“Locked In”: The Ethics of Infidelity in Adaptation and Cross-Cultural Arts-Based Research

Year 2010, Issue: 32, 52 - 56, 01.10.2010

Julia Lane

Abstract

A friend of mine was recently rushed to the hospital from his home. When he was “filling me in” about his sudden and unexplained absence, he sent me an e-mail that included this statement: “I got to have the horrific experience of being asked where I was, being sure I was in VGH [Vancouver General Hospital], wanting to tell them where I was but, for some reason not recognizing the particular room I was in meant [that] I could not say the words” Irvine . This account reminded me immediately of locked-in syndrome, a condition where one is completely awake and alert but, due to a paralysis of voluntary muscles, unable to move or speak. While this may seem like a very strange way to begin an article about adaptation studies and arts-based research, I am interested in the ways that my friend’s experience and “locked-in syndrome” are analogous to – though clearly more intense, “horrific” and traumatic than – the feelings that people have when they recognize something as an adaptation but cannot “express themselves” or don’t see themselves or their own “imaginary mise-enscène” in it Stam 55 . As Stam articulates, when we are confronted with someone else’s phantasy, we feel the loss of our own phantasmatic relation to the text 54-55 . In other words, we feel that we have been “locked in” to a vision that does not include our personal preferences. The intensity of the comparison that I am drawing to the medical world can perhaps go some way to contextualizing the intensity of what Stam has called the “profoundly moralistic” language of criticism surrounding adaptations, including words such as “infidelity, betrayal, deformation, violation, vulgarization, and desecration” 54 . Certainly, many of these words would be easily accepted in a hospital situation where lives are saved and lost.

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