The Drift: Affect, Adaptation, and New Perspectives on Fidelity 9781623560706, 9781628929058, 9781623562649

Table of contents :
Cover
HalfTitle
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Theorizing the Drift
Adaptation
Where we are going, where we have been
The persistence of fidelity
Drifting
Coming attractions: From theory to practice
2 Making the Old Words New: Dos Passos, Modernism, and the Cinematic Infection
A more real reality: From realism to modernism to U.S.A.
The man with the camera eye
Time, history, and the newsreel
Camera eye, kino-eye, and cinematic visuality
End of the story, rise of the image
3 An Epidemic of Seeing: DeLillo, Postmodernism, and Fiction in the Age of Images
Complicity and critique: From modernism to postmodernism to Underworld
Our own private histories
The power of images
Ghost and shadow: Eisensteinian montage in Underworld
Everything is connected: A note on paranoia
4 A Dark-Adapting Eye: Moore, Campion, and the Fractured World of Postmodern Noir
Contextualizing noir: Modernism, postmodernism, and “noir vision”
Susanna Moore and the regendering of literary noir
Recontextualizing noir: From page to screen to In the Cut
Jane Campion and cinematic disarticulation
Moore, Campion and beyond
5 Inventing Nat Turner: Charles Burnett and the Postmodern History Film
The many faces of Nat Turner
Thomas R. Gray’s Nat Turner
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Nat Turner
The Nat Turners of William Wells Brown and Randolph Edmonds
William Styron’s Nat Turner
Charles Burnett and the “Real” Nat Turner
6 Drifting On
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Drift

The Drift Affect, Adaptation, and New Perspectives on Fidelity John Hodgkins

N E W Y OR K • L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © John Hodgkins, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. A version of Chapter 4 appeared in College Literature 39.4 in slightly different form, under the title “A Dark-Adapting Eye: Susanna Moore, Jane Campion, and the Fractured World of Postmodern Noir.” No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hodgkins, John. The drift : affect, adaptation, and new perspectives on fidelity / by John Hodgkins. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-070-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)  1. Film adaptations–History and criticism.  2. Literature and motion pictures.  3. Affect (Psychology)  I. Title. PN1997.85.H53 2013 791.43’609–dc23 2012050837 EISBN: 978-1-6235-6264-9

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

For my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 Theorizing the Drift 2 Making the Old Words New: Dos Passos, Modernism, and the Cinematic Infection 3 An Epidemic of Seeing: DeLillo, Postmodernism, and Fiction in the Age of Images 4 A Dark-Adapting Eye: Moore, Campion, and the Fractured World of Postmodern Noir 5 Inventing Nat Turner: Charles Burnett and the Postmodern History Film 6 Drifting On Bibliography Index

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1 29 53 77 105 137

147 159

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the assistance of many, and I gladly thank them here for their generosity. I extend my deepest gratitude to Ryan Trimm, whose invaluable advice and unflagging support over the past several years were instrumental in making this study a reality. In fact, I’m quite certain that without his guidance and encouragement, it wouldn’t exist. I thank Naomi Mandel, whose own scholarship serves as a continual source of inspiration, for her thoughtful feedback on early drafts of chapters: her keen— and keenly honest—insights pushed me to become a better writer and thinker. Alain-Philippe Durand and Jean Walton supplied both counsel and kindness along the way, for which I’m deeply grateful. The researching and writing of this book were funded, in part, by fellowships from the University of Rhode Island, and I offer them my sincere appreciation, particularly Galen Johnson at the Center for the Humanities. And I am indebted to Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury, for welcoming this project with enthusiasm and good cheer, and helping it to see the light of day. Finally, I owe special thanks to my family. To my mother, Judy, who insisted I read for at least an hour a day during my childhood summer vacations, despite my loud and prolonged protestations, and ultimately instilled in me a love of books. And to my father, Huck, my reliable late-night movie companion, who helped foster my love of film. This book bears their imprint, as do I.

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Theorizing the Drift

Adaptation For Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, an evolutionary theorist writing in the early 1800s, the term connoted positive change, an ability to physiologically adjust in response to the demands of one’s environment, and to then pass along such advantageous characteristics to future generations. For Charles Darwin, adaptation suggested survival: the natural selection of genetic traits that, over time, led to greater life expectancy and reproductive success. As the protean word has increasingly found a home in our everyday parlance, beyond the realm of scientific discourse, it has accumulated additional implications and associations; yet the majority of these newer semantic colorations still adhere to the underlying idea (fundamental to both Lamarck and Darwin) that there is a certain utility to be found in adaptation—that the term by and large indicates an alteration for the better, a modification designed to increase longevity, or efficacy, or suitability. Quite simply, in an historical and a contemporary sense, “adaptation”—in its various incarnations—is most frequently understood as a form of progress. An exception to this general propensity may be found in the field of critical theory, specifically film and literary theory, where the word adaptation conjures no such favorable connotations. On the contrary, for many scholars, the notion of adaptation (normally conceived as the adapting of a novel or play to the cinema) has traditionally been synonymous with violation. Robert Stam bemoans this tendency to characterize filmic adaptations as artistic assaults on sacrosanct precursor texts, arguing that it has resulted in a critical language which is “extremely judgmental, proliferating in terms that imply film has performed a disservice to literature.”1 Such terms—infidelity, betrayal, deformation, vulgarization, bastardization—may each carry a “specific charge of opprobrium,”

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Stam concludes, but their collective (and vaguely Platonic) message always seems to be the same: the original was better, and better left alone.2 So much for the utility of adaptation. This book proposes to challenge such negative inclinations common to literary and film theory, particularly as they are manifested within the field of adaptation studies—a field that draws heavily on both disciplines, yet is embraced by neither. It does so by offering a new theoretical orientation, a new framework, through which to interrogate and understand the complicated relationship between literature and cinema: namely, affect. Specifically, I (re)conceive literary and filmic texts as affective economies that communicate with each other, and with audiences, through the transmission of affective intensities, and the adaptive process as a dissemination of those intensities from one medium to another, where they take root and induce change from within. By rethinking adaptation in this manner, I contend, by conceptualizing the process not merely as a transposition of narrative content from one work to the next, but as a generative drifting of affective forces between works, between mediums, we are able to steer away from the notion of “fidelity” (to story, to character, to theme) which has anchored so many analyses of adaptive texts over the years, and the reproving language generally attending it. We are able to steer away from the sometimes delimiting preoccupations and presuppositions, the deeply ingrained attitudes and agendas historically informing adaptation studies, and thus toward fresher, richer avenues of critical inquiry: What affective work are certain literary and filmic texts performing? How do they foster what Steven Shaviro terms “[i]ntensive affective flows,” and how do these intensities provoke, in turn, new shifts and transformations and becomings?3 What can this tell us, more broadly, about the underexplored affective dimensions of literature and cinema, and the dialogic interactions between them? Such questions are worth pondering, especially at this moment in time. As Simone Murray notes, adaptation has increasingly come “to comprise the structural logic of contemporary media and cultural industries,” and therefore constructive considerations of adaptation should play a “central role in theorizations of twenty-first century culture.”4 That is, in our global, digital, information age, adaptation represents a new cultural (one might even say intercultural) dominant, as is evident from even the most cursory survey of the latest multinational slew of novels becoming movies, movies becoming videogames, videogames becoming comic books, comic books becoming television series, television series becoming theme park attractions, and so on

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ad infinitum. Consequently, adaptation studies is advantageously positioned to begin theorizing this new dominant, to begin mapping these intermedial and cross-cultural flows and movements and disseminations, if only it can recalibrate its focus: if only it can displace (or at the very least supplement) its traditional concentration on fidelity and the rendering of judgment with more flexible, more productive analytical models, models which are sensitive to the marked fluidity and hypertextuality of our era. A critical methodology attuned to affect, I submit, is one such model. Of course, in order to articulate such an argument in full, it is first necessary to lay the theoretical groundwork—to chart out the discursive terrain one intends to traverse, and explain where and how interventions are to be made. To that end, in this opening chapter, I briefly examine the field of adaptation studies (or adaptation theory, as it is also referred to) from its origins to its current state. I do so to call attention to some of the discipline’s most problematic—and enduring—lacunae along the way. I then suggest ways in which a critical focus on affect might be profitably employed to bridge those gaps and fissures within the discourse, and offer us a novel strategy for thinking about the adaptive process. After sketching the parameters of this methodological approach, I conclude by outlining how it will be more comprehensively elaborated, more thoroughly developed, as it is utilized in subsequent chapters to analyze works by John Dos Passos, Don DeLillo, Susanna Moore and Jane Campion, and, finally, Charles Burnett. Although this book limits its immediate scope to adaptive works of literature and film (a strategically advisable move, I felt, when proposing a new analytical turn for adaptation studies, the much-contested literature/film dynamic being at the historical heart of the discipline), one hopes the critical lens it mobilizes will be seen in the end as fully applicable to other mediums as well.

Where we are going, where we have been Ingmar Bergman, that brooding poet of spiritual crisis and existential angst, once proclaimed: “Film has nothing to do with literature; the character and substance of the art forms are usually in conflict.”5 While he is far from alone in this assessment, it is impossible to deny that since its inception cinema has enjoyed close ties with literature: as long as there have been movies, there have been filmic adaptations of literary works. The first American adaptation, William Heise’s The

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Kiss, based on the stage musical The Widow Jones, was released in 1896, and it was quickly followed by others.6 Such pioneering adaptations led several authors and directors of the era to draw enthusiastic parallels between literature and the burgeoning cinematic medium. H. G. Wells, for instance, extolled film’s facility for “telling stories by means of pictures” instead of words; and D. W. Griffith, when questioned about the differences between his own work and the novels of Charles Dickens, described his movies as “picture stories; not so different.”7 Yet this initial enthusiasm for nascent cinema, and its penchant for finding creative fodder in the literary arts, was relatively short lived, and it was not long before a range of scholarly scolds were portraying the relationship between film and literature as contentious and artistically counterproductive, and affirming with Bergmanesque certainty that the two mediums had very little to learn from one another. One cannot help but wonder at the speed of this critical turnaround, and feel compelled to ask: Why did the analytical worm so quickly turn? One possible explanation, proposed by Kamilla Elliott, is that adversarial academics wasted little time in seizing on film adaptations as a fertile new battleground in the “ancient word and image wars.”8 These wars, it is generally agreed, find their contemporary roots in the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. In his 1766 treatise Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, Lessing famously drew a strong and clear demarcation between the temporal arts (literature) and the spatial arts (visual mediums like painting). Indeed, Lessing went so far as to describe the temporal and spatial arts as “two equitable and friendly neighbors,” neither of whom should be permitted “to take unbecoming liberties in the heart of the other’s domain.”9 This dictum—that the verbal and the visual should remain segregated—has been a guiding tenet for generations of critics, critics of both literature and visual media alike. According to W. J. T. Mitchell, its influence is clearly in evidence today at the heart of such “semiotic oppositions” as sign and symbol, symbol and icon, and—saliently—text versus image.10 Lending credence to Elliott’s theory is the fact that Lessing’s maxim played a major role in the first comprehensive study of cinematic adaptations, George Bluestone’s Novels into Film. Published in 1957, Bluestone’s study was a response to what he described as the “[q]uantitative analyses” that had come to dominate the discourse on filmic adaptations—analyses which were consumed with itemizing similarities and differences in story, character, and theme between an adapted text and its literary precursor, and then using that supposedly quantifiable data to render such verdicts as “The film is true to the spirit of the

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book,” or “It’s incredible how they butchered the novel.”11 For Bluestone, this type of fidelity criticism, as it would come to be known, this superficial cataloguing of convergences and divergences, did little to illuminate the complexities of the adaptive process (or “the mutational process,” as he termed it), so he set about trying to develop a more enlightening methodology in Novels into Film: one in which he compared, side by side, literary sources and filmic adaptations, with an eye trained on the formal aesthetic dimensions of each text, and—by extension—each text’s respective medium.12 However, while one may admire Bluestone’s efforts to forge a less reactionary, more incisive method for analyzing adaptations, the results of those efforts proved problematic. As James Naremore observes, in Novels into Film, Bluestone’s apparent admiration for the “classic” books he writes about leads him, time and again, to “confirm the intellectual priority and formal superiority of canonical novels, which provide the films he discusses with their sources and with a standard of value against which their success or failure is measured.”13 In other words, although Bluestone ostensibly rejects the analytical template of fidelity criticism, he reaffirms, in practice, its underlying assumption that literary precursors are inevitably superior to their cinematic adaptations, and thus implicitly orients his arguments around “the problem of textual fidelity.”14 Even more troublingly, as Bluestone tries to grapple with the aesthetic qualities of literature and cinema, he draws on Lessing’s binaristic thinking, leading him to conclude that the novel is a verbal/temporal art form and film a visual/spatial one, and therefore the two mediums, belonging as they do to distinct “artistic genera,” are “secretly hostile” to one another.15 Hence, Bluestone ultimately urges (in language reminiscent of Lessing) cinema and literature to go their separate ways, and “remain separate institutions, each achieving its best results by exploring unique and specific properties.”16 All told, then, Bluestone’s influential study, often characterized as the foundational text of modern adaptation studies, both reinscribes fidelity as the focal point of understanding adaptations, and advocates, in the end, for the artistic segregation of literary words and cinematic images.17 Robert B. Ray has suggested that, in the wake of Bluestone, a seemingly endless series of disparaging essays about filmic adaptations began to appear, essays which easily could have used a variation of the phrase “But Compared to the Original . . .” in their titles.18 James M. Welsh concurs, averring “would-be critics who followed the Bluestone example found themselves rewriting the same essay over and over and asking the same questions about whether the film adaptation was ‘faithful’ to its source.”19 At the heart of many such articles,

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I maintain, is the Bluestone-ian belief (more often implied than overtly articulated) that literature, in particular the novel, and cinema are essentially incompatible art forms, and consequently any mingling of the two is to be met with healthy skepticism, if not antagonism. It is a belief which lingers to this day, if one is to judge from the reproving tenor struck by some contemporary critics of adaptation—a surprising state of affairs, considering recent scholarship has forced us to reevaluate the validity of Bluestone’s fundamental suppositions about both mediums. To elaborate, according to Bluestone, the key to classifying and comprehending art forms can be found in the concept of tenses. As he explains, the “novel has three tenses; the film has only one [the present tense]. From this follows almost everything one can say about time in both media.”20 What also follows, Bluestone continues, is the logical extrapolation that because the novel is capable of presenting multiple tenses (past, present and future), it must be a temporal medium, whereas cinema—with its images existing in a kind of “perpetual present”—is primarily a spatial one.21 This notion of cinematic images existing in a permanent present tense resonates throughout the corpus of film theory. André Bazin, for instance, describes cinema as showing us “man only in the present,” and Béla Balázs confidently asserts that film is unable to “express either a past or a future tense.”22 Even a modern scholar as insightful as Bruce Kawin still laments the supposed absence of a cinematic past tense, calling it one of the medium’s “most decisive limitations.”23 More recently, though, a number of theorists have begun to break with this school of thought, compelling us to reconsider our long-held preconceptions about film and temporality. The most vigorous and challenging of these theorists is Gilles Deleuze, who characterizes the “postulate of ‘the image in the present’ [as] one of the most destructive for any understanding of cinema.”24 For Deleuze, there is “no present which is not haunted by a past and a future”; thus, he valorizes the irrational cuts and false continuity common to post–World War II filmmaking, and the resultant slackening of classical cinema’s “sensory-motor” connections in favor of “pure optical and sound situation[s],” because it liberates the filmic image from the strictures of causality and continuity.25 This permits “time in the pure state” to rise “up to the surface of the screen” in the form of the “direct time-image.”26 Such time-images, in turn, “seize this past and this future that coexist with [and haunt] the present,” and reveal them through “de-actualized peaks of present,” “virtual sheets of past,” and “crystals of time.”27 In this manner, the time-image, as conceived by Deleuze, belies Bluestone’s presumption of a perpetual present tense in cinema, and illustrates that film is eminently capable

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of rendering (to use Deleuze’s term) “novelesque” temporalities onscreen.28 Put another way, after Deleuze, Bluestone’s designation of cinema as a principally spatial medium—a designation central to his analysis, and to the broader conclusions he draws—is no longer tenable. The work of W. J. T. Mitchell is also apposite here. Mitchell takes issue with Lessing’s original impulse (later adopted by Bluestone) to divide the arts into two discrete categories, spatial or temporal, and then defend each from encroachment by the other. As Mitchell sees it, such classificatory labors are inherently misguided, since all “works of art, like all other objects of human experience, are structures in space-time.”29 Accordingly, a critic’s energies would be better spent on the more interesting problem of “comprehend[ing] a particular spatial-temporal construction,” rather than merely “label[ing] it as temporal or spatial.”30 This almost Bakhtinian redirection of focus, Mitchell suggests, will enable us to “stop saying many things about the arts that make little or no sense,” as we develop more flexible, less taxonomic methodologies for deepening our knowledge of artistic texts of all shapes and forms.31 More particularly, in terms of adaptation studies, Mitchell’s ideas (along with Deleuze’s) encourage us to see beyond the rigid binaries—temporal versus spatial, verbal versus visual, text versus image—which have long informed the discipline, and begin (re)conceptualizing the adaptive process not as an imprudent instance of artistic trespassing, but as the symbiotic interplay of two spatio-temporal mediums, as the intermedial and synergistic communication between various creative space-time structures. In light of these factors, then, of Mitchell’s compelling advocacy for more nuanced critical models over the binarisms of Lessing and Bluestone, as well as Deleuze’s effective dismantling of the theoretical foundation upon which a substantial portion of Bluestone’s study was built, it is difficult to fathom why Bluestone’s approach remains (to borrow the phraseology of Murray) the “almost unquestioned methodological orthodoxy within the field” of adaptation studies.32 That is to say, it is difficult to fathom why so much traditional adaptation theory, from Bluestone’s day to our own, tacitly adheres to the manner in which Bluestone thought and judged, and remains dedicated to churning out comparative analyses of literary sources and filmic adaptations that revolve, either explicitly or implicitly, around problems of textual fidelity—analyses that consistently leave readers with the impression that the former are intrinsically better than the latter, thus calling into question the advisability and the utility of the adaptive process. The puzzling resilience of fidelity in the discourse on

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adaptation, and what this resiliency might tell us about our collective artistic and cultural attitudes, is worth considering.

The persistence of fidelity Christopher Orr, assessing the status of adaptation studies in a 1984 essay, memorably remarked that “the concern for fidelity of the adapted film in letter and spirit to its literary source has unquestionably dominated” the history of adaptation theory.33 As I indicated above, in the years since Orr wrote those words, not all that much has changed. Indeed, as recently as 2007, Thomas Leitch was bemoaning the fact that, despite “innumerable exceptions to the rule, adaptation theorists have persisted in treating fidelity to the source material as a norm from which unfaithful adaptations depart at their peril.”34 For Leitch, this is a regrettable state of affairs, as analytical models grounded in textual fidelity invariably position an adapted work as secondary and therefore subordinate to its source, resulting in a critical discourse fixated on less than illuminative concerns about “difference” and “lack.”35 Or, as Leitch himself puts it, using “[f]idelity as a touchstone of adaptations will always give their source texts, which are always faithful to themselves, an advantage so enormous and unfair that it renders the comparison meaningless.”36 While one can imagine Jacques Derrida or Paul de Man objecting to the notion that a text is always faithful to itself, Leitch’s larger point holds true: fidelity criticism, in its various incarnations, does not operate on a level playing field. Of course, this is not to suggest that in the decades directly succeeding Bluestone’s Novels into Film there were no serious attempts to break the fidelity mold in adaptation studies. With the rise of narratology in the 1960s, for instance, certain theorists did endeavor to formulate a more equitable and systematic means for contrasting literature and cinema. These theorists, working with the ideas of Gérard Genette (among others), produced rigorous analyses of such issues as plot construction, narration, and focalization in cinematic texts, and even looked for filmic equivalents of verbs and pronouns. Yet, despite the professed objectivity of these studies, one can often sense, beneath their dispassionate veneer, a kind of privileging of the written word. The title of one of the more famous narratological essays, Seymour Chatman’s “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa),” is instructive here. Note the priority given in the title to literature’s (in this case the novel’s) supposedly unique and

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irreproducible qualities, while the properties distinctive to cinema are relegated to a brief, almost dismissive parenthetical. Note, also, the emphasis it places on the alleged irreducible differences between the two mediums, with no mention of their potential affinities. For many narratological critics, it seems, cinema can never quite live up to the example set by literature: the focalization techniques developed by an Orson Welles will never equal those of a Henry James; the free indirect discourse of a Pier Paolo Pasolini will always pale in comparison with the verbal virtuosity of a Gustave Flaubert. This privileging of the literary, subtly but discernibly, would eventually lead Kamilla Elliott to conclude that narratology, for all of its valuable revelations about filmic language, perpetuates the “categorical subjugation of pictorial forms to verbal paradigms” characteristic of much fidelity criticism.37 On the heels of narratology, there have been other efforts to create a more sophisticated critical idiom for discussing adaptations, an idiom informed by the insights of structuralism, poststructuralism, and neoformalism. As James Naremore suggests, however, these discussions tend to return, time and again, in one manner or another, to “questions of textual fidelity.”38 Leitch, along with Elliott, attributes this chronic inability of critical theory to ultimately shed the fetters of fidelity, in large measure, to long-standing interdisciplinary rivalries within academic circles. Historically speaking, college campuses have proven, at times, cutthroat territory, with each department constantly striving to improve its standing, not to mention its funding, in the hierarchy of academia. Thus, when cinema studies programs began appearing in the 1960s and 1970s, film scholars felt obliged to explore the medium’s purported unique and specific properties. The intention was to carve out their own theoretical terrain, apart from the realm of literary theory, thereby demonstrating the validity and value of the new discipline. Not surprisingly, then, considerations of adaptation—of cinema’s relationship to, and interactions with, literature—were viewed by these scholars as at best ancillary to their goals, and at worst impeditive. Why deal with literary texts at all, they appeared to ask, when film is where our bread is buttered? As a result, the bulk of adaptation theory over the years has been produced, and continues to be produced, in English departments, where (Stam tells us) literary scholars frequently employ Marshall McLuhan’s “rear view mirror logic” and assume that “older arts are necessarily better arts.”39 Differently put, they knowingly or unknowingly adopt a defensive posture, presuming literature to be “inherently superior to the younger art of cinema, which is itself superior to the even younger art of television, and so on ad infinitum.”40 This posture induces

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them, in turn, to reserve the greater part of their analytical energies for detailing the ways in which filmic storytelling is inferior to literary storytelling, for mourning all that is lost or destroyed when a cinematic adaptation deviates—as it inevitably must—from the letter of its literary source. Fueling this latter fear and loathing of infidelity, one surmises, and the general antipathy towards adaptation it engenders, is what Andreas Huyssen might describe as an “anxiety of contamination.”41 Just as modernists feared corruption by “an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture,” so too, it seems, have certain literary-minded critics of adaptation resisted the intermingling of a “high art” like literature with a “low” or “mass” medium like film, which can only result in the sullying and degradation of the former.42 Certainly, this was the case put forward by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, those early champions of modernism, when they wrote reproachfully of cinema’s crude appropriation of Beethoven for a soundtrack, or the “garbling” of Tolstoy in a screenplay.43 And, gauging by the equally reproachful critical barbs regularly directed at the latest adaptations arriving in movie theaters, that case is still being made today. To cling to such distinctions as high and low art, even tacitly, in a contemporary age marked by heterogeneity, indeterminacy, and the deliberate destabilization of borders, though, is to fight the proverbial losing battle.44 As Huyssen rightly points out, like it or not, the “boundaries between high . . . and mass culture have increasingly blurred,” and there is no sense trying—in futility—to redraw those lines.45 Rather, we would be better advised to look upon our present moment as one of opportunity, of discovery: a chance to step back and reassess deeply entrenched beliefs about art and culture, and perceive anew the endless exchanges continuously taking place between creative mediums. This moment, then, is a particularly opportune one for adaptation studies. In the words of Simone Murray, in the inconstant, ever-adapting landscapes of our current cultural era, adaptation theory is “the right discipline, at the right time.”46 The problem, however, is that it is also “lumbered with an obsolete methodology”: a methodology, as I have tried to show, born of academic turf wars, informed by hierarchical and binaristic precepts, haunted by the specter of fidelity, and geared toward the rendering of (mostly censorious) judgments.47 Consequently, the field currently hovers somewhere between film and literary theory, claimed by neither and marginalized by both, just when it should be coming into its own as a vibrant, pertinent discourse. If we are to rectify this situation, and rescue adaptation studies from “a bleak and servile future,” as Leitch ominously puts it, we urgently need an influx of fresh ideas, of fresh perspectives—we need new

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methodologies that speak to a new day.48 Some theorists have lately sought to answer this call, producing original and innovative work—people like Leitch, Stam, and Elliott, Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders, Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. In that same spirit, I would like to offer up one potential avenue for constructively rethinking, and hence reinvigorating, how we theorize adaptations: the concept of affective drifting.

Drifting Robert Stam, in contemplating future directions for adaptation theory, has hypothesized about “a new possible language for speaking of adaptations in terms not of copy but of transformational energies and movements and intensities.”49 Although he does not specify what this language will look or sound like, he does suggest, in very Deleuzian terms, what its focus might be: an exploration of how adaptive texts “redistribute energies and intensities,” how they “provoke flows and displacements,” the ways in which “the linguistic energy of literary writing turns into the audio-visual-kinetic energy of the adaptation, in an amorous exchange of textual fluids.”50 By foregoing preoccupations with fidelity and artistic purity in favor of such concerns, Stam believes, this new approach could usefully contribute to the rejuvenation of the discipline. A promising starting point for the development and articulation of such an approach may be located, I submit, in Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of “drift.” For Lyotard, what is significant in a text is: not what it means, but what it does and incites to do. What it does: the charge of affect it contains and transmits. What it incites to do: the metamorphoses of this potential energy into other things—other texts, but also paintings, photographs, film sequences, political actions, decisions, erotic inspirations, acts of insubordination, economic initiatives, etc.51

In other words, for Lyotard it is less important to classify a text (as, say, temporal or spatial) and cast judgment on it, than it is to recognize the particular affects a text is fostering and how those affective energies are being transmitted from one work to the next, how they are drifting from one medium to another, provoking transformations and becomings in the process. This redirection of critical emphasis away from the symbolic, sanctioned meaning of texts and

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toward the actual affective work they are doing—the specific affects they are generating and disseminating—strikes one as having intriguing implications for the study of adaptations (even though Lyotard himself makes no specific mention of them in his discussion). That is, it seems to hint at a strategy for conceiving of adaptation not as an intermedial translation of a literary source’s narrative content from page to screen, but as a flow of affective forces between texts, a generative drift of intensities between mediums. Such a strategy, in turn, such a (re)conceptualization, would cast doubt on the wisdom—and quite frankly the relevance—of questioning an adapted work’s relative faithfulness or unfaithfulness to the plot, characters, themes, or “spirit” of its precursor text. Rather, of more pressing interest to the adaptation scholar would be considerations of what affective energies individual texts are producing, how those energies come into play during the adaptive process, and what that may tell us, more broadly, about the dynamic relationship between literature and cinema. An argument could be made that such an “affective turn” in adaptation theory is long overdue—for, as Marco Abel observes, “reading literature or viewing film is first and foremost an affective operation.”52 And yet, thus far, considerations of affect have been largely absent from the field of adaptation studies.53 Indeed, as Jamie “Skye” Bianco notes with dismay, affect has, comparatively speaking, received sparse attention in general across the wider spectrum of critical theory, despite what she characterizes as a current “cultural deluge of affective production.”54 In this sense, Bianco appears to concur with Brian Massumi’s assertion that postmodern society is not, in fact, marked by a “waning of affect,” as Fredric Jameson so famously (and influentially) proclaimed, but a “surfeit of it.”55 Expanding on the notion, Abel helpfully posits: What Jameson should have said instead is that in the age of postmodernism and late capitalism, we witness the waning of emotion (to wit, a display of emotion becomes “uncool” and is being displaced by irony .  .  .); but affect is always there, even in the works of, say, Andy Warhol, Bret Easton Ellis, or A.  M. Holmes, to name but a few artists whose work is often described as affectless. Affect is not something that can be quantified, but it has . . . different qualities: it can be more or less flat, cold, hot, stimulating, paralyzing, sped up, slowed down, etc.56

Affect, then, comes in many forms, and comes at us from many directions. It is fostered by literary works and by filmic ones. It is always there, grounding our responses to artistic texts, both original and adaptive alike, shaping how

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we understand and assess them. Accordingly, it is only logical that adaptation studies should cast a critical eye on affect, and afford it, albeit belatedly, a place within the discourse’s theoretical lexicon. However, achieving this goal may be more challenging than one first supposes. As Massumi remarks, if some have the impression affect has waned in the postmodern era, this is attributable, in part, to the fact that “there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect.”57 To be sure, even the definition of affect seems to vary considerably from theorist to theorist, from year to year. Teresa Brennan has helpfully traced the evolution of this historically mutable, slippery term, beginning with its Latin root, affectus, which translates as “passion” or “emotion.”58 Brennan’s genealogy then tracks the various invocations and examinations of affect that have followed, from its appearance in Egyptian and Hebrew “tabulations of demons” to “Greek taxonomies of the emotions” to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, from the theories of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud to those of William James and Carl Lange.59 A commonality linking many of these meditations on affect, she discovers, is the direct correlation authors are inclined to draw between affect and feelings or emotions, often using the words interchangeably. Massumi objects to such conflation, though, contending it “is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion” because the two “follow different logics and pertain to different orders.”60 More specifically, Massumi (re)defines affect as “intensity,” whereas emotion is “qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized.”61 Or, as Abel more succinctly explains, “[A]ffect and emotions are related but not exhaustively synonymous. Simply put, emotions are merely affects territorialized on the subject.”62 Emotions are affects located and pinned down in a specific environment, in a specific subject. This distinction between affects/intensities and feelings/emotions—affects constituting those forces and energies preceding emotions—is a persuasive one. It is also a productive one for the adaptation theorist hoping to incorporate an attentiveness to affect into the discipline, postulating as it does that affects (such as those generated by works of film and literature) are somehow “contagious,” as Elizabeth Wissinger puts it; that affects are the energies which “flow between bodies,” possessed of a dynamism and productivity which can be “whipped up or dampened in the course of interaction.”63 Of course, any mention of bodies in critical discourse will inevitably invite a healthy dose of suspicion from some

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quarters, and the affect theory of Wissinger and others is no exception in this regard. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for instance, herself an eloquent scholar on the topic, highlights the pitfalls attendant to this line of inquiry, noting its potential to regress to essentialist or normative conceptions of “the body,” or to minimize “the continuing history of racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise abusive biologisms, or the urgency of exposures of them.”64 Similarly, as Abel makes clear, other critics accuse affect theory of retreating into “a hyper-subjective mode of thinking and acting at the very moment when, on a much larger scale, the subject has definitely ‘disappeared into a virtual ether.’”65 Interestingly, these debates—weighing the possible advantages and disadvantages of integrating bodies into critical/theoretical discussions—echo a long-running dispute in film theory, over the relative merits of addressing bodily responses to the cinematic experience. As I will be drawing on film theory (along with literary and affect theory) throughout the course of this book, the dispute is worth recapping briefly, before I move on to consider the ways in which one might avoid the pitfalls outlined by Sedgwick and Abel while investigating the affective dimensions of literature, cinema, and the adaptive process. For early scholars of cinema, the experience of watching a film was often understood to be an essentially physical, embodied one. Sergei Eisenstein, for example, wrote about a sensation of “ex-stasis,” which caused the viewer to feel thrust “out of oneself ” and brought into a kind of ecstatic vibration with the filmic text; and Siegfried Kracauer proposed a “resonance effect” whereby cinematic images “cause a deep stir in bodily layers.”66 Going even further than Kracauer, Walter Benjamin analogized the cinematic image to a work of Dadaist art, in that it “became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality.”67 Such somatic-minded descriptions, though, were not to last. According to Stam, as film studies gradually grew into a formal discipline, critics and theorists began to worry that they were relying too much on their own “neuro-glandular response to films,” and they therefore sought more systematic, objective methods for analyzing cinematic texts.68 This search led them to thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx and Louis Althusser, Ferdinand de Saussure and the semioticians and structuralists he inspired, all of whose ideas were put to work fashioning critical schemas intended to dispassionately dissect cinema’s grammatical and ideological substructures. By and large, these schemas painted a portrait of film spectatorship that could most accurately be described as disembodied, which quickly became the standard in scholarly circles. Perhaps

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best typifying this disciplinary trend was semiotic and psychoanalytic theorist Christian Metz, who—pace Eisenstein et al.—argued that filmgoers were basically “[s]pectator fish, taking in everything with their eyes, nothing with their bodies: the institution of cinema requires a silent, motionless spectator, a vacant spectator . . . a self filtered out into pure vision.”69 As of late, some have questioned whether the pendulum of film theory has swung too far, for too long, in the direction of Metz and company. Steven Shaviro, for one, passionately maintains that cinema “is a vivid medium, and it is important to talk about how it arouses corporeal reactions of desire and fear, pleasure and disgust, fascination and shame.”70 More, he believes the “pleasures, the unpleasant constraints, the consuming obsessions” of writing film theory cannot, in fact, “be separated from the bodily agitations, the movements of fascination, the reactions of attraction and repulsion, of which they are the extension and elaboration.”71 Along those same lines, Frederic Jameson insists cinema “is an addiction which leaves its traces in the body itself. This makes it inconceivable . . . that we could ever write about it without self-indulgence.”72 There are others voices in this growing chorus. Vivian Sobchack, reconfiguring Metz’s spectator fish as the “cinesthetic subject” (a neologism combining cinema with synaesthesia and coenaesthesia), holds that we are touched and moved by “the substance and texture of images,” that we experience them with “our entire bodily being.”73 Anne Rutherford calls for “an aesthetics of embodiment” to replace film theory’s “insistence on scientific models” and methodologies.74 Such asseverations, and appeals for (another) paradigmatic shift in cinema studies, are compelling. Yet, as Tim Groves muses, those theorists who take them to heart risk appearing less objective and systematic in their work than “confessional.”75 They risk opening themselves, like their earliest predecessors in the discourse did, to accusations that their analyses are overly subjective, or even essentialist. Abel’s work speaks directly to the anxieties in both disciplines: to the concerns that both affect theory and recent film theory perpetually teeter on the brink of hypersubjectivity. It does so with a healthy assist from Deleuze. For Abel, it is pivotal to bear in mind that affect is—as Deleuze construes it—pre-subjective force. That is, affects are those “pre-personal” intensities that end up “producing emotions and representations.”76 Thus, a critic attuned to affect, attuned to the intensities being fostered, say, by a literary or filmic text, is not recording his or her individual, personal reaction to the text, but is, rather, trying to identify the text’s “own affective quality [or qualities]—how it overcodes its pre-subjective force and thus affects how readers [or viewers] territorialize their response[s].”77

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The focus, in others words, is on the object (i.e., the text), and the impinging affects it generates, and not on the subject (i.e., the critic). By way of analogy, Abel likens a critic to a diamond cutter: just as the diamond cutter “must heed the pre-subjective lines of flight of a raw diamond if he wants to realize its full potential value,” so does the critic alert to affect attempt to follow the intrinsic “affective qualities (intensities) of the object/other” in order to fully appreciate “the object/other’s potential.”78 In this manner, the critic avoids descending into relativism or hypersubjectivism, and is able instead to actively shed light on a work’s formal, affective properties. As for bodies, Abel tells us, affect is indeed about bodies. And so is affect theory. It is about textual bodies, including literary and cinematic ones, and the pre-subjective forces they are fostering. It is also about the bodies of readers and viewers, and how they may be variously “enabled, allowed, or subjected to territorialize” those intensities.79 This does not mean, however, that all critical considerations of affect will necessarily devolve into reductive conversations about “your” body or “my” body. On the contrary, Abel, again playing off Deleuze, offers a way around such conversations by suggesting that we might effectively conceive of a reading/viewing body not as a stable, unified whole, but as “a multiplicity of forces,” a “bundle of sensations or affects or potentialities.”80 Hence, the intensities that a work of literature or film generates “don’t act on already constituted bodies” so much as “they act upon other forces,” other “potentials.”81 This configuration of a reading/viewing body as a Deleuzian assemblage, with its intimations of mutability and embrace of becoming, seems especially apropos for a contemporary era increasingly marked by indeterminacy and (Jameson would argue) fragmentation. It is constructive as well, as it encourages us to register the capacity cinematic and literary texts have, through their pre-subjective forces, to affectively stir and impact us—to act upon the multiplicity of potentialities within us—without resorting to overly totalizing conceptions of “the body” or a singular, universal subject. We can thereby acknowledge the kinds of bodily agitations and movements alluded to by Shaviro, while concomitantly eschewing any normative or essentialist generalizations. Take, in example, Abel’s reading of Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial 1991 novel American Psycho. In an effort to sidestep (or at a minimum delay) slipping into a traditional “mode of judgment,” Abel deliberately avoids those questions occupying much of the critical discourse on Ellis’s book, namely: “whether the text’s violence is immoral or not, whether American Psycho is a successful satire or not, and whether the incessant repetitiveness and flatness of the book’s

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prose indicates a satirical purpose or mere lack of authorial skill.”82 Rather, Abel turns his attention to the novel’s “affective force,” to the affective intensity fostered by “the force of [its] language and images.”83 In so doing, he discovers that much of the book’s affective potency derives from its juxtaposition of long, boring passages endlessly repeating “brand names, workout routines, restaurant menus, clothing advice, television programs, music criticism, misogynistic comments, and non sequitur chitchat” (passages that incite readers to “long for some action”) with abrupt, detailed depictions of graphic violence.84 This careful modulation of “slowness and speed,” Abel concludes, this “differentiating engine” of boredom and shock, repetition and violence, is calculated to provoke an “intense response” from readers.85 That is to say, the text is configured as a kind of verbal assailment on “the reader’s body,” is overcoded to bore, surprise, overwhelm, implicate, frustrate, annoy, upset, and even sicken.86 Here, then, Abel is illuminating the affective properties of Ellis’s novel—the ways in which the language and structure of the text are designed (but certainly not guaranteed) to induce a “visceral response  .  .  . a pure affective response” from readers, to affectively move and agitate—without recourse to the idea of a universal subject, or excessively subjective or essentializing notions of my body, your body, or the body.87 Suggestively, Abel also observes that while Mary Harron’s filmic adaptation of American Psycho, released in 2000, may cinematically recreate much of the original’s narrative content, it fails “to tap into the affective force of Ellis’s novel.”88 This concept of a filmmaker (or author, for that matter) endeavoring to tap into and rechannel the affective force(s) of a precursor text is one that will be explored in depth throughout this study. Abel, then, along with Deleuze, Lyotard, and others, points the way toward a new method for analyzing literature and film, a method that “adds to our existing critical toolbox,” by taking into account the affective energies flowing between bodies, the intensities drifting between texts, readers, and viewers.89 And it achieves this, ideally, with no recourse to normative thinking or undue subjectivism. In this book, I propose to import (or adapt) such a methodological orientation into the field of adaptation studies. More particularly, I intend to conceptualize literary and filmic texts as, in part, spatio-temporal motors generating and disseminating affect, and the adaptive process as the drifting of intensities from one work to another, from one medium to the next. The potential benefits of this affective turn for adaptation theory are considerable. Consider Thomas Leitch’s claim that one of the biggest—and longest running— problems within the discipline is the perennial obsession with asking whether

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an adaptation is “any good [as an artistic production] as a preliminary, a precondition, or a substitute for asking how it works.”90 A critical concentration on affect helps to resolve this problem, as its principal ambition is, in Abel’s words, “finding out how something works and what it does (rather than what it means).”91 Thus, for the adaptation scholar, it becomes less imperative to evaluate whether something is good or bad art than to discern what affective work a source text is performing, what pre-subjective forces it is fostering, and how those forces are being “link[ed] up to” and “re-direct[ed]” in the adaptive text.92 Broad assessment gives way to detailed analysis.93 This shift in focus from a text’s relative merits as an artwork to its affective economy, in turn, yields other advantages. Perhaps most obviously, as I intimated earlier, it deemphasizes the significance of story, character, and theme (the cornerstones of fidelity criticism), since a text’s intensities do not necessarily issue from or correspond with its narrative content, its manifest meaning. One thinks, for instance, of Massumi’s seminal discussion of the dissonance that can occur between a film’s content and its immediate effect, leading him to postulate a “primacy of the affective in image reception.”94 Or Abel’s contention that Harron’s adaptation of American Psycho, while sharing many of the characters and plot points of Ellis’s book, effectively “eradicat[es] the novel’s varying intensities.”95 Now of greater interest to the adaptation theorist are a work’s formal aesthetic features, its stylistic techniques, which comprise its affective lines of flight. Additionally, this shift destabilizes binaristic demarcations between so-called high and low art forms. What is of consequence is not whether a text belongs to a “superior” medium like literature or an “inferior” one like cinema; what is of consequence are the affective energies—for example, the boredom and shock, the anxiety and dread—it produces, and the metamorphoses and displacements they incite. Moreover, the very idea (fundamental to many studies of adaptation) that an adaptation is, by definition, a cinematic transcription of a literary precursor is destabilized as well. Intensities flow as equally from film into literature as from literature into film. Affect drifts both ways. In other words, a critical model calibrated to map affective drifting may circumvent certain aporias, bridge certain lacunae, in traditional adaptation theory. I am not suggesting this methodology become the “presiding poetics” of the field, to use Robert B. Ray’s terminology.96 I am suggesting, though, that affect deserves a role in the conversation. By charting affect, how it is transmitted by texts, how it drifts among them and among us, we can further and more fully appreciate the aesthetic intricacies of literary and cinematic works, and the

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dynamic interactions occurring between them. And, if Abel is correct that affects are territorialized as emotions, are innately imbricated with cognition, mapping them will only deepen our understanding of the ways in which cinema and literature, in addition to moving and shaping one another, are capable of moving and shaping us as well—of giving rise, ultimately, to feelings and thoughts and ideas that speak to our lives and our times.97

Coming attractions: From theory to practice In the chapters that follow, I mold and extend this approach as I put it into operation analyzing adaptive works that have, to date, been much neglected by adaptation critics. I begin with John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, published between 1930 and 1936, which has garnered only a handful of mentions in adaptation studies throughout the years. Challenging the precept that the adaptive act always involves a transposition of narrative from literature to film, I (re)position Dos Passos’s text—or, more accurately, its Newsreel and Camera Eye passages—as an attempt to adapt into prose the affective energies of Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s directorial aesthetic. In particular, I argue these passages from U.S.A. seek to link up to and redirect Vertov’s rushing and dislocating temporalities, his mobile and multisensorial visuality, as part of a larger articulation of a modernist literary style commensurate with the swiftly changing, frequently disorienting experience of early twentieth-century American life. Next, I move on to Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a novel from 1997 often described as quintessentially postmodern. Building on my discussion of Dos Passos, I further unsettle adaptation theory’s emphasis on story (and, by extension, character and theme) by zeroing in on the text’s verbal deployment of cinematic montage techniques developed by another Soviet director, Sergei Eisenstein. That is, I (re)conceive DeLillo’s novel as adapting from screen to page the “affective logic,” as Eisenstein dubbed it, of the filmmaker’s metric, rhythmic, tonal, and intellectual strategies of montage.98 This adaptive component of the text, I contend, is a vital ingredient in the book’s wider agenda of diagnosing, and critically anatomizing, the degree to which we are currently suffused and mediated by “the image” in contemporary American society. Having thus destabilized some of adaptation theory’s most enduring tenets, I then (re)consider a prime example of one of the discipline’s more popular targets for critical scrutiny: namely, a mainstream, commercial movie based on

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a successful novel. Specifically, I offer close readings of Susanna Moore’s violent and erotic 1995 novel In the Cut and Jane Campion’s 2003 filmic adaptation of the same name. I do so not with an eye toward convergences and divergences in narrative content between the two, but rather with an eye toward the ways in which Campion’s text is absorbing and rechanneling the pre-subjective forces fostered by Moore’s book: the unease and anxiety, the discomfort and dread. Although there is, in the end, an affinity between the intensities issuing from both works, I illustrate how they each generate them through different stylistic means, and thus comment differently on our “disarticulated” age. Along the way, I also model how a critical lens focused on affective drifting can be used to explicate the aesthetic architecture of source text and adapted text alike, without reverting to the language of fidelity. Finally, I demonstrate the possibilities this newfound methodological strategy holds for expanding the scope of adaptation studies proper, through a careful examination of Charles Burnett’s 2003 film Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property. Burnett’s multifaceted work is, on its face, a difficult one to categorize: part documentary, part speculative fiction, it also draws on a host of literary sources, ranging from novels to drama to propagandistic pamphlets and essays, which are variously adapted in brief vignettes interspersed throughout the text. It is, then, part adaptation, too. And yet, because those sources are highly abridged in their passage from page to screen, Burnett’s film is exactly the sort of “unfaithful” adaptation that would curry disfavor in fidelity-based analyses. As an alternative to such judgmental inclinations, I provide a critical (re)viewing of the text through an affective prism. To be more precise, I concentrate not on the abridgments, or on what is lost in the adaptive process, but on how Burnett’s film is redistributing the intensive affective flows, the respective affective qualities, of its literary precursors, as it struggles to make sense of Nat Turner’s legacy as both historical personage and discursive construct. As a result, I am able to simultaneously highlight the affective properties of Burnett’s work along with those of its literary sources, and open up a space within adaptation theory for the study of other innovative, unconventional texts, which too often fall beyond the self-imposed purview of the discipline. Thus, one could say that, as a whole, this study is designed to follow an organic, progressive logic (one is tempted to say an evolutionary logic). If the opening chapter has provided us with a fresh theoretical orientation, a fresh set of analytical tools for examining adaptations, those tools are honed and enhanced as I put them into operation throughout the body of the book,

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unearthing new insights, unlocking new knowledge from realist, modernist, and postmodernist texts alike. Differently put, this is a study designed to build momentum as it unfolds, drawing into its critical net disparate works that have, up to now, been either overlooked or undervalued by adaptation studies proper, with the intention of pushing at the boundaries of the discipline, and ultimately extending its discursive reach. In sum, then, the pages that ensue might best be described as my modest attempt to both elucidate and stimulate: to shed new and constructive light on the complex, much-contested literature/film (or film/ literature) dynamic, and in the process, as I address in the concluding chapter, invite further analytical inquiries, spur further efforts to continue broadening the scope and renewing the vigor of contemporary adaptation theory.

Notes 1 Robert Stam, Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 3. 2 Ibid. 3 Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester, UK and Washington: O Books, 2009), 5. 4 Simone Murray, “Materializing Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry,” Literature/Film Quarterly 36, 1 (2008): 4, 14. 5 Ingmar Bergman, quoted in Harris Ross, Film as Literature, Literature as Film: An Introduction to and Bibliography of Film’s Relationship to Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 1. 6 Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 27. As Thomas Leitch notes, unlike most contemporary adaptations, which tend to draw heavily on novels for source material, the majority of these early films were adapted from texts “that required less drastic compression” such as short stories, fairy tales, poems, and plays. 7 H. G. Wells, quoted in Ross, Film as Literature, Literature as Film, 6; D. W. Griffith, quoted in Millicent Marcus, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 13. 8 Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13. 9 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (1766; repr., Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 91.

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10 W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 50. 11 George Bluestone, Novels into Film (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1957), 5. 12 Ibid. 13 James Naremore, “Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 6. 14 Ibid., 8. 15 Bluestone, Novels into Film, vi, 2. Of course, Lessing was writing in particular about narrative poetry versus painting and sculpture, although he did concede that his observations could be applied to “those other arts in which the method of presentation is progressive in time” and “the visual arts in general.” So, one might argue Bluestone “adapted” Lessing’s ideas to his own critical ends by extending them to encompass the novel and cinema. Lessing, Laocoön, 6. 16 Bluestone, Novels into Film, 218. It is worth mentioning that Lessing himself, ironically, was not entirely opposed to the concept of adaptation. He wrote approvingly of poets and artists drawing inspiration not from one another but from “an older, common source,” and of poets finding a creative model in “a work of other arts or a work of nature.” See Lessing, Laocoön, 33, 45. And as Béla Balázs notes, in Lessing’s theatrical criticism, he “found much to criticize in the plays he reviewed, but had no objection to their being adaptations of novels. On the contrary, he proffered much good advice as to how such adaptations could be more skillfully done.” Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (1948; repr., New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1970), 259. 17 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, 13. Kamilla Elliott has of late attempted to deconstruct this word/image binary by maintaining that movies have always contained words (in intertitles, dialogue, subtitles, voice-over narration, credits, and so on), and novels have often been accompanied by illustrations (especially nineteenth-century novels, with their “pictorial initials, vignettes, full-page plates, frontispieces, and endpieces”); therefore, both film and the novel have always already been “hybrid verbal/visual arts,” making the appeals for artistic purity by Bluestone and others intrinsically paralogistic. 18 Robert B. Ray, “The Field of ‘Literature and Film,’” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 45. 19 James M. Welsh, “Adaptability: Questioning and Teaching Fidelity,” in The Pedagogy of Adaptation, ed. Dennis Cutchins, Laurence Raw, and James M. Welsh (Lanham/Toronto/Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010), 101. 20 Bluestone, Novels into Film, 48. 21 Ibid., 57.

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22 André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Volume 2, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 78; Balázs, Theory of the Film, 120. 23 Bruce Kawin, quoted in Ross, Film as Literature, Literature as Film, 18. 24 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 39. 25 Ibid., 37, 41. 26 Ibid., ix. 27 Ibid. 37, 130, 82. 28 Ibid., 187. 29 Mitchell, Iconology, 103. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Murray, “Materializing Adaptation Theory,” 4. 33 Christopher Orr, “The Discourse on Adaptation,” Wide Angle 6, 2 (1984): 72. 34 Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, 127. Taking note of those innumerable exceptions, Simone Murray points to a number of academic studies appearing in the last few years that adopt “the ritual slaying of fidelity criticism” as their primary objective (Murray, “Materializing Adaptation Theory,” 6). In spite of such efforts, however, the idea of fidelity continues to pervade popular, journalistic, and academic discussions about adaptation. To offer just one recent example, in a 2008 textbook designed to teach college students how to write effectively about film and literature, the editors explain that when analyzing an adaptation one should “look at the theme or tone of the fiction and the film. If these are consistent, then the adaptation is considered to be faithful.” By way of illustration, they go on to compare George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion with its various filmic iterations, including My Fair Lady, speculating that deviations from Shaw’s original text “might leave some critics to conclude that the adaptation is unfaithful and—worse—that it undermines Shaw’s entire message.” The implication is clear: unfaithful adaptations are not just creative failures in their own right; they also undermine the artistic value of the source material. For more, see Quentin Miller and Julie Nash, eds, Connections: Literature for Composition (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008), 137–8. And for varyingly qualified defenses of fidelity-based analysis (particularly its usefulness as a pedagogical heuristic), see: James M. Welsh’s “Adaptability: Questioning and Teaching Fidelity,” Peter Clandfield’s “Teaching Adaptation, Adapting Teaching, and Ghosts of Fidelity,” and Suzanne Diamond’s “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?: Adaptation, Collective Memory, and (Auto)Biographical Processes,” in The Pedagogy of Adaptation, ed. Dennis Cutchins, Laurence Raw, and James M. Welsh (Lanham/

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36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

The Drift Toronto/Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010); as well as David L. Kranz and Nancy C. Mellerski, eds, In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). Ian Balfour, “Adapting to the Image and Resisting It: On Filming Literature and a Possible World for Literary Studies,” PMLA 125, 4 (2010): 968–76. Consider, for instance, Ian Balfour’s 2010 essay in which he characterizes a film adaptation as “a compelling supplement to its literary source” (971) that “can easily be enlisted in the analysis of what is proper to literature” by examining where and how it “more or less fail[s]” to do justice to its precursor text (974). The implied hierarchy of artistic primacy is quite apparent here: adaptations are of interest chiefly for the ways they “show the limits of the possibilities for adaptation” and are “fated to highlight the specificity of the literary original” (974–5). Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, 16. Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, 28. Additionally, Robert Stam critiques narratology for its “exclusively formal approach.” While he admits this approach has proven “an indispensible tool for analyzing certain formal aspects of film adaptations,” he worries that it “risks foreclosing a more deeply historical analysis of the subject at hand”—that by ignoring the context of an adaptation’s production and reception, we also risk overlooking potentially important cultural insights. See Robert Stam, “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, ed. Alessandra Raengo and Robert Stam (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 41. Building on this observation, Murray has called for a shift in adaptation theory away from its predominating focus on “aesthetic evaluation” in favor of a more sociological approach, one that takes into account an adaptive text’s production, distribution, reception, and so forth. Murray, “Materializing Adaptation Theory,” 10. Naremore, “Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation,” 8. Stam, “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” 4. Ibid. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), vii. Ibid. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: The Seabury Press, 1972), 122. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 2. Not that there are not many still willing to try. As Pierre Bourdieu has shown, for those invested in the notion of cultural capital—by which I mean, in this context, the notion that a work of high art has the most value and interest for “someone who possesses the

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cultural competence, that is, the code into which it is encoded”—the protection of that capital, that code, against encroachment and defilement by lesser, lower class arts and artists can be a powerful motivator. Huyssen, After the Great Divide, ix. Murray, “Materializing Adaptation Theory,” 4. Ibid. Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, 9. Stam, “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” 10. Ibid., 46. Jean-François Lyotard, Driftworks, ed. and trans. Roger McKeon (USA: Semiotext(e), 1984), 9–10. Marco Abel, “Intensifying Affect,” Electronic Book Review, October 24, 2008, sec. 4, available at: www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/immersed. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 180. Although there have been instances where a critic or a theorist has brushed up against the issue, only to leave it unexplored. For instance, consider Balázs’s brief rumination on Jean Epstein’s 1928 adaptation, La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher): “Epstein’s exciting film . . . depicts— what? Not Edgar Allan Poe’s tale, but only the haunting atmosphere of it and the moods and associations awakened in its readers.” One would have been interested to see Balázs pursue this line of thought more fully. Jamie “Skye” Bianco, “Techno-Cinema: Image Matters in the Affective Unfoldings of Analog Cinema and New Media,” in The Affective Turn, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 71. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 27. Abel, “Intensifying Affect,” sec. 2. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 27. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 3. Ibid., 4. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 27–8. Ibid., 28. Abel, “Intensifying Affect,” sec. 2. Elizabeth Wissinger, “Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry,” in The Affective Turn, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 232, 238, 232. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 108. Abel, “Intensifying Affect,” sec. 4.

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66 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977), 166; Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 158. 67 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 238. 68 Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 92. 69 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 96. 70 Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), viii. 71 Ibid., 10. 72 Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1990), 2. 73 Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 67, 65, 63. One might posit that synaesthesia and coenaesthesia, with their fusing and transposing of sensory responses, are themselves a form of dissemination—or adaptation—between the senses. 74 Anne Rutherford, “Cinema and Embodied Affect,” Senses of Cinema (2002), available at: www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/25/embodied_affect.html. 75 Tim Groves, “Cinema/Affect/Writing,” Senses of Cinema (February 2003), http:// www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/25/writing_cinema_affect.html. 76 Abel, “Intensifying Affect,” secs 3 and 4. 77 Ibid., sec. 5. 78 Ibid., sec. 7. 79 Ibid., sec. 5. 80 Ibid., sec. 4. 81 Ibid. 82 Marco Abel, Violent Affect (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 33, 39. 83 Ibid., 30, 44. 84 Ibid., 45. 85 Ibid., 49, 55, 49. 86 Ibid., 48–9. 87 Ibid., 48. 88 Ibid., 51. 89 Abel, “Intensifying Affect,” sec. 1.

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90 Thomas Leitch, “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,” Criticism 45, 2 (2003): 162. 91 Abel, “Intensifying Affect,” sec. 7. 92 Ibid., sec. 6. 93 Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, 16. Analysis, to reiterate, of both the adaptive text and its precursor(s), which addresses another of Leitch’s concerns—to wit, that to study adaptations fairly we need to study their source texts as well, something scholars of adaptation have “traditionally avoided.” 94 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 24. 95 Abel, Violent Affect, 39. 96 Ray, “The Field of ‘Literature and Film,’” 44. 97 Abel, “Intensifying Affect,” sec. 5. 98 Eisenstein, Film Form, 250.

2

Making the Old Words New: Dos Passos, Modernism, and the Cinematic Infection

The impact of cinema on the literary style of John Dos Passos was profound. As Gretchen Foster observes, Dos Passos “responded to . . . new ways of telling a story which filmmakers were developing in the early twentieth century” more directly and self-consciously than any American writer of his generation.1 Despite his groundbreaking literary engagement with cinematic technique, however, Dos Passos’s name is largely absent from the field of adaptation theory. One possible explanation for this exclusion is hinted at in Foster’s choice of language: because Dos Passos was more interested in exploring directorial stylistics than merely recapitulating storylines, his work is normally characterized as a “response” to filmic strategies of “storytelling,” instead of an ingenious act of literary adaptation. In other words, it would seem that a prescriptive emphasis on plot, and its transposition from one medium to another, is the critical wellspring from which adaptation studies has traditionally flowed—or as Linda Hutcheon puts it, “Most theories of adaptation assume . . . that the story is the common denominator, the core of what is transposed across different media and genre.”2 In this chapter, I intend to challenge this delimiting focus on story, and reconceive Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy as not simply an homage to early cinematic form, but rather (to echo Hutcheon) as a deliberate and extended attempt by the author to adapt the affective energy of experimental Soviet filmmaking—in particular the documentaries of Dziga Vertov—from screen to page.3 More precisely, I will argue that in the Newsreel and Camera Eye sections of U.S.A., Dos Passos endeavors to redirect into language the dynamic and sometimes dizzying intensity of Vertov’s directorial aesthetic: its dislocating temporal rhythms and velocities, its stirring visual kineticism and multisensoriality. The result of Dos Passos’s efforts is a new literary style that speaks directly to the experiential

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flow and flux of life in early twentieth-century America, a decidedly modernist reshaping of narrative time and space aimed at interrogating, in the phrase of John P. Diggins, the “pull of history on the mind of modern man.”4 In the process of presenting this argument, I hope to add to our understanding of modernism and adaptation generally, and lay the groundwork for later investigations into the relationship between literature and cinema, between text and image, in our present postmodern era.

A more real reality: From realism to modernism to U.S.A. The relationship between literary style and visual technology (from photography to cinema to computer generated graphics) is a complex and often contested one. While some critics portray this relationship as strictly adversarial in nature, others—like Robert Stam—prefer to conceive of the interactions between literature and the visual arts in more dialogic, symbiotic terms. For example, Stam argues for an aesthetic kinship between literary realism and photography, both of which find their roots in the nineteenth century. According to Stam, the realist novel and the photograph are kindred outgrowths of a larger “veristic project”—that is, a movement among artists (and, one imagines, inventor/ scientists like Niepce and Daguerre) of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to fulfill their “mimetic aspirations” through works that recreate reality in as detailed and representational a manner as possible.5 Indeed, it is difficult to deny that much realist fiction of this period evinces what could be labeled a photographic impulse: an impulse to capture and represent a particular time and place through meticulously descriptive “verbal images.” One thinks, for instance, of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, with its evocative impressions of the lowlands, or the minutely observed portraits of Miss Havisham and her decaying clothing and surroundings. In a moment of self-reflexivity, Dickens even makes explicit reference to this pictorial impetus, having Magwitch recall a story that “presented pictures to me, and not mere words.”6 One is tempted to read this comment as encapsulating a central artistic goal of Great Expectations and of the realist novel in general: to present readers not with mere words, but with mimetic and veristic “pictures,” much like the incipient field of photography was doing at that time. Interestingly, just as literary realism and photography sprang from the same epoch, the modernist shift in literature roughly coincided with the rise of cinema

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as a serious art form. Yet, rather than viewing modernism and film as “partners in the same cultural project” (as Nancy Armstrong, à la Stam, writes of realism and still photography), critical opinion has often tended to pit the two as rivals.7 Kamilla Elliott nicely outlines this critical trend, which alleges that modernist prose writers recognized “film’s superior pictorial capacities,” its ability to combine the indexicality of photography with an all-too-familiar facility for linear storytelling, and responded by “abandoning their own pictorial aspirations” in favor of more antirepresentational, unfilmable literary experimentation.8 As part of this effort to compete with cinema and carve out their own artistic terrain, so the argument goes, these authors disrupted and reordered traditional narrative structure, placing greater emphasis on subjective impressions and the sense of flow and flux of lived experience in a rapidly changing world. Consider, for example, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, with its Bergsonian meditation on memory, its melding of past with present, recollection with anticipation, its variegated representations of external and internal temporalities. Indeed, when the character Quentin Compson observes that “time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life,” he seems to give voice to one of Faulkner’s primary artistic objectives for the novel: to liberate time from the linear, regimented strictures of traditional narrative progression, and offer an alternative artistic prism through which to contemplate our mutable experiential reality.9 A comparable impulse appears to be at work in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway. With its shifting perspectives and subjectivities, multivalent representations of consciousness and temporality, Woolf ’s novel weaves a tapestry of bustling urban life, effectively rendering the ebb and flow of lived experience in the streets and drawing rooms of post–World War I London. Such literary experimentation, Elliott tells us, emphasizing as it does psychology and interiority over pictorial mimeticism, has traditionally been characterized by critics as a retreat from the photographic ambitions of literary realism, a retreat “followed by a taunt that film cannot follow.”10 Among those aforementioned critics, arguably, was George Bluestone, who wrote of the modernist novel’s withdrawal “more and more from external action to internal thought, from plot to character, from social to psychological realities,” implicitly linking this shift with a purported realization that the “rendition of mental states—memory, dream, imagination—cannot be as adequately represented by film as by language.”11 The suggestion of causality here is unspoken, but discernible: cinema, which Bluestone understood as a primarily spatial medium, was deemed inadequate for rendering interior states, and thus

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the depiction of subjective impressions and temporalities quickly became prime fodder for modernist authors. With the aid of hindsight, however, it is now possible to affirm that such conclusions—which seem to position literary modernism as a reactionary gesture against cinema’s indexical superiority, as a counteractive move by a temporal medium (literature) trying to differentiate itself from a spatial one (film)—are unnecessarily oppositional. As discussed in the introduction, Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell, among others, have sought to illuminate film’s temporal dimensions, and reframe cinema not as a spatial medium but as a spatio-temporal one. Along those same lines, Joseph Frank influentially (and controversially) postulated that certain modernist works “of twentieth-century literature, because of their experiments with language and narrative structure, required a reader to approach them as a spatial configuration.”12 More recently, Karen Jacobs has highlighted other spatial attributes within modernist writing: not simply the spatial organization of words on the page (one thinks of the “visual poetry” of e. e. cummings or the varying pagination and interweaving of prose and poetry in Jean Toomer’s Cane), but the expression by novelists of an embodied visuality attuned to “subjective mediations”13—vision being, at least in part, according to Martin Jay, “a spatial experience.”14 Similarly, Keith Cohen argues that a defining feature of the modern novel’s “spatiality” is a sensitivity to “new manners of seeing,” in particular the “fragmented vision . . . peculiar to the movies,” which authors labored to replicate in language by incorporating cinematic techniques (like montage, flashbacks, and panning shots) into their writing.15 Thus, if cinema has its demonstrable temporal qualities, literary modernism has its spatial ones, including a marked attentiveness to the spatial experience of subjective human perception, as well as an awareness of a new form of visuality engendered by that mechanized “exosomatic organ,” the motion picture camera.16 Consequently, the binaristic formula pitting the temporal art (literature) against the spatial art (cinema) no longer holds. Instead of viewing them as antagonistic rivals, then, we should be revisiting the relationship between literary modernism and film through a more dialogic lens: one mindful of the spatio-temporal features of both mediums, and alert to the ways they may have intermedially engaged with—rather than simply reacted against—one another. To this end, the work of Erich Auerbach might be instructive, especially in relation to the U.S.A. trilogy of John Dos Passos. Writing in the 1940s, Auerbach was an eloquent advocate for literary modernism, placing him in direct opposition to Marxist critics such as Georg Lukács, who—a decade earlier—had offered an extensive critique of the modernist turn in literature. For Lukács, the purpose of

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literature was to lay bare the shadowy socioeconomic mechanisms of society, and elucidate how historical forces ultimately shape our lives and identities. This was accomplished, Lukács claimed, through compelling and cohesive narratives, such as those commonly on display in literary realism: narratives that allow readers to experience (via characters) “world events, objects, the forces of nature and social institutions,” thereby illustrating for them “what objects, what institutions, etc., significantly influence men’s lives and how and when this influence is effected.”17 With modernism’s subsequent destabilization of traditional narrative, then, Lukács perceived a “negation of history”—an undermining of those causal links that gave realism its revelatory power to expose “historical reality.”18 Auerbach disagreed, detecting in modernist literature not a negation of history but a desire to render a new and more modern reality. During and after World War I, Auerbach believed, the world was battered and shattered and unsure of its future. Therefore, authors (like Faulkner and Woolf) trying to recreate the uncertain and splintered reality of this period through modernist innovations, such as the upending and fragmenting of linear narrative, were not disavowing the historical conditions around them; on the contrary, they were struggling to depict “a more genuine, a deeper, indeed a more real reality.”19 They were developing a literary mode commensurate with their contemporaneous historical circumstances, one that would—as Hayden White puts it in his discussion of Auerbach—make “intelligible the specifically modern experiences of time, historical consciousness, and social reality.”20 This delineation by Auerbach of modernism’s artistic mission corresponds quite closely to the mission articulated by Dos Passos for his fiction. In reference to writing in the post–World War I era, Dos Passos noted that the “chief difficulty you have to meet when you try to write about the world today is that the shape of society is changing so fast that the descriptive and analytical part of the human mind has not been able to keep up with it.”21 Hence, for a novelist wishing to contend with and give voice to the changing shape of society, a new model of literary expression was necessary: a style that stressed sensory perception, that convincingly registered “the pictures” and “the sound of daily life,” and captured all “the clamor” of a sometimes bewildering modernity.22 One hears distinct reverberations of Auerbach here, and his proposition that literary modernism was searching for “nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life” in an ever-transforming world.23 In the case of Dos Passos, a key strategy in this artistic search was the incorporation of cinematic techniques—most famously montage—into his prose, a process that began in his 1925 novel Manhattan

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Transfer and reached its creative apogee in U.S.A. Far from rejecting film’s influence, Dos Passos clearly recognized (either consciously or intuitively) cinema’s potential for tapping into our specifically modern experiences of time and space, of temporality and visuality. In the U.S.A. trilogy, as we shall see, he effectively adapted that potential into print, fashioning a literary aesthetic that eschewed traditional narrative construction in favor of a dizzying barrage of rhythms, impressions, and sensations, intended to offer readers a deeper, a more genuine sense of early twentieth-century America than realist fiction could provide—to offer us, in the words of John Diggins, an opportunity to encounter the “fleeting, disjointed” nature of modern American life “as an immediate personal experience.”24

The man with the camera eye Dos Passos began planning and composing U.S.A. during the 1920s, drawing inspiration not only from other novelists (such as James Joyce) but also from artists working in a wide array of disciplines. Diggins, for example, has examined the impact of Italian futurists and “French poets who adopted from Cubist painters the idea of ‘simultaneity’” on Dos Passos’s opus;25 and the author himself spoke of his fascination with tableaux from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries depicting “large figures of saints surrounded by a lot of little people,” admitting that he “tried to capture the same effect in words.”26 Without question, though, it is the influence of cinema on Dos Passos’s prose in U.S.A. that has garnered the most critical attention since the trilogy’s release. This critical attention has primarily concentrated on tracing Dos Passos’s indebtedness to the filmmaking practices of D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, and not without good reason. In a 1967 interview, Dos Passos acknowledged being impressed by the films of both directors, and these films plainly left their mark on U.S.A.27 For instance, one notices a parallel between Dos Passos’s biographical sections, devoted to chronicling the lives of important historical personages, and Griffith’s penchant for separating fictional passages from historical reenactments (featuring “great men of history” like Abraham Lincoln) in 1915’s The Birth of a Nation; and, as many have observed, certain segments of U.S.A. were seemingly organized according to Eisenstein’s “dramatic principle” of montage.28 What has received less critical consideration to date is the role another Russian filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, may also have played in the formation of U.S.A. This oversight is

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understandable but unfortunate, as I contend that Dos Passos’s trilogy bears a closer affinity to the work of Vertov than it does to the oeuvres of either Griffith or Eisenstein. Although Dos Passos appears to have never mentioned Vertov publicly, Michael North speculates that the author was exposed to Vertov’s work during a 1928 visit to Russia.29 The theory is a convincing one, for Vertov himself acknowledged as much in his diary, explaining “I am accused of corrupting Dos Passos by having infected him with kino-eye. Otherwise he might have become a good writer, some say. Others object and say that if it were not for kino-eye, we wouldn’t have heard of Dos Passos.”30 Certainly, Vertov discerned in U.S.A. the unmistakable imprint of his own cinematic aesthetic, which he had been developing since his entry into the Soviet film industry in 1918. Having begun his career making newsreels for the government, by the 1920s Vertov had progressed to more experimental documentary filmmaking, founding the Kinoglaz (“Kino-Eye” or “Cinema-Eye”) movement early in the decade and releasing a feature-length movie by the same name in 1924, thereby initiating his period of maturity as a director. Tellingly, Vertov’s most famous and (arguably) accomplished film, The Man with a Movie Camera, appeared while Dos Passos was still in Russia. From such texts, Vertov asserted, Dos Passos borrowed the “structural scheme” (I will compare below, for instance, the correspondences in editorial composition between Dos Passos’s Newsreel sections and Vertov’s Kinopravda or “Film-truth” newsreels) and “even the terminology” (i.e., Dos Passos’s Camera Eye versus Vertov’s Cinema-Eye)—all in an effort by the author to translate Vertov’s “film-vision into literary language.”31 If we accept Vertov’s thesis of a filial relationship between Dos Passos’s literary language and his own film-vision, then it is worth pondering what initially attracted Dos Passos to the director’s work. At first blush, Vertov’s cinema strikes one as distinctly antiliterary: indeed, in WE: Variant of a Manifesto, later republished with Vertov’s other writings in the collection Kino-Eye, the director declared his intention to purge filmmaking of “foreign matter .  .  . of music, literature, and theater” once and for all.32 Behind such bold calls for artistic purgation and purity, however, one cannot help but detect a far more adaptive sensibility at play. For example, in a less programmatic, more reflective moment, Vertov traced the origins of his directorial aesthetic to fantastic novels like The Iron Hand and Uprising in Mexico, as well as various “short essays . . . long poems . . . epigrams and satirical verse,” in addition to other nonliterary sources.33 Similarly, when describing his creative process, he detailed the need

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The Drift

“to write poems and short stories, dry reports, travel sketches, dramatic episodes, musical word-collages . . . to make schemata and diagrams” in order to ultimately produce “the sought-for cinematic quality” he was pursuing.34 Writing, in fact, was of vital concern for Vertov, as he struggled in his film scenarios to create “a dynamic study on a sheet of paper .  .  . graphic symbols of movement.”35 This search for linguistic dynamism led to an urgent and kinetic prose style, as evidenced in this excerpt from a Vertov treatment: You are in the Donbas. You are in mining country. You go up into the buildings overlooking the mines. You descend, with the miners, beneath the earth. You leave the elevator cage. Horse-drawn wagons with their drivers are running along a drift. You descend into the lower galleries. You make your way on all fours to the coal face. Miners crawl along, holding their lamps in their teeth. Cutting by hand and with machine. A scraper rakes the coal out into a car.36

It is remarkable how closely this passage—with its propulsive fragmented sentences, its direct address, its attention to inhabiting point of view—resembles the prose being crafted by Dos Passos during this same era, prose that the author hoped (in very Vertovian terms) would “stand up off the page.”37 Consider the opening Camera Eye section from Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel: [W]hen you walk along the street you have to step carefully always on the cobbles so as not to step on the bright anxious grassblades   easier if you hold your Mother’s hand and hang on it that way you can kick up your toes but walking fast you have to tread on too many grassblades the poor hurt green tongues shrink under your feet   maybe that’s why those people are so angry and follow us shaking their fists   they’re throwing stones grownup people throwing stones   She’s walking fast and we’re running   her pointed toes sticking out sharp among the poor trodden grassblades under the shaking folds of the brown cloth dress.38

Unlike Dos Passos, though, for Vertov such literary innovation—for all of its vividness and immediacy—was not an artistic terminus, but a means to an end. It was a stepping stone on the path to Kino-Eye, which Vertov conceived as a filmic concretization of his verbal images and descriptions, a cinematic form of perception that “lives and moves in time and space,” and “gathers and records

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impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye.”39 That is, Vertov viewed Kino-Eye not as a substitute for human perception, but rather, in the words of North, as a new sort of “[c]amera vision” that “opened up to human perception possibilities unnoticed by the eye.”40 In light of Vertov’s willingness to draw on multiple mediums (prose, poetry, sketches, musical word-collages, etc.) in his quest for a “decoding of both the visible world and that which is invisible to the naked eye,” then, it is easy to see why his project would have appealed to Dos Passos.41 As Foster points out, Dos Passos’s goals in fiction were nearly identical to Vertov’s in film: the author yearned for nothing less than the artistic reproduction and decoding of modern society, American society in particular.42 Appropriating the lexicon of cinema, Dos Passos even described his burgeoning literary aesthetic of the period—introduced in Manhattan Transfer and fully articulated in U.S.A.—as “documentary,” contending that the contemporary “artist must record the fleeting world the way the motion picture film recorded it.”43 Hence, Dos Passos’s modern artist is akin to Vertov’s “man with the movie camera,” in that “[h]e must exert his powers of observation, quickness, and agility to the utmost in order to keep pace with life’s fleeting phenomena,” and manage to: go everywhere. He is present at military parades, at congresses. He penetrates workers’ flats. He stands watch at a savings bank, visits a dispensary and train stations. He surveys harbors and airports. He travels—switching within a week from automobile to the roof of a train, from train to plane, plane to glider, glider to submarine . . . and so on.44

These words perfectly encapsulate the objective of Dos Passos’s authorial presence in U.S.A.: to be everywhere at once, from the slums of the big cities to the small towns of the Midwest, from the boardrooms of big business to the meeting halls of organized labor to the kitchen tables of the unemployed, all the while documenting the ephemeral phenomena of modern existence. And like Vertov’s man with a movie camera, who strove not simply to “take pictures” of the visible world but to evoke the ineffable and changeable “feel of the world,” Dos Passos understood the need to move beyond impartial observation or photographic aspirations and explore the hidden dimensions of time and space, to explore our subjective experiences of temporality and visuality in a swiftly evolving society.45

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So, if one can say (as Vertov did) that Dos Passos was infected by Kino-Eye, then that infection induced in the author’s prose a new stylistic direction: one distinguished by a Vertovian preoccupation with artistically plumbing the spatio-temporal “feel” of modern life. Stated another way, what Dos Passos adapted from Vertov in U.S.A. was not a storyline or fictional characters; what he adapted was the affective drift of Vertov’s directorial aesthetic, as he sought to channel into language the visceral force of the dislocating temporal flow and flux, as well as the intensely kinetic and multisensorial visuality, of Vertov’s cinema. A closer inspection of the Newsreel and Camera Eye sections from U.S.A. should help illustrate these points.

Time, history, and the newsreel There are 68 Newsreel sections in U.S.A., spread throughout the trilogy’s eleven-hundred plus pages. Each section is composed as an assemblage of historical and cultural fragments: snapshots of newspaper headlines and stories (e.g., “TITANIC LARGEST SHIP IN WORLD Sinking”), snippets of popular song lyrics (“I’m going to Maxim’s/Where fun and frolic beams”), excerpts from magazine articles (“the bride’s gown is of charmeuse satin with a chiffon veil lace waist”)46 and advertisements (BUY BONDS), all intended to collectively touch upon the salient political and social developments impacting the United States during the first third of the twentieth century.47 Some critics, such as Diggins, have described these passages as chronicling world events much like Warner Bros.’s The March of Time series or 20th Century Fox’s Movietone News purposed to do.48 Others, like Justin Edwards, read Dos Passos’s Newsreels more ironically, discovering in them a parody of “the self-serving propaganda disseminated by the actual newsreels of the 1920s.”49 More recently, Michael North has challenged the very basis of such comparisons by positing that Dos Passos’s Newsreel sections “seem to be misnamed, for they are not actually newsreels at all . . . they are made up of newspaper headlines, stories clipped from newspapers, and scraps of song lyrics,” and are not sufficiently visual to be labeled newsreels.50 He goes on to conjecture that perhaps “Dos Passos was less interested in the visual quality of newsreels than in what Brian Winston has called ‘a newsreel notion of what counts as news,’” newsreels being “notoriously bereft of anything that could be considered actual news, concentrating instead on scandals, ceremonies, sporting events and human interest stories.”51

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Thus, North concludes, the only sense in which Dos Passos’s Newsreels “can be considered ‘visual’” (and, by extension, in any way comparable to filmic newsreels) is in how they: speak to ‘an eyeminded people,’ to an audience that has been encouraged to look rather than to read . . . When Dos Passos cuts up and spatially rearranges the words from his newspapers he is acting out the triumph of a spatial organization, a visual organization, in which elements can be arranged in many different ways without any particular consequence.52

North’s critical reassessment of Dos Passos’s Newsreels is suggestive, but I also find it problematic on several levels, especially if we are locating the roots of Dos Passos’s aesthetic not only in American cinema but in Soviet filmmaking as well. To begin with, while North may be correct in alleging that early Hollywood newsreels were bereft of substance, and preoccupied only with the salacious or the inconsequential, the same cannot be said for the Kinopravda and Kinonedelia (or “Film-week”) newsreels of Dziga Vertov, which openly addressed some of the most pressing sociopolitical events of the era (albeit in a highly partisan and propagandistic fashion). In a series of newsreels from 1922, for instance, Vertov documented not only commonplace occurrences, such as the reconstruction of the Moscow trolley system or the refurbishing of a Khodinka airport, but significantly more grave and historic ones too, including the treatment of malnourished and starving children at a sanitarium in Gelenzhik, the criminal trial of accused “social-revolutionaries,” and the organizing of peasant farmers into collective communes. Following Vertov’s creative template, Dos Passos also highlights—often in bold uppercase lettering—important historical occurrences in his Newsreels, from the onset of war and revolution (e.g., “EMPEROR NICHOLAS II FACING REVOLT OF EMPIRE”) to the rise and fall of world leaders (“‘At the present rate of gain,’ Mr. Wilson said, ‘after reading the results of the fifteenth ballot, I figure it’ll take about 175 more ballots to land me’”) to the collapse of national economies (“Armour Urges U.S. Save Earth From Famine”).53 Of course, this is not to imply that Dos Passos’s Newsreels are not just as concerned with the more quotidian ebb and flow of contemporary culture, with developments in music, and literature, and cinema—and so too was Vertov, who regularly consulted “manuscripts, various objects, film clippings, photographs, newspaper clippings, books” and other “popular” materials during the filmmaking process.54 In fact, Vertov preferred to think of himself

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not strictly as a purveyor of information but, additionally, as “a newsreel poet,” a moniker that could be applied with equal accuracy to Dos Passos, with his evocative, rhythmic Newsreel collages of the noteworthy and the mundane, of the historically momentous and the socially minute.55 Appreciating that Dos Passos’s Newsreels and their artful fusion of the historical, the political, and the cultural owe more to the newsreels of Vertov than to those of Hollywood, we can then take issue with North’s appraisal of them as insufficiently visual. Undergirding North’s criticism appears to be the Bluestonian supposition that cinema is a principally spatial medium: hence, for a literary newsreel to bear any relation to a filmic newsreel, it must—at the very least—follow a spatial organization, a visual organization on the page. This understanding of the medium, however, is at odds with Vertov’s belief that cinema is both a spatial and a temporal art form: that “Kino-Eye means the conquest of space” and “the conquest of time . . . the possibility of seeing life processes in any temporal order.”56 Therefore, for Vertov, a crucial function of the newsreel was to seek out “the rhythmic unity of heterogeneous themes” and events—to convey the rhythms of the modern world, the temporal flow and flux of modern experience.57 It is an analogous, Vertovian attention to temporality, I submit, that is the guiding principle behind Dos Passos’s Newsreels: they observe a predominantly temporal organization, not a spatial one, as advanced by North. And, as I shall demonstrate, far from consisting of elements which can be arranged in different ways without particular consequence, Dos Passos’s Newsreels are structured to suggest the experiential whirl and rush of modern American life while never losing sight of the causal forces propelling history forward. This interest by Dos Passos in evoking the experiential sweep of time (and, in turn, history) is evident from Newsreel I, which opens the first volume of the U.S.A. trilogy, The 42nd Parallel. In this Newsreel, Dos Passos inundates readers with the news and noise accompanying the dawn of the twentieth century: we are barraged, in rapid succession, by a song commemorating the charge up San Juan Hill, the image of General Nelson A. Miles (veteran of the Civil and Spanish-American Wars) being thrown from his horse during a parade, headlines about governmental vice and public celebrations, glimpses of President McKinley at work and ex-President Harrison at play, a paean to the new century by Senator Albert J. Beveridge, and more.58 This verbal deluge of sights and sounds and reportage, free of traditional transitions and (at times) pagination and punctuation, hits the reader in staccato bursts; we sense how

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abruptly and quickly the world seems to be changing, transforming in leaps and bounds before our very eyes. Yet, for all of its perhaps disorienting rapidity and jaggedness, this Newsreel follows a distinct—if choppy—chronological progression. We are given the “unseating” of one generation of leaders (Nelson and Harrison) and the installation of the next (McKinley); we see the close of one century on one page, and learn how labor and churches and the nation itself “GREET NEW CENTURY” on the next.59 We witness, in other words, the swift advancement of history, and are given hints of what is to come, as Beveridge announces that the “twentieth century will be American. American thought will dominate it. American progress will give it color and direction. American deeds will make it illustrious.”60 The subsequent Newsreels in U.S.A. all follow a similar pattern, offering what Diggins has described as fleeting and disjointed impressions of historical experience in early twentieth-century America.61 For Diggins, though, while these impressions effectively replicate the experiential push and pull of modernity, they also leave readers with a feeling of “discontinuity”—with the idea that “nothing occurring in history may be seen to have a discernible cause.”62 One detects a fellowship with Lukács here, and his assertion that literary modernism lacks realism’s facility for illuminating history’s driving mechanisms and causal links. Such an interpretation, however, seems to overlook the various cohering threads that Dos Passos weaves throughout and within his Newsreel sections; that is to say, it overlooks (or perhaps undervalues) the internal order and logic underwriting the Newsreels, which, I argue, prompt the reader to perceive the historical twists and turns being presented as abrupt and occasionally jolting, but rarely discontinuous or unrelated. Take, for example, Dos Passos’s decision to number his Newsreels sequentially throughout the entirety of his trilogy, beginning with Newsreel I in The 42nd Parallel and ending with Newsreel LXVIII in The Big Money. This sequentialness gives readers an overall sense of coherence, of continuity, of each section building naturally and successively on the last. It is a sense borne out by the content of the Newsreels, as a close examination of Dos Passos’s treatment of World War I and its aftermath in the Newsreel segments illustrates. Dos Passos lays the groundwork for World War I in the first Newsreels of The 42nd Parallel, referencing a variety of European upheavals, including a “BLOODY DAY IN MOSCOW” that may lead to a “REVOLT IN RUSSIA,” forcing from Czar Nicholas II certain concessions to mollify his people.63 This Russian unrest convinces Russian leaders of the need to project their

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military might into the Balkans, thereby reasserting their place as a world power and instilling their people with patriotic pride. In the Balkans, though, Russian interests conflict with the interests of Austria-Hungary, and soon, Dos Passos informs us, the “CZAR LOSES PATIENCE WITH AUSTRIA,” political assassinations ensue, and a “BIG WAR” spreads across the European continent.64 Germany, an ally of Austria-Hungary, deploys the “U-BOAT” to patrol contested waters, as British soldiers sing “It’s a long way to Tipperary” as they head off for European battlefields.65 British involvement in the conflict, coupled with German U-boat attacks on the Lusitania and American cargo ships, eventually provokes President Wilson to “FORCE DRAFT,” and in 1917 we are greeted by the bulletin “U.S. AT WAR.”66 We begin to see the effects of this war in the Newsreels of 1919, the next volume of U.S.A. We learn about “ARMIES CLASH[ING] AT VERDUN IN GLOBE’S GREATEST BATTLE,” and death and destruction on a “colossal scale,” which compel the “BOLSHEVIKI” to finally rise up and overthrow the “RUSSIAN NOBLES.”67 We hear of British operations “ON AFGHAN FRONTIER,” cementing a colonial foothold in the Middle East that Great Britain will not relinquish until World War II.68 On the home front, we are told, the “WAR DECREASES MARRIAGES AND BIRTHS,” yet “INDUSTRY” in the United States is “STIMULATED BY WAR,” and consequently “GAINS RUN HIGH ON WALL STREET.”69 This expansion of wealth and industry sparks the so-called motor revolution in America, so that after the war, we discover in The Big Money, everyone wants “to buy a Ford.”70 Not all salaries keep pace with this growth of the American economy, however, and it isn’t long before “EX-SERVICE MEN DEMAND JOBS” that pay a living wage, and organized labor starts voicing its discontent through strikes and even riots.71 Considered collectively, then, the Newsreels of U.S.A are not bombarding us with unconnected snatches of information and observation. On the contrary, they are mapping out a schematic yet ultimately continuous, comprehensible narrative regarding the causes and effects of World War I (to name but one of the thematic filaments linking the Newsreels together), and inducing readers to follow along. Although this narrative may be more temporally jarring, and thus more dislocating, than some proponents of literary realism would prefer, it certainly makes discernible—frequently in stark, straightforward headlines— the etiology, impact, and ramifications of numerous sociopolitical developments shaping American history and culture in the early twentieth century.

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Moving from the molar to the molecular, so to speak, one can also divine this montage-like engagement with historical causes and effects at work within individual Newsreels. For instance, in Newsreel XXXIII from 1919, Dos Passos pairs the song lyrics “I love my country indeed I do/But this war is making me blue” with a news story detailing the discovery by police of a cache of political pamphlets printed in “Yiddish Russian and English,” along with “membership cards for the Industrial Workers of the World.”72 Clearly, this juxtaposition creates an association for readers between growing dissatisfaction with the war and a burgeoning awareness of alternative political philosophies among the American citizenry. Later, in Newsreel LX from The Big Money, Dos Passos follows a report about workers in the “Roaring ‘20s” earning “double and treble their former salaries and sometimes even more” with an advertisement for a new home “built on the crest of Sunset Ridge overlooking the most beautiful lakeland in New Jersey,” drawing a connection for readers between the newly robust economy of the 1920s and the resultant spike in home ownership and suburban residency during the decade.73 And in the final Newsreel of the trilogy, Newsreel LXVII, Dos Passos couples the headline “WALL STREET STUNNED” with the lyrics “While we slave for the bosses/Our children scream an’ cry/But when we draw our money/Our grocery bills to pay . . . Not a cent to spend for clothing/Not a cent to lay away,” demonstrating how the stock market crash of October 1929 would precipitate diminishing wages and rising prices in the years to come.74 In both their internal structure as well as their overall organization, then, the Newsreels of Dos Passos offer readers a verbal counterpart to the Vertovian notion of the newsreel and to Vertovian temporality: a propulsive montage that is temporally disorientating yet ultimately cohesive and progressive, that registers the experiential velocity of social, political, and cultural transformations in modern life (or what Claude-Edmonde Magny calls the “rhythm of the modern world itself ”) yet never loses sight of historical causation and consequence.75 One can also descry traces of such Vertovian montage in the Camera Eye passages of U.S.A., in which Dos Passos supplies more impressionistic and personalized reactions to these national and international transformations. What distinguishes the Camera Eye passages even more than their deployment of montage, however, is their evocation of a subjective, multisensory visuality that appears to spring directly from Vertov’s conception of Kino-Eye as a cinematic form of perception—an intermedial “translation” (to use Vertov’s term) on Dos Passos’s part that warrants deeper scrutiny.76

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Camera eye, kino-eye, and cinematic visuality Dos Passos once described the 51 Camera Eye sections of U.S.A. as kind of safety valve he employed to drain off his “own subjective feelings,” allowing him greater “objectivity in the rest of the book.”77 Consequently, these sections serve as a productive complement to the Newsreels of U.S.A.—for as Edwards astutely notes, if the Newsreels are devoted chiefly to examining and rendering the “movement of history,” then the Camera Eyes effectively illuminate how those historical movements mold one’s individual experiences and subjective feelings.78 That is, they endeavor to delineate the influence that historical forces can have on our personal subjectivity, and determine—in the words of Lukács—how and when this influence is effected. They do so by providing readers with a series of impressions filtered through the perspective of a character referred to as “Jack,” whose life story essentially mirrors the life story of Dos Passos, and who operates as an authorial surrogate throughout the text. This surrogate relates and responds to various political, social and cultural shifts of the early twentieth century, thereby presenting us with a more intimate, individualized view of history: a modern “camera eye” view, which, as we will see, eschews the traditional rules of narration and the pictorial aspirations of literary realism in favor of a subjective and multisensorial visuality that bears a striking resemblance to the Kino-Eye of Dziga Vertov. One of the first critics to take notice of this aesthetic similarity between the Camera Eye of Dos Passos and the Cinema-Eye of Vertov was the director himself, who observed obvious parallels between his own philosophy of filmmaking and what he dubbed “the kino-eye of Dos Passos.”79 Despite this acknowledgment by Vertov, however, contemporary critics have generally exhibited more interest in differentiating Dos Passos’s Camera Eye passages from Vertov’s Cinema- or Kino-Eye than in exploring their stylistic and affective commonalities. Gretchen Foster, for example, has suggested Dos Passos actually applies Vertov’s terminology inaccurately, or at least contradictorily, by using a “documentary term” connoting objectivity as a rubric for “his novel’s most subjective sections.”80 North would likely agree, as he argues the Camera Eye sections of U.S.A. are “a good deal less overtly and literally visual than their title implies,” relying too heavily on the sort of “sensory experience that a camera cannot record.”81 While such criticism might initially strike one as well founded (even self-evident), though, if one contextualizes Dos Passos’s Camera Eyes within Vertov’s specific cinematic

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theories and practices, the allegations of artistic contradiction and incongruity become less persuasive. Consider, for instance, Edwards’s recent analysis of subjectivity in Vertov’s oeuvre. As Edwards construes it, although Vertov worked almost exclusively in the documentary form, his films were never intended to project a dispassionate or impartial objectivity. Rather, Vertov sought to infuse his “objective representations of life” with “the self-consciousness of the artist,” which resulted in a prominent self-reflexivity in his documentaries: they simultaneously proffered images of “reality as it exists” and reminded viewers of the mediated nature of filmic imagery.82 For Foster to suppose that Kino-Eye or Cinema-Eye is a term solely connoting objectivity, therefore, is to not fully appreciate the complexity of Vertov’s project: its ambition to document “the historical moment” while concomitantly documenting “the subjectivity of the artist.”83 A corresponding ambition also underlies the Camera Eye segments of Dos Passos. Much like Vertov’s Kino-Eye, Dos Passos’s Camera Eye seeks to register the significant historical moments of the era—say, the outbreak of World War I in Europe—and filter them through a subjective authorial lens: [A]ll week the fog clung to the sea and the cliffs   at noon there was just enough warmth of the sun through the fog to keep the salt cod drying on the flakes   gray flakes green sea gray houses white fog   at noon there was just enough sun to ripen bakeapple and wildpear on the moorlands to warm the bayberry and sweetfern mealtimes in the boardinghouse everybody waited for the radio operators   the radio operators could hardly eat   yes it was war   Will we go in? will Britain go in?84

Dos Passos’s Camera Eye aspires to “record” the notable stirrings and happenings of a changing world (e.g., news of warfare being announced over the radio), while concurrently expressing—as Dos Passos described it—“a complex state of mind” (uncertainty over the coming conflict, perhaps mixing with anticipation, causing impressions to rush together yet remain oddly disjointed).85 In the process, the author exhibits a stylistic self-consciousness, a Vertovian self-consciousness, which—through its purposeful eschewal of traditional capitalization, punctuation, and other rules of composition—continually prompts his readers to recognize the intentionality and textuality of what they are consuming. Along those same lines, when North claims that Dos Passos’s Camera Eyes are less visual than their title implies, one wonders if he is tracing that title and its

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implications back to Vertov. North’s assertion stems from his observation that the Camera Eyes freely blend “visual experience” with descriptions of bodily senses and sensations, leading him to theorize that “the camera eye metaphor meant something else to Dos Passos besides pure visual impressionism.”86 So, too, I propose, did the Kino-Eye metaphor to Vertov. For the director, Kino-Eye was about more than leaving an optical record of the world; it was about capturing and expressing the “feel” of life and society around him—its images and rhythms, its carnality and sensuality, its kinetic movements. We can see this in The Man with a Movie Camera, with its close-ups of a blanket rubbing against bare skin and hands wringing wet linen, of musical instruments being played and train wheels grinding on a track, of a chimney belching black smoke and soot; with its traveling shots racing at breakneck speed through the crowded streets of Moscow. Such moments, and many others like them, do more than impart visual information: they attempt to tap into our sensorial and tactile memories, our memories of touching (naked flesh against fabric), of hearing (the tremolo of a violin, the screech of metal on metal), of smelling (the acrid bite of industrially-polluted air), and of motion (the swirl in the stomach when one rounds a corner too fast in a careening automobile). In this way, Vertov’s Kino-Eye becomes, in effect, a multisensorial experience: a filmic eye that perceives not only sights, but sounds, scents, and sensations as well—that evinces a cinematic visuality attuned to both the look and feel of the surrounding world.87 In his Camera Eye sections, Dos Passos verbally approximates this multisensorial approach: he casts his own kino-eye (as Vertov himself labeled it) on American life, and tries—like the director before him—to document the look and feel of what he discovers. Thus, for example, while glimpsing the New York coastline through this perceptual prism, Dos Passos writes: [T]hroat tightens when the redstacked steamer churning the faintlyheaving slatecovered swell swerves shaking in a long greenmarbled curve past the red lightship    spine stiffens with the remembered chill of the offshore Atlantic    and the jag of framehouses in the west above the invisible land and spiderweb rollercoasters and the chewinggum towers of Coney and the freighters with their stacks way aft and the blur beyond Sandy Hook    and the smell of saltmarshes warmclammysweet    remembered bays silvery inlets barred with trestles

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   the put put before day of a gasolineboat way up the creek    raked masts of bugeyes against tall pines on the shellwhite beach    the limeycold reek of an oysterboat in winter88

Note the presence not only of vivid visual imagery (the jag of farmehouses in the west, the spiderweb rollercoasters and chewinggum towers of Coney Island, the blurry horizon beyond Sandy Hook), but also evocations of sensory experience (the smell of salt marshes, the chill of the Atlantic air), and even of movement (throat tightening as the steamer churns through an ocean swell). Like Vertov’s Kino-Eye, Dos Passos’s Camera Eye is striving for something beyond pictorial or photographic mimeticism here: it is striving for a kind of cinematic visuality that is at once imagistic, sensorial, and kinetic. In light of such affinities between the Kino-Eye of Vertov and the Camera Eye passages of Dos Passos, then, it is not surprising—nor is it inappropriate or contradictory—that the author would choose to echo Vertov’s terminology when titling these passages. For the Camera Eyes are, demonstrably and palpably, adopting a Vertovian aesthetic and enacting a Vertovian logic: they adapt from Kino-Eye the drive for an affectively stirring and multisensory visuality, one that trains a subjective and self-reflexive lens on contemporary existence. And it is through this cinematic “eye,” in turn, that Dos Passos is able to link the immediacy and intensity of lived experience with the mechanisms of history—to record the impact of history’s flow and flux, as chronicled in the Newsreels, on individual subjectivity and identity. Rather than negating history, the Camera Eyes enable Dos Passos to better embrace it, by showing us a consciousness being shaped by the push and pull of historical forces.

End of the story, rise of the image Although it does not fit neatly into the discourse, as the discourse currently stands, the U.S.A. trilogy of John Dos Passos deserves a larger place in adaptation studies. In his hunt for a new mode of literary expression, one commensurate with his times and alive with an Auerbachian wealth of reality and depth of life, Dos Passos turned, in part, to the cinema of Dziga Vertov. Specifically, he sought to adapt from screen to page, to redirect from celluloid into prose, not the narrative content of Vertov’s films, but the visceral affective dynamism of his

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filmmaking aesthetic: the temporal velocities and rhythms, the intense visual kineticism and multisensoriality. The result of his labors was a new and original literary voice, a decidedly modernist voice that blended a cinematic sensibility (most noticeably on display in the Newsreel and Camera Eye passages of U.S.A.) with more traditional literary devices (fictional plotlines, biographical sketches) to tell the story of American experience in the early twentieth century. It is a voice we still hear today, resonating in the work of writers like Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow, and Don DeLillo. In the case of DeLillo, however, one can also divine in his novels—in particular Underworld, which I turn to in depth in the next chapter—a growing destabilization of the sort of narrative (and historical) continuity that ultimately underpins Dos Passos’s trilogy, for all of its irruptive and sometimes disorienting stylistics. That is, one gets the sense, reading DeLillo’s work, that as we progress from modernity into postmodernity, into a brave new society of the spectacle in which the image is hegemonic, the “American story” might not be quite as cohesive as it once seemed.

Notes 1 Gretchen Foster, “John Dos Passos’ Use of Film Technique in Manhattan Transfer and The 42nd Parallel,” Literature/Film Quarterly 14, 3 (1986): 186. 2 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 10. 3 Ibid., xiv. The U.S.A. trilogy comprises The 42nd Parallel (1930; repr., New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 1919 (1932; repr., New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), and The Big Money (1936; repr., New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000). 4 John P. Diggins, “Visions of Chaos and Visions of Order: Dos Passos as Historian,” American Literature 46, 3 (1974): 329. 5 Stam, Literature Through Film, 14. Stam also includes “the naturalist play” and various “obsessively mimetic exhibitions” as products of this veristic project. Leo Charney would likely add panoramas, dioramas, the wax museum, and public morgues to the list. See Leo Charney, Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 70–1. 6 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861; repr., New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1994), 406. 7 Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 26.

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8 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, 52–3. Or as James Naremore describes it: “[T]he ‘writerly’ texts of high modernism . . . were explicitly designed to resist being ‘reduced’ to anything not themselves” (Naremore, “Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation,” 5). This notion of cinema displacing the realist novel has been much remarked upon. Sergei Eisenstein, for one, saw “the first shoots of American film esthetic” stemming directly from Dickens (Eisenstein, Film Form, 195), leading later theorists like Christian Metz to declare that “film has taken, relay fashion, the historical place of the grand-epoch, nineteenth-century novel” (Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 110). 9 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929; repr., New York: Vintage International, 1990), 85. 10 Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, 53. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this critical tendency. For more positive evaluations of the relationship between cinema and literary modernism, see Keith Cohen’s Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979); Alan Spiegel’s Fiction and the Camera Eye (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976); and Claude-Edmonde Magny’s The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction between the Two Wars, trans. Eleanor Hochman (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972). 11 Bluestone, Novels into Film, 46–7. 12 Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 97. 13 Karen Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 19. 14 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 25. 15 Cohen, Film and Fiction, 93, 6. 16 Jay, Downcast Eyes, 3. 17 Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic, ed. and trans. Arthur D. Kahn (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1970), 124, 128. 18 Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1962), 21. 19 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953), 477. 20 Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 26. 21 John Dos Passos, The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 240. 22 Ibid., 272.

50 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

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The Drift Auerbach, Mimesis, 488. Diggins, “Visions of Chaos and Visions of Order,” 332–3. Ibid., 332. Dos Passos, Major Nonfictional Prose, 283. Gilles Deleuze finds strong similarities between this latter effect by Dos Passos—with its “swarming of characters” who exhibit the “capacity to become principal and revert to being secondary”—and the directorial styles of Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 208. Dos Passos, Major Nonfictional Prose, 272. Eisenstein, Film Form, 49. Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 140. Perhaps by Eisenstein or V. I. Pudovkin, both of whom Dos Passos met during his trip. Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 174. Ibid. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 40. In an editor’s note to Kino-Eye, Annette Michelson states that the style of Vertov’s intertitles was modeled on the poetry of Walt Whitman (235). Ibid., 122. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 280. Dos Passos, Major Nonfictional Prose, 240. Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel, 3. Vertov, Kino-Eye, 15. North, Camera Works, 30. Vertov, Kino-Eye, 87. Foster, “John Dos Passos’ Use of Film Technique,” 188. Dos Passos, Major Nonfictional Prose, 240, 272. Vertov, Kino-Eye, 287. Ibid., xxv. Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel, 118–19. Dos Passos, 1919, 77. Diggins, “Visions of Chaos and Visions of Order,” 332–3. Justin Edwards, “The Man with a Camera Eye: Cinematic Form and Hollywood Malediction in John Dos Passos’s The Big Money,” Literature/Film Quarterly 27, 4 (1999): 249. North, Camera Works, 143.

Making the Old Words New 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

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Ibid. Ibid., 144 (emphasis added). Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel, 46, 134, 283. Vertov, Kino-Eye, xxx. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 87–8. Ibid., 10. Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel, 1–3. Ibid., 1–2. Ibid., 3. Diggins, “Visions of Chaos and Visions of Order,” 333. Ibid., 333, 335. Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel, 45–6. Ibid., 206–7. Ibid., 237, 276. Ibid., 276, 283. Dos Passos, 1919, 1, 108, 169. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 54, 144, 321. Dos Passos, The Big Money, 14. Ibid., 20. Dos Passos, 1919, 231. Dos Passos, The Big Money, 259–60. Ibid., 417–18. Magny, The Age of the American Novel, 130. Vertov, Kino-Eye, 174. Dos Passos, Major Nonfictional Prose, 247. Edwards, “The Man with a Camera Eye,” 249. Vertov, Kino-Eye, 174. Foster, “John Dos Passos’ Use of Film Technique,” 190. North, Camera Works, 144–5. Edwards, “The Man with a Camera Eye,” 248. For confirmation of this theory, we need look no further than the opening moments of Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera. Introduced in the credits as “An excerpt from the Diary of a Cameraman,” the film begins by juxtaposing images of a Moscow building and lamppost with images of the movie camera ostensibly taking those pictures, above which— superimposed—we see the cameraman himself setting up and then breaking down a tripod. This multilayered sequence signals to viewers that they will be seeing the reality of daily life, but reality as viewed through a camera lens, as selectively

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The Drift recorded by a cameraman, and as excerpted and assembled from a larger “diary” of footage. Ibid., 248. Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel, 208. Dos Passos, Major Nonfictional Prose, 283. North, Camera Works, 145. Eisenstein, Film Form, 233. Vertov’s colleague, Sergei Eisenstein, would later claim that such an “embodied viewpoint” was one of the Soviet cinema’s most significant innovations. Dos Passos, The Big Money, 21.

3

An Epidemic of Seeing: DeLillo, Postmodernism, and Fiction in the Age of Images

In Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, protagonist David Bell announces his desire to make a work of art that is “part dream, part fiction, part movies,” a work haunted by the “ghosts and shadows” of filmmakers like Robert Bresson, Miklós Janscó, and Shirley Clarke.1 At the risk of conflating character and author, one is tempted to read Bell’s artistic quest as in some ways mirroring the quest of Don DeLillo. For more than 30 years, DeLillo has been producing novels that fuse poetic language, language that often evinces an abstract and even dreamlike quality, with an acute visual sensibility, indeed a cinematic one. DeLillo has freely acknowledged this stylistic indebtedness to cinema, describing his literary aesthetic as being shaped, in no small measure, by the “cutting and editing,” the “strong image,” the very “dream sense of movies.”2 Yet in spite of this admission and the palpable influence of filmic techniques on his oeuvre, DeLillo—like John Dos Passos before him, whose fiction similarly probed the creative intersections of literature and cinema—has to date found no permanent home in the field of adaptation studies. This chapter intends to help redress that oversight by shedding critical light on the adaptive impulses at play in DeLillo’s magnum opus, Underworld. Published in 1997, Underworld is nothing short of a cultural and social biography: a multivalenced view of American life in the last half of the twentieth century, from the anxious onset of the Cold War, through the turbulence and paranoia of the Vietnam era, to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ostensible global conquest of multinational capitalism. It is also, more subtly, an artful verbal engagement with the montage theories of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein; for among the many ghosts and shadows

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darkening the pages of Underworld, Eisenstein’s presence is one of the most prominent. Focusing predominantly on the book’s organizational structure, I will argue that in Underworld DeLillo seeks to redirect into prose the “affective logic”—that is, the agitations and provocations, the jolts and juxtapositions—of Eisenstein’s strategies of metric, rhythmic, tonal, and intellectual montage.3 This act of literary adaptation, I contend, is crucial to DeLillo’s broader agenda in the novel of illuminating just how profoundly our understanding of ourselves and the world around us is mediated by images in contemporary American society. Along the way, I also hope to continue expanding our notion of what constitutes literary/cinematic adaptation in general, thereby extending the discursive net cast by adaptation studies proper, and begin articulating a conception of postmodernism to be utilized and elaborated in subsequent chapters.

Complicity and critique: From modernism to postmodernism to Underworld In a review of DeLillo’s novel Mao II, Martin Amis describes the author as “an exemplary postmodernist.”4 Generally speaking, this designation has become the consensus view of DeLillo in the critical community, recently leading Bran Nicol to label him “the novelist who is closest to canonical status in postmodern fiction.”5 Such an appellation, Steve Connor tells us, is hardly surprising, considering that: [i]n their exploration of the instability of identity, the enigmatic omnipresence of information, the cryptic excesses of consumption, the global power of spectacle, and the ironic sense of the interweaving of disaster and triviality, DeLillo’s works form a seemingly perfect fit with postmodern theory.6

Indeed, surveying this “reservoir of postmodern themes” to be found in DeLillo’s oeuvre, the names of certain theorists do immediately spring to mind, among them Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and, most notably, Fredric Jameson.7 Jameson, of course, famously posited a “radical break” between modernism and postmodernism, both of which he conceptualizes not as exclusively artistic or aesthetic movements, but as periodizing concepts pointing to the “cultural dominant” of a particular era.8 This is not to suggest, however, that for Jameson all cultural dominants are to be equally valorized; far from it. While many have noted

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distinct similarities between, say, literary modernism and postmodernism (e.g., a contestation of traditional narrative structure, a penchant for intertextuality and self-reflexivity), Jameson conceives of the two very differently, seeing in modernist literature, for all of its disruptive and disorienting tendencies, an attempt to express the “gesture or cry” of genuine emotions, to communicate the “anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation” of the historical period.9 One senses an affinity with Eric Auerbach here, and his understanding of literary modernism as a search, through stylistic invention, for a “deeper, and indeed a more real reality” in fiction;10 and it is precisely this striving toward depth that Jameson finds sorely lacking in postmodern culture. Jameson, in fact, divines in postmodern culture “a new depthlessness,” marked in part by a bewildering new spatiality impacting our daily lives and psychic existence, as well as a gradual bracketing and effacement of history itself, leaving us not with cries of alienation and anomie but the endless interplay of countless surfaces and simulacra.11 That is, we are left to experience the world—much like David Bowie’s character in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) seated before a bank of numberless television screens—as an overwhelming “rush of filmic images,” which ultimately results in a sense of “schizophrenic disjunction” and dislocation, and the eventual “fragmentation” of the subject.12 To return to DeLillo, then, one can reasonably conclude there are dimensions to his work (touched on by Connor above, and explored in greater detail in my discussion of Underworld below) that are, by Jameson’s standards, quintessentially postmodern, including: the direct challenge it presents to the notion of historical unity and continuity; its fascination with the profusion of images pervading every aspect of our current society of the spectacle; and its articulation of a resultant instability and mutability in contemporary identity. In the face of such palpably postmodern elements in his writing, though, there are still a handful of critics who resist characterizing DeLillo as a postmodern author. For instance, in one of the first serious and extended examinations of DeLillo’s work, Tom LeClair proposes he be classified a “contemporary modernist” rather than a postmodernist.13 More recently, Scott Rettberg has positioned DeLillo not as a postmodernist writer, per se, so much as an “apt diagnostician of the symptoms of post-modernism,” an author whose stories offer us “characters who face life in a post-modern, post-industrial, televisual culture.”14 In other words, Rettberg appears to read DeLillo’s work not as a symptomatic product of postmodern culture, but as an incisive diagnostic commentary on said culture. The work of Linda Hutcheon is apposite here,

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particularly her notion of a “postmodernism of complicity and critique, of reflexivity and historicity.”15 For Hutcheon, postmodernism is an inherently contradictory enterprise, in that it “marks neither a simple and radical break [from modernism] nor a straightforward continuity with it: it is both and neither.”16 So, for example, Jameson is not wrong when he claims postmodern artworks are inclined to efface the historical past in ways previous cultural dominants did not, supplanting the drive for a genuine historicity with intertextual play and pastiche. And yet, according to Hutcheon, such intertextuality and pastiche should not be interpreted as a naïve denial of “the existence of the past”; they are simply an acknowledgment that history is “a human construct,” and that—from our present vantage point—we can never “know that past other than through its textualized remains.”17 Thus, affirms Hutcheon, postmodernism effectively allows us to enter into a critical “re-evaluation of and a dialogue with the past in the light of the present.”18 Paul Smethurst tends to agree, arguing that postmodern novels of the 1980s and 1990s (like DeLillo’s Underworld) should be viewed as “a re-engagement [with] and a reworking” of the forms and contents of the past, in an effort to produce fresh “ways of seeing and responding to the contemporary world,” of better navigating the “fragmentation and dispersal of the subject” engendered by our current “culture of surfaces, signs and images.”19 Considered together, then, Hutcheon and Smethurst construe postmodern literature to be both symptomatic and diagnostic; that is to say, it is a literature eminently capable of being simultaneously complicit in, and critical of, postmodern, postindustrial, televisual culture. This conception of postmodern literature—attuned as it is to postmodernism’s contradictions and complexities, its interrogative relationship with history, its use and abuse of antecedent artistic conventions and traditions—is an especially useful one to bear in mind when approaching Underworld. For DeLillo’s novel is nothing if not complex and contradictory: a mammoth, multiform utterance that yearns to revisit the past while concomitantly challenging the very notion of historicity; to give literary voice to the postmodern experience, while concurrently illustrating (through, in no small part, its incorporation of Eisensteinian montage) the hegemonic role images play in shaping that experience. It is, I shall show, a distinctly postmodern work that is at once symptomatic and (as Rettberg suggests) diagnostic, a product of and an analytical lens on contemporary American society, making it what Hutcheon might call “a new model for mapping the borderland between art and the world,” one that is “historically aware, hybrid, and inclusive.”20

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Our own private histories In a wide-reaching essay on Underworld, John Duvall claims that in the novel DeLillo “ranges over American history from the 1950s to the early 1990s and charts this history’s effects on his characters.”21 While this is certainly true, it is also, so to speak, only part of the story. In the course of the work’s 827 pages, DeLillo not only ranges over the historical record, he intervenes into and occasionally reshapes it: a purposeful blurring of the line between “historical fact and fictional imagination” that would lead Kathleen Fitzpatrick to categorize the book as “historiographic metafiction.”22 The term, of course, originates with Hutcheon, who applies it to those novels “which are both intensively self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages”—that make use of history while concurrently problematizing the very idea of historical representation through literature.23 This tension between the factual and the fictional is evident from the opening pages of Underworld, which place us inside the Polo Grounds during the legendary 1951 pennant game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. Alongside evocative descriptions of the game, the stadium, and the fans and announcers in attendance, DeLillo thrusts us into the midst of four celebrity ticketholders—Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor, and J. Edgar Hoover—as they drink, banter, and (in the case of Hoover) ponder the future of humanity now that the Soviet Union has conducted its second atomic weapons test. Whether this unlikely quartet was actually in the stands that day (DeLillo maintains they were, but no reviewers or critics have been able to confirm the fact, nor has DeLillo offered any evidence) is almost beside the point; what is significant is the narrative function they serve in the prologue. In his essay “The Power of History,” DeLillo reveals he decided to focus on these historical figures because of their instant recognizability: their connection, in the public consciousness, to “working-class backgrounds” and “Irish, Italian and Jewish combustibility,” and their resultant ability to operate as a collective emblem or “herald of themes and characters that would flow through the novel proper.”24 They become, in essence, a foreshadowing device—a kind of establishing shot, which lays the foundation for later thematic and narrative concerns; historical accuracy is, at best, an ancillary consideration. Indeed, DeLillo has called his portrayal of Hoover and other historical personages in Underworld “a disinvention, real, conjectured, gambled on, guessed at,” explaining it is necessary for a novelist to “distort the lives of real people” in order to “reconfigure things the way his own history demands.”25

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This use and abuse of historical figures differs markedly from the techniques employed in a modernist text like John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy. In U.S.A., Dos Passos also draws on real-life personages, but he goes to great lengths to adhere to “just the facts,” even separating his biographical portraits of those figures from his fictional sections, thereby preventing his fictional characters from mingling with factual ones. DeLillo’s fiction respects no such demarcations or differentiation; like fellow novelist E. L. Doctorow, DeLillo allows his invented characters to interact with and be influenced by historical personalities, be it a political apparatchik like Hoover, a cultural critic cum comedian like Lenny Bruce, or even a filmmaker like Sergei Eisenstein, whose long-lost masterpiece (and DeLillo creation) Unterwelt gives the novel its name and serves as inspiration for the fictitious artist Klara Sax. Such destabilization of the boundary between reality and invention prompts readers, in a way Dos Passos never does, to be wary of the “history” being presented to us. It prompts us to reexamine our faith in the capacity of authors to straightforwardly capture reality on the page, and meditate more critically on our appreciation of historical fiction and historiography in general. DeLillo reinforces this unsettling of a clear and uncomplicated novelistic historicity through his narrative’s temporal structure. In U.S.A., for all its fragmented and irruptive stylistics, the narrative (or numerous, intertwined micro-narratives) progresses chronologically. By contrast, in Underworld, with the exception of a prologue, epilogue, and a series of inter-chapters following the plight of Cotter Martin and his father Manx, scenes are arranged in reverse chronological order (Duvall would have been more accurate to describe the book as ranging over American history from the 1990s to the 1950s). DeLillo has indicated this reversal of time was an attempt to escape “history’s flat, thin, tight and relentless designs.”26 These words strike a decidedly Lyotardian note, seeming to evidence a desire to transcend the sort of totalizing grand or master historical narratives denounced so vehemently by theorist Jean-François Lyotard. To reject traditional narrative temporality, however, is not to reject historical causality—those causal links which, according to Georg Lukács, realist fiction was so adept at highlighting as a means of laying bare for readers the mechanisms propelling history forward. As Peter Knight points out, those links are plainly present in Underworld; it is just that we learn about them “belatedly, haphazardly, in passing.”27 Again, DeLillo is challenging his audience: disrupting their preconceived ideas about “the historical novel,” its temporal arrangement and accessibility; compelling them to engage with the text as active participants,

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searching for the clues and patterns they can then assemble as their own history demands. In light of these aesthetic devices by DeLillo—the destabilizing of the real versus the imagined, the disordering of historical chronology and causality—one can guess at the types of criticisms Jameson might launch at Underworld. Being a culturally symbolic outgrowth, an allegorical utterance, of the postmodern era dating from the 1950s onward (the same span of time covered in the text, not incidentally), the novel shares many of that era’s qualities: it displaces historicity with nostalgic snapshots of the past; it fragments the individual subject; it is chaotic and dislocating, eschewing any well-defined temporal logic. And these criticisms would not be entirely unfounded. Certainly, the book at times appears as much about our memory of the past as the past itself, and the chief protagonist, Nick Shay, occasionally seems something less than a fully realized and cohesive character. So too can the text be disorienting, leavened as it is with temporal disjunctions and an obsessive sensitivity to the welter of images marking contemporary American society. Yet to think of the work solely as a symptomatic manifestation of postmodern culture is to overlook the novel’s frequently incisive analysis and critique of postmodernity—its facility, as Hutcheon says, to be at once “profoundly implicated in, yet still capable of criticizing, that which it seeks to describe.”28 In interviews, DeLillo has alluded to this fundamental duality at the heart of Underworld, characterizing the novel—along with his larger body of work—as his bid to “live in the skin of the late twentieth century” while also grappling with “what has been missing for the past twenty-five years . . . a sense of . . . coherent reality”; that is, a bid to give voice and shape to the postmodern experience while simultaneously anatomizing and interrogating the chaos and dislocation that experience entails, to be both a postmodern novelist and an astute critic of postmodern life.29 Central to this project has been an examination of the ever growing influence of the image in the postmodern era, for as DeLillo perceives it, the “proliferation of pictures” has become a defining feature of our current culture, and through his fiction he is “trying to understand its impact.”30 Consequently, much of Underworld’s form and content is geared toward delineating the role and registering the effect of images (be they filmic, televisual, commercial, etc.) in contemporary society; and it is to this imagistic focus in the novel that we now turn, as it ultimately points the way toward the adaptive intersection of DeLillo’s literary aesthetic with the montage theories of Sergei Eisenstein.

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The power of images DeLillo has said we are living in “the age of images,” and one of his principal objectives as a novelist is to better apprehend the power images exert over us, and how “in our culture and everywhere around us we are shaped—to some fairly important degree—by visual imagery.”31 It is an objective evident from his first published short stories and his debut novel, which Mark Osteen interprets as a meditation on “the inescapability of and interrelationship between cinematic and commercial images, and the profound way that they shape—and fragment— postmodern subjectivity.”32 Joseph Dewey tends to concur, positing that DeLillo’s body of work is, in large measure, about: the loss of the authentic self after a half-century assault of images from film, television, tabloids, and advertising that have produced a shallow culture too enamored of simulations, unable to respond to authentic emotional moments without recourse to media models and the blather of processed dialogue, thus content to live like voyeurs to their own reality shows, staring at a complex of domestic screens.33

To be sure, the power of images to impinge on human subjectivity and behavior is an explicit thematic concern in Underworld. The novel portrays American society as, in the words of Guy Debord, an “immense accumulation of spectacles,” in which all relationships are inflected and “mediated by images.”34 We see this through the ubiquity of billboards in DeLillo’s story, enormous images that are “systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality.”35 We see it in the pervasiveness of video imagery, which the characters find “more real, truer-to-life than anything around you. The things around you have a rehearsed and layered and cosmetic look. The tape is superreal.”36 And, most potently, we see it in the propensity of cinema to seep into people’s psyches and inform how they view themselves and those around them. Nick Shay, for example, projects self-confidence by continually lapsing into “film noir” speak when interacting with coworkers, and thinks of a poolside encounter with a young woman as a series of “movie scenes, slightly elliptical in tone, with the shots maybe a little offhand, slurred by incidental action.”37 Nick’s brother, Matt, similarly perceives the world through a cinematic lens, describing a friend as being “in another time frame . . . cut and edited, his words in stop-start format and his position frequently altered in relation to the background.”38 Later in the

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novel, when he is stationed in Vietnam and watching a fellow G. I. tossing a Frisbee to a local dog, Matt muses that in “the movie version you’d freeze the frame with the dog in midleap about to snare the Frisbee.”39 Like Matt, Nick’s wife Marian also filters her existence through a filmic prism, wondering at times “what she would say in the movie version” of her life, and behaving at other moments as if she were a spectator to her own biopic.40 What DeLillo is emphasizing, to great effect, with such cinematically and otherwise visually minded touches is what Jean Baudrillard calls the “murderous” capacity of images: the capacity for images to gradually efface and displace our sense of a firm, fixed “realness” in postmodern society, to scumble the line between authentic experience and simulation, and impose themselves on—and even help (re)constitute—our conscious and subconscious selves.41 DeLillo underscores the primacy of images in postmodern life through the highly cinematic structure of Underworld: not only are images impinging on the individual subjectivities of the characters, it seems, they are disrupting and reordering the flow of the narrative itself. That DeLillo would draw on an outside art form in the organizational scheme of his novel is not surprising, as from the beginning his literary style has been unusually adaptive, a hybrid aesthetic that freely incorporates the forms and contents of past works from multiple disciplines. On more than one occasion, in fact, DeLillo has openly allowed that his formative artistic influences were not fiction or poetry but rather jazz, Abstract Impressionism, and foreign movies. Although some critics have addressed DeLillo’s intermedial debt to music and painting, far more has been written about his aesthetic indebtedness to cinema, often in language that brings to mind the critical discourse surrounding Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy. Eugene Goodheart, for instance, affirms that DeLillo’s prose has been “infected by cinematic excitement,” while David Remnick makes reference to his authorial “focus, his camera,” and Mark Osteen his “camera eye.”42 Osteen pursues this analytical avenue the furthest, tracing DeLillo’s literary technique in the short story “The Uniforms” back to the directorial techniques of Jean-Luc Godard, whose film Weekend serves as the story’s inspiration. Osteen even positions “The Uniforms” as a kind of reverse adaptation of Godard, an idea supported by DeLillo himself when he writes about the story: “I consider this piece of work a movie as much as anything else . . . the work is an attempt to hammer and nail my own frame around somebody else’s movie.”43 DeLillo goes on to observe that countless “short stories and novels have been made into movies. I simply tried to reverse the process . . . I submit this mode of work as a legitimate

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challenge to writers of radical intent.”44 Extrapolating from these comments, Osteen concludes that one of DeLillo’s central authorial ambitions is to fashion “‘cinematic’ stories that dispense with such strategies of conventional fiction as plot, psychology, and closure.”45 While one may quibble with Osteen’s terminology (for instance, I am more inclined to say DeLillo’s work deconstructs and reorders plot rather than dispenses with it), he is undoubtedly correct that DeLillo’s fiction strives toward the cinematic in its formal construction. A number of critics and reviewers, like Dewey, make reference to this stylistic disposition in their analysis of Underworld, linking the novel to the films of Godard and his fellow New Wave directors (albeit indirectly) by highlighting DeLillo’s supposed use of “jump-cuts” within the text.46 Jump-cuts, however, customarily excise footage within continuous scenes in order to create temporal jumps and ruptures, to introduce jarring difference within something seemingly unified. In Underworld, by contrast, the overall feeling of disjunction arises mostly from the atemporal, collage-like assembly of discrete and continuous chapters—from the unexpected collision of self-contained units, which force readers to make their own connections and find their own meaning in the juxtapositions. In this way, the novel’s structure is much more akin to the montage of Eisenstein—built, as it is, around the collision of separate and independent shots—than the avant-garde experimentation of Godard. Indeed, DeLillo even describes his literary aesthetic, which reaches its creative culmination in Underworld, in markedly Eisensteinian terms: an aesthetic aimed, in his words, at capturing the “patterns and symmetry” of “American forces and energies,” and channeling them into a “flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas.”47 Compare such language with Eisenstein’s frequent evocation of impulses and intensity and dynamism, of registering life’s ecstatic pulse and flow through the “affective logic” of montage. Of course, for Eisenstein, this affective logic could take various incarnations, such as in metric, rhythmic, tonal, and intellectual montage, all of which are designed to provoke different responses from audiences; and all of which, I submit, find their verbal counterpart in DeLillo’s Underworld.

Ghost and shadow: Eisensteinian montage in Underworld As both a director and a film theorist, Sergei Eisenstein was a pioneer and early champion of Soviet cinema. He was also, at times, a fairly blunt critic of his fellow

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Soviet filmmakers. He disagreed sharply, for example, with Lev Kuleshov and V. I. Pudovkin over their “understanding of montage as a linkage of pieces. Into a chain . . . arranged in series to expound an idea.”48 Similarly, he once dismissed Dziga Vertov’s associative editing and kinetic, mobile visuality as “formalist jackstraws and unmotivated camera mischief.”49 In Eisenstein’s view, the true power of montage, and hence the true power of cinema, lay in conflict—in the conception of montage not as a tool for linking or associating “montage cells” (or individual shots), but for putting them in conflict with one another through abrupt juxtapositions or “collisions,” out of which various concepts would then arise.50 Eisenstein called this theory “the ‘dramatic’ principle”: the principle that montage is not a means of “unrolling an idea” but of spontaneously generating ideas through the collision of “independent . . . even opposite” cells.51 This principle would form the keystone of nearly all of Eisenstein’s directorial and theoretical work, and it also serves as a guiding presence in DeLillo’s Underworld. Appropriately, Underworld is itself a novel born of a filmic collision. Discussing the book’s genesis in “The Power of History,” DeLillo recounts sitting in the basement of a library, scrolling through reels of microfilm, when he was struck by the front page of The New York Times from October 4, 1951.52 On one side of the page was a headline about the Giants winning the National League pennant over the Dodgers. On the other side of the page was a “mated” headline announcing the second Soviet test of an atomic weapon.53 “[I]n this juxtaposition,” DeLillo writes, again bringing to mind Eisenstein’s critical idiolect, he saw “two kinds of conflict”: the conflict immanent in American culture, and the larger struggle between historical powers and forces.54 His subsequent effort to grapple and come to terms with these tensions—brought into relief by the serendipitous collision of filmed text—would result in a novel marked by conflict on nearly every page: from the horizontally bisected title page, in which black letters on a white background contend with their inverse image, inverted white letters on a black background; to the clashes of race and politics and class that suffuse every chapter; to the “doubling” of characters, such as the uncanny parallels that emerge between J. Edgar Hoover and Sister Alma Edgar. Underworld is a text comprised of juxtapositions, of colliding people and events and styles, a text that forgoes linear narrative progression to such a degree that some critics, like James Gardner, accused DeLillo of producing not a finely honed work of art but a literary “sprawl with little discernible order and no real center.”55 Tony Tanner nicely crystallizes this critical perspective when he complains “I just did not see the point of DeLillo’s randomizings.”56

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Taking issue with Tanner and his cohort is Joseph Dewey. Defending DeLillo’s “labyrinthine crosshatch” of plotlines and characters in Underworld, Dewey maintains this “stunning collage of styles and . . . montage of pitch perfect voices” in effect achieves: [T]he feel of coherence, the integrity of plot from echoes and fragments that confirm attractive patterns—suggestive character doublings, recurring numbers, tantalizing coincidences (some historic, some not), intriguing juxtapositions . . . resonating symbol patterns and viable motifs, parallel situations—that accumulate in re-readings and begin to suggest tissues of connections that in turn justify, even demand the diligent exercise of readerly speculation.57

In other words, overall DeLillo’s novel achieves something approximating Eisenstein’s “organic unity,” in which “immutable fragments” collide in such a way as to give the impression of a coherent whole, in the process impelling audience members to actively interpret the text and thereby become cocreators of its meaning.58 Pressing the analogy further, one could then read DeLillo’s dual temporalities (the inter-chapters unfolding chronologically, the main narrative in reverse chronology) as comparable to Eisenstein’s “two lines of flow” through which he infused his cinema with a dialectic tension;59 and view the black pages DeLillo uses to separate these inter-chapters as functioning much like Eisenstein’s “caesurae,” those snippets of black film stock that enable a director to transfer or “leap” to “a new quality . . . into opposition.”60 Within this overarching structural system in Underworld—that is, a fairly cohesive organic unit composed of colliding echoes and fragments—one is able to distinguish a range of distinct montage strategies at play, just as in Eisenstein’s films. Perhaps most readily evident is the strategy Eisenstein termed “metric montage,” that most elemental form of montage in which “the absolute lengths of the pieces”—or cells—is the “fundamental criterion for construction.”61 The primary goal of this technique is to forge a primal, affective connection between viewer and text by “alternating two varying piece-lengths according to two kinds of content within the pieces,” thus “bring[ing] into union the ‘pulsing’ of the film and the ‘pulsing’ of the audience.”62 For a representative example of this brand of montage, consider the lezginka scene from Eisenstein’s October (1927). In this sequence, set in 1917, Bolshevik rebels are celebrating their newly struck alliance with a contingent of Caucasus soldiers (who have just switched their allegiance from the Russian Provisional Government to the revolutionaries) by engaging in the traditional dance of the Caucasus, the lezginka. Eisenstein depicts the dance

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in bursts of short, rapidly edited images that seem to gain in intensity as they progress: close-ups of stomping boots and clapping hands, bodies whirling and jumping into the air, faces breaking into broad and joyous smiles. Juxtaposed against these rapid-fire images are longer, lingering shots of Alexander Kerensky, leader of the Provisional Government, asleep in the former chambers of Empress Alexandra. The implication of this assemblage is not difficult to discern: the energy and enthusiasm, the pulse and sweep of history, are on the side of the Bolsheviks, and not the lazy, drowsing government. In Underworld, DeLillo employs a similar strategy of metric montage. He does so by drastically varying the “absolute lengths” of his narrative units (or cells), interleaving the six major parts of the novel with shorter, more intimate inter-chapters.63 In the former, which last on average 111 pages each, DeLillo evinces a concerted attention to the push and pull of American culture and politics, touching on everything from the launch of Sputnik to the Cuban Missile Crisis to the assassination of John F. Kennedy; from the outbreak of the Vietnam War to the onset of student protests to the Cold War expansion of America’s nuclear arsenal; from race riots of the 1960s to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball to the New York City blackout of 1977; from the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger to the meltdown at Chernobyl to the dizzying expansion of the Internet. In the latter sections, running roughly 15 pages apiece, DeLillo narrows his focus, zooming in on the story of Manx Martin, a “furniture mover when he’s employed and a whiskey swigger when he’s not,” an African American father who occupies his mind not with “the news of the world” but “the little do’s and don’ts he carries around every day.”64 One of those “do’s” is to “somehow, from someone, make some money” to support his family, which he accomplishes, partly, by selling his son Cotter’s beloved baseball to a collector, an act of betrayal that leaves Manx with “a wrenching pull like he’s all sucked dry.”65 By juxtaposing such broad sweeps of history with these brief, personal glimpses into Manx Martin’s desperate efforts to prove himself both patriarch and provider, then, DeLillo not only generates a propulsive sense of momentum (the reader watches decades slide swiftly past as we anticipate the outcome of Manx’s street-corner haggling, as we await the inevitable guilt over his disloyalty to his son). He also creates a palpable tension, as the sheer width and breadth of historical developments—as chronicled in Underworld’s major narrative movements—threaten to overshadow and overwhelm the small, fleeting, sometimes tragic moments that constitute daily existence for the Martins.

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Slightly more sophisticated than such metric montage techniques, as Eisenstein conceived it, is “rhythmic montage.”66 In rhythmic montage, the “specifics of the cell” (i.e., the content and composition of the image) take priority over the cell’s absolute length; thus, one is free to violate “all metrical demands,” if necessary, in fashioning sequences that create a “cinematically affective rhythm” capable—in Eisenstein’s estimation—of fostering more nuanced and complex meanings than metric montage alone can produce.67 The exemplar of rhythmic montage may be found in the famed Odessa Steps scene from Battleship Potemkin (1925), which portrays the mass murder of Russian civilians by the Tsar’s Cossacks on a sandstone staircase leading to Odessa’s harbor. As the assault begins, Eisenstein offers a succession of sustained wide-angle shots showing the approach of the heavily armed Cossacks and the ensuing flight of their unarmed victims, who rush down the steps in a frightened and confused stampede. The Cossacks open fire, and as the panic of the people increases, so does the pace of the editing, and soon we are getting quicker, closer glimpses of the action: a child’s trampled body; a mother’s horrified face; blood seeping from a bullet wound. Interspersed among these flashes of carnage are longer, more neatly composed close-ups of the Cossacks’ jackboots, marching in lockstep, ever forward, calmly yet determinedly—close-ups that Eisenstein deliberately leaves “[u]nsynchronized with the beat of the cutting.”68 Within this scene, then, are varying editorial rhythms, collisions of varying speeds and intensities, designed to evoke a range of reactions and associations. We sense, for instance, the rising terror and racing pulses of the victims as reflected in the accelerating velocity of the edits. We perceive the Cossacks, with their polished boots and uniform strides, as a disciplined, even relentless military force that is tragically “out of synch” with the hearts and minds of the citizenry around them. And we recognize, gazing into that horrified mother’s eyes, she has just witnessed something no parent ever should. As with metric montage, so too does DeLillo mobilize rhythmic montage at several key moments in Underworld. The first of these, in Chapter 2, Part 1, comes when readers are introduced to Nick Shay’s home and work life. In a series of seemingly independent, unrelated paragraphs of differing (though typically short) lengths, we are informed in rapid order about: Nick’s elderly mother moving in with him in Arizona; the clean and shimmering office building where Nick works; the “violence and lament and tabloid atrocity” scarring inner-city life back East; Nick’s reticence to talk to his wife about his past; his affection for the way history is “caged . . . and bronzed” in the West, “enshrined . . . carefully in

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museums and plazas and memorial parks”; how he travels frequently for his job, and often speaks in the lingo of movie gangsters; and, tellingly, how his father “went out to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back” when Nick was a child living in the Bronx.69 Later, Nick muses that the “Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings and deeper connections,” and that is precisely what this chapter—like Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps scene before it—is inciting us to do.70 We are prodded to interrogate these superficially haphazard verbal collisions for the deeper connections and meaning they might reveal: that Nick’s trauma over his father’s abandonment is what prevents him from discussing his childhood with his wife, and darkly colors his present day conception of inner-city life back East; that Nick’s willingness to care for his aging mother and his admiration for the cleanliness and orderliness of his current environment are a corrective to his messy, desolate early years in the Bronx; that Nick’s penchant for slipping into a noir patois may be indicative of a crisis of identity begun in his youth, the ongoing battle of a fatherless child to define for himself who he truly is. Toward the end of the novel, when we learn of a childhood incident that changed the course of Nick’s life and haunted him thereafter—the accidental shooting of a friend—DeLillo again resorts to this rhythmic editorial technique, providing seven separate depictions of Nick pulling the trigger over the course of two pages, just as Eisenstein provides multiple, successive depictions of the first victim being felled by Cossack bullets. In the case of Underworld, these repetitive, brutally terse, continual returns to the moment of horror (intercut with descriptions of the resultant bloodshed and Nick’s benumbed shock) once more force readers to hunt for some semblance of meaningfulness amid the pattern: to gather, perhaps, from the shooting’s rhythmic, inexorable reoccurrence, that this accident has happened and will always be happening for Nick, that from now on and throughout his lifetime no matter how often he mentally runs “through the sequence,” in the end it will always be “played out the same.”71 Along with rhythmic montage, Eisenstein also believed complex associations and responses could be triggered through “tonal montage,” in which one takes into account the “emotional sound” of the pieces being juxtaposed: their unique “affects” and “general tone.”72 Take, for example, what Eisenstein referred to as the fog sequence from Battleship Potemkin. Following on the heels of a violent, energetically edited combat scene featuring the overthrow of the titular battleship’s officers by disgruntled sailors, this sequence is composed of prolonged, languorous images of the body of Grigoriy Vakulinchuk—the leader of the uprising, killed in action—being transported to the shore. These images, representing a kind

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of calm after the storm of battle, are as tranquil and poetic as the preceding ones were furious and frenzied: a small ship, carrying Vakulinchuk’s remains, cutting quietly through sun-dappled water; Vakulinchuk being laid out gently in a tent on the pier, as the sun sinks ever lower and disappears behind distant hills. Collectively, the images suggest a sense of loss and of peace, of Vakulinchuk’s light slowly fading, of his spirit at rest after a just struggle well fought. And yet, as night falls and the fog rolls in, and we see the ghostly silhouettes of other seagoing vessels against the moonstruck fogbanks, we sense that the memory of Vakulinchuk’s heroism lingers in the mist—that, as an intertitle tells us, “The Dead Man Calls Out” to his fellow sailors and citizens, urging them to take up his cause. Soon, the Russian people heed his call, gathering about his body, filling the streets, and, fatefully, congregating on the Odessa Steps. This suggestive type of tonal opposition is on display in Underworld as well, most prominently in Part 6. Part 6 paints a vivid portrait of life in the Bronx in the early 1950s, and it affords a decisive shift in tenor and mood from the rest of the text. As DeLillo explains, in this section he chose to eschew the compound and hyphenated words saturating much of the novel in favor a “simpler . . . more visceral” linguistic style, one that would effectively differentiate Part 6 from “the larger environment that surrounds it.”73 Richard Williams describes this style as a vernacular issuing from the “chopped ellipses of Bronx speech”—and it certainly is alive with a kind of gritty, street-savvy vibrancy found nowhere else in the book.74 Consider how DeLillo introduces us to Nick Shay’s parents, Rosemary and Jimmy: She did her beadwork, her piecework, working off the books just like Jimmy. He slept continuous. Never got up in the night. Drank coffee and slept right through. Didn’t seem to feel the cold. Walked barefoot on the cold floors, slept in his shorts on those winter nights when she’d finally hear the heat whispering in the pipes, her signal to get up for mass . . . The baseball man Charlie Dressen was a horseplayer. Jimmy took his bets. He took bets from Toots Shor. He left seven hundred dollars in a coat that she took to the dry cleaner. The coat was his private bank, only he never told her, and she took it to the dry cleaner and went back when she found out about the money and they said, What money, lady? There was an inside pocket she didn’t know was there. What money, lady? . . . But how is it we did so much laughing? How is it we went dancing the night of the seven hundred dollars and we laughed and drank?75

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Or DeLillo’s rendering of “a thousand sameshit nights”76 in Nick’s Bronx neighborhood: All movement toward the air, the night, heads sticking out windows, women eating peaches in darkened windows, laughing in the dark up there, women waiting to feel a breeze and men in undershirts down on the stoops with radios going, a ball game from breezy Cleveland. Kids running, sweating, shirtless, a kid with a boxful of bared ribs down the front of his body. Other kids on line at the rear of the Bungalow Bar truck, fudgsicles and orange pops, and there is the kid with ink on his tongue, there is always a kid with ink on his tongue. Waterman’s blue-black. What does he do, drink the stuff? . . . Later the young men will stand on corners smoking as the lights go out, bullshitting the night away, and people will sleep on fire escapes, here and there, because there’s a breath of air outside. Finalmente. A little bitty breeze that changes everything.77

With its evocative yet plainspoken sentences, then, along with its heavy reliance on crisp, colorfully profane dialogue between local families and friends, its flashes of a young Nick Shay who is “alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin . . . dumb-muscled and angry and real,” Part 6 stands apart from the cool, controlled prose preceding it.78 It strikes a note of warmth and promise and authenticity, of laughing and dancing in the face of misfortune, of youthful energy simmering away on endless summer nights—all of which, when contrasted with the emotional remoteness elsewhere in the novel, produce a sensation of loss in the reader: a nostalgia for an era prior to our postmodern moment that was filled with “days of disorder . . . heedless and real.”79 Through its tonal singularity, or, as Eisenstein might put it, its “irregularity . . . in relation to the laws of the system as a whole,” Part 6 fosters a moving, almost mournful resonance intended to inflect our memory of everything that has come before in the text, and inform our experience of everything to follow.80 The final and most artistically advanced method of montage for Eisenstein was “intellectual montage,” where ideas or “intellectual affects” are placed in “conflict-juxtaposition” with one another in order to forge profound intellectual meaning.81 In his 1925 film Strike, for instance, Eisenstein juxtaposes (and hence relates) two kinds of slaughter: the butchering of a bull by farmers and the butchering of striking factory workers by Tsarist troops. By cutting back and forth between these images of carnage, Eisenstein constructs something of a filmic

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metaphor, the implication being that to the factory owners and their enforcers, workers are mere cattle to be remorselessly exploited and slain as necessity dictates. As a result, the viewer comes away from this sequence with the notion that just as an agricultural economy runs, in part, on the blood of animals, so too does a capitalist economy require the occasional human bloodletting to keep the wheels of progress turning. That is to say, we come away from this collision of imagery thinking about more than the individual content of each frame of film; we come away contemplating broader questions about class and capital, about power relations and political systems. In Chapter 3, Part 4 of Underworld, DeLillo adopts just such a method of intellectual montage, juxtaposing (appropriately enough) a detailed analysis of Eisenstein’s supposedly lost masterwork Unterwelt, rediscovered in East Germany in the 1970s, with the portrayal of Ismael Muñoz, an underground subway-graffiti artist known as Moonman 157. Interestingly, in DeLillo’s diegesis, it is Moonman—and not the Soviet director and his recovered legacy—that appears to be carrying the torch of modernist art into the tail end of the twentieth century. As Thomas Myers observes, drawing a direct comparison between Moonman’s colorful subway murals and Eisenstein’s actual oeuvre, the “bright kinetic designs have the same power to antagonize and transform political, social, and economic reality as did the Russian film master’s in their time and place. Like the Russian director, Moonman 157 uses a team of craftsmen to create a personal art . . . that speaks strongly to and about the individual and the masses.”82 In Unterwelt, by contrast, Eisenstein seems to have taken the postmodern turn (a sly acknowledgment by DeLillo, perhaps, that he is adapting the filmmaker’s ostensibly modernist montage strategies to meet his own postmodernist ends). Although Unterwelt begins in true Eisensteinian fashion as a work of “rhythmic contradiction, it was all spaces and volumes, it was tempo, mass and stress,” DeLillo soon reveals that in this faux science fiction film: The plot was hard to follow. There was no plot. Just loneliness, barrenness, men hunted and ray-gunned, all happening in some netherland crevice. There was none of the cross-class solidarity of the Soviet tradition. No crowd scenes or sense of social motive—the masses as hero, colossal crowd movements painstakingly organized and framed, and this was disappointing.83

The depiction of lonely men wandering barren landscapes conjures images of the post–World War II cinema favored by Gilles Deleuze, in which alienated

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figures wander aimlessly across desolate “any-spaces-whatever,” those “deserted but inhabited,” temporally nebulous wastelands that “we no longer know how to react to .  .  . spaces which we no longer know how to describe.”84 DeLillo encourages such postmodern-minded readings by going on to disclose that in Unterwelt Eisenstein’s directorial innovations are “self-parodied and shattered . . . intentionally,” that the film and its kitschy presentation at Radio City Music Hall are “camp .  .  . sneak attacks on the dominant culture.”85 Through this postmodern appropriation and remaking of Eisenstein’s work, and its pairing with Moonman’s “outsider” graffiti paintings, DeLillo is essentially providing us with two competing visions of the potential form and function of art: the one, Moonman’s, a personal, original and individualized voice trying to enact the “Utopian gesture” (to borrow from Jameson) of social compensation and transformation;86 the other, a self-reflexive and self-referring deconstruction of such a voice—an amorphous, plotless, self-conscious reconsideration of art’s place and limits within the dominant culture. This juxtaposition, in other words, replicates the dialectic tension that is in many ways at the center of Underworld: a tension between the desire to express and investigate (and maybe even alter) the reality of contemporary existence, and a postmodern awareness that all we see and know about this existence is molded and mediated to a large degree by the texts and images engulfing us daily. Considered as a whole, then, the multiple and multilayered uses of Eisensteinian montage in Underworld represent a subtle yet extensive act of adaptation by Don DeLillo. Drawing on the assorted affective logics of Eisenstein’s montage theories and practices, DeLillo endeavors like the Russian director before him to provoke from audiences—through unexpected jolts and juxtapositions, through varying rhythms and levels of intensity—basal reactions and complicated emotions, complex meanings and intellectual concepts. In so doing, he successfully reaffirms through the book’s formal structure one of its prime thematic preoccupations: that in postmodern America, the influence of the image, from the commercial to the televisual to the cinematic, is discernible in nearly every aspect of our culture, our society, and our lives.

Everything is connected: A note on paranoia Near the conclusion of Underworld, Sister Alma Edgar bemoans that the contemporary world has been gripped by “an epidemic of seeing”—that we are

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afflicted by a plague of images, which encircle and enshroud us, and from which there is no escape.87 Her fear is subsequently confirmed, it appears, when Sister Edgar dies and she is raptured not into Heaven but into cyberspace, where she realizes “[e]verything is connected in the end” through an endless and inescapable webwork of proliferating images.88 Some have seized on this moment, as well as a handful of others throughout the novel, to accuse DeLillo of putting forth a paranoid worldview, one in which a clear and cogent historicity gives way to a procession of murky connections and parallels, allusive echoes and images. (One imagines this accusation would sound painfully familiar to Thomas Pynchon.) Peter Knight defends DeLillo’s creative vision, however, arguing the paranoia in Underworld is “an appropriate response to the bewildering complexities of the current world in which everything is connected but nothing adds up.”89 He goes on to suggest that the text “takes to a new level DeLillo’s attempt to map the impossibly complex interactions in the age of globalization between individuals and larger social and economic” forces.90 Put another way, Knight is situating DeLillo’s Underworld as a sort of “cognitive mapping,” Jameson’s term for a prospective “new mode of representing” that could conceivably help us “grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects” in the global information age.91 This notion of an artistic text reflecting the bewildering complexities of our brave new society of the spectacle, while concomitantly helping us grasp our position within it, is an important one to bear in mind while critically engaging with Underworld, and with the totality of DeLillo’s fiction, for that matter. It is also a notion worth remembering as we turn our attention in the next chapter to Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut and Jane Campion’s filmic adaptation of the same name, two texts that are—like DeLillo’s oeuvre—at once symptomatic products of, and diagnostic investigations into, postmodern culture.

Notes 1 Don DeLillo, Americana (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), 263. 2 Don DeLillo, quoted in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 9. 3 Eisenstein, Film Form, 250. 4 Martin Amis, quoted in Tim Engles and Hugh Ruppersburg, “Introduction,” in Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, ed. Tim Engles and Hugh Ruppersburg (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 2000), 9.

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5 Bran Nicol, “Introduction: What We Talk about When We Talk about Postmodernism,” in Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel, ed. Bran Nicol (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 10. 6 Steven Connor, “Postmodernism and Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Steven Connor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 72. 7 Ibid. 8 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 1, 4. In Jameson’s formulation, modernism and postmodernism are outgrowths of two distinct stages of capitalism: the monopoly stage or stage of imperialism, running roughly from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and the stage of postindustrial or multinational capital, running from the 1950s and beyond, respectively. 9 Ibid., 12. 10 Auerbach, Mimesis, 477. 11 Jameson, Postmodernism, 6. This state of affairs, Jameson believes, is reflected in such postmodern artworks as Andy Warhol’s paintings, E. L. Doctorow’s novels, and “nostalgia films” like American Graffiti (1973) and Body Heat (1981), all of which—according to Jameson—fail to use the actual past as referent, and instead cannibalize past styles and texts through pastiche and empty quotation. Thus, they fail to effectively capture historical reality, to give voice to “the older affects of anxiety and alienation” (29), offering in their place only affectless imitations, not “the historical past” but “our ideas and stereotypes about that past” (25). As noted in the opening chapter, Marco Abel takes issue with this notion of postmodern texts being affectless, arguing that “such works can be deemed without affect only if we reductively conceive of affect in terms of a subject’s emotions and feelings. Instead, what appears to be without affect . . . instantiates nothing but a different degree of affective intensity. These [works] have their own affective force.” Abel, Violent Affect, 50. 12 Jameson, Postmodernism, 34, 29, 14. 13 Tom LeClair, quoted in Engles and Ruppersburg, “Introduction,” 12. DeLillo himself lends weight to this proposition, suggesting in an interview for Underworld that his work might conceivably represent “the last modernist gasp.” Don DeLillo, quoted in Richard Williams, “Everything Under the Bomb,” The Guardian, January 10, 1998, available at: www.guardian.co.uk/books/1998/jan/10/fiction.dondelillo/ print. 14 Scott Rettberg, “American Simulacra: Don DeLillo’s Fiction in Light of Postmodernism,” Scott Rettberg, Spring 1999, available at: http://retts.net/. 15 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 11.

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16 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 18. 17 Ibid., 20, 16, 20. 18 Ibid., 19. 19 Paul Smethurst, The Postmodern Chronotope (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 2, 65, 97–8. 20 Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, 23, 30. 21 John N. Duvall, “Excavating the Underworld of Race and Waste in Cold War History: Baseball, Aesthetics, and Ideology,” in Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, ed. Tim Engles and Hugh Ruppersburg (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 2000), 259. 22 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Unmaking of History: Baseball, Cold War, and Underworld,” in Underwords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld, ed. Joseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman, and Irving Malin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 97. 23 Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, 5. 24 Don DeLillo, “The Power of History,” The New York Times, September 7, 1997, available at: www.nytimes.com/library/books/090797article3.html. It is tempting to draw a parallel here between DeLillo’s symbolic use of well-known historical figures and Eisenstein’s concept of “typage,” in which characters are presented to viewers so sharply and completely in our first glimpse of them that they each instantly become—in the words of Eisenstein’s American translator and editor, Jay Leyda—“a known element.” Eisenstein, Film Form, 9. 25 DeLillo, “The Power of History.” 26 Ibid. 27 Peter Knight, “Everything Is Connected: Underworld’s Secret History of Paranoia,” in Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, ed. Tim Engles and Hugh Ruppersburg (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 2000), 298. 28 Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, 23. 29 DeLillo, quoted in DePietro, Conversations with Don DeLillo, 107, 28. 30 “Interviews with Don DeLillo,” Don DeLillo’s America, available at: http://percival. com/ delillo/ddinterviews.html. 31 DeLillo, quoted in DePietro, Conversations with Don DeLillo, 125, 156. 32 Mark Osteen, “Children of Godard and Coca-Cola: Cinema and Consumerism in Don DeLillo’s Early Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 37, 3 (Fall 1996): 451. 33 Joseph Dewey, Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 6. 34 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1967; repr., New York: Zone Books, 1995), 12. 35 Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 183. 36 Ibid., 157.

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43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

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Ibid., 292. Ibid., 422. Ibid., 462. Ibid., 260. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 5. Eugene Goodheart, “Some Speculations on Don DeLillo and the Cinematic Real,” in Introducing Don DeLillo, ed. Frank Lentricchia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991), 128; David Remnick, “Exile on Main Street,” The New Yorker, September 15, 1997, 44; Osteen, “Children of Godard and Coca-Cola,” 444. Echoing Dos Passos, DeLillo once spoke of his responsibility as a novelist “to record what I see and hear and sense around me.” DeLillo, quoted in DePietro, Conversations with Don DeLillo, 107. DeLillo, quoted in Osteen, “Children of Godard and Coca-Cola,” 446. Ibid., 449. Ibid. Recently, Marco Abel shed light on the adaptive qualities of DeLillo’s nonfiction as well, contending that in his essay on the attacks of September 11, 2001, entitled “In the Ruins of the Future,” DeLillo “mobilizes a neorealist aesthetic.” Abel, Violent Affect, 192. Dewey, Beyond Grief and Nothing, 116. DeLillo, quoted in DePietro, Conversations with Don DeLillo, 31, 107, 91. Eisenstein, Film Form, 37. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 49. DeLillo, quoted in DePietro, Conversations with Don DeLillo, 91. DeLillo has remarked that his imagination is often sparked by images: that when a story idea first comes to him, it is usually “visual, it’s Technicolor—something I see in a vague way.” DeLillo, “The Power of History.” Ibid. James Gardner, quoted in Engles and Ruppersburg, “Introduction,” 10. Tony Tanner, “Afterthoughts on Don DeLillo’s Underworld,” in Don DeLillo, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003), 136. Dewey, Beyond Grief and Nothing, 114–16. Eisenstein, Film Form, 4. Ibid., 144–45. Ibid., 172. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 73.

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63 Eisenstein’s Strike, a film for which DeLillo has expressed admiration, also unfolds in six principal movements. 64 DeLillo, Underworld, 142, 353. 65 Ibid., 364. 66 Eisenstein, Film Form, 75. 67 Ibid., 74–5. 68 Ibid., 74. 69 DeLillo, Underworld, 85–7. 70 Ibid., 88. 71 Ibid., 781. 72 Eisenstein, Film Form, 75. 73 DeLillo, quoted in DePietro, Conversations with Don DeLillo, 126. 74 Williams, “Everything Under the Bomb.” 75 DeLillo, Underworld, 700–1. 76 Ibid., 711. 77 Ibid., 776–7. 78 Ibid., 810. 79 Ibid. 80 Eisenstein, Film Form, 47. In Eisenstein’s taxonomy, the cumulative effect—or “collective calculation”—of all such instances of tonal montage within the text is referred to as the work’s “overtonal montage” (78). 81 Ibid., 82. 82 Thomas Myers, “Underworld or: How I Learned to Keep Worrying and Live the Bomb,” in Underwords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld, ed. Joseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman, and Irving Malin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 175. 83 DeLillo, Underworld, 429, 430–1. 84 Deleuze, Cinema 2, xi. 85 DeLillo, Underworld, 443–4. 86 Jameson, Postmodernism, 7. 87 DeLillo, Underworld, 812. 88 Ibid., 826. 89 Knight, “Everything Is Connected,” 291. 90 Ibid., 297. 91 Jameson, Postmodernism, 54. Steven Shaviro expands on Jameson’s idea by positing an aesthetic of “cognitive and affective mapping”—a description that perhaps more fully and precisely characterizes DeLillo’s artistic project in Underworld. Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 137 (emphasis added).

4

A Dark-Adapting Eye: Moore, Campion, and the Fractured World of Postmodern Noir

In the preceding chapters, I sought to trouble the traditional modes and methods of adaptation studies proper, with its overriding concern for plot and character, by beginning to articulate a new critical orientation: one attuned to the affective logic of artistic texts and techniques (be they modernist or postmodernist) and how the intensities they foster may drift from one art form to the next, fomenting creative transformation within different mediums. In this chapter, I propose to continue this process of destabilization by training our new analytical lens on a frequent—and frequently disparaged—target of fidelity-based criticism: a mainstream cinematic adaptation of a popular literary work. Specifically, I will consider Susanna Moore’s 1995 novel In the Cut alongside Jane Campion’s 2003 filmic reinterpretation of the same name, not with an eye toward commonalities and divergences in storyline or character motivations, the customary fodder for fidelity-minded critics, but rather toward the affective forces generated by prominent stylistic techniques operating within Moore’s text, and how those affective lines of flight are tapped into by Campion’s adaptation. In particular, I shall illustrate how Moore’s novel is a carefully calibrated exercise in discomfort and dread, a work formally configured to unsettle readers through the continual invocation and subversion of “noir” tropes and expectations, and then examine the equally self-reflexive and intertextual aesthetic employed by Campion to redirect these affects fostered by Moore’s prose from page to screen. In the process, I intend to demonstrate how both texts—each in its own way, each owing to its unique dialogue with and deconstruction of prior styles and genres, its use and abuse of past forms and contents—function as critical meditations

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on the seemingly fragmented nature of postmodern identity. By engaging with the works in this manner, I hope to model a more fluid and flexible strategy for analyzing cinematic adaptations of literary precursors: a strategy less concerned with offering judgment than with contemplating what is productive and revealing about the adaptive process, and which therefore holds promise for the constructive explication of more overtly and self-consciously “unfaithful” film adaptations.

Contextualizing noir: Modernism, postmodernism, and “noir vision” In her New York Times review of Susanna Moore’s In the Cut, Michiko Kakutani described the novel as a “noir thriller,” and she was not the only reviewer to employ this terminology—far from it, in fact.1 In light of such critical accord, it is worth considering for a moment what, exactly, these reviewers mean when they characterize a work as noir, and why they so overwhelmingly judged Moore’s text to be issuing from and drawing on noir traditions. For, despite the frequency and laxity with which “noir” pops up in our critical and everyday lexicons, the term has—historically speaking—been a notoriously slippery one to define. Numerous film and literary scholars have pondered over the years whether noir represents an independent genre or simply an aesthetic philosophy; whether it suggests a specific thematic and narrative content, or merely a set of distinctive stylistic codes. James Naremore succinctly crystallizes this definitional dilemma when he posits there is “no completely satisfactory way to organize the category,” which explains why noir has been variously identified as everything from a mood to a period to a cycle to a style to a phenomenon.2 Indeed, such categorical uncertainty recently led Slavoj Žižek to speculate that perhaps noir is not so much a genre unto itself as “a kind of anamorphic distortion affecting different genres,” making it a “vampire-like entity which, in order to be kept alive, need[s] an influx of fresh blood from other sources.”3 Amid these persistent differences in classification and characterization, though, there have emerged a few points on which most students of noir can agree. As a critical appellation, noir finds its origin in the phrase roman noir, or “black book,” applied by French critics of the early 1940s to the brand of “hard-boiled” crime fiction pioneered by American writers like James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett.4 In the mid-1940s the term was adopted by film critics, in the expression film noir, or “black

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film,” to describe a series of contemporary American crime movies that were distinguished by their brutality, moral ambiguity, and sexual tension—movies that borrowed both storylines and attitudes from what David Madden calls the “tough guy novels” of the 1930s.5 More recently, in our common parlance, noir has come to connote a marked darkness in theme and subject matter, generally featuring a disturbing admixture of sex and violence, accompanied in films by a correspondingly shadowy or chiaroscuro mise-en-scène and in novels by a spare and unsentimental prose style. Seizing on this final, popular understanding of noir, it quickly becomes evident why so many critics chose to designate Moore’s novel a noir thriller: as we shall see, In the Cut is positively suffused with sexuality and violence, and written in a language that is both cool and cutting. Yet if Moore’s text is operating within the noir tradition (and I agree with reviewers that it is), it is doing so in a distinctly self-aware and revisionist fashion, consciously reworking the tradition’s familiar generic markers in order to critically revisit what Lee Horsley has termed the “noir vision” of hard-boiled crime stories from the 1930s and 1940s.6 That is, for Horsley, such classic stories are bound together as noir—and thereby differentiated from, say, the more chaste mysteries of Agatha Christie— not merely by their shared penchant for criminality and corruption as narrative grist, but also by their common vision of the anxiety and alienation engendered by early twentieth-century existence. In other words, Horsley conceives of classic literary noir as a sort of popular modernism: a literature that may lack the “aesthetic self-consciousness” and “formal complexity” of the high modernisms produced by James Joyce or John Dos Passos, but that nonetheless seeks to voice the solitude, anomie, and anxiousness of the modern condition.7 Other critics have seconded this notion of a creative kinship between modernism and classic noir. Simon Malpas, for instance, working with the theories of Brian McHale, argues that if modernist fiction is fundamentally asking “how a world can be interpreted or changed, and is interested in questions of truth and knowledge, i.e. in epistemology,” then the classic literary detective “who sifts the evidence presented” in pursuit of truth and knowledge represents the quintessential modernist character.8 And David Madden, adopting a more Auerbachian tone, contextualizes the tough guy novels of Cain, Hammett, and others within the turbulent 1930s, discerning in their “disinherited” characters and “disrupted, disoriented” fictive worlds a literary “reflection of the times.”9 If we accept this proposed affinity between classic literary noir and modernism, we can then begin to position those subsequent texts that evoke the noir vision

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of crime stories from the 1930s and 1940s, only to deconstruct and refocus that vision through form and content, as a kind of postmodernist rewriting of noir’s classical patterns and presumptions. René Dietrich has made interesting inroads in this direction, identifying as “postmodern noir” certain contemporary novels that infuse a traditional “private eye” narrative with a radical questioning and destabilization of identity.10 As Dietrich explains, classic noir—as typified in the hard-boiled detective procedural—shares with high-literary modernism the underlying faith that one’s identity, though threatened with disintegration by a rapidly transforming modernity, will ultimately cohere as a unified, if imperfect, whole: at the end of the day, Philip Marlowe and Clarissa Dalloway remain discrete and stable subjects, despite their respective travails. In such recent detective tales as Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man or William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, however, Dietrich sees this essentially centripetal impetus displaced by a centrifugal one, as the coherent self of classic noir is progressively fractured and fragmented, until it appears that the very idea of a stable or unified identity is no longer tenable under the weight of our present postmodern moment.11 By rethinking and problematizing identity in this way, Dietrich believes, these works of postmodern noir are able to suggest the fragmentizing effects of our current “ruling political and social conditions,” and speak to “the unbearable condition of postmodern indeterminacy”—that is, our struggle to maintain a cohesive sense of self in the face of a bewildering and dislocating postmodernity.12 Extrapolating from Dietrich, then, we can loosely define literary postmodern noir as a mode of noir that deploys the narrative and stylistic templates of classic hard-boiled crime fiction, while concomitantly subverting its traditional generic codes (such as the ultimate prevailing of the coherent self), in order to comment critically on the perceived inconstant, disjointed nature of postmodern life. In turn, we can also return our attention to Susanna’s Moore’s In the Cut, and conclude with confidence that it more than meets the criteria to be categorized as such. For in the novel, I contend, Moore not only speaks the language of hard-boiled noir, the language of Cain and Hammett and Raymond Chandler, she re-imagines noir vision as a creative prism through which to interrogate our socially and culturally conditioned assumptions about gender, and the destabilizing impact they may have on postmodern subjectivity and identity. In the process, her “re-visioning” of noir artfully and unexpectedly defies generic expectations, thereby discomposing readers and generating much of the text’s considerable affective power, power that Jane Campion would later endeavor to redistribute onscreen in her filmic adaptation of the novel.

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Susanna Moore and the regendering of literary noir In the Cut is Susanna Moore’s fourth published novel, and it tells the story of Frannie: a 34-year-old woman living near New York City’s Washington Square Park. Frannie, we learn in the opening pages, is divorced, teaches writing to college freshman, and in her spare time researches a book on urban slang. During the course of this research, Frannie fatefully arranges to meet one of her students, Cornelius, in a local bar. The meeting is an uncomfortable one, and when Frannie excuses herself to use the restroom downstairs, she accidentally witnesses—in a basement room—a young red-haired woman performing fellatio on a man whose face is obscured by shadows, and whose wrist is marked by a strange tattoo. Several days later, Frannie is tracked down (through a credit card receipt) by Detective Malloy, who informs her that this same red-haired woman has been found murdered and dismembered, or “disarticulated,” as he memorably phrases it, and questions her about who and what she may have seen that day in the bar.13 Frannie withholds what she knows, for reasons not entirely clear even to herself, and she soon embarks on a sexual relationship with Malloy, whom she is drawn to despite the fact that he is married with children and sports a disturbingly familiar tattoo on his wrist. She also begins flirting with Malloy’s partner, Detective Rodriguez, recently placed on restricted duty for threatening his wife. As foreboding events start to accumulate—Frannie is mugged late one night on West Broadway, her best friend Pauline is murdered—she becomes convinced that Detective Malloy means to do her harm. She turns to Rodriguez for help, who lures her to an abandoned lighthouse underneath the George Washington Bridge, where he reveals to Frannie that he, in fact, is the killer Malloy has been searching for (the two detectives got matching tattoos while serving together in Vietnam), and the novel ends with Rodriguez proceeding to disarticulate Frannie while she is still fully conscious. Considering the grisly content and downbeat conclusion of In the Cut, it is hardly surprising that the novel was met, on its release, by a decidedly mixed critical response. As Amy Taubin notes, Moore’s text provoked “a flurry of controversy” in both critical and “feminist academic circles” as it was alternately lauded as a provocative cautionary tale and dismissed as salacious exploitation.14 For every Colin Walters, of the Washington Times, hailing the book as a “startling” and “erotic” mediation on “the male’s violence toward the female,” it seems, there was a Richard Dyer, in the Boston Globe, condemning it as “without

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conscience, opportunistic and utterly repellent.”15 Where most of these critics, both admirers and detractors alike, could find common ground, however, was in their appraisal of the work’s affective potency—or as Peter Rodgers put it, its “visceral immediacy.”16 Time and again, reviewers made reference to the sensations of “dread” and “shock” generated by Moore’s writing, depicting her novel as a kind of verbal machine intended to menace and discompose readers. Nicely summarizing this common critical viewpoint was Terry D’Auray, who characterized In the Cut as an exercise in pushing “the boundaries of good taste and tolerance, deliberately opting to go too far” in order to “build dread” and “probe uncomfortable territory,” an exercise that—in D’Auray’s estimation— “cuts cleanly to the bone.”17 In view of such consensus, of so many reviewers (regardless of their stance on the book’s morality or sexual politics) calling specific attention to the unsettling affective energy of In the Cut, it behooves us to move beyond the critical controversies surrounding the text’s initial reception and ponder which of its formal stylistic features, precisely, contribute to producing these intensities. Certainly, Moore’s use of foreshadowing, to name a readily apparent attribute much on display in the novel, plays a significant role in creating a feeling of foreboding throughout the work. From the opening paragraphs, it appears that Frannie is being drawn ineluctably toward some terrible fate—everywhere she looks, she sees people and places which “fill me with dread.”18 Every action she takes is understood in relation to an upcoming catastrophe, as yet unknown to the reader: “That was my second mistake,” she informs us after entering the Red Turtle with Cornelius and then excusing herself to use the restroom, thereby setting in motion the narrative that will end in her murder; “If I’d only known,” she laments, after cheerfully preparing herself for an evening out with Pauline, only to discover Pauline’s freshly mutilated corpse minutes later.19 Soon, Frannie confesses “I do not think that any of the things that have happened to me . . . are the result of chance,” acknowledging a growing suspicion, shared by readers, that she is being conducted unwittingly yet inevitably, moment by moment, page by page, to a horrifying confrontation.20 Moore fuels this suspicion with evocative imagery, particularly her use of the color red: from the red-head with the red nails at the Red Turtle, we move through the “red-flocked” wallpaper outside Frannie’s apartment, take notice of skin chafed red from sex and the “red plastic bucket” so out of place in Malloy’s precinct station, sitting atop the desk shared by Malloy and Rodriguez, until we eventually arrive at the “red lighthouse” where Frannie is sliced open, and we realize with a jolt what we already feared—that the

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reds bespattering the narrative at every turn are, in fact, harbingers of Frannie’s spilled blood.21 This doomful mood is intensified by Moore’s abrupt and immediate prose style. As Richard Dyer observes, In the Cut is composed of clean, crisp sentences that tend to “dwindle into fragments.”22 Although Dyer compares this style to the choppy prose found in advertising copy, it is far more analogous to the lean, plain-spoken language of hard-boiled crime thrillers from the 1930s and 1940s, typified by the works of James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich. Like those thrillers, and unlike advertising copy, Moore’s writing is self-consciously and at times poetically “terse and idiomatic.”23 It is also, as Joyce Carol Oates once said of Cain’s fiction, “so economical, so oblique” that “one feels the reader must participate as a kind of writer himself. He must, at least, be reading between the lines .  .  . he is forced into the position of imagining what is not given.”24 Moore, in other words, is not content to simply and straightforwardly relate a tale of deception and murder. Rather, like Cain, Woolrich, and other notable noir practitioners, she pares her prose and disarticulates her sentences to such a degree that readers are forced into an active engagement with the text: we are invited to finish Frannie’s trailing or truncated thoughts for her, to furnish the emotional responses she is either unwilling or unable to articulate. As a result, we become, in effect, what Oates might term imaginative participants in the shaping of Frannie’s character, and are thus acutely sensitive to her ensuing anxieties and imperilment. While such implicative prose, in conjunction with the aforementioned use of foreshadowing and suggestive imagery, may go some way toward explaining the affective force of In the Cut, though, it does not fully account for what critics identified as the book’s uncommon facility for unsettling and discomforting readers. To do so, we must also take into consideration the novel’s highly self-reflexive and intertextual dimensions—for if Moore’s text is, in its own way, a work of literary noir, it is also very much a work about literary noir. Moore indicates this on the first page, when Frannie alludes to stories featuring “short flat sentences” and “the beating, murdering and dismemberment of women” (as In the Cut does), and then goes on to reference various noir progenitors and practitioners: Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene; John O’Hara and William Faulkner.25 Such stories, Frannie informs us, are often misunderstood by readers, who are “so sensibly outraged” by the violent content they fail to see “the intelligence”—that is, the deep moral engagement, the ruthless dissection of our worst prejudices and impulses—beneath it.26 With this comment, it is almost as

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if Frannie is launching a preemptive defense of her own narrative, which has yet to unfold: yes, her story will be filled with jarring brutality, she seems to imply, but it is also well worth telling. This notion that Frannie is somehow cognizant of, or at least has a subconscious inkling about, her status as the heroine in a noir fiction is intimated elsewhere in the text. When Frannie reminisces about her fashion photographer ex-husband, for instance, and his decision to make art postcards from the images of murdered children because he is “sick of beauty,” she appears to be indirectly commenting on Moore’s own decision to forego the lyrical description of previous novels like My Old Sweetheart and The Whiteness of Bones in favor of Frannie’s raw, wounded narration.27 And later, as Frannie is trying to usher Cornelius out of her apartment, and he tells her he is complying with her wishes only because “This is your scenario, man,” he seemingly confirms for Frannie what she already senses—that this is her story, her scenario, and he is simply a bit player in it.28 If, then, Moore is clearly situating In the Cut inside the literary noir landscape, with Frannie representing a kind of acutely (even extra-textually) self-aware protagonist, what surprises about Moore’s text is its subsequent shifting and remaking of that landscape beneath our feet—its reshaping of the discourse from within. To begin with, and most obviously, Moore offers us a hard-boiled plot narrated by a female, whereas the vast majority of classic noir is told in the first person by a “tough guy” narrator. Typically, these tough guys find themselves alienated in some manner from their culture’s general mores and strictures, particularly in relation to sexual desire (one thinks, for instance, of Frank’s lust for the married Cora in Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, or Roy’s incestuous infatuation with his mother Lily in Jim Thompson’s The Grifters). So, too, does Moore’s Frannie, who counters patriarchal assumption with a frank sexual honesty, as when she responds to Pauline’s dismay over her “unwillingness to seek romance” or find a boyfriend with the assertion that all she really wants is “a fuck.”29 Such foregrounding of female desire, coupled with detailed descriptions of sexual encounters, constitutes a sharp break from classic noir’s proclivity to keep women on the edges of the narrative, to relegate them to one-dimensional roles as either helpless prey or erotic predator.30 Of course, this is not to suggest that Frannie should be viewed as neither victim nor transgressor—in actuality, she oscillates between these two poles throughout the novel: victim of abandonment by her father, of robbery, and finally of murder, she is also (in the words of Lee Horsley) “independent, sexually defined, courting danger, anything but domestic,” much like the traditional femme fatale.31 Consequently, it proves

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impossible to position Frannie within noir’s existing taxonomy of characters: pendulating unpredictably from fearful quarry to fearless nonconformist, from a tough and hard-bitten narrative presence to emotional and sexual vulnerability, Frannie resists being pigeonholed under a specific generic rubric. In this way, she comes to signify something altogether new for literary noir—a complex and mutable woman, one equally capable of great strength or great weakness, of great insight or great foolishness, making her a character whose thoughts and actions are difficult for a readership raised on the templates of classic noir to anticipate. Judging by Moore’s efforts to create a complicated, even contradictory, subjectivity for Frannie, one might reasonably label In the Cut a sort of “regendering of the genre”—a phrase developed by Horsley in reference to a handful of post-1970s British and American noirs seeking to carve out a place for the female voice within an otherwise “monolithic repository of stereotypical male gestures.”32 To designate it as such, however, does not mean that Frannie’s newfound female agency goes entirely unchallenged or untroubled throughout the narrative. On the contrary, a good deal of the text’s underlying tension in fact stems from a subtly delineated yet unmistakable competition for mastery over “the gaze.” As Dietrich observes, in classic noir, there is often a detective—or private eye—whose task it is to “see” the assorted “strands that point to a hidden plot in a web of deception, fragments and seemingly unrelated events.”33 Frannie, as our eyes and ears in In the Cut, struggles to perform a similar function: she casts her own private eye on miscellaneous clues and portents, victims and suspects, trying to piece them together into a complete and intelligible whole. Yet, we quickly learn, Frannie’s “eyes are not very good”—an observation repeated multiple times during the course of the novel.34 Unlike Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, Frannie cannot “see” the connections between these elements clearly, and is left searching for “signs to help me along.”35 At the same time, Frannie fights not to be fixed under the male gaze, to be morphed from subject into object, noting with consternation when her friend John Graham “seems to be keeping an eye on me,” or her student Cornelius “seems to be watching me.”36 The most persistent male gaze trained on Frannie belongs to Detective Malloy, who, she tells us, always appears to be “standing there, watching me,” and who discloses to her in her bedroom that “I want to look at you . . . I want more.”37 Frannie is attracted to Malloy, perhaps in love with him, but still she refuses to relinquish her agency, even appropriating his point of view after sex, imagining she can see “myself through his calm, shrewd eyes, standing alongside the bed.”38 Despite her best exertions, though, Frannie’s vision does not ultimately crystallize, the clues

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and portents do not finally coalesce, until Detective Rodriguez has taken her to the lighthouse, his killing grounds, at which point, she explains, “I saw everything very precisely, very exactly . . . Malloy would have been proud.”39 But by then, unfortunately, it is too late to matter: Rodriguez removes a straight-edged razor from his duffel bag, cuts Frannie on the neck and breast, and the horror of the moment renders her “blind.”40 This extended battle by Frannie to retain narrative agency against the controlling male gaze, regrettably lost when her “private eyes” are blinded by Rodriguez’s blade, nicely hints at of one of In the Cut’s primary thematic concerns—namely, the seemingly insurmountable challenge facing postmodern subjects to maintain a stable and empowered sense of self in the face of socially and culturally conditioned assumptions about gender. To elaborate, although one could say that Frannie occupies a place of authority within the text—she, like Marlowe or Spade, is the investigative lens through which the mystery is perceived—her authority is not backed up within the diegesis, as was her literary forebears’, by bullets, brawn or a badge. Instead, those privileges are reserved for Detectives Malloy and Rodriguez, who almost gleefully instruct her that because they are men with guns, “We can do anything we want.”41 Frannie, who claims to be “interested in the ways that men are different from women,” is attracted to this stereotypical bravado, despite her better judgment.42 She confesses it is “masculine gestures that aroused me,” even though they make her feel “powerless,” and she even pictures herself not unhappily “slapping my man’s shirts against stones in the river. Grinding flour for his tortillas.”43 Cornelius, questioning such attraction and capitulation to patriarchal archetypes, asks her if “chicks act the way they do, you know, like captives, ‘cause they be scared of male violence.”44 Frannie suspects there may be some truth in Cornelius’s statement, but nonetheless discovers herself longing to “be fixed, to be held down” by Malloy, “I who did not wish to belong to one man. I who did not wish to belong to anyone.”45 More, she discovers herself not only wanting to be liked by Malloy, but wanting “to be like him”—confident, dangerous, independent.46 As this power dynamic between Frannie and Malloy, the familiar classic noir dynamic of a vulnerable woman drawn to a self-assured masculine man, is established on one narrative level, however, Moore sets about systematically unsettling and undermining it on another—for, as Malpas points out, a principle objective of much postmodern art is the intentional disruption of “traditionally ascribed gender positions.”47 For Moore, this disruption comes in the form of what could be called Frannie’s double consciousness, or perhaps

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divided consciousness is more accurate: as much as Frannie feels the urge to surrender herself to Malloy, his strength, his protection, she is equally motivated to avoid “the old brooding effacement of the female.”48 As aroused as she is by his masculine gestures, when he touches her she feels “as if I’d been branded.”49 She recognizes in Malloy’s aggressive sexuality a tendency to conceive of women “as adversaries,” understanding him to be one of those men—one of those stock characters of literary noir—that has “to despise [women] in order to come near us, to get over their terrible fear of us.”50 Frannie seems to sense something potentially empowering in this fear, and for a time contemplates surrounding herself with women, finding herself “a nice girl” and joining a lesbian enclave, which meets in a nearby “garden where women may come to embrace each other.”51 This fantasy of an escape from heteronormativity into an idyllic, Garden of Eden–like sanctuary is short-lived, though, as men once again insinuate themselves into her life: first Cornelius, who exposes himself in her apartment, his uncircumcised penis reminding Frannie of “the snake in the Garden of Eden,” and then Rodriguez, who tells her an obscene and sexist joke about Eve as he is abducting her.52 With Frannie, then, we witness a variation of Fredric Jameson’s “fragmentation” of the subject, or the emergence of what Christine Di Stefano—in a discussion of the intersections between feminism and postmodernism—describes as a “fractured” identity.53 That is, we come to recognize that while Frannie feels the forceful, even seductive pull of traditionally ascribed gender roles, which require her to succumb to the hegemony of the masculine, she is also wary and at times scornful of these roles; that even as she apparently embraces the retrogressive gender assumptions articulated by classic noir, she concomitantly rejects them. As a result, Frannie becomes a kind of schizophrenic subject: torn asunder by her competing impulses to adhere to and disregard the gender positions historically dictated by her society and its culture, she is unable to take decisive steps in either direction, leaving her instead in a fissured state where “I don’t know where to start. What to say. What to think.”54 Such fissuring, such inner division and inconstancy, marks an unexpected turn for literary noir: the active, coherent protagonist of classic noir (whether said protagonist is a private detective, à la Hammett and Chandler, or a two-bit crook, à la Cain and Thompson) has been supplanted by a quintessentially postmodern subject, characterized by Stuart Sim as “a fragmented being” in a continual state of flux and dissolution.55 Among those made uneasy by this shift was Michiko Kakutani, who complained that with Frannie Moore had “conjured up a disembodied creature”—a peculiar charge, when one considers

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how much of the text is devoted to chronicling Frannie’s bodily sensations, her physical pleasures and pains.56 At the heart of Kakutani’s objection, one infers, is a tacit recognition of, and discomfort with, Frannie’s inability to be comfortable in her own skin: her inability to define for herself and the reader who she is, what she wants, where she situates herself in relation to social codes and conventions. And Kakutani has good reason to be dismayed—it is precisely this lack of self-definition that leads Frannie to eventually show symptoms of paranoia, question the validity of her own memories, and lose the ability to maintain her “train of thought.”57 These breakdowns cause her to misinterpret the clues she has gleaned in a way that would be unimaginable for a Sam Spade or a Lew Archer. As Dietrich notes, the classic noir investigator, though faced with a morass of evidence and an increasingly chaotic world, inevitably discerns a pattern in the disorder, allowing him to solve the mystery and maintain moral and psychological stability as well as the perception of himself as “a unified person.”58 In Frannie’s case, however, her schizophrenic liminality leaves her incapable of lucid thought or purposeful action, and hence incapable of discerning such patterns or effecting an orderly narrative resolution. Thus, rather than uncovering proof of Rodriguez’s wrongdoings, Frannie—our private eyes and ears in this mystery—misreads events and misjudges motives, ultimately convincing herself (erroneously) of Malloy’s guilt and delivering herself into the hands of the actual killer. It is a misinterpretation for which she pays a heavy price: in contrast to the detectives of classic noir, whose successful sleuthing permits them to avert the “disintegration of identity,” Frannie’s missteps precipitate her corporeal and psychic disarticulation.59 Just as her body is dismembered by Rodriguez’s razor, so is Frannie’s already destabilized and fragmented subjectivity permanently riven, as the narrating “I” is joined, in the concluding sentence, by the more remote, impersonal “She.”60 Frannie, caught between her conflicting compulsions to conform to and to transgress against social and generic constrictions, who even in her last moments vacillates between acquiescence (“I asked him not to hurt me. It seems to be what women say”) and autonomy (“I bit through the skin and he screamed”), in the end splinters, both mentally and physically, under the burden of such unbearable and unsustainable indeterminacy.61 This conclusion, with its eschewal of classic noir’s “soothing certainty” that “whatever the problem, it is going to be unraveled, the obscure made clear, the issue settled, the crime avenged, the guilty person punished,” is perhaps the most extreme and startling of the novel’s subversions of generic—and, by extension,

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readerly—expectations.62 In the absence of reassuring closure, of the restoration of lawfulness and the preservation of identity, we are set adrift in what could be called (borrowing from Horsley) a “fractured world”: one in which not all puzzles are solved and all wrongs redressed, one in which the endangered identity no longer coheres.63 In other words, it is a world, as Fredric Jameson might argue, not unlike our own postmodern moment: we, like Frannie, search fruitlessly for the structure in the chaos, for the pattern that will give order and meaning to the bewildering rush of events surrounding us; we, like Frannie, strive desperately to preserve our agency and a cohesive sense of self amid the disarranging collision of past assumptions and present uncertainties, old faiths and current doubts. Moore’s text, then, operates not only as a contemporary reenvisioning of classic literary noir, one that reworks its generic conventions in deliberately self-conscious and unpredictable ways; it also enunciates, more broadly, a Jamesonian critique of the hazards of postmodern existence—the deterritorialization of mind and body, the sundering of subjectivity, the dissolution of identity. It is a novel that invokes and rewrites yesterday’s traditions in order to speak powerfully and critically to today’s conditions, a complex formulation that would not be lost on filmmaker Jane Campion as she sought to translate In the Cut from printed word to moving image.

Recontextualizing noir: From page to screen to In the Cut If Horsley and others are correct in characterizing hard-boiled crime stories from the 1930s and 1940s as a kind of popular modernist literature, then according to James Naremore the Hollywood films they inspired in the 1940s and 1950s—many of which were direct adaptations of literary noir, from John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), based on the book by Dashiell Hammett, to Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), from the James M. Cain novel, to Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946), an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s mystery— can similarly be regarded as “a kind of modernism in popular cinema.”64 For Naremore, such “classic noir,” as these films came to be known in the 1980s, regularly “reproduce[d] themes and formal devices” associated with modernist art, among them a predilection for “urban landscapes, subjective narration, nonlinear plots, hard-boiled poetry, and misogynistic eroticism.”65 Stanley Orr concurs, divining in these movies a pervasive preoccupation with Jameson’s “great modernist thematics” of the alienation and anomie, the solitude and

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isolation endemic to modern life.66 Indeed, as Orr suggests, one is hard pressed to think of a film noir from this era in which such thematics are not key motifs. Of course, to appreciate classic noir as a form of popular cinematic modernism is to recognize its aesthetic and thematic tropes as inviting targets for postmodernist appropriation and alteration. A prime example of this revisionism can be found in the so-called neo-noir movies that began appearing in the 1960s and 1970s, crime films that reference either overtly or obliquely the style and substance of vintage Hollywood noir.67 One thinks, for instance, of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), a private detective tale set in 1930s Los Angeles, or Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), a Cain-like concoction of sex, murder, and double-crosses taking place in modern-day Florida—two films that inventively reimagine the femme fatale character, and forego film noir’s high contrast black-and-white cinematography for glossy color imagery.68 Similarly, in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), Raymond Chandler’s “tight-lipped, macho” gumshoe Philip Marlowe is reconfigured as “an out-and-out schlemiel” who mumbles his way through contemporary L. A., taking at least as much interest in peering at his scantily clad female neighbors as sussing out clues—the epistemological hero turned peeping tom.69 In more recent neo-noirs like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) and Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995), Orr affirms, this impetus to rethink the “‘fundamentals’ of noir modernism” has grown even more pronounced, as the “basic categories of noir epistemology” such as fiction/reality and subject/object are problematized, and “the human subject itself becomes destabilized, contextual, fluid.”70 Appropriately, Orr labels such works postmodern film noir—a moniker that could be applied with equal accuracy to Jane Campion’s In the Cut. Though far less celebrated than the films of Singer or Tarantino, Campion’s text is, I will argue, similarly deconstructive, similarly interrogative, evincing an artful self-reflexivity and intertextuality, as well as a commitment to the disconcerting disruption of generic codes (including but not limited to the codes of classic noir) in its investigation of postmodern identity and indeterminacy.

Jane Campion and cinematic disarticulation Initially, the decision by New Zealand–born filmmaker Jane Campion to adapt Susanna Moore’s controversial novel to the screen struck some critics as puzzling, if not downright strange. As Dawn Dietrich and Douglas Park explain,

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these reviewers, accustomed to Campion’s acclaimed, lushly photographed period pieces like 1990s An Angel at My Table or 1993s The Piano, seemed to have difficulty reconciling their expectations of the director “with what they took to be sensationalist commercial material,” in apprehending why Campion would leave her familiar “territory of Anglo Australia and a high literary mode for New York City and the pop culture associations of the slasher/thriller film.”71 Despite such critical perplexity, however, the creative comingling of Moore and Campion is not as counterintuitive as it might appear at first blush. One cannot help but notice, for example, a certain thematic congruence between Moore’s In the Cut and Campion’s oeuvre, which, Dietrich and Park tell us, tends to favor “dramas of psycho-sexual entanglement in which the protagonists’ strong wills, romantic yearnings, and transgressive desires exist in painful tension with their social and physical vulnerability.”72 To be sure, Frannie’s story is very much one of psycho-sexual entanglements, of the tensions between desire and vulnerability. Likewise, Dietrich and Park maintain Campion’s films generally produce meaning and generate affective resonance through “narrative intensity, surprise, and viewer discomfort.”73 So, too, are intensity, surprise and discomfort integral to Moore’s text. Add to this thematic and stylistic consonance Campion’s partiality for working in a range of genres, with the intention of “skewing or perverting” the dynamics of each “‘host’ genre” (see, for instance, her erotically insinuative reinterpretation of Henry James and the “heritage film” in 1996’s The Portrait of a Lady), and the director’s adaptive interest in Moore’s book becomes not only understandable, but also quite logical.74 If a handful of critics expressed misgivings over the artistic compatibility of Moore and Campion, an equal number proceeded to assuage such concerns, upon the movie’s release, by assuring audiences that Campion’s adaptation demonstrated an admirable fidelity to its source material. Typifying this trend were Leslie Felperin, in Sight and Sound, who praised the film for staying “faithful” to Moore’s novel, and David Nusair, of Reel Film Reviews, who, in a fairly negative evaluation of Campion’s text, held that “if nothing else, the movie does a fantastic job of bringing . . . Moore’s story to life,” making it “one of the more effective adaptations of a novel to come around in a while.”75 Interestingly, though, these assurances of fidelity are belied by the film itself, which in fact departs in significant ways from Moore’s story, most notably when Frannie (played by Meg Ryan)—now half-sisters with Pauline rather than friends, now coveting love and marriage instead of proudly refusing to seek romance—saves herself at the lighthouse by shooting and killing Rodriguez with Malloy’s gun. In light of such

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substantial changes to character and plot, one is led to wonder whether Felperin and Nusair, in their appraisal of In the Cut’s faithfulness, were sensing (perhaps unwittingly) a more subtle, less readily articulable affinity between movie and book: a correspondence in artistic tone and timbre, an accordance in affective animus and import. David Denby, writing in The New Yorker, touched on this affinity when he remarked that Campion’s film “has been entirely prearranged for dreadfulness,” a sentiment recently seconded by Kathleen McHugh, who sees the film as generating “a persistent mood of apprehension, if not dread”—dread, of course, being a word frequently invoked both within Moore’s text and by literary critics seeking to describe the novel’s affective forcefulness, its facility for keeping readers anxious and off-balance.76 Along those same lines, Dietrich and Park theorize that this disturbing and disordering “affect” fostered by the movie stems, in large measure, from Campion’s directorial aesthetic, which knowingly “surprises and disrupts viewers’ expectations.”77 Above, I presented an analogous theory about Moore’s book, and its unsettling violations of generic and readerly expectation. Rather than a precise reflection of storyline and characterization, then, what Felperin, Nusair, and company may have intuitively recognized in Campion’s film is a refraction of creative tenor and technique: a cinematic engagement with the affective dynamism of Moore’s work, its affective lines of flight, in an ambitious attempt to tap into and rechannel its aesthetic strategies and the intensities they foster from one medium to another. To observe that both incarnations of In the Cut aim to surprise and discomfort through the calculated subversion of traditions and expectations, however, is not to suggest that Moore and Campion are necessarily subverting the same traditions and expectations. For, if Moore’s novel is a self-reflexive deconstruction of the conventions of classic literary noir, then Campion’s adaptation is an equally intertextual meditation on the history and habitual practices of the cinema— that is, it is a movie, in many ways, about “the movies.” This inclination towards cinematic intertextuality is evident from the film’s opening credit sequence, which, McHugh informs us, recalls “the opening moments of each of Campion’s feature films, save The Piano, which is eerily evoked throughout by the dissonant piano that accompanies the theme song.”78 In addition to referencing Campion’s own work, this sequence also alludes to a host of antecedent films and filmmakers, from an array of cinematic styles and eras. For example, the theme song cited by McHugh is “Que Sera, Sera,” originally written for and performed by Doris Day in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Campion’s discordant version of the song, performed by China Forbes, immediately suggests

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to viewers that her movie will be, at least in part, a correspondingly revisionist riff on the Hitchcockian thriller.79 Accompanying the music is a series of images of New York City: its desolate early-morning waterfront, its trash-littered streets, its graffiti-marred buildings. These images, with their perpetually shifting focus, their handheld jitteriness, their gritty and grainy film stock, explicitly emphasize their own artifice, all but announcing themselves as subjectively mediated pictures of American cinema’s most popular cityscape. By doing so, they invite, even impel, comparison with other cinematographic representations of said cityscape, from Josef von Sternberg’s similarly bleak waterfront in The Docks of New York (1928), to the dirty and dangerous streets of Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973), to the graffitied subway cars and abandoned tenements in Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979). Through such images and associations, Campion is able to establish, in mere minutes, a filmic space within which the ensuing story can unfold: one that is at once familiar and defamiliarized, that connotes both an actual city and that city’s myriad cinematic iterations. It is a space—a sort of temporally fluid New York “moviescape”—which brings to mind the temporally nebulous “any-spaces-whatever” identified in post–World War II cinema by Gilles Deleuze, and characterized by Laura Marks as “disjunctive spaces” where fixed histories and identities begin to destabilize.80 Nor is identity fixed or stable in Campion’s disjunctive cinematic world, as Campion intimates in the film’s first few moments by lingering on a graffito of a woman’s face dividing in two—a striking harbinger, we soon discover, not only of the physical violence to come, but of the progressive rupturing of Frannie’s emotional and psychic unity. Having adumbrated her film’s intertextual agenda in this visually impressionistic opening, Campion concludes the credit sequence with a brief, outwardly non-sequiturial vignette that appears to have been lifted directly from a silent movie: a man and woman, dressed in early twentieth-century clothing and filmed in black-and-white, their movements artificially hurried (as if recorded at 16 frames per second but viewed at 24 frames per second) and accompanied by lilting piano music, ice skating together on a frozen forest pond. This vignette, we come to learn, is Frannie’s dream—or perhaps fantasy is more appropriate—of her parents’ courtship, a courtship that plays out over the course of the film in two more episodes. We see, in true silent movie fashion, how Frannie’s mother catches her father’s eye from afar; how her father falls instantly in love, dropping to one knee and proposing on the spot; how an ethereal snow begins to drift down as her father places an engagement ring on her mother’s finger, and the two share their first kiss. That is to say, we see, in these cinematically anachronistic

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reveries, not a realistic courtship story but an idealized and romanticized one—a kind of “private mythology” (as Campion puts it in her DVD commentary) in which Frannie envisages her family history through the poeticizing filter of film history, through the nostalgic veil of old-fashioned “movie romance.” More, one senses, at times, that Frannie wishes to replicate this mythology in her own life, to conjure for herself the same type of movie romance she has conjured for her parents. Campion hints at this longing, initially, through a suggestive soundtrack, featuring song titles like “Show Me the Way to Your Heart” and “The Look of Love.” She adds to the impression through periodic close-ups of poetry printed on subway posters, which she deploys much like allusive, Griffith-esque intertitles (juxtaposing, for instance, a solitary, forlorn looking Frannie with lines from Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Variations”: “The still waters of the water under a frond of stars/The still waters of your mouth under a thicket of kisses”). Later, the longing becomes more manifest as Pauline (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) tells Frannie that she should have “a baby . . . and a man,” and she presents Frannie with a charm bracelet representing, as Pauline phrases it, “a courtship fantasy.” That evening, Frannie absentmindedly fingers these charms—a wedding bell, a house, a tiny baby in a baby carriage—on her date with Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), who promises her, “I can be whatever you want me to be.” Just as Frannie feels the tug of prototypical movie romance, the psychic pull of innumerable cinematic images conditioning her for love at first sight and marriage and motherhood, though, she also seems to harbor doubts about the feasibility, even the advisability, of this paradigm.81 She indicates as much to Malloy, when he asks her what, exactly, she wants from their relationship, and she admits to him, “I’m scared of what I want.” Frannie’s inner turmoil is reflected even more vividly in her final “silent film” daydream about her parents, a drunken vision in which her father—who by this time we know to be a serial womanizer whose eventual abandonment of Frannie’s mother drove her “crazy with grief ”—accidentally skates over her mother’s legs, slicing them into pieces. Even in her private reveries about her parents’ happy beginnings, it appears, Frannie cannot fully inure herself to life’s ugliness, its violence, its ghastliest colors (red blood seeping into white ice); she cannot fully suppress her mounting suspicion that reality is not, and never can be, as pleasing and painless as so many movies would have us believe. This suspicion is seemingly confirmed by the conclusion of In the Cut, when, in a deviation from Moore’s narrative, Rodriguez (Nick Damici) forces Frannie to take part in a demented parody of romantic seduction: he cordially offers her wine upon their arrival at the lighthouse;

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he plays soft music and dances with her; finally, he proffers a wedding ring at knifepoint, asking Frannie to marry him, declaring that “all women want love, right? . . . My guess is, you want it so bad it hurts.” As Dietrich and Park have argued, Rodriguez comes to embody, in this scene, a “nightmare version of the courting male,” and hence a perverse caricature of cinema’s traditional leading man.82 In turn, Frannie finds herself caught in the crosscurrents between dream and nightmare—between the allure of leading lady mythology (where women are joyfully swept off their feet, or skates, and ushered into marriage, family, and domesticity) and the very real dangers that mythology tends to suture over (women being forced, at knifepoint or otherwise, into compliance with male expectancies, into surrendering themselves to heteronormative rules and roles). Not unlike the protagonist of Moore’s novel, then, Campion’s Frannie becomes, at this moment, a type of fragmented subject: as her filmic fantasies intersect with harsh actualities, Frannie teeters on the brink of both mental and corporeal dissolution. Such sly interrogation of cinematic romance, such allusion to and upending of mainstream filmmaking’s traditional romantic archetypes and iconography, is matched in In the Cut by a comparable “disarticulation” of the aesthetic precepts of classical film noir. According to Naremore, since the 1970s, many critics and theorists revisiting film noir from a feminist perspective have interpreted the movies as a “reflection of male hostility toward women,” as evidencing a “perversely masculine need for social and sexual control.”83 Central to this interpretation is what Naremore calls film noir’s “sadistic gaze”—its penchant for positioning women as objects to be exhibited, observed, and ultimately dominated (a famous instance of this can be found in Hitchcock’s Vertigo from 1958, with its voyeuristic and fetishistic fixation on Kim Novak’s Madeleine/Judy).84 Thus, film noir comes to exemplify the brand of patriarchal visual logic, and “visual pleasure,” assailed by Laura Mulvey, in which women “are simultaneously looked at and displayed,” and men retain ownership of “the determining male gaze,” remain the privileged bearers of “the look.”85 In Campion’s film, we see this same logic at work, first when we are introduced to Frannie, who evinces a quality of to-be-looked-at-ness (to employ Mulvey’s terminology) as she lounges on her bed sleepily and partially clothed, and subsequently when she leaves her apartment, and we watch her walking the city streets in a succession of point of view and over-the-shoulder shots filmed from the perspective of John Graham (Kevin Bacon), a deranged and obsessive ex-lover.86 Indeed, if Moore’s Frannie worries that men are always “keeping an eye on her,” in Campion’s film that fear

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is literalized as Frannie is routinely surveyed by male eyes. Whether it is John Graham following her through the neighborhood or Rodriguez peering up at her apartment window, Cornelius (Sharrieff Pugh) leering at her in the Red Turtle with his self-described “bitch vision” or Malloy keeping tabs on her through his car windshield and rearview mirror, Frannie is constantly navigating a hostile network of masculine gazes that threaten to objectify and subjugate her. Yet, even while Campion is enacting this sadistic visual logic, she also differentiates Frannie from other women of film noir by providing her with a degree of agency, by offering us glimpses into her complicated, fully imagined interior life. We witness, for example, her wishful dreams about her parents’ courtship, hear her mental recitation of a poem in voice-over, and at one point are privy to her erotic imaginings, as she pictures Malloy (whom she has just met) sitting beside her bed, watching her masturbate. This last sequence is notable for its shallow, shifting focal plane, achieved with the aid of a swing tilt lens, a visual motif that recurs throughout the film. Whenever Frannie is aroused or fantasizing, the image softens and blurs, save for a single mobile focal point that probes the scene like a searching eye, or a caressing hand—moving slowly, languorously, along the curve of Frannie’s leg, across the arch of Malloy’s shoulder, over the softly angled peaks of entwined bodies and crumpled bed sheets. The effect of this stylistic motif is twofold. First, as Felperin notes, it gives one the impression of viewing these moments “through a heat haze of desire,” through Frannie’s own “ecstatic subjectivity,” thereby creating an immediate, subjective connection between Frannie and the audience.87 Secondly, this visual haziness imbues the imagery with a texture and granularity reminiscent of the “haptic images” discussed by Laura Marks: those cinematic (or videographic) images that, because of their tangibly grainy surfaces, appeal to our sense of touch, our memories of touching, and therefore encourage us to utilize our eyes “like organs of touch” and conceive of the filmic experience as “an exchange between two bodies . . . that of the viewer and that of the film.”88 Clearly, this is how Amy Taubin responded to In the Cut, writing that the movie’s “shallow focus and constant camera movement” brought her into direct “contact with the images.”89 So, it seems, did McHugh, who credits Campion’s work with bringing audiences into “tactile” and “visceral” union with the “desiring body” of her heroines.90 Such sensitivity by Campion to cinema’s tactile potentialities, in the service of rendering Frannie’s desiring body and ecstatic subjectivity, makes In the Cut a keen riposte to film noir’s traditional presentation of female sexuality as inherently dangerous, if not sinister, and sexually forthright women as either evil

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temptresses or wanton opportunists.91 By allowing us access to Frannie’s private wants and needs, by inviting us to partake in her palpably evoked desires and pleasures, Campion forges an intimate bond between Frannie and the viewer— one that discourages us from reducing Frannie to one-dimensional generic stereotypes, to temptress or opportunist, urging us instead to perceive her as a complex, flesh-and-blood being possessed of carnal instincts and impulses not so different from our own. Considering this sympathetic humanization of Frannie, this markedly rich and sensitive portrait of female desire and sexuality, one might suppose that Frannie will, in the end, avoid the obligatory punishment meted out to sexually “transgressive” (or sexually empowered) women in film noir. She both does and does not. From the minute we are introduced to Frannie, barely clad and deep in fantasy, an atmosphere of impending violence looms over her so heavily, so appreciably, that several reviewers were compelled to draw parallels not only to classic noir, but to a cycle of movies from the 1970s that Taubin refers to as “woman-in-jep thrillers”—thrillers like Klute (1971) and Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), in which a single, independent woman is stalked relentlessly by a homicidal man.92 Such comparisons are well founded: to be sure, with her combination of intellectualism and sexual self-awareness, not to mention her chopped bangs, Frannie not only acts, at times, like Jane Fonda’s Bree from Klute, she bears a physical resemblance to her as well; and much like Faye Dunaway’s Laura Mars, who has her vision literally co-opted by a fixated male suitor, Frannie too struggles to maintain individual agency and subjectivity amid a potentially subsuming thicket of sadistic masculine gazes. Perhaps the woman-in-jep thriller that In the Cut most closely resembles, though, is Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), which also tells the story of a young New York City schoolteacher (Theresa, played by Diane Keaton) whose sexual autonomy incites an imbalanced man to violent action. Following the tenets of noir, and presaging the slasher movies of the 1980s to follow, Looking for Mr. Goodbar concludes with Theresa’s brutal murder, a commensurate penalty—the text intimates—for unabashed female sexuality. Throughout In the Cut, it often appears that Frannie is heading toward a similar fate (the color red pervading the film, for instance, seems to augur a bloody climax, just as it did in Moore’s novel)—that the movie is hewing to a generic template which, in the words of McHugh, “depends for its pleasure on her death.”93 Indeed, some critics even voiced consternation at being denied this pleasure (or, more charitably, consternation at what they took to be a corruption of, and thus a reduction of, Moore’s original ending), and

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dismissed Campion’s finale, in which Frannie escapes the lighthouse and returns to Malloy, as a disappointing “compromise” and an act “of bad faith” that refuses “to follow through and deliver the emotional punch that the material really insists on.”94 What such critics risk overlooking, however, with their wholesale denunciation of Campion’s ostensibly upbeat conclusion, is the extent to which this happy ending is, in actuality, quite troubling. In the film’s penultimate scene, Frannie, having shot Rodriguez, walks from the lighthouse toward her apartment along a deserted, early-morning road, her arms and legs pasted with blood, her red-smeared skin mirroring the deep crimson hue of her dress. These images, with their handheld restlessness, their inconstant focus, could as easily be Frannie’s dream as her reality, and as she propels herself onward we are reminded, as Taubin rightly remarks, of “Sissy Spacek trudging home after the prom in Carrie.”95 Like Carrie, there is something almost spectral about Frannie at this moment, something both haunting and haunted: her face ashen, her expression empty, her movements listless and weary, Frannie seems less an exultant survivor than the haggard ghost of a victim. Although Frannie’s body, her desiring body, which Campion has brought us into such visceral contact with, remains relatively unscathed, one suspects her psychological and emotional integrity have not been as fortunate—a notion reinforced by the film’s closing shot, which shows us Frannie, looking shattered, defeated, psychically disarticulated, curling up submissively at Malloy’s side. This gesture, connoting surrender as much as affection, appears to imply that Frannie, chastened if not broken by Rodriguez’s assault, by her culturally dictated and generically mandated chastisement, is prepared in the future to foreswear her sexual independence, her ecstatic subjectivity, for Malloy’s protective embrace. With Campion’s Frannie, then, as with Moore’s Frannie, we have a character whose sense of self, whose motivations and inclinations and understanding of her place in the world, is in constant flux. Perfused by filmic imagery, Frannie dreams of movie romance, yet she is also confronted by the ugly, patriarchal realities underlying that dream. Negotiating an onslaught of male gazes and violences, Frannie fights to retain individual agency and an independent sexuality, yet she is seemingly rent and undone by that fight. In Campion’s cinematic world, a fractured world in which generic codes are invoked only to be violated, in which the formerly reliable tropes of silent cinema and film noir and woman-in-jep thrillers have begun to unexpectedly destabilize, Frannie’s identity becomes correspondingly fractured, correspondingly unstable. In this way, Campion’s film, like Moore’s novel before it, can be said to speak (in

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very Jamesonian terms) to our present postmodern experience: as the line between image and actuality is ever more scumbled, Campion’s text seems to suggest, as we concomitantly resist and accede to our old traditions, to our old assumptions, we, much like Frannie, desperately endeavor to maintain a cohesive sense of self, a coherent and unified identity. That is, we recognize in Frannie’s unbearable indeterminacy an analogue of our own indeterminacy, our own uncertainties and unfixedness, and thus Campion’s In the Cut comes to function as a critical conduit through which we may better apprehend, and better map, our precarious position in the fragmented and fragmentizing landscapes of postmodernity.

Moore, Campion and beyond In this chapter, I have sought to model a new critical orientation, a new strategy, for analyzing cinematic adaptations of literary texts, one less concerned with evaluating fidelity to storyline and characterization than with reconceiving the adaptive process as an affective exchange, a dialogic drift of intensities and creative energies from one medium to another. My starting point in this undertaking was Susanna Moore’s In the Cut, a novel formally configured to build and then subvert readerly expectations through the invocation and deconstruction of the traditions, and traditional assumptions, of classic literary noir. I then considered how the affective forces generated by Moore’s text, the intensities fostered by her subversions and deconstructions—the dread and discomfort, the discomposure and surprise—had been channeled and redistributed by Jane Campion in her filmic adaptation of Moore’s novel, a movie seeking to unsettle viewers through a correlative disarticulation of cinema’s generic patterns and precepts, its iconography and ideologies. Along the way, I explored how both works—each in its own manner, each owing to its unique use and abuse of past forms and contents—manages to articulate a diagnostic critique of our current postmodern condition, and the outwardly insurmountable challenges we face in retaining a stable sense of self, a unified identity, in an increasingly fractured and fracturing postmodern society. As I turn my focus, in the next chapter, to Charles Burnett’s Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, a film that is part documentary, part adaptation of literary and historical texts, and part meditation on the very nature of historical representation, I plan to continue developing this analytical approach by demonstrating its utility in explicating and effecting

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deeper understanding of an adaptive work that would, traditionally speaking, be thoroughly disfavored by fidelity-based criticism.

Notes 1 Michiko Kakutani, “She Has an Ear for Slang and an Eye for Trouble,” New York Times, October 31, 1995, available at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage. html?res=9C02 E7DD1639F932A05753C1A963958260. 2 James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1998), 9. 3 Slavoj Žižek, “’The Thing That Thinks’: The Kantian Background of the Noir Subject,” in Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 199. 4 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 79. 5 David Madden, “Introduction,” in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), xvi. 6 Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 7. 7 Ibid., 3. 8 Simon Malpas, The Postmodern (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 24. 9 Madden, “Introduction,” xxiii. 10 René Dietrich, “Postmodern Noir Investigations and Disintegrations of Identity: Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man and Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly,” Crimeculture (Summer 2006): sec. 1, available at: www.crimeculture.com/ Contents/ Articles-Summer05/ReneDietrich.html. 11 Ibid., sec. 2.1. One might add to this list Paul Auster’s noir-inflected City of Glass, with its protagonist Quinn who only “exists as a series of reflective mirrors, doubled and redoubled in a treacherous and elusive world” where nothing is certain or real except chance itself. For more on City of Glass, see Samuel Chase Coale, Paradigms of Paranoia: The Culture of Conspiracy in Contemporary American Fiction (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2005), 49. 12 Dietrich, “Postmodern Noir,” sec. 2.1and 2.2. 13 Susanna Moore, In the Cut (New York: Plume, 1995), 19. 14 Amy Taubin, “The Wrong Man,” Film Comment 39, 6 (2003): 51–2. 15 Colin Walters, “Forbidden Wishes Aroused in ‘Cut,’” Washington Times, November 26, 1995, B6; Richard Dyer, “What’s a Nice Author Like Her Doing in a Book Like This?,” Boston Globe, November 20, 1995, 38.

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16 Peter Rodgers, “In the Cut,” The Richmond Review, 1996, available at: www. richmondreview.co.uk/books/inthecut.html. 17 Terry D’Auray, “In the Cut,” The Agony Column, February 2004, available at: http:// trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2004/moore-in_the_cut.htm. 18 Moore, In the Cut, 5. 19 Ibid., 7, 147. 20 Ibid., 56. 21 Ibid., 62, 71, 107, 173. 22 Dyer, “What’s a Nice Author Like Her Doing in a Book Like This?,” 38. For example: “I looked over my shoulder. There was no one. Which frightened me. Because I could hear him.” Moore, In the Cut, 72–3. 23 Madden, “Introduction,” xix. 24 Joyce Carol Oates, “Man Under Sentence of Death: The Novels of James M. Cain,” in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 121. 25 Moore, In the Cut, 3, 55, 59. 26 Ibid., 3. 27 Ibid., 11. 28 Ibid., 14. 29 Ibid., 65. 30 The break was deemed too sharp, evidently, by certain critics. Among those expressing discomfiture over the book’s unconventional emphasis on female arousal and sexuality were Richard Dyer, who likened it to “femporn” (Dyer, “What’s a Nice Author Like Her Doing in a Book Like This?,” 38), and Michiko Kakutani, who accused Moore of trying to compete with the “sensationalizing” movies of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven (Kakutani, “She Has an Ear for Slang and an Eye for Trouble”)—a less than convincing allegation, when one contrasts the misogyny and phallocentrism of would-be noirs like Basic Instinct (1992) or Showgirls (1995) with In the Cut’s sustained attention to female desire and gratification. 31 Lee Horsley, 20th Century Crime Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 282. 32 Ibid., 248. 33 Dietrich, “Postmodern Noir,” sec. 2.2. 34 Moore, In the Cut, 7. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 124. 37 Ibid., 27, 93–4. 38 Ibid., 78. 39 Ibid., 174.

102 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64

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The Drift Ibid., 176. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 19, 35, 61. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 46. Malpas, The Postmodern, 74. Moore, In the Cut, 88. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 62, 51. Ibid., 127, 124. Ibid., 162, 177. Jameson, Postmodernism, 14–15; Christine Di Stefano, “Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity, and Postmodernism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 76. Moore, In the Cut, 55. Stuart Sim, ed., Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 366–7. Kakutani, “She Has an Ear for Slang and an Eye for Trouble.” Moore, In the Cut, 103, 113, 123. Dietrich, “Postmodern Noir,” sec. 4.2. A process aided, at times, by a “lucky break” benefiting the detective—that is, a happy coincidence or turn-of-fate that facilitates the survival and success of a Spade or Archer. By contrast, Frannie is a thoroughly luckless investigator. Ibid, sec. 1. Moore, In the Cut, 180. The final sentences read: “I know the poem. She knows the poem.” Ibid., 179. Madden, “Introduction,” xxxiii. Horsley, 20th Century Crime Fiction, 281. Naremore, More Than Night, 38. David Bordwell draws an even stronger (primarily stylistic) parallel between literary and cinematic noir, averring that “Hammett’s first four novels . . . defined most of the conventions of film noir, including first-person narration and expressionist subjectivity.” Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 79. Naremore, More Than Night, 45. Stanley Orr, “Postmodernism, Noir, and The Usual Suspects,” Literature Film Quarterly 27, 1 (1999): 67.

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67 Foster Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir (New York: Proscenium Publishers Inc., 1999), 4. Such films, Foster Hirsch tells us, have also been variously described as “post-noir noir,” “postclassic noir,” and “nouveau noir.” 68 Jameson, Postmodernism, 20–1. Fredric Jameson famously described Body Heat as a “nostalgia film,” in that its evocation of classic noir connotes a sense of “pastness” for the viewer, blurring the text’s contemporaneity and making “it possible for the viewer to receive the narrative as though it were set in some eternal thirties, beyond historical time.” 69 Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 116. 70 Orr, “Postmodernism, Noir, and The Usual Suspects,” 67, 71, 67. 71 Dawn Dietrich and Douglas Park, “In the Cut,” Film Quarterly 58, 4 (2005): 39. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 46. 74 Kathleen McHugh, Jane Campion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 132–3. 75 Leslie Felperin, “In the Cut,” Sight and Sound 13, 12 (2003): 38; David Nusair, “In the Cut,” Reel Film Reviews, November 7, 2003, available at: www.reelfilm.com/ inthecut.htm. The somewhat tortured reasoning of Nusair’s review is typical of fidelity criticism: he extols the film for, in his estimation, remaining faithful to Moore’s book, and then attacks that book (and by extension the filmic adaptation of it) for being “filled with sleazy characters that weren’t compelling or interesting in the least.” 76 David Denby, “Creep Shows,” The New Yorker, October 27, 2003, 112; McHugh, Jane Campion, 134. 77 Dietrich and Park, “In the Cut,” 40. 78 McHugh, Jane Campion, 128. 79 Campion reinforces this notion throughout the text by layering in additional nods to Hitchcock’s oeuvre, including a compositional allusion to the famous close-up of Janet Leigh’s lifeless eye in Psycho (1960), and a cameo by the director herself, the first time Campion has appeared in any of her films. 80 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 120; Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 27. 81 A tension given special piquancy by the extra-textual currency Meg Ryan brings to role—Ryan, of course, being the veritable queen of modern movie romances. 82 Dietrich and Park, “In the Cut,” 43. 83 Naremore, More Than Night, 221. 84 Ibid.

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85 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 2186. 86 Ibid. 87 Felperin, “In the Cut,” 38. 88 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 162, 150. 89 Taubin, “The Wrong Man,” 51. 90 McHugh, Jane Campion, 95. 91 Ibid. 92 Taubin, “The Wrong Man,” 52. Taubin conjectures that these films were “Seventies Hollywood’s response to incipient female consciousness,” a hypothesis supported by Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, who contextualize the generic cycle within a “broader cultural backlash against feminism unleashed by the Right,” and construe its depictions of violence against females as a “reaction by men to women’s escape from domesticity and subservience.” See Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 137, 139. Foster Hirsch states the case even more bluntly, calling such works “self-defensive male backlash stories,” which “record the revenge of the patriarchs against the forces determined to unseat them from their historical place of privilege.” Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 8. 93 McHugh, Jane Campion, 132. 94 Julia Dudnik-Stern, “In the Cut,” Scene360, 2003, available at: www.scene360.com/ xtra/FilmScan/filmscan_09_incut.php; John Atkinson, “In the Cut,” Kamera.Co.UK, 2003, available at: www.kamera.co.uk/reviews_extra/ in_the_cut.php. As Campion explains, this particular subversion of viewer expectations—and surprising deviation from the novel’s narrative—was in fact mandated by studio executives, who warned her that either Meg Ryan’s character “lives or the movie dies” (Jane Campion, quoted in McHugh, Jane Campion, 125). 95 Taubin, “The Wrong Man,” 52.

5

Inventing Nat Turner: Charles Burnett and the Postmodern History Film

Robert Stam has opined that because of the collaborative nature of filmmaking, one can conceive of individual cinematic texts as “hybrid constructions” in which the words, images, and ideas of multiple contributors combine to form a singular artistic utterance.1 This Bakhtinian conception of film as a kind of innately heteroglossic medium is a particularly useful one to bear in mind when approaching writer/director Charles Burnett’s Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property. Released in 2003, Burnett’s film strives to be many things at once: part documentary, drawing on the research and hypotheses of various historians from various eras; part speculative fiction, drawing on the work of a host of artists, authors and journalists; and part meditation on the very limits of historiography and historical representation. In weaving together such diverse voices and sources, Burnett’s text sheds critical light on the myriad ways in which Nat Turner, leader of a slave rebellion in 1831 Virginia, has been continually reimagined and reinvented in the years since his death. Key to Burnett’s investigation into these uses and abuses of Nat Turner, an investigation Linda Hutcheon might describe as a postmodern “dialogue with the past in the light of the present,” are brief cinematic adaptations of the more influential literary depictions of Nat Turner that have appeared over the last seventeen decades.2 Foremost among them are Thomas R. Gray’s 1831 pamphlet “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1856 novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, William Wells Brown’s 1863 character sketch entitled “Nat Turner,” Randolph Edmonds’s 1935 play by the same name, and William Styron’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. In this chapter, I will focus on these adaptive passages in Burnett’s film, positioning them as an attempt by the filmmaker not to visually transcribe or otherwise faithfully recreate the full narrative content of his literary

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sources (indeed, Burnett in fact dispenses with large portions of the stories he purports to adapt), but rather to tap into their potent affective economies, to redirect from page to screen—in a mere handful of images—their intensive affective flows. Thus, I argue, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property offers viewers not one definitive portrait of Nat Turner but multiple portraits, not one affective experience but multiple experiences, as it grapples with Turner’s status as both historical figure and discursive construct. In making this argument, I endeavor to further illustrate how an analytical lens attuned to the drift of affective forces from one medium to another, to the bleed of intensities from one work to the next, may be effectively employed in elucidating the aesthetic qualities of source text and adapted text alike. I also hope to carve out a productive space within adaptation studies for the consideration of those less straightforward, more unconventional adaptations (like Burnett’s), which have too often fallen beyond the critical purview of the discipline.

The many faces of Nat Turner Historians generally agree that Nat Turner was born in 1800 in Southampton County, Virginia, a slave to Benjamin Turner. Upon Benjamin Turner’s demise in 1810, he became the property of Benjamin’s younger brother, Samuel, until 1822, when he was sold to the family of Thomas Moore. After Moore’s death in 1828, ownership of Nat Turner fell to Moore’s young son Putnam, although Joseph Travis, who married Putnam’s widowed mother in 1831, was the ostensible head of the household in which Turner was enslaved at the time of the rebellion.3 The rebellion itself began on the morning of August 22, when a then 31-year-old Turner led a small group of his fellow slaves to Joseph Travis’s farm, where they killed all of the white inhabitants, and gathered weapons and supplies to aid them in their insurrection. Over the next 24 hours this scenario was replayed at other homes throughout Southampton County, as the band of slaves moved from farm to farm, killing white men, women, and children, and collecting guns, horses, and new enlistees along the way. By the time the revolt was suppressed on August 23 by a hastily assembled militia, a force of roughly 60–80 rebels had dispatched approximately 60 white victims. In the ensuing days, white residents exacted their revenge by mutilating and executing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of local slaves, many of whom had no connection with or knowledge of the rebellion.4 Such massive retaliation against the slave community, in concert

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with subsequent passage of stricter laws regulating the behavior of Virginia’s black population, led Charles Joyner to label Turner’s uprising an unmitigated “catastrophe, not only for Nat Turner and of course for the white victims, but especially for the slaves.”5 Turner himself escaped this initial wave of retribution, hiding in the woods and eluding captors for over two months. He was finally captured by Benjamin Phipps on October 30, tried a week later, and hanged on November 11. As Kenneth S. Greenberg observes, if these are the known facts of Nat Turner’s life, there is far more that remains unknown. To begin with, and most basically, Greenberg tells us, we cannot be sure what Nat Turner looked like, what happened to his body after his execution, or if “Nat Turner” was even his actual name (did he also have a non-slave name?).6 Furthermore, those sources we do have informing us about Turner’s life and his rebellion are “notoriously obscure and difficult to interpret,” and were “produced by people who deeply hated the rebels and their leader.”7 This cloud of uncertainty hanging over Nat Turner, the unanswerable questions and the questionable historical sources, prompts Greenberg to conclude that the men who killed Turner and then dissected and disposed of his corpse not only obliterated his body but effaced “his character and identity” as well—that they effectively “shattered [Turner] into a thousand fragments,” and because “[w]e live in a world, and have long lived in a world, that is deeply fractured,” even our best “efforts may never suffice to put the pieces back together again.”8 At first blush, such evocative language may well bring to mind Paul Gilroy’s notion of the “rhizomorphic, fractal structure” of black experience, of “the inescapable fragmentation and differentiation of the black subject” in the modern world.9 Yet Greenberg’s characterization of the historical Turner as somehow atomized and, perhaps, ultimately unknowable, and our own society as one in which “experience, language, and meaning” have become “deeply fragmented,” strikes a decidedly postmodern note, too.10 That is, Greenberg seems to subscribe to what Simon Malpas terms “a postmodern rethinking of history,” a conceptualization of history as “a site of fragmentation” rather than an inherently “progressive structure.”11 According to Malpas, this rethinking encourages, in turn, a radical questioning of the traditional desire to weave historical events and peoples into a cohesive, linear narrative where all “conflicts and contradictions” are neatly resolved.12 To challenge the utility, and even the sustainability, of conventional historical narratives and historiographic narrativizing in the face of a messy, disjunctive society of the spectacle, however, does not constitute a negation or a rejection of historical reality. As Hutcheon

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argues, postmodern-minded artists and historians do not deny the existence of the past; they simply contend that our access to the past is “entirely conditioned by textuality,” and hence we can only know the past “through its textualized remains.”13 Thus, for the present day historian or artist hoping to effect a deeper understanding of a figure like Nat Turner, hoping to put the pieces back together, as it were, and better grasp what Gilroy might call Turner’s “inescapable pluralities,” it becomes necessary to conceive of him as both a historical personage who remains largely (if not wholly) inaccessible, and a discursive construction who has taken many different forms over the years, sometimes conflicting and contradictory ones, all of which are not easily reconcilable into a single authoritative portrait or defining narrative.14 A quick survey of just a few of Nat Turner’s varied textual incarnations will help illustrate this latter point. Nat Turner made his initial appearance in print in the days following the rebellion, first in local newspapers, which tended to depict him as a bloodthirsty madman, and soon after in the so-called confessions authored and published by Thomas R. Gray. In the ensuing weeks and months, according to Greenberg, Southern whites (and some Northern abolitionists) proceeded to portray Turner as a sort of cautionary “embodied nightmare” stalking the slaveholding states, while at the same time Virginia slaves were appropriating the rebel for their oral folkloric traditions, transforming him into a version of the trickster hero.15 In 1856, Turner appeared as a character in George Payne Rainsford James’s The Old Dominion; or, The Southampton Massacre, a novelistic treatment of the Southampton uprising in which Turner is presented—in the words of Mary Kemp Davis—as “a chivalrous knight.”16 James’s novel would be followed by others, including Mary Spear Tiernan’s Homoselle (1881), Pauline Carrington Rust Bouvé’s Their Shadows Before: A Story of the Southampton Insurrection (1899), and Daniel Panger’s Ol’ Prophet Nat (1967), each offering its own distinct variation of Turner, or a markedly Turner-like figure. Turner has also progressively found his way into drama and poetry, the most prominent poem being Robert Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner” from 1962, and more recently into rap music, with Reef The Lost Cauze’s song “Nat Turner” (2008), and the graphic novel genre, with Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner (2008), a text characterized by the artist’s website as the “action-packed true story of an American freedom fighter” that “reads like Death Wish meets In Cold Blood meets Juice.”17 From madman to trickster, from embodied nightmare to freedom fighter, Nat Turner has been perennially reimagined by journalists and propagandists, historians and authors, artists and performers, all of whom create a new Nat Turner for

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a new era and a new audience, leaving us with a veritable wealth of contrasting interpretations and representations to choose from. Of course, the question then arises: in view of this multitude of irreconcilable discursive iterations, what are the most efficacious means and methodology for the contemporary artist or historian endeavoring to sift through these texts in order to shed fresh critical light on Nat Turner the person and Nat Turner the textual construct? One answer may be found in what Robert Rosenstone identifies as the “postmodern history film.”18 Rosenstone defines the postmodern history film as a cinematic amalgam of styles, techniques, and contents that articulates a new “kind of history,” in that it provides “a distinctly new relationship to and a new way of making meaning of the traces of the past.”19 Examples include Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), a nonlinear, self-reflexive meditation on Vietnamese women living in Vietnam and the United States that blends documentary-like interviews with poetic visual and aural impressionism, and Juan Downey’s Hard Times and Culture (1990), a study of fin-de-siècle Vienna that incorporates footage of contemporary American people and locations, and restages political developments from Viennese history “in three ways: as waltz, as soap opera, as bad TV drama.”20 While the look and feel of postmodern history films varies widely, Rosenstone notes certain aesthetic strategies that tend to recur among the works, including: an inclination to “[t]ell the past self-reflexively,” never forgetting that “the present is the site of all past representation and knowing”; to recount the past “from a multiplicity of viewpoints,” eschewing “traditional narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and end”; to make use of “fragmentary and/or poetic knowledge”; and to refuse “to sum up the meaning of past events, but rather make sense of them in a partial and open-ended, rather than totalized, manner.”21 Tellingly, all of these strategies are also on clear display in Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, Charles Burnett’s cinematic effort to forge a new relationship with the storied rebel leader, and find new ways of making sense of the (in)famous slave who proved both a troublesome human property to his white owners and a troublesome intellectual property to subsequent generations of authors, historians, and artists hoping to claim him as their own. For instance, Burnett’s film (cowritten by Frank Christopher and Kenneth S. Greenberg) is highly self-referential, calling attention to the mediated and subjective nature of the images it offers, and contextualizing itself as a decidedly modern-day reconsideration of Turner and the many historiographic and artistic treatments he inspired. The film examines Turner from an assortment of differing perspectives, supplied by an array of historians and writers, critics and activists, even utilizing

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seven different actors throughout the course of the movie to represent Turner at various points in his life. And the text never shies away from the limits of our knowledge about the real-life Turner, from the partial and fractional character of the documentary record(s) informing us about him, acknowledging (in the phraseology of Burnett’s narrator) that “today we cannot clearly make out the face of the man,” and we probably never will. In conjunction with such aesthetic strategies, Rosenstone continues, postmodern history films also frequently “[i]ntermix contradictory elements” such as drama and documentary in their search for fresh modes of perceiving and comprehending the past, which in turn may help illuminate our present moment.22 Again, Burnett’s work is no exception in this regard. In Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, Burnett freely blends elements of documentary filmmaking (on-camera interviews, use of archival footage, incorporation of historical illustrations) with more overtly creative and unorthodox touches, among them dramatized reenactments of moments from Turner’s life, as well as adaptations of assorted texts providing diverse portraits of Turner, his revolt, and its aftermath. These “source texts” appropriated and adapted by Burnett range from a nineteenth-century lithograph rendering Benjamin Phipps’s capture of Turner, to journalistic accounts of Turner’s execution, to interviews with ex-slaves conducted by Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers in the 1930s about the tales and legends Turner inspired. By far the most stylistically complex and provocative of the film’s adaptive passages, though, are those drawing on the influential literary interpretations of Turner produced by Thomas R. Gray, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Randolph Edmonds, and William Styron. In approaching these works, Burnett claims, he intended to be as faithful as possible to each author’s vision, to think of their “stories .  .  . as almost etched in stone.”23 The almost is important here—for, as noted above, despite Burnett’s professed desire for faithfulness, his film in actuality excises enormous portions of the stories it adapts, opting instead to focus on a single scene or handful of scenes from each text. In his handling of Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, to take but one example, Burnett distills Stowe’s 593 page novel into a lone sequence lasting approximately one minute. Clearly, then, Burnett’s notion of an effective adaptation diverges considerably from that put forward by fidelity-based criticism, which typically protests any major deviation from a literary source’s narrative structure and content. That is, rather than trying to painstakingly reconstruct every significant incident and episode recounted in these works, as fidelity-oriented critics would presumably prefer,

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Burnett adopts a more narrowly tailored and artfully concentrated adaptive model in Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property. It is a model, I submit, less concerned with a cinematic transliteration of “story” than with registering the affective qualities, the varying intensities, of literary source texts, and concisely yet potently channeling their respective affective logic(s) from page to screen. A closer look at the film’s adaptive sections should be useful in clarifying this proposition, and in situating them within Burnett’s larger artistic and critical mission: an ambitious rethinking of Nat Turner as both historical being and discursive entity.

Thomas R. Gray’s Nat Turner In early November, 1831, Nat Turner was visited in his jail cell by a white Southampton resident named Thomas Ruffin Gray. Gray, 31 years old, was a slave owner and struggling attorney, who in the previous months had provided legal counsel to five slaves accused of participating in the Turner insurrection. His interest in the rebellion thus whetted, Gray secured permission to interview Turner in the days after his capture in order to record, as Gray put it, the leader’s “own account of the conspiracy.”24 From November 1st to the 3rd, Gray questioned Turner about his motivations and his participation in the revolt, and by November 5 had completed the 8,494-word manuscript he entitled “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” Characterized by Gray as Turner’s version of events presented “with little or no variation,” “Confessions” would come to be viewed, according to David Allmendinger, as “the most authoritative account of the rebellion to that day.”25 So widely accepted was its authority, in fact, that as late as 1968 Lerone Bennett, Jr.—in a critique of William Styron’s alleged distortion of historical reality in his 1967 novel about Nat Turner—was still referencing without qualification “the facts as established by the Gray ‘Confessions.’”26 In more recent years, however, the reliability of these facts and the proclaimed editorial impartiality of “Confessions” have come under deeper critical scrutiny. To begin with, we now know that Gray thoroughly researched the uprising before ever meeting with Turner, and he is generally believed to have written a letter that appeared in the Richmond Constitutional Whig in September of 1831 (more than a month prior to his Turner interviews) outlining a “narrative of the rebellion” that closely resembles the sequence of events later laid out in “Confessions.”27 In other words, Gray, it seems, already had a specific narrative

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architecture in mind when questioning Turner, and he shaped Turner’s testimony to fit within it. Along those same lines, Stephen Howard Browne argues Gray borrowed from prominent generic traditions of the era when composing his manuscript, including “the popular slave narrative, criminal confession, trial record, Indian captivity narrative, execution speech, conspiracy tale, and atrocity story,” not to mention an “emerging gothic sensibility,” all in a deliberate effort to concomitantly horrify and placate his readership.28 Going Browne one better, Naomi Mandel divines an even broader spectrum of authorial agendas in Gray’s pamphlet, of which, she contends, “the need to pacify yet tantalize the public, to offer an authentic report and to produce a lucrative account, to transform scattered rumors into a coherent and definitive narrative, and to reconcile the violence of the insurrection with a version of slavery as a benevolent institution are but a few.”29 Far from being a transcription of Turner’s words with little or no interference, then, Gray’s “Confessions” can be more productively understood as a discursive space comprising a range of narrativizing impulses, literary genres, and rhetorical agendas. As a result of such problematizing and reappraising of Gray’s text, Mandel observes, many contemporary critics have come to conceive of “Confessions” as a sort of struggle between two competing voices: “Nat Turner’s voice” and the authorial, editorial voice of Gray trying to “silence and manipulate” and control it.30 Typifying this trend is Kenneth S. Greenberg, who depicts Gray’s pamphlet as encompassing “the intimately intertwined strands” of Gray’s voice and Turner’s voice, necessitating an interpretive unraveling and “sorting out” of the two.31 This task, as Greenberg sees it, though, is no easy one. Although he theorizes that Gray’s voice may be most clearly heard in his largely hostile opening note to the public, as well as his parenthetical comments and interjected questions within the body of the confession itself, and Turner’s may be found in those passages containing “information which Gray would have had no reason to create or distort,” Greenberg acknowledges that, in the end, it might be “virtually impossible” to conclusively distinguish Turner’s thoughts and words from those of his self-described amanuensis.32 Thus, in Greenberg’s formulation, “Confessions” is a text that simultaneously “reveals and conceals,” offering us glimpses of Nat Turner refracted through the subjective consciousness of Thomas Gray, making for a reading experience that is at once enlightening and limiting, undeniably compelling yet frustratingly suspect.33 And it is precisely this affective experience, I argue, this affective logic, which Burnett seeks to evoke in his cinematic adaptation of Gray’s work.

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Burnett’s “Confessions” opens with Thomas Gray (Tom Nowicki) standing in the doorway of a jail cell, looking down at a hunched, manacled Nat Turner (Carl Lumbly) seated on the floor. Gray, well-lighted, centrally framed, studies Turner, who faces away from the camera, whose figure is obscured by shadows and the dusty, hazy air. It is a visual motif that Burnett maintains throughout the sequence: even as Turner proceeds to tell his story, following the basic progression of Gray’s “Confessions” as he recounts memories from his childhood, his early realization that he is destined to be a prophet, and, finally, details of the Southampton uprising, his features remain cloaked in darkness, viewed from an elevated angle, as if we—like Gray—are peering down at Turner, scrutinizing him, only to find him umbral, enigmatic, even ominous. Conversely, Gray remains in the sunlight: we see his face clearly, his changing expressions, are given numerous close-ups of his hands as they scribble words across sheets of paper and historian Thomas Parramore speculates (in voice-over and on-screen interview) on Gray’s possible motivations for writing about Turner, among them a search for personal fame and financial reward. Such images subtly yet unmistakably align viewers with Gray within the filmic diegesis—we come to sense that he is our “eyes and ears” in the scene, that all we are seeing and hearing roughly coincides with his perspective, is colored by his personal sensibilities and motivations. Burnett heightens this impression through the use of direct address: first when Gray pauses outside of Turner’s cell to announce to the viewer that because the “late insurrection in Southampton has greatly excited the public mind,” he has decided to come here and “commit his [Turner’s] statements to writing” (the words come straight from the preface to Gray’s “Confessions”); and later when he offers parenthetical asides (“The eclipse of the sun last February,” “Which was invariably adhered to”) into the camera lens during Turner’s testimony. These instances of direct communication, direct contact, effectively form a bond between Gray and the audience. We hear Gray informing us he will be our guide into Turner’s prison and into his life and crimes. We hear him helpfully supply missing details when needed. And, as his questioning of Turner winds to an end, we hear him reassure us that even though the rebel is “fiend-like” and a “complete fanatic,” he is now safely “clothed with rags and wrapped in chains.” In Burnett’s “Confessions,” Gray’s voice both tantalizes and pacifies, frightens and assuages, as it addresses us explicitly and—we come to realize—guides us implicitly during our encounter with the mysterious insurrectionist. And yet, at points in Burnett’s adaptation, one can also detect a second, more muted voice struggling to be heard—the voice of Nat Turner. As noted,

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throughout Burnett’s “Confessions,” Turner is veiled in deep shadow. As he relates incidents from his childhood, for example, his face is barely visible, the scene’s key light source (a shaft of sunshine) falling primarily across his manacled hands, emphasizing Turner’s dual status as slave and prisoner. Later, this composition is repeated as Turner recalls the specifics of the murders committed during the rebellion, his seemingly disembodied voice emerging from the blackness, its tone distant and emotionless, nicely echoing the dispassionate tenor of the prose in Gray’s pamphlet. When Turner begins describing his religious visions, however, those divine signs and messages he believed were instructing him to revolt, Burnett breaks from this visual pattern, this murky mise-en-scène, quite noticeably. Now in close-up, Turner’s visage emerges from the gloom, his haunted eyes watery and wide, as his voice suddenly fills with a newfound earnestness and urgency. At the same time, Turner’s gaze—formerly trained in the direction of Gray—is redirected toward the camera, as if Turner were no longer satisfied with talking to and through his amanuensis, and is determined, like Gray before him, to speak directly to the viewer. Significantly, historians like Greenberg have singled out the revelatory portion of Gray’s “Confessions” as being the most reliable testimony, the most authentic, affirming that “when he gives details of his religious visions . . . then we hear Nat Turner.”34 Setting aside the validity or provability of such claims, it seems no coincidence that Burnett chooses this moment to have Turner face the audience, to meet our collective spectatorial stare, and address us candidly and forthrightly. In this instant (and it is only an instant, a few fleeting seconds) Burnett, following Greenberg, appears to indicate we have briefly slipped past the mediating presence of Thomas Gray, and are genuinely hearing the voice of Nat Turner. After the instant passes, Turner returns to the dark corners of his cell, and Gray concludes Burnett’s “Confessions” by disclosing to us—again, in words lifted verbatim from the source text—that upon looking at Nat Turner “my blood curdled in my veins.” Despite Gray’s provocative admission, though, our affective reaction to Turner as spectators has been more complicated, more multifaceted. If, as historian Peter Wood proposes in an on-camera interview, one may come away from reading Gray’s pamphlet equally convinced that Turner is either “a saint” or “a crazy man,” then Burnett achieves something similar in his cinematic adaptation. By essentially focalizing the sequence around Thomas Gray (his voice, his perspective), only to allow Nat Turner to momentarily rupture that focalization (with his own individuated voice, his own heretofore suppressed narrative agency), Burnett fashions a text that speaks with two distinct tongues,

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which suggests two individual, subjective voices vying to be heard. As such, it prompts us—as does Gray’s “Confessions”—to engage actively with the work, and be attentive to its potential multiplicity of interpretations, to its submerged and sometimes conflicting meanings, to what it concurrently reveals and conceals.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Nat Turner The next prominent adaptive passage in Burnett’s Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property centers on Harriett Beecher Stowe’s 1856 novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Released four years after her hugely popular—and controversial—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s Dred takes place largely on a North Carolina plantation, Canema, run by a young white woman, Nina Gordon, with the assistance of her slave (and secret half-brother) Harry. Nina, vivacious, immature, falls in love with Edward Clayton, a socially conscious lawyer and owner of Magnolia Grove, a neighboring plantation where Clayton and his sister Anne have resolved to educate their slave population in order to prepare them for eventual freedom. Under Clayton’s influence, Nina grows religious and self-sacrificing, and when a cholera outbreak strikes the area she insists on nursing the sick despite the threat to her own health. Tragically, Nina succumbs to the disease and dies, leaving Canema in the hands of Tom Gordon, her brutal and racist brother. Fearing for his own safety and that of his wife Lisette, Harry flees into the Dismal Swamp where he meets Dred, the prophetic leader of a community of escaped slaves, who is awaiting a divine signal commanding him to start a violent insurrection. Clayton, heartbroken by Nina’s death and disillusioned with the injustices of the Southern court system, leaves the bar and begins a campaign for gradual emancipation, only to find himself driven into the Dismal Swamp as well, hounded by a vengeful Tom Gordon and the lynch mob he has assembled. After Gordon and his gang enter the swamps and kill Dred, Clayton helps Harry and the other fugitive slaves flee to Canada, where they establish an outwardly utopian settlement in which all seem to live freely and prosperously. Even though her novel is set in North Carolina, rather than Virginia, and the titular character is described by Stowe as the favorite son of historical figure Denmark Vesey, the ex-slave and would-be revolutionary from South Carolina, critics generally hold it is Nat Turner who served as the primary and guiding inspiration for Stowe in her creation of Dred.35 The conclusion is a persuasive

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one, for many of Dred’s defining qualities and characteristics appear to have been culled, with very little alteration, from the portrait of Turner offered in Thomas R. Gray’s “Confessions.” For instance, like Gray’s Turner, Dred (whose name Stowe took from one of Turner’s coconspirators) acquires at a young age “the power of reading, by an apparent instinctive faculty,” leaving the feeling among his fellow slaves that “this child was born for extraordinary things.”36 Also like Gray’s Turner, Dred is compelled, as the years progress, to “fast and pray for days,” to decipher “strange hieroglyphics . . . written upon the leaves” and listen for the voices of spirits instructing him in “knowledge of the elements, the revolutions of the planets, the operations of the tides, and changes of the seasons.”37 The purpose of such instruction, Dred convinces himself, is to mold him into an earthly vessel for God’s “avenging justice,” to be unleashed on the slaveholding public as soon as the “sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood”—a solar eclipse being, in Gray’s document, the cosmic sign that spurs Nat Turner to “arise . . . and slay my enemies.”38 And just as Turner reportedly accepts punishment for his deeds with the question “Was not Christ crucified?” so does Dred deflect entreaties to abort his dangerous plan with the words: “Die?—Why not? Christ was crucified!”39 Finally, lest anyone should overlook these, and many other, parallels between Dred and Nat Turner, Stowe ends her novel with an appendix that incorporates lengthy extracts from Gray’s “Confessions,” a resource—she explains—for those readers wishing to gain further insight into “the character and views ascribed to Dred.”40 As a fictionalized approximation of Turner, then, Dred represents a sharp departure for Stowe from the saintliness and forbearance of her most renowned character, Uncle Tom. Unlike Uncle Tom, we are told, Dred commands “awe and respect” from all who encounter him, as he cuts an intimidating and even frightening figure: He was a tall black man of magnificent stature and proportions. His skin was intensely black, and polished like marble. A loose shirt of red flannel, which opened very wide at the breast, gave a display of a neck and chest of herculean strength. The sleeves of the shirt, rolled up nearly to the shoulders, showed the muscles of a gladiator . . . The large eyes had that peculiar and solemn effect of unfathomable blackness and darkness which is often a striking characteristic of the African eye. But there burned in them, like tongues of flame in a black pool of naphtha, a subtle and restless fire, that betokened habitual excitement on the verge of insanity.41

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Dred’s daunting physical presence is matched by an unrivaled oratorical power, his voice being “one of a singular and indescribable quality of tone,” his words seeming to peal “down through the air like the vibrations of some mighty bell,” causing every listener to “feel a creeping awe” when he speaks and “every ear to tingle.”42 And when words are insufficient, we come to learn, Dred is not afraid to use his “immense bodily strength” for violent ends: after killing an overseer in his flight from bondage, Dred breaks Tom Gordon’s arm and contemplates further “schemes of insurrection and bloodshed.”43 If Stowe knowingly invokes the unnerving character and views of Nat Turner in an effort to make Dred a more formidable figure than Uncle Tom, though, she stops short of fully embracing or promoting Turner’s sanguinary vision.44 That is to say, she wants Dred to be “a gigantic and fearful force to the white characters in the book,” but not necessarily to her white readership.45 Consequently, almost as soon as Stowe has introduced us to this “wild, dark” rebel, she begins mollifying readers with assurances that the “negro race,” while exhibiting “many of the faults of children,” also share “many of their most amiable qualities,” and are therefore not to be feared—that even Dred himself possesses “a vein of that gentleness which softens the heart toward children and the inferior animals.”46 Such allusions to children and the natural world when describing African-Americans are threaded throughout the novel: slaves and freed blacks are variously depicted as “restless and effervescent sprites” marked by their “childishness,” their “glossy skin” harmonizing “with the intense and fiery glories of a tropical landscape” while passions roll in their bosoms “with a tropical furor”;47 as “airy little creature[s]” remindful of “tropical insects and flowers,” with “a bird’s soul” and “teeth which a shark might have envied”;48 as possessed of  “a good understanding with all created nature,” as well as “that certainty of instinctive discrimination which belongs to animals.”49 Dred, we discover, is especially in tune with his environment, coming “into sympathy and communion with nature” so profoundly he exhibits the “agility and stealthy adroitness of a wild animal,” and is able to “understand the speech of birds” and exercise control “over the animal creation . . . drawing to him the birds and squirrels from the coverts of the forest.”50 Thus, for all of his imposing physical and verbal prowess, there is something about Dred, these idyllic flourishes imply, as there is about virtually all of the African-Americans in Stowe’s text, which is innately innocent and decent: a native uncorruptedness at once childlike and animal-like, a natural purity more akin to flora and fauna than the base machinations of mankind. Accordingly, the reader is comforted in spite of Dred’s bellicose pronouncements, as it quickly becomes inconceivable

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that such noble and gentle “creatures” as Dred and his fellow slaves ever could or would engage in a Turner-like mission of organized, systematic, and remorseless murder.51 This suspicion is confirmed by the conclusion of the novel. In the end, Dred proves not an insurrectionist but a martyr, his death at the hands of Tom Gordon inspiring the Dismal Swamp’s community of fugitive slaves to head to southern Canada and establish a township that rapidly becomes “one of the richest and finest in the region.”52 It is a township, as Richard Boyd observes, where even the “most aggressively rebellious slaves can be ‘rehabilitated’ and transmogrified into pillars of New England industriousness,” as they learn to reject the use of violence and behave “in essence” like “model white citizens.”53 Enabling and underwriting all of this success is Edward Clayton, without whose leadership and largesse, Stowe makes clear, neither the slaves’ flight to Canada nor the establishment of a new town would have been possible—a fact that has prompted some critics to accuse the novel of “supplanting . . . black revolution with white paternalism.”54 Indeed, one could make a convincing argument that it is really Clayton, rather than Dred, who is the true hero of Stowe’s story. While Dred does not appear until roughly two hundred pages into the book, Clayton (along with Nina) is there from the beginning, presenting the arguments, tilting at the legal, social, and religious ramparts, effecting the changes Dred cannot. In other words, throughout much of Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, white agency is emphasized over black agency, white experience over black experience. As a result, Jeannine Marie DeLombard tells us, Stowe’s purposed critique of slavery can also be reasonably construed as an unsettling exercise in the “silencing of African-American voices”—a notion that is echoed and explored in Charles Burnett’s brief but richly textured filmic adaptation.55 Burnett’s Dred begins with a series of four still images, each slowly dissolving into the next: a drawing of Nat Turner taken from contemporary newspaper accounts of his rebellion; a painting of a slave being whipped by a white man and beset by snarling dogs; the original title page to Stowe’s novel; and, finally, an illustration of Harriet Beecher Stowe herself. The effect of these dissolves, of the images bleeding by degrees one into another, is one of intimate association, of visual assimilation. We watch as Turner’s sketch is absorbed, gradually, ineluctably, into the dramatic portrait of slave combating owner, which itself disappears into the faded lines of Stowe’s prose, leaving us with the sense that Nat Turner is being appropriated and remade by successive “creators” (as William Styron refers to them in voice-over), by journalists and artists and authors, all of whom draw on

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each other’s work in the hopes of momentarily “possessing” Turner for their own ends. This impression is intensified as Burnett freezes, during the final dissolve of the collage, in a double exposure: a page from Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp superimposed over the likeness of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The composition, with its visual fusing of text and author, signals to viewers that the two are inextricable—that even though, as the narrator informs us, Stowe based her title character on “the historical Nat Turner,” Dred and his tale are in actuality discursive inventions, issuing from a procession of prior texts and images, and ushered into artistic life via Stowe’s animating authorial presence, a presence that continues to lurk behind each word like a ghostly palimpsest. Burnett continues to emphasize Stowe’s authorial agency as the double exposure dissipates (almost as if it is a fog we are passing through, on our way into Stowe’s imaginative world) to reveal a bucolic scene: Dred, played by Patrick Waller, lounging in a small forest glade, a baby wildcat playing in his lap. Physically, Burnett’s Dred is very similar to Stowe’s—he, too, is dark-skinned and broad shouldered, clad in a red flannel shirt that reveals bulging biceps and muscled chest, with large, striking eyes peering out from beneath a scarlet turban. And yet, as the scene unfolds, one is unable to shake the feeling something is missing from Burnett’s incarnation, some vital and defining attribute. Then it hits: the voice. Whereas Stowe’s Dred is gifted with a riveting, almost poetic oratorical eloquence, Burnett’s utters not a sound, not a syllable. Instead, we hear the voice of a woman, identified in the credits as Harriet Beecher Stowe and performed by Laurel Lyle, speaking on Dred’s behalf—telling us, as he seemingly cannot, that under other circumstances Dred might have been “a poet,” that there is a “gentleness” about him that inclines him affectionately toward “children and the inferior animals,” and so on. If, then, DeLombard is correct that Stowe’s novel may be read, at least in part, as a silencing of African-American voices, we may here read Burnett’s adaptation as cinematically concretizing that silencing: Burnett is offering us glimpses of a powerful-looking African-American character, yet denying this character, through the film’s sound design, the power of speech, the power to articulate his individual thoughts and beliefs. He is showing us a strong and imposing black man, a figure discernibly patterned on Nat Turner, being quite literally silenced and even ventriloquized by the omniscient “voice” of a white author. As this writerly voice further expounds on the gentle qualities of the voiceless Dred, Burnett’s narrator explains that although Nat Turner served as the model for Stowe’s character, she could not ultimately bring herself to embrace his

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reported devotion to violence, and therefore “she softened him considerably” while composing her book—and, indeed, there is an element of this softness reflected in Burnett’s accompanying imagery. Filmed in bright hues and a slightly gauzy focus, Dred looks contented and at ease as he sits in the glade, smiling and cocking an ear to the sounds of the forest, a gentle breeze rustling the surrounding plants. Plants, in fact, abound: tall green grasses, colorful flowers, twisted weeds, all enveloping Dred to such a degree that he appears to emerge directly from their tangled weave, a cinematographic literalization of Stowe’s depiction of him as existing in sympathy and communion with the natural world. Dred’s affinity with nature is underscored by the tiny wildcat, playful and unafraid in his grasp, and the birds trilling melodically on the soundtrack. A man like this, these images suggest, a man so in harmony with his surroundings, so instinctively beloved by denizens of the forest, is not to be feared but admired—clearly, there is in him a kind of palpable benevolence, a kindness. As if to drive the point home, Burnett concludes the scene with a shot of Dred slipping quietly into the woods and disappearing behind a curtain of foliage, as a piano lilts sentimentally in the background. No bloody insurrections or violent death for this Dred: only a peaceful return to the idyllic arms of Mother Nature. Interestingly, this scene is nowhere to be found in Stowe’s novel, making Burnett’s adaptation an unfaithful one by the standards of traditional fidelity criticism. However, it is apparent that Burnett is after something other than a traditional adaptation here, something other than a meticulous filmic recitation of the major plot points from Stowe’s narrative (his determination partially spurred, no doubt, by the dual constraints of time and money). Instead, he is trying to capture and convey, in only a few seconds of screen time, in just a few frames of film, the larger affective import of Stowe’s text—to suggest, in a condensed and concentrated form, the work’s broader affective qualities. We see this in the opening montage, which visually corporealizes the confluence of Nat Turner (his likeness, his legacy) and Harriet Beecher Stowe (her subjective, mediating presence) in the pages of Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. We hear it in the sound design, through which we experience the suppressing and displacing of a black voice by a white voice, evocative of the verbal suppression and displacement to be found in Stowe’s book. Such aural appropriation, in turn, causes us to cast a critical eye on the images we are being shown of the would-be rebel turned idealized poet: his improbable nobility, his impossible purity. Thus, in the end, we are left wondering by Burnett’s Dred, as we are by Stowe’s book, if we have perhaps been witness

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not to the spiritual triumph of a Turner-like hero, but rather to the triumph of white agency over African-American agency.

The Nat Turners of William Wells Brown and Randolph Edmonds Of course, in addition to the work of white writers, the literary voices of African-Americans also provide rich adaptive fodder for Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property. For, while the story of Turner and his rebellion were initially the exclusive province of white authors (from newspaper reporters to Thomas R. Gray to novelists like Harriett Beecher Stowe), it was not long before the rebel leader began turning up in the writings of black authors as well. As activist and actor Ossie Davis notes in Burnett’s film, there quickly grew in African-American communities a desire to “create among ourselves . . . our own version[s] of what Nat did.” One of the first to do so was William Wells Brown, ex-slave and abolitionist, who in 1863 published what he called neither “a biography [n]or a eulogy, but simply a sketch” of the Southampton rebel.56 In this sketch, Brown presents a version of Turner that is both eloquent and heroic, a man who recognizes he was born to be “a prophet, a preacher, and a deliverer of his race.”57 Although Brown incorporates certain details and passages of dialogue from Gray’s “Confessions,” the bulk of his text consists of apparently invented descriptions of Turner, his life, and the lingering impact of his insurrection. For instance, Brown stresses that Turner’s parents “were of unmixed African descent,” resulting in Turner himself having noticeably “African features”—this, arguably in contradiction to the reward notice issued in the days after Turner’s uprising, in which he was characterized as having a “rather bright complexion.”58 Brown also recounts supposed incidents from Turner’s childhood, where Turner seeks revenge on those who have wronged him, leaving them “on the field of battle, crying, swearing, calling for help.”59 Such incidents, Brown intimates, conclusively prove that Turner—“like Napoleon”—is “a being of destiny,” fated for a lifetime of meting out retribution on behalf of himself and his people.60 Most famously, though, Brown imagines, in his sketch, the speech Turner may have delivered to his followers in the “wild and romantic” swamp where they gathered to plan their assault.61 Speaking in prose that is elegant and inspirational, Turner reminds his troops that they are “[f]riends and brothers” engaged in “a struggle for freedom,” his words moving them so deeply, and echoing so intensely through the years,

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they light “in the hearts of his race” a “torch of liberty that cannot be extinguished by the hand of man.”62 In his adaptation of Brown’s sketch, Burnett focuses exclusively on this moment of oratory, evoking a comparable undercurrent of romanticization, of veneration bordering on the didactic and propagandistic. In a single, slowly zooming shot, we are introduced to a group of slaves gathering in the depths of an overgrown swamp, in the depths of night. A faint firelight dapples the clothing and the skin of those who have assembled, as the wild sounds of the forest (such as chirring crickets) drone on in the background. Lurking in the shadows, we can make out the outline of a man: a dark figure, grander than the others, it seems, more animated, gesturing to his companions with energy and conviction. Above the noises of the swamp, his voice begins to become audible. It is a voice that is strong and inspiring—a voice, we realize, which could only belong to Nat Turner (played, in this instance, by Michael Lemelle). Turner, speaking forcefully, with a sense of destiny, declares to his men: “We are to commence a great work tonight. Our race is to be delivered from slavery, and God has appointed us as the men to do his bidding . . . let us be worthy of our calling!” The words come directly from Brown’s text, and hearing them intoned so heroically, so passionately, one cannot doubt their capacity for igniting a fire in the hearts of Turner’s followers, and perhaps in the hearts and minds of others who encounter them, as well. Speech-making is also central to Nat Turner, a one-act play by African-American author and educator Randolph Edmonds. Written in 1935, during an era that saw opportunities for black artists expanding under the New Deal, while segregation and Jim Crow remained the laws of the land, Edmonds’s drama gives us a Nat Turner that is less romantic, and hence more humanized, than Brown’s. To begin with, unlike previous incarnations, Edmonds’s Turner expresses himself not in graceful, grammatical sentences but in a coarse and choppy vernacular (“Den we mus’ fight fuh our freedom. We mus’ let dem know we’s gut a backbone”).63 In addition, the veracity of his divine visions, and by extension the wisdom of his revolutionary plans, is not accepted unquestioningly by his fellow slaves. While one of them, Nelson, proclaims with confidence that Turner’s “gut the spirit o’ God in him, dat’s all. He is a prophet,” his cohort Job cautions him “Ole Nat jes’ outer his head . . . Ef yuh keep listenin’ tuh him de white folks is gwine tuh hang yuh all.”64 This is not to suggest, however, that Edmonds’s portrait of Turner is an unflattering one—far from it. Although characters may debate Turner’s status as a prophet, Edmonds (in his stage directions) insists there is still “a mystical

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appearance about him. All of his movements and words give the impression that he is a strange man, that he is a part of this world with a strong suggestion of the other.”65 Even more than a mystical figure, though, this Nat Turner is a militaristic one. Early on in the play, Turner tells his men they will be liberating the entire nation from slaveholders, just “lak George Washington did from de British,” and soon he has them running martial drills as he shouts instructions: “Squad right! March! Squad left! March!”66 Also like a true soldier, he confesses he “hates tuh kill folks,” but it is his spiritual duty to do so—and it is here that what might be described as the text’s agitprop quality starts to become manifest.67 Ever the teacher, Edmonds originally intended for his work to be performed in black colleges and high schools. Consequently, at key moments in the drama, Edmonds’s tone veers toward the pedagogical and the exhortative. After Turner has convinced his fellow slaves it is their obligation to throw off the shackles of white oppression through whatever means necessary, for example, only to see this revolutionary dream shattered by the guns of white militiamen, Turner announces to the audience that when the fighting got rough his troops “deserted and run lak cowards,” when what was needed was for them “tuh stand up and be men.”68 Edmonds’s implicit social message—of the necessity for courage, for solidarity in the face of white intolerance—is not hard to deduce. Similarly, in the play’s most powerful moment, Turner delivers a monologue in which he contextualizes his violent acts within the larger horrors of slavery: “Ef Ah’s a beast, who made me one? Ef dey buy and sell me, whip me lak dawgs, and feed me dere leavin’s, how can Ah be nothin’ else but a beast?”69 The true criminals, Edwards is telling us in no uncertain terms, are not Turner and his rebels, but the white slave owners who forced their hands. In adapting Nat Turner to the screen, Burnett nicely highlights these instructive, exhortatory dimensions of Edmonds’s text. Embracing the work’s theatrical origins, Burnett opens with an image of a theater stage, his wide-angled composition explicitly calling attention to the footlights, curtains, and stylized artificiality of the set design. On the stage are Lucinda (Reshara Coleman) and Nat Turner (Tommy Hicks), and as they argue over the body of a slave killed in battle, Burnett quickly moves from long shot to medium shot to medium close-up, a visual analogue—one might argue—of a common spectatorial experience for theatergoers (an acute consciousness of artifice, of lighting and staging and so forth, being eclipsed as one is gradually “drawn into” the drama). Soon, Lucinda rushes off, and Turner launches into his “If I’m a beast” speech, turning to face the camera as he does so. This use of direct address, of Turner

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looking at and speaking to the audience directly, gives his performance a visceral immediacy, invests his words with an urgency, that allow his monologue to strike home with the provocative force of a call-to-arms. “Was Ah wrong, Lawd, tuh fight dat black men mout be free?” he asks, and we instantly know the answer: he was not wrong, nor is anyone wrong who fights for a just cause like freedom. “Ah wants to be free! Ah mus’ hab freedom fuh all de black slaves!” he shouts, stirring in us a sympathy for his plight, and the plight of all those still struggling against bigotry and inequity. Burnett underscores the agitprop import of Nat Turner by following Turner’s direct-address speech with a series of images of social strife from the 1950s and 1960s—African-Americans marching in the streets, being forcibly removed from segregated lunch counters, having their feet knocked from under them by powerful blasts from fire hoses. These images, linking as they do the rousing words of Edmonds’s Turner with the actions of civil rights protestors, appear to demonstrate that Turner’s rallying cry has been both heard and heeded: people have decided racial equality is indeed worth fighting for. They also lay the groundwork for Burnett’s subsequent examination of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner; for, as footage of early civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. gives way to footage of the more radicalized figures of the 1960s, from Huey Newton to H. Rap Brown to Eldridge Cleaver, men who (Burnett’s narrator tells us) “sought inspiration” from a conception of Nat Turner as a proud and uncompromising forebear, one gets an inkling of the charged political atmosphere that would be awaiting Styron’s novelistic reconsideration of Turner on its publication in 1967.

William Styron’s Nat Turner The critical response to The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron could not have been more polarized, or polarizing. A first-person recounting of Turner’s childhood, rebellion, and final days in prison (including his meetings with Thomas R. Gray), Styron’s novel was initially greeted with glowing reviews from major American newspapers and magazines, as well as prestigious literary awards like the Pulitzer Prize. Before long, though, a critical backlash grew among a number of African-American writers and activists, who strenuously objected to the appropriation of Turner by a contemporary white author—and a southerner, no less—and denounced the book for its purported historical inaccuracy and

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covert racism. The ensuing controversy all but ensured that Styron’s would become the most well-known, and hotly contested, literary portrayal of Turner, a fact clearly not lost on Charles Burnett. In Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, Burnett devotes more screen time to discussing and adapting Styron’s text than any other, and he never shies away from the interpretive discord the text has generated in the past, and continues to generate to this day. Indeed, the very first scene adapted from Styron’s book (a quietly powerful image of a youthful looking Nat Turner, played by James Opher, his face partially obscured by shadow, his shoulders limned by a pale ribbon of sunlight, staring into the darkness before him as if contemplating dark deeds) is accompanied on the soundtrack by two sharply divergent readings of Styron’s titular character. One, offered by the author himself, describes how the novel is an attempt to “present a complex, multifaceted overview of slavery” while fleshing out Turner as an equally complex figure with “human dimensions.” The other, provided by Ossie Davis, avers that The Confessions of Nat Turner “didn’t humanize Nat for me” or any other African-American reader; rather, it merely revealed Styron’s tendency, shared by the rest of “the white community,” to “look upon our rebels as demons and subhumans.” With this juxtaposition, this counterposing of our introductory glimpse of Styron’s Turner against interpretations of him that could not be more different from each other (complex human versus subhuman), Burnett seems to indicate that Styron’s text is capable of supporting diverse readings, of eliciting conflicting and conflicted reactions. More, he hints that his own cinematic adaptation of Styron’s work will try to evoke a similar affective experience, will try to foster a comparable affective economy—a suggestion borne out by the film’s succeeding adaptive sections. If critical responses to Styron’s novel have been deeply divided over the years, one reason for this may lie in the deeply divided nature of Styron’s protagonist. This Nat Turner, more than any prior discursive iteration, is a character marked by inner turmoil and uncertainty, a veritable textual tissue of contradictions. Like Stowe’s Dred, for instance, there is something prophetic, almost Christ-like about Styron’s Turner. He too enjoys an affinity with the natural world (squirrels, which Turner describes as “God’s blest,” escort him on his solitary walks through the woods), and he is visited by holy visions.70 He attracts “disciples” that pledge to follow his commands and escape with him to the safety of the Dismal Swamp, only to find himself, in the end, taunted and scourged along the road “toward Jerusalem.”71 And yet, as he sits in his jail cell awaiting execution, Turner admits that in “my maddest imaginings I had never known it possible to feel so removed

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from God,” and he wonders if perhaps “God is dead and gone” and “all I’ve done was evil.”72 Along those same lines, Turner references a “leftover savage part of me” that impels him to revolt, to engage in his “bloody mission,” and he tries to instill a similar “sense of black militancy” in his disciples.73 When the rebellion finally commences, however, he proves an inept killer and a lackluster commander, and—in a nod to Randolph Edmonds’s Turner—he lays a large portion of the blame for his failures at the feet of his own troops: “[T]he black men had caused my defeat just as surely as white.”74 Both attended by God and abandoned by Him, both a stalwart leader of his men and an ineffectual soldier ready to scapegoat them, Styron’s Turner, then, is a figure not easily parsed or pigeonholed: neither a straightforward hero nor a villainous madman, this Turner occupies a more complicated middle ground, making him a difficult character for readers to wholly embrace or condemn. Not that there have been no readers willing to try—especially among those critics offended by what they perceive to be Styron’s presumptuous literary arrogation of a historical black personage. For these critics, whose views were most influentially and polemically articulated in the book-length study William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, Styron’s protagonist is to be understood not as a complex individual with human dimensions but as a racist caricature, a “white man [the author] in blackface.”75 In justifying this conclusion, they point to a handful of creative decisions on Styron’s part that they deem particularly gratuitous and insulting. Among them are, in the words of Lerone Bennett, Jr., the author’s “assault on Nat Turner’s family” (i.e., Styron’s decision to have Turner learn to read from his white owners rather than his parents, as is alleged in Gray’s “Confessions,” and to have him remain unmarried, even though there is some documentary evidence that the historical Turner had a wife); and Styron’s depiction of an adolescent homosexual encounter between Turner and a friend, which according to Alvin Poussaint “implies that Nat Turner was not a man at all. It suggests he was unconsciously really feminine.”76 Also troubling to such critics are Styron’s portrayal of Turner as a less-than-accomplished murderer, making him appear “panicky, fearful, impotent” in the eyes of Bennett, as if a direct correlation may be drawn between proficiency in killing and sexual potency, and the “clear, even elegant” narrative voice with which Turner relates his story, a voice characterized by Mike Thelwell as evincing a “Latinate classicism, a kind of New England Episcopalian prissiness.”77 Of course, what Thelwell overlooks is that this “classical” language is only one of several employed by Turner throughout the book, a calculated rhetorical address not so different

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from the “nigger talk” (as Turner calls it) he frequently uses in the presence of white listeners.78 As Naomi Mandel explains, Styron’s narrator utilizes “many languages in the novel,” each one “a strategic ploy determined by the context in which he speaks—a context inevitably informed by the racialized relations of the world.”79 Without question, though, it is Turner’s lustful fascination with white women in Styron’s text that has generated the most critical hostility. At first, this fascination takes the form of fervid idealization. Turner sees “white ladies” as floating “like bubbles in an immaculate effulgence of purity and perfection,” thrills at the sight of their “fine white skin, milky, transparent,” and imagines himself in the carnal embrace of “a nameless white girl . . . a young white girl with golden curls.”80 Such is his obsession, in fact, that Bennett accuses Styron’s Turner of harboring a “reverence for whiteness”—and indeed, at one point in the novel, Turner daydreams with some satisfaction about becoming “white as clabber cheese, white, stark white, white as a marble Episcopalian . . . I was no longer the grinning black boy in velvet pantaloons . . . What a strange demented ecstasy! How white I was! What wicked joy!”81 Later, after Turner witnesses a sexual tryst between a young white woman, Miss Emmeline, and her cousin, his sexual fantasies turn toward violence, toward rape, as he ponders “the wicked and godless yet unutterable joys of defilement”; and it is not long before he is overcome by a “rage” to “penetrate .  .  . a young white woman,” in particular Margaret Whitehead, a teenager from a neighboring farm and the only person the historical Turner is reported to have slain with his own hands during the insurrection.82 Not surprisingly, many critics construe these reveries of despoilment as reinscribing old stereotypes about African-Americans as sexual predators, and resurrecting what bell hooks terms an old “historical narrative . . . invented by white men . . . about the overwhelming desperate longing black men have to sexually violate the bodies of white women.”83 Moreover, when this longing goes unfulfilled, and Turner’s frustration incites a thirst “to plunge myself into the earth, into a tree, a deer, a bear, a boy, a stump, a stone, to shoot milky warm spurts of myself into the cold and lonely blue heart of the sky,” one cannot help but think of Michael Dyson’s contention that white society has traditionally been inclined to conceive of African-American men as “peripatetic phalluses” that are both rapacious and insatiable.84 Such problematic sexual impulses and idealization also play a major role in Burnett’s Confessions, which centers largely around Turner’s relationship with Margaret Whitehead (performed by Megan Gallagher)—a bold move by the

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director, as it is precisely Turner’s controversial sexuality and his relationship with the white teenager that proved the undoing of earlier attempts to adapt Styron’s novel to the screen. For example, in 1968, advocacy groups like the Los Angeles– based Black Anti-Defamation Association, or BADA, placed so much pressure on Twentieth Century Fox (the studio owning the film rights to Styron’s story) to eliminate all traces of rape and homosexuality from its planned adaptation, as well as to minimize or elide Turner’s fixation on Whitehead, producers decided to scuttle the project entirely, one of the few instances in which concerns over a cinematic adaptation exhibiting too much fidelity to a source text, rather than too little, have become a critical casus belli.85 Just because Burnett elects to tackle the troubling sexual components of Styron’s book head-on, however, instead of ignoring or downplaying them, does not mean that his film supplies us with the sort of reductive caricature feared by BADA and others. On the contrary, Burnett’s Turner, much like Styron’s, evidences a vibrant and complicated interior life, and we are afforded intimate access to that interiority through Burnett’s extensive use of voice-over. Speaking in a soft, almost confessional voice, Turner shares with us his musings on “a Negro’s Christian faith,” his animosity toward both whites (“hating [their] guts”) and blacks (“God’s mindless outcasts”), and even a memory about his former owner, Thomas Moore. (Significantly, Burnett pairs this recollection with a visual recreation of the event being described: dissolving from Turner in his jail cell, reflecting on past experiences, to a bygone day on Moore’s farm, Burnett amplifies the sense that we are delving deeply into Turner’s consciousness, that we are gaining immediate and unfettered access to his formative thoughts and memories.) Through Turner’s voice-over, we also discover that he employs different speech patterns for different situations—the articulateness of his internal voice matched against the strategic inarticulateness he uses around whites—and that he is a man beholden to his lusts, captive to the “voluptuous stirring in my blood.” The primary object of these lusts, this stirring, we swiftly gather, is Margaret Whitehead, and Burnett presents her to us from Turner’s perspective, in images that evoke the rhapsodic and romanticizing timbre of Styron’s descriptions. She is small and lovely, with long blonde curls framing her ruddy cheeks and bright smile, her crimson dress spangled by shards of sunshine breaking through the emerald forest canopy overhead. So visually striking is Margaret, in fact, that Turner confesses he can no longer follow her “chattering monologue pitched at a girlish whisper,” can no longer be “bothered to listen to or understand” her words, consumed as he is by her physical “incandescence” and his own “remorseless desire”—a confession

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filmically literalized by Burnett as Margaret’s voice fades into inaudibility, giving way on the soundtrack to Turner’s insistent, anguished ruminations on her carnal allure. While Burnett is establishing Turner as a complex (if flawed and at times unsympathetic) individual on one level, though, he simultaneously intimates there may be something dark and menacing about him on another, a kind of inherent predaciousness not unlike the one certain African-American critics divined in Styron’s portrait. We see this in Burnett’s choice of camera angles: as Turner and Margaret Whitehead stroll together through the woods, Burnett films the teenager from a slightly elevated point of view, making her look petite, vulnerable, exposed. Turner, conversely, is shown from a low angle, his massive shoulders filling the frame as he looms unsettlingly above us, the shade from his wide-brimmed hat darkening and hiding his features, transforming him into an ominous shadow stalking Margaret’s bright young light. We also see it in Burnett’s compositions—for instance, the image of Margaret gripping a sapling with one hand and leaning toward the river, Turner standing close behind her, dwarfing her, as he grips the same sapling, strikes the same pose, but directs his gaze not at the river but down at Margaret’s blonde hair and tiny shoulders. The shadow, it seems, is threatening to engulf Margaret for good. This notion of Turner as a darksome force dogging Margaret Whitehead is reinforced by the concluding scene of Burnett’s adaptation, which details Turner’s murder of her during the Southampton rebellion. In Styron’s novel, this moment is a tragic one not only for the teenage victim, but the killer as well: driven half-mad by his vying emotions, his attraction and repulsion, his lust and loathing, Turner chases Margaret down and dispatches her in a lonely field, an act that leaves him wracked with “sobs from my chest,” “bereft of mind,” picturing her still alive and well and whispering to him, “Oh, I would fain swoon into an eternity of love!”86 In Burnett’s film, on the other hand, viewers are encouraged to identify solely with Margaret throughout the ordeal, to feel her pain and sorrow most acutely. Dispensing with Turner’s voice-over, the director begins the sequence with Margaret, again in sunshine, running across a grassy meadow, a murky figure trailing her from the shady recesses of an adjacent tree line. As the figure emerges into daylight, we see it is Turner, sword in hand, and soon he overtakes Margaret and plunges his blade into her side. Tellingly, when Margaret collapses, the camera goes with her, giving us a close-up of her tearful, dying face from ground level, as if we, too, had been knocked to the dirt, as if we, too, were bleeding into the grass at Turner’s feet. Likewise, when Margaret peers

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up at Turner hoisting a fence rail above his head, preparing to deliver the final blow, we see him as she does: immense, soaring into the sky, a dark mountain ready to tumble down and obliterate us. There is, then, an undercurrent of malevolence in these images, this insinuating mise-en-scène, a suggestion of dreadful benightedness about Turner, which stands in counterpoint to Burnett’s contemporaneous efforts to humanize the rebel, to make him a convincing and multifaceted character with strengths and deficiencies, formidable attributes and terrible failings. Thus, Burnett’s adaptation engenders an affective and interpretive tension commensurable to the tension fostered by Styron’s source text: once more, we are being confronted with a Turner who can be alternately (and persuasively) perceived as either a flesh-and-blood human being with complex human dimensions, or as a monstrous and demonic entity, a subhuman caricature; and once more, it falls on each of us to ultimately reconcile these disparate responses, these equally plausible readings, for ourselves.

Charles Burnett and the “Real” Nat Turner Toward the beginning of Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, Peter Wood suggests that those historians studying the titular insurrectionist—or any other controversial figure from the past, for that matter—will need to carefully sift through the “myths” and “conflicting reports” about him if they hope “to find the real historical person.” As the film progresses, however, this idea that one may, through scrupulous research, assemble a definitive portrait of the “real” Nat Turner, effect an authoritative understanding of the true historical person, is increasingly problematized. This problematization culminates in the closing minutes of the movie, as Burnett’s adaptive passages and interviews give way to a stark scene: the home of Joseph Travis in Southampton County, Virginia, during the early morning hours of August 22, 1831, Travis and his wife Sally asleep in their bed, a small group of armed men gathered about them. The scene, as far as we can tell, is not an adaptation of a prior text, does not claim to draw on previous renderings of this morning by authors or artists, journalists or historians. Rather, it is presented as if we are witnessing events as they actually happened, unvarnished and unmediated. Hence, as one of the men standing over the bed lifts his axe into the dark dawn air, we think, for an instant, for a fleeting, fearful moment, we are finally going to see the truth of the matter, are going to be privy to what really transpired on that day: Did

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Turner deliver the first blow? Was he cowardly, or intrepid? An incompetent killer, or an adroit one? Before we can answer these questions, though, and settle the issue once and for all, something strange occurs: we hear a voice, Charles Burnett’s voice, announcing “Cut!” And suddenly we are no longer in Southampton County circa 1831, no longer sutured into a seamless diegetic world, but find ourselves on a movie set, surrounded by cameramen, and lighting technicians, and the director himself, as he offers instructions to the actors playing Joseph and Sally Travis, preparing them for the next take. This rupturing of filmic illusion signals to viewers that what they have just been watching is not, in fact, a faithful and impartial reenactment of what took place on the morning of August 22, but merely another subjective interpretation—another in a long line of novels and plays, songs and poems, news reports and history books, each providing its own distinct perspective on the Southampton slave rebellion and its storied leader, Nat Turner. Acknowledging this, and extrapolating in an on-camera interview, Kenneth Greenberg goes on to theorize that “interpretation” is as much the subject matter of Burnett’s film as Turner is: how historical inquiry, as we conceive of it in our current era, often takes the form of interpreting a seemingly endless line of preceding interpretations (or, as Greenberg puts it, how every act of “interpretation ultimately forces you back into another interpretation, another interpretation, another interpretation . . .”). Of course, by adopting such a self-reflexive and interrogative approach in his work, by communicating to viewers so explicitly that we can only access the past through its textualized, interpretive remains, and may therefore never fully and objectively know Nat Turner “the real historical person,” Burnett did provoke criticism from certain quarters, most pointedly from reviewer Junious Ricardo Stanton. For Stanton, the director’s decision to regard Turner “through the eyes of the few people, black or white, who wrote about him” results in a cinematic text “lack[ing] a definite point of view or vision,” and as a consequence “at the conclusion of the film we still don’t have a clear picture of who Nat Turner was, what motivated him.”87 What Stanton fails to appreciate, however, is that a clear picture of Turner was never Burnett’s goal; indeed, his guiding thesis appears to be that such a thing is, in the final analysis, unattainable. Instead of advancing a single, conclusive narrative about Turner and his uprising, Burnett’s film is seeking to furnish us with what Simon Malpas might call “multiple, conflicting, ‘finite’ histories”—an array of images and micro-narratives that are not so much determinative as speculative, tentative, and that shed light upon the myriad

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ways in which Nat Turner has been perceived, and perennially reinvented, throughout the decades.88 According to Robert Rosenstone, such resistance to overly totalizing gestures is one of the defining markers, and key strengths, of postmodern history films: they “accept the notion that the weight of the past has somehow helped to shape (us in) the present,” while concomitantly conceding “they are not certain how to assess that weight” or concretely articulate its effects.89 Certainly, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property registers the impact of Turner in shaping our present moment—the place he still holds in the collective memories and imaginations of some communities, the power his historical specter continues to possess, inciting anger and affection, outrage and admiration, even now, after all these many years. Yet the film also recognizes that the historical Nat Turner—his character, his motivation—remains largely inaccessible to us today, and thus anyone aspiring toward a deeper knowledge of the rebel leader, toward a critical assessment of his life and legacy, must necessarily grapple with the multitude of textual traces left in his wake, must think of him (at least to some degree) as a discursive construct to be deconstructed. In this chapter, I have attempted to illuminate how Charles Burnett does just that: how, in conceptualizing of Nat Turner as both historical figure and troublesome discursive property, he is compelled to reflect critically on the most influential of Turner’s literary depictions, which he accomplishes (in part) by zeroing in on the affective economies, the underlying affective qualities, fostered by each depiction, and artfully redirecting those intensive affective flows from page to screen for his viewers to then experience and evaluate for themselves. Along the way, one hopes, I have also modeled how an analytical focus on the drift of affective forces between one text and another, to the bleed of intensities between one medium and the next, may be productively applied in generating fresh readings, and extracting new meanings, from an adaptation as challenging and unconventional as Burnett’s, an adaptation that speaks idiosyncratically yet eloquently to our past and present selves.

Notes 1 Stam, Literature Through Film, 4. 2 Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, 19. 3 Kenneth S. Greenberg, “Name, Face, Body,” in Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5–6.

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4 Kenneth S. Greenberg, “Introduction,” in Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), xi. 5 Charles Joyner, “Styron’s Choice: A Meditation on History, Literature, and Moral Imperatives,” in Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 193. 6 Greenberg, “Name, Face, Body,” 3. 7 Greenberg, “Introduction,” xi–xii. 8 Greenberg, “Name, Face, Body,” 3, 23. 9 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4, 35. 10 Greenberg, “Name, Face, Body,” 14. 11 Malpas, The Postmodern, 103, 101. 12 Ibid., 89–90. Hayden White famously termed such narrativization of historical events “emplotment,” describing it as a means by which historiographers seek to reveal “the meaning, coherence, or significance” behind certain actions and occurrences. Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 54. 13 Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, 16, 20. 14 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 30. 15 Kenneth S. Greenberg, “Introduction: ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner’: Text and Context,” in The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1996), 27. 16 Mary Kemp Davis, Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 106. 17 Kyle Baker, “Nat Turner,” KyleBaker.com, 2008, available at: www.kylebaker.com/ and www/turnerbaker/turner.htm. 18 Robert A. Rosenstone, “The Future of the Past: Film and the Beginnings of Postmodern History,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 206. 19 Ibid., 202. 20 Ibid., 211. 21 Ibid., 206. 22 Ibid. 23 Charles Burnett, quoted in Gerald Perry, “Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property,” GeraldPerry.com, September 4, 2001, available at: www.geraldperry.com/essays/ stuv/turner-troublesome.html. 24 Thomas R. Gray, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” in The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1996), 41.

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25 Ibid., 40; David F. Allmendinger, Jr., “The Construction of ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner,’” in Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 24. 26 Lerone Bennett, Jr., “Nat’s Last White Man,” in William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, ed. John Henrik Clarke (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968), 13. 27 Allmendinger, “The Construction of ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner,’” 24, 37. 28 Stephen Howard Browne, “‘This Unparalleled and Inhuman Massacre’: The Gothic, the Sacred, and the Meaning of Nat Turner,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3, 3 (2000): 313. 29 Naomi Mandel, Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 141. 30 Ibid. 31 Greenberg, “Introduction,” xii; Greenberg, “Introduction: ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner,’” 11. 32 Ibid., 9–10; Greenberg, “Introduction,” xii. 33 Greenberg, “Introduction: ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner,’” 7. 34 Ibid., 10. 35 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, ed. Robert S. Levine (1856; repr., Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 208. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 211, 449. 38 Ibid., 458, 499; Gray, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” 48. 39 Ibid., 48; Stowe, Dred, 341. 40 Ibid., 551. Fittingly, in their 2000 reissue of Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, the University of North Carolina Press highlighted the influence of Nat Turner on Stowe’s text by selecting a nineteenth-century engraving of Turner and his followers to adorn the cover. 41 Ibid., 198. 42 Ibid., 200, 262–3. 43 Ibid., 209, 447. 44 Ibid., xxix. In fact, as editor Robert S. Levine notes in his introduction to Dred, in the excerpts of Gray’s “Confessions” appended to her novel, Stowe elides the more gruesome descriptions of the murders of women and children. 45 Gail K. Smith, “Reading with the Other: Hermeneutics and the Politics of Difference in Stowe’s Dred,” American Literature 69, 2 (June 1997): 294. 46 Stowe, Dred, 270, 306, 447. 47 Ibid., 46, 35, 50. 48 Ibid., 52, 59, 82. 49 Ibid., 91, 275. 50 Ibid., 274, 264, 448, 447.

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51 Ibid., 91. 52 Ibid., 543. 53 Richard Boyd, “Violence and Sacrificial Displacement in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” Arizona Quarterly 50, 2 (1994): 69. 54 Jeannine Marie DeLombard, “Representing the Slave: White Advocacy and Black Testimony in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” The New England Quarterly 75, 1 (March 2002): 106. 55 Ibid. 56 William Wells Brown, The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (New York: Thomas Hamilton, 1863), 59. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 59, 61; Greenberg, “Name, Face, Body,” 15. 59 Brown, The Black Man, 60. 60 Ibid., 59. William Styron would later pick up on this analogy in The Confessions of Nat Turner, having Turner invoke Napoleon to his fellow slaves as a murderous conqueror to be emulated, a decision for which Styron was soundly criticized by African-American critics. Typifying the attacks was John Oliver Killens, who asked: “[W]hy did not Nat think to inspire them with an example of black militancy in the person of black Toussaint, who liberated a nation of black folk from the colonial rule of the same Napoleon?” John Oliver Killens, “The Confessions of Willie Styron,” in William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, ed. John Henrik Clarke (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 42. 61 Brown, The Black Man, 63. 62 Ibid., 64, 71, 73. 63 Randolph Edmonds, “Nat Turner,” in Black Heroes: Seven Plays, ed. Errol Hill (New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, Inc., 1989), 89. Although, it is worth mentioning, Edmonds’s parenthetical notations indicate that at times Turner’s vernacular should be delivered “eloquently.” 64 Ibid., 85. 65 Ibid., 86. 66 Ibid., 88, 93. 67 Ibid., 88. 68 Ibid., 94. 69 Ibid., 97. 70 William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967; repr., New York: Vintage International, 1993), 51, 291. 71 Ibid., 333, 18. 72 Ibid., 10, 115. 73 Ibid., 131, 288, 331.

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74 Ibid., 398. 75 Bennett, Jr., “Nat’s Last White Man,” 11. 76 Ibid., 8; Alvin F. Poussaint, “The Confessions of Nat Turner and the Dilemma of William Styron,” in William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, ed. John Henrik Clarke (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968), 21. Such stereotypical attitudes toward homosexuality were not uncommon in the black resistance movement of the 1960s, which, as bell hooks tells us, tended to equate “freedom” with heterosexual “manhood.” bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 58. 77 Bennett, Jr., “Nat’s Last White Man,” 13; Mike Thelwell, “Back with the Wind: Mr. Styron and the Reverend Turner,” in William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, ed. John Henrik Clarke (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968), 81. 78 Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner, 9. 79 Mandel, Against the Unspeakable, 148, 150. 80 Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner, 177, 89, 173. 81 Bennett, Jr., “Nat’s Last White Man,” 9; Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner, 232. 82 Ibid., 183, 374. 83 hooks, Yearning, 58. 84 Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner, 347; Michael Dyson, quoted in hooks, Yearning, 58. 85 Christopher Sieving, “The Concessions of Nat Turner,” The Velvet Light Trap 61 (Spring 2008): 42–6. 86 Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner, 414–15. 87 Junious Ricardo Stanton, “The Trouble with Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property,” ChickenBones: A Journal (2003), available at: www.nathanielturner.com/ troublewithnatturner.htm. 88 Malpas, The Postmodern, 97. 89 Rosenstone, “The Future of the Past,” 215.

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In a wide-ranging examination of adaptation and appropriation throughout the arts, Julie Sanders observes that too often the relationship between a source text and an adapted text is “viewed as linear and reductive; the appropriation is always in the secondary, belated position, and the discussion will therefore always be, to a certain extent, about difference, lack, or loss.”1 In the field of adaptation studies, we see how this fixation on what is lost during the adaptive process, rather than on what may be revealed or disseminated, has resulted in a fidelity-based criticism that has become, in Linda Hutcheon’s words, “the critical orthodoxy” for much academic and journalistic writing about cinematic adaptations of literary works.2 Hutcheon goes on to observe that despite recent attempts to break with this critical model by scholars such as Robert Stam, Kamilla Elliott, and Thomas Leitch, “disparaging opinions on adaptations as a secondary mode—belated and therefore derivative—persist.”3 Thus, Hutcheon is driven to ask, if the idea of fidelity is no longer a productive framework for “any theorizing of adaptation today,” which she contends it is not, what analytical approach should take its place?4 That is to say, what new critical strategy will be able to dislodge rigid concerns over “faithfulness” (to story, theme, and character), and the disparaging opinions inevitably attending them, from their persistent place of prominence in contemporary adaptation theory, and help clear the way for more fluid and fruitful conceptualizations of the film/literature dynamic? Although Hutcheon offers her own answers to these questions, this book is my attempt to suggest one potentially rich avenue of critical investigation and engagement: affect. As Marco Abel notes, “[r]eading, viewing, listening, sensing . . . is first and foremost a matter of affect.”5 And yet, to date, considerations of affect, and the bleeding of affective forces between texts, between mediums, or even between artworks and audience members (be they readers or viewers), have

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been largely absent from the field of adaptation studies. In seeking to redress this oversight, I have conceived of affect—following Elizabeth Wissinger—as a kind of “contagious energy”: as infectious intensities coursing between bodies, both corporeal and textual, where they take root and foster changes from within.6 Wissinger describes this transmission as an “affective flow,” in which “flows of energy . . . move in and through” us.7 I have chosen the term “drift,” adopted (or adapted, as it were) from Jean-François Lyotard, for its stronger connotations of nonlinearity, of unpredictability and potentiality. Intensities do not necessarily progress from point A to point B; they drift between multitudes of points, along the way provoking shifts and movements, transformations and becomings. If such language strikes a Deleuzian note, it is deliberately so. Stam writes (not without admiration) that Gilles Deleuze has had a “positively corrosive impact” on film theory.8 One person’s corrosion, however, may be another’s liberation. As Anna Powell argues, Deleuze’s understanding of filmic texts as “assemblages” of movement and duration to be experienced and mapped, rather than discrete audio-visual narratives to be systematically decoded for latent messages, shifts critical emphasis away from considerations of plot and characterization, thereby encouraging scholars to look beyond cinema’s storytelling facility in favor of its other, often overlooked (and hence under-theorized) properties, such as its “affective dynamics.”9 Take, for example, Jamie “Skye” Bianco’s recent essay on contemporary thrillers like Run Lola Run (1998) and Memento (2000), in which she conceives of the works not as “representational narratives” but as “designed distributions of movement and affect,” or Steven Shaviro’s description of films and music videos as “machines for generating affect.”10 Deleuze’s influence is not difficult to discern. Still, such attention to what Powell calls the “stylistic affect” of cinematic texts remains the exception rather than the rule in film analysis, even as Deleuzian thought is slowly yet steadily making its presence felt throughout the corpus of cinema studies.11 Hoping to alter the balance of that equation in some small way, this study has sought to illuminate the valuable insights to be gained from a critical orientation more fully attuned to a film’s affective dimensions. And I have tried to demonstrate the useful work such an orientation can accomplish when imported into the field of adaptation theory, allowing us to contemplate, side by side, the affective qualities of cinematic texts and literary texts, to chart and therefore better comprehend their complex affective interactions and interrelations, their varying transmissions and disseminations. The potential advantages of incorporating an attentiveness to affect, and to the affective drifting between artistic texts and mediums, into adaptation studies are

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significant. Consider Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan’s claim that very few “investigations [into adaptation] attempt to theorize the textual transactions that occur in the process.”12 Rethinking works of film and literature as affective economies communicating through the exchange of intensities addresses that oversight, placing critical and theoretical emphasis squarely on such transactions. At the same time, it destabilizes the hierarchical bias historically at the core of much adaptation criticism: film is no longer the low parasitic art feeding off of the high host that is literature. On the contrary, we see how literary texts link up to and redirect the affective energies of cinema just as cinema redistributes the affective energies of literature. Thus the adaptive process is revealed to be less linear and reductive than multiform and dialogic. Just as importantly, as Powell saliently points out, a critical eye alert to affective dynamics is focused primarily on a work’s formal stylistic features, as opposed to its originality of plot, development of characters, or articulation of specific themes. As a result, for the adaptation theorist sensitive to affect, the central questions of fidelity criticism—is the adapted text true to the story, characterizations, themes, and spirit of the source text?—lose their relevance. More imperative than rendering verdicts about adaptive faithfulness, or lack thereof, is exploring the affective forces fostered by individual texts, and how those drifting forces provoke further intensities, subsequent metamorphoses; for, to paraphrase Abel, what is of concern to a critic of affect is not uncovering what an artwork means, per se, but examining its affective utility: how it works, and what it does.13 By recalibrating adaptation studies to address such concerns, we move away from the inherently judgmental template of fidelity-minded analysis (“Which is better, the original or the adaptation?”) toward fresh points of inquiry: How do certain literary and filmic texts generate particular affective qualities? What role do those intensive affective flows play in the adaptive process—in what manner are they rechanneled and remade? And, if Abel is correct that affect and cognition are immanently imbricated, what feelings, thoughts, or ideas are triggered as these affective forces are then territorialized by readers and viewers?14 In the preceding chapters, I modeled a critical approach that takes such points of inquiry into account, an approach thereby resistant to the pull of judgment, to the biases and binaries (high art versus low art, text versus image) that continue to inform many analyses of adaptive texts. One might accurately describe this new orientation, as I have done, as an affective turn for adaptation theory. I began this turn with a meditation on the U.S.A. trilogy of John Dos Passos, a work that has garnered a handful of mentions in adaptation studies over the years (usually

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cited as evidence of early cinema’s impact on novelistic storytelling), but rarely been given extended consideration as an inventive act of literary adaptation. Eschewing the notion that transposition of plot is the wellspring from which adaptation theory must necessarily flow, I was able to (re)position Dos Passos’s opus—in particular, its Newsreel and Camera Eye passages—as an attempt by the author to adapt the affective import, the affective dynamism, of Dziga Vertov’s filmmaking practices from screen to page, to redirect into language the temporal rhythms and velocities, the visceral visual kineticism and multisensoriality of Vertov’s directorial aesthetic. The end product of such adaptive efforts by Dos Passos, I argued, is a distinctly modernist literary style that speaks vividly to the rushing, dislocating experience of early twentieth-century America. More precisely, it is a style commensurate with the social and cultural transfigurations of the era, the evolving historical consciousness, the experiential flow and flux of time—a style that aspires to render in prose what Eric Auerbach might call “a more genuine, a deeper, indeed a more real reality.”15 Moving from a well-known modernist writer to an author frequently described as prototypically postmodern, I continued to trouble the centrality of story (and, by extension, character and theme) in adaptation studies by rethinking Don DeLillo’s sprawling novel Underworld as, in part, a prose engagement with the montage philosophies of Sergei Eisenstein. Specifically, I contended that in Underworld DeLillo endeavors to adapt into print the affective logics of Eisenstein’s metric, rhythmic, tonal, and intellectual strategies of montage, in effect mobilizing the filmmaker’s ostensibly modernist aesthetic devices for his own decidedly postmodernist ends. In so doing, I concluded, DeLillo reaffirms through his book’s structure what he suggests more overtly within its narrative: that in a rapidly evolving, ever changing information age, the influence of “the image” (from the cinematic to the televisual to the commercial) is discernible in nearly every aspect of our society, our culture, and our lives. In this manner, DeLillo’s text comes to function, in some ways, as a kind of “cognitive and affective mapping,” to appropriate Shaviro’s terminology.16 It helps us to better grasp our positioning in a brave new society of the spectacle, and thus to better plot our course through the sometimes bewildering, fragmentizing landscapes of postmodernity. Next, I turned my focus to that popular target of fidelity-inclined critics, a commercial film inspired by a popular literary work, in the hopes of demonstrating how an affective turn in the study of adaptations enables us to avoid the judgmental tenor of much adaptation criticism. Comparing the

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affective economies of Susanna Moore’s novel In the Cut and Jane Campion’s cinematic adaptation of the same name, instead of merely itemizing similarities or differences in plot and characterization, I proposed that Campion’s film may be most constructively understood not as a faithful (or unfaithful) celluloid corporealization of Moore’s narrative, but as a complex intermedial engagement with the affects generated by Moore’s text. Differently put, if Moore’s novel can be viewed as a kind of verbal engine creating dread and discomfort through the subversion of generic expectations, Campion’s adaptation absorbs and redistributes those affective forces, fostering its own sense of dread, its own discomforts, through cinematic means. In this way, I observed, both texts—each in its own unique manner—manage to articulate a Jamesonian critique of our contemporary postmodern moment in which maintaining a stable, unified identity seems increasingly and disquietingly untenable. And finally, I offered a close reading of Charles Burnett’s ambitious and multidimensional film, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, in order to illustrate the ways in which an affective turn for adaptation theory might widen the analytical net cast by the discourse. Burnett’s text—part fiction, part documentary, part investigation into the limits of historiography and historical representation—is not an easy fit for adaptation studies. Indeed, drawing as it does on a host of literary sources, only to massively truncate and condense those sources in the journey from print to celluloid, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property would likely elicit only disapproval from adaptation critics invested in the notion of fidelity. In my discussion of the film, however, I concentrated not on the aforementioned abridgments, but on tracing the affective drifting between precursor texts and Burnett’s work—on exploring how Burnett’s film assimilates, and refashions in cinematic form, the affective qualities of its literary sources as part of a larger interrogation of Nat Turner’s dual status as historical figure and discursive construct. Consequently, I was able to shed light on the affective operations of, and interchanges between, filmic adaptation and literary precursors without resorting to fidelity as a guiding framework, hence creating a productive space within adaptation studies for the consideration of highly unorthodox, idiosyncratic adaptive works (like Burnett’s) that still too regularly fall beyond the purview of the discipline. Having created this space for the unorthodox and the idiosyncratic in adaptation theory, having offered a series of analyses that train a progressively expansive critical lens on lauded works of literary modernism and postmodernism, controversial noir thrillers on page and screen, and the myriad

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discursive iterations of a “troublesome” historical personage, one immediately thinks of additional texts—both canonical and unconventional—that could benefit from an “affective reading.” To begin with, and most obviously, there are the cinematic adaptations of William Shakespeare’s works, which have (arguably) been studied and taught more frequently than any other adaptations. Indeed, as Douglas Lanier points out, incorporating filmed versions of Shakespeare into the classroom has become de rigeur for most English teachers, particularly those versions “perceived to be most faithful to the Shakespearean script, those most useful for teaching the text.”17 This, despite—in the words of Lanier— the “popular commonplace that had Shakespeare been born in the twentieth century, he would have been a filmmaker . . . his international appeal springs not from his words but from the moving images that lie behind them.”18 A focus on the affective potency of these images, then, on their varying punctums and intensities, and how filmmakers endeavor to tap into those affective forces, could potentially make room in English classrooms for less traditional, less faithful Shakespearean adaptations. It could make room for a work like Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), a Japanese film, inspired by Macbeth, which dispenses with most of Shakespeare’s language, offering us instead a cinematic “scene of carnage, born of consuming desire,” as described in the screenplay—a film that is as suffused by fear and paranoia and a haunting, doomful intensity as Shakespeare’s Scottish play. An affective turn in adaptation studies could lead to other “classics” as well. For instance, one might explore how Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999), which filters Jane Austen’s novel through a postcolonial prism, extends and amplifies what Nina Auerbach characterizes as the “uncertainty,” “unease,” and “discomfort” fostered by the book.19 Or how Isaac Julien’s impressionistic Looking for Langston (1989) evokes, according to bell hooks, the “sexual longing and erotic despair” expressed in Langston Hughes’s poetry.”20 In addition to such literary adaptations, affect also opens the door to “postliterary adaptations,” defined by Leitch as “movies based on originals that have neither the cache of literature nor the armature of a single narrative plot that might seem to make them natural Hollywood material.”21 By way of illustration, Leitch points to such films as American Splendor (2003), based on Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic books, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), adapted from Nia Vardalos’s stand-up comedy routines. But he just as easily could have highlighted Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), a cinematic reimagining of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting that left 15 people dead and many more

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wounded. Based, in large measure, on the school’s video surveillance tapes and ensuing newspaper reports, Elephant also draws on videogame imagery and the directorial aesthetic of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr in its visual design. It is, then, in its own way, a multifaceted and multilayered example of postliterary adaptation. And yet, to date, it has been virtually ignored by adaptation studies—an omission presumably stemming from Van Sant’s decision to engage with a variety of sources, both verbal and visual, rather than to rely on a single, definitive written account of the event and its aftermath. If, however, we step back and regard the film anew as an artfully adaptive work registering and responding to the affective qualities of a number of source texts, a whole range of intriguing questions begin to present themselves: How does the film’s use of shallow focus, slightly grainy imagery, and a 1.33:1 aspect ratio tap into the awful immediacy, the unnerving vividness, of both the school’s surveillance footage and the news media’s live television coverage of the killings? How does Van Sant’s use of the “subjective camera” channel what Alexander R. Galloway calls the “intuitive sense of affective motion,” the “’affective regime of vision’” generated by first-person shooter videogames?22 And how does Elephant’s intricate temporal structure, with its whorling sheets of time, foster an increasingly unsettling sense of dread, not unlike the sensations of impending doom described by many survivors of the massacre? Issues like these, so far neglected by adaptation scholars, are well worth pondering. Moving from the literary and postliterary to the “post-cinematic” (again borrowing from Shaviro), there are newer mediums that are themselves highly adaptive, like videogames, that might be cast in a fresh light by an affective turn in adaptation studies.23 Take Gabriel Winslow-Yost’s recent discussion of how the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. videogames—based on the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, itself adapted from a story by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky—and the series of novels they spawned have brought “the cycle of adaptation full circle.”24 What are the affective dimensions of this cycle, one is tempted to ask? What kinds of affective transactions is it enacting? And, of course, there are other artistic avenues, other genres and media forms, to be (re)visited and explored. There are novelizations, dubbed by Jan Baetens the “hidden continent” of adaptation theory, as well as texts like Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, a 1997 novel layered with movie stills, which expounds on her 1991 film of the same name.25 There are audio books, infusing written words with the tone and timbre of the human voice, and the “lightbox” photographs of Jeff Wall depicting scenes from the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Franz Kafka. There are songs and musicals, ballets

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and operas, websites and graphic art, theme park attractions and fan fiction, and much, much more. One can see, therefore, that this study is less exhaustive than suggestive. It steers a path away from the hierarchies and binaries, the preoccupations and judgments of traditional adaptation studies, toward the possibilities afforded by an affective turn for the discipline. Among those possibilities is an escape from the limiting language of fidelity, in favor of a lexicon alive to the driftings and becomings inherent in the adaptive process. More, this approach engenders a renewed interest in the formal aesthetic features of individual texts, be they literary or filmic (or something beyond): in identifying the various intensities these texts are transmitting, and the technical methods and means by which they are doing so. Such an approach is not relativist, nor overly subjective. Rather, like Abel’s diamond cutter who follows the pre-subjective lines of flight within the raw stone, the adaptation theorist attuned to affect carefully traces the affective structure of a text, divines its immanent affective features, and then actively charts the “transformational relays” forged by its intensive affective flows: how they are subsequently territorialized by audiences; how they provoke shifts and metamorphoses in other works, in other mediums.26 And, as I have tried to show in this book, just as the diamond cutter ultimately profits from this meticulous procedure, so too does the adaptation scholar’s labor yield profitable rewards: for instance, a deeper, fuller understanding of the affective work literary and filmic texts can do, of the ways they may move us from one state to the next; a newfound appreciation for the affective relationship between literature and cinema, a relationship that is more symbiotic than adversarial, more generative than destructive; and, to extrapolate from Wissinger, an enhanced recognition of the linkage between the dissemination of affective forces and the production of “conscious knowledge.”27 In other words, to introduce a poetics of affective drifting into adaptation theory is, in part, to radically rethink our prior assumptions, our previous conceptions about the literature/film dynamic and its cultural relevance. It is to reconceive of cinematic images and literary texts as conduits of affective currents that drift around and through us, forming an affective network within which each medium continually moves and (re)shapes the other, within which these currents impinge on readers and viewers, thereby moving and (re)shaping our feeling, cognizing selves. I submit that this network, this drifting, warrants further mapping.

Drifting On

145

Notes 1 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 12. 2 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 7. 3 Ibid., xiii. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Abel, “Intensifying Affect,” sec. 5. 6 Wissinger, “Always on Display,” 232. 7 Ibid., 238, 253. 8 Stam, Film Theory, 256. 9 Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film, 6, 2. 10 Bianco, “Techno-Cinema,” 51; Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 3. 11 Anna Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 210. 12 Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, “Introduction—Literature On Screen: A Synoptic View,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1. 13 Abel, “Intensifying Affect,” sec. 7 14 Ibid., sec. 5. 15 Auerbach, Mimesis, 477. 16 Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 137. 17 Douglas Lanier, “William Shakespeare, Filmmaker,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 67–8. 18 Ibid., 61. 19 Nina Auerbach, “Jane Austen’s Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought about Fanny Price,” in Mansfield Park: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 446, 457. 20 hooks, Yearning, 194. Timothy Corrigan has noted that “film adaptations of poetry essays, and other non-narrative forms . . . have been a regular but largely invisible part of film culture” and criticism. See Timothy Corrigan, “Literature On Screen, A History: In the Gap,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 26. One reason for this invisibility, perhaps, is that critics have no ready analytical method for grappling with such unusual texts. The concept of “affective drifting” could help remedy this problem. 21 Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, 258.

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22 Alexander R. Galloway, “Origins of the First-Person Shooter,” in Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, and Meta Mazaj (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011), 1082, 1079. 23 Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 137. 24 Gabriel Winslow-Yost, “The ‘Stalker’ Game,” The New York Review of Books 59, 11 (June 21, 2012): 14. 25 Jan Baetens, “From Screen to Text: Novelization, the Hidden Continent,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 227. 26 Abel, “Intensifying Affect,” sec. 7. 27 Wissinger, “Always on Display,” 232.

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Index 1919  see U. S. A. 42nd Parallel, The  see U. S. A. Abel, Marco  12, 13, 14, 15–17, 18, 19, 137, 139, 144 Adorno, Theodor  10 Allmendinger, David  111 Amis, Martin  54 Armstrong, Nancy  31 Auerbach, Erich  32–3, 55, 140 Balázs, Béla  6 Battleship Potemkin  66, 67–8 Baudrillard, Jean  54, 61 Bazin, André  6 Benjamin, Walter  14 Bennett, Jr., Lerone  111, 126, 127 Bianco, Jamie “Skye”  12, 138 Big Money, The  see U. S. A. Bluestone, George  4–6, 7, 8, 31 Boyd, Richard  118 Brennan, Teresa  13 Brown, William Wells  see “Nat Turner” Browne, Stephen Howard  112 Burnett, Charles  3, 20, 99, 105–6, 109–11, 130, 131, 132, 141 and adaptations in Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property  111–30 see also Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property Cain, James M.  78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 89, 90 Campion, Jane  3, 20, 72, 77, 80, 89, 90, 99, 141 and In the Cut (Film)  90–9 see also In the Cut (Film) Cartmell, Deborah  11, 139 Chandler, Raymond  80, 87, 89, 90 Chatman, Seymour  8 Christopher, Frank  109 Cohen, Keith  32

“Confessions of Nat Turner, The”  analysis of  111–12 film adaptation of  113–15 Confessions of Nat Turner, The  analysis of  124–7 film adaptation of  127–30 Connor, Steve  54, 55 D’Auray, Terry  82 Debord, Guy  54, 60 Deleuze, Gilles  6–7, 15, 16, 17, 32, 70, 93, 138 DeLillo, Don  3, 19, 48, 53–4, 140 cinematic influences  61–2 and postmodernism  54–6 see also Underworld DeLombard, Jeannine Marie  118 Denby, David  92 Dewey, Joseph  60, 62, 64 Di Stefano, Christine  87 Dietrich, René  80, 85, 88 Diggins, John P.  30, 34, 38, 41 Dos Passos, John  3, 19, 29, 53, 58, 61, 79, 139–40 cinematic influences  34–8 and modernism  32–4 and postmodernism  47–8 see also U. S. A. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp  analysis of  115–18 film adaptation of  118–21 Duvall, John  57, 58 Dyer, Richard  81, 83 Edmonds, Randolph  see Nat Turner Edwards, Justin  38, 44, 45 Eisenstein, Sergei  14, 15, 19, 34, 35, 53, 54, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64, 70, 71, 140 on intellectual montage  69–70 on metric montage  64–5 on rhythmic montage  66 on tonal montage  67–8 Elliott, Kamilla  4, 9, 11, 31, 137

160

Index

Faulkner, William  31, 33, 83 Felperin, Leslie  91, 92, 96 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen  57 Foster, Gretchen  29, 37, 44, 45 Frank, Joseph  32 Gardner, James  63 Genette, Gérard  8 Gilroy, Paul  107, 108 Goodheart, Eugene  61 Gray, Thomas R.  see “The Confessions of Nat Turner” Greenberg, Kenneth S.  107, 108, 109, 112, 114, 131 Groves, Tim  15 Hammett, Dashiell  78, 79, 80, 87, 89 hooks, bell  127, 142 Horkheimer, Max  10 Horsley, Lee  79, 84, 85, 89 Hutcheon, Linda  11, 29, 55, 56, 57, 59, 105, 107, 137 Huyssen, Andreas  10

Lukács, Georg  32–3, 41, 44, 58 Lyotard, Jean-François  11, 12, 17, 58, 138 McHugh, Kathleen  92, 96, 97 Madden, David  79 Malpas, Simon  79, 86, 107, 131 Man with a Movie Camera, The  35, 46 Mandel, Naomi  112, 127 Marks, Laura  93, 96 Massumi, Brian  12, 13, 18 Metz, Christian  15 Mitchell, W. J. T.  4, 7, 32 Moore, Susanna  3, 20, 72, 77, 78, 79, 80, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 141 see also In the Cut (Novel) Mulvey, Laura  95 Murray, Simone  2, 7, 10 Myers, Thomas  70

Kakutani, Michiko  78, 87, 88 Kawin, Bruce  6 Knight, Peter  58, 72 Kracauer, Siegfried  14 Kuleshov, Lev  63

Naremore, James  5, 9, 78, 89, 95 “Nat Turner”  analysis of  121–2 film adaptation of  122 Nat Turner  analysis of  122–3 film adaptation of  123–4 Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property  20, 99, 105–6, 141 as adaptation of Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp  115–21 as adaptation of Randolph Edmonds’s Nat Turner  122–4 as adaptation of Thomas R. Gray’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner”  111–15 as adaptation of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner  124–30 as adaptation of William Wells Brown’s “Nat Turner”  121–2 as postmodern history film  109–11, 130–2 Nicol, Bran  54 North, Michael  35, 37, 38–9, 40, 44, 45–6 Nusair, David  91, 92

LeClair, Tom  55 Leitch, Thomas  8, 9, 10, 11, 17, 137, 142 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  4, 5, 7

Oates, Joyce Carol  83 October  64–5 Orr, Christopher  8

In the Cut (Film)  20, 72, 77, 90, 99, 141 critical reception of  90–2 as self-reflexive film adaptation  92–9 In the Cut (Novel)  20, 72, 77, 91, 92, 99, 141 affective force of  82–9 critical reception of  81–2 as postmodern literary noir  80 synopsis  81 Jacobs, Karen  32 Jameson, Fredric  12, 15, 16, 54–5, 56, 59, 71, 72, 87, 89 Jay, Martin  32 Joyner, Charles  107

Index Orr, Stanley  89, 90 Osteen, Mark  60, 61, 62 Parramore, Thomas  113 Poussaint, Alvin  126 Powell, Anna  138, 139 Pudovkin, V. I.  63 Ray, Robert. B.  5, 18 Remnick, David  61 Rettberg, Scott  55, 56 Rodgers, Peter  82 Rosenstone, Robert  109, 110, 132 Rutherford, Anne  15 Sanders, Julie  11, 137 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  14 Shaviro, Steven  2, 15, 16, 138, 140, 143 Sim, Stuart  87 Smethurst, Paul  56 Sobchack, Vivian  15 Stam, Robert  1–2, 9, 11, 14, 30, 31, 105, 137, 138 Stanton, Junious Ricardo  131 Stowe, Harriett Beecher  see Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp Strike  69–70 Styron, William  see The Confessions of Nat Turner Tanner, Tony  63, 64 Taubin, Amy  81, 96, 97, 98

161

Thelwell, Mike  126 Thompson, Jim  84, 87 Turner, Nat  20, 105, 106, 130, 131, 141 and the Southampton rebellion  106–7 as textual construct  107–11, 132 various portraits of  111–30 Underworld  19, 48, 53–4, 55, 56, 140 as cognitive mapping  71–2 and Eisensteinian montage  62–71 as historiographic metafiction  57–9 and the power of images  60–2 U. S. A.  19, 29, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 48, 58, 61, 139 Camera Eye sections  44–7 Newsreel sections  38–43 Vertov, Dziga  19, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 47, 63, 140 influence on Dos Passos’s U. S. A.  38–47 Walters, Colin  81 Welsh, James. M.  5 Whelehan, Imelda  11, 139 White, Hayden  33 Williams, Richard  68 Wissinger, Elizabeth  13, 14, 138, 144 Wood, Peter  114, 130 Woolf, Virginia  31, 33 Woolrich, Cornell  83 Zizek, Slavoj  78