Horror or realism? Filming ‘toxic discourse’ in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres
2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502360500091436
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), p. 255. Subsequent page references to this novel appear in the text. 2 Marina Leslie, ‘Incest, incorporation, and King Lear in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres’, College English, 60 (1998), pp. 1–14; p. 1. See also James A. Schiff, ‘Contemporary retellings: A Thousand Acres as the latest Lear’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 39 (1998), pp. 367–81; and Steven G. Kellman, ‘Food fights in Iowa: the vegetarian stranger in recent Midwest fiction’, Virginia Quarterly Review, 71 (1995), pp. 435–47. 3 Jane Smiley, ‘Shakespeare in Iceland’, in Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson and Dieter Mehl (eds), Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996 (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998), pp. 41–59; p. 42, p. 43, and p. 44. Two years after presenting ‘Shakespeare in Iceland’ at the World Congress, Smiley publicly disavowed her novel's reading of King Lear – which is primarily political, for ‘I had interpreted King Lear as a brief for the patriarchy’ – in favour of, first, a psychological reading, and finally, a philosophical one. But, as I think Smiley understands, the correctness of her reading of Lear in A Thousand Acres is irrelevant to the novel's status in contemporary culture: ‘To those readers who adore A Thousand Acres, I have to say, it is more your book now than mine. I have run out of things to say on the subject, and, more important, I have run out of the desire to say them. I have made way in my mind for something else that may not have the same legs or the same impact. The paradox of literature is that everything must be written with total commitment, or the work reads falsely and insincerely, and yet all total commitment is to partial knowledge’ (Jane Smiley, ‘Taking it all back’, in Marie Arana (ed.), The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), pp. 389–392; p. 390 and p. 392). 4 Jane Smiley, ‘Shakespeare in Iceland’, in Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson and Dieter Mehl (eds), Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996 (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998), pp. 41–59; p. 42, p. 43, and p. 44. Two years after presenting ‘Shakespeare in Iceland’ at the World Congress, Smiley publicly disavowed her novel's reading of King Lear – which is primarily political, for ‘I had interpreted King Lear as a brief for the patriarchy’ – in favour of, first, a psychological reading, and finally, a philosophical one. But, as I think Smiley understands, the correctness of her reading of Lear in A Thousand Acres is irrelevant to the novel's status in contemporary culture: ‘To those readers who adore A Thousand Acres, I have to say, it is more your book now than mine. I have run out of things to say on the subject, and, more important, I have run out of the desire to say them. I have made way in my mind for something else that may not have the same legs or the same impact. The paradox of literature is that everything must be written with total commitment, or the work reads falsely and insincerely, and yet all total commitment is to partial knowledge’ (Jane Smiley, ‘Taking it all back’, in Marie Arana (ed.), The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), p. 55. 5 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952), p. 165. 6 Smiley, ‘Iceland’, p. 55. 7 Leslie, ‘Incest’, p. 1. 8 Smiley, ‘Iceland’, p. 55. 9 Smiley, ‘Iceland’, p. 55. 10 See e.g., Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Mary Paniccia Carden, ‘Remembering/engendering the heartland: sexed language, embodied space, and America's foundational fictions in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 18 (1997), pp. 181–202; and Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy, ‘Introduction’, in Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy (eds), Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 1–13. 11 Quoted by Catherine Cowen Olson, ‘You are what you eat: food and power in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres’, The Midwest Quarterly, 40 (1998), pp. 21–33; p. 21. 12 Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 37, p. 38, pp. 42–44, p. 41, p. 40. 13 Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 43, p. 36, p. 39, p. 43. 14 Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 45. 15 Bate, Song of the Earth, p. 283. 16 Bate, Song of the Earth, pp. 138–152. 17 Buell, Writing, p. 33, p. 45, p. 46. 18 Buell, Writing, p. 285, n. 73. 19 A Thousand Acres, Jocelyn Moorhouse (dir) (Beacon Communications Corp/Polygram Filmed Entertainment, Inc, 1997). 20 See e.g., David Ansen, ‘Pfeiffer and Lange triumph in A Thousand Acres,’ Review of A Thousand Acres, Newsweek (22 September 1997), p. 82; Nick Coleman, ‘This way madness lies’, Review of A Thousand Acres, New Statesman (12 June 1998), pp. 43–4; Peter Mathews, ‘A Thousand Acres’, Sight and Sound, 8 (1998), p. 55; John Ottenhoff, ‘A Thousand Acres’, Review of A Thousand Acres, The Christian Century (5 November 1997), pp. 1015–16; Richard Schickel, ‘A Thousand Acres’, Review of A Thousand Acres, Time (22 September 1997), p. 93. 21 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 13–14, pp. 144–57. See also Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard. (Ithac, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). 22 See Carroll, Philosophy, 53–54 and Noël Carroll, ‘Horror and humor’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (1999), pp. 145–60. 23 Raymond Williams, ‘Realism, naturalism, and their alternatives’, in Ron Burnett (ed.), Explorations in Film Theory: Selected Essays from Cine-tracts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 121–6, pp. 122–3. See also Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment, Realism and Popular Cinema (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000). 24 Safe, Todd Haynes (dir) (Columbia TriStar/Sony Pictures Classics, 1995). 25 Buell, Writing, p. 38. 26 Abby McGanney Nolan, ‘King Leer’, Review of A Thousand Acres. Village Voice (30 September 1997), p. 84; and Coleman, ‘This way madness lies’. 27 Quoted by Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 5. 28 Edmundson, Nightmare, p. 5. 29 Kellman, ‘Food fights in lowa’, p. 440. 30 A Thousand Acres, Moorhouse (dir). This quotation from the film is my transcription from the video. 31 Mathews, Review, p. 55. 32 Ottenhoff, Review, p. 1016. 33 Quoted by Ansen, ‘Pfeiffer’, p. 82. 34 Coleman, ‘This way madness lies’, p. 42. 35 George Bluestone, Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 42. 36 Robert Stam, ‘Beyond fidelity: the dialogics of adaptation’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 54–76; p. 73, p. 75. 37 Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (London: Verso, 1994), p. 179. 38 David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), p. 24. 39 Edmundson, Nightmare, p. 36. 40 Judith Butler writes compellingly that, just as ‘the terms of an exclusionary modernity have been appropriated for progressive uses, progressive terms can be appropriated for regressive aims’ (p. 179). That is, terms such as feminism or sexual difference or justice or equality ‘are never finally and fully tethered to a single use… such terms belong to no one in particular; they assume a life and a purpose that exceed the uses to which they have consciously been put’ (p. 179). ‘The end of sexual difference?’, in Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 174–203. 41 Dudley Andrew, ‘Adaptation’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 28–37, p. 32. 42 Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 218. 43 Barbara Adam, Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 37, p. 10. 44 Jonathan Miller, ‘The mind's eye and the human eye’, Daedalus, 117 (1985), pp. 185–99, p. 199. 45 Carroll, Philosophy, p. 57. 46 Todd Haynes, quoted in Amy Taubin, ‘Nowhere to hide: Director Todd Haynes on his eerie new film ‘Safe’’, Sight and Sound, 6 (1996), pp. 32–4, p. 34. 47 Ross, Chicago Gangster, p. 186. 48 Roddey Reid, ‘UnSafe at any distance: Todd Haynes’ visual culture of health and risk’, Film Quarterly, 51 (1998) 32–44, p. 34. Collier Schorr, ‘Diary of a sad housewife: Collier Schorr talks with Todd Haynes’, Artforum, 33 (1995), pp. 87–8, 126, 128, p. 126. 49 Buell, Writing, p. 48. 50 Buell, Writing, p. 49. 51 Adam, I think, would say this kind of response will remain likely so long as we are wedded to ‘industrial’ habits of mind that assume ‘linear causality on the one hand and reversibility on the other’ (p. 58, p. 9). With respect to the effects of chemicals, radiation and other invisible environmental agents, however, these assumptions are proving inadequate: ‘We are dealing with phenomena [that] work invisibly below the surface until they materialize as symptoms – sometime, somewhere. At the point of materialization, however, they are no longer traceable with certainty to original sources’ (p. 10). 52 Haynes, in Schorr, ‘Diary of a sad housewife‘, p. 126. 53 See e.g., André Bazin, What is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray, Vol. 2 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 16–40; David Bordwell, ‘Deep-focus cinematography’, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson (eds), The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 341–52, p. 348; and Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 106–8. 54 Haynes, in Taubin, ‘Nowhere to hide’, p. 34. 55 Tony Rayns, ‘Safe’, Sight and Sound, 6 (1996), pp. 59–60, p. 59. 56 Haynes, in Schorr, ‘Diary of a sad housewife’, p. 88. 57 The quotation is my transcription from the video of Safe. 58 Haynes, in Taubin, ‘Nowhere to hide’, p. 34. 59 Adam, I think, would concur. Adam is suspicious of any technology, including lens technology, based upon ‘Newtonian conceptions and assumptions’ (p. 51). The camera results from and reinforces the ‘industrial’ habits of mind that privilege ‘visible materiality at the expense of that which is latent, immanent, and hidden from view’ (p. 12). 60 Haynes, in Schorr, ‘Diary of a sad housewife’, p. 126. 61 Haynes, in Taubin, ‘Nowhere to hide’, p. 33. 62 Haynes, in Schorr, ‘Diary of a sad housewife’, p. 128. 63 Buell, Writing, p. 33, pp. 45–6. 64 Haynes, in Taubin, ‘Nowhere to hide’, p. 33. 65 Haynes, in Taubin, ‘Nowhere to hide’, pp. 33–34. 66 Ingram, Green Screen, p. 147. 67 Buell, Writing, p. 41, p. 40. 68 A Civil Action, Steven Zaillian (dir) (Paramount Pictures/Touchstone Pictures, 1998). 69 Erin Brockovich, Steven Soderbergh (dir) (Universal Studios and Columbia Pictures Industries, 2000). This quotation from the film is my transcription from the video. 70 See, e.g., Andrew, ‘Adaptation’; Bluestone, Novels into film, and Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1999). 71 Cited by Bluestone, Novels into film, p. 19. 72 Adam, Timescapes, p. 37. 73 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Routledge, 1990), 1.1.156, 157.
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