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North American Fiction and Film

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Filmed versions of the texts

In this unit we will be giving you the opportunity to include in your discussion of American novels some comparative reference to the film versions of these novels, if you are able or willing to do so. Although the major emphasis in this unit will be on "literary" or written texts, those of you who have access to a video recorder and a reasonably well stocked video hire outlet may decide to view some of these film versions.

You will then be in a position to make some relevant, although probably fairly limited, reference to the film or films in your assignments either as a point of contrast or in terms of a different perspective to the written text provided by the film text. If you are particularly interested in the relationship between a written and film text, you may choose to include a discussion of a film or films in your assignments. However, merely referring to the film text will not automatically give you an advantage as far as assessment is concerned-although it may make the unit a bit more interesting for those of you who enjoy watching movies, or at least the movie "versions".
Of course not all the literary texts have film versions-or accessible film versions. Here is a list of those that do:
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Fall of the House of Usher
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The World According to Garp
The Handmaid's Tale
Like Water for Chocolate.

We don't expect you to become experts in film-making techniques and technology, so don't get carried away with detailed descriptions of close-ups, zooms, pans, cutting rates, etc., unless you feel you have some startlingly relevant point to make about these things. There is a theory that meanings and ideologies are inscribed in the technologies of film and the formalistic or aesthetic characteristics of film attributed to these technologies-particularly as they operate within the "classic" Hollywood film. But it would be impossible for us to delve into the finer details of such a theory in this unit. We would expect you, rather, to concentrate on the narrative structures of the films as you compare and contrast them with those of the novels.

When discussing two different media there is a great temptation to make all kinds of value judgments based on our own preferences for, or prejudices against, these media. What this boils down to is statements such as: "The film version is a superficial and trivialised travesty of the novel, obviously made to appeal to the lowest common denominator". Subjective opinions about which is the "better" or more "profound" or "insightful" version should be avoided, at least when we are trying to concentrate on what meanings the texts are producing for their audiences.

Again, it's easy to fall into the value judgment trap when we approach a film in terms of how faithful it is to the novel, or how it "distorts" the novel. Perhaps here it's the choice of words (along with their connotations) that implies somehow that film is the "inferior" medium. Rather than concentrating on distortion as such, should we not begin with the assumption that the novel and the film are different?

This is a step in the right direction: we are considering two different forms of expression, with film obviously deploying visual signs along with verbal signs as well as being directed at a wider audience (although the latter can be a debatable point). Instead of dwelling on the differences from a subjective point of view based either on personal aesthetic preferences or on the attribution of psychological or philosophical "depth" or "insight" (with film invariably coming out second-best) we should now be able to direct our attention to how different sign systems and different narrative techniques are used by each medium, and how meanings have been transformed or certain meanings accentuated or even repressed in the process of adapting or transferring a text from one medium to the other.

For example, meanings suppressed in the literary text or creating contradictions in the literary text (relating, shall we say, to class and gender) may "rise to the surface" in the filmic text, and thus encourage us to reconsider their function in the written text. On the other hand, various ambiguities in the written text may be suppressed or apparently resolved in the filmic text, and again this may make us more aware of the existence of such ambiguities in the written text.

We're suggesting here that we adopt an intertextual approach by analysing how our reading of one text may change or influence our reading of another text. (Normally, intertextuality refers not to different versions or adaptations of the same text but rather to a whole range of different, but related, texts. But for our purposes, though, we think it's an appropriate term.)

Finally, for those of you who decide to view some, or even all, of the film texts, watching these films might enable you to do more than simply "compare and contrast" novels and films in a fairly obvious and perfunctory way: it might expand the range of possible meanings available to you in the novels; it might make you more aware of the narrative techniques deployed in the novels; it might draw your attention to both novels and films as cultural constructs, the product of the interaction of texts and the contexts in which they are read; and it might help you to analyse your responses to both novels and films.

The operative word here is "might". We doubt that film viewing will give you any profound advantage in undertaking this unit, but at least it should provide the potential for widening your perspectives and broadening your approach to, and enjoyment of, the literary texts. Let's now move on to some issues which we will be dealing with more specifically in the first few chapters of the Guide. We will begin with the notion of the American "Adam."

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The American Adam

Western contemporary literary theory and practice radically question the notion that art/literature ultimately transcends place and history and bears witness to some transcendent eternal realm governing an essentially fixed human nature. Such a notion, indeed, can be seen as inextricably linked with the philosophical position that sanctioned European colonial expansion in the first place. Broadly speaking it was held that while there was an ideal human nature, that ideal had to be realised by the "civilisation" of the "primitive". In considering North American fiction and film we are in fact considering the ideological "play" taking place in European cultural production in the course of its invasion and (mis)appropriation of the North American sub-continent.

Acknowledgment of colonial (and, indeed, much of even post-colonial) North American society as "imperialist", racist and sexist is to be found in both "creative" fiction and criticism. Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, for instance, attempts to reinstate the American Indian as "natural" inheritor of the North American territory. Unfortunately, this novel does so while being strongly anti-feminist. Later novels such as John Irving's The World According to Garp attack sexism along with imperialism and racism.

Contemporary American criticism has also begun the radical re-assessment of North America's predominantly male, white, cultural past. For a long time, however, both North American fiction/film and the critical/educational machinery which helped produce/sustain it was firmly rooted in the idea of the all-conquering white ("Christian") American hero.

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The innocent hero

As elaborated by R.W.B. Lewis in The American Adam, early North American Fiction may be characterised as presenting the idea of the American as radical innocent (Adam) of the New World, divorced from the corruption of the Old. Both the lawyer/narrator and Bartleby in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," and Captain Delano in Benito Cereno may be argued as participating in this presentation of the American as radical innocent. However, the depiction of the innocent "hero" can be further argued as highly problematic.

The following comments by Lewis on Melville's Billy Budd (which could equally apply to Bartleby and Captain Delano) serve to sum up his basic view of the central preoccupation of North American fiction:
The entire story [Billy Budd] moves firmly in the direction of a transcendent cheerfulness: transcendent, and so neither bumptious nor noisy; a serene and radiant gladness. The climax is prepared with considerable artistry by a series of devices which, though handled somewhat stiffly by a rusty creative talent, do their work nonetheless. The intent of all of them is to bring into being and to identify the hero and his role and then to institute the magical process of transfiguration. Billy appears as another Adam: thrust ... into a world for which his purity altogether unfits him. (...) Melville sets swirling around his hero other allusions which relate Billy by inference to other beings: splendid animals, Catholic priests, royalty, the gods-Apollo, Hercules, Hyperon. It is the destiny of these figures to suffer transfiguration, to die into their sacrificial counterparts-the sacrificial bull, the "condemned vestal priestesses," the slain monarch, and the dying god. This is the process by which Adam changes into the "new Adam" of St. Paul, "the Lord from heaven."
The value of the American Adam is thereby, at last, transvalued. Much earlier in his study Lewis describes American fiction as "the story begotten by the noble but illusory myth of the American as Adam." The scepticism with which Lewis views the American Adam in this earlier statement has clearly vanished in his pronouncements on Billy Budd, pronouncements unmistakably rooted in a totalising phallocentric Christian idealism. The critics who wholeheartedly embraced Lewis's affirmative transcendent hero-centric view of North American fiction are numerous.

As the twentieth century advanced, the strong element of fantasy/allegory (non-realism) always present in North American fiction began to intensify in the advent of Absurdity and Black Humour. The critics, however, were still able to accommodate these more "extreme" forms to the hero-centred classic realist position. Even when metafiction appeared-a form much stronger than both absurdity and black humour in its questioning of realist assumptions-the affirmative hero-centred position prevailed. Please now read the material in the Resource Materials book relating to black humour.

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Black humour

At first glance black humour-that brand of "modern" humour which is compounded of laughter, pain and disgust-may appear to be very radical indeed. A number of critics, however, have argued that it is "essentially" conservative, a judgment borne out by One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. When it figures in deliberately "open" "disruptive" texts, however-that is, in radical metafictional texts-black humour becomes a humour of excess which aids in the demolition/interrogation of all conservative/traditional values.

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (though published as early as 1930) is open to such a metafictional/"excessively" comic reading. How do we read this book? Are we meant to combine/unify its soliloquies into some visionary whole or does the self-conscious nature of the novel raise the whole issue of the fictional nature of the real itself? Does the book have a hero (Darl)? a heroine (Addie)? or both? or does it rather broach the notion of the self as a set of socio/cultural constructs rather than as some essential given?

Given that As I Lay Dying can be read as radically interrogative rather than as an imperative/declarative text, it can be seen as such only on a covert level; that is, it does not openly thematise its anti-realism but depends on parody and subversion for its interrogative effects. With John Irving's The World According to Garp (1976), however, there is a noticeable move into the field of overt or explicit metafiction; that is, into metafiction which directly thematises the constructed nature of the real and of the individuals who experience that "real". The World According to Garp can, in a sense, then, be seen as at the farthest remove from earlier North American fiction.

To put the matter in its simplest terms, while early American fiction tends to subjugate the possibilities of radical socio/cultural interrogation to various forms of idealism (largely Christian), The World According to Garp articulates the ideological basis of all realisms/idealisms.
As noted earlier, contemporary literary theory and criticism have radically questioned the "positivist" view of North American fiction fostered by some of these texts. Such a questioning can, in fact, be traced back as coeval with some of the above studies. In 1962, for instance, Wylie Sypher published a study entitled Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art. As the title suggests, this work strongly opposes the notion of the hero as unifying force in an otherwise fragmented world.

In Sypher's view mid-twentieth century North American fiction shows us that the "self has only an uncertain existence"; that we "now walk in a universe where there is no longer an echo of the 'I'."
This view of the radical dispersal/dissolution of the self is one made quite explicit in novels such as The World According to Garp. This unit will attempt to show, however, that such a dissolution has been present in the "classics" of early American fiction themselves. That is, it will be demonstrated that the orthodox notion of American fiction/film as dominated by affirmative heroes is nothing more than a particular critical construction or set of such constructions. What will be shown to exist instead from the time of the "classic" nineteenth century American texts is a competing/conflicting set of discourses.

On the one hand, there is the presentation of the "innocent" "hero" set against corrupt social systems. On the other hand, those innocent "heroes" are caught up in constricting idealist ideologies (largely white, Christian, male) which effectively undo any meaningful critiques of social injustice the novels might otherwise pretend to. Later texts such as As I lay Dying, and The World According to Garp will be shown to openly contest such ultimately idealist hero-centred ideology. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1962) can be seen as continuing the American search for the "true" hero. Randle P. McMurphy strives to reassert heroic values in a world turned machine cum asylum. However, as already intimated, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest arguably seeks to re-assert the heroic values at the expense of being both highly racist and sexist.

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Your response to the texts

As you pursue your own reading, you may find that you do not agree with the broad survey of relevant ideas and texts set for this unit. You may also find critics who would dispute all or some of the arguments put forward, as well as others who would support them. You should, then, see this survey as the starting point for your own readings of the texts and of the associated criticism and use it as a reference point from which to embark.

As with all of the external Literary Studies units, this guide is not intended as a "master" narrative which you are expected to accept as authoritative. We hope merely to provide you with a provocative reassessment of North American fiction and film-a reassessment which you will be expected to contest/contribute to through your own readings of both the novels and the relevant theoretical/critical texts.

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Review Questions

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Last updated August 1996
Comments to Dr John Fitzsimmons:
Phone: (079) 309240; Email: j.fitzsimmons@cqu.edu.au
Humanities Department
Faculty of Arts
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton MC Queensland 4702
Australia