Chapitre D'ouvrage From the Blank Page to the Silver Screen: Film Adaptation in the English-Speaking World Année : 2010

‘In space things touch, in time things part': James Ivory and David Lean adapting E. M. Forster's subversive aesthetics

Résumé

Out of E. M. Forster's six novels, five were adapted for the screen, including three by James Ivory (A Room with a View, Maurice and Howards End) and one by David Lean (A Passage to India). Each film seems to be based on the same misapprehension, forcing the text to show what it did not clearly say and concurring with Virginia Woolf's regret that Forster was too much of a materialist writer to make his point. Yet the novels should not be limited to mere historical documents on Edwardian society, since what they really put forward is, paradoxically enough, a coherent and asserted lack of both contextual and visual information: there is hardly anything to be visualized from Forster's writing. “Playing around” this constitutive gap in the text, directors will in fact suggest a perfect equivalent of what lies behind Forster's words and gives the plots their true meaning – the progressive opening of the character and the writing to vision and visibility. Here lies the true Forsterian motif, which argues for an unexpected form of modernity: the text indeed belies Lessing's aesthetic categories of the Nacheinander and the Nebeneinander, and claims that words do not necessarily tell an action in time, but can also depict a scene in space. Still the adaptations fail to echo this ultimate inversion in Forster's aesthetics, tied up as they are by their emphasis on the contemporary message of the plots. While first they could reveal the modernity of the text, here they only mute Forster's underlying subversive writing, unable to inject an external and modern voice into the image (in reference to Deleuze's own continuation of Lessing's work in L'Image-temps). In A Passage to India Adela Quested is haunted by this strange aphorism: “In space things touch, in time things part.” In his last novel Forster actually reverses this aesthetic motto – the text chronologically writes the possibility of contact and touch, while it can merely show the opposite. Not only does Forster challenge Lessing's categories but he claims too that the visual is not the proper opening for literature, as if already questioning the need for adaptation. Again there is no such tension between space and time in the films, which eventually ask and already answer the question of genre and modernity in the process of film adaptation – as the unexpected profundity of these seemingly shallow and academic adaptations.

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halshs-00475218 , version 1 (21-04-2010)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-00475218 , version 1

Citer

Laurent Mellet. ‘In space things touch, in time things part': James Ivory and David Lean adapting E. M. Forster's subversive aesthetics. From the Blank Page to the Silver Screen: Film Adaptation in the English-Speaking World, inconnu, 2010. ⟨halshs-00475218⟩

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