The nature of the novel is that it is a long (25,000 or more words), written work of narrative fiction that is intended to be read (rather than performed); that it is linear and sequential, intended to be read from beginning to end; that it is experienced by one reader at a time who usually reads a printed version of a manuscript; that it can contain descriptions of places, things, ideas, but also of people, their actions, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, desires, joys, and sorrows, that is, that it can portray both external physical realities and internal psychological realities; that it is a living instrument of literature and as such the definitions of what a novel is and what it can and cannot do shift and change with time.

The nature of cinema is that it records on a strip of light-sensitive film the continuous, often moving visual reality that is presented before it as a series of discrete, rectangular photographic images, each image recorded a fraction of a second after the image that preceded it (and film also records aural reality either on an optical soundtrack or on a magnetic stripe on the film); that each image taking up only a portion of the entire film has boundaries, and being thus framed by those boundaries, each image has a sense of including some things in it and of excluding others from it; that cinema reproduces in performance the visual and aural reality it has recorded as light is passed through the film and the frames are projected and focused onto a screen one at a time at (usually) 24 frames per second, a speed fast enough to give the illusion of visual continuity and movement (and the sonic portion—whether recorded visually on the film or electromagnetically on magnetic stripe on the film—is also reproduced and fed through an electromagnetic-mechanical sound system); that cinema’s frames reproduce the visual reality it records in two dimensions although the shadow of the third dimension is evident because some things are closer to the camera than others, some things obscure others, lines of perspective are evident, and so forth; that cinema is linear and sequential, that is, one frame is projected after another and then another and so on from the beginning to the end of the film; that there is no upper limit on the number of frames that can be projected; that cinema can be plastic within the frame, that is, people and things within the frame can move or be moved, can be added or removed, can be replaced by other people and things; that it can be plastic from frame to frame, that is, the reality of what is depicted in one frame can be butted up against the reality of what is depicted in the succeeding frame without regard for how "realistic" or "logical" this juxtaposition is; that cinema can be experienced via performance by many people at the same time (rather than being read by a single person); that cinema has its roots as an art form in the novel, the drama, and photography, but that it is not limited to being precisely like any of these things because of its plastic nature, its changing nature, and the limitless options provided by human imagination and technological changes.

As a scholar of both literature and film, I am fascinated by film adaptations of novels. The topic of film adaptations of novels, although fascinating and well worth investigating, is far too broad a topic for the purposes of this study. Moreover, it is a subject that has been studied by many scholars. To narrow the scope of this study and to make it more my own, I have chosen to perform a comparative study in literature and film, specifically a comparison of the portrayal of the theme of alienation in four source novels with the portrayal of that same theme of alienation in the four films that have been adapted from these novels. Thus, the topic of this study could be briefly explained as a comparative study in the adaptation of alienation from novel to film. Some people believe that adapting a novel into a film destroys the literary essence of the novel, that translating a novel into a film is akin to and as unlikely to be successful as trying to dance architecture or sculpt music. Perhaps. Nonetheless, novels are routinely adapted into films.

Since its inception at the end of the nineteenth century, film has raided the realm of the novel in order to borrow means of creating characters, of explaining relationships, of expressing dialogue, and most of all, of telling a story. Moreover, novels have not only been a source of style, they have also been a source for film content as well. Indeed, Marguerite G. Ortman, quoted in George Bluestone’s Novels into Film suggests that "one-third of all full-length features [made by three of the major studios between 1934 and 1935] were derived from novels" (Bluestone, p. 3). Lester Asheim reports that "[976 of 5807 or 17.2%] releases by major studios [between 1934 and 1945]" were adapted from novels (Bluestone, p. 3). Of the fifty-one films that have won the Academy Award for Best Picture since the end of World War II (from 1946’s The Best Years Of Our Lives through 1996’s The English Patient), twenty-one were adapted from novels, one, The Godfather Part II, was a sequel to The Godfather, one of the twenty-one winners adapted from novels, and one other, All About Eve, was based on a short story, for a total of twenty-three deriving from written narrative works. Nine of the fifty-one winners were adapted from plays, four were adapted from biographies or autobiographies, one was adapted from magazine articles, and only fourteen were original material written expressly for the screen (The Internet Movie Database, http://us.imdb.com). Twenty-three of fifty-one is 45%. These comments and statistics confirm that a significant portion of films have had their origins in narrative fiction, primarily novels.

Turning to novels as both source material and guide has been a natural move for film-makers. One of the ways that producers hope to guarantee a large audience and hence a large profit for a film has been to adapt a best-selling novel and hope that the built-in audience of readers will guarantee a film audience and contribute to the word of mouth advertising for the film. Paramount Studios began in 1912 as producer Jesse Lasky’s Famous Player’s Film Company, which operated under the slogan "Famous Players in Famous Plays," a slogan which belied the fact that he oversaw the adaptation of both famous plays and famous novels for the screen. He correctly intuited that "famous" source stories, stories that were already published and read widely, were what some audiences wanted. In 1936, producer David O. Selznick won the rights to film Margaret Mitchell’s astonishingly successful novel Gone With The Wind by paying the novelist the then-astronomical sum of $50,000. Selznick went on to make in 1939 one of the most successful films of all time, which made enormous profits both on its initial release and on re-releases through the 1970s. It still runs on television to enormous audiences. Also in 1939, George Schafer, then head of RKO, wanting to add prestige to the studio, initiated an effort to hire talented artists to film literary adaptations, a move which led him to hire Orson Welles whose "first film was to be an adaptation of Heart of Darkness" (Carringer, p. 3). The Heart of Darkness project was scrapped, and Welles’s first film was an original screenplay written by Herman Manckiewicz and Welles that became Citizen Kane, but Welles’s second film was an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons. In short, film has always been related to the novel, deriving from it technique, prestige, and matter.

There is perhaps another way to look at the relationship between novels and the films that are adapted from them. Two of the fields that the term "comparative literature" includes are the use of literary criticism in the study of literature and the studies of relationships between literatures. As Wellek and Warren put it in their basic textbook on comparative literature:

This relationship between source and receiving factor is well suited to the study of film adaptations. In this study, then, I will compare the alienation that is the "image and concept" of the original author in the novel with the "image and concept" of that alienation in the receiving factor, the film adaptation. Moreover, although alienation in literature has been explored by other scholars, there is a distinct absence of comparative scholarship exploring how alienation is expressed in novels and in the films adapted from those novels, a void which this study will help to fill.

Alienation as a topic for literary analysis probably peaked in the 1960s and early 1970s, but in spite of its being apparently passe, alienation remains interesting to some scholars. In his recently published study The Future of Alienation, Richard Schacht writes that:

But of course, there are many other meanings for the word "alienation" beyond that suggested by Marx. Schacht examines Marx’s definition as well as most other prominent and useful definitions of alienation in Schacht’s earlier book on alienation entitled simply Alienation. In his essay "The Inevitability of Alienation" that opens Schacht’s chrestomathy, Walter Kaufmann writes, "Estrangement from nature, society, one’s fellow men, and oneself is part of growing up" (Kaufmann, p. xlvi). Kaufmann proceeds to demonstrate the ubiquity and timelessness of alienation, and that alienation of the modern era is no different from the alienation experienced in previous eras. Although it is apparently Kaufmann’s intent to belittle the commonly held contemporary notion that alienation is worse and more widespread today than it was in the past, doing so only makes the topic of alienation more interesting to me. Indeed, alienation’s ubiquity alone makes it worthy of study—if every human being in the world had the same disease, it is safe to assume that that disease would be studied in every medical school in the world—and being a characteristic that some people find an impediment to leading healthy lives makes it even more interesting. It is a difference, a disease state, something to be identified, studied, analyzed, and explained, both in the physician’s examining room and the comparatist’s dissertation.

But the diffuseness of alienation’s many meanings is problematic. In Alienation, Richard Schacht reasonably points out that alienation is a vague term, loaded with both scholarly and popular meanings that can diverge. In examining the many meanings of the word alienation in the past three centuries, Schacht quotes from the writings of philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists showing how they use the word alienation and what it means in those writers’ contexts. Schacht makes the point that a scholar writing about alienation needs to clarify which of these available meanings she or he is using: "In spite of the term’s popularity, however, few people have a very clear idea of precisely what it means to say of someone that he is ‘alienated’" (Schacht, Alienation, p. 2). For the purposes of this introduction to the study of an alienation that is primarily a psychological and sociological problem as it manifests itself in some characters in some specific works of literature, a medical psychiatric dictionary provides a reasonable first cut at a definition:

Another description of alienation from a sociological perspective (Johnson, pp. 54-55) likewise treats alienation as a neurosis that manifests itself clinically through the following symptoms:

Johnson specifically says that alienation is " ... not only ... a specific syndrome, but ... a number of conditions in which individuals manifest their suffering in terms of their consciousness of estrangement and idiosyncracy." The term syndrome is useful in dealing with alienation because of its implication of a diffuse set of symptoms that are connected but not necessarily causally connected, a set of symptoms so diffuse that they might manifest themselves differently in different people.

But is this an authentic and useful meaning of alienation? Is this meaning of the term alienation congruent with the way in which the term is used by other thinkers, other writers, other psychologists and sociologists? In his article "On the Meaning of Alienation," Melvin Seeman writes:

For Seeman, then, alienation can be reduced to five characteristics that can be placed into two categories. Normlessness and isolation define a lack of fit of the alienated individual into relationships with other people. Powerlessness, meaninglessness, and self-estrangement refer, in Seeman’s usage, to an inability to fit with oneself, to an awareness of self as being different and being unable to do anything about it. Despite their being five separate markers, they bear in common the idea of "lack of fit."

In his equally hopefully entitled article, "Alienation: Its Meaning and Measurement," Dwight G. Dean parrots:

But Dean quickly adopts the five meanings of alienation suggested by Seeman, namely, Powerlessness, Meaninglessness, Normlessness (although he adds the divisions of normlessness/purposelessness and normlessness/conflict of norms), Isolation, and Self-Estrangement (Dean, pp. 754-755).

This is an useful definition--there is only one, because Dean piggy-backs on Seeman and adds little--because it defines alienation as an individual’s set of empty sets, set of lacks, of nots, as in the individual suffering from alienation does not have power, does not find meaning in his beliefs and does not believe in his ability to make clear decisions, does not share norms which other people have, does not have the same sets of goals or beliefs as other people, does not find satisfying feelings, desires, and behaviors in himself. Thus is the alienated man. He does not. Whereas other people do, he does not. He does not fit and he knows it.

Other people have defined alienation in terms of this set of nots, in terms of not having what other people have, of not being like other people, of not fitting in. Jan Hajda writes of alienation in terms of functional definitions in his article, "Alienation and Integration of Student Intellectuals:"

Alienation here again is determined in feelings that the individual has about herself or himself and her or his relationships with society, again feelings of not fitting in, of being different, and more than just being different, of being unable to find some common ground to be able to fit in and of being unable to overcome the differences and being able to fit in despite the differences.

Of the idea of the lack of fit, of the conflict between society and the individual, sociologist Irene Taviss writes:

Thus, alienation does not always mean a simple alienation. In Walter Kaufmann’s simple equation that he offers in "The Inevitability of Alienation," person A is alienated from person B (Kaufmann, p. lii), but as Taviss notes, alienation can include both self-alienation, which may paradoxically look to an observer as the exact opposite of alienation because the self-alienated person transforms her or his self-alienation into submergence into a group, and alienation from others, which may paradoxically involve a retreat into the self. All the protagonists in the four novel-film pairs exhibit this kind of double-alienation in maintaining the relationship between their inner selves and society. So alienation involves not only a distance from things outside the individual suffering from it, but also from the individual himself.

Because the human mind is stunningly complex, because it remains remarkably unknown, because the possible relationships between the drives, thoughts, and energies it contains are quite literally limitless, it is probably unwise to try to decide which theorist is "correct" in her or his theory of alienation. Indeed because of the complexity of the mind, it is possible that they may all be correct in one way or another and in different combinations. It is probably not very useful to try to determine which one of several theories of alienation is more correct than the others. What is useful is to note that alienation is seen by many philosophers, researchers, writers, and clinicians to be corrosive to human development, to cause problems to the alienated person because that person suffers from a feeling of a lack of fit with self, fit with others, or both.

Alienation as a part of human existence, a condition that causes problems for some who struggle unsuccessfully against it, a condition that causes novelists to write about it, is the topic for this study. I will examine that alienation in four novels and the films that have been adapted from those novels. I have coined the phrase "novel-film pair" to refer to both the novel and the film adapted from it. The novel-film pairs I have chosen to study are the following:

There are any number of novel-film pairs that depict alienation that I could have chosen, but I have chosen to study these four novel-film pairs not only because they display and examine alienation as a neurotic state, but because in all four novel-film pairs the alienation is cathected by obsession. Because obsession would appear to be the opposite of alienation, it is the curiously counterintuitive but unbreakable relationship between them in these specific novel-film that pairs interests me. Alienation is, after all, a disease, specifically a neurosis, with symptoms as well as causes. In order to deal with their alienation, all of the alienated characters in the novel-film pairs that I have chosen to study find the opposite of alienation, their release from alienation in obsessive behavior taking the form of rampant and obtuse sexuality, self-destruction, and violence. Thus, the alienation as it is manifested by these symptoms is well-suited to portrayal on the screen because it deals with things and actions, two narrative elements that film portrays well, as well as with mental states, a largely interior human activity that novels portray well.

Finally, this study seeks to examine how alienation is portrayed in novels through the language of the author as he (all of the authors studied herein are men) describes the appearance, action, thought, and speech of the alienated character (or characters, in the case of Selby’s Last Exit To Brooklyn) and consequently how alienation in the film is portrayed through the language of the cinema as it describes the appearance, action, thought, and speech of the alienated character or characters. By "language of the cinema," I mean acting style, composition of shot, direction, editing, lighting, and sound. This is a comparative study with no preconceptions as to which of the two, novel or film, does better or worse at this portrayal. Rather, I am more interested in how successful each medium is in using the mechanics of its own expression. A benefit of focusing on just the alienation present in the source novel and the adapted film is that it does not matter if the form of the novel has "changed" when going from the written word to the screen. The theme of alienation remains the theme of alienation. It matters very little if places change, people change, incidents are added or deleted, and the like. The central theme of alienation remains the same, centrally available for portrayal in both formats.

I am not interested in writing a production history of the films, for although production histories are interesting, they are inappropriate for studying the results. For whatever reasons—budget crunch, late script, inexpert actors, and the like—the filmmaker has chosen to portray alienation in a particular set of ways in the four films, and it is that portrayal and not the production reasons that may have influenced it in which I am interested. Nor do I expect to become a scholar of these four authors. To do so in the case of Mann or Proust would require several lifetimes, in the case of Lowry or Selby, several years of a singularly active lifetime. No, rather I am interested in performing a close reading of the novels and the films that have been adapted from them for this comparative study in the portrayal of alienation.

Someday I would like to discuss adaptation in more detail. I believe that there is much more to be said than what is available today. But now is not the time, and this dissertation is not that discussion.