ABSTRACT
Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam presents an especially intricate instance of the revision of a narrative through cinematic adaptation; for although David Mackenzie’s film is almost perfectly faithful to the novel on the level of character, setting, and incident, it subjects its source material to a critical review quietly informed by an awareness of historical distance—one that is, in effect, anti -countercultural. The effort of the chapter is therefore not only to highlight the demystifying transformations wrought by the filmmakers but also to recover the original orientation of Trocchi’s writing toward a quest for unmediated experience, along with the collapse of that project into a deconstructive mise en abyme ; and it includes the first detailed textual comparison of the widely differing published versions of the novel.
