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SUBSTANCE INTO SHADOW 189
the incompetence (or unscrupulousness) of most adaptors rather than the impossibility of adaptation itself.
The commercial reasons for the cinema's frequent reliance on the novel for its subjects are not difficult to find. Modern publishing methods especially in America can bring a novel to an extremely wide public and the producer who buys the film rights already has one gauge of his film's potential selling power. This, perhaps, is why the short story (which provides different but equally suitable film material) has been comparatively rarely tapped. But beside this, there are technical affinities between the novel and the film which naturally tempt the adaptor. The two media have a similar flexibility of movement and scope for characterization. They share the capacity to develop narrative in terms of both dialogue and action. Where a novel's conflicts are primarily externalas happens in a great deal of contemporary American fiction a film can often take over the novel's treatment of detail as well as its over-all structure. These similarities have, however, frequently blinded adaptors to the fact that, to be valid, their work is subject to the same disciplines as the original artist's. Adapting another man's novel does not absolve the adaptor from the necessity of creating an integrated work within his own medium, nor from the need of starting from a consistent, clearly defined conception. His conception may take the form of wishing to reproduce the balance and emphasis of the original. Or it may be new : the adaptor may treat the novelist's subject as more or less raw material and interpret it afresh in the light of his own creative personality. Though the two forms are different, both are legitimate : in the latter, the adaptor's approach to his material is merely applied, so to speak, one stage further back in the creative process and becomes comparable to the novelist's approach to life itself.
The following notes (which do not attempt a comprehensive survey) illustrate the two kinds of adaptation. The