European journal of American studies

4-1 | 2009 Spring 2009

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/7518 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.7518 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 4-1 | 2009, “Spring 2009” [Online], Online since 18 March 2009, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/7518; DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejas.7518

This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Carnivalizing the Cold War: Mexico, the Mexican Revolution, and the Events of 1968 Julia Sloan

American Minimalism: The Western Vernacular in Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Andrew Wilson

Inventing and naming America: Place and Place Names in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Monica Manolescu-Oancea

THE MUMMY in context Richard Freeman

"Josef K von 1963...": Orson Welles' ‘Americanized’ Version of The Trial and the changing functions of the Kafkaesque in Postwar West Germany Anne-Marie Scholz

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Carnivalizing the Cold War: Mexico, the Mexican Revolution, and the Events of 1968

Julia Sloan

1. Introduction

1 During the 1960s, United States intelligence officers in communiqués back to their supervisors in Washington DC lamented that the political situation in Mexico was so complicated as to evade easy and sure comprehension. They expressed frustration and uncertainty about such things as the role of communism in Mexico, the ideology of the protest movements taking place there throughout the decade, and the difficult logic of Mexico’s relationship with Cuba.1 This confusion resulted from, among other things, the profoundly different views the two nations had of the Cold War.

2 The Cold War world was governed by the bipolarity established and enforced by the United States and the Soviet Union. Within this context, the superpowers engaged in a global struggle for nothing less than “the soul of mankind,” each advancing their own agendas for the betterment of all. For the United States the route to progress lay in modernization through democratic capitalism, involving bringing the world’s poorer nations into the international economy and elevating the living conditions of their people. Conversely the Soviet Union similarly advanced improvements in the material quality of life for the world’s poor, but through the communist system. Thus, both superpowers had essentially the same broad agenda, but diametrically opposed ideologies governing how to achieve it. Practically, however, their methods for reaching this goal were not so far apart, both involving the assertion of their military and economic power over the world’s weaker and poorer nations.2

3 Mexico was one such nation. For the United States the Cold War was a global struggle against communism as embodied by the totalitarian Soviet state. The United States government and a significant portion of its citizenry considered communism an evil force in the world, one that must be combated with all available ideological, military, and financial means. Mexicans, and Latin Americans in general, on the other hand took a much less critical view of communism and were less likely to associate all things

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communist with the Soviet Union. As a result, Mexicans viewed the Cold War not as a principled crusade, but as an example of aggression by imperialist states whose financial and military power allowed them to dominate less developed countries.

4 Nonetheless, neither Mexico nor any other Third World nation could escape the Cold War and its pervasive influence, both in international affairs and in domestic politics. Thus, to fully appreciate events and developments in Mexico during the Cold War, we must understand both the foreign and domestic components involved. We must explore the relationship between the overarching ideology of the Cold War and the important national ideology of the Mexican Revolution. We must employ what one scholar of the Cold War in the Third World has called the ‘double vision’.3

5 The Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin provides a theoretical framework through which the dynamic relationships between the superpowers and Third World nations, in this case Mexico, can be understood. Bakhtin characterizes heteroglossia as a situation in which context is more important than text. In a state of heteroglossia, the meaning of all utterances is defined by the context.4 As such heteroglossia is an apt concept for analyzing the Mexico of 1968 and, arguably, the ways in which the Cold War was experienced in the Third World in general.

6 In addition to heteroglossia, Bakhtin provides another concept useful for analyzing the Cold War in the Third World during the 1960s. Carnival or carnivalization involves the destabilization of the center, the normal, and the regular through the addition of multiple points of view. This concept illustrates the processes occurring in Mexico and throughout the Third World as countries began to contextualize the Cold War and learn how to exist, even succeed, within it. Their voices became part of the global policy discussions of the day. The resulting multivocal dialogue was at once destabilizing and complicating for the superpowers. Thus, in carnivalesque fashion, Mexico by the 1960s, had begun to reframe the Cold War not as a contest between communism and capitalism, but as a contest between the nations that were internationally dominant and those that were dominated. Taken together, heteroglossia and carnivalization posit a world in which Third World peoples appropriated the rhetoric, ideologies, and symbols of the Cold War for their own purposes. In doing so the multiplicity of texts within the Cold War context fractured the bipolarity the superpowers had worked so assiduously to maintain.

7 In this environment where bipolarity had given way to conflicting discourses and an increasingly multivocal understanding of the Cold War, Mexicans began to view the Cold War, its combatants, and its battles through the lens of their own Revolution. That Revolution, as embodied in the 1960s by its institutionalization (the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI) and revolutionary nationalism, was an ongoing struggle between the government and the popular classes and their advocates for control of the national agenda. The Cold War became a primary discursive arena in which this struggle was waged in the 1960s. Most prominently in the watershed year 1968, when Mexico hosted the Olympic Games and experienced its most significant social protest movement in a generation, the conflicting discourses of the Cold War took center stage. This article seeks to identify those discourses and the points at which they influenced the events of 1968. 2. The Influence of Communism 8 The reasons for the primacy of Cold War-related discourses in Mexico in 1968 were multiple, but foremost of all was the fact that communism occupied a prominent

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position in the struggle between Mexican youth and their government. In a clear example of heteroglossia, the context of communist ideologies, sympathies, and allegations proved far more important than the text. A local understanding of communism won out over the global characterization advanced by the United States. In addition, US anti-communist rhetoric failed to have the desired effect in Mexico, and pro-communist positions resonated throughout Latin America for reasons that had little to do with the Cold War and much to do with regional circumstances.5

9 As one Cold War scholar has noted, “Communist Parties in Latin America and their sympathizers cannot easily be fitted into the United States State Department’s kit for profiling communists.”6 Profiling communists in Mexico would likely involve casting too wide a net due to the popular front strategy adopted by leftist parties throughout the region. As the name implies, the popular front was a coalition of organizations allied in their adherence to certain general principles but sometimes quite divergent on the specifics. Communists might ally themselves with all manner of other leftists to achieve a broad goal or advance a general agenda within a particular country, but this alliance would not necessarily equate to ideological agreement. Thus, communists in Mexico were neither the political outcasts nor the social scapegoats that they sometimes were in the United States.

10 Even when those seeking to profile communists could identify them within the popular front, the very nature of the communist agenda could prove problematic within the rigid structure of bipolarity. This is because, as Jorge Castaneda argues, for communist parties in Latin America the “long-term objective remained a national, democratic revolution, agrarian reform, and an alliance with the middle-classes and the national bourgeoisie.” Such an alliance would be antithetical to strict Marxist doctrine but as Jean Franco contends, “Marx’s work is often badly translated and crudely digested” in Latin America.7 This is not to suggest that Latin Americans could not accurately translate or digest Marxism, but rather that they chose to make of it what worked best for them. Here again is an example of heteroglossia.

11 The resonance of the popular front in general and communist ideas in particular in Latin America rested in the simple fact that “in Latin America, joining the Communist Party was one way of getting close to that elusive entity – the ‘people’.”8 Because of the centrality of “the people” to the discourse of revolutionary nationalism, any political movement or organization in Mexico professing to advance their interests was likely to fall in line with the ideology of the institutionalized revolution. Protestors and politicians alike looked to “the people,” both real and mythologized, for revolutionary validation and popular legitimacy.

12 The Cuban Revolution in 1959 and Fidel Castro’s conversion to communism shortly thereafter brought these issues to the forefront of Mexican political discourse.

13 The Cuban Revolution put the Mexican government between the proverbial rock and a hard place. The rock was the United States, whose determined, public opposition to the Cuban Revolution and Castro government helped shape a decade of United States - Latin American relations. The hard place was Mexican public opinion that saw in the Cuban events something akin to the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917, and thus something positive and worthy of support. 9

14 After Castro allied himself with the Soviet Union, the United States attempted to isolate Cuba from the community of nations. Mexico refused to sever ties with Cuba despite much pressure from and repeated efforts by the United States to expel Cuba

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from the Organization of American States. A 1964 vote imposed sanctions against Cuba and required all member states to comply. Mexico’s ruling party, seeking to avoid “popular wrath,” steadfastly refused. 10

15 President Adolfo Lopez Mateos revealed the complexity of Mexico’s position on Cuba when he said: “We Mexicans have, alone, accomplished our revolution, by ourselves and for ourselves. We could no longer say this about the Cuban revolution.”11 With this brief statement Lopez Mateos attempted to appease the United States by condemning Cuba’s affiliation with the Soviet Union while reaffirming the Mexican commitment to revolutionary nationalism; to reject communism while validating revolution. Such diplomatic and rhetorical machinations make clear the context of Mexican popular interest in Cuban communism and provide a potent example of the multi-layered significance of one of the Cold War’s most contentious relationships.

16 By the late 1960s communism remained at the forefront of Mexican political discourse, but still often in heteroglossia fashion. For example, in 1968 both the student protest movement and the administration of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz routinely invoked “the people” when asserting their revolutionary and nationalistic credentials. As the youth protest against Diaz Ordaz and his government grew larger and more vitriolic, the president worked harder to discredit it in the eyes of both foreign and domestic audiences. His key strategy for doing so was to claim communist conspiracy and foreign infiltration of the student organizations. The Diaz Ordaz Administration had some plausible evidence for making such assertions, but these claims did not have the desired effect at home or abroad. The student movement, as a popular social protest movement, ostensibly began on 26 July 1968 when two student marches collided in downtown Mexico City and erupted into a riot.12 One of the student groups was marching in protest against government violation of university autonomy and the ensuing acts of repression committed by the hated riot police, the granaderos. The other group was marching to mark the anniversary of the Cuban revolutionary attack on the Moncada Barracks. The latter group clearly had communist members and was influenced by communists. A number of student organizations at Mexico’s major universities, particularly the UNAM, had communist members, ideals, or agendas. The government had for years monitored these groups and manipulated campus politics. While the conflagration on 26 July 1968 was cause for increased concern, the pro- Cuban students’ political orientation provided the government with an opportunity to deflect attention from the other group of students who expressed legitimate criticism of police repression.13

17 As the student movement continued and grew through the summer and fall, the Mexican government kept up its claims of communist agitation. Yet this explanation did not have the anticipated impact on either of the intended audiences, the Mexican public or foreign observers. Firstly, for Mexican public opinion, the communist threat was not sufficiently menacing. Communist and socialist political parties operated relatively openly in Mexico and had an influence in labor unions, on university campuses, and in intellectual and artistic circles. Secondly, even United States embassy and intelligence-gathering personnel did not accept Diaz Ordaz’s claims of communist control of the student movement. This skeptical assessment from American officials, even in a time when State Department and Central Intelligence Agency officials could be accused of wearing rose-colored glasses given their propensity to overstate the red menace, reveals the danger in crying communist. Diaz Ordaz sought to use communist

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conspiracy allegations to gain political legitimacy for his repressive handling of the student movement, but instead only undermined his image among American officials.14 Justifications for rejecting the student demand to repeal the controversial Law of Social Dissolution may have been rooted in the need to protect Mexico from internal subversion, but they were highly problematic. Passed when then Senator Diaz Ordaz had led that body, this statute in the Federal Penal Code was sufficiently vague as to be widely applied and sufficiently broad as to be easily abused. The law covered any activity engaged in by an individual or group that could be deemed as threatening the social fabric of Mexico. Mexicans as diverse as striking railroad workers and the famed painter David Alfaro Siquieros as well as students in 1968 were charged and jailed under this law.15 Once again the language of the Cold War, threats of communist infiltration, and foreign subversion peppered discussions of this law and prevented its repeal, all the while reflecting the dominance of US-style rhetoric over the substance of political reality in Mexico.

18 Even as the government of President Diaz Ordaz committed its worst act of violence and repression against the student movement, it continued to allege communist conspiracy. Just hours after the brutal Tlatelolco Massacre in which a still undetermined number of civilians, most of them students, were killed, government officials made another public claim of communist infiltration and communist responsibility for the carnage of that evening. After midnight on 3 October 1968, as soldiers hosed the bloodstains from the Plaza de las Tres Culturas and ambulances and army trucks carried the bodies of the dead back to military bases, the Mexican government summoned foreign journalists to a press conference. In addition to informing these reporters that student snipers had fired the first shots and that this was a matter of national security, the government claimed that communist agitators from abroad had been responsible for the violence that had taken place.16 Here again, the Mexican government employed a rhetorical weapon of the Cold War to perpetuate a lie and justify a heinous act. 3. Politicization and Internationalization 19 Another reason why heteroglossia and carnivalization characterize the events of 1968 in Mexico and why Cold War discourses came to occupy such an important place in these events is due to what Greg Grandin has called “the politicization and internationalization of everyday life” in Mexico during this period.17 During the Cold War in Latin America, the most routine elements of national life like newspaper editorials, labor negotiations, and university curricula were dominated by the rhetoric of bipolarity. When the Cold War came to Latin America a constant, unrelenting filtering of all aspects of national life through North American and Soviet Cold War barometers began.

20 The “everyday” concept popularized by James C. Scott, and most notably applied to Mexico by Gilbert Joseph et al in Everyday Forms of State Formation, does not confine itself to the elements of life, personal or societal, that are truly mundane. Rather it also connotes those events of popular origin undertaken by “everyday” people as opposed to heads of state, captains of industry, and celebrities in artistic and intellectual life.18 Certainly the 1968 student movement was not a mundane occurrence, but it was a popular movement. Further it was part of a growing constellation of popular movements, including almost annual student strikes throughout the 1960s as well as protest movements launched by railroad workers, teachers, doctors, and others. The

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student movement was definitely undertaken by everyday people, tens of thousands of them who took to the streets to protest, hundreds of them who languished in prison for their participation, and an additional undetermined amount that died as a result of that participation. Grandin’s quote suggests that the lives of everyday people, just like the actions of their governments, were politicized and internationalized. The events of 1968 did not change this, but rather revealed that Mexicans had begun to internalize this reality. The United States and the Soviet Union filtered national events for the purpose of surveillance and control. Mexicans did this as a means to advance their own agendas.19

21 Though the student movement did not succeed in taking its message directly to the people and winning their support as French students had tried to do in Paris, the Mexican youth did have an ideological affinity with certain elements of the press. This is not to say that large numbers of journalists openly praised the student cause (although some did), but rather to suggest that left-leaning editors and columnists tended to perceive Mexico’s situation in much the same way the students did. Some journalists presented ‘rebel without a cause’ images and derided the students as lazy and spoiled at best, delinquent and subversive at worst. Countless articles about the youth problem and the generational question ran throughout the summer of 1968 in Mexico City periodicals.20

22 However, countless other articles framed Mexico’s domestic situation in the context of the Cold War. These journalists, like the students, recognized the “politicization and internationalization” of their everyday lives and their country’s everyday problems and controversies. In articles too numerous to list, the Diaz Ordaz Administration and the United States shared blame for many of the problems facing the nation. The war in Vietnam was the obvious focus of much of this condemnation, but the Mexican media took aim at individuals and agencies of the United States government as well. Most significantly, references to the Mexican Revolution and the institutionalized revolution (usually as being in trouble) and the Cold War (usually as being partially to blame for the trouble) worked their way into articles ostensibly about the student movement. It seemed that Mexican journalists, in their everyday coverage of the student movement, could hardly write about it without making reference to the Cold War.21 Thus they helped to popularize the politicization and internationalization of everyday life. 4. The Context of Mexican-US Relations 23 A third explanation of the convergence of revolutionary nationalism and the Cold War lies in the long history of Mexican relations with the United States. Looking at diplomacy, politicians on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border had long since recognized the importance and the complexity of the relationship between their two nations. With a shared colonial past and hard-fought struggles for national independence, the doctrine of pan-Americanism had found many adherents in the late 19th and early 20 th centuries in both countries. However, as the nature of Mexico’s dependent status relative to the United States became clear, and as Mexico became embroiled in a revolution in which that dependence would be a key issue, the relationship between the two neighbors became more complex. Perceived cordial relations with the United States became a political liability for Mexican officials at home but a virtual necessity abroad. Militarily, the United States dominated Mexico, the United States was Mexico’s most important trading partner, and a long history of

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cross-border migration left the populations and interests of the two nations inexorably intertwined.

24 During the 1910 Revolution, anti-Americanism became a hallmark of Mexican nationalism when militants targeted United States and other foreign investments and new laws tightened the country’s hold on its natural resources and key industries. Expropriation of US-owned property, assertion of subsoil rights, and limitations on foreign ownership all framed foreign involvement in Mexico as a threat to revolutionary principles. The land and labor reforms so central to the revolutionary ideology of 1910 were substantively tied to anti-Americanism as post-Revolutionary governments took land from foreign owners and distributed it to the campesinos and as new labor laws protected workers from the exploitation they had previously suffered. It was also politically expedient for the new ruling party, which framed economic nationalism alongside land and labor reform as the third leg of the institutionalized revolution.

25 When the Cold War was in its infancy, Mexican anti-Americanism evolved from issues of expropriation, land ownership, and treatment of labor to broader issues of national sovereignty, economic nationalism, and anti-imperialism. In the 1960s, for the people in the popular front and communist organizations, “the principle enemy was once again imperialism, reduced to its barest expression, the government of the United States.”22 Among the Mexican population as a whole, the majority of people favored remaining neutral during the Cold War.23

26 As the students took on their government in 1968, the latter’s relationship with the United States was of central importance. Anti-Americanism had occupied a prominent place in Mexican revolutionary nationalism since the days of the Revolution itself, but that sentiment had ebbed and flowed throughout the intervening half century. Episodes like the oil expropriation in 1938 and the nationalization of the electrical grid in 1958 sparked groundswells of anti-Americanism, as did the Cuban Revolution, Bay of Pigs invasion, and death of Che Guevara. As the latter three items suggest, popular criticism of the United States, its policies, and all it represented was on the rise in the 1960s, and was quite visible in the 1968 student movement.

27 Beyond United States guilt for the failed invasion of Cuba and complicity in the death of Che Guevara, a more generalized critique of the systemic place of the United States in the world had taken hold in Mexico in the 1960s. Mexicans, particularly those of the political left, resented American dominance in global affairs and influence in Mexico.24 Thus, the deeply rooted strain of anti-Americanism in Mexican political discourse took on new significance during the Cold War. As the students challenged their government in 1968, one example of the “primacy of context over text” comes from the student marches themselves and their tendency to make references to Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong in their signs, banners, and chants. Che was an iconic figure throughout Latin America, particularly after his death at the hands of United States forces in Bolivia the previous year. Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong were similarly symbolic but perhaps less understood in Mexico. Thus, when the students carried pictures of Che Guevara and chanted Mao-Mao-Mao-Zedong as they marched through the streets of Mexico City during their protests, the context of these figures was far more important than the texts of their lives and their ideologies. These men were symbols of defiance, independence, and resistance, in the case of Che and Ho Chi Minh, against the United States. When the students made reference to them, the message was

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not one of ideological solidarity with Cuban, Vietnamese or Chinese communism, but rather unity in the struggle against domination.

28 Tens of thousands of Mexican youth participated in rallies and marches in the summer and fall of 1968, and while certainly a portion of them knew and agreed with the ideological texts of these revolutionaries, the vast majority just knew that they were revolutionaries. And to be a revolutionary in Mexico had, for decades, been looked upon favorably as advancing the cause of the downtrodden, fighting for independence, and standing up to imperialist powers like the United States. Thus, the importance of these figures and the use of their images and names in the protests of 1968 lies not in their value as text, but as context. The students lauded them for revolting against the US-dominated status quo, asserting their independence from American domination, and standing up for the weak in the face of American strength.25 5. Conclusion 29 While scholars provide far more eloquent explanations, the old cliché that all politics are local ultimately proves illusory. Mexicans viewed the events of the Cold War, internalized them, and came to understand them as related to their own history and particularly their revolution. The Cold War was an all-encompassing international ideology. The Mexican Revolution was an all-encompassing domestic ideology. Both were pervasive throughout politics, economics, society, and culture, becoming explanatory discourses in the process. Both provided legitimacy to their adherents and were delegitimizing for those in opposition.

30 As President Diaz Ordaz and Mexico’s youth were locked in conflict to determine the meaning of that revolution and the character of the national agenda for the future, the Cold War was the arena in which they waged this battle. Three factors contributed to the centrality of the Cold War in 1968 Mexico. First, the juxtaposition of the aggressive anti-communist stance of the United States with the more tolerant and more fluid understanding of communism in Mexico made identifying communists a politically expedient move. In Mexico, politicos quickly learned that labeling an individual or group as communist was sure to raise suspicion and even contempt for them. Thus, when Diaz Ordaz was looking to discredit the student movement in 1968, labeling them as communist and raising the specter of a communist threat to the stability of Mexico seemed a likely way to win support from the United States, other members of the international community, and certain sectors of the Mexican population for repressing the students. Unfortunately for Diaz Ordaz however, the communist label did not produce the desired results. Few either at home or abroad took the threat seriously enough to act upon it. As it turned out, Diaz Ordaz was right about the global context, but wrong in assuming that this context could overcome the local text that rejected his notion of communist control of the student movement.

31 The second factor, “the politicization and internationalization of everyday life” similarly brought the Cold War more prominently into Mexican politics. The filtering of national life to express its Cold War significance effectively carnivalized the Cold War by assigning so many issues a Cold War significance and thus bringing so many people into Cold War debates. Bipolarity gave way to a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints coming out of the Third World and demanding acknowledgement. In 1968 Mexico, the press played an integral role in this “politicization and internationalization” across the Mexican political landscape, most prominently on issues related to the student movement. The press, particularly that on the left,

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routinely framed the student rebellion and politics in general within the context of the Cold War.

32 The third and final factor in making the Cold War a primary discursive arena for the contest between the students and the government was anti-Americanism. Mexico had a long history of anti-Americanism, the context of which had little to do with the Cold War prior to the 1950s. Thus, when the students marched in the streets carrying signs of Che Guevara or chanting Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh, theirs was not solely a display of solidarity with the peoples of Cuba and Vietnam, but rather a declaration of support for revolution, independence, and anti-imperialism. Neither did this represent acceptance of Soviet, Cuban, or Southeast Asian communism, but instead acceptance of Third World economic nationalism and national sovereignty. The youth were embracing anti-American symbols and in so doing, in 1968, in the height of the Cold War, elevating national issues to become international Cold War debates.

33 These Mexican Cold War narratives included a position on communism which evolved throughout the decade, from the early 1960s when being labeled a communist was a political liability, to the late 1960s when governmental attempts to similarly label the student movement failed. These narratives also included a strong anti-American and anti-imperialist stance, both of which had their roots in Mexican revolutionary nationalism and the long history of United States-Mexican relations. In each of these cases, domestic, revolutionary ideologies became the lenses through which Cold War issues and events were filtered. More importantly, they became arenas in which Mexican nationalists and proponents of the institutionalized revolution could prove themselves. By 1968, this pattern was well established. The ideological impact of the Cold War had already become such a part of the Mexican political landscape when the student movement began that it was already inseparable from the events themselves.

34 Mikhail Bakhtin provides us useful theoretical tools with which to come to an understanding of the integration of the Cold War into national life at all levels and with varying degrees of significance. The expansion of Cold War understanding and debate that such integration precipitated served to carnivalize the Cold War, transforming it from mere bipolarity into the complex cacophony of influences that it clearly was by 1968. Further, heteroglossia serves to bridge the analytical gap between the macro and micro-level workings of the Cold War, between the overarching ideologies and agendas and the everyday events and attitudes. We know 1968 changed nations as well as the international milieu in which nations operated. We know that 1968’s legacy is at once profound and nebulous. This application of theory to the events of 1968 in one country is meant to serve as an example of how research that seeks to integrate the national and the international, the ideological and the practical might be undertaken. The three issues in the Mexican case (the different understandings of communism, the convergence of the everyday and the local with the significant and the global, and the impact of long-standing pre-Cold War factors) serve as points of departure for further research. In this way a truly global understanding of a watershed year like 1968 may be gradually put together. Julia Sloan, Assistant Professor of Social Science / History, Cazenovia College, Cazenovia, NY

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NOTES

1. United States officials monitored any and all communism-related items in Mexico with great interest and considerable concern. Difficulties arose, however, concerning the identification of communists and when the motivation for a particular statement, action, or event could be deemed to be ‘communism’. For example, U.S. officials paid close attention to the actions of former Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas and appeared to have difficulty reconciling his nationalist, populist persona with his association with known communist organizations and sympathizers. For examples of U.S. commentary on communism in general and Lazaro Cardenas in particular, see Department of State Telegram, 2 August 1968, POL 23-8 Mex, POL 13-2 Mex, Box 2340; Department of State Airgram 27 June 1964, POL 14 Mex, POL 6 Mex, Box 2344; Department of State Airgram 17 February 1965, POL 6 Mex, Box 2344, Department of State Airgram 27 June 1964, POL 2-1 Mex, Box 2344, all in Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park (hereafter RG 59, NA). The communist question would remain prominent throughout the decade and particularly during the 1968 student movement when embassy communiqués routinely contradicted themselves about the role of communists in the movement. On numerous occasions consular officials reported Mexican government and/or press assertions of communist involvement, only to follow them up with analysis questioning the validity of these reports. Words like “scapegoat” appear in the correspondence as U.S. officials criticized the Diaz Ordaz government’s handling of the student crisis. For examples of such analysis, see Covey T. Oliver to the Secretary of State, September 20, 1968, POL 23-8 Mex, Box 2340; Department of State Intelligence Note, September 26, 1968, POL 13-2 Mex, Box 2340; Department of State Telegram, 2 August 1968, POL 23-8 Mex, Box 2340, RG 59, NA. In addition to being uncertain about the communist involvement in the movement, U.S officials were wrong about the students on several other counts as well. Most significantly, after the Paris Spring when the State Department questioned whether other countries could experience a similar student uprising, the Mexican Embassy staff said no. In their analysis, undertaken in late spring and early summer of 1968, serious conflict similar to the French situation was at least two years off and would not occur before President Diaz Ordaz left office. Within two months, the embassy would have to acknowledge that a crisis akin to that in France was not only possible in Mexico, but underway. Other, more minor miscalculations suggest an overall intelligence failure, such as when at the end of September the embassy reported a calming of tensions between students and the government and cautiously projected an optimistic resolution to the conflict. Less than a week later, U.S officials would be reporting on the carnage at Tlatelolco. See Department of State Telegram 6 July 1968, POL 13-2 Mex, Box 2340; Department of State Telegram, 14 June 1968, POL 15 Mex, Box 2341; Department of State Telegram 29 September 1968, POL 13-2 Mex, Box 2340, RG 59, NA. Finally, Mexico’s relationship with Cuba remained of constant interest to the United States throughout the 1960s. For examples of U.S. analysis of that relationship, see Department of State Telegram 29 September 1969, POL Cuba-Mex, Box 2336; Foreign Service Despatch No. 1101, March 30, 1961, Amembassy, Mexico, D.F. to Department of State, Box 1511, RG 59, NARA.

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2. Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3. Arif Dirlik, ‘The Third World in 1968,’ in Carole Fink, Phillip Gasser, and Detleff Junker, 1968 The World Transformed (Washington, D.C., The German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 1998): 295-317. 4. Utterances herein will not be confined to the verbal, but will also be taken to include written text, visual images, government policies, and symbolic actions taken by groups or individuals. See Robert Bennett, ‘National Allegory or Carnivalesque Heteroglossia? Midnight’s Children’s Narration of Indian National Identity,’ in Barry A. Brown et al (eds.) Bakhtin and the Nation (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000): 177-194; Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 295-302; Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. Caryl Emerson. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 5. Jean Franco The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002): 60. 6. Ibid., 60. 7. Ibid.,60, 59. 8. Ibid., 66. 9. With his quote “Poets may see the world in a grain of sand… but only diplomatic historians could reduce the Latin American Cold War to a Cuban beach” Greg Grandin warns of the danger in placing too much emphasis on Cuba. For Mexico however, an emphasis on Cuba is warranted. Joseph, In from the Cold, 9; Angel Gutierrez, Lazaro Cardenas Y Cuba (Ciudad Universitaria, Morelia, Michoacan: Universidad Michoacana De San Nicolas De Hidalgo, Instituto De Investigaciones Historicas, 1989). Thomas C. Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1991): 41. 10. The first United States attempt came in January 1962 at Punta del Este, Uruguay. With Mexico’s no vote and abstentions from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador, the United States did not have the necessary votes to remove Cuba. By 1964 however, with Argentina, Brazil, and Ecuador ruled by military regimes, the vote carried despite no votes from Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, and Uruguay. Wright, Latin America, 41, 65; Lorenzo Meyer, The Course of Mexican History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): 658. 11. For information on the position of the Lopez Mateos Administration, see ‘Ponencia al Comite Directivo Nacional,’ GD 304, AGN, and ‘Joint Weekly No. 13,’ Foreign Service Despatch no. 1101, AmEmbassy Mexico, March 30, 1961, Box 1511, RG 59, NARA 12. While the 1968 student unrest grew out of the July 26 melee and the events of preceeding days, student protest had become virtually endemic in Mexico during the 1960s. For more than a decade and across the country, student unrest had been commonplace. Thus, the 1968 movement was part of a much larger wave of youth activism in Mexico. For example, between 1963 and mid 1968 alone there were 40 episodes of student unrest that the U.S. State Department considered “significant.” See Department of State Airgram no. A-1471, November 3, 1968, POL 13-2 Mex, Box 2340, RG 59, NARA. 13. Donald J. Mabry, The Mexican University and the State: Student Conflicts, 1910-1971 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982).

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14. Philip Agee, Inside the Company (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975); Department of State Telegram 2 August 1968, and Department of State Memo to Secretary of State from Covey T. Oliver, August 28, 1968, POL 23-8 Mex, Box 2340, RG 59, NARA 15. ‘Estos Son Los Agitadores!’ Hoy, No. 1475 (17 August 1968): 18-25. 16. Christopher Brasher, Mexico 1968: A Diary of the XIXth Olympiad (London: Stanley Paul, 1968). 17. Greg Grandin as cited in Gilbert M. Joseph, ‘What We Now Know and Should Know: Bringing Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies,’ in Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser (eds.) In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008): 4. 18. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds.), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). 19. Carole Fink makes a similar argument; stating 1968 represented a key phase in the Cold War when a “peculiar linkage between domestic and international affairs” emerged “between social and cultural developments, on the one hand and world politics, on the other.”Carole Fink, Phillip Gasser, and Detleff Junker, 1968 The World Transformed (Washington, D.C., The German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 1998): 2. 20. Leopoldo H. Mendoza, ‘Mexico Y Sus Jovenes,’ Hoy, No. 1422 (8 August 1966): 52-53; Ricardo Ampudia M., “Responsabilidad De La Juventud Mexicana,” Hoy, No. 1473 (20 July 1968): 18. 21. Examination of a variety of Mexico City newspapers and magazines from the summer and early fall of 1968 provide many examples of the trends discussed herein. In particular, see Siempre! and Politica. 22. Franco, The Rise and Fall of the Lettered City, 60. 23. Seth Fein, ‘Producing the Cold War in Mexico: The Public Limits of Covert Communications,’ in Joseph, In from the Cold, 171-213. As many as 71 per cent of Mexicans favored neutrality during the Cold War. 24. See Westad, The Global Cold War for a general discussion on political attitudes in the Third World. 25. Ibid., 158. The United States government recognized this and diplomatic correspondence between the American embassy and the Department of State makes repeated reference to the importance of revolutionary nationalism. One example of such correspondence is Department of State Airgram A-1471, November 3, 1968, POL 13-2 Mex, Box 2340, RG 59, NA.

AUTHOR

JULIA SLOAN Julia Sloan, Assistant Professor of Social Science / History, Cazenovia College, Cazenovia, NY

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American Minimalism: The Western Vernacular in Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.

Andrew Wilson

1 In January 1977, Gary Gilmore was executed in Utah for the murders of Max Jensen, a gas station attendant, and Ben Bushnell, a motel manager. Preferring death to a life in prison, Gilmore refused to appeal his sentence. In a landmark case, he was the first person to be executed in the U.S. in a decade after a Supreme Court ruling against capital punishment in 1972. The Executioner’s Song (1979), in one thousand pages, documents the period from Gilmore’s release from Illinois State Penitentiary in April 1976, to his execution just over nine months later. After the execution, Norman Mailer went to Provo, Utah, to interview the families, friends, lawyers, legislators and civil rights activists involved in the “true-life story” and to prepare the groundwork for his first western. The purpose of this paper is to address and account for the western voice(s) used by Mailer in his treatment of Gary Gilmore’s life story. The minimalist approach to narration and minimal authorial presence is read alongside and contrasted with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” and explored by way of Mailer’s use of tragic and cinematic properties, as well as oral- based, real life testimonies.

2 “The Executioner’s Song” had been used as a title in earlier works: it first appears as the title of a poem in Cannibals and Christians (1966), and then as a chapter heading in The Fight (1975), a documentary novel on the heavyweight contest in Zaire. The poem’s speaker associates an executioner’s work with the poet’s labour for inspiration: “if (I) could kill cleanly…” he might execute “a fist of the Lord’s creation/into the womb of that muse which gives us poems” (131). If this is the source, the title of the Gilmore life story refers to Mailer. He executes a “song” in a literary coup de grace. In The Fight, “The Executioner’s Song” refers to Muhammad Ali, who would execute a “fine ending” against George Foreman – self-determinism – which would “live in legend” (200). Therefore, Gilmore, defined in the book as “his own writer” executes – again self-

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determinism – a defiant ending to his life (793). The title could even target the Attorney General’s office, and other advocates of capital punishment, who ‘sing’ of death.

3 “Execute” derives from the Latin ‘ex(s)equi’ – to follow. Mailer’s position in The Executioner’s Song is also one of “following”. After ten consecutive autobiographical works, Mailer rid his prose of every discernable feature of his earlier narrative presence. His previous voices, idiom, favoured vocabulary and polemical strategies disappear in The Executioner’s Song; he is neither a character, nor a thinly-veiled narrator. Jean Radford goes as far as to deny both the existence of a narrator or a single voice: Not only have the usual tags ‘she said’ or ‘he said’ been omitted, the narrator’s voice is virtually effaced in favour of the diction, syntax and grammar of the original speaker or interviewees (55).

4 Other absences include the understated representation of Gary Gilmore and of his victims’ widows. After beginning work at an insulation plant, Gilmore “just sat on a piece of machinery off to the side and ate the food in all the presence of his own thoughts. Nobody knew what he was thinking” (55). This is as relevant to the readers of The Executioner’s Song as it is for the characters involved in Gilmore’s story. Every character, with the exception of Gilmore, has free indirect discourse; Gilmore’s thoughts, in contrast, do not appear. Moments before his death, this “veritable Houdini” tells the book’s producer, Lawrence Schiller, “You’re going to help me escape” (982). Mailer makes certain that Gilmore’s thoughts escape the reader’s detection. Of the widows, only Colleen Jensen appears in “Eastern Voices” after her husband’s death in “Western Voices,” as if to reiterate her marginalised position in the story. Her return to the narrative consists of two paragraphs in which the narrator makes known that “she did not tell” her enquiring school students about her life after her husband’s death (1000). She appears, in effect, for the narrator to point to her concealment, disappearance, during the capital punishment proceedings.

5 Notwithstanding these self-excising features, The Executioner’s Song is a self-referential study. The second book “Eastern Voices” regales the genesis of the first book “Western Voices”. Lawrence Schiller’s “book” – Gary Gilmore’s “true-life story” – ends as the writing of “The Executioner’s Song” begins. The penultimate chapter, with its transcript of Schiller’s first interview with Nicole Baker, Gilmore’s girlfriend, closes with the producer’s grievance, “so he went on with the interviews and at times was ready to cry in his sleep that he was a writer without hands” (1043). “Eastern Voices” ends just as the work begins to find a writer (Norman Mailer) rather than a speaker (“a writer without hands”) to craft the life stories that comprise “Western Voices”.

6 Mailer may have sought to pre-empt charges of complicity in the Gilmore case by alluding to his absence. A decade earlier, Kenneth Tynan entitled his review of In Cold Blood – Truman Capote’s “non-fiction novel” on the execution of two men in Kansas for the murder of four members of a farming family – “For Cold Cash”. Tynan cited Capote’s five year research on the lives of the condemned men and his remonstration at the capital punishment process. The review targeted Capote’s absenteeism in the defence of the lives of Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock between 1960 and 1965. Mailer’s title refers to the position of representation, or Schiller’s plans for a literary re- enactment, in the original proceedings. In the fourth chapter of “Eastern Voices” Lawrence Schiller is introduced as a book and film producer who “put together a project that became a book about Marilyn Monroe” (629): a reference to Norman

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Mailer’s “novel-biography” Marilyn (1973). Schiller and Mailer worked together on The Faith of Graffiti (1974) and for a fourth time for Oswald’s Tale (1995), the life story of John F. Kennedy’s assassin. Schiller buys the rights to Gary Gilmore’s “true-life story” and hires Life columnist Barry Farrell to prepare interview material. Schiller concedes: “all around me, I’m becoming part of the story” (714). Farrell realized he had “become an integral part of this machine that was making it impossible for Gilmore to take an appeal” (831). Schiller’s ‘true-life story’ had, to a certain extent, an influence on the capital punishment proceedings, by obliging Gilmore to fulfill his contract. The question of Mailer’s place in the proceedings arises, which he responds to by forcing the reader to recognise his absence at the very end of the second book. “Eastern Voices” is another chapter in the saga of Mailer’s self-referential vein of writing, the making of The Executioner’s Song moulding the content of The Executioner’s Song.

7 A larger question which persists in criticism of The Executioner’s Son relates to Mailer’s literary contribution: if he has not invented a style or dialogue, narrative action and its arrangement, what has he done and where does he appear? A few features of the text provide a clarification of this discussion point: (1) an emphasis on appearance (2) an understated authorial intention. Mailer presents a surface world of North American life in The Executioner’s Song. Every character, with the exception of Gilmore’s fellow prison inmate Gibbs, is described as handsome in appearance. In the case of women, there is reference to their beauty, in the case of men, their strength: Brenda knew her power in conversations like these. She might be that much nearer to thirty-five than thirty, but she hadn’t gone into marriage four times without knowing she was pretty attractive on the hoof, and the parole officer, Mont Court, was blond and tall with a husky build. Just an average good-looking American guy, very much on the Mr. Clean side, but all the same, Brenda thought, pretty likeable (9).

8 The aesthetic ground-plan is to attract the readers’ eyes to the surface of the page, or to deny depth and interpretation. Along with his decision not to present Gilmore’s thoughts, Mailer veils Gilmore’s motive for murder, and the intentions beneath his behaviour, to suggest the difference – or lack of difference – between two types of killing, murder and execution. There is a virtue, for Mailer, in dispensing with a centred, authoritative narrative voice. If murder and execution are denied an interpretation or a stated intention, they are indistinguishable on the surface: killings by gunfire. The appearance of murder and execution (this is true in the Gilmore case if not in the Clutter/Smith case) is the same. As a means of introducing this idea, Mailer documents the surface world.

9 The influence of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) on The Executioner’s Song is evident in this regard. Capote’s title referred to both the killing of the Clutter family and the execution of Smith and Hickcock: “Maybe I drink too much, but I sure as hell never killed four people in cold blood.” “Yeah, and how about hanging the bastard? That’s pretty goddam cold-blooded too” (298).

10 Mailer revised Capote’s verdict on the shared properties of murder and execution, even taking his chapter heading for the execution “The Turkey Shoot” from the latter’s description of the hangman as a “turkey buzzard huffing then smoothing its neck feathers” in the final part of the novel (214). There is a fundamental difference, however, between the two books. The Executioner’s Song is not in keeping with In Cold Blood in its presentation of the tenuous boundaries between the true life act and the

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narration of the act. In Cold Blood exercises a judgment, as discussed in due course, on the capital punishment process. The Executioner’s Song serves a plea in defence of its characters on both sides of the legal divide and, by implication, an apology by its author.

11 Neither writer spoke favourably of the other’s work, Capote charged Mailer with having “stolen” his non-fiction novel technique, while undertaking none of the extensive research that went into his own book (Plimpton 214). And, with this in mind, Capote and Mailer differ most in their varying dependency on the spoken testimonies of others. In The Executioner’s Song, Mailer’s narration recreates the “prairie twang” that Capote describes, although only includes in his dialogues, as a Kansas (western) accent in the opening paragraph of In Cold Blood (1). Gilmore’s speech, for instance, is described by his cousin, Brenda, as “twangy, held back” in the first chapter, “The First Day” (10). The regional dialect is accentuated for the page: “but, boy, I got tore up on that plane. I was happier than hell,” Gilmore says to Brenda on meeting her after his release (13). Capote retained the literary veneer (“grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples”) he brought to earlier novels, serving to increase, an intended effect, his narrator’s distance from the West: “Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances,” suggests the narrator, conveying the impression on the eye to a visitor, “not that there is much to see”(1).

12 Mailer worked against the written word, the baroque design of the documentary novels between The Armies of the Night (1968) and The Prisoner of Sex (1971), and concentrated on reproducing the idiom, or spoken word, of Utah’s working men and women. Mailer strove, in a renewal of the spirit of the American Renaissance of the previous century, to produce a democratic literature and corresponding vernacular; if not a paean to working class life, The Executioner’s Song nevertheless confers equality to the various voices, and grants an equal treatment of the various subjects.

13 Novelists have a tendency to distort speech, abstract the written word from the spoken word, to support authorial intention. Mailer argues along these lines in his essay on the 1964 Republican Convention, with a parody of the speech of William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson: ‘Nobody of course was Quentin Compson. Nobody spoke like that any more’ he concluded (Cannibals 8). Sentences that would not be spoken by a storyteller are written for their worth in referring to something beyond themselves or for their metaphorical value. The Executioner’s Song shuns metaphorical elaborations and poetic license in its minimalist aesthetic. The place of the spoken word is clarified in the differences between the narrative contents of the first part of The Executioner’s Song and the first chapter of In Cold Blood (passages of equal length). Mailer’s and Capote’s differing strategies can be gauged in their opening references to a New World Eden. The second of the twenty-two sections that form the first chapter describes Mr Clutter’s morning journey through his orchard: The little collection of fruit bearers growing by the river was his attempt to contrive, rain or no, a patch of the paradise, the green, apple-scented Eden, he envisioned. […] Passing through the orchard, Mr Clutter proceeded along beside the river, which was shallow here and strewn with island – midstream beaches of soft sand, to which, on Sundays gone by, hot-weather Sabbaths when Bonnie had still ‘felt up to things’, picnic baskets had been carted, family afternoons whiled away waiting for a twitch at the end of a fish line. Mr Clutter seldom encountered trespassers on his property (11).

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14 American individualism has its effect on Capote’s narration: his descriptiveness (“a patch of paradise”, “the green, apple scented Eden” and “hot-weather Sabbaths”) does not belong to the oral, group storytelling tradition. Narration in In Cold Blood testifies to the isolating effects of individualism on the lives, experience and speech of its characters. Capote’s narration, in contrast to Mailer’s voice, is an abstraction of the spoken word. In terms of the larger story, or any story, Clutter’s walk is inconsequential to the narrative’s progress. For Capote, the description clarifies aspects of Clutter’s character, focusing on a setting which is woven into the larger framework of his thematic concerns, Smith’s and Hickcock’s assault on utopia. Nevertheless, the act itself, Clutter’s walk, defies dialogue, or spoken report, other than the bare statement – he passed through an orchard. The description is, however, a means of creating mood. Capote’s first sixteen sections, before the killers’ arrival on the Clutter property and the subsequent discovery of their corpses, represent complete tranquillity, as in the stated case. The Clutters’ last day is marked by its normalcy, just as Smith’s and Hickcock’s journey is marked by obliviousness, on their part, to the gravity of what is underway. For the Clutters’ last day, Capote reports only fragments of dialogue. In terms of concrete verbs, or physical acts, Capote includes Mr Clutter permitting pheasant hunters to shoot on his land; Nancy teaching Jolene Katz to bake a cake; Mrs Clutter showing the girl her miniatures and retiring to bed; Kenyon varnishing a mahogany chest as a wedding present; Mr Clutter, presiding at a 4-H meeting, proposing to honour a neighbour at an Achievement Banquet; the family watching television together in the evening (11–50). Cases of developed dialogue involve a resident employee asking Clutter if he can return to his wife to care for their sick infant, Nancy’s detection of the scent of cigarette smoke in her father’s study, and Herb’s disheartened response to news of a neighbour’s plans to move to Nebraska (10– 34). All of which refer to an injury to, or failing of others, and a relation between people, in contrast to the independent position of each family member (baking a cake, varnishing a chest, retiring to bed) during the majority of the day. Capote represents a silent country, on the brink of an explosive noise, as one side of national life collides with another.

15 Nothing of this kind could appear in The Executioner’s Song; the basis of the narration is an oral testimony or a dialogue. In a later true life story, Oswald’s Tale, Mailer returned to the lean prose of The Executioner’s Song. The foundation of narrative here is fragments of conversation and, more often, speculation or gossip. For instance, discussion of the state of Marina’s marriage to Oswald: She bumped into Misha Smolsky once on the street, and she asked her how she was doing with her man, and she answered, ‘very difficult’. Misha said, ‘If it is difficult, why did you jump into it?’ She said, ‘No, he’s not a bad guy, but food is very difficult’ (452).

16 In The Poetics of Norman Mailer’s Non-Fiction, Markku Lehtimaki also gauges the central position of the spoken word in Mailer’s true-life story: In The Executioner’s Song there are several instances where the narration not only ‘imitates’ dialogic communication but is actually derived from a tape-recorded interview between the author and real-life person. This type of conventional discourse both represents and foregrounds oral storytelling or ‘natural’ narratives (274).

17 Mailer’s novel also opens in an orchard; the mood of this incident, as with most in the novel, is a distillation of various strong or unpleasant sensations which, in each case

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and in contrast to Capote’s opening, bring about a fraught dialogue. In this first chapter, the children are frightened by the prospect of discipline, at some point verbal, for their transgression: Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree. She climbed to the top and the limb with the good apples broke off. Gary caught her as the branch came scraping down. They were scared. The apple trees were their grandmother’s best crop and it was forbidden to climb in the orchard. She helped him drag away the tree limb and they hoped no one would notice. That was Brenda’s earliest recollection of Gary (5).

18 Mailer begins his narrative with the imprint of an event on memory. “There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively” Walter Benjamin argues, “than the chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis” (91). Mailer first concentrates on a literal fall, and then a metaphorical fall-from-grace. Each incident in the novel appears to have been selected for its potential mark on memory, rather than its worth in referring to an idea beyond itself. Capote, without detracting any less from his purpose, does not include acts of magnitude in the Clutters’ last day, which contributes to the force of the final discovery itself. In Cold Blood draws on the features of a psychological novel: free-indirect discourse, the past ever intrusive in the present consciousness. In order to increase the depth of his characters’ experience on that last day, Capote retreats from their acts to their thoughts. In his introduction of Perry Smith to the narrative, Capote delineates Smith’s consciousness as he waits for Dick in the Little Jewel café. In the present, Smith’s singular, concrete act is to chain-smoke. Of the past, the reader discovers, Smith has Cherokee and Irish parentage, collected maps, and dreamt of prospecting and singing in Las Vegas. This description of a chain- smoking reverie consists of four extended paragraphs (12–15). The Executioner’s Song, in contrast, thrives on pure narration (Benjamin’s “chaste compactness”) and the absence of psychological delineation. Capote’s narration is descriptive, and has proportionally less dialogue than The Executioner’s Song. The dialogue, indicating a relationship or exchange between two or more people, is the starting point for the narration in Mailer’s novel. Using as many words as Capote does for the Clutters’ last day, in the first part of The Executioner’s Song Mailer describes Gary Gilmore’s first day (the influence of In Cold Blood is evident in Mailer’s inversion of Capote’s first chapter title), his first week and first month: The First Day Brenda, aged six, falls from an apple tree. She is caught by Gary. Brenda and her sister Toni sponsor Gary’s parole from Illinois State Penitentiary. Gary flies to Utah to live with Brenda, exchanging his bus ticket for the comfort of air travel. The First Week Gary moves to Uncle Vern’s house. Brenda helps him buy clothes. Gary begins work at Vern’s shoe shop. A date is arranged with Lu Anne Price. He raises his fist after she rejects his advances. The First Month Gary is unable to speak during a family dinner. Gary and Rikki Baker chase girls in GTO automobile. Toni and Brenda discuss Gary’s financial dependency on Vern. They recommend new residence and employment. Marjorie Quinn refuses to speak to Gary after passing out on a drunken date with him. Gary is arrested, though not charged, for fighting with a driver after hitchhiking to Idaho. Brenda and Toni drive to Idaho to collect him from a bar.

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Gary begins work at insulation plant; he smashes the windshield of Marjorie’s Quinn’s car. Rikki Baker refuses to help Gary rob a bank. Gary swears and shouts in the cinema in the presence of Brenda and her husband. Gary pays Val Conlin his first instalment for a Mustang. Gary introduces his new girlfriend Nicole to Brenda.

19 Gilmore is the catalyst for most discussion, the subject of other people’s dialogues in The Executioner’s Song: Uncle Vern advising patience after Gary goes over his ill- tempered first date; Brenda informing Gary of the financial strain that he has put on her father; Brenda’s and Vern’s arguments with Gary over his hitchhiking and arrest in Idaho; Brenda, Johnny and Spencer McGrath expressing dismay at Gilmore’s relationship with a teenage mother (31–66).

20 Mailer presents a panoramic view of the social activity that revolves around Gilmore’s hour to hour behaviour, the antics of the self-defined “eternal recidivist” (798). Without irony, Mailer provisionally entitled his life story of Gary Gilmore “American Virtue” – based on his response to the character of the western social landscape (Lennon 390). The Executioner’s Song is Mailer’s version of an American tragedy, whereas In Cold Blood is a protest against a number of institutions in the U.S. Intention is undercut in several ways; in Mailer’s faint presence, in the absence of free-indirect discourse in the characterisation of Gilmore, and in the absence of lingering judgement on the part of the hundreds of characters that comprise The Executioner’s Song. Mailer has done this for an aesthetic effect. In Poetics, Aristotle has a definition of the most effective tragic narrative: Necessarily, we are concerned with interactions between people who are closely connected with each other, or between enemies, or between neutrals. If enemy acts on enemy, there is nothing pitiable either in the action itself or in its imminence, except in respect of the actual suffering in itself (20).

21 Gilmore murders two Mormon family men at their respective workplaces. His paltry profit discredits the financial motive; the crime as direct cause-effect is also untenable. Gilmore’s intention is not to inflict injury on an enemy, but nor does he, as Aristotle would have it, commit the pitiable deed of harming a relation. In The Executioner’s Song, Mailer is out to achieve a tragic effect by understating intentionally hateful acts between people. To produce a cathartic conclusion to his story, the reader has to develop longing for the injured or absent (after death, disappearance, separation) characters. Longing for the tragic figure is limited if the character has continuously and intentionally committed hateful acts towards others. As Aristotle continues, “it is better if the action is performed in ignorance and followed by recognition – there is nothing disgusting in this, and the recognition has great emotional impact” (23). In In Cold Blood, the execution is knowingly undertaken by the prosecutors, which Capote protests against. Mailer withdrew anger, disgust – whether for his protagonist or his protagonist’s opponents – and critical judgement from his proceedings to ensure readers were not led into opposition to any specific character or group. Rather than use a third-person narrator as a commentator on the character and psychology of his people, his characters gave their verdicts on one another. In the absence of a fixed perspective, readers journey between various positions on murder, capital punishment and media coverage. In contrast, Capote’s narrator raises objections to the prosecution and the supporters of capital punishment. He gives the example of the selection of a juror who testifies to opposition to capital punishment by principle, but not in the case of Smith and Hickcock. The narrator concludes: it is “a declaration which, to some who

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heard it, seemed clearly indicative of prejudice” (265). On the worth of his protagonists’ legal representation, the narrator interjects: “a classic country lawyer more happily at home with land deeds than ill deeds” (275). Capote’s response to the prosecuting attorney and Judge is evident in his critical description of “[a] citric smile [that] bent Green’s tiny lips” and the latter’s deflection of the defence testimony – “his Honour saw that it went no further” (288). Capote’s narrator defines the eventual hanging of Hickcock and Smith as a “ritual of vengeance” (331). The narrator’s judgements are not a feature of the first three chapters; Capote interprets, and presents without censure, the thoughts of the Clutters, Smith and Hickcock. He does this without an undercurrent of indignation, either to the family’s lives or the latter’s criminality. In The Executioner’s Song, judgements reside and rest with the characters. The narrative progresses through the eyes of the witnesses; the possibility of a single consciousness, voice or verdict gaining advantage over others is reduced. The presentation or presence of every character’s intention, or the absence of intention, bitter thought, altered the tone of his writing considerably from Capote’s prose voice. In an interview with George Plimpton, Mailer distinguished between his technique and Capote’s approach: “What the hell is In Cold Blood finally? It’s the description of a crime from the outside” (214). Capote treated those characters that acted ‘in cold blood’ from a distant, external perspective, according to Mailer. Capote does not present the internal life of the ‘cold-blooded’ authority figures; he does, however, describe the inward existence of Smith and Hickcock. In contrast, Mailer largely avoided identification with Gilmore. As Robert Merrill suggests, “no one in The Executioner’s Song offers a more persuasive psychological profile of Gilmore than Gilmore himself” (172). As Gilmore recedes, Mailer encourages the reader to pity other characters, rather than side with or oppose anyone in particular. In an early stage of his enterprise, Schiller concedes, “I have a big problem. Where are the sympathetic characters?” (646). Mailer’s personal position on the criminal and execution case does not intrude on, or conflict with his characters’ voices and consciousness. The characters in The Executioner’s Song, with the exception of Gilmore, are sympathetic, due to the fact the narrator, in so far as there is one, does not adopt a critical position on his characters. Merrill argues: If we read the book as Mailer conceived it, we must feel compassion for nearly every character – for Kathy Maynard as well as Larry Schiller, for Earl Dorious as well as Kathryne Baker, for the youthful April Baker as well as the elderly Bessie Gilmore (178).

22 Mailer ensures that Schiller and every other character are pitiable. Every character’s intentions towards others are ‘virtuous’ if limited. Schiller, whom other characters consider a “carrion bird” is depicted as a conscience-burdened, self-critical figure: He said to himself: ‘I don’t know any longer whether what I’m doing is morally right,’ and that made him cry even more. He had been saying to himself for weeks that he was not part of the circus, that he had instincts which raised him above, a desire to record history, true history, not journalistic crap, but now he felt as if he was finally part of the circus and might even be the biggest part of it (857).

23 In his pitying rather than indignant tone of narration, Mailer meant to draw in the reader, rather than “disgust” or repel, to encourage absorption in the novel’s group life.

24 The Executioner’s Song has over one hundred characters (active agents rather than named persons in the narrative), by far Mailer’s largest assemblage. Mailer’s “true-life story” has a panoramic perspective that proved popular with the writer, but elusive in

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the society for several reasons. Group activity in an advanced individualistic, capitalist state is limited; participation in ‘national’ affairs is also restricted by representational government. The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song dealt with group life, or the dissolution of individualism, to various degrees. The first describes a U.S. platoon, consisting of thirteen soldiers, waging war on a Japanese army for control of a Pacific Island. The characters represent a cross-section of American life, bound together by circumstance (and need of medical attention) rather than nationalism or patriotism. In The Armies of the Night, his delineation of the protest march to the Pentagon, Mailer joins with 150,000 Americans to register opposition to government foreign policy in South East Asia. In both cases the individual’s independence dissolves in the group activity: a march, a riot as in Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1969) or a litter-bearing mission. In The Executioner’s Song, he weaves together family, social and political group life: various families (Damico, Nicol, Gurney, Baker, Gilmore), working class communities (Orem and Provo, Utah) and a legal (Utah State Prison and the Attorney General’s office), media (ABC News and Salt Lake Tribune), religious (Mormon, Catholic) and political (UCLA and the Utah Coalition against the Death Penalty) backdrop attending to and determined by Gary Gilmore.

25 The difference between The Executioner’s Song and the earlier works is that, while Mailer created a group presence, a mountain patrol and a vigil at night before the Pentagon in The Naked and the Dead and The Armies of the Night , he did not bind together the individuals who made up the group. For instance, consider the basis of the relationship between Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell in The Armies of the Night. Mailer and Lowell drink together at a party and discuss their roles for the march; Mailer and Lowell speak separately to an audience of anti-war protestors at a Washington theatre; Mailer and Lowell dine together and compliment one another on their speeches at the Department of Justice; Mailer and Lowell march to the Pentagon together and stand to the side of a Yippie exorcism ceremony; Lowell fails to follow Mailer to the Pentagon lawns, at which point the latter is arrested (13–129). As a character, Lowell is a presence, rather than a narrative agent. He shares with Mailer nothing other than that which they share with hundreds of thousands in their group: the personal desire to get to the Pentagon to protest a war. In contrast, in The Executioner’s Song, characters act in concert with one another, or in opposition to one another, aiding or injuring one another directly, and serving only as narrative agents: Gary catches his cousin Brenda when she falls from a tree; Brenda acts as a sponsor for Gary’s parole; Brenda asks Gary to find new lodgings and new work; Brenda drives to Idaho to bring her penniless cousin back to Utah after another arrest; Brenda alerts the police to Gary’s whereabouts after the second murder while he waits for her husband to arrive (6–264).

26 The broad social scope of The Executioner’s Song is assisted by its partial ties to the oral or storytelling tradition. The Executioner’s Song is a story of a man who is executed after refusing to appeal his death sentence. The Armies of the Night is the story of a man who tries to gain entry to the country’s military headquarters to protest its workings. In contrast, The Naked and the Dead, the narrative of a mountain patrol, belongs to the tradition of novelistic discourse. What separates The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner’s Song is a memorable story about a protagonist. The Naked and the Dead narrates a patrol, rather than regaling the tale of Croft’s mission to force his soldiers to the summit of a mountain. The first two texts, The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song are based on a line of reasoning which, in turn, possess a meaning: a person’s choice between a lesser life and death, and a person’s decision to confront his

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country’s political authorities for its unacceptable war. Both define the qualities of the protagonist and his antagonist. The opposition of good/attractive traits and evil/ unattractive characteristics marks the said stories: Gilmore’s plea for a dignified death versus Gilmore’s senseless murder of two married men; Mailer’s brave confrontation at the Pentagon versus the brutality of the military police. These central acts are memorable and the foundation of every other incident in the story. In consequence, the imaginative potential and moral significance of the protagonist’s exceptional situation resonates in the memory, without which storytelling is restricted.

27 The Executioner’s Song is not entirely bound to that oral tradition, group network. As with In Cold Blood, its narrative does not progress purely through cause and effect. Gilmore’s killing of Jensen and Bushnell is not a direct or intentional effect of his separation from Nicole. A narrative with cause-effect ties between each episode, in its strict and memorable ordering of events, would be repeatable for the reader, as in the oral tradition, as a story in which the final statement completes a series of acts: In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song still consist of fragments. In the final part, “The Fading of the Heart”, Mailer ends his narrative with forty two fragments that describe the response of the principal characters to Gilmore’s death. Where fragmentation does exist in both texts, the effects are cinematic, as Frederick Karl states: “Each paragraph like a burst of film reel, existing in itself, but carrying the viewer forward to the next unit” (522). Again In Cold Blood has an influence over The Executioner’s Song. Capote’s Eisenstein-like montage or juxtaposition of the Clutter family’s last day and Perry and Dick’s journey across the state of Kansas to their farm leads Mailer to cut between Colleen Jensen’s work and worries during the day and night of her husband’s death and Gilmore’s journey from the gas station where he would kill her husband to the motel where he would spend the night. The Executioner’s Song is cinematic not only in the fragmented arrangement of the narrative, the gaps between paragraphs resembling the cuts between shots, but in the brevity of the descriptions of landscape. In its pre- publication form, John Aldridge described The Executioner’s Song as “a sort of immense prose photograph”, meaning the narrative had an unusual visual aspect for the printed word (176). In realist literature, the narrator is known for delineating setting, furniture and fashions as a record of the material world inhabited by the people of a certain age and class. In the first chapter of In Cold Blood, the narrator describes the precise furnishing of the Clutters’ house: As for the interior, there were spongy displays of liver-coloured carpet intermittently abolishing the glare of varnished, resounding floors; […] a breakfast alcove featuring a banquette upholstered in blue-and-white plastic. This sort of furnishing was what Mr and Mrs Clutter liked, as did the majority of their acquaintances, whose homes, by and large, were similarly furnished (7).

28 These details are largely avoided in The Executioner’s Song. Mailer’s consideration to setting consists of occasional simple sentences: Right outside the door was a lot of open space. Beyond the backyard were orchards and fields and then the mountains. A dirt road went past the house and up the slope of the valley into the canyon (5). The mountains had been gold and purple at dawn, but now in the morning they were big and brown and bald and had grey rain-soaked snow in the ridges. It got into their mood (18).

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29 The colours of the landscape, more than anything, “got into their mood”: colours, not the signs for colours, affected mood. For Morris Dickstein, The Executioner’s Song concentrates on the pre-rational mood or response to an environment:

30 Mailer’s old belief in personal freedom gives way here to a brooding sense of how the unvaried landscape, Mormon culture, and dysfunctional families resonate in people’s lives without fully explaining their behaviour. (161)

31 The description of setting is cinematic in that it succeeds through spectacle, with a broad emphasis on the present. In film, the audience does not have to be told there is a mountain in the background. It may not even register as a word, or a conscious thought, beyond its primary features, colour, shape and form, as Mailer implies. Language, indicated in the continual use of the past tense, is bound to the past, whereas spectacle lives in the present. Mailer’s cinematic aesthetic is also a reflection of a broader minimalist approach to language. Realist literature, and a great deal of novelistic discourse, describes places and property and outward garb to sustain the reader’s mental landscape whether incidental to the plot or not. The writer guards against potential hazards of the imagination to ensure the reader sees the world the writer intends to project in language. This is not necessary in cinema; the world exists, on screen after set-design, for the audience.

32 Both Mailer and Capote introduce film-inspired documentary techniques to their novels. Capote very often encloses character’s viewpoints in quotation marks. The Chaplain’s clerk at Kansas State Penitentiary, Willy-Jay, is described as Perry’s “real and only friend” (40). By sealing statements in this way, Capote intimates an interviewer/interviewee dialogue between the narrator and his characters. The narrator repeats and incorporates disclosed information, witness testimonies, police reports, culminating in Capote’s allusion to his own prison visits between 1960 and 1965: ‘“Nobody ever comes to see him except you,’ he (Hickock) said, nodding at the journalist, who was as acquainted with Smith as he was with Hickcock”’( 327). Mailer’s division of his prose into separated, isolated paragraphs also suggests a witness testifying to an undisclosed reporter or director. For instance, Mailer shifts back and forth between the perspectives of ten characters in “The Turkey Shoot” chapter as if each character were asked, in turn, for their interpretation at critical moments in the proceedings.

33 Capote registers his position on the capital punishment-divide through the narrator’s aside-like commentary during the trial. In the absence of broad public opposition at the time, Capote assumes the voice of dissent to the trial, sentencing and hanging of Smith and Hickcock. Capote intends to draw conclusions as to the mainsprings of Smith’s “motiveless” crime, which lead him to make analogies between Mrs Clutter’s illness (“it was physical, a matter of misplaced vertebrae”) and Smith’s own mental disorder (5). In an interview with George Plimpton, Mailer’s criticised Capote’s judgement on this subject: I think Truman decided too quickly this is all heredity, that in their genes his killers were doomed and directed to act in this fashion; there was no other outcome possible (214).

34 Mailer’s final statement would, in fact, reinforce the premise of Capote’s aesthetic arrangement of his material: the montage of the Clutters’ last day and Smith and Hickcock’s journey to their property; this illustrates an inevitable drift rather than a cause-effect (logical) narrative progression.

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35 The Executioner’s Song looks to restore language to the specified incident. Mailer is determined to reconcile the word to the world, and to bridge the gulf between the word and the world (not an unusual goal in realist or representational writing). Even though he uses the past rather than the present tense, Mailer closes the gap between the event and the narration of the event. In her Lectures in America Gertrude Stein argues that art should “live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present” (112). Although Hemingway, rather than Stein, is the more obvious source and influence, The Executioner’s Song is committed in its child-like immediacy to the “complete actual present”. To clarify, consider a recent position taken by Mailer regarding the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York. In Why Are We at War? he gives an account for a public’s muted responses to representations of life’s most critical situations, or its suspension of belief: The one thing TV always promises us is that, deep down, what we see on television is not real. […] The most astonishing events, even terrifying events, nonetheless have a touch of non-existence when seen on the tube. […] It’s why we can watch anything on TV (8).

36 According to Mailer, the audience’s senses are distracted by the presence of the medium, whether film, literature or painting, which serves as a disrupting and distancing effect for the witness, minimising realism, impact and imprint. Before The Executioner’s Song went to print, its author admitted his purpose in adopting a markedly lean style, reminiscent of reported speech: “The aesthetic imperative, if there was one, finally came down to: let the book be lifelike,” Mailer told John Aldridge, “let it be more like American life than anything that’s been done in a long, long time” (182). Not everything is completely suited to description. Violent acts, for instance gunfire, require the writer to replicate in words an auditory and visual, rather than verbal, act. If Mailer thought to reproduce realistically Gilmore’s violence, the written word, any word as a sign, would prove a barrier. In The Executioner’s Song, Mailer does recognise certain limits. There is a dual operation in the novel: (1) simple language as the world (the realism he aspires to) and (2) the word irrevocably estranged from the world (the reader cannot hear or sense the gunfire). His description of the murder of the gas station attendant is so understated he could be writing about a minor, everyday event:

Gilmore brought the Automatic to Jensen’s head. ‘This one is for me,’ he said, and fired. ‘This one is for Nicole,’ he said and fired again. The body reacted each time. He stood up. There was a lot of blood. It spread across the floor at a surprising rate. Some of it got onto the bottom of his pants (224).

37 The pivotal act of the first book is reduced to eight, single clause sentences, without adjectival statement or interiority. The account of the execution is slightly more developed. The final moments of Gilmore’s life are seen through the eyes of eight witnesses. The execution itself is relayed through three viewpoints: Right through the cotton, Ron heard these whispers, ‘One,’ ‘Two,’ and they never got to ‘Three’ before the guns went, ‘Bam. Bam. Bam.’ So loud it was terrifying. A muscle contracted from Ron’s shoulder down to his lower back. Some entire school of muscles in a spasm. Schiller heard three shots, expecting four. […] Vern just heard a great big WHAM! When it happened, Gary never raised a finger (986).

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38 What words convey sufficiently the auditory resonance of gunshots? “Bam. Bam. Bam.” “WHAM!” There are no words commensurate to the sound of gunfire. Although The Executioner’s Song exhibits cinematic techniques, as a text of printed words it cannot render or begin to recreate, unlike documentary film, gunfire. Mailer’s realistic intentions could be found elsewhere. Realism would be measured by the reader’s belief, or disbelief, and absorption, or distance, in the narration. When the novel was published in 1979, reviewers took notice of the boundaries between fact and fiction. In his review for The Common Weal, John Garvey felt Mailer’s depiction of real lives to be intrusive: “how will they feel about seeing themselves revealed this way?” he asked (141). Mailer responded in a lecture at Yale by saying he had intended to present an illusion of reality, which would encourage the reader, on reflection, to question the veracity of the delineated incidents: The stuff on April, the sister of Nicole, is probably three-quarters fanciful…I’d say it was ninety-five percent fictional, in fact, with April. […] Always as one’s reading that book, one’s saying, how real is it? Is he telling the truth? (Fishkin 208).

39 Several references to escapologist Harry Houdini appear in The Executioner’s Song and Mailer’s aesthetic priority is similar to the illusionist’s design: art as a deception of an audience’s senses; a fiction, or representation, is projected onto the eye as a reality. Any doubt the reader has over Mailer’s sincerity as a storyteller corresponds to the caution of the characters themselves: The moment he heard the news of the double suicide attempt, Schiller said to himself, there is a story and it’s real. Since it’s real, it has, in this case, to be fantastic (598).

40 Mailer said he intended The Executioner’s Song to be more realistic than earlier American fiction, but he also refers to the fantastical attributes of the American reality described. He simulates realities to astound and raise suspicion among readers. Schiller’s response to the double suicide development corresponds to the response of many readers to the revelation, for instance, of Gilmore’s relation to Harry Houdini.

41 In The Executioner’s Song, readers are also witnesses to the execution, autopsy and burial of Gary Gilmore. The entire body of the work serves to strengthen the reader’s participation in the capital punishment process. Mailer means to cut through the veil of fiction and distance to create an impression of reality. Gilmore’s lawyer’s perception of the case moves beyond a mood of fiction to a sense of reality as his client is seated before a firing squad: He had never felt any moral dilemma in carrying out Gary’s desire. In fact, he couldn’t have represented him if he really believed the State would go through with it all. It had been a play. He had seen himself as no more important than one more person on the stage (974).

42 Similarly, Mailer’s references to the grain of the narrator’s voice tie in with his realist aims. Very soon after his arrival in Utah, Brenda noticed, “there was something so real about the way” Gary said things (14). In his commitment to the storyteller’s diction and rhythms, Mailer’s characters’ speech consists of basic American slang of the 1970s: “supernice”, “pretty neat”, “a real bad four year old”, “Just yuck, she described it” (52, 99, 74, 28). In this form of everyday realism, The Executioner’s Song drove near to minimalist tendencies in the use of language in the United States.

43 The Executioner’s Song consists, to a large extent, of simple clause and double clause sentences; rarely do sentences possess more than three clauses. Adjectives and adverbs

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are also used sparingly. In the first part of the first chapter, only one sentence contains more than three clauses, in a deliberate delineation of the historical Mormon backdrop to life in Utah: With all the excitement, Brenda was hardly taking into account that it was practically the same route their Mormon great-grandfather took when he jumped off from Missouri with a handcart near to a hundred years ago, and pushed west with all he owned over the prairies, and the passes of the Rockies, to come to rest at Provo in the Mormon Kingdom of Deseret just fifty miles below Salt Lake (14).

44 The long sentence, with its jolts and turns, represents a journey, but also depth and detail. Mailer reverts to the simple sentence to represent bareness in the modern western landscape, the loss of a mythical, historical backdrop. The Executioner’s Song inhabits a milieu of deserts and mountains, motels and used car lots, a world where the borders between civilisation and wilderness disappear. Civilisation, and therefore language, is less refined; dialogues drift into the wastes of the barren spaces surrounding their settlements.

45 Mailer’s minimalist style in The Executioner’s Song sways under the influence of Ernest Hemingway’s lean prose idiom, although his debt to the author of A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bells Tolls (1940) has been overestimated. Hemingway’s aesthetic has no overriding influence on Mailer’s writing before The Executioner’s Song. In Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer wrote: I was one of the few writers of my generation who was concerned with living in Hemingway’s discipline, by which I do not mean I was interested in trying for some second-rate imitation of his style (265).

46 A short story, which appears in Hemingway’s Men Without Women (1929), has parallels to Mailer’s true-life story. “The Killers” describes two men waiting at Henry’s lunchroom for Old Andreson. Nick Adams, the diner whom the killers of the title force into the kitchen, along with the owner and cook, finds Andreson at his lodgings and advises him to leave. Andreson, who has been pursued for some time, accepts his fate: “I’m through with all that running around,” he goes on to say, “there ain’t anything to do. After a while I’ll make up my mind to go out” (427). Andreson’s resignation is restored in Gilmore’s decision not to prolong his incarcerated existence: “you cannot escape yourself” he says of his approaching death (889). Another similarity between the two texts is the subject of stoic endurance. “The Killers” concludes with Nick returning to the lunchroom and receiving the Hemingway creed by way of the owner: ‘“I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.” “Well,” said George, “you better not think about it”’ (429). Hemingway’s brevity stood for, among other things, his intention to present and advocate, in literature, quiet dignity: ‘better not think about’ or speak in fear, anger or pain, as Hemingway repeatedly intimates in his second novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926): “Let’s not talk. Talking’s all bilge,” Brett Ashley says with stoical resignation (46).

47 In contrast to Hemingway’s depiction of the dignity of male veterans, in The Executioner’s Song, women, more than men, endure. Mailer repeats Andreson’s message in the final sentence of the book. Gilmore’s mother, hearing the sound of cars stopping outside her trailer park, would “say to herself, ‘If they want to shoot me, I have the same kind of guts Gary has. Let them come’” (1049). In her review “Let’s go ahead and do it,” Joan Didion foregrounds the position of the stronger, enduring voices of women in Mailer’s narrative. Alongside women’s voices are the unworldly tones of children’s voices in The Executioner’s Song. Often the prose, as in the case of Hemingway’s stories

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dealing with the young Nick Adams, takes on the features and sounds of children’s stories: “She remembered liking Gary so well she would not bother to see who else was there – Hi Grandma, can I have a cookie? – come on, Gary, let’s go” (5).

48 Hemingway’s and Mailer’s characters’ speech is governed by a shared principle; everything is stripped bare to an ideal and pure state. To puritans, purity is simplicity, excess is impurity: the language is clean, washed of the excesses of a baroque style. Mailer and Hemingway belong to a tradition in American literature which severed ties with previous rhetorical traditions and reduced language to the bare and present circumstance, very often representing in their narratives the immediacy of a child’s perception of, and verbal response to, experience.

49 The fractured layout of the prose also testifies to the silences surrounding life in the West. The gaps are the pauses, the empty spaces in speech. The silent country is at the centre of the protagonist’s troubles. Brenda remembers “Gary was kind of quiet” as a child (6). After telephoning her on his arrival in Utah, she found, “this was one guy who wouldn’t talk your ear off for a dime” (13). As they drove from the airport, “the first silence came in”. In a café, a short while later, “the conversation died. Gary had no clue what to ask Johnny next” (14). The same idea is pursued later: In fact, if he did tell a story it was usually about when he was a kid. Then she would enjoy the way he talked. It was like his drawing. Very definite. He gave it in a few words. A happened, then B and C. Conclusion had to be D (105).

50 Nicole’s recollection of Gary’s style of storytelling is playfulness on Mailer’s part. He would imitate Gilmore’s speech in The Executioner’s Song. Like Gilmore, his narrator is also “very definite. He gave it in a few words”. Didn’t bother having a subject at the start of a sentence. Mailer’s lean prose is a representation of the minimalist, purifying tendencies in American society, and a means of returning to the “thing” rather than describing the “thing” – an aspiration shared also by Hemingway and Stein.

ABSTRACTS

This paper identifies and discusses the western vernacular and minimalist tendencies in Norman Mailer’s 1980 Pulitzer Prize winning “true-life story” The Executioner’s Song. Mailer’s use of a lean, often flat style of narration is read in relation to Truman Capote’s “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood to measure the extent to which Mailer moved beyond a conventional novelistic approach. The article positions The Executioner’s Song alongside earlier minimalist styles in American Literature and takes stock of Mailer’s use of oral storytelling techniques and panoramic perspectives. Mailer’s minimal presence in the narrative and the original capital punishment proceedings is established, with support from early reviews, debates surrounding the genre of The Executioner’s Song and interviews given by the author since its publication in 1979.

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AUTHOR

ANDREW WILSON Andrew Wilson, National Taichung University, Taiwan.

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Inventing and naming America: Place and Place Names in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita1

Monica Manolescu-Oancea

After the Gold Rush

(Silk crepe de chine hand painted, machine quilted, 66 × 53.3 cm)-Linda Gass, 1998, http:// www.lindagass.com/GoldRush.html

1. Vladimir Nabokov’s Sense of Place: Recreations and Fairy Tales

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1 This paper is an exploration of Nabokov’s geographic and toponymic sensibility and of its very special combination of observation, cultural projections, desires and expectations, words and “average ‘reality’” (Strong Opinions 26; “On a Book Entitled Lolita” 312) that contribute to the invention of a hybrid America, an America that is partly recognizable and partly a game in a mental or literary space. Nabokov’s America is best rendered, visually and kaleidoscopically, by the image of the patchwork, “the crazy quilt of forty-eight states” that features in Lolita (152), a colourful and playful surface dotted with real place names that seem imaginary and imaginary place names that sometimes seem real. Nabokov has a special preference for mosaics, kaleidoscopes, stained glass windows, lozenge surfaces, colourful butterflies, chessboards: composite objects that share the dimensions of patterning, chromatic contrast and fractioned design. The “crazy quilt” in Lolita is the textile version of the mosaic, the artefact that best represents Nabokov’s American geography.

2 This paper will first offer a quick survey of Nabokov’s various statements on his vision of place in fiction developed in the forewords to some of his Russian works and in the afterword to Lolita, as well as in his critical texts. A shift of paradigm is visible from the rejection of mimetic interest (with notable exceptions) in the Russian fiction to the thorough research conducted for Lolita. Critics have already examined the ways in which Lolita’s America reconfigures cultural projections coming from elsewhere (from Humbert’s European background). This paper will look at the erotic overtones of Lolita and Humbert’s American journeys and examine space as a narrative of seduction. Place names will then be analyzed, with a special focus on the notion of referentiality and the various ways in which a “crazy quilt” of real and imaginary place names is created. Finally, the heterogeneity of Nabokov’s American patchwork will be contrasted with the existence of a unique consciousness manipulating geography and naming, playing games of words and worlds (like John Shade in Pale Fire 63).

3 Nabokov’s relationship with America is best understood in terms of his mosaic-like diversity as an individual and as a writer, since linguistic, exilic, geographic diversity is inherent in this “American writer born in Russia and educated in England” (Strong Opinions 131), a “one-man multitude,” as he defines himself ( Strong Opinions 99). Nabokov studied French literature at Cambridge University and was an exile in Prague, Paris and Berlin before emigrating to the United States, where he spent twenty years teaching and writing before retiring in the rosy exile of Switzerland and Montreux Palace, never to return to the United States. In terms of languages and genres, Nabokov’s prolific production in Russian, English and French2 testifies to his multilingual talent and proves his consummate mastery of the conventions of narrative, poetry and drama, conventions that he often liked to transgress.

4 Once in the New World, the lepidopterist went butterfly-hunting in the West, the professor praised the dream libraries of American universities, the writer impregnated himself with all things American in order to instill “a modicum of average ‘reality’” into the book about the nymphet (“On a Book Entitled Lolita” 312). What is at stake is the invention of the United States after Nabokov had invented Europe in the Russian language: I had to invent America and Lolita. It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by a similar task, with a lesser amount of time at my disposal. The obtaining of such local ingredients as would allow me to inject average “reality” into the brew of individual fancy proved, at

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fifty, a much more difficult process than it had been in the Europe of my youth. (Strong Opinions 26)

5 Vladimir Nabokov’s aesthetic temperament is definitely not that of the literary sociologist or the literary realist. The word “reality” itself is a problematic concept, since he famously claimed that reality means nothing without quotation marks (“On a Book Entitled Lolita” 312). The forewords that open the works of fiction produced during Nabokov’s Russian years often discuss the choice of place (most of the time Berlin) and develop a theory of place in fiction which seems quite remote from the more substantial “average ‘reality’” which is visible in some of Nabokov’s American novels. The foreword to the 1967 English translation of King, Queen, Knave (Korol’, dama, valet, 1928) insists on the accidental choice of Berlin and on the a-spatial, a-topological quality of the book, which is actually a fairy tale presenting German characters in a German setting: One might readily conjecture that a Russian writer in choosing a set of exclusively German characters […] was creating for himself insurmountable difficulties. I spoke no German, had no German friends, had not read a single German novel either in the original, or in translation. But in art, as in nature, a glaring disadvantage may turn out to be a subtle protective device. […] the lack of any emotional involvement and the fairytale freedom inherent in an unknown milieu [i.e. Berlin] answered my dream of pure invention. I might have staged King, Queen, Knave in Rumania or Holland. Familiarity with the map and weather of Berlin settled my choice. (King, Queen, Knave viii)

6 King, Queen, Knave is thus situated at the crossroads between pure invention and the local ingredients offered by the author’s familiarity with Berlin’s cartographic and meteorological identity. Place appears to be a fatality (even fairy tales need distant and vague kingdoms in order to exist), the result of a more or less arbitrary choice. Similarly to Saussure’s arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, Nabokov’s foreword seems to posit the arbitrariness of the world framed in his fiction, since there is no necessary connection between the plot or the characters and their milieu. The bond uniting them is utterly accidental, influenced by the author’s own knowledge of a given place. Interestingly, the absence of emotion (“lack of any emotional involvement”) leads to the emergence of invention, partly because German, not Russian, characters were chosen to play the schematic roles of the king, the queen and the knave.

7 The English foreword to The Eye (Soglyadatay, 1930) conceives of place as a diagram rapidly assembled with elements close at hand. Nabokov hints once again at his preference for a fairy tale setting, but although his “favourite” Russian characters may seem to unsettle “the lack of emotional involvement,” his conclusion regarding the fundamental accidentalness of place is unchanged: The people in the book are the favourite characters of my literary youth: Russian expatriates living in Berlin, Paris, or London. Actually, of course, they might just as well have been Norwegians in Naples or Ambracians in Ambridge: I have always been indifferent to social problems, merely using the material that happened to be near, as a voluble diner pencils a street corner on the table cloth or arranges a crumb and two olives in a diagrammatic position between menu and salt cellar. (The Eye i-ii)

8 There is however one notable exception to the rule of the diagram and to the vision of accidental place: Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift (Dar, 1937-1938), whose 1962 English foreword talks about the “recreation” of an environment, although various

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degrees are identified, from the mild recreation offered by The Gift, to the radical recreation put forward in Nabokov’s American fiction: In the days I worked on this book, I did not have the knack of recreating Berlin and its colony of expatriates as radically and ruthlessly as I have done in regard to certain environments in my later, English, fiction. Here and there history shows through artistry. (The Gift i-ii)

9 The term “recreation,” however, should not be confused with the impure or downright comical notion of local color, whom Nabokov mockingly condemns in his lectures on literature and in his study of Gogol’s fiction: Couleur locale has been responsible for many hasty appreciations, and local color is not a fast color. I have never been able to see eye to eye with people who enjoyed books merely because they were in dialect, or moved in the exotic atmosphere of remote places. […] There is nothing more dull and sickening to my taste than romantic folklore or rollicking yarns about lumberjacks or Yorkshiremen or French villagers or Ukrainian good companions. (Gogol 31)

10 “Place is accidental” is an axiom which holds true even in masterpieces like Ulysses or Madame Bovary, which we generally associate with Dublin or France in an indissoluble way: Gogol’s heroes merely happen to be Russian squires and officials; their imagined surroundings and social conditions are perfectly unimportant factors – just as Monsieur Homais might be a businessman in Chicago or Mrs. Bloom the wife of a schoolmaster in Vyshny-Volochok. Moreover, their surroundings and conditions, whatever they might have been in “real life,” underwent such a thorough permutation and reconstruction […] that it is as useless to look in Dead Souls for an authentic Russian background as it would be to try and form a conception of Denmark on the basis of that little affair in cloudy Elsinore3. (Gogol 70-71)

11 What Nabokov calls “good readers” should not expect fiction to provide didactic information on history or geography: Can we expect to glean information about places and times from a novel? […] Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlour? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. […] The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales […]. (Lectures on Literature 1-2)

12 Words like “recreation,” “permutation,” “pure invention” and “fairy tale” are landmarks defining Nabokov’s aesthetic vision of place. A sentence like “My sense of places is Nabokovian rather than Proustian” (Strong Opinions 197), which can be endlessly analyzed from a comparative perspective, is meant above all to distinguish Nabokov’s own stance from that of other famous writers with whom he had been compared. Despite the prominence of the term “fairy tale” and of the type of rarefied aesthetics it implies due to its rejection of any mimetic imperative, there clearly emerges a nuanced mimetic scale in Nabokov’s fiction (Nabokov’s rainbow of “realities”), in which one can distinguish the sketchy outlines of Berlin in Mary, the definitely more substantial, but still phantasmal, Berlin in King, Queen, Knave, the “ruthless recreation” of Berlin and its expatriate colony in The Gift, the introduction of considerable quantities of average American reality in Lolita and, on a totally different plane of mimetic disentanglement (copying the “emotional disentanglement” mentioned earlier), the invented Zembla and Antiterra in Pale Fire and Ada.

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13 In his introduction to The Annotated Lolita, Alfred Appel Jr. insists on the writer’s thorough research for the book “in scholarly fashion,” on his efforts to document slang, to collect newspaper stories, to gather signs of Americanness (Lolita xl). Lolita seems to be a “radical and ruthless” recreation and the idea of violence inherent in such ruthless (because truthful) recreations suggests that the lightness and the fairy tale freedom of King, Queen, Knave have been replaced in Lolita by the toil and strain of a different kind of approach, more labored and premeditated, aiming at recapturing the spirit of place. The sober minimalism of the diagram drawn rapidly on a napkin is swept aside in favor of the chromatic richness of the crazy quilt made up of patches of different colors, motifs and sizes sewn together, a striking and time-consuming artefact. The quilt is a metaphor of the geographic and administrative configuration of the United States as well, a country that grew out of a gradual assemblage of states4. The variegated nature of the quilt suggests heterogeneity, a motley space flaunting its decorative hybridity – and it is precisely the hybridity that characterizes the representations of America in Lolita that I will try to highlight.

14 Lolita’s American setting and the extreme paucity of Russian references it contains5 prove that Nabokov was trying to go beyond his status as a “Russian-born author of a would-be all-American novel” (Toker 21) and become the American author of an all- American novel. Pnin (1957), composed at the same time as Lolita, channels a great number of Russian elements and is thus considered by Toker to be “a contrasting companion piece to Lolita” (ibid.).

15 In 1966, Nabokov defined himself as an American writer and as a proud American citizen, but he also presented himself as humorously aloof from a certain number of regional or popular elements in American culture: I am as American as April in Arizona. The flora, the fauna, the air of the Western states are my links with Asiatic and Arctic Russia. Of course, I owe too much to the Russian language and landscape to be emotionally involved in, say, American regional literature, or Indian dances, or pumpkin pie on a spiritual plane; but I do feel a suffusion of warm, lighthearted pride when I show my green USA passport at European frontiers. (Strong Opinions 98)

16 Just how American is “April in Arizona” and in what ways one can be “emotionally involved” in “pumpkin pie on a spiritual plane” are questions that would deserve further attention, but not within the limits of this paper.6 And just how American is Lolita’s America? 2. “We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing.” 17 For Nabokov, becoming American also implied an organic process. In 1964, the writer claimed, tongue-in-cheek, that even his body was partly made up of American flesh: I became as stout as Cortez7 – mainly because I quit smoking and started to munch molasses and candy instead […]. In consequence, I am one-third American – good American flesh keeping me warm and safe. (Strong Opinions 27)

18 This metaphor of the colonist who goes native, whose body is one third American, could also be applied to Humbert Humbert’s America, which is one third American, the rest being a mixture of European great expectations, cultural references and clichés – in the image and likeness of the narrator. Humbert defines himself as a “salad of racial genes” (9), someone who is made up of “French epithets, a Dorset yokel’s knuckles, an Austrian tailor’s flat fingers – that’s Humbert Humbert” (274). Genetically and metaphorically, Humbert is a quilt himself. Moreover, Humbert is a weaver who calls himself “Humbert the Wounded Spider” (54) and whose thread meanders around the

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Haze house. In the arctic adventures episode, his crafty web of stories and caresses is meant to capture and captivate the nymphet: “I had completely enmeshed my darling in this weave of ethereal caresses” (45).

19 If we browse through Lolita, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, El Greco, Claude Lorrain, Arcadia, Botticelli are the main elements of an alchemy of cultural references that allows the Old World to construct the myth of the New (Haegert; Raguet-Bouvart 1996 & 1999). Many of the various patches making up the American quilt are of European origin. The forests display “enormous Chateaubriandesque trees” (145) borrowed from Atala, the sky is “pregnant with the inky rain” of El Greco’s paintings (152), the clouds remind one of Claude Lorrain (152), the American wilderness suggests a semblance of Arcadia, but is actually populated with “semi-extinct dragons” (168) and is therefore too aggressive for erotic pastimes. The filter of European mental models is not always applicable, since Humbert admits that at times his expectations are baffled by the unpredictable landscape: “the models of those elementary rusticities became stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them” (152). The French language constantly interferes with Humbert’s American idiom, to signal strangeness, charm, erudition. Lolita’s second translator into French argues that Humbert’s English syntax is at times surprisingly close to French syntax and therefore relatively easy to transmute into French (Couturier, “The French Nabokov” 145). It seems that Humbert writes his memoir of the nymphet in a disguised French and that he writes America in the European idiom.

20 When the learned traveller, book in hand and talking “like a book” (114), finally visits the America of his bookish European experience, a reverse alchemy takes place – gold is transformed into lead and the grandiose mental image of the European child who had equated America with mountains, adventures and Indians is bathetically deflated into the garbage and smoke of a suburban lawn: I remember as a child in Europe gloating over a map of North America that had “Appalachian Mountains” boldly running from Alabama up to New Brunswick, so that the whole region they spanned--Tennessee, the Virginias, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, appeared to my imagination as a gigantic Switzerland or even Tibet, all mountain, glorious diamond peak upon peak, giant conifers, le montagnard émigré in his bear skin glory, and Felix tigris goldsmithi8, and Red Indians under the catalpas. That it all boiled down to a measly suburban lawn and a smoking garbage incinerator, was appalling. (209-210)

21 The “measly” suburban lawn epitomizes Nabokov’s notion of “poshlust,” defined as “cheap, sham, common, smutty, pink-and-blue, high-falutin’, in bad taste” or “inferior, sorry, trashy, scurvy, tawdry, gimcrack” (Gogol 64). Small-town America is painfully “poshlust,” although Nabokov denied any satirical intention in Lolita: I can only repeat that I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist. Whether or not critics think that in Lolita I am ridiculing moral folly leaves me supremely indifferent. But I am annoyed when the glad news is spread that I am ridiculing America. (Strong Opinions 22-23)

22 The fact that the book was perceived by some readers as a satire (which grieved Nabokov9) is symptomatic of its double status of “American novel” and Nabokovian fairy tale.

23 However, we have to do justice to Humbert’s “measly” suburban lawn, because the nymphet appears, like Venus out of the foam of the sea (Lolita is actually compared to “Botticelli’s russet Venus” 270), in the sleepy town of Ramsdale, on the lawn of the

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Haze house: “I cast around for some place in the New England countryside or sleepy small town (elms, white church) where I could spend a studious summer” (35). Ramsdale, the New England cliché parenthetically defined by its elms and white church, becomes the site of an explosive epiphany, since the copy of Annabel Leigh peers at Humbert over dark glasses from the suburban lawn, with no garbage incinerator, for a change.

24 The “yearlong travels” of Humbert and Lolita across the United States function as a means of seduction, a term that points to the Latin “se-ducere,” leading astray, which is precisely Humbert’s project. Baudrillard sees seduction, in spatial terms, as a ritual of disorientation, as a way of going off-track (Baudrillard 38). As a consequence, these travels do not proceed in a straightforward manner, but are essentially made up of zigzags, loops, meanders, “wiggles and whorls” (154), “twists of lust” (117), the geometrical shapes of voluptuous digression. A spatial discourse of seduction is developed, in which a spiralled vertigo of speed and renewed vistas sucks the nymphet in, keeps desire alive and the two unlikely partners close to each other. Roland Barthes compares erotic discourse to a skin caressing the body of the lover, a verbal skin tremulous with desire (Barthes 87). The “crazy quilt” is analogous to an erotic discourse constantly unfolding in an ever-changing American setting, enveloping the nymphet in its colourful embrace. The “weave of ethereal caresses” (45) mentioned earlier is transmuted into the geographic and textile metaphor of the quilt. The predatory aspect of Humbert’s spidery web is complemented by the carnivalesque excess of a harlequin patchwork suggesting transgression and delight. We are dealing with a geography of seduction in which desire is the fuel of movement. There is no definite objective, no destination, no end: Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed. The object in view might be anything […] anything whatsoever – but it had to be there, in front of us, like a fixed star […]. By putting the geography of the United States into motion, I did my best for hours on end to give her the impression of ‘going places,’ of rolling on to some definite destination, to some unusual delight. (151-152)

25 Humbert’s conclusion at the end of the trip talks about blindness and frantic, intransitive movement in order to keep the nymphet alive, literally, but also metaphorically, in order to keep the myth of the nymphet alive: “We had been everywhere, we had really seen nothing” (175). During the “yearlong travels,” the motels, the tourist attractions and the landscapes are condensed in more or less fugitive remarks, eloquent vignettes that capture the essence of the scene: Cliff dwellings. The mummy of a child […]. Our twentieth Hell’s Canyon. Our fiftieth gateway to something or other fide that tour book, the cover of which had been lost by that time. A tick in my groin. Always the same three old men, in hats and suspenders, idling away the summer afternoon under the trees near the public fountain. (157)

26 These nominal sentences, each focusing on a distinct element, prove that the narrative is on the run, just like America, which constitutes a narrative in itself. There is no satisfactory descriptive pause, no narrative patience, no repose. Umberto Eco says at a certain point in the Postcript to The Name of the Rose that there are novels that breathe like elephants and novels that breathe like gazelles (Eco 50-51). In the pages devoted to

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the “yearlong travels” Lolita (actually both the nymphet and the text) certainly breathes like a chased gazelle.

27 Arguably, the landscape and the tourist attractions exist only because Humbert resorts to them in order to “keep the nymphet alive.” Their mere existence depends on her presence, on her need to consume them – as if the consumer’s desire nourished the vitality of the landscape. The funereal overtones of Humbert’s description (“the skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed”) prove, symmetrically, that Lolita’s days are inanimate, irredeemably deflated when the life-giving tourist attractions are no longer available. Ultimately, Lolita and America are mutually dependent. Quite revealingly, once Lolita has left Humbert, the landscape slips out of Humbert’s sight (for objective, but also subjective, reasons): “By that time night had eliminated most of the landscape” (292). In Humbert and Lolita’s second trip, the tourist book and the tourist attractions are “overshadowed” (217) by the intriguing Red Aztec Convertible which follows them across the “great and ugly plains” (217). Visions of the mountains that surround Humbert are conflated with delirious visions of multiple Lolitas – an effect which is typical of the pathetic fallacy: “The noncommittal mauve mountains half encircling the town seemed to me to swarm with panting, scrambling, laughing, panting Lolitas who dissolved in their haze” (224). America is “hazy” indeed, and it gradually dissolves, just like Humbert’s hallucinatory Lolitas (whose model will soon leave him).

28 Despite the exuberance of the “crazy quilt” and of the “joyride” (175, 209, 298) that Humbert imagines for Lolita’s pleasure, the first trip leaves a bitter aftertaste (and the second trip an even bitterer one). Humbert’s signature of defilement is spread across the quilt like the repulsive trace of a snail or an insect: And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep. (175-176)

29 The slime of desecration and Lolita’s sobs reintroduce the moral issue at the very heart of the representation of America in the text. The defiled quilt and the “ruined tour books” cannot be dissociated from Humbert’s enterprise of mapping the country and the nymphet.

30 Among the various ways in which America is represented, “ruthlessly” dislocated or bent by the game of wayward seduction, toponymy plays a privileged role. Laurence Guy talks about Nabokov’s “manipulations of naming” through anagrams (Guy 137). Place names in Lolita belong to a distinct category, since place names that do not exist on any American map and that could be compared to extraneous onomastic patches are sewn onto the existing toponymic fabric of the United States, thus creating a Nabokovian “crazy quilt.” These intrusions of naming (intrusions of invented names into real geography) complement the “manipulations of naming” restricted to the reconfiguration of existing verbal entities. Reversing Nabokov’s pronouncement, we could say that it seems at times that individual fancy is injected into “reality” and thus place names allow Nabokov to invent or at least appropriate America by (partially) naming it all over again. 3. Place Names: a Referentiality of Suspicion, a Suspicion of Referentiality

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31 Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature project the image of the writer as creator and explorer of a new world with a specific topography and creatures, and with imaginative place names. The act of naming is endowed with a performative value: The writer is the first man to map it [the new world of the book] and to name the natural objects it contains. Those berries there are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called lake Opal or, more artistically, Dishwater Lake. (Lectures on Literature 2)

32 Place names are among Nabokov’s favourite lexical playgrounds, as the hesitation between the pompous “lake Opal” and the humorous “Dishwater Lake” suggests. Dieter E. Zimmer’s website devoted to the unravelling of Lolita’s geography shows that there are fifteen imaginary towns in the novel, some of which carry larger intertextual and metaphorical implications: Ramsdale, Parkington, Climax, Briceland, Lepingville, Pisky, Kasbeam, Soda, Wace, Snow, Champion, Elphinstone, Cantrip, Coalmont, Gray Star. Briceland echoes the enchanted forest of Brocéliande in Arthurian texts, Elphinstone and Pisky point to the motif of elves and fairies, and so on.

33 The simplest observation one can make about Lolita’s place names and general topographic framework is that, obviously, real and imaginary place names (real and imaginary places) coexist, but actually the ways in which this coexistence is enacted in the narrative are quite oblique. When Humbert catalogues his fights with the nymphet, precise details saturate the passage, describing altitudes, crossroads, reasons for fighting: We had rows, minor and major. The biggest ones we had took place: at Lacework Cabins, Virginia; on Park Avenue, Little Rock, near a school; on Milner Pass, 10,759 feet high, in Colorado; at the corner of Seventh Street and Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona; on Third Street, Los Angeles, because the tickets to some studio or other were sold out… […] And on McEwen St., corner of Wheaton Ave., in a Michigan town bearing his first name. (158)

34 Upon close scrutiny, it turns out that McEwen Street does intersect Wheaton Avenue in Clare, Michigan (as proved by Brattin), but there is no intersection between Seventh Street and Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona (the two streets run parallel to each other). Escher’s eerie lithographs come to mind, with their illusive crossroads and intersecting staircases masking actual physical impossibilities. Such Escher-like moments and spaces in the text, in which real intersections coexist with imaginary ones, become apparent only if a maniac reader emerges (not a manic-depressive reader, but rather a manic-euphoric one), a maniac reader who is ready to verify the accuracy of Humbert’s minutest details, their adequacy to reality. One reason why the American quilt in Lolita is “crazy” is precisely because of such hybrid instances that construct trompe l’oeil vistas.

35 Several levels of toponymic inventiveness can be identified: within Humbert’s narrative, which creates a geography of its own through the use of real and invented place names, Quilty’s “cryptogrammic paperchase” through motel registers (250) opens up another topographic and toponymic frame, which requires impressive hermeneutic skills. In this case, geography and interpretation cannot be dissociated, as if traveling through America (through Quilty’s paper America) were equated with the reading of cultural and literary signs encoded in the language and conventions of toponymy.

36 Once Lolita has left him with an unknown man on the emblematic date of the 4th of July, Humbert retraces his steps from motel to motel trying to gather clues that might reveal

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the identity of his rival. Quilty’s signatures are disseminated in hotel registers, showing his stubborn pursuit of Humbert and Lolita, but also the fact that he is leading the chase. The “crazy quilt” is toponymic in nature as well, the result of a mad pursuit (Quilty is partly hidden in the quilt). Each of Quilty’s signatures is made up of an invented name with an overt or covert literary allusion and a place name, real or imaginary, mostly in the United States, although there are three European references as well: N. Petit, Larousse, Ill.; Dr. Gratiano Forbeson, Mirandola, NY; Harold Haze, Tombstone, Arizona; D. Orgon, Elmira, NY; Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.; A. Person, Porlock, England… Humbert traces Quilty’s trajectory in an encrypted labyrinth of words (he mentions “logodaedaly and logomancy” 250) which offers an implicit comment on Humbert or Quilty’s relationship with Lolita, but also a displacement of America itself, which becomes a shadow of European culture and a shadow of the plot itself, just like Quilty is Humbert’s shadow, his nemesis and Doppelgänger. Hotel registers become a storehouse of signs (and America becomes a book of signs) talking about the multiplicity of identities of the mysterious rival as well as the rich diversity of his literary culture, which is projected onto the map of the United States. Each of these encrypted signatures and place names is a private or scholarly joke, as well as a riddle that needs to be solved, annotated, translated from the language of Quilty into world literature and into English. Every town he mentions, as well as every town Humbert mentions, are haunted by the possibility of non existence (Tombstone and Elmira are real, but Mirandola, Merrymay and Eryx are invented) and by the almost certainty of a linguistic or cultural disguise, of an alibi pointing to some other hermeneutic level (see the footnote for a selection of annotated signatures and place names10).

37 Through the use of cryptogrammic place names, Nabokov exploits the cultural and poetic potential of American geography. The traditionally virgin land is cultivated, cultured, encrypted in Quilty’s toponymic riddles. Such place names are also, arguably, the starting point of Nabokov’s fictional geographies in later novels like Pale Fire (where Zembla coexists with the United States) and Ada (where Antiterra replaces the planet Earth11). Ada is without any doubt the text that best illustrates Nabokov’s creative geography, the novel in which Nabokov takes the art of toponymic invention to its limits, pouring out dozens of imaginary place names belonging to Antiterra, a planet that could be described as Terra with a temporal and spatial difference12. Ada’s “tessellated protectorate” of the Seven Tories which “commingles, granoblastically13 and organically, with ‘Russian’ Canady” (Ada 3) is an avatar of the “crazy quilt,” recombining Russia and America in a strange mosaic.

38 We could talk about Lolita’s autotelic geography or rather about Lolita’s “textotelic” geography, that is a metatextual geography making references to the text in which it features. American toponyms are led astray, metaphorically seduced and made to signify in unexpected ways, placed on the semiotic orbit of the “yearlong travels” of Humbert and Lolita. Beyond the playful place names that make up the “cryptogrammic paperchase,” the problem of referentiality becomes central, since even if toponyms like Elphinstone, Lepingville or Gray Star are not identifiable on any American map (Melville would have said that “they are not down on any map, true places never are”), some critics tend to read Nabokov’s texts as riddles, following the writer’s cue: “I only like to compose riddles with elegant solutions” (Strong Opinions 16). Therefore, each of the towns and tourist attractions begs to be decrypted. This kind of logic has led to the

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emergence of a trend in Nabokov studies that could be qualified as referential criticism, that seeks to find the real place behind the imaginary one (Zimmer14).

39 To give an example, when Humbert meets pregnant, 17-year-old Lolita for the last time, at the end of the novel, their encounter takes place in the bleak town of Coalmont, where, as Lolita puts it, “you can’t see the morons for the fog” (266): [T]he address she gave was “General Delivery, Coalmont” (not “Va.,” not “Pa.,” not “Tenn.” – and not Coalmont, anyway – I have camouflaged everything, my love). Inquiries showed this to be a small industrial community some eight hundred miles from New York City. (267)

40 Coalmont is therefore not Coalmont at all, because “I have camouflaged everything, my love.” This camouflage is also manifest in the use of famous brands, for instance throughout the novel “Shell” is transformed into “Conch,” “Mobil” into “Pegasus” and “Camel” cigarettes into “Drome” cigarettes (a chain of associations going from camel to dromedary, then drome), smoked and advertised by Quilty. John Ray Jr. mentions, in the Foreword, the suppressions he has carried out in Humbert’s memoir, which complete Humbert’s own “camouflage”: Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite ‘H.H.’’s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. (3)

41 At times, Humbert is careful to signal the change of names, for instance when he mentions the quite transparent address of Mr and Mrs Schiller, “10 Killer Street”: “I am not going very far for my pseudonyms” (268). The same holds true for Hunter Road (Lolita’s actual address, 269). In these cases, a cliché (Killer, Hunter) suffices to shed light on what the reader expects as a predictable dénouement. The same oblique strategy is at work in “a Michigan town bearing his first name” (158), which is another riddle concealing a reference to Clare, although “his” is not preceded by any identifiable antecedent (it is the general plot which provides it once the first-time reader has finished the book). Michael Wood claims that when Humbert says that he is writing under observation, he “presumably tells us to look out for codes and clues and beware of the literal” (Wood 110). Certain toponymic occurrences accompanied by more or less precise details suggest that the reader is faced with a riddle carrying its own solution: the above quoted Coalmont, “an industrial community some eight hundred miles from New York City” (267), or, to give another example, Lepingville, in New England, “where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century” (112). A certain number of questions naturally spring in the reader’s mind: what great poet15? Are Lepingville and Coalmont mere nominal veils that we are goaded into lifting?

42 Certain place names are Humbert’s fiction and the numerical details giving the distance from New York City to imaginary Coalmont urge the reader (or some readers, in any case) to take a map and start making guesses about where and what Coalmont really is16. “Average ‘reality’” strikes back. We could talk about a referentiality of suspicion or a suspicion of referentiality, about a geography that is haunted by meaning, but also by its referential doubles. Geography is contaminated by cultural allusion and by the illusion of referential depth as well. The poetic and the referential functions of language, in Roman Jakobson’s terms, are here playfully interconnected, truly inseparable, each mimicking the other.

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43 The real place name hidden behind the invented one (identified by critics as such) sometimes plays a significant role in the game of interpretation, expanding meaning and inviting further cultural connections. To give an example, Alfred Appel Jr. identifies Gray Star, the “capital town of the book” according to Nabokov (“On a Book Entitled Lolita” 316), as Juneau, the capital of Alaska (Lolita 443), and so does Brian Boyd, who interprets it as a reference to a cartographic convention (stars used to indicate capitals), “but also a play on Juno, the goddess of marriage” (“Even Homais Nods” 77; italics mine). The imaginary Gray Star leads the critic to Juneau (hence to Juno), and thus the real place name allows a new layer of meaning to emerge, an additional significance which is relevant for the plot itself. Indeed, in this game of annotation and interpretation, meaning grows out of such findings. Juno, the goddess of marriage, is added to the constellation of meanings surrounding Gray Star (and indeed, Nabokov’s fiction constantly builds networks of motifs): the nymphet has gray eyes, Humbert has reached his “gray goal” (269), Gray Star completes the “haze of stars” (15) inaugurated by Annabel, Gray Star reminds the reader of the “fixed star” (152) that Humbert offers to Lolita during their trips… With Juneau/Juno, my previous statement concerning Lolita’s autotelic or “textotelic” geography is further complicated, since real geography becomes “Lolitotelic” (the camouflaged Juneau reflects on Lolita’s marriage to Richard Schiller) and the usual transitivity connecting the book and the world is reversed: America talks about Nabokov’s novel just as much as Lolita talks about America. Who knows, one day a town may be called Ambridge or Briceland or Mirandola, and a lake – Lake Opal or, more artistically, Dishwater Lake.

44 What I have called “referential criticism” signals an interest in Nabokov’s manipulations of the real (with an emphasis on “real” rather than “manipulations”) which complements the various critical approaches that have dominated Nabokov studies so far (stylistic, moral, metaphysical or otherworldly). In the “Prologue” to Nabokov’s World, Brian Boyd and Donald Barton Johnson encourage researchers to explore Nabokov’s various worlds, be they real or imaginary: Do not overlook all his other worlds, his Russia, his Germany, his France, his England, his America, his Switzerland, his dream and nightmare Europes, his Zemblas and Antiterras. If he could not make this world exist so well in his fiction, his other worlds would matter much less, much less. (Boyd & Johnson 20)

45 Referential criticism is part of the mapping of what Boyd and Johnson call Nabokov’s “other worlds,” since it provides a useful basis for launching further analyses. 4. Conclusion. America: between Unum and Plura

46 The “cryptogrammic paperchase” creates the image of a very diverse (one is tempted to say “crazy quiltic”) America, which is Italian (“Dr. Gratiano Forbeson, Mirandola, NY”), Greek (“N.S. Aristoff, Catagela, NY”), Don Quixotic (“Donald Quix, Sierra, Nev.”), French (“Lucas Picador, Merrymay, Pa.”), Sicilian (“Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.”) and, in the end, highly idiosyncratic. However, in spite of this heterogeneous explosion of place names, the identity of the creator of this encrypted labyrinth is unique. Quilty is at the origin of this cryptogrammic dissemination, and the heterogeneity of toponyms is absorbed into the homogeneousness of the mastermind – this is something that Humbert comes to realize very soon: “The clues he left did not help establish his identity but they reflected his personality, or at least a certain homogenous and striking personality” (249). This “homogeneousness” which is discernible behind the crafty web of Quiltian traces is in the spirit of Nabokov’s philosophy of the author as

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God or tyrant17 of his fictional world – he referred to his characters as “galley slaves” (Strong Opinions 95). The idea of encrypted signature which is apparent in the “cryptogrammic paperchase” reminds one of Vladimir Nabokov’s well-known anagrams disseminated in most of his texts, anagrammatic masks of the creating mind (analyzed in Shapiro 1999, Guy 134-140): Blavdak Vinomori, Vivian Badlook (King, Queen, Knave), Vivian Darkbloom (Lolita), Vivian Bloodmark (Speak, Memory), Baron Klim Avidov (Ada), Adam von Librikov (Transparent Things), Van Bock (Strong Opinions). A design is hidden in the “crazy quilt,” and the diversity of Quiltic America is a trompe l’oeil diversity that dissimulates the unique and versatile consciousness behind it. The pictorial device of the trompe l’oeil18 is a useful complement to the metaphor of the quilt.

47 In Strong Opinions, Nabokov talks about an invented painting entitled The Artist’s Studio by the painter Van Bock, an imperfect anagram of Nabokov himself (Strong Opinions 72-73). Nabokov was very fond of Flemish painting, of its meticulousness and of a specific motif – the convex mirror that one can find in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini (1434) or in Hans Memling’s Diptych of Maarten Niewenhove (1487) for instance 19. This device allows the painter to prolong the space of the painting (details of the room are shown in the mirror), while also offering at times a reflection of the author/painter himself, as in The Arnolfini20 (Stoichita 212-213). The convex mirror is, in a way, the painter’s signature inside the space of the painting. This is precisely how diversity and heterogeneity function in Lolita, with the “crazy quilt” and “the cryptogrammic paperchase” actually hiding a convex mirror somewhere, where the authorial figure, Van Bock (also called McFate in Lolita), inscribes his signature and marks the origin, the unum of the tesselar plura that he has created. To go back to the image of the patchwork, beneath the “crazy quilt” there lies the “underside of the weave” (Pale Fire 17), bearing the discrete traces, knots and stitches of the supreme artificer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. Fragments d’un discours amoureux. Paris: Seuil, 1977.

Baudrillard, Jean. De la séduction. Paris: Denoël, 1979.

Boyd, Brian. “‘Even Homais Nods’: Nabokov’s Fallibility, Or, How to Revise Lolita.” Nabokov Studies 2 (1995). 62-86.

---. ADAonline. http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz, 1992-2008.

Boyd, Brian & Johnson, Donald Barton. “Prologue. The Otherworld.” Nabokov’s World. Eds. Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin, Priscilla Meyer. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave, 2002, vol. 1. 19-25.

Brattin, Joel J. “The Intersection of McEwen and Wheaton. A Nabokovian Locus Identified.” Nabokov Studies 1 (1994). 1-7.

Burling, Valérie. “Nabokov et le trompe l’oeil.” Delta 17 (1983). Ed. Maurice Couturier. 11-21.

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Chouard, Géraldine. “‘Once Upon a Quilt’: la fabrique de l’Amérique.” Revue française d’études américaines 116 (2008). 20-33.

Couturier, Maurice. Nabokov ou La Tyrannie de l’auteur. Paris: Seuil, 1993.

---. “The French Nabokov.“ Transitional Nabokov. Eds. Will Norman & Duncan White. Oxford & Bern: Peter Lang, 2009. 135-150.

De Vries, Gerard & Johnson, Donald Barton (with an essay by Liana Ashenden). Nabokov and the Art of Painting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.

Delage-Toriel, Lara. “Brushing through ‘veiled values and translucent undertones.’ Nabokov’s Pictorial Approach to women.” Transatlantica 2006: 1. http://www.transatlantica.org/ document760.html

Eco, Umberto. Apostille au Nom de la Rose (1983). Tr. Myriem Bouzaher. Paris: Grasset (“Poche”), 1985.

Guy, Laurence. Vladimir Nabokov et son ombre russe. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2007.

Haegert, John. “Artist in Exile: the Americanization of Humbert Humbert” (1985). Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook. Ed. Ellen Pifer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 137-153.

Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics.” Style In Language. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. 350-377.

Maixent, Jocelyn. Leçon littéraire sur Vladimir Nabokov, de La Méprise à Ada. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995.

Nabokov, Vladimir. King, Queen, Knave. (Korol’, dama, valet, 1928). Tr. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov (1968). New York: Vintage International, 1989.

---. The Eye (Soglyadatay, 1930). Tr. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov (1965). New York: Vintage International, 1990.

---. The Gift (Dar, 1937-1938). Tr. Michael Scammell in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov (1963). New York: Vintage International, 1991.

---. The Annotated Lolita (Lolita, 1955). Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: Vintage International, 1991.

---. “On a Book Entitled Lolita.” The Annotated Lolita. Ed. Alfred Appel Jr. New York: Vintage International, 1991. 311-317.

---. Nikolai Gogol. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1961.

---. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage International, 1973.

---. Pnin (1957). New York: Vintage International, 1989.

---. Pale Fire (1962). New York: Vintage International, 1989.

---. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). New York: Vintage International, 1990.

---. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt, 1980.

Proffer, Carl R. Keys to Lolita. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968.

Raguet-Bouvart, Christine. Lolita: un royaume au-delà des mers. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1996.

Raguet-Bouvart, Christine. “European Art: A ‘Framing Device’?” Nabokov at the Limits. Redrawing Critical Boundaries. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. New York & London: Garland, 1999. 183-212.

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Shapiro, Gavriel. “Two Notes on Pnin”. The Nabokovian 29 (Fall 1992). 35-38.

Shapiro, Gavriel. “‘Setting His Myriad Faces in His Text’: Nabokov’s Authorial Presence Revisited.” Nabokov and His Fiction. New Perspectives. Ed. Julian Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 15-35.

Shapiro, Gavriel. “Nabokov and Early Netherlandish Art.” Nabokov at Cornell. Ed. Gavriel Shapiro. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 241-251.

Stoichita, Victor Ieronim. L’Instauration du tableau: méta-peinture à l’aube des temps modernes. Paris: Méridiens-Klincksieck, 1993.

Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. “‘April in Arizona’: Nabokov as an American Writer.” American Literary History 6 (1994). 325-335.

Toker, Leona. Nabokov. The Mystery of Literary Structures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Updike. John. “Van Loves Ada, Ada Loves Van.” The New Yorker (2 August 1969). 67-68.

Welty, Eudora. “Place in Fiction” (1957). The Eye of the Story. Selected Essays and Reviews, London: Virago, 1979. 116-133.

Wood, Michael. The Magician’s Doubts. Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994.

Zimmer, Dieter E., “Lolita, USA. A Geographical Scrutiny of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita.” http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/LolitaUSA/LoUSpre.html, 2007.

“The Vladimir Nabokov Forum (Nabokv-l).” http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html

NOTES

1. A preliminary and radically different version of this paper was presented in Oslo at the conference of the European Association for American Studies (9-12 May 2008). I would like to thank Nathalie Cochoy and Kristiaan Versluys for their kind support. I am very grateful to Géraldine Chouard for her assistance in finding a suitable image of a quilt, Linda Gass’ wonderful After the Gold Rush. 2. Nabokov wrote only two texts in French, “Mademoiselle O” and the essay “Pouchkine ou le vrai et le vraisemblable.” 3. For a radically different opinion, see for instance Eudora Welty’s claim that place in famous works of fiction is of paramount importance: “Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else. Imagine Swann’s Way laid in London, or The Magic Mountain in Spain, or Green Mansions in the Black Forest. The very notion of moving a novel brings ruder havoc to the mind and affections than would a century’s alteration in its time” (Welty 122). 4. For the quilt as fabric of the American nation, see Géraldine Chouard, “’Once Upon a Quilt’: la fabrique de l’Amérique.” 5. Valeria’s lover, Maximovich (28), and a “repulsively handsome White Russian, a baron they said” (155), are the only Russian characters in the novel. 6. For a discussion of Nabokov’s claim that he was “as American as April in Arizona,” see Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, “’April in Arizona’: Nabokov as an American Writer.”

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7. This is a reference to John Keats’s “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” (1816): “Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,/And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;/Round many western islands have I been/Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold./ Oft of one wide expanse had I been told/That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;/Yet did I never breathe its pure serene/Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:/Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken;/Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/He stared at the Pacific – and all his men/Looked at each other with a wild surmise–/Silent, upon a peak in Darien” (italics mine). 8. A reference to Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (1770): “where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey.” 9. He also gave a humorous answer to those who read Lolita as a satire by joking that the book should have been published in the Soviet Union, where it was banished, of course, because it was a bitter condemnation of the American system of motels (Strong Opinions 97). 10. For the reader’s delight and in order to show how Quilty’s place names function, I will reproduce, with minor changes and additions, a selection of examples accompanied by Alfred Appel’s explanatory notes from The Annotated Lolita. There are no novel discoveries; my main interest here is not in annotating Lolita, but in discussing the interweaving of artifice and reality through the use of cultural references in Nabokov’s American place names. All the entries that are mentioned hereafter can be found in Lolita, 248-251: N. Petit, Larousse, Ill. : A reference to the title of the French dictionary, Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré. Of course there is no Larousse in Illinois. Larousse becomes La Rousse in Nabokov’s novel Ada, a pun on the French “rousse,” “red hair.” Lucette, Ada’s sister, is called La Rousse. ; Dr. Gratiano Forbeson, Mirandola, NY : Dr. Gratiano is a character in the Italian commedia dell’arte; he frequently delivers quotations in Latin and Greek. His audiences interrupt him in order to stem the flow of eloquence – a reference to Humbert’s eloquence. Forbeson is a minor character in Italian comedy as well, whereas Mirandola is an invented town. Harold Haze, Tombstone, Arizona : This is a reference to Lolita’s father, who is dead. Tombstone is an actual town, the most renowned of Arizona’s old mining camps. D. Orgon, Elmira, NY : Orgon is the husband of Elmire in Molière’s Tartuffe (1664). Hypocritical Tartuffe attempts to seduce her, just like Quilty attempts to seduce Lolita – the denouement is different however, since Elmire is faithful to Orgon, whereas Lolita is more than willing to leave Humbert. The term “orgon” also refers to the Austrian- American psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who coined the term “orgone” to designate sexual energy, a version of Freud’s libido (Proffer 13). Elmira is an actual town in New York and the location of a college for women. Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss. : Eryx is a mountain in western Sicily, where the cult of Aphrodite flourished, many temples were built and religious prostitution was practiced - hence the name “Venus Erycina.” Venus was the patron goddess of prostitutes. Alfred Appel translates this entry in the following way: Dr. Clitoris, Venus, Miss. (427). Miss Venus is the winner of the famous beauty contest, and so Lolita is cast as the beauty queen, with references to The Iliad and to Greek mythology: Lolita/Helen is stolen by Quilty/Paris from Humbert/ Menelaus. Donald Quix, Sierra, Nev. : This is a transparent reference to Don Quixote, with whom Quilty shares the first three letters of his name. Both Don Quixote and Quilty claim to be “redressers of wrongs.” Don Quixote is associated with the Sierra Morena mountain range, whereas Sierra Nevada is of course a mountain range in

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California, which creates a conflation between the Spain of Cervantes and chivalric romance and the United States of Humbert and Quilty, with Lolita cast as Dulcinea del Toboso. (Gerard de Vries has provided some help with this entry). Ted Hunter, Cane, NH : “Hunter” is a reference to Quilty hunting Humbert, to Humbert hunting Quilty, to the name of the motel where Humbert seduces Lolita, The Enchanted Hunters. The whole phrase is an anagram of Enchanted Hunter. Also, there is an allusion to Cain/ Cane, Abel’s brother, since Quilty is Humbert’s imaginary brother. Will Brown, Dolores, Colo. : A county, a river and a town are called Dolores in the state of Colorado. Brown is Lolita’s colour – she is always compared to dark liquids and ripe fruit. Dolores is of course Lolita’s name. Incidentally, there is a town called Lolita in Texas, with a population of 548 people at the 2000 census. Clare Quilty’s name is also derived from a place name, an Irish one: there is a small fishing village called Quilty in County Clare. 11. John Updike complained about the fictional nature of the general framework (country and planet) in Ada: “I confess to a prejudice: fiction is earthbound, and while in decency the names of small towns and middling cities must be faked, metropolises and nations are unique and should be given their own names or none. I did not even like it when Nabokov, in Pale Fire, gave New York State the pre-empted appellation of Appalachia” (Updike 68). 12. Brian Boyd’s project ADAonline offers annotations and interpretations of the novel, including place names. See also Maixent 26-37. 13. Vivan Darkbloom’s annotations explain that “granoblastically” means “in a tesselar (mosaic) jumble” (Ada 591), another patchwork image. 14. Dieter E. Zimmer has accomplished an impressive and painstaking work of annotation of Nabokov’s texts, without which our understanding of the writer’s use of “average ‘reality’” would be dramatically incomplete. Dieter E. Zimmer foregrounds the various ways in which Nabokov incorporated or disguised elements of reality into his texts, thus proving that the consummate stylist was also attentive to the smallest details of the material, political and geographic world around him. 15. Nabokov game some mocking clues to Alfred Appel Jr. as to the identity of the famous poet, who is an invention: “That poet was evidently Leping who used to go lepping (i.e. lepidoptera hunting) but that’s about all anybody knows about him” (Lolita 376). 16. A quick search on the archives of the Vladimir Nabokov Forum (“Nabokv-l”) shows that readers have inquired about the real place behind Coalmont and have done detective work in order to identify it. Two possibilities have emerged: Coal Mountain, Georgia, or Carbondale, Indiana. There are also several real Coalmonts in the United States (in Indiana, Colorado, Tennessee) and one in Canada, which further complicates matters. 17. The idea of the “tyranny of the author” is developed by Maurice Couturier in his seminal study Vladimir Nabokov ou la Tyrannie de l’auteur (1993). 18. For Nabokov and the trompe l’œil, see Valérie Burling’s article. 19. On the convex mirror in Pnin, see Shapiro 1992 and (more generally on Nabokov’s interest in Netherlandish art) Shapiro 2003, as well as the chapter on art in Pnin that can be found in Gerard de Vries & Donald B. Johnson, 44-59. In her article on “Nabokov’s pictorial approach to women,” Lara Delage-Toriel discusses the Arnolfini portrait and the convex mirror in the context of Nabokov’s anagrammatic signatures. 20. I cannot help finding similarities between the final encounter at Coalmont and the domestic scene in the Arnolfini. The painting presents the husband and the wife (the

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analogues of Richard and Dolores Schiller) from the point of view of “Johannes van Eyck” who “was there” (the inscription in the convex mirror says “fuit hic”). The painter includes himself in the mirror, just like Humbert includes himself in the narrative of the scene, which is presented from his point of view. Pregnant Giovanna is echoed by pregnant Lolita. Even the dog in the painting has his counterpart in Lolita’s dog (“a nondescript cur” 269). The slippers on the carpet (which are present in many of Jan van Eyck’s paintings) call to mind Lolita’s “sloppy felt slippers” (269).

ABSTRACTS

In the afterword to Lolita, Nabokov claimed that in this book he had to invent both Lolita and America after having invented Europe in his previous fiction. This paper focuses precisely on the various ways in which Nabokov “invented” America in his best-known novel. This invention is first of all the result of the author’s evolving stance on the complexity of what he called “average ‘reality’” in his works. Through a survey of Nabokov’s statements on the choice and role of place in the forewords to his Russian works and in his critical texts, I show that Lolita is indeed considered by Nabokov to be a “recreation” of American reality, to a much greater extent than his Russian works had been recreations of a given milieu. I take the metaphor of the “crazy quilt” mentioned in Lolita to suggest complexity, chromatic exuberance, hybridity. The invention of America is also the result of a process of naming. Place names will be examined, not only those which make up Quilty’s “cryptogrammic paperchase”, but also Humbert’s choice of place names. The problem of referentiality is discussed and the way recent criticism has dealt with it. Finally, the interplay between one and many is emphasized, the way in which the diversity of the “crazy quilt” is counterbalanced by the uniqueness of the mastermind having produced it. The American motto “From many make one” could be reinterpreted as “From one make many”.

INDEX

Keywords: place and place names in literature, geography and representation, referentiality, authorial interference

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THE MUMMY in context

Richard Freeman

1 One reason why mummy films suffer in comparison to other films of the classic horror genre is that they have, as Kim Newman describes it, no “foundation text” (Newman 225). The other famous monsters either have a literary source beginning with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and ending with Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera in 1911, or they have a mythical origin such as the vampire or werewolf.

2 Mythology regarding re-animated mummies is also a nineteenth-century invention. There are no records in archaeology that the ancient Egyptians ever considered such a possibility. The mummified body was for use in the after-life, not for re-use on this earth; it served as the link between the physical self and the ka, the spirit. Due to the mummification process, it was also unlikely that a re-animated mummy would be able to function. This was because the process involved the removal of vital organs, including the brain and the eyes, the loss of which would have made a revived mummy somewhat ineffective. In the Universal horror films, and the Hammer remake in 1959, the mummy is buried alive, this punishment making the removal of vital organs unnecessary. The idea of being buried alive appears in Cleopatra (1889), a novel by H. Rider Haggard. In this story a high priest called Harmachis, the main protagonist of the story, is buried alive by his priests for failing to remain pure to Isis (Pearson 230). This thread, of offending the ancient gods, is one of many that have found their way, consciously or unconsciously, into the scripts of the films.

3 The first story in the English language to feature a revived mummy was published in 1827, written by Jane Webb, called The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century. It shares with Frankenstein the theme of a re-animated being, but rather than being brought to life by chemical means as Mary Shelley had employed, here it is through electricity, an idea that the filmmakers would adopt for the Frankenstein story. Other than a revived mummy, this novel has no other connection with films, nor does Edgar Allan Poe’s Some Words with a Mummy, 1845, which also revives a mummy through electricity. In 1858 Théophile Gautier published The Romance of the Mummy, which is historically accurate about Egypt, and also introduces the idea of love across the ages. An ancient Queen’s remains are transported to England by an archaeologist, who has read the sad tale of her life, and he falls in love with the memory of her. In 1863 Gautier

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wrote The Mummy’s Foot, which is the first with supernatural overtones. After buying the preserved foot of an Egyptian princess to use as a paperweight, the narrator dreams that the princess comes to reclaim her lost appendage. She and he then travel back to ancient Egypt where her father denies them permission to marry as the storyteller does “not know how to preserve” himself. Again the mummy here was not a threatening force, or a role model for future films (Craig and Smith 174). In his Smith and the Pharaohs, Haggard uses a similar device, when an Egyptologist is locked in the Cairo Museum overnight. He apparently dreams that the ancient Kings and Queens of Egypt come to life to discuss the desecration of their tombs. In his 1897 novel The Beetle, Richard Marsh introduced the theme of vengeance for defiling a tomb. In this story a fantastical creature from Egypt, “born neither of God nor man,” with supernatural and hypnotic powers (like Karloff in the 1932 film), stalks a British politician who had earlier opened a sacred tomb. However, apart from this and the reincarnation theme introduced by Haggard, it was Arthur Conan Doyle who introduced most of the recognizable plot points from the Hollywood movies in his two stories The Ring of Thoth (1890) and Lot No. 249 (1892).

4 The first story concerns scientist John Vansittart Smith and his encounter with an attendant in the Louvre, an Egyptian called Sosra, who claims to have been born 1600 years before Christ (Craig and Smith 174). Sosra discovered a chemical compound that has made him immune to disease and death. Later in the story Sosra, secretly observed by Smith, enters one of the rooms and takes a mummy from a case. Elsewhere Sosra describes a scene that is shown directly in the 1932 film: “In a frenzy I broke my way through the attendants, and rushed through hall and corridor to my Atma’s chamber. She lay upon her couch, her head high upon the pillow, with a pallid face and glazed eye.” This same scene is used again in two of the Universal B pictures of the 1940s, substituting different actors for the close-ups. The mummy that Sosra took from the case was that of the woman he loved in ancient Egypt. He has continued to be in love with her over the centuries, and this is central to the plot of The Mummy (Dir: Karl Freund, 1932) and the other films discussed here.

5 His other story, Lot No. 249, is less influential, but does include three important elements. Firstly, there is the notion of the avenging mummy, which is the popular conception of the “monster.” That the mummy is being controlled by someone else is used in the Universal pictures of the 1940s and in the Hammer film of 1959. Secondly, there is the (unexplained) use of a scroll, which may have been used in bringing the mummy to life. Universal, and in particular screenwriter John Balderston, created the Scroll of Thoth, central to the revival of Boris Karloff’s Im-Ho-Tep. Thirdly, there is also mention made of strange leaves, which may be the origin of the tana leaves, which were used in the 1940s films to keep the mummy alive (Delahoyde 1).

6 The one novel dealing with a mummy that has been filmed is Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars. However, no aspects of this work found their way into the films of Universal, especially as it does not include a revived mummy. It was adapted as Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb by Hammer in 1971, and then again in the U.S. in 1980 as The Awakening, starring Charlton Heston.

7 It is not possible to state with any certainty how many of these stories (and others) were known to the Hollywood screenwriters. However, there is little doubt that there are many plot points in common, and the popularity of Conan Doyle would indicate that his stories are likely to have been known, at least by John L. Balderston, the final

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scenarist on the 1932 film. Victorian and Edwardian fiction, along with the silent movies considered next, do show that The Mummy movie made in 1932 did not spring solely from the screenwriters’ own imaginations.

8 The early years of cinema produced over forty films with an Egyptian theme before the definitive mummy film of 1932. These began in the earliest days, in 1899, as French fantasy film pioneer Georges Méliès produced Cleopatra, showing her being raised from the dead. The last film before Freund’s 1932 classic was a Disney ‘Silly Symphony’ cartoon called Egyptian Melodies, in which a spider investigates tunnels beneath a sphinx and discovers dancing mummies and ranks of marching hieroglyphics.i Between these two there were films of varying running times, dividing into either comedies or dramas. Several are derived from the fictions discussed earlier; however, it is interesting to note that the discovery of the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen, and the intense media interest in it, did not lead to more films. In fact, of the forty or so films of this era only five were produced from 1923 onwards. Many of the plots, especially the comedies, have little in common with the mummy films under discussion here; especially popular are instances of people dressing up as mummies in order to play jokes or to fool and frighten other characters. As with the literature, many of the silent movies involve the revivification of female mummies, and the reincarnated lovers are male, which is the opposite of nearly all the films that were made later.

9 The storylines from the silent films that have an influence on the major mummy films can be divided into four categories: • Curses – on either defilers of tombs or on artefacts removed from tombs. • Fluids/elixirs – used to bring mummies back to life. • Reviving mummies – usually females, either by use of a fluid or by electricity. • Reincarnation – revived mummies find their former lovers reincarnated in modern people.

10 Some of the films can be seen as adaptations of some of the literature, such as The Beetle (Dir: Alexander Butler, UK, 1919), but the majority have taken specific ideas from the literature and used them for dramatic effect.

11 Curse: The curse on a tomb or its contents, or made against those who defile the sanctity of the grave appears in seven of the silent films. Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars features artefacts taken from a tomb, and in particular the ring of the title. The earliest film on this theme, made in the UK in 1912, is one of the longest and it features Napoleon Bonaparte in his invasion of Egypt. A cursed scarab ring is stolen from a mummy, and successive owners of it are killed. The curse is lifted when an Egyptologist returns it to the mummy, whose eyes glow in triumph. Two years later, the Edison Company made two attempts at a similar story. One, called Naidra, The Dream Worker, was a three-reel drama in which a man steals a necklace from a mummy and then finds that he is unable to dispose of it. The other version was called The Necklace of Rameses (Dir: Charles Brabin, USA, 1914), where a curse prevents a jewel thief from peddling a necklace he has stolen from the mummy of Rameses’ daughter. In 1918-19 there was a fifteen chapter serial that involved a cursed stolen gem. Following the opening of the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen and the press stories about a curse, there were, strangely, only two films that attempted a dramatization. The first, King Tut-Ankh-Amen’s Eighth Wife (Dir: Andrew Remo, USA, 1923), was a drama about a curse on those who violated the tomb of the Pharaoh. Three years later Cecil B. DeMille produced Made for Love (Dir: Paul Sloane, USA, 1926) where, apparently, a man is killed by the curse on an Egyptian

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tomb. Garrett Fort who later worked on Dracula, Frankenstein and The Invisible Man scripted this film.

12 Fluids/Elixirs: A fluid that can revive the dead appears in three films between 1911 and 1916. A chemical process features in Conan Doyle’s Ring of Thoth; such a method does not reappear until the first Universal sequel to The Mummy, The Mummy’s Hand (Dir: Christy Cabanne, USA, 1940). Here the fluid is made from the fictional tana leaves, of which there is only a vague reference in Conan Doyle or the silent movies. They were the invention of screenwriters, who claimed in publicity that the leaves were used as part of the embalming process (Brunas, Brunas and Weaver 234). In one of the early films, The Mummy (Dir: A. E. Colby, UK, 1911), the elixir may not have been used on a mummy at all – in the film the scientist’s assistant impersonates a mummy as part of a plan to marry the professor’s daughter. In Too Much Elixir of Life (Dir: Bruce Mitchell, USA, 1915), a professor believes that his elixir has restored life to an ancient mummy. A comedy short of a year later, Elixir of Life (Dir: Allen Curtis, USA, 1916) has a potion that not only returns a mummy to life but also sausages back into dogs.

13 Reviving Mummies: Reviving mummies is the oldest storyline from mummy fiction. Some of the silent films use electrical apparatus as described by Jane Webb or Poe, or use an elixir. Only Conan Doyle employed a supernatural means to revive a mummy in Lot No. 249, and it is not clear from the descriptions of some of the silent films whether such a method was used. The films do share with the fiction the idea that most of the revived mummies are female, which rarely happens in later films (only in The Mummy’s Curse (Dir: Leslie Goodwins, USA, 1944) do we see a female mummy revive, though no external agency is involved). One film that definitely did have a male mummy revived was produced in France in 1909, and King Rameses in this film was probably restored to life through chemical means.

14 Reincarnation: Closely allied in popular consciousness with revived mummies is the notion of reincarnation, usually of a lover. This idea has its literary roots in Haggard’s Smith and the Pharaohs, where the modern Egyptologist discovers that the reason for his fascination for an Egyptian princess is that he is her reincarnated lover. An early adaptation of Gautier’s The Mummy’s Foot, made in France in 1910, ends with the character Lord Evandale, who has dreamt that he loved an Egyptian princess, waking up to meet and marry a woman who looks just like her. The first film to feature a reincarnated lover was When Soul Meets Soul (Dir: J. Farrell McDonald, USA, 1912), and two years later there are two reincarnated lovers who actually restore life to a 3,000- year-old princess in Through the Centuries (Dir: Fred W. Huntley, USA, 1914). The idea of rival lovers can be found in Conan Doyle’s Ring of Thoth, though this story and Huntley’s film are very different. In all there are six silent films that feature reincarnations, but it is only the 1917 drama The Undying Flame (Dir: Maurice Tourneur, USA) that resembles the 1932 Universal picture in that it has an ancient Egyptian reincarnated in the body of an English girl.

15 The genesis of ideas that informed Freund’s The Mummy can be seen in some of these silent films. The degree to which these films influenced the writers of the classic 1932 film can only be a matter of speculation. Some of the silent film ideas found their way into earlier drafts of the 1932 film, but were discarded.

16 The background to the making of The Mummy in 1932, indeed the background to American society at that time, was the Great Depression. The great inter-war slump is usually dated from 29 October 1929, when the New York stock market crashed; however

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the collapse came against the background of an already declining and fragile world economy (Overy 264). The film industry was not unaffected, even though those stars and executives at the top earned phenomenal salaries. The dollar’s buying power was high – admission at some local movie theatres was as low as 5 cents – but many people had little to spend on anything but necessities (Thompson and Bordwell 213). Despite this, attendances stayed high and would climb throughout the 1930s and peak in the boom years of wartime. One of the most popular genres during the first half of the Great Depression was the “horror” film, although that term was yet to be coined. What we recognize today as the horror film was described as a “thriller” in the silent days and the early years of sound. It was in Europe that the stylistic elements for horror were laid down. The influence of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Dir: Robert Wiene, Germany, 1919), The Golem (Dir: Paul Wegener, Germany, 1920) and Nosferatu (Dir: F. W. Murnau, Germany, 1922) is strong on the Universal classics of 1931 to 1936. Son of Frankenstein (Dir: Rowland V. Lee, 1939), re-launching the genre for the studio, took these elements and pushed them almost into parody – little surprise, then that this film forms the basis for Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedy pastiche. Many of the German filmmakers and technicians found their way to Hollywood, and some to Universal. For example one was Paul Leni, who directed some influential silent thrillers, including the Cat and the Canary at Universal in 1927.

17 Universal’s origins can be traced back to 1906 when Carl Laemmle gave up his post as a bookkeeper and used his savings to buy and operate a nickelodeon in Chicago. Universal were one of eight large companies who dominated the industry, though they were not one of the “majors.” To be a Major, a company had to be vertically integrated, owning a theatre chain and having an international distribution operation (Thompson and Bordwell 214). The five majors, Paramount, MGM, 20th Century-Fox, Warner Brothers and RKO, dominated the industry not through their control of production but through their ownership of the most desirable and profitable movie theatres. Although it was the largest of the other three (Columbia and United Artists being the other two), and it had an extensive distribution system, Universal had constant money problems (Thompson and Bordwell 216). Apart from the problems caused by the depression, Laemmle “imported shiploads of relatives and friends from Germany and employed them in dozens of diverse positions” (Brunas, Brunas and Weaver 2). Net losses exceeded profits on a regular basis, for example, for the nine months ending 31 October 1932, while The Mummy was in production, there was a net loss of $759,646, a figure greater than the profit for the whole of the year of 1931 (Brunas, Brunas and Weaver 2). That was the year of the great success of Dracula (Dir: Tod Browning), the film that initiated the horror cycle.

18 In the silent days, Universal had produced three of the best known “thrillers.” Apart from The Cat and the Canary mentioned above, they also produced The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Dir: Wallace Worsley, 1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (Dir: Rupert Julian, 1925, re-released in 1929 with some sound effects and music added), which both starred Lon Chaney. Since the stage success of Dracula, the Studio had been in negotiation for the property, with Chaney in mind for the title role. Although Laemmle was against it, he had given the running of the studio over to his son, Carl Jr., who completed the deal and put the film into production. Despite its unparalleled box office performance, Universal remained in deep financial difficulties. The reaction to a major hit was not talk of a sequel as would happen today, but a follow-up of a similar nature was required for the studio to remain solvent (Brunas, Brunas and Weaver 21). As Andrew Tudor puts

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it, “financially successful films encourage further variations on their proven themes, thus generating a broadly cyclical pattern of successes which then decline into variously unsuccessful repetitions of the initial formula” (Tudor 23). In the initial cycle of Universal horrors, 1931-36, repetition was minimal, but they did establish the formulas that were repeated in the second cycle from 1939-46. The follow up to Dracula, Frankenstein, was an even greater success, and Universal now looked for another success that would use its new star, Boris Karloff.

19 The unifying thread of un-dead beings can be seen again in the figure of the mummy. The preservation of the body as practised in ancient Egypt was boosted in the popular imagination with the discovery of Tut-Ankh-Amen in 1922. In an attempt to allow the archaeological work to carry on unhindered by the press hordes, The Times of London was made the exclusive agent, and everyone, including Egyptians, had to go through London for news. With nothing else to report on, the myriad of journalists resorted to gossip and stories of the squabbling between Carnarvon, Carter and the Egyptian authorities (Guran 2). In March 1923, a writer of popular occult novels, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, wrote to The New York Times, and claimed that she had a translation of an Arabic text found in the tomb that promised “Death comes on wings to he who enters the tomb of a Pharaoh.” After some interest from the fact-starved press, the curse story would have died down immediately if Lord Carnarvon had not died shortly after (Guran 2).

20 Fantastic story built on fantastic story. Conan Doyle, well known for his belief in the occult, announced to the world that a ‘Pharaoh’s curse’ could indeed have caused Carnarvon’s death (Hoving 226-27). This kind of sensationalism - reporting of fiction as fact - caused near hysteria: hundreds of people in England packed up and shipped to confused members of the British Museum staff every scrap of Egyptian antiquity that they had in their houses. Several American politicians went so far as to call for an investigation of mummies in various museums to determine whether or not these possessed the same medical dangers as those thought to be apparent in the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen (Hoving 228-29). Little attempt was made to establish any facts, or to ask questions – for instance, why was Howard Carter unaffected by the curse? Surely he, of all the defilers, would have been top of the list for retribution. The curse lived on, and talk of it was revived when the treasures from the tomb were on a world tour in the 1970s (Guran 2).

21 One of the reporters present at the opening of the tomb was John L. Balderston. After the Great War, Balderston was based in London as a correspondent for the New York World, and he was assigned to report on the discovery of Tut-Ankh-Amen (Guran 2). When Universal decided to use the mummy theme for their next supernatural thriller, they had a man on the payroll that had knowledge of and insight into ancient Egypt. However, the writing assignment went elsewhere, and when it did end up with Balderston, he was influenced by more immediate stories than those he may have written as a correspondent in Egypt. Carl Laemmle, Jr, the producer of the original horror cycle, conceived the idea of making a film loosely based around the discovery of Tut-Ank-Amen, and the alleged curse that accompanied it. Shrewdly, Laemmle also knew that such a story would not cost the studio any money for the story rights as it was in the public domain (Dyson 25). He assigned Nina Wilcox Putnam, a novelist, and Richard Schayer, head of the scenario department at Universal, to come up with a feasible story (Brunas, Brunas and Weaver 50).

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22 Their story, entitled Cagliostro, was about an ancient Egyptian who keeps himself alive by injecting nitrates, and who revenges himself through the centuries on women who resemble his unfaithful lover. The writers knew their Conan Doyle, but also they knew something of the real Cagliostro, an eighteenth century Italian who passed himself off as an alchemist and a hypnotist. He conducted séances and became a fashionable figure in aristocratic circles in France. Laemmle liked the story well enough to announce it as Karloff’s next appearance for Universal and appropriate pre-publicity was drawn up. The story was passed to Balderston to write the screenplay, and he had experience in this area of the ‘thriller’ as he had been involved in the stage adaptations of both Dracula and Frankenstein.

23 Balderston made many crucial changes to the Putnam/Schayer story, most notably providing a supernatural element (the mummy is revived by reading the Scroll of Thoth) rather than a scientific one for the main character’s survival over the millennia, and moving the story from San Francisco to the more exotic Cairo (Brunas, Brunas and Weaver 51). Neither the Putnam/Schayer treatment nor the Balderston script used the curse. In the script and the film the curse on the box containing the Scroll is read out, but apart, perhaps, from the unfortunate Norton, who reanimates Im-Ho-Tep, none of the other defilers are punished for their sacrilege then or later. Although Sir Joseph Whemple is murdered by Im-Ho-Tep, it is for more practical reasons than a curse. Balderston had ditched the Cagliostro angle and had changed the title to Im-Ho-Tep by the time he submitted the script on September 12, 1932, and, it has been argued, he also changed the movie to resemble Dracula. Brunas, Brunas and Weaver contend that it “wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call The Mummy a disguised remake of the Lugosi picture” (Brunas, Brunas and Weaver 52). There are many points of similarity in the two films as shown in the table below:ii

Dracula The Mummy

Undead being Undead being

Hypnotic powers Hypnotic powers

Renfield as slave Nubian as slave

Film starts in ancestral homeland Film starts in ancestral homeland

Move to city setting (London) Move to city setting (Cairo)

Lives in house echoing origin in homeland Lives in house echoing origin in homeland

Young woman at centre of struggle (Mina) Young woman at centre of struggle (Helen)

Confronted by knowledgeable expert (played by Confronted by knowledgeable expert (played by van Sloan) van Sloan)

Ineffective fiancé (played by Manners) Ineffective fiancé (played by Manners)

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They track him to lair at the end They track him to lair at the end

24 In keeping with genre theory, this can be seen as a prime example of repeating situations to meet audience expectations. There are two major twists that make it different. The heroine, Helen, is the reincarnated lover of Im-Ho-Tep, and is therefore much more than just a victim, and at the end the “heroes” do not destroy the monster. Because the heroine is in touch with her former incarnation, she is able to call on the power of the ancient Gods to save her from Im-Ho-Tep’s plans. Much more was made of the reincarnation theme in Balderston’s script. Scenes were filmed showing Helen in different guises throughout history, revealed to her in Im-Ho-Tep’s magical pool. These scenes were later cut from the final release print. Zita Johann indicated that this was revenge for her insisting on being released from her contract. “It wasn’t really nasty,” she said, “they had to protect Karloff,” suggesting that Laemmle felt her performance outshone the star (Mank 419). Karloff himself later said that the cuts were made for pacing reasons (Riley 31). Karloff’s character also suffered from strange cutting decisions. For example, in the script, when he kills the museum guard, the guard has snatched the Scroll of Thoth, and when Karloff attempts to retrieve it, another guard arrives and he is forced to leave it. In the final film, most of this is left out, and it seems as if he has somehow just forgotten to take with him the most important object in the film.

25 The scroll was one of the things that Balderston introduced that not only added to the atmosphere, but also gave authenticity to the story. Thoth, depicted with the head of an ibis, was the wisest of the Egyptian gods, and he helped Isis work the ritual to bring Osiris back from the dead, and he is believed to be the author of the spells contained within the Book of the Dead. The names of the two central characters were taken from Egyptian history. Im-Ho-Tep was a multi-talented commoner in early Egypt, who was so revered that he later was regarded as a God. The name of the dead princess, Anck-es- en-Amon, was the actual name of the wife of Tut-Ank-Amen, which would have been well known to Balderston, though probably not many others in Hollywood.

26 The film was written for Karloff, as is made clear in the character list in the script, and though most stills of the film available today show him as Im-Ho-Tep, he only appears in full mummy make-up for the first few minutes. For the rest of the film he portrays Ardath Bey, and his make-up is not so heavy. The audience would have recognized Karloff as the mummy when he re-appears ten years after his disappearance - helpfully he is framed in a doorway, suggesting Im-Ho-Tep in his sarcophagus. His dislike of being touched and his precise, slow movements suggest his fragility. When he murders the museum guard, he does so off-camera, so that the characterization is not compromised, as it would be if he were seen struggling with another character. It was Karloff’s first talking role at Universal (he had spoken in his appearance as Fu Manchu at MGM), and it was still a sympathetic role, much like the Frankenstein monster. He may be a murderer, but he doesn’t belong in the same category as such blatantly evil Karloff characters as the Oriental sadist Fu Manchu (The Mask of Fu Manchu, 1932) or his Satan-worshipping Hjalmar Poelzig (The Black Cat, 1934) (Brunas, Brunas and Weaver 55).

27 The film follows the script very closely. Karl Freund, in his first film as director, seemed loath to step outside what was written, and Balderston’s script already included the

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fluid camera movements for which Freund was famous. In the production itself there were two notable innovations. The Mummy was the first Universal horror to have a musical score, although it only amounted to around twenty minutes in all. The music was the idea of Freund himself, and was composed by James Dietrich to Freund’s precise instructions. Freund was not happy with Dietrich’s compositions and used stock pieces from earlier Universal pictures. For the opening credits, after a few bars, the music plays a piece from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake – the same piece that had opened Dracula and Murders in the Rue Morgue. The second innovation, not just for Universal but also for the film industry, was that the film pioneered the use of the process screen (also called back projection), whereby characters can be placed in any location in the world without having to transport them and the crew to the actual locale (Riley 12). A second camera crew was dispatched from Universal’s Berlin office to Cairo, where they photographed the locations and also shots from moving vehicles. Back in Hollywood, the film was projected on to a screen from behind and the actors played in front of it. The camera and the projector were synchronized, and in the final film the illusion is given that the action is taking place in Cairo. The process is most familiar from shots of characters travelling in cars, and it is appropriate that the first time the process was seen in the cinema it was of such a scene. There is a publicity photograph of the process in action, however the scene shown, if shot, did not appear in the final film. Apart from synchronization, careful attention has to be given to the lighting of the live action, ensuring that it matches the luminosity of the back projection.

28 The final cost of the film was $196,000, significantly less than Dracula or Frankenstein (Riley 31). This figure does not include the costs of publicity, which Universal used effectively to sell the picture to the public. Posters of different sizes displayed “Karloff the Uncanny,” and in New York there was a giant electrical billboard over Times Square. The press book gave hints to exhibitors on how they could increase business, ranging from casket-shaped hangers for a few cents to elaborate speaking mummies who would answer questions in the foyer. Almost all the publicity gimmicks used Karloff in the full mummy makeup, which must have given the public the impression that this was how Karloff would appear throughout the whole film. In the later films, Universal would not need to be so misleading.

29 Literature on The Mummy is variable. Some books on the subject of horror films barely mention it (Ivan Butler’s Horror in the Cinema does not mention it at all), while others deem it a peak in the horror/thriller genre. In his survey of Hollywood in the Thirties, John Baxter describes it as ‘a fantasy almost without equal’ (Baxter 76). William K. Everson described it as “the closest that Hollywood ever came to creating a poem out of horror” (Everson 93). A slow pace with no fast cutting creates the poetic atmosphere, and this is criticised by some modern authors. Jeremy Dyson feels that this pace makes it hard to appreciate today, although he does acknowledge the care and the skill with which the picture was crafted (Dyson 26). Two articles by female authors examine the film in a different way from the usual horror film commentator. Carol Siri Johnson puts forward the view that while the film is “ostensibly a reification of the colonial British hegemony, [it] displaces itself, and presents a subverted and subversive message” (Johnson 105). She goes on to say that the film presents the colonial archaeologists never questioning “their right to excavate and loot the remains of an ancient civilization - there is a clear assumption that they are a superior culture, and, since superior, should rule” (Johnson 108). However, she sees that the film subverts this by showing that male and British standards are powerless against “the (sexualized)

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concept “Egypt”. The mummy is stronger than the British empire” (Johnson 108). Also rather than being the standard man-save-woman horror scheme, the men are shown to be powerless. The hero, Frank, cannot save Helen; although he and Dr Muller arrive in time, they can do nothing. Helen’s appeal to the statue of Isis sees the goddess raise an arm holding an Ankh and Ardath Bey crumbles to dust. “The Ankh is the Egyptian symbol of life, a circle with a cross, the contemporary symbol for woman” (Johnson 112). Another female writer disputes this interpretation of the film as empowered womanhood. Caroline T. Schroeder argues that “Isis represents the triumph of a submissive construction of femininity, in that Isis’ actions serve to position Helen back to her “traditional” submissive position as beloved and wife” (Schroeder 4). Schroeder interprets the film as enforcing the colonial superiority, and it does this through the character of Helen. Through her mixed parentage (English-Egyptian), she symbolizes the struggle between the Orient and the West, and the threat posed to the rational world. The fact that the ancient Egyptian goddess saves “Helen herself from herself” could be seen as subversive, but in fact the Egyptians “are finally subjected to British rationality and sensibility through their own complicity in the colonial project” (Schroeder 2). Not all commentators are convinced by this triumph of colonialism. Annette Kuhn describes the ending as failing “to deliver a complete resolution, and the ‘victory’ of the powers of western enlightenment remains somewhat unconvincing” (Kuhn 90).

30 Egypt had declared its independence in 1922, and the ownership of relics is mentioned in the film, when Frank feels it unjust that the Cairo Museum receives the finds of his expedition. Further racist references by Frank are in Balderston’s script, but they were either not filmed or did not make the final cut. In the original film, it is the westerners who ‘invade’ Egypt, and stir up powers they cannot understand. Later films reverse this concept, the mummy comes to the west, and the populace must pull together to defeat the menace in undisguised wartime propaganda.

31 The Mummy remains a unique film, as much romance as thriller (Halliwell 211).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works Cited

Baxter, John. Hollywood in the Thirties. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1968.

Brunas, Michael, John Brunas, and Tom Weaver. Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931-1946. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990.

Craig, J. Robert and B.R. Smith. “Tracking the Sands of Time: Origin Stories in the Mummy Films.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology. August 2003: 172-80.

Delahoyde, Michael. “The Curse of the Mummy’s Text.” http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/ mummy.article.html [accessed 13 February 2005].

Dyson, Jeremy. Bright Darkness: The Lost Art of the Supernatural Horror Film. London: Cassell, 1997.

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Everson, William K. Classics of the Horror Film. Seacaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1974.

Guran, Paula. “Return of the Mummy: Part Two – Curses!” http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/ horroronline/mummy2.html [accessed 11 February 2005].

Halliwell, Leslie. The Dead That Walk. London: Paladin, 1988.

Hoving, Thomas. Tutankhamun: The Untold Story. London: BCA, 1979.

Johnson, Carol Siri. “The Limbs of Osiris: Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Hollywood’s The Mummy.” MELUS 17 (1991-92): 105-15.

Jones, Stephen. The Essential Monster Movie Guide. London: Titan Books, 1999.

Kuhn, Annette. An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002.

Mank, Gregory. “The Mummy Revisited.” Films In Review 35 (1984): 414-21.

Newman, Kim (ed.). The BFI Companion to Horror. London: British Film Institute, 1996.

Overy, Richard (ed.). The Times History of the World. London: Times Books, 1999; repr. 2000.

Pearson, Richard. “Archaeology and Gothic Desire: Vitality Beyond the Grave in H. Rider Haggard’s Ancient Egypt.” Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Ruth Robins and Julian Wolfreys. Basingstoke: Palgrave Publishers, 2000.

Riley, Philip J. (ed.) “The Mummy”: The Original 1932 Shooting Script. Atlantic City: MagicImage Filmbooks, 1989.

Schroeder, Caroline T. “Ancient Egypt on the Silver Screen: Modern Anxieties about Race, Ethnicity and Religion.” Journal of Religion and Film 7 (2003). www.unomaha.edu/jrf/Vol7No2/ ancientegypt.htm.

Thompson, Kristin and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction. 2nd Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.

Tudor, Andrew, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Filmography (Films mentioned in the article in chronological order)

Mummy Films

1899 Cleopatre. Dir. Georges Méliès. Georges Méliès. Star Film.

1909 The Mummy of King Ramses. Dir. Gerard Bourgeois. Lux.

1910 The Romance of the Mummy. Pathe.

1911 The Mummy. Dir. A.E. Colby. Pathe-Britannia.

1912 When Soul Meets Soul. Dir. J. Farrell McDonald. Francis X. Bushman, Dolores Casinelli, Fred Wolf. Essanay.

1914 Naidra, The Dream Worker. Edison.

Necklace of Rameses. Dir. Charles Brabin. Robert Brower, Gertrude Braun, Marc McDermott. Edison Film Company.

Through the Centuries. Dir. Fred W. Huntley. Harold Lockwood, Mabel van Buren, Henry W. Otto. Selig Polyscope Company.

1915 Much Elixir of Life. Dir. Bruce Mitchell. Alhambra.

1916 Elixir of Life. Dir. Allen Curtis. William Franey, Gale Henry, Lillian Peacock. Joker/Universal.

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1917 The Undying Flame. Dir. Maurice Tourneur. Olga Petrova, Mahlon Hamilton, Edward Mordant. Lasky/Paramount.

1919 The Beetle. Dir. Alexander Butler. Leal Douglas, Fred Morgan, Maudie Dunham. Barker.

1923 King Tut-Ankh-Amen’s Eighth Wife. Dir. Andrew Remo. Max Cohen.

1926 Made for Love. Dir. Paul Sloane. Leatrice Joy, Edmund Burns, Ethel Wales. Cinema Corporation of America.

1931 Egyptian Melodies. Dir. Wilfred Jackson. Disney/Columbia.

1932 The Mummy. Dir. Karl Freund. Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, Edward van Sloan. Universal.

1940 The Mummy’s Hand. Dir. Christy Cabanne. Dick Foran, Peggy Moran, Cecil Kellaway. Universal.

1944 The Mummy’s Curse. Dir. Leslie Goodwins. Lon Chaney, Peter Coe, Virginia Christine. Universal.

1971 Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb. Dir. Seth Holt. Andrew Keir, Valerie Leon, James Villiers. Hammer/MGM-EMI.

1980 The Awakening. Dir. Mike Newell. Charlton Heston, Susannah York, Jill Townsend. EMI/Orion.

Other Films

1919 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Dir. Robert Wiene. Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover. Decla-Bioscop.

1920 The Golem. Dir. Paul Wegener, Carl Boese. Paul Wegener, Lyda Salmonova, Ernst Deutsch. Union.

1922 Nosferatu. Dir. F.W. Murnau. Max Schreck, Greta Schroeder, Gustav von Wangenheim. Prana.

1923 The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Dir. Wallace Worsley. Lon Chaney, Patsy Ruth Miller, Norman Kerry. Universal.

1925 The Phantom of the Opera. Dir. Rupert Julian. Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry. Universal.

1927 The Cat and the Canary. Dir. Paul Leni. Laura La Plante, Creighton Hale, Forrest Stanley. Universal.

1931 Dracula. Dir. Tod Browning. Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, Edward van Sloan. Universal.

1931 Frankenstein. Dir. James Whale. Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, Mae Clarke. Universal.

1932 The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Dir. Robert Florey. Bela Lugosi, Sidney Fox, Leon Waycoff. Universal.

1932 The Mask of Fu Manchu. Dir. Charles Brabin. Boris Karloff, Myrna Loy, Lewis Stone. MGM.

1934 The Black Cat. Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer. Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners. Universal.

1939 Son of Frankenstein. Dir. Rowland V. Lee. Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi. Universal.

1974 Young Frankenstein. Dir. Mel Brooks. Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman. Twentieth Century Fox.

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NOTES i. The film descriptions derive from Jones and from the Internet Movie Database . ii. Table compiled from text in Brunas, Brunas and Weaver 52-4.

ABSTRACTS

This article examines the literary and cinematic antecedents of a cinema icon, The Mummy, produced by Universal Pictures in 1932. It looks at the sources in Victorian and Edwardian literature to see if any of the ideas found their way into the film. Similarly, the silent cinema is surveyed to see if the 1932 film was a collection of previously filmed stories remoulded. The context of the Great Depression and its effects on Universal Studios will be shown to have a significant influence on the decision to make the film. The film itself and its publicity is discussed, followed by its reception at the time, and its significance to writers since.

INDEX

Keywords: Literature, culture, cinema, Edgar Allan Poe, Mummy, Hollywood, Egypt, Universal Pictures, Frankenstein, Dracula, Orientalism, Archaeology, Horror, Genre., Carl Laemmle, Carl Laemmle Jr, John L. Balderston, Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, Edward van Sloan, Charlton Heston, Im-Ho-Tep, Tutankhamun, Lord Caernavon, Howard Carter, Georges Méliès, Karl Freund, Lon Chaney, Rupert Julian, Paul Leni, James Dietrich, Wallace Worsley, Richard Schayer, Nina Wilcox Putnam, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Theophile Gautier, Mary Shelley, H. Rider Haggard, Gaston Leroux, Jane Loudon Webb, Richard Marsh, Bram Stoker

AUTHOR

RICHARD FREEMAN Richard Freeman

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"Josef K von 1963...": Orson Welles' ‘Americanized’ Version of The Trial and the changing functions of the Kafkaesque in Postwar West Germany

Anne-Marie Scholz

1. Introduction

1 When Orson Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial was released in West Germany in 1963, many critics were preoccupied with the changes Welles had made to the original work, a response that was perhaps unsurprising given the assumption that film adaptations are meant to abide by the literary work. The key issue here, however, is the meaning of fidelity. What makes specific texts meaningful within a particular culture, so that issues of “textual fidelity” become significant? 1 After the end of World War Two and the Third Reich, during which time Kafka’s works had been banned in Germany, those same works re-entered the Federal Republic (they continued to be banned in East Germany) essentially altered in their original meanings. They had become symbolic of what is still known as “the Kafkaesque”, an atmosphere of “Angst”, resignation and powerlessness linked with the anxieties of postwar life. Promoted primarily through the editorial efforts of Kafka’s friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who encouraged a reading of Kafka’s works as allegories with a universal philosophical dispensation and an understanding of their author as a type of spiritual figure outside all historical and literary context,2 the “Kafkaesque” would nonetheless find itself circulating in very real historical and national contexts where the idea of ‘postwar anxiety’ meant different things to different people, including fear of nuclear annihilation, communist takeover, and in the case of West Germany, fear and unease over the legacy of the Third Reich, its effects on German society, and its international standing as a nation.

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2 By the early 1960s West Germany had integrated into a Cold War alliance with the United States, which tended to encourage a focus upon the immediate threat of communism and to discourage either an open confrontation or a working through of the fascist past. Until recently, many scholars of German history have argued that an active effort to confront the legacy of the National Socialist past did not begin until the late 1960s. Recently, however, revisionist historians have put forth that the issue of how to remember World War Two and what conclusions should be drawn from it were already on the agenda by the mid 1950s.3 Habbo Knoch conceptualizes this process of active memory construction in terms of what he calls “the long 1960’s”: The “modernization” of memory took place between 1955 and 1965 when Nazi crimes attracted public attention and when they were reinvented as a visual, emotional but virtual and limited experience. In the long 1960’s that began in the second half of the fifties, West German society continued its long process of “coming to terms with the past”. It produced its images of Nazi crimes to serve not as a mirror but as a movie of something that took place far away and remote from everyday life.4

3 This essay seeks to explore a small corner of this process by focusing upon the ways in which a German speaking author banned by the Nazis was appropriated by an American film auteur and how German commentators responded to his movie.5 2. The Trial 4 Certainly one of the founding texts of “the Kafkaesque” was The Trial, written by Kafka as a fragment during World War One and organized and published as a novel by Brod after Kafka’s death in 1924.6 In the original story, the protagonist Josef K. is arrested in his apartment without being informed of charges, accusers, and without being imprisoned. Instead, his ensuing trial becomes an extension of the hierarchy and regimentation he experiences at his job as a bank administrator, where he attempts to save face and keep the proceedings a secret to protect his reputation. Though he is never informed of the charges, Josef K. is progressively integrated into the legal formalities of constructing a defense within a system that offers him no basis upon which to act. Throughout his trial, Josef K. comes into contact with a number of figures who aid and abet him within this absurd scenario, such as Miss Burstner, his boarding house neighbor, Hassler, his attorney, and Leni, Hassler's nurse. Throughout The Trial, a series of erotic scenarios involving Josef K. and a variety of female figures tend to link sexuality to the other corrupt dimensions of the court. As Josef becomes increasingly frustrated and disoriented, searching for help that only seems to involve him more deeply in the unjust proceedings, he is eventually found guilty and executed by knife at the hands of two "wardens" of the court.

5 In the adaptation for film, an international co-production starring Anthony Perkins as Josef K., Welles himself as the attorney Hassler, Romy Schneider as the nurse Leni and a number of other internationally prominent stars, Orson Welles altered the story in a number of telling ways.7 Most significant for the German reception, he linked Kafka almost directly to the issue of German fascism. Welles’ tapped into one of the then prevailing interpretations of Kafka as a “prophet of fascism”, a writer whose works had anticipated the dehumanization and tyranny of the concentration camps in their focus upon how the rational, bureaucratic mechanisms of the state can lead to the annihilation of the individual. Yet, rather than linking the figure of Josef K. to the idea of victimization under that system, he instead focused upon the protagonist as a figure of ambivalent resistance. In an interview with the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema,

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Welles explained why he refused to take over the ending of The Trial, where Josef K. is executed without resistance: "To me it's a ‘ballet’ written by a Jewish intellectual before the advent of Hitler. Kafka wouldn't have put that after the death of six million Jews. It all seems very Pre-Ausschwitz to me."8 Welles' sense of The Trial as being narrated by a Jewish man in pre-fascist Europe ultimately motivated him to alter it in such a way so as to emphasize the themes of agency and resistance. Josef K. is executed at the end, but he resists his oppressors, and the theme of resistance plays a far greater role in the film than it does in the novel. In the novel, Josef K. offers a certain amount of resistance at the outset but this gradually breaks down, whereas in the film his level of resistance actually increases.

6 Welles reinforces his emphasis on agency through his modification of the “Parable of the Law” which he uses as a frame for understanding the proceedings of his film. In the parable, a guard stands before the door of the Law, controlling entry. A “man from the country” comes requesting admittance but is not allowed to enter. The man decides to wait by the door, in the hope of some day gaining admittance. In old age, still waiting, he asks the guard why in all the years of waiting no one else has ever come by to request admittance to the Law, to which the Guard replies: no one else could gain admittance at this door, as it was intended only for him, and now he (the guard) would close the door. This parable, presented in the film on pinscreens created by Russian and U.S. artists, is shown at the beginning, thus framing the subsequent plot, whereas in the novel the parable is told towards the end.9 In the film, however, the parable reappears briefly towards the end as well, emphasizing the contrast between "the man from the country" and the figure of Josef K. Indeed, Josef K. interrupts the figure played by Welles as he attempts to tell the story again, thus disrupting its function as parable (i.e. having universal significance). Welles’ reframing of the Parable of the Law thus highlights Josef K's resistance to its message of chaos and arbitrary power.

7 As Josef prepares his case, he moves through a series of modernist and baroque spatial environments, not specifically located anywhere, that tend to dwarf and overwhelm him from the perspective of the viewer, and which make his efforts to take charge of the situation appear quite ludicrous. He becomes progressively more active and resistant as his case moves along, and tends to put up a front of resistance whenever he is confronted with court officials. When he is finally executed, it is not with a knife, but rather with dynamite that sends up a cloud of smoke, reminiscent of an atomic explosion for a number of critics, though Welles denied the connection. In the film, the two court wardens appear to be uncomfortable with the prospect of stabbing the condemned man, and prefer to dispense with him at a distance by throwing sticks of dynamite into the pit where he had been lying.

8 One very telling change was noted only by a few critics. In the novel, as Josef K. is being carried to the execution site, he spots a figure raising a hand toward him in a window. He then speculates who this person might be, a foe, or even possibly a friend? No such figure appears in the film, and several critics noted this as a point of even greater unremitting pessimism in the film than in the novel. At least Kafka offered the hope of some kind of human connection in the midst of the tyranny of arbitrary power. In contrast, Welles offered only the nervous resistance of a completely isolated individual.10

9 Throughout the proceedings, Josef K. has a series of erotic encounters, most of which find their precedent in the novel. Yet unlike the novel's protagonist, Welles' Josef is

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active in the legal sphere but generally passive in the erotic sphere. Consistently, he is only seduced reluctantly by the women he meets. For example, during the first ‘realistic’ scene, Josef K's arrest, Welles links Josef K's sense of guilt to his sexual feelings for his neighbor, Miss Burstner, who has been transformed from a stenographer in the novel to a nightclub dancer in the film. Thus, sexuality in the film is a source of guilt and anxiety for Josef K., rather than a source of resistance to the system that entraps him.

10 Josef K. moves among a group of other accused persons who take on the contours of concentration camp victims/survivors, and throughout the film there are explicit references to the cruelties of the concentration camps, such as a row of meat hooks Josef K. walks past as he moves through the building where his trial is taking place. Welles works into the plot symbolic references to and associations with modern forms of totalitarianism and tyranny, including the legacy of concentration camps under German fascism, the threat of nuclear annihilation as a result of the Cold War, and the subordination of the individual within a technocratic mass society. By integrating these references to different forms of state tyranny as a series of surreal confrontations that Josef K. has with his environment as he prepares his trial, Welles in effect links all of these totalitarian forms into one ‘modern order’, suggesting cultural connections between them that transcend national boundaries. As we will see, for German viewers these references functioned both as specific historical referants and as a part of a larger transnational tendency toward totalitarianism that ideologically linked ‘the brown and the red’.11 This tension between the historically specific and the metaphysically general would prove to be a central aspect of the identity of “Josef K of 1963” and marked a development in Kafka’s German reception away from philosophy and toward history, meaning German history. (See Figure 1)

Figure 1 Anthony Perkins as Josef K. in Orson Welles’ The Trial (Pressefoto No. 7 Der Prozess, Schorchtfilm).

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3. The Trial in the USA and Germany

11 When Welles' version of The Trial was released in the United States, the issue of textual fidelity played only a minor role in critics' responses to the film. Those critics who didn't like the film tended to blame the ego of Orson Welles and his inability to discipline it in such a way as to produce a second world class film. Since Citizen Kane, several argued, Welles had not made a similar masterpiece, and The Trial was no exception. Living up to Citizen Kane was more important to U.S. critics than whether or not The Trial was an adequate adaptation of Kafka.12 Critics who didn't like the film tended to argue that it wasn’t true to the novel, while those who liked it were not concerned about fidelity. The film had of it "more Welles than Kafka," to be sure, but then again it was so much better than other films, "even when they are well made."13 The film had humor, something which American critics appreciated. This was associated, however, with Welles rather than Kafka. American audiences won't catch the humor, critics argued, because they will see the name Kafka and automatically think of "polite despair".14 That Welles actually derives much of this humor from Kafka was not at issue. U.S. critics also frequently mentioned the portrayal of sexuality in the film. Here, too, they assumed this was a Wellesian addition. It wasn't. When Peter Bogdanovich asked Welles where he got the concept of the "dirty pictures in the judge's textbook," Welles responded, "From Kafka. And I got all the dirty eroticism of the rest of the movie out of that one thing." Later in the interview, Welles told Bogdanovich to "read the book sometime. It's short." 15

12 Few critics who reviewed Welles' film in West Germany in 1963 were unfamiliar with Kafka, and most based their observations on the comparison between novel and film. Yet here, too, this was not an inevitable approach. As in the U.S., there were critics in Germany who linked the film to Welles' oeuvre, especially to Citizen Kane, primarily because Citizen Kane was not even screened in Germany until twenty years after its release. This gave viewers the chance to make comparisons, and one Berlin critic wryly noted that Welles hadn't developed his film technique much since that time.16 Indeed, a number of critics titled their reviews "Citizen K", suggesting that the themes of The Trial had more in common with Welles' earlier film than they did with Kafka, that it was, in essence, more American than German.17 Another critic linked The Trial to the era of German expressionism and referred to it as in essence a silent film, "even if Orson Welles lets his actors talk too fast."18

13 When Welles’ film was released in West Germany, the indigenous film industry was under fire on a number of fronts. As elsewhere, television was making major incursions into formerly movie-going audiences. But more significantly, the German film industry was subject to major criticism for not managing to keep up with the quality productions issuing from other European countries, such as France and Italy. The German film was in a moribund state and needed reviving. Film clubs in West Germany that came into existence after the war to promote international films as a means for re- cultivating and re-civilizing German society were generally appalled by the escapist ‘Heimat’ film fantasies and other film fair that was, indeed, popular with German audiences, but not, in their eyes, of great aesthetic or didactic value.

14 In 1962, young German filmmakers issued the Oberhausen Manifesto, a moment that has been linked to the beginnings of the new German cinema. However, as Heide Fehrenbach has argued, the Oberhauseners were not part of a new generational trend, but had emerged out of the critical film club and festival scene of the 1950s. It was not

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until the mid 1960s that New German cinema began to come into its own.19 In the meantime, art cinema in Germany was coming from elsewhere, providing potential models for a new German cinema. Orson Welles was a respected American auteur and popular actor with international credentials; Kafka was an internationally respected German-speaking author who had been banned by the Nazis. This combination promised something novel and sought-after: greater political and artistic diversity for German audiences in need of re-education, and aesthetic quality for German filmmakers in need of inspiration.

15 Publicity for the film in West Germany was managed by the Schorcht Film Verleih. The Schorcht Verleih had distributed some of the most successful films of the 1950s, such as Ein Herz spielt Falsch(1953), Sauerbruch-Das war mein Leben (1954), and Rose Bernd (1957).20 However, after the death of its founder Kurt Schorcht in 1959, it “lost direction”, despite increased investment, and went out of business in 1965.21 The publicity Schorcht generated for Welles’ The Trial reflected a film industry in a time of transition in its effort to market the film as simultaneously a politically aware cinema, an elite art cinema product and a potentially popular blockbuster. Its overarching goal seems to have been to reclaim Kafka as a German author of international renown. Kafka “could not conquer the walls of German dictatorship” of the past and was rejected as decadent by communist East Germany. Nonetheless, his work triumphed in France, England and the United States.22 Now an American auteur of the highest calibre had decided to adapt a famous Kafka (read: German) text and expectations for the film were very high. The Schorcht publicity quoted Welles’ emphasis on the “prophet of fascism” model at several points,23 and now, at a time of a “Kino tief” (cinema slump), Welles had taken a great risk with controversial material that had arrived late on the German scene due to its place on the “rassische Verbotsliste”, the list of racially banned authors.24 Further, the publicity emphasized that the film was true to Kafka, despite one invented love scene by Welles involving Anthony Perkins and Romy Schneider. With this pronouncement, Schorcht seemed to be attempting to appeal both to elitist Kafka afficionados as well as average filmgoers interested in love and romance between attractive and popular actors.25

16 Most German critics of the film (and some French critics whose work was published in German periodicals) relied on a number of aspects from the Schorcht publicity as jumping-off points, but then went in decidedly different directions. The majority of German critics did not agree that the film was true to Kafka and sought to understand it within the framework of "Welles vs Kafka", two auteurs with decidedly different agendas. Yet, interestingly, this was not primarily a question of a demand for textual fidelity. Rather, setting up this opposition was a means to understand the meaning and function of Kafka's work in German society since the end of the “rassische Verbotsliste”, the meaning that "the Kafkaesque" held for elite members of German society since the end of the war and, crucially, what had changed.

17 Schorcht’s publicity (and several critics) pointed to a recently published (1961) Kafka bibliography that contained over 5000 entries, testifying both to the literary significance of Kafka as well as to the many possible ways Kafka might be understood. 26 The socialist-oriented critic Rolf Traube wrote in the Deutsche Volkszeitung (Düsseldorf) that Kafka had been a very fashionable author after World War II: The awareness that one has barely escaped a terrible catastrophe and is most likely moving toward an even greater one, gave a snobbishly cultivated "Kafkaesque" a popularity that soon irritated professional literary observers, so that in 1955 the

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young people in the Group 47 resolved the following: whoever pronounces the name Kafka one more time today, will be fined one German Mark.27

18 Group 47, whose membership included such figures as Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ingeborg Bachmann and Günther Grass, had been founded to create a more innovative, politically aware space for literature as a counter-voice to the Adenauer era's social, political and cultural conservatism, and their satiric criticism clearly called attention to the more conservative functions of the "Kafkaesque" that was often associated with what Andreas Huyssen referred to in 1986 as a depoliticized version of modernism that had come to provide a much needed cultural legitimation for the Adenauer restoration. During the fifties, the myth[s] of...universal existentialist Angst...helped block out and suppress the realities of the fascist past. From the depths of barbarism and the rubble of its cities, West Germany was trying to reclaim a civilized modernity and to find a cultural identity tuned to international modernism which would make others forget Germany’s past as predator and pariah of the modern world.28 4. Kafka v. Welles

19 Traube’s review demonstrated that criticism of this depoliticized version of Kafka was already circulating in the 1950s.29 By 1963, so Traube continued, the "Kafkaesque" could no longer function exclusively as an elitist form of intellectual contempt. Welles' production would be subject to objective scrutiny rather than to fashionable acceptance. Critical reflection upon Welles' film was thus one means of coming to terms with the different possible meanings attached to the "Kafkaesque" in the postwar period.

20 Confronted with Orson Welles' reading of Kafka, German critics often felt compelled to put into words what it was that Kafka meant to them as well. Few did this by dismissing the film; indeed, the film was praised by most critics as a fascinating attempt to come to terms with Kafka. Yet, by and large, German critics were profoundly ambivalent about Welles' version of The Trial. Within the framework of the "Kafka vs. Welles" debate two principle definitions of the "Kafkaesque" emerged from the critical discourse. The first was the "prophet of fascism" model, the notion that Kafka's works had "anticipated" the concentration camps in their emphasis upon arbitrary tyranny and violence, which was understood as at odds with the second notion of Kafka as a metaphysician whose stories raised general questions of the meaning of existence; this tension between a ‘historical’ and a ‘metaphysical’ Kafka governed the discussion of the ways Welles had updated or modernized the novel to make Kafka relevant to the early 1960s. Even if critics preferred an ahistorical, metaphysical version, the debate nonetheless created a space for a historical Kafka that Welles in his film had inextricably linked to the German past.

21 The "anticipation of fascism" was a theme that was quite familiar to most German critics, though it did not go uncontested. Welles offered this version in the Schorcht film publicity, reprinted in the Welt am Sonntag: "Why Kafka? Because of his up-to- dateness. This story of a person, who winds up underneath the wheels of the organized society, the wheels of the police, the army, the justice system...and then there is this premonition of the times of concentration camps, that still exist today. And will always exist."30 Overall, in contrast to his early films, which focused upon the U.S. as a country ruled by wealthy elites, Welles understood his later work as attempting to analyze abuses of state power "because today [1958] the state is more powerful than money."31 The motif of “abuse of state power” allowed Welles to incorporate references to

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different tyrannical political systems into his film, but his specific reference to concentration camps was an unmistakeable reference to German fascism.

22 There were a number of German critics who also associated the name of Kafka with a "premonition" of "things to come": "Franz Kafka predicted what in the decades following his death happened to so many people: the state of absolute lawlessness."32 K.H. Krüger noted that "this premonition [of Kafka's] of the concentration camps is nonetheless made palpable by Welles."33 A critic in the Westfälische Rundschau, following the Schorcht publicity, wrote: That is the story, that is a dream, filled with dream logic. "Do not try to solve puzzles!" Orson Welles warns. Despite this reality shimmers through everywhere. The reality of the concentration camps and the Gestapo, that Kafka anticipated. The reality of today, where the individual is lost in the whirlpool of the masses. A film that finally demonstrates what film is and should be.34

23 Reinold Thiel, film critic for Filmkritik and an SPD activist, linked the "anticipation of fascism" model to Hannah Arendt's reading of Kafka as a critique of the form of bureaucratic government in pre World War One Austria, and that Welles had taken over Arendt's perspective in his film and transferred it to the bureaucratic state of modern times.35 Like Arendt, Thiel argued, Welles ignored Kafka's "metaphysical aspect" and his interest in "the meaning of existence," instead focusing soley upon the historical dimensions. Ultimately, Thiel did not think Kafka's Trial was an appropriate vehicle through which to critique the totalitarian state, and that Welles' version left the viewer "with the baroque violence of isolated ideas."36 Others disagreed. Volker Baer wrote in the Tagesspiegel Berlin: "over these pathetic creatures, who are being intimidated to death by a totalitarian system, hang coldly threatening meat hooks which recall terrible associations with concentration camps. Welles has extended and concretized Kafka's vision."(37) Baer thought that the most authentic dimensions of Kafka had been captured by Welles in the visual images of the film, less in the dialogue and performances.

24 Enno Patalas, founder of the journal Filmkritik, suggested that the interpretation of Kafka as a "prophet of fascism" had had a critical function in the immediate postwar years. Particularly such works as "In der Strafkolonie" began to be taught at German universities just as the first eyewitness accounts of concentration camps were published after the war.38 By the early 1960s many critics were ambivalent about this model and tended to reject it as a trend that had long since passed and that, moreover, had been imported from outside. According to critic Walter Kaul, foreigners had essentially made Kafka into "a world fashion, in whose train concepts such as Angst, mechanization and bureaucratization cavorted with one another."39 Critic Karena Niehoff also passionately rejected this interpretation: Welles would like to persuade Kafka, as have others before him, that he had prophesied Hitler, all terror dictatorships, concentration camps and other anonymous tortures, [as] a visionary contemporary critic ... Welles misunderstanding is "horribly banal"; he views Josef K. as a classical hero, who goes to his death with the courage of a Russian anarchist, the siblings Scholl or the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, unconquered, with one last cynical word on his lips, ennobled by the radiance of innocence in an evil world.40

25 Why Niehoff's objection to Welles' ‘heroic’ version of Josef K? Kafka did not see fascism coming, she continues. Rather, he saw a world without God. Niehoff's discussion of her own sense of Kafka, however, revealed a preoccupation with questions of guilt and its

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attribution that suggested history played a role in the "Kafkaesque" as much as did metaphysics and religion: That which gets the heart beating while reading Kafka is the untragic triviality and how it insinuates itself; the absurd does not reveal itself as such, rather it becomes the crystalline result of an unprotected Reality considered through to its logical conclusion; the complacent everydayness hides and releases in every moment the possibility, not only to be put on trial, but, what is even worse, to actually become guilty, guilt based upon an unknown and inaccessible law.41

26 Despite her generalized language, Niehoff's bitter resistance to the heroic Josef K. and the preoccupation with K becoming ‘guilty’ indirectly reveal an awareness that the reality of the recent German terror dictatorship was the reality of collaboration rather than heroism. Karena Niehoff was a Jewish woman who had survived the Nazi period in the Berlin underground. After the war she became a journalist and wrote for the Berliner Tagesspiegel between 1952 and her death in 1992. She was also a witness in the postwar trial of the German filmmaker Veit Harlan. Harlan had directed the anti- semitic film Jud Süss(1940) and was accused in the late forties of membership in Nazi organizations and “crimes against humanity,” from which he would be acquitted.42 Niehoff had testified against Harlan and, in the course of the proceedings, had been subject to anti-semitic heckling and insults. She was politically engaged, but refrained from talking about the past and did not draw attention to her status as a Jewish survivor in her work. Her ironic-associative style of writing reflected here in her critique of Welles’ film hinted at her own personal experience of persecution.43

27 For the conservative critic Walter Kaul, writing for the Kurier (Berlin), the "prophet of fascism" model also concealed a preoccupation with getting to historical essentials in aesthetic terms: "Every bitter association is quickly blended out through the hoaky flashing of a blade, at which point one yearns for Bunuel-Dali's (from Un Chien Andalou) shaving of the eyelid from the eyeball."44

28 One French critic, Alexandre Alexandre, writing for Der Kurier from Paris, noted that Kafka's texts were a means of coping with the terrors of the Gestapo during the war and that his texts continued to be relevant in a postwar world where "the deeply awaited Renaissance of freedom and human dignity did not immediately materialize."(45) Another French critic, writer and academic, Jean-Louis Bory, also actively approved of Welles' linkage of Kafka to fascism. Welles had "modernized" Kafka. He wrote in Arts that Welles had "accused that which had made history even more Kafkaesque than Kafka: the world of the concentration camps, and, in short visual allusions, had awakened the memory of the Nazi camps. This world threatens to become our world as we continue on the road of progress."46 For Bory, Welles had detected two interrelated types of guilt. The first was the guilt of the accused who resists the accusation; he is guilty of being an individual. And as an individual, he is guilty of collaboration, of being a cog in a system, becoming frightened only when he is accused himself.47 Bory, as a French critic, was surely not unfamiliar with issues related to French collaboration with the Nazis during World War Two. His views and those of other French critics were circulated widely in German film magazines.

29 Like Bory, German critics were also preoccupied with questions of agency and guilt. Welles’ ‘modernization’ of Kafka was about the state of ‘Josef K.’ in 1963: Today, whoever has experienced a trial, whether a political trial directed against war criminals all the way to civil cases involving traffic violations, notices again and again how in our secularized times the consciousness of guilt has either receded or

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been completely damaged. Particularly in treason cases the familiar phenomenon may be observed, that fear of terror and its organizations is much stronger than the feeling that one is guilty of something .... In Welles film, the conscience has long since been lost, and the terror of an authoritarian regime and its organizations liquidates the isolated, soulless human being.48

30 Despite the self-righteous tone, the analysis here of how in police states fear replaces conscience as a basis for action or agency, hints at the relevance of such issues for an understanding of the (then) recent German past. Indeed, as the previous five years had seen a number of spectacular court cases, such as the “Einsatzgruppen” trial of former SS members in the late 1950s and the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961, the courtroom had been transformed from a metaphysical symbol to a concrete, historical place. Welles’ film thus encouraged viewers to link Kafka’s Trial to the present moment.49 5. The Role of Anthony Perkins 31 Making Kafka into a “prophet of fascism” was one thing, but transforming Josef K. into an active agent who resists the tyrannies of the court was quite another. Many German critics rejected this idea by way of a critique of the American actor Anthony Perkins's performance. German critics often framed Welles' casting of Anthony Perkins in the role of Josef K. as a misreading of the character.50 In Kafka, they claimed, Josef K. has two primary characteristics: he is passive and he is anonymous. Anthony Perkins did not fit either of these. First, Perkins was a well-known star in the early 1960s, which made it difficult for viewers to understand the figure of K. in the ‘authentic’ Kafkaesque sense of anonymity. The German-born Jewish refugee François Bondy , Swiss citizen and political editor of the Schweizer Monatshefte,51 described this notion of anonymity in his critique of the casting of Perkins, which again shed light upon the ways such apparently neutral notions as anonymity were being actively tied to more controversial, more politicized concepts such as complicity: In The Trial there is a tendency to self-destructiveness, to complicity in one's own destruction, to masochism .... Orson Welles does not pick up on this strain. Only for this reason could he choose an actor for whom the grey anonymity of the Man without a last name does not fit, and in whom one can detect no traces of resignation or complicity with his own enemies.52

32 Secondly, Josef K. in the novel is perceived to respond passively to the arbitrary charges of the court. In the final scene, in particular, as well as in his response to the Parable of the Law, Josef K. actively resists the court's interpretation of the events and his execution.

33 A number of critics attributed this resistance to an Americanization of Kafka through the figure of Welles. The director had projected his own identity as a "rebel against American conformity" onto Josef K., yet nonetheless remained a very real American.53 In the film, Perkins assumes the contours of an ‘Americanized’ resistance hero, taking on the court single-handedly and refusing to succumb.54 American art had a tendency to exaggeration and overextension, another critic argued, citing such disparate examples as William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Jackson Pollock and Elia Kazan. Welles belonged in this company.55 The link to Welles as an American made plausible the otherwise rather unconventional connection between resistance and Americanization and exemplifies how the figure of Welles as an American auteur could function as a “transnational mediator”, in Uta Poiger’s term, for alternative notions of Americanization, ones that went beyond the U.S as imperialist world power or purveyer of mass culture.56

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34 Resistance to the casting of Perkins functioned on another level as well, since this particular Josef K. had a past. As one German critic put it, Perkins' star image was so influenced by his previous roles, particularly that of Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho, that his presence in the film functioned as an "illusionsstörende personelle Vordringlichkeit"57 (an obtrusive, illusion-shattering persona). Thus, the content he gave to the form of the ‘anonymous’ Josef K. was that of a murderous neurotic cross- dresser. And even his later, more romantic role, as the young lover opposite Ingrid Bergman in Lieben Sie Brahms? (Goodbye Again) echoed the effeminate qualities of the character of Bates for a number of German critics. Thus, paradoxically, critics found Perkins too heroic, American and protest-oriented on the one hand, and too neurotic, hectic and jumpy on the other. This combination of qualities, bridging as it did conventional divisions of gender, was not suited to the characterization of an anonymous everyman.

35 Other critics, however, appreciated the dimensions Perkins brought to the role and did not necessarily collapse his previous performances into one stereotypical image: "Anthony Perkins has dispensed with the sophisticated ladies-man type. He portrays the increasing confusion of Josef K. with great sensitivity and intelligence."58 "Anthony Perkins," the Augsburger Allgemeine stated, "personifies the trembling soul of Josef K."59 Critic Peter Körfgen offered a subtle analysis of why he thought Perkins’ performance fitted Kafka quite well by comparing Kafka with Hitchcock's films: It has been criticized that Anthony Perkins' Josef K does not get under the skin. But Kafka is not Hitchcock. His intellectualism prevents him from leaving things at a recoverable shock. The insinuating confusion of our time does not hit like a bolt of lightening. And psychologically it is much more likely that the crew of an anchorless ship would be more subject to a paralyzing sense of horror than to spontaneous panic.60

36 Significantly, Körfgen linked this empathy for Perkins' "lähmendes Entsetzen" (paralyzing horror) to his understanding that Kafka's works did indeed contain elements of resistance, an aspect that was regularly underplayed by German critics.

37 During their first meeting to discuss the possibility of Perkins playing the role of Josef K., Welles said that Perkins was an essential precondition for him to make the film.61 Perkins was well-known in the early 1960s and a number of German critics attributed Welles' (mis)casting to have been undertaken largely for commercial reasons.62 Yet in later interviews Welles revealed that it was precisely the qualities Perkins brought to his previous roles that he wanted in the part of Josef K. In addition, Welles also linked those qualities to Perkins' status as a closet homosexual; Josef K's fears were thus linked to transgressive sexuality.63 Thus, subjectivizing and ‘sexualizing’ K.’s guilt was one of Welles' central strategies in his adaptation of Kafka. Indeed, Welles relied upon the intertextual quality of Perkins' image to lend to Josef K. a complex subjective dimension. 6. Kafkaesque? 38 Interestingly, German critics did not directly comment upon the sexual dimensions of K's guilt; instead, they argued that the film parted company with Kafka because it relied too much upon "psychological realism" where a star, not an anonymous hero, determines the action. In a report on the evening from a journalist identified only through the initials ‘tm’, it was stated that "biography" rather than "existence" was the film's main issue.64 Thus, a genuinely Kafkaesque hero, in German eyes, was one whose primary characteristics were passivity and anonymity, not sexuality or biography. To

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sexualize his crisis was to personalize it and thus make it less publicly significant to the question of the "plight of modern man." This was the essence of the problem with the film in the eyes of several German podium discussion participants at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. During a public discussion in a “large packed lecture hall” between humanities professors, critics, and a representative from the Schorcht Film Verleih, Rudolf Lubowski, the question was raised: “Was Welles’ The Trial ‘Kafkaesque’ or not?” Lubowski responded with the assertion that the film’s psychological aspect had a purpose: to make “the nightmare of modern existence emotionally accessible to the average cultural consumer.” The critic of the Deutsche Zeitung, Hellmuth Karasek, countered with the response that culture was meant for the “happy few” and that to psychologize was “to vulgarize”. By transforming Kafka into a mass cultural vehicle, Karasek implied, Welles had created a “dangerous forgery”.

39 While not giving much space to the responses out of the “packed lecture hall” to this conservative reading of The Trial, the journalist ‘tm’ nonetheless conveyed his own criticism of this old fashioned reading of Kafka in a sarcastic introduction to his report: The apologists for literary purism and the unassailability of the literary work of art were in their element when it came to the issue of whether the film had either totally messed up or retained minimal traces of the “Kafkaesque” atmosphere … Rudolf Lubowski quickly became the black sheep, upon whom the conceited and the differentiated, the objective and the resentful reproaches against this film and against the film industry were unloaded.65

40 It is useful here to refer to Dietmar Schmidt, editor of the Protestant Information Services periodical Kirche und Film (Church and Film) and biographer of the controversial Protestant church president Martin Niemöller,66 who called attention to what he perceived as an anti-intellectual trend in the West Germany of the early 1960s. He suggested in an editorial that films like The Trial could provide models of "heilsame Unruhe", forms of "healing restlessness" that might awaken the conscience of their viewers more effectively than most church sermons were doing. Additionally, Schmidt suggested that Church leaders should take the critical capacities of their congregations more seriously and promote more complex cultural products that did not necessarily offer "positive images". In the area of literature, according to the well-known scholar Walter Jens, a one-sided emphasis on the "positive" had taken over, and the same seemed to be happening in film: With a nonchalance, from which can only be assumed that there never was such a figure as Goebbels or such an institution as the Reichskulturkammer, or indeed, that both have again become definitive authorities, the familiar adjective pairs "nihilistic" and "positive", "corrupting" and "healthy" are thrown into the debate.67

41 Schmidt thus linked the either/or criticism of such films as The Trial to the cultural politics of the Third Reich, and called on his readers to remember the function of such ‘black and white’ judgements on public culture in the past.

42 If many German critics preferred Josef K. as an anonymous everyman lacking sexuality and biography, and hence rejected Anthony Perkins’ characterization, they were more enthusiastic about the cast of female players, especially about Romy Schneider's performance as Leni. Their discussion revealed the ways Schneider’s image as the naive, charming Kaiserin Sissi, a holdover from her popular films of the 1950s, was shifting in the early 1960s. Schneider as the young empress Sissi embodied an archetypal female ideal of the 1950s in Germany and Austria. Sissi's dilemma as a foreign import into the royal Austrian house was that, unlike her mother-in-law who

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identified with the public function of ruling and insisted that her daughter-in-law do the same by giving her children to a royal governess, Sissi wished to raise her children herself in classic middle class fashion, vehemently rejecting any claims or pretensions to power. The popularity of this image would haunt Schneider, pushing her to move to Paris where she took on other roles and was recognized by the critical establishment as a fine character actress.

43 German critics took note of the dramatic shift in Schneider's image in their response to The Trial. While many could not see beyond Perkins' previous roles, Schneider had clearly shifted away from her earlier screen image: Schneider's "bravado performance as the (sexually promiscuous) nurse has nothing more in common with the little Sissi soul she once was."68 The Frankfurter Allgemeine wrote: "Romy Schneider has dispensed with the charming little goose Sissi. The svelt, high-heeled witch with the cat's eyes, quick steps, pressing gestures and whispers understands the elementary art of seduction. An excellent performance."69 Often Schneider's performance was favorably compared with the performances of the other actresses: Jeanne Moreau, who played the nightclub dancer Miss Burstener, and Elsa Martinelli, who played Hilda, the court attendent's wife. This almost seemed like a contest between European nation-states, with West Germany, France and Italy competing for the prize of who could play a Kafkaesque female most effectively.70 In the eyes of German critics, Schneider's was the most convincingly Kafkaesque performance.

44 What exactly did this mean? More detailed discussions of Schneider's Leni revealed a key assumption some critics held about the role and place of women in a Kafkaesque universe: that they were not true subjects: Romy Schneider as Leni ... is a doll in a double sense of that word, in her erotic submissiveness and marionette-like impersonality. She represents completely the image of the women in The Trial who do not possess sufficient substance, who are too animalistic, ever to become the "accused " themselves.71

45 Apart from drawing attention to the interesting fact that there are indeed no accused women in Kafka's universe, the interpretation of this absence by critics highlights the archetypal significance attached to forms of submissive female sexuality and the ways these apparently stood in deep conflict with notions of agency. Ironically, several critics praised Schneider's Leni as her first quality characterization, even as they defined her, tongue in cheek, as without character, a being "somewhere between a frog and a human," referring to Leni's physical defect: small webs between several of her fingers.72

46 Those critics who commented upon the clearly sexual, as opposed to "Kafkaesque" dimension of the female performances stressed the morally problematic nature of their behavior: "Kafka's reality is completely disconsolate—how dreadful then that the "deliverance through the woman" seems here always to be expected from some half- prostitute, in a form of final confusion, which loses itself in empty sensuality."73 This could not be Kafka, despite the fact that these sexually aggressive female characters all crop up in The Trial. Those critics who conceded that there were sexual dimensions to be found in Kafka and who liked Schneider's performance sarcastically attributed her shift of image to the "arts" the "little Vienna beast" had learned in Paris.74

47 Thus, Schneider's performance as Leni was, on the whole, considered quintessentially Kafkaesque, while Anthony Perkins' Josef K, with important exceptions, was not. What did this suggest about the changing functions of the

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Kafkaesque in postwar West Germany? One very interesting aspect is tied to gender. Despite Josef K.’s passive anonymity, his status as subject is reinforced as an accused party. Women in this world of passive anonymity occupy a space a notch below even this status, as their sexuality degrades them to animal status. German critics did not think to link the sexual aggressiveness of the female characters in The Trial to the more active dimensions of Josef K. that Welles creates. Nor did they relate a Josef K. who resists his oppressors to the isolated moments of resistance in the Third Reich, as Niehoff suggested but then rejected—the Warsaw Ghetto fighters or the Siblings Scholl. Instead, the proper world of Kafka was a world where men were unjustly accused but did not resist and women were not accused at all. Thus the framework of the “Kafkaesque” essentially excluded women as agents and indeed suggested the limits (as critic Reinhold Thiel argued in his critique of the film) of using Kafka as a framework within which to analyze the dynamics of state power.

48 Nonetheless, the reception of Orson Welles’ adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial in the West Germany of the early 1960s demonstrates that there had been a development of sorts in the ways Kafka could circulate in German society. If Kafka’s works could be actively linked to German history and its terrors, as was argued by some German and French critics during (in France)75 and immediately following (in Germany) the war, the ‘fashionable’ pessimism of the Kafkaesque that could be linked to a suppression of the past which followed in the first half of the 1950s had now given way to the option of both. Active, resisting individuals circulating in a “Kafkaesque” world could be put down to the hubris of an isolated American film auteur, but it provoked questions in West Germany as critics saw something like a concrete historical agent, if not an active rebel, hidden away under the layers of metaphysical existence: Persecution no longer emerges, as in Kafka, out of a metaphysical consciousness of guilt; rather, it is secret yet real powers, that take a Josef K. to court leading to execution. The Josef K of 1963 … this must be decisive.76

49 It was then up to, among others, the New German cinema to interpret this historical agent and what he (and indeed, she) chose to do or not to do. 7. Conclusion 50 While Welles’ The Trial did not become a popular blockbuster in 1963, its status in German film circles is well-established.77 Enno Patalas has described The Trial as a “Film Club Heuler”, a film that was well-liked and appreciated in art film circles and that has since taken on a didactic aspect.78 Pupils reading Kafka for the Abitur exams (Kafka is a regular on exam lists in German schools) might see the film as part of their coursework, or the film may be screened as a classic in the remaining art cinemas in Germany today.

51 In hindsight, Welles’ ‘sexualization’ of Josef K., which several German critics linked to the vulgarity of mass culture, has proven to be prophetic. Four years after the film’s German release, the publication of Kafka's Briefe an Felice (Letters to Felice) would reveal an intriguing connection between the metaphysical aspects of Kafka’s Trial and his tormented engagement to Felice Bauer, the woman to whom Kafka was engaged twice but never married. This material was not available to the public when Welles made his film (although Felice Bauer had sold the letters to Kafka's publisher in New York in the late 1950s). Thus, Welles' and Perkins' attempts to give to K. a dimension of sexual guilt would, to some extent, anticipate later revelations about the relationship between

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Kafka's biography and his work.79 During his engagement with Bauer, Kafka was engaged in an intimate correspondence with Bauer's best friend, Grete Bloch, at the same time that he was writing in a similar vein to Bauer. Bloch revealed this correspondence to Bauer, who subsequently called a meeting between herself, her friend and Kafka at a hotel in Berlin to confront Kafka with what both she and Bloch perceived as his duplicity. Kafka's account of this ‘hearing’ reveals that he remained completely silent throughout, unable to articulate an adequate defence on his own behalf and claiming to be completely unaware of a conflict between the two correspondences. The engagement to Bauer, which consisted almost exclusively of letters rather than face to face encounters, was broken off twice and a marriage never took place. Because he perceived his engagement as in essence an extension of his literary calling, whereby any form of literary expression could or would not be excluded, Kafka had an acute awareness of a conflict between his writing and the bourgeois norms attached to marriage and founding a family. He began work on The Trial in August of 1914, shortly after the meeting in the Berliner hotel.80

52 These revelations suggest a completely different reading of Kafka's Trial from those that ultimately defined the contours of the historical or metaphysical "Kafkaesque", and certainly lend credence to the distinction between the pre and post-fascist Kafka. Indeed, 125 years after Kafka’s birth, scholars of German literature are still battling with the metaphysical “Kafkaesque” first created by Max Brod, attempting to situate him in a historical and cultural context that today is more interested in ‘re’- constructing Kafka as a product of his time.81

53 In 1963, however, Kafka’s status as a German-language writer banned by the Nazis and his politicized function as a ‘prophet of fascism’ enlisted Welles’ film and the leitmotif of ‘Americanized resistance’ in the continuing process of coming to terms with the past in West Germany. While receptive to the idea that fascism may have been anticipated by a Jewish writer, German critics preferred an anonymous, passive Josef K. to one who resisted his oppressors. Ultimately, this preference reflected less a more accurate reading of Kafka than it did a defensive though basically accurate perception of the increasing exposure of the ‘anonymous German everyman’ to historical scrutiny as the 1960s progressed. Orson Welles cryptically suggested such an aspect in a statement quoted in the publicity material: My film is not only about the conspiracy of the court against the innocent; it is much more a study of the corruptability of the judicial process. My hero (Josef K) is not innocent; he is capable of being just like the others. Yet none of the others comes to his aid. And neither does he do anything for those around him.82

NOTES

1. See especially James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000): 1-16. Compare also with John Orr, "The Trial of Orson Welles," in John Orr and Colin

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Nicholson (eds.), Cinema and Fiction: New Modes of Adapting, 1950-1990 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992): 13-27. 2. Paul M. Malone, “Trial and Error: Combinatory Fidelity in Two Versions of Franz Kafka’s The Trial“ in Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan (eds.), Classics in Film and Fiction (London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2000): 176-193, 179. 3. Wolfgang Becker and Norbert Schöll, In Jenen Tagen...Wie der deutsche Nachkriegsfilm die Vergangenheit bewältigte (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 1995); Christoph Classen, Bilder der Vergangenheit: Die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus im Fernsehen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1955-1965 (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 1999); Helmut Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte: Die nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in den Debatten des Deutschen Bundestages (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999); Norbert Frei, 1945 und Wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewußtsein der Deutschen (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2005); Michael Geyer, "Cold War Angst: The Case of West German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons" in Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968 (Princeton UP, 2001): 376-408; Michael Th. Greven and Oliver von Wrochem (eds.) Der Krieg in der Nachkriegszeit: Der Zweite Weltkrieg in Politik und Gesellschaft der Bundesrepublik (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2000); Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Knut Hickethier, "Der Zweite Weltkrieg und der Holocaust im Fernsehen der Bundesrepublik der fünfziger und frühen sechziger Jahre," in Greven and Wrochem, Der Krieg in der Nachkriegszeit, 93-112; Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Useable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Robert G. Moeller, “Victims in Uniform: West German Combat Films from the 1950s,“ in Bill Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Nazi Past in Contemporary Germany (MacMillan: Basingstoke, 2006): 43-61; Hanna Schissler, "Writing about 1950s West Germany," in Schissler, The Miracle Years, 3-15; Frank Stern, "Film in the 1950s: Passing Images of Guilt and Responsibility," in Schissler (ed.), 266-280; Frank Stern, "Gegenerinnerungen seit 1945: Filmbilder, die Millionen sahen," in Greven and Wrochem, 79-91; Edgar Wolfrum (ed.), Die Deutschen im 20. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004). 4. Habbo Knoch, “The Return of the Images: Photographs of Nazi Crimes and the West German Public in the “Long 1960s.” in Philipp Gassert and Alan E. Steinweis (eds.), Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and the Generational Conflict, 1955-1975 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006): 31-49, 46. 5. For further arguments dealing with questions of the influence of American popular culture on the construction of a German memory culture, see Anne-Marie Scholz, “Eine Revolution des Films: The Third Man, The Cold War and Alternatives to Nationalism and Coca- Colonization in Europe,” Film and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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of Film and Television Studies 31 (2001): 44-53, and “The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Revisited: Combat Cinema, American Culture and the German Past,” German History 26 (2008): 219-250. 6. All primary source materials are taken from the archival collections of the Deutsches Film Institut, Frankfurt am Main, the press archives and library of the Film Museum Berlin, the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin, and the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, Konrad Wolf, Potsdam-Babelsberg. All references to Kafka's The Trial taken from Franz Kafka, Der Prozess, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998, which is based upon: Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Werke, (Dritte Ausgabe). Max Brod (ed.) Der Prozess (S. Fischer Verlag / New York: Lizenzausgabe von Schocken Books, 1950). 7. All references to Orson Welles' adaptation of The Trial from: "The Trial: A Film from Orson Welles", dir. Orson Welles, Paris-Europa Productions, 1963; video release Fox-Lorber Associates, Inc., 1998. 8. Originally published in Cahiers du Cinema, 165 (April 1965); reprinted in The Trial: A Film by Orson Welles, Modern Film Scripts; Eng. trans (of interview) by Nicholas Fry (New York: Simon Schuster, 1970; London: Lommer Publishing Limited): 9. 9. Wikipedia defines „pinscreen animation” as follows: to “make use of a screen filled with movable pins, which can be moved in or out by pressing an object onto the screen. The screen is lit from the side so that the pins cast shadows…” The artists were Alexandre Alexeïeff and his wife Claire Parker. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinscreen 10. USE (Ulrich Seelmann-Eggebert), "Der Prozess," Film-Dienst (24 April 1963). 11. Wolfgang Beutin et.al., Deutsche Literaturgeschichte (6th ed.) (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 2001): 612-613.

12. See for example Stanley Kauffman, "Joseph K. and Orson W," The New Republic (2 March 1963):34-35. 13. Jonas Mekas, "Movie Journal," The Village Voice, 8 (21 February 1963):15. 14. Ernest Callenbach, "The Trial," Film Quarterly, 16 (Summer 1963): 42. 15. Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich. This is Orson Welles, Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.) (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993): 285-86. 16. Karl-Heinz Krüger, "Kein Freisprüch für Orson Welles," Der Abend (West Berlin) (2 April 1963). 17. Enno Patalas, "Citizen Kay," Frankfurter Rundschau (8 June 1962); Ulrich Seelmann-Eggebert, "Franz Kafka als Citizen K," Stuttgarter Nachrichten (8 February 1963); "Der Prozess," Rheinische Post, Kreis Dinslaken (23 July 1964). 18. Walter Kaul, "Der Prozess," Der Kurier (West Berlin) (1 April 1963).The film's soundtrack, which was entirely 'looped', was

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characterized several times as ‘difficult’. The film contains no original dialogue. 19. Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity After Hitler (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995): 211-233. 20. Klaus Sigl, Werner Schneider, Ingo Tornow. Jede Menge Kohle? Kunst und Kommerz auf dem deutschen Filmmarkt der Nachkriegszeit (München: Verlag Filmland Press, 1986):123-133. 21. Tim Bergfelder, International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005): 73; “Schorcht-Film stockte auf,” Hamburger Abendblatt, 162 (14 July 1962): 14. 22. S.M.P (Siegfried M. Pistorius), “So leise fallen Dichter aus dieser Welt,“ Schorcht Filmgesellschaft m.b.H., Publicity Press Release, 2-3. “So erscheint 1937 die sechsbändige Prager Gesamtausgabe seines Werkes, das zwar die Mauer der deutschen Diktatur nicht zu überwinden vermochte, dafür aber den Raum der französischen und angelsächsischen Literatur über Nacht erobert“ (3). 23. Alfred Maria Schwarzer, “Orson Welles verfilmte Franz Kafka,“ Schorcht Filmgesellschaft m.b.H. Publicity Press Release.“ Schwarzer refers to the story as a “Vorahnung der Konzentrationslager” (1). 24. Sigfried M. Pistorius, “Orson Welles: nach fünf Jahren wieder ein Film“, Schorcht Filmgesellschaft m.b.H. Publicity Press Release. 25. Sigfried M. Pistorius, “Der Prozess: Gegen die Zwangsjacke der Obrigkeit,” Schorcht Filmgesellschaft m.b.H. Publicity Press Release. 26. Harry Järv, Die Kafka-Literatur: eine Bibliographie (first edition) (Malmö: Cavefors, 1961). 27. Rolf Traube, "Das Pathos der Angst," Deutsche Volkszeitung (Düsseldorf) (17 May 1963). “Das Bewusstsein, einer furchtbaren Katastrophe soeben mit knapper Not entronnen zu sein und möglicherweise einer noch viel fürchterlicheren entgegenzusteuren, verlieh einem snobistisch gepflegten „Kafkaismus“ eine Popularität, die selbst den professionalen Literaturbetrachtern bald übel aufstieß, so das 1955 die jungen Leute der „Gruppe 47“ den Beschluß fassten: „wer heute noch einmal den Namen Kafka ausspricht, zahlt eine Mark.“ Significantly, Traube was one of the few critics to discuss Kafka's Judaism. 28. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986): 191. 29. Oliver Passek, "Die Gruppe 47 im politischen Kontext," in Peter Gendolla and Rita Leinecke (eds.) Die Gruppe 47 und die Medien, MUK (Massenmedien und Kommunikation), 114/115 (Siegen: FB 3 Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft an der Universitaet-GH Siegen, 1997): 102-114. 30. Anne Bauer, “Orson Welles: Darum drehe ich Kafka…“, Welt am Sonntag (Berlin) (15 April 1962).“Warum Kafka? Seiner Aktualität

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wegen. Diese Geschichte eines Menschen, der unter die Räder der organisierten Gesellschaft gerät, die Räder der Polizei, der Armee, der Justiz...Und diese Vorahnung einer Zeit der Konzentrationslager...“ 31. Andre Bazin, Charles Bitsch, Jean Domarch, “Gespräch mit Orson Welles,“ Cahiers du Cinema, 87 (September 1958); German translation in Der Film: Manifeste, Gespräche, Dokumente 2 (Piper Verlag). 32. Georg Herzberg, "Der Prozess,“ Film Echo/Film Woche 29 (10 April 1963): 8. “...Was in den Jahrzehnten nach seinem Tode so vielen Menschen widerfahren ist, hat Franz Kafka vorausgeahnt: Der Zustand absoluter Rechtslosigkeit.“ 33. Karl-Heinz Krüger, "Romy's Erfolg im "Prozess" (West Berlin) (28 January 1963). “...und etwa die Vorahnung der Konzentrationslager.. [wird] von Welles immerhin spürbar gemacht.“ 34. J.S. "Überall schimmert Wirklichkeit," Westfälische Rundschau (Dortmund) (13 June 1963). "Das ist die Geschichte, die ein Traum ist, erfüllt von Traumlogik. "Lösen Sie keine Rätsel!"-warnt Orson Welles. Trotzdem schimmert überall die Wirklichkeit hindurch. Die der Konzentrationslager und der Gestapo, die Kafka vorausschaute; die unserer Tage, die den einzelnen im Strudel der Masse versinken lässt...Ein Film der endlich wieder einmal zeigt, was Film sein kann und sein sollte." 35. Reinold E.Thiel, "Der Prozess," Film Kritik (May 1963): 244-248. 36. Ibid, 248.“So ist alles, was dem Zuschauer bleibt, sich zu delektieren an der barocken Gewalttätigkeit einzelner Einfälle...“ 37. Volker Baer, "Nicht Kafka..." Der Tagesspiegel Berlin (4 April 1963).“...Über den armseligen Kreaturen, die von einem totalitären System zu Tode eingeschüchtert sind, hängen kalt drohend Fleischerhaken, grausame Assoziationen an KZ-Lager weckend. Welles hat Kafkas Visionen weitergeführt, konkretisiert.“ 38. Enno Patalas, interview with the author at the 9th Annual International Bremen Film Symposium at the Kino 46, Bremen, 24 January 2004. 39. Walter Kaul, "Der Prozess", Der Kurier (West Berlin) (1 April 1963).“...es machte den metaphysischen Dichter zur Weltmode, in deren Schleppe Begriffe wie Lebensangst, Mechanisierung, Bürokratisierung, usw. sich bald munter zu tummeln begannen.“

40. Karena Niehoff, "Geisterbahn auf dem Oktoberfest," Christ und Welt, (3 May 1963): 22. “Welles möchte, wie ja vor ihm schon andere Interpreten, Kafka einreden, er habe Hitler, alle Schreckensdiktaturen, Konzentrationslager und sonstige anonyme Tortüren vorausgesehen, ein Visionärer Zeitkritiker...Welles Misverständnis ist entsetzlich banal...(er) hat (Josef K.) zu einem klassischen Helden bestimmt, der mit der Tapferkeit eines russischen Anarchisten, der Geschwister Scholl oder der Warschauer Gettokämpfer in den Tod geht, unbesiegt, mit

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einem letzten zynisch-verächtlichen Wort auf den Lippen, vom Glanz der Unschuld in einer bösen Welt geadelt.“

41. Niehoff, "Geisterbahn auf dem Oktoberfest," 22. „das was das Herzklopfen beim lesen Kafkas ausmacht, ist doch die untragische Trivialität, in die es sich einschleicht, das Absurde gibt sich nicht Absurd, sondern stellt sich als kristallinisches Ergebnis der schutzlos zu Ende gedachten Wirklichkeit dar; die gleichmütige Alltäglichkeit verbirgt und entlässt in jedem Augenblick die Möglichkeit, nicht nur gerichtet, sondern, was fürchterlicher ist, tatsächlich schuldig zu werden, schuldig nach einem unbekannten, unzugänglichem Gesetz.“ 42. Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany, 195. 43. Karena Niehoff: Feuilletonistin und Kritikerin, with an essay by Jörg Becker, “Wer das Schreiben liebt, wird es auch fürchten,“ (München: Verlag edition text + kritik in Richard Boorberg Verlag GmbH & Co, KG, 2006): 9-77. 44. Kaul, "Der Prozess," Der Kurier (Berlin) (1 April 1963). "Jede bittere Assoziation wird rasch durch kinntophaftes Messerblinken verwischt, bei dem man sich nach Bunuel-Dalis Augapfelrasur sehnt." 45. Alexandre Alexandre, Der Kurier (10 January 1963). “Ruf und Anerkennung dieses Propheten festigten sich im Nachkriegs-Europa, da die sehnsüchtig erwartete Renaissance der Freiheit und Menschenwürde des Staatsbürgers sich nicht schlakkenlos kristallisierte.“ 46. Jean-Louis Bory, Arts (26 December 1962), Film distribution materials from the Schriftgutarchiv of the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek , 111/11-12, 31 January 1963. “Angeklagt wird das, was die Geschichte noch kafkaischer als Kafka die Welt des Konzentrationslagers nannte- und Welles hat in kurzen anspielenden Bildern die Erinnerung an die Nazilager verwandt.” 47. Ibid. 48. USE (Ulrich Seelmann-Eggebert), "Der Prozess", Film-Dienst (24 April 1963). “Wer einmal heute einem Prozeß beigewohnt hat, von politischen gegen Kriegsverbrecher bis zu zivilen wegen Verkehrsvergehen, macht immer wieder die Erfahrung, wie sehr in unserer säkularisierten Zeit das Schuldbewußtsein verflacht oder gar zerstört ist. Gerade in Landesverratsprozessen zeigt sich stets von neuem, daß die Angst vor dem Terror und seinen Organisationen weit starker entwickelt ist als das Gefühl, sich schuldig zu machen…(In) der Kafka-Deutung von Welles dagegen ist das Gewissen längst verloren, und der Terror eines autoritären Regimes und seiner Organisationen liquidiert nun den isolierten, entseelten Menschen.” (152) Another significant trial that took place during this time that was linked to the Cold War was that involving the federal government vs. the magazine, Der Spiegel. Editor-in-Chief Rudolf Augsburg had been arrested for allegedly publishing classified defence information. 49. Konrad H. Jarausch. ”Critical Memory and Civil Society: The Impact of the 1960s on German Debates about the Past.“ in Philipp Gassert and

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Alan E. Steinweis (eds.), Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955-1975 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006): 11-30, 20-22. 50. "Der Prozeß," Die Zeit (Hamburg) (19 April 1963); Dieter Strunz, "Kafka, von der Kamera gejagt" Berliner Morgenpost (4 April 1963). 51. R. Reich and B. Bondy (eds.) Homme de lettres [Rudolf Köser] (Zurich: Freundesgabe, 1985). 52. François Bondy, "Im Entscheidenden kein Kafka," Die Welt (West Berlin) (6 April 1963). “Im „Prozess“...ist ein Zug zur Selbstvernichtung, zur Einwilligung in die eigene Zerstörung, zum Masochismus vorhanden, den die Exegeten sehr verschiedener mannigfacher Weise gedeutet haben, der aber nicht wegdiskutiert werden kann. Orson Welles ist dieser Zug entgangen. Nur deshalb konnte er einen Darsteller wählen, zu dem die graue Anonymität des Mannes ohne Nachnamen nicht passt und bei dem von Resignation, von Komplicität mit den eigenen Feinden nichts zu spüren ist.“ 53. Ulrich von Thuna, "Citizen K," Film: Zeitschrift fuer Film und Fernsehen (June/July 1963): 42. Thuna described Welles as a „’Rebellen’ gegen amerikanische Konformität, der in Wahrheit doch ein sehr echter Amerikaner bleibt.“

54. Ulrich Kurowski, "Ein verfilmter Kommentar" Echo der Zeit (Recklinghausen) (12 May 1963). 55. USE (Ulrich Seelmann-Eggebert), 11904, "Der Prozess,", Film-Dienst (24 April 1963): 153. 56. Uta G. Poiger, “Beyond “Modernization” and “Colonization,” Diplomatic History, 23 (Winter 1999): 45-56. See also Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999). 57. Erwin Goelz, "Prozeß gegen Kafka," Stuttgarter Zeitung (25 May 1963). 58. Karl Korn, "Ein Exempel" Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (1 July 1963). “Anthony Perkins hat den Typ des smarten Damenlieblings abgetan. Er ist mit hoher Sensibilität und Intelligence Josef K, in dem Verwirrung unheilbar angerichtet wird.“ Anthony Perkins' European image was linked much more closely to his role as the young lover of Ingrid Bergman in Goodbye Again. In contrast, in the United States, his image was always tied to the performance in Psycho. 59. Dr. T.L., "Neue Filme in Augsburg: Der Prozeß" Augsburger Allgemeine (11 July 1963). “...AP, die personifizierte, zitternde Seele des JK.“ 60. Peter Körfgen, "Der Mensch braucht das Unzerstörbare..." Mannheimer Morgen (8 June 1963). “Es ist bemängelt worden, AP’s JK gehe nicht unter die Haut. Aber Kafka ist kein Hitchcock. Seine Intellektualität hindert ihn daran, es bei einem reparablen Schock

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bewenden zu lassen. Die schleichende Verwirrung unsere Zeit teilt sich nicht in einem Blick mit. Und der Besatzung eines ankerlosen Schiffes bemächtigt sich mit psychologischer Wahrscheinlichkeit weit eher lähmendes Entsetzen als spontane Panik.”

61. Charles Winecoff, Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins (Raleigh, North Carolina: Lightening Bug Press, 2001 [1996]): 193-194. 62. Erwin Goelz, "Prozeß gegen Kafka," Stuttgarter Zeitung (25 May 1963); Ulrich Seelmann-Eggebert, "Franz Kafka als Citizen K," Stuttgarter Nachrichten (8 February 1963). 63. Edward Guthmann, "Repeat Performance: Welles' Rare Masterpiece Restored-Film Based on Kafka's The Trial opens at the Castro," San Francisco Chronicle (7 January 2000) available online at http:// www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2000/01/07/DD15381.DTL 64. tm, “Prozess gegen Orson Welles," Stuttgarter Zeitung (21 June 1963). 65. Ibid. “Die Apologeten des literarischen Purismus und der Unantastbarkeit des absoluten Sprachkunstwerks waren in ihrem Element, als es auf der Podiumsdiskussion des AstA im überfüllten großen Hörsaal der Technischen Hochschule darum ging, ob der Film „Der Prozeß“ von Orson Welles Kafkas Roman total vermurkst oder in minimalen Spuren doch noch etwas von der „kafkaesken“ Atmosphäre wiedergegeben habe. Rudolf Lubowski vom Schorcht-Filmverleih, München, avancierte schnell zum schwarzen Schaf, auf das sich die plumpen und die differenzierten, die sachlichen und die ressentimentgeladenen Vorwürfe gegen diesen Film und gegen die Filmwirtschaft überhaupt entluden.“ 66. Rudolf Joos et al. (eds.), Mosaiksteine: Zum 65. Geburtstag von Dietmar Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main: Gemeinschaftswerk der Evangelischen Publizistik): 172-173. 67. Dietmar Schmidt, "Heilsame Unruhe," Kirche und Film, 6 (June1963): 2-3. "Mit einer Unbekümmertheit, die vermuten lassen könnte, es habe nie ein Goebbels und eine Reichskulturkammer gegeben--oder aber: beide sein heute schon wieder massgebliche Autoritäten--werden die vertrauten Adjektivpaare "nihilistisch" und "positive" , "zersetzend" und "gesund", in die Debatte geworfen." 68. "Der Mensch K. unterliegt der Macht," Westdeutsche Allgemeine (Essen) (13 June 1963). “Neben P und OW...fällt besonders RS auf, deren bravouröses Spiel als flittchenhafte Krankenpflegerin nichts mehr mit dem Sissi-Seelchen von einst gemein hat.“ 69. Karl Korn, "Ein Exempel" Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (1 July 1963). “Romy Schneider hat das Strahlegänschen Sissi abgetan. Die ranke, hochbeinige Hexe versteht sich mit Katzenaugen, raschen stelzenden Schritten, drängenden Gebärden und Flüstersätzen auf elementare Verführung. Ein vorzügliche schauspielerische Leistung.“ 70. "Genial an Kafka vorbei," Kölnische Rundschau, (25 April 1963).

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71. François Bondy, "Kafka-Gesehen von Orson Welles," Die Welt (29 December 1962). “Romy Schneider als Leni...eine „Puppe“ im doppelten Sinn des Wortes, in erotischer Willfährigkeit und marionettenhafter Unpersönlichkeit. Sie entspricht ganz der Vorstellung der Frauen, die im „Prozeß“ nicht genug Substanz haben, zu tierhaft sind, um selber Angeklagte zu werden.“ 72. "Filme der Woche: Nach Kafka: "Der Prozeß", Westdeutsche Rundschau (Wuppertal-Barmen) (18 May 1963). “Ihr gelingt der Darstellung der Leni, jenes Wesens zwischen Frosch und Mensch.“ 73. "Hitchkafka," Die Welt (West Berlin) (18 April 1963).“Immer ist seine (Kafkas) Wahrheit ganz trostlos—wie entsetzlich ist es, um nur ein Motiv herauszunehmen, dass...die ‚Erlösung durch die Frau’ hier immer von irgendwelchen Halbprostituierten erhofft wird, in einer Art letzter Verzweifelung, die sich in leerer Sinnlichkeit verliert.“ 74. Karl Heinz Krüger, "Kein Freispruch für Orson Welles," Der Abend (Berlin) (2 April 1963). 75. Kafka did have a small readership in France during WWII. See Françoise Tabery, Kafka en France: essai de bibliographic annotée (Paris: Minard, 1993): 17-22. See also Robert Marthe, “Kafka in Frankreich,“ Akzente 13 (1966):310-320. 76. USE (Ulrich Seelmann-Eggebert). Review of Der Prozess, Film- Dienst, 17 (24 April 1963): 152-153. 77. Of the 409 films released in West Germany in 1963, Welles’ The Trial was in 194th place that year in terms of cinema attendance. See Sigl et al, Jede Menge Kohle?, p. 137. 78. Enno Patalas. Interview with the author at the 9th Annual International Bremen Film Symposium at the Kino 46 in Bremen, 24 January 2004. 79. Franz Kafka, Briefe an Felice, und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit, Erich Heller and Jürgen Born (eds.) (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1976); see also Elias Canetti, Der Andere Prozeß: Kafka's Briefe an Felice (München, Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1984). 80. Canetti, 60. 81. See for example Volker Weidermann, “Kafkas Welt in einem Kästchen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 16 (20 April 2008): 31; Friedmar Apel, “Mythengestöber“, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 283 (3 December 2008): 32; Friedmar Apel, “Der war ja gar nicht kafkaesk,“ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 186 (11 August 2008): 34 82. S.M Pristorius, “Orson Welles: nach fünf Jahren wieder ein Film,“ Schorcht press and publicity release. “Mein Film erzählt nicht nur von der Verschwörung des Gerichts gegen die Unschuld; er ist vielmehr eine Studie der Bestechlichkeit von Gerichtsverfahren. Mein Held ist nicht unschuldig, er ist fähig, den Anderen ähnlich zu sein. Aber von allen Anderen kommt ihm niemand zur Hilfe. Und auch er tut nichts für die Menschen , die ihn umgeben.“

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RÉSUMÉS

This article investigates the reception of the American auteur and actor Orson Welles' adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial in West Germany in 1963. It argues that the film’s ambivalent reception by German critics was closely tied to the process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (coming to terms with the past) that had developed in Germany during the mid-1950s with the widespread circulation and publication of visual images of Nazi war crimes, and that was in the process of a more politicized transformation in the early sixties. Through the figure of Welles, this essay also explores the ways U.S. culture could influence this process. Welles’ reading of Kafka as a “prophet of fascism”, whose Josef K. actively resists his oppressors—even if to no apparent avail— set off a timely discussion among commentators about the meaning and function of Kafka’s works in post-war West Germany. In 1963, in the midst of spectacular court cases and “trials” that began to highlight the widespread complicity of Germans in National Socialist war crimes, the theme of “active resistance” to tyranny that Welles’ version of The Trial offered did not fit the picture. It was, as one critic suggested, a distorted, “Americanized” fantasy. Others, however, appreciated the didactic value of Welles’ international co-production, which coincided with the beginnings of the New German Cinema movement, a confrontational effort to engage with questions of the past through film.

AUTEUR

ANNE-MARIE SCHOLZ Anne-Marie Scholz, University of Bremen, Germany

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