Fariña’s Metatextual Universe: Four Media, One Story

In 1948, André Bazin prophesied the advent of a “reign of adaptations” where a critic of the year 2050 would encounter “not a novel from which a play and a film would have been ‘obtained,’ but rather a single work reflected in three artistic forms, a pyramid with three faces,” all of them equally valuable. Fariña is a literary or narrative journalism work that explains the history of drug trafficking in Galicia (Spain). Following Bazin’s analogy, it could be argued that Fariña is indeed a tetrahedron whose four sides are the book written by journalist Nacho Carretero in 2015, a television series (2018), a play (2019), and a graphic novel (2019). This paper examines how such a local story has been adapted to different media, each with its own language. To this end, we conducted six in-depth interviews with some of the creatives behind each work and a comparative textual analysis focused on how the specificity of each language affects particular narrative categories (concept, genre, characters, and structure) in the adaptation process. This study reflects on the universal themes that Fariña addresses, ultimately allowing stories like this to be repeatedly told in such diverse media.