University of Szeged
Faculty of Arts
Doctoral School of Literary Studies
THESES OF THE DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
Zoltán Dragon
Tennessee Williams Goes to Hollywood,
or the Dialogue of Drama and Film
Szeged
2010
1
The Topic and Aims of the Dissertation
Although film adaptation was born at the same time as film as a medium, its
theoretical and critical discourse seriously lags behind when compared with the plethora
of approaches and methodologies in the field of film studies. My dissertation relies on
the works of Tennessee Williams in order to point at the problems of the conspicuously
stagnating discourse of the theory of film adaptation that define its critical place and
reception. Following the identification of these problems, utilizing some relevant
theoretical grids I introduce an alternative way of interpretation, a new theoretical
approach, based on examples taken from the Williams adaptations which, in turn, proves
to be fruitful both for literary and film studies. Simultaneously, this endeavor also
sketches the frames of a productive critical-theoretical methodology for the study of film
adaptations of literary works.
I used a strange, uncanny phenomenon as the trampoline for the analysis of the
selected Williams adaptations that I interpreted as a demetaphorized trope of the theory
of adaptation. The skeleton that appears in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959, dir. Joseph L.
Mankiewicz) bears significance both in terms of the theory of adaptation and the
practice of comparative analysis. My practical aim was to prove that – as a result of the
medial break – the texts (drama and film) under analysis cannot be interpreted by relying
on the traditional temporal asymmetry of “source text and its transformation,” only as
simultaneously present entities in the intermedial space shaped by the transgressive act
of adaptation. This intermedial space sets the dialogue of the two texts into motion,
which can uncover the mechanism of adaptation and can also provide basis for the
investigation of particular texts or parts of texts. In fact, it is the intermedial (and
intertextual) tension generated by the transgression that nurtures the dialogue the
definition and mapping of which was my primary theoretical aim. Contrary to the clichés
of fidelity criticism that endlessly seem to rely on structuralist claims, and to the system
of adaptation theory and criticism that heavily relies on judging values, I proposed to
draft a more flexible theoretical frame as an alternative approach that – when applied to
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particular cases – does not fail to take into consideration the idiosyncrasies and
particularities of the given textual and intertextual contexts.
With the introduction of the notion of the medial break I intend to mark that
virtual break that is born out of the transgression of the borders between the
participating individual media, defined by their specificities. When literature and film
gets connected through adaptation, it is also the meeting of two completely different
sets of medium specificities that start a dialogue with one another. The dialogue can only
be born of the transgression of medial boundaries, and in turn can only be nurtured by
this transgressive tension. Thus the works participating in the process of adaptation get
into a special, intertextual relation that crosses medial boundaries – the meeting point,
or the virtual line of medial break, of which can be understood as an intermedial space.
The term that forms the theoretical core of my dissertation is the notion of
dialogue as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin, which originally referred to the idea that each
and every text is a meeting point for other texts: in other words, a given text is never
exclusively itself but refers to and feeds on other textual entities (by way of conscious or
unconscious citations, for instance). This way of thinking about texts also means that
texts only exist side by side with other texts, in a kind of dialogue. Dialogue, therefore,
means the basic, necessary and indispensable relationship of an utterance to other
utterances.1 This definition treats the text qua utterance as an interactive entity, the
basic characteristic feature and ontological pretext of which is that it needs to get
involved in a dialogue with other, in some way related texts. Furthermore, any verbal (or
non-verbal, for that matter) utterance or performance “inevitably orients itself with
respect to previous performances in the same sphere, both those by the same author
and those by other authors.”2 In this light a dialogic approach in the present context has
to take into account more directors’ or filmmaking crews’ Tennessee Williams
adaptations in order to produce the most comprehensible analysis that can shed light on
the interactive, intertextual, and intermedial nature of dialogism, and in turn point out
modes of interpretation hitherto unexplored.
1
Robert Stam et alii. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, London: Routledge, 1992., 203.
V. N. Voloshinov (Mihail Bahtyin) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (trans. L. Matejka és I. R. Titunik),
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986., 95.
2
3
This unexplored aspect had, strangely enough, been always an inherent part of
the original Bakhtynian idea. Robert Stam points out this seemingly forgotten and rarely
cited nuance:
Dialogism refers to the relation between the text and its others not only in
the relatively crude and obvious forms of argument *…+ but also in much
more diffuse and subtle forms that have to do with *…+ what is left unsaid or
is to be inferred.3
This part of the definition of dialogism is simply missing both from Julia Kristeva’s
notion of intertextuality,4 and from Gérard Gennette’s conceptualization of
transtextuality5. This way, while the dialogue between texts points at a web of reference
that the participating texts obviously share and they are thus part of, simultaneously it
also functions as a hiding mechanism. It is exactly the hidden and hiding mechanism that
becomes highly relevant in terms of the medial break, since the break is nothing else but
the intrusion of an intermedial space into the text that is in turn covered and hidden by
the filmic mechanisms of representation to secure the seamless working of the
Hollywood type of representation.
The notion of the dialogue was introduced by Robert Stam – relying on his
definition I use the term as the ground for a theoretical frame, which is the most flexible
tool in the analysis of a given text that invites other textual instances that in some way
shape the text under investigation. This understanding allows for a reciprocal approach
as well, since the invited texts are also shaped by the text that forms the subject of the
analysis in return. As this scenario implies an active, continuously shaping intertextual
relation, it can be claimed that both texts (e.g., drama and film) includes characteristic
signs of one another. It is in fact this intertextual relation that sheds light on the problem
that I mark with the terms medial break and intermediality in my dissertation, and the
exploration and mapping of which is the aim of my analysis. With the introduction of
these two terms I intend to define that inapprehensible and impossible space and
3
Robert Stam. Subversive Pleasures. Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989., 14.
4
Julia Kristeva. “A szövegstrukturálás problémája” (trans. Tímea Gyimesi), in Helikon 1996/1-2., 19.
5
Gérard Genette. “Transztextualitás,” in Helikon 1996/1-2. (trans. Mónika Burján), 81.
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moment that exists not merely between two texts, as it is far more radical: the
momentary transgression of the media.
The introduction of the terms of the medial break and the intermedial dialogue
into the field of the theory of adaptation, in pair, closely related to each other, becomes
more important and relevant when referring to the claim by André Gaudreault and
Philippe Marion according to which the primary stake of adaptation is not textual but
rather medial, as the expression of a story or the adaptation of it depends solely on the
medium of representation.6 Everything depends on the encounter of the story and the
physical medium, therefore the primary field of study for the theory of adaptation
should be the intermediality that is nurtured by the origin of médiagénie (i.e., medium
specificity), as the success, the effect, the logic and the aesthetics of a story is
fundamentally determined by the mechanisms of representation pertaining to the given
medium.7
What the critical discourse of adaptation is set out to do is precisely to cover, to
hide, to annihilate the line of the medial break discussed above, while it should use it as
its starting point on which it feeds in the given analyses. Trivial it may seem, but the
skeleton that appears in the film version of Suddenly, Last Summer – that will in the later
parts of the dissertation be accompanied by further entities with the very same function
– calls attention to this covering or hiding mechanism, opening the way to the drafting
of an alternative approach to the study of adaptations. It is the study of this new
approach that forms the focus of my dissertation.
The Structure and Methodology of the Dissertation
Following the discussion of the theoretical framework I introduced the practice of
the proposed alternative approach for the study of adaptations by tackling concrete
intermedial relationships in the oeuvre of Tennessee Williams. In this part of the thesis,
which also serves as the testing of the claims I made in the theoretical part, I proved that
6
André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion. “Transécriture and Narrative Mediatics: The Stakes of Intermediality”
(trans. Robert Stam), in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds.). A Companion to Literature and Film.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2004., 58.
7
Op. cit., 66.
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in the analysis of film adaptation, more precisely of the dialogue between drama and
film, theory, context and critical practice works fruitfully via a dialogic relationship in
tandem with the investigated primary texts: just as the cinematic example of the
skeleton provided the trampoline for the discussion of theoretical claims concerning
adaptation, in this pragmatic part of the dissertation the theoretical terms and notions
become integral ingredients of the interpretations.
First, I underlined the relevance of my choice of subject, explaining why
Tennessee Williams constitutes the focus of my study. The authorial persona of Williams
may be seen as the guarantee of the dialogue born out of the medial break between
drama and film: both as playwright and as filmic author or scriptwriter, his works
constitute a significant collection of intermedial texts in terms of quality and quantity.
Williams had close ties to the cinema from early childhood, furthermore he got into close
contact with the film industry on two domains as well: first in 1943, when Audrey Wood
got him contracted with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a scriptwriter, where he was assigned
to carry out literary adaptations;8 second in 1976, as the president of the jury of the
Cannes Film Festival.9 Beyond these remarkable professional points of connection, he
had always been present in US filmmaking, as his plays had been adapted in a significant
amount even compared to his contemporaries – and this is still the case today.
According to R. Barton Palmer, the Tennessee Williams films had in fact created a
new subgenre in post-war Hollywood filmmaking.10 In his view, the 1950s and 1960s
Hollywood scene cannot be tackled without taking into account the adapted plays by
Williams, and the birth of a new subgenre, the so-called “adult art film” also originates in
these films that differed significantly from the contemporary studio productions that
dominated the market or screen at the time.11 While Hollywood had always liked to
reach out to adapt successful plays running on Broadway, Williams became one of the
8
Gene D. Phillips. The Films of Tennessee Williams. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1980.,
42.
9
Op. cit., 33.
10
R. Barton Palmer. “Hollywood in Crisis: Tennessee Williams and the Evolution of the Adult Film”, in Matthew
C. Roudané (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997., 221.
11
Op. cit., 205; 209-10.
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most widely adapted and most successful American playwrights in the twentieth
century.
To introduce the analysis of film adaptations based on dialogism, I first tackled
two significant examples from the filmic and dramatic texts of Suddenly, Last Summer: a
visual and a verbal one. The visual example was the above mentioned skeleton, the role
of which was examined first in the structure of the film, then in the context of the
intermedial space. In this part I proved that the origin of this phenomenon was not the
drama, neither was it the film: rather, it was the medial break that had been formed by
the process of adaptation. The skeleton in fact is similar to the “flashing light,” referred
to by Michel Foucault in his essay on transgression: the excess, the visual output of the
transgressive act.12 In the analysis of the appearance of the skeleton I also used the
concept of incorporation that is pivotal in the understanding of both examples in this
section, and that also grounds the mapping of the characteristic features of
intermediality.
By way of preservative repression, it is the fantasy of incorporation that creates
the break the objectification of which is the phantom. Using this claim, based on the
clinical practice of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, applied in my dissertation as a
term in the theory of adaptation, I was able to point out that the incorporation
appearing in multiple levels in the film in fact refers to a break the visual manifestation of
which is the skeleton which, being completely heterogenic to the diegetic environment
and missing from the dramatic text as well, refers to the beyond of the filmic and
dramatic texts. It is this dialogic context that makes the investigation of the verbal
example possible. I analyzed a verbal utterance, which is highly emphatic in the drama,
yet missing from the film version. Through this lack I was able to show what I referred to
as radical lack: the lack of the sentence in question is present as a jump cut – it is there in
a way of not being uttered. On the one hand, it is the voice qua object in the Lacanian
sense (the voice or sound that cannot be heard); on the other, the insistence of the lack
is embodied by a strange, uncanny phenomenon. The most emphatic word of the
sentence in question (“Don’t you understand, I WAS PROCURING FOR HIM!”), which is an
12
Michel Foucault. “A Preface to Transgression” (trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon), in Jeremy R.
Carrette (ed.). Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999., 60.
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explicit homosexual allusion in the context of the story, was examined in an etymological
fashion, the result of which revealed an unspeakable, almost perfectly sealed traumatic
secret. I then replaced this silenced particle of the story into the happy end of the film,
which thus turned out to be a covering mechanism the same way as the incorporating
sentence or the figure of the skeleton.
Obviously it does not mean that the hidden content of the analyzed word
(procure) or sentence becomes the secret of the medial break itself. The incorporated
secret is Catherine Holly’s, but covering mechanism of this secret and its structural role
within the two texts ignites a dialogue between drama and film the cohesive power of
which is the medial break. Similarly, the presence of the skeleton does not refer directly
to the medial break, as it would go against the logic of the phantom. The skeleton
becomes uncanny (as the remains of a literally incorporated body) because of the
position it takes in the film which, through its inapprehensible origin, refers to the
transgressive act of adaptation, the intermedial space, and the medial break.
In the next section of my dissertation I continued to analyze the selected
Tennessee Williams’ dramas and their intertextual and intermedial connections and film
adaptations grouped into thematic clusters according to the similarities in the strategy of
adaptation. In the first subchapter I put those cases of adaptation that shared some
significant common traits both among themselves and with Suddenly, Last Summer in
terms of proto-dramatic trauma, the system of relationship among characters,
topographic structure and location, and the tackling and utilization of diegetic spatiality.
According to these criteria, the following cases were selected to feature in this section: A
Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the
Iguana. Continuing the critical practice of interpretation performed in the case of
Suddenly, Last Summer, I located the manifestations of the medial break on the levels of
verbality and visual representation in all the four adaptations, then connecting these
levels, I presented my case for intermedial dialogue. The basic method of analysis in
terms of these adaptations was the mapping of the covering mechanisms, with the help
of which filmmakers turned explicit homosexual relationships in dramas and other
textual connections in the oeuvre into heterosexual romances by way of minimally
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altering systems of character relationships (primarily in terms of motivation and
pretexts) and adhering to the clichés and forms of classical Hollywood narratives. These
covers left traces both on the verbal and on the representational (visual and audial)
levels, the analysis of which was conducted via the phenomena found in the adaptations,
but involved and invited the dialogue of participating intertexts either explicitly (via
direct references) or implicitly.
In the next subchapter, in the analysis of intermedial dialogue in Baby Doll and
The Glass Menagerie, I focused on how the intertextual web of these films made it
impossible to utilize the compare and contrast method advocated by fidelity criticism. In
the analyses I called attention to textual and medial relationships the sophisticated
system of connections of which made it absolutely clear that the adaptation is but one
point in the intermedial textual universes, far from being the ultimate end point in a
lineage that feeds on other, previous points in the process of transforming one text into
another: true to the idea of dialogism, in these examples the Symbolic field of meaning is
upheld by the closely related medial instances.
The final subchapter tackling the Williams adaptations is about The Roman Spring
of Mrs. Stone, which is a kind of outlook on the critical and theoretical aspects of
adaptation, since turning from the drama-film dialogue of the previous analyses, I
examined an adaptation that is based on narrative-to-narrative transfer. Thus, basing my
arguments on what I learnt from the dialogue between drama and film, I addressed
issues of adaptation that make narrative transformation the most widely heralded way
of adapting literary texts into film, comprising the gist of critical engagement for
contemporary theorists in the field. The aim of the analysis in this section of the
dissertation was to point at the presence and role of the medial break and through this
to frame the strategy of adaptation, the result of which was that the narrative
connection between the novella and the film is the least important and decisive factor in
determining the diegetic structure and system of the adaptation. The film employs visual
solutions that – especially in the film-within-film scene – have implications beyond the
compare-contrast method and opens the way for the intermedial dialogue with the help
of metatextual signs. The more so, as it can be inferred from numerous scenes that the
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filmmakers of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone employed techniques and formulas that
can be seen in previous Williams drama adaptations. By mapping the medial break and
the intermedial dialogue springing from it I intended to prove that the narrative
connection between texts only covers those medial differences and specificities that
make the adaptation of a narrative (be it a novel, a novella or a short story) just as
problematic as those of dramas.
Results
As the result of the intermedial dialogue, in relation with the strategy of
adaptation of drama and film, based on my analyses a formation took shape that seems
to provide structural framework for the Williams adaptations. On the first level, a
triangle structure can be identified in the system of relationships among characters in
the plays which, while fairly similar to the classical love triangles based on the Oedipal
structure, modifies the traditional economy of desire of this formation as in each and
every case it is a missing character connecting two present ones – those who in turn are
connected via this fundamental lack in the structure:
This basic formation then generates intriguing permutations and thus I claimed
that it fundamentally determines the thematic and spatial structure of the given
adaptations. The study of diegetic space, in which I focused on the confession-like
appearance of traumatic contents, presented a visual form that overarches particular
adaptations and provides the topographic logic and frame of Williams adaptations: these
spaces are dominated by the missing character of the triangular formation as volatile,
spectral bodies, as intrusions of the Lacanian Real into the diegesis of the filmic text(ure),
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as excessive, heterogenic presences, taking the position of the filmic point of view, that
is, the position of the camera, generating shots that frame the uncovering of traumatic
contents performed usually on a verandah or terrace. The evocation of these traumas is
performed – under the supervision of the missing characters, present via their lack
inscribed in the film – by those characters that are connected precisely through the lack
and the related traumatic content.
This is the structural pattern that appears with occasional variations in nearly all
of the examined Williams adaptations as the fundamental structuring force of the
diegesis. In this respect this structure constitutes the intermedial model of the Williams
oeuvre that determines the particular diegetic actualizations by organizing them around
the medial break.
Tennessee Williams went to Hollywood and has become the symbol or icon of
adaptation. Williams’ authorial persona is the potential for the dialogue between drama
and film itself, which focuses on the fundamental differences between the two media
and the phenomena nurtured by these differences. The phenomenon of a formation
born out of one of the adaptations, notably the skeleton, is uncannily the
demetaphorized embodiment of the theory of adaptation that has implications not only
for practical, critical interpretations, but also for its theoretical framework. The aim of
my dissertation was to transcend the methodology of fidelity criticism still favored today,
and propose a real and feasible alternative approach to study drama and its film
adaptation – a domain in contemporary theory and criticism that is left untouched and
unaffected by theoretical development, deemed utterly unproblematic and easily
tackled. By putting the issue of the medial break into the limelight I discussed the
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possibility of a dialogue in the intermedial space which sheds light on the issue of
adaptation by utilizing the logic of the phantom and which opens new ways for the
interpretative practice of texts of fundamentally different media.
Publications Pertaining to the Topic of Dissertation
Books
Dragon, Zoltán. The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006.
Cristian, Réka M. and Dragon, Zoltán. Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film
Theories. Szeged: JATEPress, 2008.
Studies and Articles
“The Disappearing Body: The Unrepresentable Carnality in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s
Suddenly Last Summer,” in Kiss, Attila and Szőnyi, György Endre (eds). The
Iconology of Gender, Volume II. Gendered Representations in Cultural Practices.
Szeged: JATEPress, 2008., 179-184.
“Merre tovább?: A pszichoanalitikus filmelmélet útjai a huszonegyedik században,” in
Apertúra, 2006. Fall. http://apertura.hu/2006/osz/dragon
“A lehetetlen valósága, avagy a filmi narratíva tere – a valóság benyomásától a borromei
kötésig,” in Apertúra, 2006. Spring. http://www.apertura.hu/2006/tavasz/dragon/
“Derrida’s Specter – Abraham’s Phantom, or Psychoanalysis as the Uncanny Kernel of
Deconstruction,” in The Anachronist, Vol. 11, 2005., 253-269.
“Adaptation as Intermedial Dialogue, or Tennessee Williams Goes to Hollywood,” in Jan
Chovanec (ed.) Theory and Practice in English Studies 4: Proceedings of The Eighth
Brno Conference in English, American and Canadian Studies, Brno, Masaryk
University, The Czech Republic, 2005., 187-192.
“The Ambiguous Male of the 1950s: The Filmic Subversive Strategies of Tennessee
Williams,” in The 1950s: Proceedings of the 2003 Biennal Conference of the
Hungarian Association of American Studies, Budapest, Eötvös Lóránt University,
2005., 103-109.
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“Tennessee Williams and the Hollywood Film,” in Focus – Papers in English Literary and
Cultural Studies, Special Issue on Film/Video Studies and British Studies, Kurdi,
Mária and Sári, László (eds.), Pécs, 2004. pp. 46-55.
“Homoszexualitás és kannibalizmus: a megjeleníthetetlenség kérdése Joseph L.
Mankiewicz Múlt nyáron, hirtelen című filmjében,” in Kalligram, Vol. 12., January
2004, 82-84.
“Filmadaptáció: az irodalom és a film végtelen dialógusa,” in Filmtett, Vol. 4. No. 29., 812.
Conference Presentations Pertaining to the Topic of Dissertation
June 19-22, 2008. “The Phantom of the Cinema: New Frames of Psychoanalytic Film
Theory” - NECS Budapest Conference.
January 25-27, 2007. “What Filmmaking Can Do, and Theory Can’t: Dialogue of Film and
Novel on the Screen” - HUSSE 8, Szeged, University of Szeged.
February 2-4, 2005. “Adaptation as Intermedial Dialogue, or Tennessee Williams Goes to
Hollywood,” The Eighth Brno Conference in English, American and Canadian
Studies, Brno, Masaryk University, The Czech Republic.
January 27-29, 2005. “The Return of Film Theory’s Repressed: Classic Suture and
Beyond,” HUSSE 7, Veszprém, University of Veszprém.
November 25-27, 2004. “Tennessee Williams in the Context of Adaptation Theory,” HAAS
Conference, Budapest, ELTE.
May 28-30, 2004. “Tennessee Williams and Hollywood Film.” HUSSDE/2 – „Now You See
It, Now You Don’t: Hiding and Revealing in Text and Performance” Conference,
Piliscsaba, Péter Pázmány Catholic University.
October 27-29, 2003. “Homoszexualitás és kannibalizmus: a megjeleníthetetlenség
kérdése Joseph L. Mankiewicz Múlt nyáron, hirtelen című filmjében.” „Erőszak és
nemek” conference, Budapesti Közgazdaságtudományi és Államigazgatási
Egyetem.
July 14-17, 2003. “The Disappearing Body: The Unrepresentable Carnality in Joseph L.
Mankiewicz’s Suddenly Last Summer.” Iconography of Gender Conference,
Szeged.
March 6-7, 2003. “The Ambiguous Male of the 1950s: The Filmic Subversive Strategies of
Tennessee Williams.” HAAS Conference, Budapest, Eötvös Lóránt University.