New Orleans Review VOLUME 12 NUMBER 41$7.00 Cover: "Stately Steed" by Peter P
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New Orleans Review VOLUME 12 NUMBER 41$7.00 Cover: "Stately Steed" By Peter P. Briant Watercolor, 22" x 28" Collection of Susan A. Thomas New Orleans Review Winter 1985 Editors John Biguenet, Art and Literature Bruce Henricksen, Theory and Criticism John Mosier, Film, General Editor Managing Editor Sarah Elizabeth Spain Design Vilma Pesciallo Contributing Editor Raymond McGowan Founding Editor Miller Williams Advisory Editors Richard Berg Doris Betts Joseph Fichter, S.J. Alexis Gonzales, F.S.C. John Irwin Murray Krieger Frank Lentricchia Wesley Morris Walker Percy Herman Rapaport Robert Scholes Marcus Smith Miller Williams The New Orleans Review is published by Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118, United States. Copyright © 1985 by Loyola University. Critical essays relating to film or literature of up to ten thousand words should be prepared to conform with the new MLA guidelines and sent to the appropriate editor, together with a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The address is New Orleans Review, Box 195, Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118. Fiction, poetry, photography or related artwork should be sent to the Art and Literature Editor. A stamped, self-addressed envelope should be enclosed. Reasonable care is taken in the handling of material, but no responsibility is assumed for the loss of unsolicited material. Accepted manuscripts are the property of the NOR. The New Orleans Review is published in February, May, August and November. Annual Subscription Rate: Institutions $30.00, Individuals $25.00, Foreign Subscribers $35.00. Contents listed in the PMLA Bibliography and the Index of American Periodical Verse. US ISSN 0028-6400 CONTENTS THEORY AND CRITICISM 18 Murray Krieger as Pre- and Post-Deconstructionist Terri Brint Joseph Ekphrasis and the Temporal/Spatial Metaphor in Murray Krieger's 34 Critical Theory Gwen Raaberg 61 The Cunning of Dialectic: Plato's Mastery Robert A. Brinkley 83 The Problem of Value in "Simon Lee" John Rieder POETRY AND FICTION 82 Maidenhair Daryl E. Jones 70 Thanksgiving Daryl E. Jones 60 Cornfields Larry French 28 Of Man's Desiring Bart Ramsey 90 ' Security LuAnn Keener 33 Mayflies David Sanders 27 The Woodworker Katherine Soniat 44 Beside What Doesn't Die Antonio Hernandez/tr. Frederick H. Fornoff 5 I . Sexual Politics John Mosier ·1 William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Directing Andre Bazin/tr. Alain Piette/ ed. Bert Cardullo 47 71 Joe Walker: The Cameraman Neil Hurley, S. J. : Three Hitchcock Heroines: The Domestication of Violence Kay Sloan 91 ( si bi lil K Fj a ir le tl tr ai Sl The New Orleans Review is planning a special issue on the politics of the ocular image in film, literature, literary · theory, and philosophy. il1 0 Papers are sought on such topics as how power is enacted in the gaze, the visualization of the other, metaphors of enunciation, the ocular representation of reason and unreason, and the genderization of discourse. b tl There are no specific requirements as to length. Papers should be prepared in accordance with the new MLA standards, and submitted by August 1986. c is This issue is planned for the Spring of 1987. tl tl Papers dealing primarily with film should be sent to the film editor, John Mosier; all others to Bruce Henricksen, y the theory and criticism editor. The mailing address in both cases is Box 50, Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana 70118. p a: a. h R at F1 E1 Ei S: H hi John Mosier SEXUAL POLITICS f the more interesting films in competition The Redl affair is the archetype for modern 0 at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, one society's distrust of homosexuals: their attempts · sizeable group emphasized the close relationship to lead double lives make them targets for between sexual and political behavior. This blackmailers, and they are easily led into linkage was the most obvious in Hector Babenco' s betraying their allegiance. Kisch and subsequent Kiss of the Spider Woman and Kusturica's When writers saw in Redl a more general problem: the Father Was Away on a Business Trip. In the former tension between the sensitive homosexual and a radical journalist and a lonely homosexual meet the oppressive heterosexual world in which he in jail: the journalist experiences homosexual lives. Alfred Redl was an exemplary officer and love, and the homosexual becomes involved in a sympathetic man, so the Redl affair is also the the journalist's cause. In the latter, it is the archetype for more enlightened accounts such as treacheries of sex that send the hero to prison, John Osborne's A Patriot for Me and the recent and it is through sex that he gets his revenge. But play Another Country. subtle variations on the central idea can be seen Szabo's interpretation rejects both the purely inMishima, Colonel Redl, and even in Puenzo's The homosexual theories and the literal facts. He Official History. makes Redl's life the focal point of Imperial So disparate are the treatments that it might be hopes: Redl' s sexual preferences have little to do better to call these films mediations on the idea with his demise. Although Alfred Redl as that sexual and political behavior are linked. Brandauer plays him is too given to Collectively the films show us what that linkage contradictions, he comes across as a dedicated is and how it operates in society. As mediations patriot. We see how from the first his patriotism, 1.:1'i they are intriguing in yet another way, because manifested in a childish poem read in school, gets :1 there really was an Alfred Redl and a Mishima him preferment to a military academy. As a ;I 1: ~ I Yukio, and their historical predicaments are as potential officer he is introduced to the better problematic-one might almost say cinematic things in life, and he becomes wholly as any artist might wish. indoctrinated with Imperial views. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of For Szabo the Redl affair is the archetype of the Istvan Szabo's Colonel Red[. Alfred Redl was a decline and fall of the Empire. A poor Ruthenian colonel in the army of the Hapsburgs. From 1900 lad whose intelligence and devotion to the to 1905 he was in charge of the counter-espionage Emperor propel him through military school, he . and espionage department based in Vienna. befriends an aristocratic Hungarian cadet, From 1905 on he was chief of staff of VIII Corps, Christopher Kubinyi, and drags him along in his based in Prague. He committed suicide on 25 May meteoric rise through the officer corps. He 1913, after having been caught passing military marries Kubinyi's sister, and, as head of the secrets to the Russians. The exact nature of the intelligence department, becomes entangled in affair was shrouded in secrecy. In the 1920s the Franz Ferdinand's clique, which by this time Prague journalist Egon Kisch investigated the constituted a virtual shadow cabinet. affair at length and concluded that Redl, a Brandauer plays Redl as a mercurial and homosexual, was being blackmailed by the unstable fellow. But he still comes across as an Russian military attache into spying. 1 outstanding officer and an attractive man, and would be more so if Szabo were more interested 'Two brief and authoritative perspectives on the Red! affair in Redl' s profession and Brandauer less 'are: Norman Stone, "Austria-Hungary" 43, and William C. enamored of histrionics. The real villain is Franz Fuller, Jr., "The Russian Empire" 115, in Knowing One's Ferdinand, who uses Redl as a scapegoat, turning Enemies: Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars, ed. his friends against him, isolating him, and setting : Ernest R. May (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Szabo's own comments (in the Press Kit supplied by him up with a young homosexual. Redl perceives Hungarofilm) speak of his conscious decision to violate the that he has been set up, and that he has become historical truth of the situation. the very person that Franz Ferdinand wan~ed him MOSIER 5 aroun to find. He understands that he has been nature of the Empire as a sign of moral deficiency. a film thoroughly betrayed, and that he is supposed to And for all of that, it fought well enough. The of the kill himself-not because of his sexual Army did not collapse until the end of war was really inclinations, but because of his abilities. He is to clear enough to all, and when it did, it was the ac be made a scapegoat, and his sexuality is simply holding almost all of the Imperial territory it held in 1914, which can scarcely be said for the French Szabo a convenient way of nailing him. Brand Szabo's point seems to be that in a society as or the Italians. timeF generally permissive as the Empire's, Redl is Most people thought that the Empire, or some a mac correct to see that he is doomed. Redl's efficiency, form of it, would survive the War (as it had energy, and allegiance to the Emperor should survived earlier defeats). Most of the evidence to make him the symbol of the Empire's ability to the contrary is hindsight, whether it is Musil use the upward social mobility of its ethnic looking back with sympathy or the intellectuals minorities as the great symbol of its stability. But of the Czech Republic trying to mythologize their his fall, caused by the intrigue of the court, national chauvinism. prefigures the collapse of the Empire. An edifice so morally rotten does not deserve to flourish. Szabo is at his best in sketching these things in; as in Mephisto, he sketches rather than details.