Storytelling and Mythmaking

...The Devil's world is associated with feminine sensuality, heat, and darkness...

...Both circumcision and baptism are substitutes for child killing and so redemptive (p...

...Golding's parable offers characters as unfleshed ideas...

...Since his style is lucid, his tone calm, and his knowledge of both literature and film history considerable, Commonweal: 536 these fairy regular partings of company made me nervous, as if one of us had inexplicably wandered off the subject...

...I'd never thought much of Red River, but McConnell's description of the dissolve which spans twenty years in the film and focuses attention on the pretender (the "knight" of the American West) in the character played by Montgomery Clift rings true, tracing as it does the lateral move from epic to romance...

...So do the accounts of Sophy's life in the (hippy, yippy,) punk (or whatever it is currently called) London scene...

...He is a dramatist for the Williamstown Theatre Festival and a producer for the Dick Caven Show...

...He's particularly acute on transitions from one mode to another...

...He's good at the telling anecdote, too: John Wayne didn't feel like dying at the end of a film in which he'd ~tarred...

...Bakan's basic thesis is that, while proposing an explicit patricentrism, the Bible has many traces, both explicit and implicit, of matrilineal, matrilocal, and matriarchal elements...

...Stop this farce...

...And his chapter on satire as "a twice-told tale, repeating as 'farce'whatwasoncetoldas 'tragedy,' " is especially bright...

...The illustration is not a perfect parallel to our case since the author professes no atheism...

...Noah, "the major progenitor of all the rest of humankind," was possibly a female figure (so, matrilineal) before the text was tampered with...

...It's still murder, folks...

...I only wish McConnell had mentioned the host's frantic appeal to his butler amid the shootings and hysteria at his party's height--"Corneille...

...Bakan admits that "a license for speculation can also be an invitation for wild or self-serving interpretations...

...122-3) he argues, in line with that interpretation, that Sarah had a visitor in her tent after the promise of a child...

...The last section of the book is entitled "One is One...

...He simply has not the visionary power that offers us Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, say, or Saul Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm in Seize The Day, tragically disturbing yet ultimately reconciliatory figures...

...By interchanging "r" and "d" in Sarah's name, one can read it as meaning "field," the place where the seed (or "male sexual exudate") is deposited (p...

...Bakan sees it as a key text in the (canonical) development ofpatrilineality, as it still allows for the continuation of matrilinealitythrough divine impregnation...

...And the ultimate ascendancy of patrilineality, with its imposition on the father of greater concern for child-rearing and so involving an effeminization of the male, leads to the male's relationship in fidelity to a single God, much as the wife is faithful to the husband...

...No matter now many ingenuities are there to project "complexity" of vision, theirs is a simple and programmatic view of life after all...

...Bell...

...The order of letters in a text can be changed "to produce new words and new meanings" (p...

...It deals with the sons of God who "took themselves wives" fromamong the daughters of men, a traditionally difficult pericope...

...A good discussion usually follows...

...And it's never funny...

...Ifit had been theological rather than psychological "play," it would at least have been truer to the Bible's overall nature...

...Not only are plots similar...

...There are minor errors--Laura was made in 1944, not 1941, and the still of North by Northwest shows Grand Central Station in New York, not Union Station in Chicago--but these don't obstruct our 26 September 1980:537 relish of Storytelling and Mythmaking...

...One can squabble with McConnell over priorities, but essentially he achieved what he set out to do--to add a worth-while chapter to the (slowly) developing study of the debts film owes literature and the fascination of the "stories" they share...

...But he opens himself to that invitation when he states that precisely because the biblical stories are so unreal or inconsequential the reader can "play" with them...

...In an earlier version of the LotSodom story the sin may have been "a violation of the emerging principle of patrilocality" (p...

...Now Frank McConnell, a professor of English at Northwestern, has published Storytelling and Mythmaking , the central thesis of which is that film recapitulates narrative literature in Western art and the major themes and subjects of literary classics are echoed in contemporary movies...

...The Benjamin War (Jdg...

...al.--but, after all, why...

...Good, vivid dissections of My Darling Clementine, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, et...

...Stalin...

...Try as I may what I end up with is an impression of a very earnest writer, blessed with remarkable skills and up to all sorts of ingenuities, struggling with a dark vision of man trying to express it through a complex art, making another attempt at another tour deforce, and getting nowhere...

...But with a very few exceptionsneed for a comprehensible answer to the problem of evil...

...I said "too much of a good thing," and more than once the author's parallels strain credulity...

...The problem is certainly still with us, and no one could object to a twentieth century artist feeling a crying need to face it...

...There is more in this vein, all sharp, especially in an analysis of the movement of the Romantic hero of old into such disparate roles as the detective and the outlaw in this century...

...Golding cannot persuade that he is interested in them...

...It may very well be, he argues, that these could be helpful in taking on ourselves anew "the burden of social design" and "fashion appropriate arrangement among ourselves so that we may live...

...The novel's oxymoronic title is echoed in Matty's dualistic role as wise fool with two faces, and in the, dualities and doubl!ngs that abound...

...SFaCqARDMc¢~E teaches in the English department of Tufts University...

...The forces oflight have made some ground, then...

...The sexual encounters go beyond embarrassment, Golding gritting his teeth and getting it over with...

...And even if one takes the best Hitchcock films like North by Northwest seriously, as I do, the "social survival" link between Cary Grant's predicament in that film and the Ververs' marital crisis in James's The Golden Bowl overdoes things...

...Even theologoumena are made to cede to psychologoumena...

...The Manichaean movement developed as a response to the second century's crying Skirting the swamp of STORYTELLING AND IqYTHNAK]IIG: IMAGES FROMFILM AND LITERATURE Frank MeConneli Oxford University, $13.95, 289 pp...

...And it's uncomfortable being pressed into such priggishness...

...Renoir's Rules of the Game, suggests McConnell, is a masterpiece of intricacy the pace of which mirrors its own inner agitation--"the machinery is going haywire.., too intricately designed for its own original and originating purpose: to make the world habitable...

...Any serious and believing biblicist would have to challenge the invalidation of obvious theological meanings, intended by the biblical authors as revealed in both text and context, by the use of possible, underlying psychological insights, even while admitting that those insights may "constitute an important part of the cultural context of biblical history...

...I shall now risk another guess -- that Golding used a Manichaeanmythassustaning framework for Darkness Visible, as well as calling on the Old Testament prophets...

...A license for speculation l MIlDTBEYTOOKTMENSELVESWIVES DsvJd ILakan Harper and Row, $10., 224 pp...

...That is a very good point...

...ST~VELAWSONhas writtenfor Horizon, The New Republic and the New York Times...

...Chaplin's City Lights is brought in for some good observations ("Chaplin's greatest discovery as filmmaker and metaphysician," suggests McConnell apropos the recovered blind girl in that film, "was that the cruelest, and therefore potentially funniest, pressure we exercise upon one another is that of seeing each other"), not the least of which is its perceived influence on Allen's Annie Hall...

...in the original text "Ham took sexual advantage of his mother in her drunken state" (p...

...enthused G. K. Chesterton when he first saw Times Square...

...The special madness involved in the dialog of those "two selves" is, as the film makes clear, a madhess generated by the attempt tolive in the two identities at once...

...It is part of Matty's role to bring a unifying vision to his own self and some moments of such a vision to others...

...And the characters are all stereotypes...

...Later (pp...

...Later in the book, he sketches the plot sweeps of the film version of Lawrence ofArabia and the hopeless yearnings of the O'Toole Lawrence to live in the Western (British) and Eastern (Arab) skins at once, summing up beautifully...

...Here McConnell loses his footing and starts to sink into the Swamp of Profundity littered with thebones of those who saw Hjtchcock as a modern master of ambiguity, rather than as a brilliant exponent of emotional manipulation and visual rhythm...

...Also, divine impregnation, in the case of Mary, "served the purpose of Christianity, which sought to transcend the particularity of the more limited kinship of the Israelites...

...is working on a critical study of Evelyn Waugh...

...I would dispute (violently) his contention that Fellini's liberties with the original Petronius in his film Saryricon were "quite in the spirit of the author...

...FATHER JOHN L. McKENZIEo a distinguished biblical scholar, is the author of several books, most recently, The New Testament Without Illusion (Thomas More Press...

...profundity I -- Stanley Kanffmann, Leo Brandy in The World in a Frame,Robert Richardson in Literature and Film, the late Charles T. Samuels in Mastering the Film--the experts have come off as enthusiastically muddled as the masses...

...He boils these elements down into what he persuasively sees as the basic storytelling forms--the epic, the romance, the melodrama, and the satire...

...It is not this basic thesis with which I necessarily quarrel...

...Still, there are enough murky areas to make disagreeing with McConnell interesting...

...The Greek text of Luke suggests that the angel had sexual intercourse with Mary (p...

...white battles to the death which only gained great popularity during a gray war like Vietnam...

...9:22...

...Golding's glimpses into life among the depraved young, told in "their" language sounds embarrassingly pop-eyed and alarmist, like a busload of tourists peering through the windows at the Village or Haight-Ashbury ten years ago...

...For McConneU isn't embarrassed to admit film's literary heritage, and indeed starts off with Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism and its archetypal spring (comedy), summer (romance), autumn (tragedy), and winter (satire), supplementing these with the laws in Rousseau's Social Contract...

...w.s...

...Neither is the faith element apparent, however...

...Goodness, in Manichean terms, is associated with bright light, quickening fire, clear water and cooling wind...

...and the appropriately-named valet, replying with well-bred sangfroid, "Which one, sir...

...From this astute yet lively introduction of his premise, McConnell proceeds to apply it to both literary classics and latter-day films, drawing parallels all the way...

...Lord of the Rings was belated allegory, a nostalgic look back at black vs...

...Above all, I worried more than once that, for all his intelligence and acumen, McConnell was making the common buff error of confusing a film style (I refer to Ford, Hawks, and their ilk) with a regular set of subjects...

...that is the world of Sophy...

...So, by the stratagem of divine impregnation there are explained the retention of matrilineality along with the introduction of patrilineality,thenecessityof monotheism because of the latter, and Christianity's universalism through Mary's virginal (?) conception of Jesus...

...Pedigree is given a moment of unitary awareness...

...Even Mr...

...DiPIEROis a poet and translator, and teaches at Northwestern...

...For years, a few hardy commentators have sought to trace the parallels and differences between film and its antecedents in literature...

...The scholar has obvious advantages: knowledge of languages, of the history of religions, of archaeology, and especially of all the kinds of criticism that contribute to good exegesis...

...The Christian has one advantage, the insight of faith, not available to the atheist...

...Fredonia...

...The Genesis passage from which the book's title is taken is a case in point...

...The greater concern for children, which patrilineality was designed to foster and did, should not lead to a blind imitation of biblical patterns, which can lead to the major sin of idolatry...

...Goodchild and the childish school teacher Mr...

...Film critics and analysts have been more or less applying Chesterton's maxim to the narrative sound film and audiences' reactions to it ever since that locomotive scattered the front row three generations ago...

...instead, Joanne Dru makes peace between him and Clift and domesticity upstages tragedy or melodrama...

...He is forever separated from the purity of the culture he wishes to assimilate himself into by the very imagination-- modern,anthropological, self-conscious-which leads him to desire such an assimilation...

...McConnell's parallels can be equally keen, as in a look at the similarities between Vergil's Aeneid and Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible...

...FmLWTERZ~Nhas written for Commonweal, The New Republic and other journals...

...Hence, my opening question.Here are just a few illustrations of Bakan's "playing" with the texts...

...Ivan is also compared--more farfetchedly, but cheerfully--to the Marx Brother's Duck Soup: the epic versus the satire, both opening with stately inauguration ceremonies in wildly nationalistic countries (Russia...

...This explains the strange reaction to Ham's seeing his father's nakedness (Gen...

...What is more, it is bad for the writer, who perforce must present himself as one of the elect, and bad for the reader, too, who naturally excepts himself from the catechumen's role and wants to join the writer, up there with the elect...

...FATHEREUOENEX.MALVis a member of the faculty of Mr...

...Perhaps the explanation comes under "too much of a good thing...

...FATHER DAVIDTOOLAN, S.J., is assistant editor of Commonweal...

...as Ralph saw at the end of Lord of the Flies man's heart is dark: "darkness visible" is of course a phrase from Milton's description of Hell...

...Admirable, intense--and arguable...

...131...

...Commonweal: 538...

...For a film historian, McConnell is refreshingly free of movie-buff cant, and his book is devoid of that slightly desperate tone most film books assume when they think they aren't convincing you about this week's masterpiece...

...But it is clear in thefinal pages that such achievements have been costly, and are tenuous and precarious...

...Matty, whose mission it is to protect that small boy, keeps a journal about his sessions with his tutelary angels that seems, well, simply silly...

...Well, that is as it may be...

...It is the manner in which the biblical text is so frequently manipulated in order to arrive at selfserving conclusions...

...She moves to sadism, has a near-go at incest, and soon is planning and passionately imaging a combined sexual assault and knifing to death of a kidnapped small boy...

...Welles's Citizen Kane is seen, rightly, as another installment in a long line of "inheritance novels" like Bleak House, The Red and the Black, and Before the Revolution...

...Darkness Visible has its undeniable fascinations, and has been greeted with loud applause on both sides of the Atlantic...

...Yes, Samsa-as-cockroach can't admit anyone ieto his room, and yes, Bickle can't keep anyone out of his cab, but it's still reaching...

...Storytelling and Mythmaking, despite such lapses, is full of good points...

...But Manichaeans do not make good novelists...

...And I think he (like most admirers) overelaborates the shift in The Godfather(s) from the "human" killings of old Don Corleone to the "cold-blooded" efficiency of son Michael's new regime...

...Fire and water are Matty's elements, he is bathed in light, and his last name, which keeps changing, (I'm not sure why) is always associated with the wind -- Windrave, Windrove, Windrow and so on...

...both works were commissioned by despotic patrons--Augustus...

...Mary of the West Seminary in Ohio...

...The hellish twins, the pair of Bells, the duality that emerges in almost every character's dialogue with an inner self...

...J.V.LONG,In...

...Eugene H. Maly AQUF_~TIONI often ask my students is whether an atheistic scholar can understand the Bible better than a barely literate Christian...

...20-21) "may be interpreted as a story of victory over matrilocality" since the women must be moved from REVIEWERS ~O.RGARETWIMSATrlives in New Haven, Connecticut...

...One dissenting voice was Joyce Carol Oates, who remarked that Golding's fiction is "probably most admired by people who dislike'fiction...

...Having come from fire he dies in fire, in another apocalpytic scene, but not before he has saved a child's life, presumably thus expiating his early offense against Pedigree, and not before he has afforded a moment of silent vision to Mr...

...For Golding has a Manichaean cast of mind, and in such a worldview, although the elect'have their moments, and even humble catechumens such as Goodchild and Bell sometimes learn to see, the sublunary world is largely the Devil's property, and is passionate in its outrage and cruelty...

...McConnell no sooner had me on his side'in this book than a new ingredient in the debate would promptly alienate my sympathies...

...No, a film like The Longest Day does not "become almost Homeric," nor does an implied relationship between Gregor Samsa's anguish in Metamorphosis and Travis Bickle's madness in Taxi Driver convince that Scorsese is on Kafka's wavelength...

...As McConnell views it, the new ending makes more aesthetic sense, pointing up not so much a revolution in generational cdnflict but a growth of wisdom and "humanization...

...All this high-flown material escapes Golding's control...

...The interpretations he offers are far more dependent on psychological eisegesis than on theological exegesis...

...SteveLawson $BI||tHAT A WONDERFULSIGHT for y¢ people who can't read...