Adaptation: From Mason & Dixon by Pynchon to Miller & Pynchon by Maurer

Adaptation is a form of hypertextuality, wherein an original source text (the hypotext) is transformed or imitated by a later text (the hypertext) (Genette 1997 [1982]). An adaptation is a massive and officially stated (Genette 1997 [1982]) or deliberate, announced, and extended transcoding of another text (Hutcheon 2006).

The word “adaptation” refers both to the hypertext produced by the simple or indirect transformation of the hypotext and to the process of creation and reception of the hypertext. Following Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation (2006), this essay will consider the produced hypertext as a transposition of the hypotext, which involves a shift in medium, genre, and/or context; it will consider the process of creation, which means reinterpreting the hypotext; and it will consider the process of reception, which reads the hypertext as an intertext (see also Sanders 2006).

The essay will read Leopold Maurer’s graphic novel Miller & Pynchon (2012; first published in German in 2009) as an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon (1997). Recognizing and reading a text as an adaptation means reading it in relation to another text that it repeats but does not replicate.

Reading Maurer’s Miller & Pynchon as an adaptation from prose literature to comics literature helps us to understand transmediation, which is the process of transposing a work from one medium (in this case, associated with “telling”) to another (in this case, associated with “telling and showing”). An awareness of Miller & Pynchon as a creative adaptation also results in an understanding and interpretation of the text informed by perceived similarities with and differences from Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.