Life is complicated. That’s one of the things I like best about it: life isn’t black and white, but it isn’t shades of gray either—the truth is, we don’t know what life is until we’re done living it, after which point we don’t know anything about it at all—so the best I can do (and this isn’t terribly original) is to suggest life is deeply emergent—a collision of splinters and chards that influence and are influenced by competing and surrounding forces. Perhaps that’s what Foucault meant by “a moving substrate of force relations” (93). I think it is.

Within these alternating currents of beauty and dissipation, framed by anticipatory chaos, it’s helpful to have friends; they can stabilize you when you’re imbalanced, open doors when you’re lost, offer insights about your “personality” that you are too terrified or blind to acknowledge—and if they’re truly good friends, they can even help you with your writing. There’s a spectrum of friendship running from acquaintances and colleagues to the five or six close friends who, if your luck turns bad, might post your bail, take care of your kids, or help you make a mortgage payment. My most significant personal friends include my life partner, my children, my hunting buddy, my transsexual sisters, and two of my work colleagues.

Yet there’s another kind of friendship that’s worth mentioning, particularly in the spirit of this homage, and that’s academic friendship and theoretical alliance; what Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, might refer to as networks of kinship—or Murat Aydemir, in an interesting twist, views as an incestuous system of affiliation and differentiation.1 The simple fact is, if you’re going to swim in academic waters, you’ll need a few good friends and a few serious enemies, even if it’s just so you can get to the point of interpersonal revelation and actualization; the place where we can make change. The price of admission to arrive at that juncture is getting to the point at all; stating your claim, making your argument, bolstering your position, and, eventually, letting the interpersonal chips fall where they may.

Friends who can help you get to the point are valuable friends, indeed.

Such was my friendship with Laurence Raw, whom I recently came to Albuquerque to pay homage.2 By no means did I start off with Laurence on cozy footing—and that type of comment deserves some backstory. Not coincidentally, it was right here in Albuquerque, at this very conference, where I first connected with Laurence in 2013. On a theoretical level, however, we’d made contact much earlier than that; in the preface to a book I edited in 2011, Adaptation Theories, I made a snarky comment about Laurence’s statements in support of the inaugural edition of Oxford University’s Adaptation magazine—and of course Laurence, who read literally everything about adaptation, who had a lexicographical memory and definitely didn’t balk from and even enjoyed having a few enemies and slow-roasting them in public forums with his indomitable British schoolmaster style, actually read my snarky little footnote (St. Jacques, 2011, Raw, 2009).3 To make matters worse, in my conference abstract for my Albuquerque paper, I’d lamented the way in which “adaptation theorists [make] sweeping comparisons between adaptations of cultural objects and Darwinian models of natural selection,” concluding it was high time “for adaptation theorists in the humanities to update their notions of contemporary scientific adaptation theory.”

I still stand behind that statement, by the way—particularly my notion that adaptation studies is, by necessity, always changing and evolving its reflexive ontologies as it interacts, shapes and is shaped by other academic and even rarified technical discourses. But there is no denying that my footnote in Adaptation Theories, combined with my session abstract for the Albuquerque conference, must’ve tweaked Laurence’s critical attention, as he observed in a blog essay titled “My Adaptation Theory Can Lick Your Adaptation Theory”:

I would argue that St. Jacques has to update her notions of how other theorists have considered adaptation using Darwin as their model [….] The only person who has made ‘quick inferences’ is St. Jacques herself, who in her desire to show that her theories can lick those of other theorists, has put forward a viewpoint that can be readily challenged. I await her paper with interest. (2015)4

Of course, it wasn’t until I arrived in New Mexico that I realized my old friend, Chuck Hamilton, that Texas Ranger of adaptation theory and session coordinator for the adaptation panel series at SWPACA for many years, had (in an act of devil’s advocacy—or diabolical humor), placed Laurence and I on the very same panel.

Being your average conference procrastinator, I’d stumbled on Laurence’s blog post only the evening before my actual presentation, so you can imagine my panic (perusing new releases at the Intellect Books display), when a tweedy gentleman in a green suitcoat with leather elbow-patches appeared at my side asking if I was the same Jillian St. Jacques who suggested his Darwinian ideas were out-of-date.

Backpedaling with the blind desperation of a mole on rollerblades, I quickly explained to Laurence that I hadn’t meant his specific adaptation theory was out-of-date, adding that I was in fact personally inspired by his work in Translation, Adaptation & Transformation, and was looking forward to having a wonderfully collegial discussion on our panel.

“Pity,” he replied, with a shark-like smile, and we retired to The Forque Kitchen & Bar, where I consumed a bowl of green chile stew and Laurence drank black tea. Over lunch, our discussion primarily focused on the topic of adaptation as a transformative process on a personal level; particularly, how adaptation theory might break free of its seemingly inherent role in service to other disciplines—thereby to envision and create new and even experimental forms of writing about lived experience. And that’s how our friendship, our real friendship, a friendship that was both intellectual and personal, began. The funny thing is, in the final knell, it was this cathexis of scholarly discourse and personal writing that motivated Laurence and me—and our old friend Chuck Hamilton—to begin exploring new realms of adaptation theory. After years of listening to academic papers about originality and fidelity, we wanted to find routes out of the rarified heights of technical discourse and into the personal, where we might stand a chance of putting adaptation theory to use.

And it is exactly this discursive move that brings me, almost abruptly it seems, to the precipitous edge of my point – not simply the point of this paper, but maybe to the point of my life as a writer, if there ever was a point beyond the obsessive drive for publication. I guess for the moment the point of this paper will do, particularly as it comes to bear on the distinction between homage and citation, and how these concepts relate to adaptation and acclimation.

Concerning the first conceptual entanglement (of homage and citation), as I argued (not that I was alone in arguing it) at the Rhetorics of Sincerity Conference in Leiden, an homage first-and-foremost indicates a personal relationship between an author and the subject of homage, while the act of citation merely indicates an intellectual relationship that may or may not entertain the personal. One can cite a person they don’t know, or don’t know much about, whose work they don’t properly understand or even loathe: I cite you because I seek to prove what you said was idiotic, revolting, impossible. But the homage? Even when we pay homage to a foe, it suggests there was something remarkable about the person (or their work): the worthy enemy, the evil genius. While I have my share of sworn academic enemies—both in person and in theory—I nevertheless regard their every move with deadly seriousness, the way a tarantula might regard a scorpion competing for the same rock.

It’s not often you find a scorpion paying homage to a tarantula, however—so when you do, you tend to listen closely to what the scorpion says. The saying isn’t “give the devil his citation,” after all, it’s “give the devil his due” — and ultimately, this is what separates the homage from the citation: a gesture beyond scholarly lip-service or enslavement (let’s put that quote to work!). An homage, even of a foe, predicates the subject of its reflections matters to the author as a human being.5 Ethically speaking, performing a “proper” citation might require a modicum of responsibility or curation—to accuracy at least, if not to facilitating a meaningful interaction between citation and object, citation and text—but the requirement to breathe soul into your citation is strictly optional. Putting some soul in your homage is a must.

The second conceptual entanglement concerns the distinction – not a binary distinction, mind you, because both concepts are mutually interdependent – between adaptation and acclimation, a conceptual entanglement I will bring directly into contact with homage and citation. Ironically, it’s here that Laurence and I most parted company ­– and this remains the conversation I would most like to have with Laurence today.

To my way of thinking, the process of adaptation is transgenerational and has long term effects; it’s about the way a species or interconnected set of phenomena changes over time in response to a variety of intellectual or physical pressures, many of which are interconnected and all of which are deeply emergent—an adaptation of the many, not of the one. Acclimation is more applicable to the individual, to how one changes to accommodate one’s own personal exodus through the volatile terrain of survival, in which the topography—and the pressures which summon it—are constantly shifting, melding, breaking apart and dissipating. As singular entities, we acclimate to these forces as long as we can, until, in a best-case scenario, the herd stumbles on without us.

Without sufficient acclimation, there is no adaptation.

This is just as true of the object as it is the subject: the publication of a source text (and what text isn’t a source?) is the acclimation on which ensuing adaptations depend. But while acclimation and adaptation are intimately linked, and in some cases even interdependent, they’re not the same thing; something can acclimate, even many somethings can acclimate without the entire group of things ever adapting—just as things can adapt without entirely acclimating to their environment.

Adaptation in no way guarantees survival; in some cases, it guarantees demolition.

Yet even as adaptation and acclimation are distinct phases of emergence overall, there seems to be an inherent open-endedness to both processes; just because a species adapts a new feature over time, it doesn’t mean it can’t lose the same feature later (in the case of vestigiality) or gain new, future adaptations, given sufficient survivability. I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator”: just as the existence of a text posits its inherent translatability, the existence of an acclimation posits an inherent adaptability (70-81).

This precisely returns me to that crux in my friendship with Laurence, which is also the crux of this homage. Even though Laurence was kind enough to publish my work, and while he was a good enough friend to edit my work for publication, I don’t think Laurence ever agreed with me about the significance of the distinction between adaptation and acclimation. I’ll never know, because we never had time to discuss it thoroughly; Laurence’s death cut that possibility short.  I’d like to stick with that point for a moment; citing the interrupted conversation between Laurence and myself.

While sufficient acclimations over a sufficient period of time might result in trans-species adaptations, the death factor assures us the singleton never adapts. Some individuals might last longer, for better or worse – but sooner or later, we’re all headed through the same door, the same exit, and there’s no returning through that door, regardless of whether it leads in or out. We might depart with varying styles, perhaps that’s our final revision: cavalier laughter, a shower of recriminations, bravado, cowardice, apathy. The determination of our own panache. Begging, repentant, defiant, denial. Into the light, up to the heavens, down to the darkness, forgetful of everything, back into Arwen’s cauldron; there’s no lack of stories and adaptations.

But whoever we are, however resilient our acclimations, we know we must ultimately part company with the physical world—so the interrupted conversation is, in fact, the natural product of discourse, as one conversation is handed to another, simultaneously yielding to and summoned forward by “the metatext,” which is simply a fancy way of referring to the preexisting conditions that foreground our talking. Yet even as that outcome, our parting, is seemingly predetermined, I’m beginning to suspect our existence, if not our libidinal satisfaction, depends on individuals stepping forward and identifying themselves in a trans-subjective interstice that’s both adaptive and incomplete ­– interrupted and disruptive—yielding at the former end into the indeterminate shadows of the past, while opening, at the latter end, into the incalculable hues of the unknown. And no matter how close we are in friendship, our alliance within this trans-subjective milieu is based on this reliably unreliable language. In a Lacanian sense, neither friend owns language — it’s language that owns us — so no matter what the intentions, language will always betray a friendship in ways that neither party intended (1-7).

Intentions are everything in homage. Indeed, when I accused Laurence, or appeared to accuse him, of engaging Darwinism in an obvious or outmoded manner, he responded:

I am not especially concerned with the relationship between Darwin and the ‘determination of narrative structures and tropes in adapted works.’  My principal interest is in the way individuals adapt to the world around them, and translate that process of adaptation into texts of various kinds – screenplays, essays, blog posts, or whatever.  Through this process of writing we can learn something about the social, cultural and psychological forces that shape the way they write. (2015)

Reluctantly setting aside our interrupted conversation about Darwinism and how/if “individuals adapt”—because the fact of Laurence’s death precludes its mutual resolution—I turn to his stated interest, the thing he cared about more than Darwin; namely, authorial intent. Because that is precisely the point, right here, right now, in Albuquerque or not: the main distinction between homage and citation is one of authorial intent. In the case of an homage to a writer, one author intends to access [the other] for the purpose of tribute, while the intent of the citation, when unadorned, merely seeks to engage the other in service. Clearly, both acts seek access, but in homage the author’s access to the other comprises the journey, while in citation, it is merely one point in a larger journey — it’s not the revelatory point. Citation is always one part of the story, but rarely the whole, and if the case is otherwise then I feel sorry for the work. At best, a citation is an embedded narrative (to borrow a phrase from Mieke Bal), that might characterize a world within a world, but we hope it doesn’t overshadow it (57).

I’ve never seen anyone as bored as Laurence during a novel-to-film treatment of adaptation; he had this way of leaning back in his chair and busying himself with his conference program. It’s not that he hated such analyses — he’d simply heard them up the proverbial wazoo and was looking for any other way to activate adaptation theories, aside from the seemingly inevitable return to vouchsafing the primacy of a source text or analyzing its “correct” interpretation. Yet that’s not entirely true, come to think of it: it was never Laurence who was falling asleep, or yawning, or snorting in derision—that was me—and while Laurence might not be thrilled about some particularly naïve or poorly informed presentations, when it came to any discussion about adaptation, no matter who was at the center (or how mundane their argument), Laurence never lost his edge; there was always the same keen look in his eye, like a puma watching a fawn. Ready to pounce. If there was any action to be had, Laurence wanted to be right in it. That was his intent.

I am a great believer in authorial intention.  If we consider adaptation as a process involving psychological as well as other forms of transformation, then we cannot help but take individual viewpoints into consideration.  A cinematic text, or a literary text, evolves out of collaborations between different individual viewpoints – the writer, director, editor, publisher, as well as the reader.  Studying the interaction between these viewpoints helps us understand how texts are adapted and re-adapted, just like the individual who produce these adaptations (“My Adaptation Theory Can Lick Your Theory”: 2015).

In the final knell, nobody’s adaptation theory licked the other guy’s. Instead, once we’d met and studied our interactions—much like the scorpion and the tarantula—Laurence and I became allies, conspirators and friends. And now that friend is gone, and I’m writing an homage, perhaps the beginning of many, to continue our interrupted conversation, a discourse revolving around more than academic technique, more than a discussion about life. Growing to know Laurence as a man, I learned more about what we had in common as human beings—far more than I could’ve done through innumerable cheeky citations. While the impact of “the personal” enriched us and made our discussion more profound and reflexive than “the academic,” blending them was even more energizing and fun.

Postscript: Alternate Endings

When I first wrote this homage, I ended it by trying to envision an impossible place that could never exist outside the realm of fantasy: Laurence and I departing the conference hall and standing by the Pecos River on a summer boyhood day, smelling the golden scent of Gloriosa daisies. On the New Mexican hillsides of my youth we played Billy the Kid, fished, swam, drank cans of Dad’s root beer and ate German Brown trout. Of course, I was assuming Laurence would enjoy these things: the outdoors, the New Mexican sun, elephant-ear cactus.

But maybe Laurence hated fishing. Maybe he was allergic to the sun.
Hopes are so often naïve.

Then, the facticity of my own wishful thinking reminded me the Other—the real Laurence Raw, now departed—might have sentimental reflections of his own, and I found myself wondering what Laurence’s fantasies would be like, and to question my reaction to their machinations; their possibilities and impossible/implausible snapshots; Laurence and I as boyhood chums, fishing for carp in a British stream, green as turtle soup. Sitting at creaky desks in an ivy-covered building waiting to be caned by an impatient British schoolmaster. Taking our turns at cricket, sweltering in woolen trousers and sweaters. But all these dopey fantasies simply underscored how little I knew about Laurence. Did he play cricket? Did he ever get caned? I had no clue.

This confusion gave rise to another set of fantasies: ensconced in Ankara, Laurence introduces me to colleagues at Baskent University; we shake hands, talk about Burroughs, savor mint tea and Kuzu Tandir at Laurence’s favorite restaurant.

But how many pages of this story were also missing? Did Laurence eat lamb? Was he a vegetarian? What was his favorite Turkish restaurant? Did he still long for British food after he moved to Turkey? I’ve known Frenchmen who still ate McDonald’s even when in Paris; life is full of strange occurrence and ramblings. What was Laurence’s favorite beer? And why did he care so much about adaptation anyway?

God, I would love to know those things!

Perhaps fantasy is too open-ended a structure with which to end an homage—but it occurs to me eulogies are often based on fantasies: lives never lived, glories never seen, reunions and reawakenings that’ll never happen; we’ll see them in heaven, they went to the light, they’ve gone to a “better place.” These alternate endings are fantasies in which the main character is adapted into an abstractly cheerful utopia, when really the ultimate fantasy fulfillment would be to have them back again. So instead of indulging in parting fantasies, I’ll return to the real gift, which was Laurence as I knew him, in precisely the temporal and spatial conditions in which I knew him, and the love that grew in my heart for Laurence within those parameters, most of which—all of which—involved adaptation, the theoretical potion Laurence ate, slept and breathed.

You can see how much Laurence cared about adaptation theory when you look at his blog. Thus far, I’ve avoided blogging like the plague, which doesn’t mean anything except I’m old-fashioned and a little bit dumb. But Laurence loved to blog, and his blogspot site is arranged pretty much like a journal; it isn’t just postings on developments in adaptation studies, it’s everything from nostalgia to activism. The advents in adaptation theory are there, but you can also trace a shift in Laurence’s thinking as he began wondering how adaptation theory might be brought directly into our lives to improve things. Some of the blog entries have typically incendiary titles (“Who Really Cares about Original Texts?”), but many of them foreground his emerging interest in the personal, from “Adaptation, Acting, and Emotional Transformation” to “Adaptation and ADAPTATION: Foregrounding the Personal.” In one of my favorites, titled: “Binarisms, Adaptation and Love,” Laurence muses:

… a mindful awareness of one’s surroundings and how we respond to them can help us become more “adaptive” as people, as well as making us more aware of the continuities linking different cultures.  Leo Tolstoy once emphasized how the world might become a better place if we learned to love each other more – perhaps these adaptive experiences might play a significant part in helping us to achieve this goal. (2016)

Laurence’s quick reference to Tolstoy and the necessity of “loving each other more” reminds me of Lacan’s mischievous delight in applying ornate psychoanalytic theories to abstract human practices: God, orgasm, love. What I particularly admire about Lacan—and what reminds me of Laurence—is their deliberate seriousness about these connections, a deliberately mischievous seriousness, and you can see the foreheads wrinkle—surely they can’t be serious. Yet it’s right there, in the text, this matter of authorial intent, and in that sense, Lacan and Laurence bear a similar adjuration: you’d better think twice about dismissing abstractions often taken for granted, no matter how trite, implausible or provincial they seem.

This year, I turn 62. It’s a rainy day here in Oregon. My wife bustles out the door, laden with bags of books, a laptop, her Hydroflask. She walks past a rock retaining wall burgeoning with blossoms—asters, veronica, pinks. She’s headed to the university; “a big day of meetings,” she says. Our dog surveys her departure from the kitchen, resting his chin on his paws. I notice small nuances in our front yard fauna: purple cones of lupine, a rock rose I didn’t suspect. Everything is liquid and dripping; springtime in Oregon belongs to poets with waterborne hopes, the rest suffer from colds and damp shoes. I watch my neighbor inspect her debris box with dubious intent, even as I see my personal history laid out in a series of phases that would seem chaotic, were it not for their intersection in the body of the self-same individual. If you’d encountered me at any of these junctures—say, perhaps, when I was in the military—and you said: “Hey there, young man! Do you realize one day, eight years from now, you’ll be a transsexual living in San Francisco?” I would’ve said you were nuts. Similarly, if you approached me during when I was a transsexual, teetering through The Castro on stiletto heels, and proclaimed: “Jill Saint Jacques! Take heed! Ten years from now you’ll be married, the father of two, teaching journalism at Oregon State University!” I would’ve been equally incredulous: I’m a goddamn performance artist, after all. Kids are for breeders, straight people. Parents equal jobs and mortgage. Radical queers blow their student loans on a chest full of silicone.

And so I find myself a crowd of captive audiences caught in the same body, sometimes arguing, sometimes happy, never completely at rest or even at ease with ourselves, grudgingly admitting the party always comes to an end regardless of our nomenclature or number.

“You’ve lived through many manifestations,” a friend of mine said recently over lunch. But as far as I can see, those manifestations are inseparable, and I’ve only had one visible manifestation: my life—and during this life, at a particularly fortuitous crossroads, sitting in The Forque at the Albuquerque Hyatt Regency, surrounded by businessmen and conference-goers with plastic nametags, I had the good fortune to strike up a friendship with Laurence Raw. We would’ve probably been drawn to each other anyway by sheer dint of our overbearing opinions, not to mention our thirst for a good intellectual row—but our biggest connection was our common belief that adaptation theory could be more—could be extruded through the uncertain skein of “the personal” to forge more nuanced connections. Whether an individual acclimates or adapts to an ever-shifting subjective context is ultimately beside the point. What matters most is that something’s adapting—the personal is the source of the spark and the drive. Too often, adaptation scholars push that inconvenient fact to the side, along with the axiomatic role of the libido in impelling the adaptation process. Without that initial spark, nothing.

Laurence had that spark.