Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1974"

The Character of "Character"

Abstract: HAT EXACTLY is "character"? How is it possible at present to think of the "concept" of "character"-if it is a concept? Assuming that this concept has a history, how far are we along now in this history or in the examination of this history? What does "character" name? These questions are, on the one hand, involved in a whole system of critical presuppositions and crop up from traditional discussions about literature, within a conception of literary creation that is today outmoded. But, on the other hand, these same questions, having cropped up out of a disintegrating system, allow, through displacement, for the emergence of new, prying questions opening out onto the unknown of a text rather than its recognizable development; onto life, the incessant agitation of literary practice rather than its theses and its stability; onto its indescribable, unidentifiable aspects rather than its rules and means of being classified. To be more precise, it is with the removal of the question of "character" that the question of the nature of fiction comes to the fore,' as well as the examination of subjectivity--through fiction, in fiction, and as fiction: where the term "fiction" should not be taken simply (in the sense of borne in mind) as part of a pair of opposities, which would make it the contrary of "reality." Here, rather, it would appear that subjectivity as reality is continuously worked over by fiction, because of several factors: the surplus reality produced by the indomitable desire in the text; that which, beginning with the subject, tears itself away, through desire, from what already exists (le de~ij-ld), from the donnie, to project itself out into what does not yet exist (le non-encore-l&), into the unheard-of; and the imaginary, secreted by a subjectivity that has always been disturbed, changeable, literally populated with a mass of "Egos."

Narrative Structure in the Third Man

Abstract: The Third Man. as fiction, is usually classified among Graham Greene's "entertainments." What elevates The Third Man, as film, to the level of structure of The Power and the Glory, Brighton Rock, and the best of Greene's fiction is that, in the adaptation from novel to film, the "entertainment" becomes self-serious and self-serving, becomes a masterpiece of reduction and refinement. Where the narrative structure of the novel belongs clearly to the nineteenth century, depending upon character development, limited space and linear time, deliberate cause-and-effect relationships in the plot, and authorial observations or intrusions, the film belongs clearly to the twentieth century, for the characters are static and presentational; space is referential and variable, that is, to be seen in terms of multiple perspectives; time is circular, repetitive, associative; cause and effect become ritualized, conditioned, a series of real or imaginary expectations; and the caretaker narrator is replaced by the controlled eccentricity of the camera eye. Where the novel employs rhetoric, allusion or metaphor, relying on the connotative power of the words to evoke in the reader an envisioning of what is often never really there, the film employs ellipsis (distorted camera angles, a stylized musical track, editing on the basis of associative simultaneity rather than on the basis of sequence or succession), relying on the denotative power of the images to force the viewer to see in a new way what has always been there. Consequently, in the film's narrative structure the ubiquitous debris of war-ravaged Vienna has as much "presence" (denotative power) as any of the protagonists. As Sharon Spencer has stated, "A broad impulse toward expressionism underlies all the modern arts." 1 If this is true. The Third Man is at the forefront of the modern. And by exaggerating the denotative power of the image, by often rendering the real unreal, the film recaptures the connotative (figurative, symbolic) power of the original novel. With Calloway as narrator in the novel, the central character. Rollo Martins, never absolutely establishes himself as a bona-fide presence. Instead, he moves through the novel like a poltergeist, dependent in many respects upon Calloway (his avowed enemy through most of the novel) for his mouthpiece and, indeed, his very existence. Calloway is weak, because he is there but never acts (he doesn't precipitate action, he reacts to action initiated by others); Martins is weak, because, although he is very active, he is almost never "there" in the novel. As with most of the novel's characters, Martins is defined by his idiosyncracies, painted swiftly and strikingly by Greene/Calloway. Other central characters in the novel, like Harry and Anna, tend to be underdrawn in the same way, while secondary characters, like the porter (here Koch), Crabbit (here Cribbin) and Popescu (here Cooler) tend to be overdrawn for their relative importance to the story. Kurtz has his idiosyncracies (toupee, snuff box, silver cane, fur collar, violin); Winkel (here Winkler) has his idiosyncracies (objets d'art, obsession for cleanliness); but Holly and Harry are more important characters, either because they have more idiosyncracies or because those idiosyncracies are repeated more often. Calloway has the same dialogue with the reader concerning fact and fiction that Martins has with Cooler/Popescu. Calloway constantly reasserts his own credibility as narrator by asserting that what we read is fact, not fiction. I have reconstructed the affair as best I can from my own files and from what Martins told me. It is as accurate as I can make it - I haven't invented a line of dialogue, though I can't vouch for Martins' memory . . . 2 Later, when he describes Martins' observations of Kurtz, he says: The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action. …