This essay addresses the question of literary adaptation, with reference to Sebastian Faulks’ 1993 novel Birdsong, which has proved notoriously difficult to adapt for the stage as well as the screen. It is argued that Birdsong is better understood both despite and because of its problematic adaptations. Not reductively a novel ‘about’ the First World War, Birdsong may be seen as itself a form of adaptation of works by key writers who feature in Faulks’ text, namely Rabindranath Tagore and Marcel Proust. It emerges that Faulks is more of a writer in the tradition of Flaubert and Proust than a novelist in the classic realist tradition. A properly literary adaptation of Birdsong is seen – through a pivotal transversalist turn – as one which grasps this novel as a form of verbal artifice, of artful fabrication. In this respect it is an expression of style as content’s ‘overdrive’, an ‘overdetermining’, that is, of the semantics of content that produces an at once reflexive and supplemental decomposition of the age-old form/content antinomy.

中文翻译：

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福克斯、泰戈尔、普鲁斯特：从福楼拜到鸟歌通过改编

这篇文章参考了塞巴斯蒂安·福克斯 1993 年的小说《鸟歌》，解决了文学改编的问题，众所周知，这部小说很难适应舞台和银幕。有人认为，尽管有问题，也因为它的适应有问题，人们更好地理解了 Birdsong。鸟歌并不是一部关于第一次世界大战的小说，它本身可能被视为对福克斯文本中的主要作家，即罗宾德拉纳特·泰戈尔和马塞尔·普鲁斯特的作品的一种改编形式。可以看出，福克斯更像是福楼拜和普鲁斯特传统中的作家，而不是经典现实主义传统中的小说家。通过一个关键的横向转向，对《鸟歌》的适当文学改编被视为将这部小说理解为一种口头技巧，一种巧妙的捏造。