'Faulks, Tagore, Proust: From Flaubert to "Birdsong" through Adaptation'

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.