Faith in the Faithless: An Inter(Re)View with Linda Hutcheon (Interview‪)‬

LINDA HUTCHEON IS UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto and is arguably one of the most prolific of Canadian scholars. A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006) is her ninth solo effort. A Theory of Adaptation points out the pervasiveness of adaptation in the current multimedia climate but also shows how the practice has had long and deep connections to literary and cultural practices long before the present. As with elements of the postmodern, the new is not so new after all. Hutcheon is at pains to point out that "there are many and varied motives behind adaptation and few involve faithfulness" (xiii). "Faithfulness" assumes a singular origin, a stable source from which anything that follows must flow. The notion of being faithful has guided many earlier studies of the relations between, say, fiction and film, comics and video games. Her premise is not so much that of Borges or Eliot, where the present re-writes the past but, rather, that the adapted text "challeng[es] the authority of any notion of priority. Multiple versions exist laterally, not vertically" (xiii). Fidelity to the text being adapted is, then, not the issue here.