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The Ironic Secret Adapteur: Hitchcock And Hampton Adapting Conrad’S The Secret Agent

The Ironic Secret Adapteur: Hitchcock and Hampton adapting Conrad’s The Secret Agent

Rodrigo Alonso Lescún

The Ironic Secret Adapteur: Hitchcock and Hampton adapting Conrad’s The Secret Agent

The adaptation of the same literary work may give birth to extremely different cinematic products. Written by Joseph Conrad in 1907, the novel The Secret Agent inspired three cinematic adaptations. Here I shall be focusing on the concepts of authorship and adaptation when dealing with the analysis of two of these adaptations: Sabotage (1936) by Alfred Hitchcock and The Secret Agent (1996) by Christopher Hampton. The frontier between one and the other will be given by the use of irony, the element which articulates the narratological structure of the novel.


“I don’t suppose there’s any novelist except Conrad who can be put directly on screen”

Orson Welles

"My task (…) is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see.”

J. Conrad on his Preface of The Nigger of the Narcissus

Edges have always been one of the favourite playgrounds for artists. They have invented bridges, to cross from an artistic medium to another one. This essay might just as fittingly been titled “The frontiers of authorship in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) and Hampton’s The Secret Agent (1996)”, such have been the divergent positions the film directors have adopted in order to portray Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. Furthermore, a fundamental word would be missing: irony. According to this fact, the inclusion, exclusion or manipulation of parts of the novel when adapted into film would locate the identities of Alfred Hitchcock and Christopher Hampton as authors in respect of that of Conrad. The analysis of these deflections will constitute the corpus of this essay. The purpose is to explore the intertextual relationships between...