As previously mentioned, Blum-Kulka writes about the concept of coherence referring to an explicitation of textual elements during the process of translation, which in our case is an inter-semiotic one rather than an inter-lingual one.
In his essay Beyond fidelity: The dialogics of adaptation, Robert Stam (2000) writes that “one way to look at adaptation is to see it as a matter of a source novel hypotext’s being transformed by a complex series of operations: selection, amplification, concretisation, actualisation, critique, extrapolation, analogisation, popularisation, and reculturalisation.” (p.68) To him, “the source text forms a dense informational network, a series of verbal cues that the adapting film text can then take up, amplify, ignore, subvert, or transform,” (p.69) and these changes that occur in the process of adaptation happen due to a series of factors such as “studio style, ideological fashion, political constraints, auteurist predilections, charismatic stars, economic advantage or disadvantage, and evolving technology”. (p.69) Put simply, the source text provides a wealth of materials that adapters can draw on to produce their adapted version according to their own motivations and agenda.
Speaking from practical experience, Andrew Davies, a well-known writer with more than a few successful novel-to-screen adaptations under his belt22, shares about his experience in selecting and adapting materials from a source text. In an interview with Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, Davies pointed out that not all parts of the source text are equally important to an adapter. In his words, “what interests me will also have a lot to do with ‘the way we live now’ – and what kind of relevance
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different parts of the book have, or don’t have, because some bits will seem really interesting and vital and some bits, won’t” (Cartmell & Whelehan, 2007, p.245).
Hence, at least for Davies, one of the criteria for his decisions on what and how to adapt a certain text is the material’s relevance to his intended viewers.
Here, we argue that The Handmaid’s Tale adapters share a similar motivation.
As we have seen from the previous chapter, the adapters have created shifts between the source text and the adaptation in order to explicitate the novel’s themes and messages. In this section, we will take a closer look at how they have made alterations to the plot content in The Handmaid’s Tale in order to produce an adaptation that is relevant to their audience. Besides pointing out how the adapted product is similar to or different from the novel, we will also discuss why these shifts are made the way they are.
In our analysis, we will categorise the shifts between the novel and the television adaption of The Handmaid’s Tale according to Blum-Kulka’s classification of shifts in coherence, namely reader-focused shifts and text-focused shifts. By doing so, we hope to show that shifts can occur on many different levels and for a variety of reasons, but all of these shifts serve the adapters’ purpose(s).
Reader-focused shifts
To recap, reader-focused shifts refer to those that are made to bring the product of the translation/adaptation closer to the audience’s reference network.
Engelstad points out that “adaptations are only of interest if the source text enables the film to hit a nerve within contemporary culture and therefore to make a commercially successful film,” (p.35) and we believe that one way to accomplish this objective
would be to make an adaptation that taps on the audience’s existing reference network, which is actually what the adapters of The Handmaid’s Tale did.
The Handmaid’s Tale novel was written in the 1980s, more than three decades before the television series was produced, but set in a near future. So, in a bid to make the novel more futuristic, Atwood imagined a world in which a system called the Compucount contains all of one’s money (the equivalent of a bank account). In this cashless society, the citizens make all their transactions through Compucards, which, as the name implies, are tied to the Compucount system. Atwood’s invention of the Compucount system is far from being a mere whim, as it constitutes an important plot point as well, for the Gilead government use the Compucount system to seize control of each woman’s money on the same day that they ban women from holding jobs. The establishment of a cashless society is a prerequisite to the government’s sudden and successful takeover, and we get a glimpse of the process through what Moira tells June after they each loses their jobs and money.
They’ve frozen them... Any account with an F on it instead of an M. All they needed to do is push a few buttons. We’re cut off. (p. 178)
They had to do it that way, the Compucounts and the jobs both at once.
Can you picture the airports, otherwise? They don’t want us going anywhere, you can bet on that. (p. 179).
Vulture describes the terms “Compucount” and “Compucard” as “futuristic” (Hudson, 2017). In the television series, instead of retaining these retro-futuristic terms, the adapters choose to shift these concepts to what 21st century viewers are familiar with, which is the debit and credit card system. In a flashback in
Episode 3, June and Moira are trying to buy coffee from their regular café with June’s debit card, but the card is declined even though June had just deposited her paycheck into her account the day before. By not mentioning the words “Compucount” and
“Compucard”, the adapters avoid the confusion that these terms might cause in the minds of the viewers (What are Compucards? How are they different from our bankcards?), and also eliminate the time that had to be invested into explaining these terms. Instead, the adapters choose to present the scene in such a way that is very familiar to us, thus shifting the narrative closer to the viewers’ frame of reference and consequently enhancing the coherence of the adaptation.
Besides avoiding any mention of made-up banking terms, the adapters also insert references to our modern life into the television adaptation. A flashback in the first episode had Moira complaining about her slow Uber ride to June as an explanation for arriving late. She could have just complained about her slow taxi ride instead of referring to it as an Uber ride, so we believe that this name-dropping of the popular ride-hailing app is not insignificant.
In the same episode, in another flashback, there is also a mention of another popular app Tinder23 by Aunt Lydia. June has just been brought to the Red Centre during one of Aunt Lydia’s indoctrination lectures. As June is being led to her seat, we hear Aunt Lydia saying, “Birth control pills, morning-after pills, murdering babies. Just so they could have their orgies, their Tinder.” By putting “Tinder” in the same sentence as “orgies”, Aunt Lydia is implying that both are sinful acts of promiscuity that led to the population crisis that the Gilead government is trying to reverse. Later on, in Episode 6, a flashback scene shows Moira scrutinising June’s
23 Tinder is a location-based social search mobile app that allows users to like or dislike other users based on pictures and a short bio. If both parties like each other, they can then start chatting. It is marketed as a dating app but also commonly used as a hookup app.
Tinder profile and even asking Luke, whom they have just met, his opinions on June’s pictures. Luke eases into this “task” without questions, which tells us that he is familiar with what Tinder is, and also that it is common to use Tinder to search for potential romantic partners.
It is worth noting that both Uber and Tinder are mentioned in the very first episode of the series. The first episode of any television series is very important to the entire series, as it sets the tone for the series and also acts as a “hook” to keep viewers coming back for more. As such, by incorporating mentions of Uber and Tinder in the pilot episode, the adapters bring the reference network of the adaptation close to their viewers’, thus closing the gap between the series’ reality and the audience’s reality in order to establish a sense of resonance in the minds of the viewers.
In other words, this decision to do away with unfamiliar made-up terms and incorporate content that relates to the audience’s reference network shows how adapters can make an adapted series more coherent to its viewers by performing audience type reader-focused shifts in the adaptation process. In Blum-Kulka’s words, this type of shifts allows the readers/audience “to draw the necessary inferences for understanding both the letter and the spirit of the text.” (p.304) In the case of a television adaptation, “the letter” refers to the events in the narrative, while “the spirit” refers to the themes and messages that the series wishes to bring across to its audience. Thus, in those examples, we see that the adapters have not only presented the events of the novel (the letter) on screen, but also made the themes and messages easier to digest through its updating of the source content, hence staying true to “the spirit” of the novel, which at its core is a work of speculative fiction set in the near future that runs chillingly close to our own.
Other than Blum-Kulka, Hutcheon (2014) has also written about the relevance of, well, relevance. In her book Theory of Adaptation, she points out that “to appeal to a global market or even a very particular one, a television series or a stage musical may have to alter the cultural, regional, or historical specifics of the text being adapted” (p.30). This alteration often involves updating the temporal, cultural, and social context in order “to shorten the gap between works created earlier and contemporary audiences,” “in an attempt to find contemporary resonance for their audiences” (p.142). Hutcheon terms this process “a form of transculturation” as
“adapters seek the ‘right’ resetting or recontextualizing” (p.146) in order to make their adapted product more relevant to their audience.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, Hulu’s main subscribers are relatively young, mostly in their 20s and 30s. According to statistics published on Wikipedia, more than 80% of Tinder users are between the ages of 16 to 34. Uber users share similar characteristics. According to statistics published by Statista, in the first quarter of 2017, the majority of Uber’s users (65%) are between the ages of 16 to 24 (“Share of Uber's users,” n.d.). Evidently, the main users of these two services and the main subscriber base of Hulu overlap greatly. Hence, the mentions of Uber and Tinder in the television adaptation, and in the first episode no less, are far from incidental, but an intentional move by the adapters to relate to their viewers’ schemas, in order to create audience engagement and interest in the series.
Text-focused shifts
The second type of shift under the “coherence” concept is the text-focused kind, also referred to as “text-based” shifts in Blum-Kulka’s paper. Blum-Kulka writes, “Texts may change or lose their meaning potential through translation.”
(p.304) She goes on to elaborate that “text-based shifts of coherence often occur as a result of particular choices made by a specific translator, choices that indicate a lack of awareness on the translator’s part of the SL text’s meaning potential.” (p.309)
As we can see from the above excerpts from Kulka’s paper, Blum-Kulka thinks that this kind of shifts are “losses” that are undesirable, in the sense that the translated text inevitably restricts or changes the meaning potential of its source text. However, are changes to a text’s meaning potential necessarily undesirable? We will like to argue that such shifts might not be so by default, for changes to a text’s meaning potential might even open up new possibilities that were unexplored in the source text and hence strengthen and reinforce the messages and themes inherent in the source text.
Since the novel-to-television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale is a cross-medium one, many changes have been made to the source text materials in order to bring it to the small screen. Besides the realisation of the narrative’s visual potential explored in the previous chapter, there are also many changes in terms of its narratology and plot structure either because of the nature of the medium or because of the agenda of the adapters. However, instead of reducing or warping the meaning potential of the novel, I will like to argue that these shifts enhance it. The following sections will examine shifts in the plot structure between the novel and the adaptation to see how these changes give the product its own meaning potential which is, in our opinion, not inferior to that of its novel counterpart.
Narrative Point of View
One very notable shift from the novel to the television adaptation is that of the narrator’s point of view. The novel consists of 15 chapters that are later revealed to be a series of voice recordings made by June. Thus, the text is entirely generated from only her point of view, consisting of recounts of events (not in strict chronological order) as well as thoughts, memories, and dreams. The novel is divided into 15 chapters, alternating between chapters titled “Night” and other chapters named otherwise (we can refer to these chapters as “Day” chapters). The Night chapters contain mostly memories, thoughts, and longings of our protagonist; it is what Sheckels (2012) calls June’s “time of self-empowerment” (p.83). On the other hand, the Day chapters are accounts of her life as a Handmaid. We can also see the Night chapters as June’s private sphere, while the Day chapters constitute her public one.
The first person narrative point of view establishes a high degree of intimacy between the reader and our protagonist, for this perspective offers us glimpses of both her mental world and her physical world. However, it is largely unfeasible for an adaptation to transplant such a narrative point of view wholesale (assuming that it is even possible) because of the many restrictions such a viewpoint brings with it.
Imelda Whelehan (1999) writes about how adapters need to make changes to what she calls “the stock formal devices of narrative”, namely the point of view, focalisation, tense, voice, metaphor etc (p.9). Also, according to Stanley Kauffmann, “the more purely ‘literary’ the achievement of the source novel, the less likely it is to be effectively or ‘faithfully’ adapted to the screen.” (Welsh, 2007, p.XXII) The Handmaid’s Tale is rather “literary” in the sense that it is a novel that only “tells” (as oppose to “show”) the story, for every word before the “Historical Notes” segment is
spoken by June to communicate with the listener/reader of her tale. In a somewhat metacognitive statement, June even says, “I tell, therefore you are” (p.268), highlighting the “telling” nature of the novel.
The transposition of a “telling” narrative to a “showing” medium brings with it inherent challenges. In the shift from novel to television, defining the narrative point of view on screen becomes a tricky task. The first person recount in the novel is clear enough, but who is the narrator in the television series? Is there even a “narrator” in this sense? We see/hear a lot of June’s monologue in the adaptation; however, at the same time, we also know that we are not restricted by her perspective and knowledge, for we also see what happens or happened to other characters when they are or were away from June, so we know that the adaptation’s narrative point of view is not simply a first person one.
If the novel emphasises the depth of June’s internal world, the adaptation emphasises its breadth. In the novel, June has a lot of open questions that she has no answers to. What happened to Luke? What happened to Moira? Did they escape? Are they alive? Atwood likes to create open endings in her works, and these ambiguities offered the show creators opportunities to flesh out the story by filling in these gaps.
The narrative strategy of the adaptation allows the production team to show the viewers the stories of important characters like Luke and Moira, who both make it to Canada by the end of Season One. If we had been restricted to June’s viewpoint, it will not have been possible to tell these stories, which are undoubtedly important to future storylines. By the end of the season, we see that the storyline has swallow-tailed into two, with one anchored by June in Gilead, and the other one by Luke and Moira in Canada, creating opportunities for the show creators to explore how their
respective circumstances can guide the narrative’s development in the next season and even beyond.
It is no simplistic task to compare the respective narrative strategies of a novel to screen adaptation, for each medium possesses its inherent unique characteristics and limitations. François Jost (2004) writes that “comparative narratology is less a matter of pointing up resemblances or differences between two semiotic systems than of deploying the cinema–literature shuttle in order to forge more precise and productive concepts” (p.71), and differentiates between primary internal ocularisation, secondary internal ocularisation, and zero ocularisation (p.78 & 79) to explore the relationship between the positioning of the camera and the narrative point of view.
Jost also points out that zero ocularisation, which occurs when a shot is not
“anchored… internal to the diegesis” (p.74), is the most common narrative strategy used on film. Jost further explains that zero ocularisation “simply means that it is not possible to assign an image to any specific gaze” (p.76), which makes it somewhat similar to the third-person narrative point of view in literary genres.
In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, as with most on-screen narratives, zero ocularisation is the most commonly used narrative strategy. Also, instead of the Day/Night dichotomy of the novel, the television series’ structure is a largely linear narrative punctuated by flashbacks. However, the shift in narrative strategy between the two mediums does not diminish the coherence of the adaptation; it just infuses the product with different narrative possibilities by shifting the emphasis from a Handmaid’s internal world to an external one, thus expanding the narrative in the sense that the story can now cover more grounds in terms of the stories of other characters and other nations in regards to Gilead. Expansion of a story inevitably
involves the creation of new content as well as changes to existing materials. On this note, we can move on to look at the differences in plot structure between the novel and the television adaptation in terms of the reshuffling of plot points, additions, omissions, and changes based on the source content, while keeping the characteristics
involves the creation of new content as well as changes to existing materials. On this note, we can move on to look at the differences in plot structure between the novel and the television adaptation in terms of the reshuffling of plot points, additions, omissions, and changes based on the source content, while keeping the characteristics