ADAPTING TRISTRAM SHANDY by Adria Young Submitted in ...

we are aware that we are watching a film adaptation, just as Tristram consistently
reminds us that we are reading his book. According to Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin in
Remediation, these moments in A Cock and Bull Story are hypermedial, and draw
attention to the relationships between the novel and the film. A Cock and Bull Story
challenges the conventions of cinema and appeals to various conventions and
characterizations. The film is a “refashioning” of the original (Bolter and Grusin 15); the
“interpretive” aspect of the adaptation (Hutcheon 20) transfers the spirit of the text to film
in intertextual and contextual ways. In line with Hutcheon’s principles of adaptation, A
Cock and Bull Story, bothinterpretive and creative, is thus faithful to the spirit of Tristram
Shandy.
I. High Fidelity
It may seem contradictory to toss fidelity criticism out of the window (much like
Tristram's foreskin), and then assert that an adaptation is faithful to its source text. The
idea of fidelity is a subject of debate among adaptation theorists. But the popularity of
literary adaptations in the cinema warrants such debates. As of 2002, roughly 30 per cent
of films were based on novels (Mayer 2) and it can be safely assumed that this number
has increased since then. 77 When it comes to eighteenth-century literary adaptations in
particular, there is a habit of producing the “heritage film,” the kind of film where film-
makers “revel in the opportunity to represent the long eighteenth-century” (Mayer 1)
through elaborate set design, costume, and film locations, like Sofia Coppola's Marie
Antoinette (2006). 78 Often, literary adaptations focus on the direct text-to-screen
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