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INTERLUDE: FILM AND NOVEL 237
They are secondary differences; were it for them alone, the novel would offer little resistance to adaptations conforming to the cinematic approach. But the two media also embrace different worlds. And this difference between them is crucial indeed.
Two worlds
THE MATERIAL AND THE MENTAL CONTINUUM
The fact that both film and novel feature the flow or stream of life does not imply that they focus on the same aspects of it. As mentioned earlier, film gravitates toward a kind of life which is "still intimately connected, as if by an umbilical cord, with the material phenomena from which its emotional and intellectual contents emerge."* Cinematic films, that is, capitalize on the suggestive power of these phenomena to convey all that which is not visible and material. In Diary of a Country Priest, for instance, it is the allusive expressions of the young priest's face rather than his explicit diary entries, which succeed in evoking and impressing upon us his spiritual struggles and sufferings; everything here hinges on the transparence to beliefs and values of a physical entity. Life, as captured by the camera, is predominantly a material continuum.
To be sure, the novel too is frequently engrossed in physical existence —faces, objects, landscapes and all. But this is only part of the world at its command. A composition in words, it is able, and therefore disposed, directly to name and penetrate inner-life events that range from emotions to ideas, from psychological conflicts to intellectual disputes. Practically all novels lean toward internal developments or states of being. The world of the novel is primarily a mental continuum. Now this continuum often includes components which elude the grasp of the cinema because they have no physical correspondences to speak of. Unlike the country priest's spirituality, they cannot be intimated by facial expressions or so; there is nothing in camera-reality that would refer to them. (The counterargument that they are within the reach of dialogue and, hence, easily accessible to the screen is flimsy, for it means endorsing uncinematic films— those with verbal statements in the lead.) Consequently, the differences between the universes of the two media threaten to outweigh their resemblances.
REMEMBRANCE OF GREGORIAN CHANTS
That life, as depicted in literary narratives, may always extend into cinematically irreproducible regions, is strikingly illustrated by the Proust
*Seep. 71.