Baetens 2005

Novelization, a Contaminated Genre?
Authors(s): Jan Baetens

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Autumn 2005), pp. 43-60
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Novelization, a Contaminated Genre?
Jan Baetens
Translated by Pieter Verrmeulen
The Text Writes Back

Contemporary culture is a visual culture or, more precisely, a culture
marked by the visual turn, the transition from a culture dominated by the
model of writing to a culture dominated by a model of the image.1 Whatever
the interpretation of this phenomenon, which is still far from being un-
derstood in all its implications, the observation is unavoidable that new
ways of thinking the image often tend to elude the bilateral relations ob-
taining between the verbal and the visual order. But although the theory of
visual culture quite logically opposes the linguistic imperialism that dis-
torted many traditional theories of the image2 (most obviously in certain
kinds of semiotics and art history),3 it cannot simply be equated with an
1.
Whatever the pictorial turn is, then, it should be clear that it is not a return to naive mimesis,
copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial
“presence”: it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex
interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality. It is the
realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation,
surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading
(decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or “visual literacy”
might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality. [W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial
Turn,” Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, 1994), p. 16]
2. For a critique of this linguistic imperialism, see Thierry Groensteen, Système de la bande
dessinée (Paris, 1999) and the numerous studies by James Elkins, for instance, “What Do We Want
Pictures to Be? Reply to Mieke Bal,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Spring 1996): 590–602.
3. All traditional forms of iconography and iconology are intended here, as criticized in, for
instance, Oskar Bätschmann, Einführung in die kunstgeschichtliche Hermeneutik (Darmstadt,
1988), and Mieke Bal, Reading Rembrandt (Cambridge, 1991).
Critical Inquiry 32 (Autumn 2005)

䉷 2005 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/05/3201-0001$10.00. All rights reserved.
43 All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
44 Jan Baetens / On Novelization
antiverbal or antilinguistic culture. This theory, exemplified most notably
in visual semiotics or new iconology, rather positions itself at the intersec-
tion of the two systems and emphasizes the interaction of the opposing reg-
isters and domains.4 There is, for instance, no shortage of attempts to bridge
the gap between the textual domain and that of the image in numerous texts
drawing, albeit in diverse ways, on poststructuralism: from Jean-François
Lyotard’s seminal Discours figure to the methodological principles proposed
in Mieke Bal’s Travelling Concepts, which elaborates Lyotard’s overcoming
of the opposition between word and image; the visual reading of graphic
systems by Anne-Marie Christin, whose “screen-theory” articulates written
language as a form of image; or a work such as David Norman Rodowick’s
Reading the Figural, which extends the ideas of Lyotard to the domain of
digital culture.5 In all these instances, the theoretical analysis while clearly
having its roots in the visual turn in no way implies a refusal of the verbal,
which is rather integrated in the new semiosphere of the image.
From this perspective, the cultural form (in the sense Raymond Williams
gave to this term in his studies on television) called novelization appears as
an ambiguous anachronism both innovative and monstrous.6 It seems to
go counter to the visual mutation now affecting every form of writing. Also,
this paradoxical return of writing presents itself unburdened by any false
modesty and instead claims some sort of revenge of writing on the image.
Paraphrasing an expression that has gained currency in the last decade (“the
empire writes back”),7 it could be said that the rise of novelization is one of
the ways in which a previously dominated system (that of writing) manages
to counterattack, to appropriate the tools of the dominant system (that of
the image) and to aim them against it; the text writes back.
These preliminary observations enable us to determine the stakes of a
study of novelization. This genre offers simultaneously a very precise, com-
4. See Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986).

5. See Jean-François Lyotard, Discours figure (Paris, 1970); Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the
Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto, 2002); Anne-Marie Christin, L’Image écrite, ou, la déraison
graphique (Paris, 1995) and Poétique du blanc (Louvain, 2002); and David Norman Rodowick,
Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham, N.C., 2001).
6. See Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1975; London, 1990).
7. See The Empire Writes Back, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London,
1989).
J a n B a e t e n s teaches at the Institute of Cultural Studies of the University of

Louvain, Belgium. His most recent books are Romans à contraintes (2005) and a
novelization in verse of the 1962 film by Jean-Luc Godard, Vivre sa vie (2005). His
email is [email protected]. P i e t e r Ve r m e u l e n is research
assistant of the Flemish Fund of Scientific Research. He is currently working on
his dissertation, a critical description of the work of Geoffrey Hartman.
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2005 45
plex, and varied case that allows us to consider the workings of the visual
turn in a domain that seems to escape its grasp without being reduced to a
mere site of impotent resistance, a remnant from the past, an anachronistic
residue heading for absorption by a triumphant visuality. In this way, nov-
elization could prove symptomatic of the way in which the visual transfor-
mation of cultural facts can occur differently than in the clear cases in which
the image directly replaces writing. As we will see—and this is the thesis I
want to defend here—the impact of the visual is not necessarily diminished
by the apparent return of the verbal. Novelization, in other words, offers a
good example of the indirect contamination of one media regime by another.
To give some indications of this, I will examine the relationship of three key
ideas of contemporary visual turn theories: adaptation, remediation, and
specificity. At the end of the analysis, I will attempt to relate the case of
novelization to a more general theory of mediological differences in the era
of the hybridization of the work of art in the context of contemporary visual
culture.
Novelization as Anti-Adaptation
What is novelization? Whereas there are numerous studies available on
the interaction between literature and film, novelization itself has not yet
been the object of in-depth research.8 There are many reasons for this si-
lence, but two circumstances seem to play an essential role: first, the con-
tempt with which the genre is often treated (but one should recall, in
comparison, the time and the energy that was expended before the univer-
sity was willing to accept comics as an object of study);9 second, the struc-
tural changes in research programs that force the scholar to study the image
first and to neglect whatever is not valorized in this framework. The insti-
tutional shift from literary to cultural studies, however, would seem to
8. For a good synthesis of the situation in France, see Alain and Odette Virmaux, Le Ciné-roman
(Paris, 1984), and Jeanne-Marie Clerc, Littérature et cinéma (Paris, 1993). For the situation in the
anglophone world, see the introduction to Adaptations, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda
Whelehan (London, 2000). If I am correct, except for the studies by Virmaux and Clerc, only two
academic articles have been published thus far on this issue. See Claes-Goran Holmberg, “Extra-
terrestrial Novels,” in Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, ed. Ulla
Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erick Hedling (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 109–14 (which deals
especially with Steven Spielberg), and Jan Baetens, “La Novellisation: Un Genre impossible?”
Recherches en communication, no. 17 (2002): 213–21 (which also addresses the sensitive but decisive
issue of copyright, a topic I will not address here). The publishing industry has shown more
interest in the phenomenon, as is indicated by the frequent publication of articles such as John-
Michael Maas, “Attack of the Novelizations—Star Wars Dominates a Summer Tie-in Roster
Skewed to Young, Male Sci-fi Fans,” Publishers Weekly, 15 Apr. 2002, pp. 24–27.
9. On the reasons underlying this reticence, see Groensteen, “Why Are Comics Still in Search of
Cultural Legitimization?” in Comics Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, ed.
Anna Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen (Copenhagen, 2002), pp. 29–41.
encourage the serious study of novelization as it connects many of the dis-
cipline’s favorite aspects, such as popular culture, mass media, and visuality.
As a first excursion into the fairly pristine territory of novelization, let
us consider the following definitions (or, more exactly, observations),
as diverse in their perspective as they are similar in their approach of
the phenomenon: The procedure consists in having a novel written on
the basis of a screenplay and subsequently having the publication of the
book coincide with the release of the movie. . . . Except for some notable
cases . . . these works obtain a guaranteed but ephemeral (a couple of
months) audience, and are not reprinted.10
For two decades, American SF has suffered from the irresistable rise of
fantasy and, more recently, the invasion of scifi, an ersatz consisting in
literary novelizations and adaptations of SF movies (Star Wars), televi-
sion series (Star Trek), role-playing games or computer games, which
has been a great success with the adolescent public.11
The phrase comes from the back cover of a mass distribution paper-
back, the kind of book one finds in airport and supermarket stands. . . .
Neither a screenplay nor a novel but a novelization, this is a new genre
of fiction that is itself the product of a new film-marketing technology.12
What is most striking in these first approaches (often found in the notes,
not even in the body of the text!) is that novelizations are adaptations very
different from film adaptations, not only because of their culturally less le-
gitimate status but by dint of the absence of the two characteristics indis-
pensable for a cinematographic adaptation proper. First, novelizations lack
the intermediality or, more precisely, the transmedialization essential to
the adaptation of a book in a cinematographic process.13 (This absence is
of course hypothesized rather than real, as it remains perfectly possible that
the filmic images do intervene in the composition.) Most of the noveliza-
tions are in fact based on one form or another of screenplay, that is, on
a verbal pretext, which entails, among other things, that the problem of
the “translation” from one semiotic system to another is systematically
eluded.14 Second, because novelizations are based on an already prenovel-
10. Virmaux, Le Ciné-roman, p. 70 n. 23.

11. Jacques Baudou, La Science-fiction (Paris, 2002), p. 41.
12. Teresa de Lauretis, “Becoming Inorganic,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003): 557 n. 24.
13. For more details on the “conditional” perspective on literary categories (in contrast to the
“constitutive” or “realist” perpsective), see Gérard Genette, Fiction et diction (Paris, 1991).
14. The screenplay may take the form of a “visual” scenario or a storyboard. But except for very
few cases, this form never mediates between the movie and the book. Below, we will mention the
case of visual novelizations (for instance, the so-called photo novella), which no doubt constitute
a different genre.
ized pretext, they also skirt the major challenge of filmic adaptation, that is,
the equilibrium (as problematic as it is exciting) between the two forces that
Brian McFarlane has termed transfer and adaptation proper.15 The first term
concerns all aspects and mechanisms that let themselves be replicated un-
problematically across systems; the second term designates the aspects and
mechanisms that resist this transfer and hence require a creative interven-
tion of the adaptor.16 To the extent that novelizations restrict themselves to
the textual transposition of an already written screenplay and to the nov-
elistic transposition of an already emphatically narrative structure, the
genre can comforatably be an adaptation that skirts almost all the tradi-
tional problems of cinematographic adaptation. In this sense, novelization
can be called a false adaptation or, even more strongly and again in relation
to the traditional model of adaptation—that is, from book to film—it can
be called an anti-adaptation.
Thus far we have used a prototypical definition of novelization. If we take
into account all particular cases, especially from a historical perspective (as
the genre is so to speak as old as cinema itself), we can of course give nuance
to some of these accepted ideas. Indeed, for every aspect of the definition,
one or more counterexamples can be found. First, that novelization is nec-
essarily a literary by-product knocked together by some unassuming hack
in the service of the Hollywood merchandizing machine and timed to co-
incide with the release of the movie is belied by novels such as Tanguy Viel’s
Cinema, which novelized Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Sleuth over three decades
after its release,17 or Robert Coover’s A Night at the Movies, a highly idio-
syncratic novelization of a whole series of generic models, from animation
pictures to pornography.18 Second, that novelization is first and foremost a
narrative transcription of a screenplay, purged of all technical indications,
does not chime well with novelizations that flirt with the (more high-brow,
not to say elite) technique of découpage, such as the ciné-romans of Alain
Robbe-Grillet or Marguerite Duras,19 and even less with those that explicitly
start out from images, such as Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot.20 And, finally,
15. See Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film (New York, 1996).
16. In the terminology of the Mu-group, there are four forms of this “adaptation proper”:
suppression, adjunction, suppression-adjunction, and permutation. See Jean Dubois, Rhétorique
générale (Paris, 1970). The best example of a discussion of these aspects is still François Truffaut’s
polemic against the so-called “qualité française” (Aurenche-Bost) that was precisely founded on a
particular interpretation of the adaptation of literary texts. See François Truffaut, “Une Certaine
Tendance du cinéma français,” Le Plaisir des yeux: Ecrits sur le cinéma (1987; Paris, 2000), pp. 293–
314.
17. See Tanguy Viel, Cinéma (Paris, 1999). Manckiewicz’s movie was released in 1966.
18. See Robert Coover, A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This: Fictions (London,
1987).
19. For more details, see Virmaux, Le Ciné-roman, and Clerc, Littérature et cinéma.
20. See Jean-Claude Carrière, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, d’après le film de Jacques Tati
(Paris, 1958).
that there is always a clear temporal division between the before of the movie
and the after of its novelization has been quite uncertain from the very first
instances of the genre. The example of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, created
simultaneously as movie and as book, is well known but far from unique.
For instance, when Louis Feuillade filmed his serial The Vampires (1916) in
quick succession and without a real screenplay at the same time the nov-
elized serial by Georges Meirs was appearing,21 it became extremely difficult
to force the work of the writer into the straitjacket of conventional novel-
ization, given that Meirs was both the movie’s official coscreenwriter and
its very liberal novelizer (and add to that all the crossovers the simultaneous
publication of a filmic and a written serial allows). A more contemporary
example is that of Dr. Strangelove, renovelized by its author, who felt be-
trayed by Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel.22 A more extensive in-
vestigation would permit us to nuance the prototypical definition still more
drastically. Novelization, for instance, does not necessarily depart from a
film screenplay; there are also novelizations of comics and videogames.23
Also, novelization does not always result in prose; there are, if the catego-
rization is still appropriate, also novelizations in verse or in the form of
photo novellas.24 Novelization can also, in an intermingling of different
forms and genres, present itself in the form of a continuation—no longer
an adaptation of work A by work B but a prolongation of A by B in an
“original” sequel.25 Finally, we could add the limitless range of reports of
movies of an often considerable length.26
21. See Louis Feuillade, ed. Émile Feuillade and Francis Lacassin (Paris, 1964).
22. The author in question is Peter George, whose novel Red Alert was adapted by Kubrick and
by the author himself under the title Dr. Strangelove. When this collaboration became increasingly
troublesome, George came up with a new written version of the film. The account of the
collaboration of Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke on 2001 is at least as complicated.
23. Max Allan Collins and Richard Rayner, Road to Perdition (New York, 1998), a graphic novel,
was adapted for film by Sam Mendes in 2002. There are of course the famous novelizations of the
video game Tomb Raider.
24. See the excellent anthology The Faber Book of Movie Verse, ed. Philip French and Ken
Wlaschin (London, 1993). The photo novella based on Chris Marker’s cult film The Jetty (1962),
produced by Bruce Mau in collaboration with the author, is a masterpiece in this genre; see Chris
Marker and Bruce Mau, La Jetée/The Jetty (New York, 1992).
25. For an interesting example, see Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London, 1992), in which
he invents a ruby slippers auction.
26. See, for instance, what happens in “On Moonlight Bay as Time Machine,” chap. 2 of
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 30–92. An example
that may seem quite exotic to non-Belgian readers is the “filmatique” of the Flemish author Johan
Daisne, by which term he designated a form of literary criticism, amply illustrated by his own
work from the fifties, which attempted to replace the film, first because the writer allegedly had
privileged access to the essence of the work and, second, because writing was considered to possess
a permanence that film was supposed to lack in those days when it was hard to resee a movie and
when the material fragility of film reels was all too apparent.
Still, however formally and functionally complex and subtle these ex-
amples are (at some time in the future they will have to be surveyed less
haphazardly), the thesis of novelization as anti-adaptation can be sustained
without violating the corpus. In general, the “typical” aspects of adaptation
continue to be downplayed, and their specific difficulties and challenges are
only rarely thematized or made explicit. A more historical approach to nov-
elization leads to similar conclusions. Roughly, this history ranges from the
early novelization-serials to the narrated films (“films racontés”) of the
twenties and thirties to the comparable but less mediatized adaptations of
the forties and fifties,27 and the different attempts to revive the genre in the
sixties and seventies, to the standardized Hollywood novelizations that have
become the norm in the last few decades.28 (It must be noted that like every
noncanonical genre, novelization is hardly aware of its own history, hence
the inclination, both logical and curious, of many writers on the genre to
believe that it is a recent phenomenon.) Anyhow, it is clear that novelization
in its contemporary meaning is more drastically separated from other forms
of cinematographic writing (such as screenplays, découpage, and ciné-ro-
mans) than in the first decades of the medium when there was a real con-
tinuum between more experimental forms (such as the “virtual” screenplay
of an as yet nonexistent movie) and more mainstream forms (such as the
narrated novel).29 The more one approaches the present in the history of
the relation between writing and cinema, the more the most commercial
and popular forms of filmic writing stray from the experimental forms and
are almost entirely absorbed in the most standardized subnovelistic canons.
Here also, then, the thesis of anti-adaptation can be maintained; noveliza-
tion goes out of its way to adopt a low profile and to avoid marking the
semiotic rupture that the change from film to book entails.
This desire for absorption in the literary domain in its most hackneyed
forms, on the one hand, and the refusal to create a form of novel writing
proper to the cinematographic domain, on the other, can explain the status
27. Less mediatized, because these adaptations were produced by smaller publishing houses and
written by writers very much inferior to those writing for the collections of the twenties (such as
Cinario, published by Gallimard).
28. Was Delos W. Lovelace, King Kong (New York, 1932) the first example of a Hollywood
novelization? If it was, it was a very exceptional one: “King Kong was probably the first Hollywood
film to generate a ‘novelization’, although, curiously, the book appeared the year before the film.
King Kong the novel followed cinematic custom, by having several credits: ‘conceived by Edgar
Wallace and Meriam C. Cooper, screen play by James A. Creelman and Ruth Rose; novelized from
the Radio picture by Delos W. Lovelace’” (J. C., “NB: What Is an Embargo For? King Kong in
Literature, etc.,” Times Literary Supplement, 29 Aug. 2003, p. 14).
29. This analysis is based mainly on Virmaux, Le Ciné-roman, and Clerc, Littérature et cinéma.
For a short synthesis, see Marc Mélon, “Cinéma,” in Dictionnaire des termes littéraires, ed. Paul
Aron, Denis Saint-Jacques, and Alain Viala (Paris, 2002).
and the form of novelization as well as its persistence as a genre that distin-
guishes itself in its every detail from more ambitious variants of cinemat-
ographic writing. Whereas découpage, for instance, is accorded all the
prestige of the art movie, novelization is demoted to an almost scandalous
effect of mass culture. It is constructed along simple and transparent nar-
rative lines, using the image merely as inessential illustration, whereas nu-
merous avant-garde writers have attempted a hybrid of the verbal and the
visual in their writings based on cinema. It maintains, finally, despite pe-
riods of decline, a prominent place in the book market, whereas more in-
novative genres come and go without any long-term potential.
Common to these prototypical novelizations is the ambition to reduce the
tension between media and discursive regimes. Novelization does not so
much aspire to become the movie’s other as it wants to be its double. This
strategy of conflict avoidance makes it an anti-adaptation—defined as an ad-
aptation that strives to deny itself as an adaptation and to deny the ruptures
every adaptation necessarily supposes. The imaginary regime novelization
fosters for itself is that of a copy (calque), that is, an immediate transfer. All
this strongly indicates the indirect but considerable importance of the visual,
which implicitly constrains the specific properties of the verbal.
Novelization as Anti-Remediation
Both the prototypical definition and the historical survey of novelization
as a genre have remained subject to a binary approach. The relation between
cinema and book is sketched in bimedial terms (the textual novelization
presents itself as the conversion of a cinematographic work), which occa-
sions comparative judgements (the novelization, as the derivative product,
is assessed in relation to the original movie). Of course, both of these di-
mensions are downplayed as much as possible (the novelization does not
explicitly wish to compete with the movie because it presents itself as a
transformation of the screenplay, not of the images, and because it avoids
raising the question of the respective merits of the movie and the book by
adopting a low profile), but that does not change the fact that the general
horizon of the genre is clearly binary, and this raises further difficulties (and
hence the need to broaden the canvas).
The first difficulty is theoretical. The binary perspective that has long
dominated adaptation studies has increasingly been experienced as a strait-
jacket incapable of accounting for the mobility of the phenomenon as a
social and cultural practice. Imelda Whelehan offers an excellent articula-
tion of the problem:
Many commentators have focused on the process of the transference
from novel to film, where often a well-known work of great literature is
adapted for the cinema and expectations about the ‘fidelity’ of the
screen version come to the fore. . . . These commentators have already
charted the problems involved in such an exercise and the pitfalls cre-
ated by the demands of authenticity and fidelity—not least the intensely
subjective criteria which must be applied in order to determine the de-
gree to which the film is ‘succesful’ in extracting the ‘essence’ of the fic-
tional text. What we aim to offer here is an extension of this debate, but
one which further destabilizes the tendency to believe that the origin
text is of primary importance.30
The second difficulty is practical. The binary and teleological perspective
on the relations between the objects of media adaptations becomes obsolete
in the context of the essentially hybrid character of today’s visual culture,
in which not only do the relations between, before, and after intermingle
but in which the very autonomy of the object tends to disappear:
Phenomenologically, the field of visual images in everyday contempo-
rary “Western” cultures (and others, such as that of Japan) is heteroge-
neous and hybrid. The consumer of images “flips” through endless
magazines, “channel surfs” on waves of TV shows. The integrity of the
semantic object is rarely, if ever, respected. Moreover, the boundaries of
the “object” itself are expanded, made permeable or otherwise trans-
formed. For example, a “film” may be encountered through posters,
“blurbs,” and other advertisements, such as trailers and television clips;
it may be encountered through newspaper reviews, reference work syn-
opses, and theoretical articles (with their “filmstrip” assemblages of still
images); through production photographs, frame enlargements, mem-
orabilia, and so on. Collecting such metonymic fragments in memory,
we may come to feel familiar with a film we have not actually seen.31
In other words, this postmodern property of infinite hybridization is a
considerably less novel phenomenon than some maintain. In his (admit-
tedly very critical) presentation of Jameson’s theses on postmodern culture,
John Storey remarks that the phenomena discerned by the author of “Post-
modernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” display a definite
analogy with the structures of popular culture as it has functioned since at
least the nineteenth century.32 The supposed characteristics of postmodern
30. Whelehan, “Adaptations: The Contemporary Dilemmas,” in Adaptations, p. 3.

31. Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley, 1996),
pp. 22–23.
32. Storey concludes: “There may, therefore, be a certain (postmodern) irony in Jameson’s
complaint about nostalgia effacing history, given that his own critique is structured by a profound
nostalgia for modernist ‘certainty,’ promoted, as it is, at the expense of detailed historical
culture do not so much break with those of the mass culture born with
industrialization but rather prolong them. The industrial revolution, infact,
is equally a cultural revolution that profoundly alters both the production
and the reception of cultural objects. Following, for instance, Dominique
Kalifa, it becomes obvious that a mere description as the transformation of
the work of art into a cultural commodity is insufficient.33 Such a moralizing
judgement preempts a detailed analysis of the cultural impact of the changes
in the semiotics of the object, which now has to obey the triple law of novelty,
seriality, and adaptation. New cultural objects must be circulated contin-
uously for a public in constant search of new stimuli that wants to (or must)
consume in order to fill up a leisure time now radically separated from
working time; those objects that are well received by the public are serially
reproduced for a greater return on investment and to the extent possible
exploited in different media. Adaptation, in this view, represents the cul-
minating logic of the combination of novelty and seriality; it is a product
that is new and serialized at the same time and can be considered profitable
for just this double reason.
Applied to the case of novelization, this frame proves both useful and
revealing. As false novelty and true serial repetition, novelization is symp-
tomatic of the mass culture the culture industry dreams for itself. Also, it
offers an occasion to critically reassess the debate over the concept of re-
mediation, which in the last couple of years has replaced the larger and
vaguer concept of adaptation and now dominates numerous debates on
media mutations. According to J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, West-
ern media systems all strive for a maximal realism, that is, a system in which
the signs erase themselves in order to reveal the things themselves.34 This
genuine realist drive propels the West towards systems in which the signs
render themselves invisible (transparency) and the referents are increasingly
directly present (immediacy). When, then, the transition from one medium
to another is no longer thought of along the teleological lines of McLuhan,
this transition is never neutral; its ultimate motivation is always remedia-
tion, in the double sense of the term (one medium replaces another, one
medium improves another). In any case, the fading of the sign and the un-
understanding of the traditions of popular entertainment” (John Storey, Inventing Popular

Culture [Oxford, 2003], p. 70).
33. See Dominique Kalifa, La Culture de masse en France (Paris, 2001).
34. See J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, Mass., 1999). The subtitle is a direct allusion to McLuhan’s Understanding Media,
which points to the programmatic intent of the book. For a critical reading of the ideas of Bolter
and Grusin, see Baetens, “Back to Basics? A Critique of Cyberhybrid-hype,” in The Future of
Cultural Studies, ed. Baetens and José Lambert (Louvain, 2000), pp. 151–67.
veiling of the referent are always possible only via the aid of signs, which
always risk drawing attention to themselves to the detriment of the referents
they are supposed to present. Whence the paradox or, rather, the inherent,
insolvable, and insurmountable aporia of every representational system;
whence, also, the vast dynamic of the mediological system in its totality,
incessantly generating systems that are ever more performative (from the
point of view of transparency and immediacy) while at the same time al-
lowing outmoded systems to adapt and remedy themselves in order to bet-
ter compete with new developments. In this respect, Bolter and Grusin
propose a distinction between remediation proper, for instance of photog-
raphy (motionless) by cinema (mobile), and repurposing, the operation that
reproduces in a given medium A what is done in a medium B that remedies
the former, thus hoping to generate within the older medium effects iden-
tical to those active in the more recent one. Bolter gives the example of the
printed newspaper, the layout of which increasingly resembles the mosaic
pattern of a computer screen.35
Does the conversion of a feature film into the conventional form of a
traditional novel of normal length offer a good example of remediation or,
just perhaps, repurposing? Obviously, neither model applies, and it is pre-
cisely this disregard for the “laws” of the remediation/repurposing binary
that renders novelization (and perhaps mass culture in general) so fasci-
nating. At a very general level, it seems logical to consider the move from
movie to novel a historical anomaly, a regressive movement in a context
that in general does not let such a step back go unpunished. As Bolter re-
minds us,
Film, which was often said to be the preeminent popular art form of the
twentieth century, refashioned narrative forms and repurposed individ-
ual stories that had belonged to the novel and stage play. Because they
were such vivid audiovisual experiences, films seemed to offer greater
immediacy and authenticity than novels or plays.36
The same author in no uncertain terms rejects the verbal translation of
visual or multimedia signs, which he condemns as so many attempts to
recuperate the new in the service of an outmoded ideology and which rep-
resents a conservative current in the mediological history of the West.37
Moreover, on a more particular level, novelization, except again for its more
35. See Bolter, “Critical Theory and the Challenge of New Media,” in Eloquent Images, ed. Mary
E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 29.
36. Ibid., p. 19.
37. “There is a tradition in humanistic studies of translating other media forms back to the
medium of print, and this tradition continues with new media” (ibid., p. 24).
marginal elite manifestations, does not even aspire to equal the achievement
of the movie on which it is based, let alone to outdo it (even if some rare
instances point out, however timidly, that they wish to do “something dif-
ferent”).38
In order to understand and explain the very existence and the success
(certainly relative but enduring) of novelizations, we need to abandon the
traditional binary approach (which still informs the notion of remediation)
for an inscription in a larger cultural context. In mass culture, to which
novelization, for all intents and purposes, belongs, remediation is not the
(only) crucial factor. Also and primarily at issue is the need to produce con-
stant change right across the interrelated processes of the introduction of
the new, the evolution to serialization and intermedial adaptation. What-
ever the weaknesses of remediation (and these are no doubt real), the genre
of novelization must be granted access to the realm of mass culture. One
should always remember Edgar Morin’s great insight into the spirit of the
age: in a society in movement, the important thing is not to be ahead but
to be able to follow this movement.39 The impact of the visual is here as
strong as it is indirect. Granted that novelization does not wish to compete
with cinema, its very existence participates in the dynamic of a mass culture
propelled and dominated by visual signs.
Novelization as Antiliterature
As soon as we move to the texts of novelizations themselves, that is, to
the books that contain them (the distinction is fundamental), we notice the
stark opposition between the domain of the text and that of the peritext.40
Considering the latter, the reader is immediately flooded by indices of the
cinematographic adaptation. First, many novelizations carry a subtitle that
specifies their relation to the screenplay or the movie on which they are
based. Second, this filiation is enforced by the often very extensive illustra-
tions (cover picture, illustrated fold-in, stills). As for the text itself, the sit-
uation is completely different. On the one hand, on a microstylistic level, it
38. A good example is La Banquière (The Banker), a novelization by Jean Noli of Georges
Conchon’s screenplay for a Francis Girod movie. In his preface, the editor writes: “the story was
too beautiful, too rich in narrative turns, in changes in love, hate, and death, to leave it to only the
filmmakers, and not to make a book out of it. That is why we have asked a writer, Jean Noli . . .
and an economist, Eric Chanel . . . to tell in their own ways the extraordinary destiny of this
woman” (editor’s note to Jean Noli, Georges Conchon, and Erik Chanel, La Banquière: Récit
[Paris, 1980], n.p.).
39. See Edgar Morin, L’Esprit du temps: Essai sur la culture de masse (Paris, 1962).
40. In Gérard Genette’s sense of the term (not to be confused, as often happens, with the
paratext); see Genette, Seuils (Paris, 1987). The peritext is constituted by all the elements that
surround the text in a book without belonging to it (for instance, the names of the author and the
publisher, the title, the illustrations, and so on).
has often been pointed out that the writing of a novelization mitigates what
one might be led to expect from it—a very visual style (and this elimination
of the visual, here considered an antiliterary intervention, more than com-
pensates for another, undisputedly literary dimension—the often emphatic
presence of a narrative voice, which grafts all sorts of ideological comments
onto the text that are absent in the movie version).41 Novelizations empha-
size narration, in the double sense of the term; the level of the story retains
the attention and is at the same time often filtered by a narrative device
missing in the movie (think of how the cinema is less drawn to voiceover,
especially in the case of fictional movies). On the other hand, on a ma-
crostylistic level, there is an almost total eclipse of the ekphrastic nature of
novelization.42 Only very rarely, in fact only in the few elite variants of the
genre, does the text itself advertise the relation, descriptive or other, that
connects it to the movie.43 The text at the inside of the copy carefully dis-
simulates the relations to the movie to the precise extent that its peritext
exhibits them. Of course, the visual repressed asserts itself in many places,
even in the most popular forms of novelization, but the explicit deletion of
the ekphrasis seems to be inherent in the generic definition.
Here, again, we can only properly assess these generic characteristics if
we transcend the binary frame of the derivative relation between movie and
book. It would, for instance, be wrong to read the anti-ekphrastic status of
the novelized text as the revenge of literature on the cinema.44 Such an in-
terpretation must ignore two essential insights. First, the reception of a nov-
elization depends less on the text itself than on the peritext, which inevitably
classifies the former as a cinematographic adaptation. And while the reader
of course retains a certain liberty to read the text differently than the peritext
suggests, the default reading of a novelization is not at all one that valorizes
the work’s literary or aesthetic dimension. Second, and even more impor-
tant, is the observation that the hypothesis of the revenge of the literary text
on its cinematographic pretext fails to take into account the simple fact that
literature has lost its longstanding central position in the cultural polysys-
tem. Nowadays, it is clear that this centre is occupied by film and that the
very idea of the revenge of a cultural form reputed to be more elevated
(literature) on one judged more vulgar (cinema) is, if not a merely theo-
41. Clerc stresses this point most clearly in Littérature et cinéma.

42. Ekphrasis designates any form of narrative or nonnarrative description of fictional or
nonfictional works of art. For a historical survey of ekphrasis in Western poetry, see James
Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, 1993).
43. See, for instance, Viel, Cinéma. There is a notable difference here between poetry and prose,
as the poets who write on the basis of movies explicitly signal the ekphrastic nature of their
practice; see The Faber Book of Movie Verse.
44. See Virmaux, Le Ciné-roman.
retical chimera, at least a conception that the evolution of modern society
has long since devalued. In contrast, the starting point of a reflection on the
relations between film and literature today should be the observation that
the strict separation between these domains has been corroded in our media
culture and that the internal force relations no longer simply favor the tex-
tual culture. We must, in other words, think in terms of systematic adap-
tations (the focus is no longer the work but the relations obtaining between
different works) within a mobile system in which power is now on the side
of the image (the revenge of the book on the film is merely a vacuous claim
in this context). Rather than with revenge, we are dealing here with resis-
tance. In the words, from a distinctly different context, of Joseph Tabbi:
Books have been, or they have been made to seem, instances, of a
bounded, individuated organization, but they must now link up (again)
with a wider, distributed media network. Literature, the most developed
form of book culture . . . will continue to resist this incorporation, the
way that consciousness resists reduction to the modules that are work-
ing hard just to work, automatically and without reflection.45
Cultural studies, which can elaborate Tabbi’s statement on literary stud-
ies, has amply demonstrated that resistance does not equal outright op-
position, but rather negotiation and reappropriation.46 From this point of
view, it is less interesting to investigate the way in which novelizations po-
sition themselves in relation to cinema than to note how the contemporary
novel tends to be read as itself already a novelization, albeit an imaginary
one. Even when we know for a fact that the book precedes the movie (in
the case, for instance, of books adapted to the screen), the contemporay
literary system will position the text as a novelization. Also, the book is read
in relation to the cinema, from which it now derives its status and its legit-
imation, both in the case of a novel already adapted and in the case of a
book that only has the potential of being adapted. In the first case, the ad-
vertisements for the book will present it as if it were a novelization with an
aggressively cinematographic peritext that in almost every detail reproduces
the novelization conventions (a formula such as “the book from the movie”
is being used more and more to present both novelizations and adapta-
tions). In the second case, the interpenetration of the different models goes
one step further, as here the cinematographic regime is interiorized by both
the producers and the consumers of the novel. The former write less with
the intention of being read than with the aim of being adapted to film;47 the
45. Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions (Minneapolis, 2002), p. xi.
46. See Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During
(New York, 1993), pp. 90–102.
47. And even, more technically, to acquire the right style and tone for the only thing that really
counts: the screenplay and then the filmic realization. A good example is Bruno Dumont,
latter no longer read a novel as if it could one day be turned into a film but
as if this had already happened. Such is the impact of the adaptations sur-
rounding us that while reading we already imagine the visual scene, of which
the text is a sort of phantasmagoric transposition.48
Such a situation, in which one medium is absorbed by another, is not
without historical precedent. In his study of the relations between literature
and photography in the nineteenth century, Philippe Ortel poses a similar
question: “it seems that, as soon as it had taken place, the ‘photographic
revolution,’ as [Victor] Hugo called it in a letter to [Pierre-Jules] Hetzel, saw
its impact dwindle, until it was completely forgotten even by those who
profited from it.” How, then, lacking a sufficient number of direct testi-
monies, can one “render visible the literary effects of an invisible revolu-
tion?”49 Ortel goes on to show how this absence of explicit references to
photography in the literary canon at a moment when they where abun-
dantly available in the field of painting should not disguise the implicit but
nonetheless thorough decisive impact of the photographic code on the art
of writing. Literature here borrows from photography a new scene of enun-
ciation (the author increasingly starts to consider himself as a photographic
film registering the real), a new frame of reference (the way literature cuts
and selects its material owes much to photographic framing techniques)
and finally a new interpretant (the interpretation of this material occurs in
relation to a larger cultural “text” conceived in more visual terms). In other
words, what is true of photography in the nineteenth century goes for cin-
ema in the twentieth. The presence of scattered references of the cinemat-
ographic model should not lead us to conclude that it is absent where no
trace of direct influence or imitation can be found. Novelization, with its
opposition between a cinematographic peritext and an anti-ekphrastic text,
offers a good illustration of this. Even where the writing seems to distance
itself from the film, as in the style of the novelized text, the impregnation
by visuality is complete. Whatever it may happen to think or say about itself,
novelization is a typical case of antiliterature.
Second Birth, First Death?

We can no longer restrict ourselves to an essentially binary approach to
novelization that retains a focus on the comparison between the writing of
L’Humanité (Paris, 2001). This text also has great literary merits, which makes it a fascinating case.
The phenomenon is obviously not new. See, for instance, the comments on hard-boiled novelists
in André Bazin, “Pour un cinéma impur,” Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris, 1987), pp. 81–82; this
whole text is in fact very relevant to the subject treated here.
48. Admittedly, there is no empirical evidence for this hypothesis, which does not mean it is
incorrect (it recurs, at any rate, regularly in informal discussions of the reading process).
49. Philippe Ortel, La Littérature à l’ère de la photographie: Enquête sur une révolution invisible
(Nı̂mes, 2002), pp. 7–8, 9.
the book and that of the film. The extension of the research to the totality
of the mediological landscape is a necessity that the problem of the passage
from film to book allows us to consider in unexpected ways. Novelization,
indeed, offers a real challenge to media theory first because it so obviously
goes against the currents diagnosed by media theorists from McLuhan and
Debray to Bolter and Grusin, but also because the strange interaction be-
tween verbal and visual logic occurs precisely in a genre so distant from
figural postmodernism. Structurally, novelization is a monster, simulta-
neously anachronistic and innovative, both cinematographic and anti-
ekphrastic.
In The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell has developed a media theory (it is
worth noting that for him the notions media and genre are interchangeable)
based on the interaction of three elements: a material host-medium, a class
of signs, and a type of content. For Cavell, one can speak of a medium or a
genre as soon as there is an automatic coincidence of a material substrate,
a type of sign and a certain content.50 The sudden emergence of one of these
elements in a certain work that will go on to function as a norm of what
can and cannot be done within a medium does not automatically entail the
introduction of a new element in one of the other domains. The new host-
media do not immediately find the new signs and contents that they need
in order for a new medium to come into existence, and the same goes for
the use of new signs or the discovery of a new content. This phenomenon,
also analyzed in the technological domain by media historian Brian Win-
ston, is central to the research of two film historians, André Gaudreault and
Philippe Marion.51 They have termed it “the second birth” of media, which
designates the moment when, after a latency period or a series of immature
developments in which the medium has not yet gained recognition, it es-
tablishes a technically stable and institutionally acknowledged “fixed” form
that persists until other innovations or new developments either modify or
suppress its structure.52
The example of novelization also allows a new perspective on an aspect
of this problematic that has received little attention—the perspective of the
impure after the second (and “definitive”) birth of a genre or medium. In
this context, novelization appears as an unorthodox artifact, which seems
to look for its specificity precisely by avoiding what could fortify it. It as-
50. For more on the notion of automatism, see Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on
the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 101–8, and Baetens, “Le Roman-photo: Média
singulier, média au singulier?” Sociétés et Représentations, no. 9 (Apr. 2000): 51–60.
51. See Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society: A History (London, 1998).
52. See André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “Un Média naı̂t toujours deux fois . . . ,”
Sociétés et Représentations, no. 9 (Apr. 2000): 21–36.
pires to the new by fleeing it; it aspires to innovation without looking for
what has not been tried before either in terms of isolated mediatic elements
or their possible combinations. And if the case of novelization nuances the
theory of double birth, its real interest no doubt lies elsewhere. Indeed, nov-
elization suggests that the passage from the first to the second birth of a
medium—the passage from a state in which the medium has not yet come
to acknowledge itself to the state in which it discovers and assumes its spec-
ificity—often hinders our perception of the persistence of the impure, of the
nonspecific within the “triumphant” phase of the medium, in which the part
played by these remainders is surprisingly more real and definitely more
relevant because useful and effective.
In this respect, the example of novelization allows us to reframe the his-
torian Livio Belloı̈’s important observations on early cinema.53 In the
contemporary conception of the cinema, we often simply assume a discon-
tinuity between two periods and two types of images: first, premodern or
“early” cinema, with its own type of images and its own logic (a type of film
said to be less focused on the narration of a fictional story than on the dis-
play of images with the goal of surprising or entertaining the spectator,
whence the name “cinema of attractions”); then modern film (to simplify
things, born in the revolutions of Porter and Griffith), also characterized
by its proper images and its own logic (that of fictional narration). Trying
to reread the key moment in the transition between both types of film, Belloı̈
is forced to problematize this opposition in two ways. First, on a temporal
plane, he shows how early cinema already crucially anticipated many of the
later forms and functions of modern cinema and, conversely, how the prop-
erly narrative modern cinema retains many of the characteristics of early
cinema. Second, on the level of the images themselves, early cinema is not
merely the domain of imagistic attractions, just as modern cinema does not
monopolize that of narrative images. Belloı̈ thus categorically rejects the
equation of periods with types of images. Early cinema is not the cinema of
attractions but the cinema in which attractive images dominate other me-
dial virtualities; similarly, modern cinema is not narrative cinema but rather
the cinema in which the mere “attractive” image is dominated by other vir-
tualities, especially by the narrative dimension.
It now seems fair to say that, on the basis of the temporal and mediatic
distortions that novelization, as a cultural form, has revealed, the adoption
of a historical model based on the restless and total mutation of genres and
media becomes untenable. Whatever claims to purity a cultural form may
entertain along its historical trajectory, the creative presence of residues has
53. See Livio Belloı̈, Le Regard retourné: Aspects du cinéma des premiers temps (Montreal, 2002).
an incontestable and productive mediatic and generic reality. The second
birth of a genre or a medium can thus equally be considered the moment
of its death, that is, the moment at which the medium or the genre must
condemn or deny its own heterogeneity. Banned from the genre, however, this
heterogeneity does not so much disappear as reappear with a vengeance. It
takes the form of anachronisms, of more or less exotic nostalgia, or of prac-
tices perceived as external and often dismissed as being old-fashioned or
too commercial. It is then, I claim, the case of novelization that shows the
difficulty of thinking of these anachronisms or commercial setbacks in
purely teleological terms. Novelization and, more generally, all that resists
purity is not therefore reactionary but rather a signal of vitality.

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Novelization, a Contaminated Genre?

Authors(s): Jan Baetens

Translated by Pieter Verrmeulen

The Text Writes Back

Critical Inquiry 32 (Autumn 2005)

4. See Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986).

J a n B a e t e n s teaches at the Institute of Cultural Studies of the University of

10. Virmaux, Le Ciné-roman, p. 70 n. 23.

30. Whelehan, “Adaptations: The Contemporary Dilemmas,” in Adaptations, p. 3.

understanding of the traditions of popular entertainment” (John Storey, Inventing Popular

41. Clerc stresses this point most clearly in Littérature et cinéma.

Second Birth, First Death?

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