titles and copyright claims, which precede the image of the book’s title page. The novel’s copyright page thus becomes complicit with declaring the film’s rights and the expiration of its own.1 Even as the author is screened, rendered pictorially present, he is, in another sense of the word, screened off from the very film screening him. Still portraits in film, even at this early date, conventionally signal a dead or absent person. The author’s portrait, then, declares him dead and absent by contrast to the moving images of the film. Taken in revered old age rather than at the time of Vanity Fair’s first edition, the portrait too presses the author closer to his death. Since the death of the author is used to determine the legal date on which a copyright ends, this affirms the film’s birth through the death of the author. The next shot serves as tombstone; it depicts the entrance to one of Thackeray’s former residences with this plaque above it: W. M. Thackeray 1811‐1863 Novelist Lived here. 7 The endpoint of Thackeray’s life (1863) is declared before his “Lived here”; it declares his present absence along with his past presence. Shots of first editions, frontispiece portraits, and preserved buildings in this and other similar films place dead authors in filmic shrines of literary relics, icons, and temples. These imagistic traditions grow out of contemporaneous print biographies. The illustrations to Keim’s and Lumet’s biography of Dickens, published in 1919, include a frontispiece of the author and photographs of “Houses made famous by Dickens” (1919: vii).2 Even as such hagiography supports literary canonization, it co‐opts it for other works, for biographies and films. This is less a matter of birthing ordinary readers through the deaths of canonical authors than of birthing and legitimating other works and other authors through the death of the author. Authorial meaning is neither maintained intact nor widely dispersed as gathered and conferred upon works that he did not produce. The dead author has not disappeared into writing; he has been mummified as dead author, as authorial corpse, displayed as filmic property in a filmic museum. The Bioscope review of the series perceives this when it decrees the films ‘‘admirably produced, with the atmosphere of the period, country, and author faithfully preserved.” The review goes further to posit the film as a medium for authors as well as their texts: [T]hese carefully chosen selections from literary masterpieces will appeal alike to those who are intimate with the books, and will be gratified to see the characters so reverently brought to life, and the others, who from such excellent short entertainments, will surely desire a better acquaintance with the authors. (1922: 59, my emphases) 8 The conflation of author names and texts in reading extends to film viewing; the books’ mediation of authors and readers extends to the films’ mediation of authors and film audiences. Bringing fictional characters to life extends to bringing dead authors to life for reader‐viewers who already know the author through his books; indeed, the film claims to bring readers into “a better acquaintance with the authors” than the book. Again, the author function does not live by words alone, as film carries readers beyond verbally inculcated “intuition” to the knowledge of visual perception. Reviewing a re‐edition of Lodge’s volumes, a periodical writer claims that There are minute traits and delicate shades of mental and moral character, which may be more correctly estimated on seeing the countenance, than they can be from a mere perusal of what the individual has written, said, or done. (Review of Portraits and Memoirs 1832: no page numbers) Deemed both resurrecting and fecund, the Tense Moments with Great Authors series is seen to animate past reading and produce future reading. The film and its review concur with Walter Pater: There are some to whom nothing has any real interest, or real meaning, except as operative in a given person; and it is they who best appreciate the quality of soul in literary art. They seem to know a person, in a book, and make way by intuition. (2004: 18). Yet even as the author lends authority to the film, subjecting the author’s name, portrait, books, and residence to filmic modes of representation means that “the author” takes on filmic properties. The title page and frontispiece vacillate between authorizing literary and biographical origins and props 9 photographed on a film set; the shot of the author’s former residence oscillates between literary shrine and filmic establishing shot. Yet in the end, the interchange of literary and filmic crediting and representation is not mutual and reciprocal. Just as the film shows the entrance to Thackeray’s residence, but does not allow viewers to enter it, so too it presents the title pages of Vanity Fair, but denies viewers access to its inner pages. Only a few snippets of the novel’s text appear on title cards; new text has been written for the film; the vast majority of the film unfolds wordlessly. The film thereby not only pronounces the author dead in a historical sense, but also in a Barthesean sense. Barthes is not so much concerned with the physical death of authors and their subsequent canonization as with the death of interpretive traditions that make author intent the final authority. The film goes further than Barthes to declare the death of the text as well as of the author. In 1911, G. K. Chesterton adduced that “the whole substance and spirit of Thackeray might be gathered under the general title Vanity Fair” (51). As the film screens far more of Vanity Fair from view than it screens to view, the body of the text dies along with the body of the author. Released from the constraints of copyright in the Copyright Act of 1911, the “general title Vanity Fair“ became the property of the general public and “the substance and spirit of Thackeray” were gathered for new media. Thus the film subscribes to Romantic theories of authorship only to dislocate and co‐opt them. Silent cinema and the undead author Early American films take a more vivacious approach to screened writers than British films, adding the technological animation of authorial bodies to the 10 mythical mediation of authorial spirits. In “The death of the author,” Barthes perceives “Writing [as] that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (142, my emphasis). Barthes rejects the body of the author— the authorial “voice” and the “body writing,” and castrates the writing hand from both voice and body as “a pure gesture of inscription” (1977a: 146). By contrast, Edison’s Vanity Fair (1915) foregrounds the authorial body in the act of writing; indeed, a preview promises audiences “a prologue which will show Thackeray, in all verity, in his study starting to write the novel.” Thackeray “in all verity” refers to the dead author’s filmic simulation by an actor; a title card announces “William Makepeace Thackeray,” but bears the subscript, “Harold Hubert.” Although Jean Baudrillard’s work on simulation comes to mind, the claim to verity is a transparent one, with no attempt at deception. Like cinema verité later in the century, the film adopts the “verity” to express a documentary style. In American silent films of canonical British literature, the death of the author, the disappearance of the authorial subject and body into writing, is held at bay by acts of live screened writing, in which the writing subject does not disappear, but remains highly visible. More than this, although Barthes pronounced that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (1977a: 148), reader‐viewers are born inextricably from acts of writing in these films, reading the words formed in wet ink on blank pages. In Zenith’s Scrooge (1913), the audience sees the words that “Dickens” writes, reading “A Christmas Carol. Marley was” as they are formed. In one sense, the writing hand is not cut off from the body; in another sense, it is. The close‐up shot that renders the writing legible to readers does cut the writing hand off from the body and 11 subsequently, both the image of the author writing and his writing are displaced by film scenes and title cards. But it is not so much the birth of the reader that produces the death of the author as the beginning of the filmed novel. Whereas Scrooge portrays Dickens writing only at its start, Edison’s Vanity Fair returns to the writing Thackeray at its end. As the final film scene fades, the final words of the novel appear as live writing on a hand‐held, hand‐ written, legible manuscript. “Thackeray’s” hand places a full stop at the end of the novel’s last sentence. The film cuts to a long shot of the “author” in his study, piling up sheaves of manuscript and placing this last sheet on top with an air of satisfaction. The clear implication is that, as the audience has been watching the film, “Thackeray‐Hubert” has been writing it. We discover that “Thackeray” did not die after the prologue to birth this film; he is still writing at its end. As live writing both frames and contains the film, film viewing is presented as a live reading of live writing. Film keeps the ink wet; every screening shows Thackeray beginning to write the novel and does not allow the final period to be placed until the film ends. Such live writing simultaneously literalizes and undermines Barthes’s argument that “every text is eternally written here and now” (1977a: 145). The film frame presents its text as written here and now, not by reader‐ audiences, but by the novel’s author. Such simulations figure authors as neither alive nor dead, but rather as undead, eternally writing, rising from their graves at each screening to author the films that screen them. Undead screened writers lie somewhere between Slavoj Žižek’s two authorial bodies (“a terrestrial body subject to the cycle of generation and corruption” and “a sublime, immaterial, sacred body”—1991: 254) and as such dismantle the opposition. Through the quasi‐immortality of celluloid, cinema 12 produces terrestrial authorial bodies not subject to corruption at the same time it materializes the “sublime, immaterial, sacred” bodies of canonical literary authors. Such representations and such acts of undead writing do not allow a final death of the author. Rather, resurrecting authors at each screening keeps writings attached to and emerging from undead authorial bodies. Filmic animations of dead authors disrupt Romantic ideas of dead canonical authors as well as Barthesean ones. Instead of communing with readers as disembodied spirits through the body of their works, undead authorial bodies insist on manifesting and their words refuse to manifest apart from writing bodies. The undead screened writer nevertheless allows for a partial death of the author that enables the film to claim the dead literary author and animate him as an undead filmic writer. In scenes of authorial inscription, screened writing is always already the language of film, a language that constructs the author constructing the language of the book as the language of the film. At the same time, because literary authors are cast, costumed, enacted, directed, filmed, edited, and credited, they are subjected to the same modes of representation as their adapted fictional characters in these films, thereby undermining undermines their authorial identity, biographical actuality, authorial omniscience, interpretive authority, autonomy, and agency. Beyond these diminutions, the “verity” of the screened literary author turns out to be a lie. Neither Thackeray nor Thackeray played by Harold Hubert has written the Edison film. An uncredited Charles Sumner Williams wrote the scenario; no one knows who wrote the intertitles. Each intertitle is headed “The Edison Studios,” claiming that text as studio property. If the author is undead, the 13 screenwriter is a ghostwriter who does not manifest at all. If the literary author is a simulation, the film’s writer is unseen and his name untold. Film, television, and the name of the author In adaptations of canonical literature made in the 1930s and 1940s, the bodies of authors too become unseen, appearing solely as names in film credits and on the covers and title pages of books. These representations support Foucault’s view that the author function is located in the proper name and make proper names complicit with Barthes’s declaration of the author’s death. As authorial names and bodies of work displace images of authorial bodies, author names function as epitaphs on the tombstones of their texts. Photographed book covers and pages in this period “turn” in two senses of that word: they turn book pages into film scenes in a parody of flip‐book animation (Elliott 2003: 96); they equally turn from the authorial name and its declarations of authority, origin, creation, and copyright, to the collaborative authorship of film credits. Unlike Vanity Fair (1922) before it and Great Expectations (1946) after it, Monogram ’s 1934 adaptation of Jane Eyre does not photograph the novel’s title page but instead creates a film‐book that places film credits on the pages of a book. The photographed book looks like an edition of Jane Eyre, but it is not. It puts film production credits where books place publisher information and claims copyright for the film where books display theirs. It further ruptures the literary relationship between author and, inserting “based on the novel” between “Jane Eyre” and “by Charlotte Brontë. The book’s title pages, then, belong and refer to the film. 14 Subsequent pages break from Romantic notions of solitary authors to credit the film’s other authors—actors, director, cinematographer, costumer, production designer, editor, composer, etc. The chief actors are credited twice; once in prose and again in picture identifications resembling moving “book” illustrations. Displacing the authorial frontispiece, these images restore the very conventions that Dickens had displaced in Nicholas Nickleby and silent films had perpetuated. In the 1950s, as the auteur movement took hold in academic and high art film circles, the director became the “author” of the film, a notion that persists to the present day. The literary author’s name gradually left its home on filmed book covers and title pages and became subject to film and television crediting practices. The opening prologue of Tom Jones (1963) attaches the film’s title to an image of the title character rather than to the author’s name. The first and only credit to the novel’s author appears divorced from the title of the book and subordinated to a screenwriting credit: Screenplay by JOHN OSBORNE Based on the novel by HENRY FIELDING Size matters. While the screenwriter shares a large font size with the director, producer, and lead actors, the author shares a smaller font size with the composer, production designer, art director, cinematographer, editor, assistant director, script editor, various minor producers, and the voiceover narrator. (The significance of font size is established early on, when supporting actors appear in smaller font than leading actors.) Appearing mid‐credits further diminishes the 15 prominence of the literary author: the film’s stars are credited first; the climactic credit goes to the film’s director‐producer, Tony Richardson. Apocalypse Now (1979) does not credit Joseph Conrad or Heart of Darkness at all, even though it adapts much of the novel’s plot, character names, relations, dialogue, and colonial setting. When asked why Conrad was not credited, screenwriter John Milius protested: “If Apocalypse Now is based on Heart of Darkness, then Moby Dick is based on the Book of Job!” (qtd. in Phillips 1995: 35‐6). Milius reflects a Bakhtinian, Barthsean view of adaptation as intertextuality, but uses it as a pretext for screening the literary author from view rather than to view. Far from the democratizing free‐for‐all that Barthes championed, the death of the author enables new authorial hierarchies. The more conservative 1980s witnessed both a retreat from and an accentuation of authorial discreditings. On the one hand, some auteur directors actively harnessed author names to their own rather than screening them off or burying them mid‐credits. In the opening title, “David Lean’s film of A Passage to India by E. M. Forster,” the author’s name follows the director’s name but uncharacteristically precedes star names; moreover, the names share a font size. The title hovers ambivalently between film title and book title; the pronouns too are ambiguous, “of” indicating both possession and derivation. The idea that the director possesses both author and book culminated in the 1990s with a new titling trend that makes the author’s name part of the film title, as in such films as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1992; 1998 …), William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1996), William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet 16 (1996), and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999). The expanded titles of promotions, reviews, and posters extend the possessive construction, making directors and production companies the authors’ keepers rather than editors and literary critics, as in “Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” “Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” “Peter Kosminsky’s Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,” and Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.” These redoubled possessives assert not only the film’s authentication by the literary author, but also the director’s or production company’s ownership of that authorial authenticating power. The film auteur now authors the literary author at the same time s/he is authorized by him/her. (Elliott 2003: 141)3 Yet this practice was instituted as much to differentiate new film and television adaptations from prior ones as to affirm film and television via canonical literature. Russell Baker confidently asserted in his introduction to the US broadcast of London Weekend Television’s Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1998) that it “finishes the story just as Emily Brontë wrote it,” suggesting that prior adaptations had not.4 If in the early decades of the twentieth century, film adaptations invoke the images and names of canonical authors to define film via literature synonymically, as writings produced live by dead authors or as film‐ books, in the century’s latter decades, they do so to define themselves as not literature. In the final decade, adaptations further attach to, possess, and identify with author names in order to define themselves differentially from other adaptations. Complicating Foucault’s argument that the author function is lost at the moment an author is proven not to have written the texts attributed to him 17 or her, in adaptation, the author name and function extend to those works s/he is known not to have written, as well as to differentiating works s/he has not written from other works s/he has not written. The return of the authorial body: the author as narrator, character, audience In the wake of the auteur movement and the cultural revolution of the 1960s, film and television adaptations turn from representing authors as screened writers to positioning them diversely as narrators, audiences, and characters of their own works. Such representations fragment and diminish their authorial authority. From the early nineteenth century, authors and literary critics have taken great pains to distinguish authors from their narrators. In the latter twentieth century, literary film and television adaptations blur such distinctions. “The Great Gonzo as Charles Dickens” (voiced by Dave Goelz) contravenes formal literary distinctions between author and narrator in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), parodying the problems of omniscient narration for embodied author‐ narrators, problems especially heightened when they are puppets who must mask the hands, strings, and rods manipulating them. If The Muppet Christmas Carol heightens the constructedness of screened writer‐narrators, Wuthering Heights (1992) works to obscure it. The film opens with Emily Brontë (played by an uncredited Sinead O’Connor) wandering the moors and beginning to “imagine” her novel: First I found the place. I wondered who had lived there—what their lives were like. Something whispered to my mind and I began to write. My pen creates stories of a world that might have been, a world of my imagining. 18 And here is one I’m going to tell. But take care not to smile at any part of it. In this scene of pre‐writing, cinematic voiceover restores the voice of the author that Barthes and Foucault, following Derrida, had pronounced dead at the moment of writing. As she speaks of writing without being seen writing, the scene renders writing unseen and foregrounds the voice. The scene of pre‐writing is equally a scene of pre‐production, since “Brontë” does what filmmakers do before they begin shooting: she scouts out a location before she begins writing. More broadly significant, figuring vision and sound as the bases of writing inverts traditional, linear concepts of literary film adaptation that make writing the basis of audiovisual representation. Adaptation is rendered a cyclical affair, as writing derives from and returns to sounds and images. The scene of pre‐writing furthermore inverts adaptation sequencing, as the last stage in the chain of literary film adaptation—the film— dramatizes the first—pre‐textual authorial imagination and inspiration. Such a preface touts the film as more comprehensive of the novel’s origins than the novel itself and authenticates the film with a dramatized incarnation of the author caught in the very act of inspiration. (Elliott 2003: 137) While Kosminsky’s film co‐opts Romantic theories of imagination to dismantle linear sequences of adaptation and posit written and audiovisual representation as the origin and end of writing, other films tie literary inspiration to dreaming and the unconscious. Identifications of film and dream evolved through the twentieth century. In 1907, Georges Méliès released a short film, “Le Rêve de Shakespeare”: literally, “Shakespeare’s Dream,” but translated, 19 “Shakespeare Writing Julius Caesar.” The slippage is significant, as the film presents a cause‐and‐effect relationship between dreaming and writing. Shakespeare (played by Méliès) struggles to write the murder of Julius Caesar. He falls asleep and the scene appears to him in a dream, positioning him as its audience. The film‐dream is made the source of literary inspiration; again, what comes last in the chain of adaptation (the film within the film) is positioned as a scene of pre‐writing. Waking, “Shakespeare” re‐enacts the dream before he writes it down; pre‐writing is thus figured as a performance adapting the film‐ dream. These are the bases of his literary celebrity: “the scene dissolves into a bust of William Shakespeare, around which all the nations wave flags and garlands” (Star Film Catalogue, qtd. in Ball 1968: 36). The idea that inspired writing can derive from dreaming is an ancient one; in the Judeo‐Christian bible, dreams produce written prophecies and, at the start of Méliès’s Shakespearean dream, he is visited by classical muses. In 1892, Robert Louis Stevenson suggested that writing inspired by dreams may not be divine or heroic, but sinful and antisocial. Of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), he recounts: I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously … I do most of the morality … my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a conscience. (264) Like dreams, film adaptations from the 1980s on were often transgressive and parodic of canonical texts and authors. At the end of Jekyll and Hyde … 20 Together Again (1982), the camera pans to a tombstone announcing the death of the author: Robert Louis Stevenson 1850‐1894 Famed Author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde The tombstone marks both the biographical and Barthesean death of the author of Jekyll and Hyde. Yet what lies beneath undercuts both deaths: the tombstone begins to shake and the camera pans below ground to reveal a skeleton in rags rolling in his grave, growling, “Ruined! The bastards, the bastards! My story ruined!” The decomposing, seething, undead, yet resoundingly buried author is represented as audience of the film, relegated to an impotent, bitterly critical afterword, protesting the illegitimacy of his “bastard” adapters. The author returns to life to condemn the birth of these readers as illegitimate. Furthermore, in literalizing and incarnating a cultural expression, “rolling in his grave,” the film embodies conventional language as the (un)dead author, parodying Barthes’s distinctions between dead authors and living language. By contrast, “Shakespeare,” voiced by Patrick Stewart and imaged as an animated statue in Gnomeo and Juliet (2011), approves this adaptation of his play, which casts (pun intended) feuding families and star‐crossed lovers as garden gnomes who are also animated. Coming to life to shout “Bravo!” and applaud the gnomes, Shakespeare as cultural monument authorizes the production as both author of the text and audience of the film. 21 Salmone’s Last Dance (1988) positions its screened writer, Oscar Wilde, more ambivalently. The film belongs to a sub‐group of adaptations that dramatize the staging of canonical plays,5 depicting Wilde watching a performance of Salome. Again, the screened writer is represented as audience rather than author of his text. His conflicted response to the play indicates its power over him as audience, again blurring the lines between authors and readers, between playwrights and audiences. The author is constructed by his text not solely in Foucault’s sense, but by the ways in which watching it performed construct and reveal his desires and sexuality. Dream, film, desire, and sexuality conflate in psychoanalysis. Film and psychoanalysis have been aligned throughout the twentieth century into the twenty‐first. Films of the 1990s and 2000s seize on and parody pop‐cultural theories of libido, repression, and language in their representations of screened writers, eroticizing Romantic theories of creation, libidinizing inspiration, aligning writer’s block with sexual impotence, and carnalizing literary production. Tromeo and Juliet (1996) epitomizes and parodies these trends. In a filmic preface, its writer‐director, Lloyd Kaufman, and co‐writer, James Gunn, discuss their inspiration for this satiric, schlock horror adaptation: Shakespeare’s spirit entered my body. I can’t tell you which orifice Shakespeare’s spirit exited my body, but the result is Tromeo and Juliet … One of the things few people know … scholars know this, but most people don’t … is that on William Shakespeare’s deathbed, he had a dream. Troma was able to find out and actually fulfill Shakespeare’s dream by adding a three‐foot penis monster in Tromeo and Juliet. … I think Shakespeare is smiling down from above and very happy with the Troma 22 team. … We’ve given Shakespeare the car crashes, the kinky sex, the dismemberment, all of the wonderful things that Shakespeare wanted but never had. The implication that Shakespeare enters as spirit and exits as sperm is reinforced by the unsubtle “three‐foot penis monster.” The adaptation claims to fulfill unrealized authorial desire; the carnalization of his play paradoxically makes the spirit of Shakespeare “very happy.” In contrast to the parodied Stevenson, this author is silently “smiling down from above” rather than rolling below ground as cursing corpse. Two years later, Shakespeare in Love (1998) libidinizes literary inspiration so blatantly that even the most casual observer cannot fail to observe it. Lying back on an anachronistic, pseudo‐psychoanalytic alchemist’s couch, Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) describes writer’s block in metaphors of sexual impotence: I have lost my gift. … It is as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination is dried up, as if the tower of my proud genius has collapsed. … Nothing comes. It’s like trying to pick a lock with a wet herring. The scene parodies Lacanian psychology, which conflates linguistic and sexual power. Many critics have discussed Viola’s (Gwyneth Paltrow) revival Shakespeare’s pen and penis, but none more eloquently than Courtney Lehmann: [A]s dress rehearsals from ‘The Rose Theatre’ are intercut with un‐ dressed rehearsals in ‘Viola’s bedroom’ … rhymed couplets emerge from the rhythms of orgasm, and the seminal work of Romeo and Juliet is born … the more they play, the more of the play … they produce … the authorial body [is] the privileged site of the adaptation process … authorship is 23 anchored in and made accountable to the body—in all its vulnerability and virility … quite literally raising Shakespeare from the ranks of death and its perpetual paramour: impotence. This bedroom farce thus reimagines the “death of the Author” as a “little death” by playfully linking poetic labor to sexual expenditure. (2002: 223, 213). And yet the play does not derive solely from the private worlds of love‐ making and closed rehearsals. In spite of its parody of Barthes’s “The death of the author” as a little death, it supports his view that any text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture … the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. (1977a: 146) Throughout the film, characters speak lines from Romeo and Juliet apart from and prior to its writing. Shakespeare overhears an anti‐theatre cleric declaiming, “The Rose smells thusly rank by any name. I say a plague on both their houses!”; he takes lines and plotlines from Marlowe (Rupert Everett); he adapts lines spoken by friends and lover; when he cannot find language spoken by others, he adapts lines that he himself speaks in the course of his daily life. But even as the film supports Barthes’s view that authors recycle existing texts, it astonishingly omits any credit to Shakespeare’s actual written sources. Its Shakespeare adapts speech, not texts; it restores the voices and “the body writing” that Barthes and Foucault had claimed writing destroys (Bartes 1977a: 142; Foucault 1988: 283). Here, just as it partially supports and partially rebuts Barthes’s and Foucault’s theories of authorship, the film supports Romantic 24 theories of expressive authorship while denying Romantic notions of originality when it figures both Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night as adaptations of Shakespeare’s life. The letter play is particularly significant in this regard, since it is deemed a rare instance of an “original” Shakespeare play. But Shakespeare’s “life” here is the film and the film is fictional; therefore, the extradiegetic claim is that the plays adapt the film. The film and its assertions of biography, an eternal present tense, and Hollywood realism lay claim to Shakespeare’s life as the origin of Shakespeare’s writings. Barthes argues that “life never does more than imitate the book” (1977a: 147); the film incongruously and anachronistically presents the author’s life and books as imitating the film. Claiming to show Shakespeare’s sources, the film proposes itself as Shakespeare’s source. And yet the film has been adapted from Shakespeare’s writings and other writings and films. The film paradoxically harnesses multiple texts to lay claim to origin. Although screenwriter Tom Stoppard claimed in interview that the film “was an original” (Teeman 2008) and although the screenplay won the Oscar for best original screenplay, Shakespeare in Love adapts Romeo and Juliet. When it stages the play at the Globe, it joins the body of Shakespearean adaptations about the making of play performances, more centrally, it adapts the writing of the play. In representing the writing of Romeo and Juliet as deriving from its own subsequent writing, the screenplay not only hides Shakespeare’s written sources and Shakespeare as its own source, it also hides its other written sources. There is no credit to the novel, No Bed for Bacon (1941), even though Stoppard admits that he read it and Fidelis Morgan submitted a screenplay of No Bed for Bacon to 25 Shakespeare in Love’s producer, which co‐screenwriter Marc Norman may have read (Sherrin 2000: 7‐8). The film is clearly indebted to the novel’s plot, which the 1986 reprint summarizes: Lady Viola Compton, a young girl from the Queen's Court, visits the theatre and is so infatuated by Shakespeare and his plays that she disguises herself as a boy player and inspires Twelfth Night and the playwright's affection. (qtd. in Offman) Offman attests that Both versions feature the same grand scene, in which a troubled production of Shakespeare's play finally reaches the stage after many disasters (in both cases, connived by a rival theater owner)—only to have one of the first actors on stage struggle to spit out his lines. (1999) Even more specifically, the novel opens with its Shakespeare struggling with his authorial name: [A] melancholy figure sat tracing its signature on a pad. Shakesper Shakspere Shekspar He always practiced tracing his signature when he was bored. He was always hoping that one of these days he would come to a firm decision upon which of them he liked the best. (13) The film adapts and parodies this episode, carrying it into a poststructuralist parody of Foucault’s author function, as this author struggles to produce a proper authorial name on which to pin his author function. Carrying the novel’s 26 experiments beyond phonetics to semantics, the film deconstructs the proper name into improper or common nouns, as Derrida had done in 1989: Will Shakespeare Willm Shakesbear [or Willm Shakesbeer?—a blot renders the letters indeterminate] W Shake Willm Shaksebee William Shakepen Will Shagswell Will Shagsbeard The author name is further incomplete, crossed out, and overwritten, techniques that Derrida and other poststructuralists have used to represent their theories of language. In a film about impotence and about an author whose authorship has been hotly contested, the double strike through “Will Shagswell” is doubly resonant. This film further deconstructs Shakespeare as author by making him a biographical character who speaks his fictional characters’ lines and an actor in his own play. The following year, Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park, “based on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, her letters, and early journals,” deconstructs the author name and function. In this “portrait of Austen and her work” (Rozema qtd. in Berardinelli 1999), Rozema goes beyond the usual conflations of author name and works. In her merger of Jane Austen and Mansfield Park’s fictional protagonist, Fanny Price, the character name displaces the author name and it is Price who authors Austen’s juvenilia and biographical letters. The film’s opening further deconstructs poststructuralist oppositions between writing, bodies, and 27 voices. Extreme close‐ups align the paper’s tiny hairs with human skin and the pen scratching that skin slides through a sound dissolve into a whispered story. Since the extreme close‐ups render the text illegible, the narrative depends upon the voice. The film joins others that have deconstructed oppositions between authors and readers, as the character‐author is the main reader of her texts, reading them to other characters and, looking at the camera, to the film audience. On film, Shakespeare, Austen, and numerous screened writers in biopics that lie outside the scope of this essay regularly crumple, tear, and burn their writings. Foucault argues that the author is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. … The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning. (1988: 292) Screened writers upend Foucault’s argument; on film and television, the author proliferates and redistributes meaning, including the meanings of literature and film in relation to each other, and the meanings of philosophical theories of authorship. Screened writers crumple, tear, and burn the writings of philosophy as well as the writings of canonical literature. KAMILLA ELLIOTT 28 1 The UK Copyright Act of 1911 set the expiration of copyright at 50 years past an author’s death (which would be 1913 for Thackeray’s works) and protected literature from new technological incursions upon copyright, including “cinematographic” productions. 2 Four of the twelve short films made in the Tense Moments with Great Authors series derive from Dickensian novels. No other author appears more than once. 3 The tradition continues with BBC’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (2006). 4 The trailer to the 1992 film of the same title had made a similar claim. Neither is accurate; Kiju Yoshida had adapted both generations of the novel in 1988. 5 These include A Double Life (1947), Kiss Me Kate (1953), A Midwinter’s Tale (1995), and Shakespeare in Love (1998). 29