7
French Visual Humanisms and the American Style
The pathos of modernity’s mechanical image stems from the way moderns know it to be essentially inhuman but so often ask it to bear a universal humanity. Formed automatically, seemingly devoid of will and intention, photography and cinema exposed modernists to a stratum of perceptual reality heretofore unavailable to the paltry, unassisted eye. In this sense, film, like photography, became a modernist “meta-technology: a medium whose constant subject-matter was the limits of the human” (Trotter 2006: 239). Shaking their confidence in naked human perception by revealing its constitutive gaps, repressions, and patterns of attention, such technologies posed a real challenge to modernists, who were anxious about the ways the new media furthered the pervasiveness of mechanism in the social order, and yet were aware that these visual technologies – by destroying the so-called “reality” of the senses – could in fact become a powerful weapon in their battle against mimetic realism. For moderns, part of the alluring modernity of camera vision lay in its role as an inhuman supplement to human seeing, cracking staid codes of vision and opening them to the perceptual experimentation and radical subjectivity we have come to associate with modernism. And yet the modernist inhumanity of the visual media, further eroding the vanishing modern faith in a transparent, objective, and disembodied subject of vision, existed in a kind of dialectical tension with another promise whispered by the new media – the fantasy that the photograph, and later the cinema, might perfectly record the script of nature and thereby provide a universal language transcending boundaries of age, race, class, religion, gender, and nationality (North 2005, Hansen 1991).
My essay explores a more local version of how modernism and its inhuman visual technologies were called to respond to the broad challenge to the human posed by the global forces of modernization. I do so by examining the place of the modern American novel in the particular cluster of mid-century visual humanisms operating in France in the postwar context, and by telling a story of how and why a form of modernist style, and its cinematic visuality, became read as the sign of a new, international humanism. Recent studies of literary modernism’s visual culture have encouraged us to consider the role of modern literature in the emergence and production of new kinds of modern observers – modern because they reflect newly skeptical philosophical discourses of vision, or the nascent visual epistemologies of emerging social sciences like anthropology and sociology, or the influence of new visual technologies like photography and film (Jacobs 2001). Drawing upon this style of thinking, my essay considers what kinds of observers French intellectuals produced in their reading of modern American fiction, how this kind of vision is shaped by humanism, and why the particular visuality of the modern American style would lend itself to a form of humanistic witnessing.
I approach these questions through a close reading of French literary critic Claude-Edmonde Magny’s fascinating 1948 study, The Age of the American Novel. Magny’s work, best known today as one of the first sustained attempts to describe the influence of cinema on the technique of authors like Dos Passos, Faulkner, and Hemingway, also stands as an unruly archive of mid-century humanisms inflected through the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and existentialism (Magny was, in fact, a student of Jean-Paul Sartre’s). An eloquent example of the conscription of the modern American novel in the service of humanistic seeing, Magny’s text is all the more striking in an intellectual context dominated by rising concerns about the very inhumanity of America’s new, postwar hegemony on the continent. In what follows, then, I aim to reconstruct the heady visual culture of Magny’s humanism in the context of postwar France, showing how the style of the modern American novel becomes – in the work of Magny and others – both a new, and newly impersonal grammar of the human being and a form of postwar internationalism. I then conclude by considering Magny’s reading of modern American style in dialogue with current critical returns to the politics of modernist style that find in it, as Magny did, a cosmopolitan metaphysic.
Magny’s study, which initially appeared as a series of articles in 1944 and 1945, is generally understood as an example of French intellectuals’ postwar Americanophilia – their enthusiastic reception and willful reinvention of American culture in keeping with local philosophical currents. Bored with the bloodless, bourgeois novel of psychological introspection à la Proust and Gide, the French had developed a taste for the modern American novel as early as 1928, with French expatriate Maurice-Edgar Coindreau’s translation of Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer for Gallimard Press in Paris. In the 1930s, Coindreau would go on to translate the work of all of the authors who became known as les cinq grands (Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, Steinbeck, and most importantly, William Faulkner), sparking a publishing craze for the American novel that went underground during the German Occupation, when American fiction (like its films) was banned and the practice of reading them became, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s terms, a “symbol of resistance” (Sartre 1945: 115). What Magny calls “The Age of the American Novel” peaked in the years immediately following the Liberation, which saw the 1944 launch of Marcel Duhamel’s influential series of hard-boiled crime novels, la série noire, largely comprising translated works of American pulp fiction, and the publication of a number of book-length French critical studies of the American novel, including Magny’s own. The vogue had begun to wane by the end of the decade, when the imported technical charms of le style américain – as the experiments of the American novel were commonly known – could no longer be separated from the cultural work of Americanization on the continent. But during the Occupation and the immediate postwar period, le style américain was a telling barometer of France’s vision of the postwar face of the United States, as, in Sartre’s terms, “tragic, cruel, and sublime” (Sartre 1945: 114).
A kind of modern realism, the hallmark of le style américain was a new mode of poetic objectivity that eschewed intellectual analysis for journalistic concreteness and reportage, modeling a nonpsychological, behavioristic approach to character that privileged spontaneous and often violent action over soulful navel-gazing, gesture over interiority. Tailor-made for France’s reigning existentialist aesthetic, the American novelistic style was, much like the American film noir, an invention of the French that tells us plenty about the kind of sentimental primitivism through which many French critics saw their postwar American imports. For this reason, Magny’s study, the first attempt in France to “fuse the literary and philosophical interest in American fiction and culture with the grass-roots popularity of the movies” (Elsaesser 2005: 242), tends to be read as typical of a certain mode of highbrow appropriation and refashioning of American pop culture. With its twinned taste for modernism and mass-cultural form, Magny’s The Age of the American Novel anticipates French film critics’ later discovery of the vernacular modernism of Hollywood movies in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s.
Without denying the romantic limitations of Magny’s view of the American novel or forgiving its occasional slumming in the pulpy American grain, I want to suggest that Magny’s text be read as an example of the visual humanisms operating within – and a kind of anxious response to – the horizon of Americanization in postwar Europe. Magny suggests something along these lines near the conclusion of the first portion of her study, which deserves to be quoted at length:
We are here concerned with a new convergence of the same kind as that which has already been discussed – a convergence between the results of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and sociology and the new vision of the world that the movies and the novel communicate to us almost unconsciously, by virtue of their technique alone. It is no longer a question of a kinship between two forms of the same genre, or of two neighboring arts, but of one between the abstract themes that haunt contemporary thought and the conclusions that are suggested by the evolution toward an epoch of purely aesthetic techniques belonging to the domain of the emotions rather than of the intellect. This is a partial explanation of the growing vogue for the American novel in France … But this is not the only reason for its success: it also gives us a more simple and direct, and therefore a more universal, vision of man than that proposed by our traditional literature. Through its masterpieces we glimpse the promise of a new humanism. If its major importance is its content, however, why is it that its technique is the most imitated? To use Sartre’s apt phrase, it is because the technique is pregnant with a whole metaphysic.
(Magny 1972: 100–1, my emphasis)
In the literary and visual culture in which her study emerges, Magny’s appeal to the “promise of a new humanism” echoed a volley of similar calls, since in France’s reconstruction period, humanism was in fact “the dominant ideological tendency” for roughly 15 years following World War II (Kelly 1989: 103). Having served as an ideological umbrella for antifascism during the Resistance, “humanism” reemerged as the watchword of a defensive postwar consensus among socialists and Catholics, offering a common ideological reference point for the nascent Fourth Republic that soldered wartime divisions within the nation while also conveniently excusing the collaborationist positions of many traditional Catholics. Indeed, in 1945 and 1946, it seemed everyone in France claimed to be a humanist, from the Catholic perfectionists of Emmanuel Mounier’s Personalist movement; to the socialists, whose resurgent humanism was spurred by the recent publication of Marx’s early, and deeply humanist, 1844 Paris Manuscripts; to the Gaullists, to the French Communist Party. Even Sartre got into the act, giving a well-attended lecture titled “Existentialism is a Humanism” in 1945. The cresting humanist tide within the nation would soon be affirmed internationally with the 1948 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations. But of course, with the 1946 passing of the Blum–Byrnes agreement, which reopened French movie screens to American markets, with the arrival of Marshall Plan aid in 1948, and with the Franco-American NATO alliance in 1949, international humanism became inextricably connected to the emerging bipolar world of the Cold War, and to the global reach of Americanization and its cultural products. In a 1945 interview with André Malraux published in the British arts journal Horizon, Malraux made clear that the “new humanism” defining the postwar orientation of European culture was in fact, indicative of salutary “convergence” between America and Europe – a “harmony of sensibilities” – that would produce a new “Atlantic culture” (Malraux 1945: 238).
While Magny’s analysis often speaks in Malraux’s Atlanticist idiom of humanistic cultural “convergence” rather than American “influence,” her study also appears a year after the French communist press had begun to turn against le style américain, finding in the novels of William Faulkner or Henry Miller a despairing and reactionary pessimism and an unwelcome reminder of Yankee imperialism (Smith and Miner 1955). For humanism at this moment was also the contested ideological terrain on which “neutralist” leftist intellectuals like Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty would attempt to defend Marxist revolutionary humanism from Stalinist terror, and to carve out a political “third way” by aligning themselves neither with the false promises of American-style liberal democracy or a revolution that seemed to exacerbate a bloody dictatorial apparatus in the USSR. In Humanism and Terror (1947), Merleau-Ponty described precisely this tough spot:
Thus we find ourselves in an inextricable situation. The Marxist critique of capitalism is still valid and it is clear that anti-Sovietism today resembles the brutality, hybris [sic], vertigo, and anguish that already found expression in fascism. On the other side, the Revolution has come to a halt … It is impossible to be an anti-Communist and it is not possible to be a Communist.
(Merleau-Ponty 1947/1969: xxi)
Thus, whatever Magny means by the “new humanism,” her call for it in an analysis of Franco-American cultural exchanges is overdetermined by her fractious intellectual culture, divided between Gaullist Atlanticism and leftist neutralism.
The contours of this humanism, Magny insists, are limned in the particular technique linking the American novel and the movies, which is to say, in the so-called cinematic “objectivity” or “realism” of le style américain. Magny does not propose an expressivist reading of style, one that would read the objective technique as narrowly national, an expression of what those wild Americans do, or how they feel or act. Rather, the American style is the vessel of “a whole metaphysic” – a philosophical idea, an ethical perception of experience – crossing media and national boundaries, haunting the postwar cosmopolitan ether. Moreover, Magny locates this technique in the domain of the “purely aesthetic.” Later in the study she clarifies that she means aesthetic “in the etymological sense of the word” – that is, as a form of sensual perception (1948/1972: 57). The “objectivity” shared by the American novel and film, rather than cool and detached, is a visual mode throbbing with human feeling. No sterile thing, technique carries the seed of metaphysical warmth. In other words, Magny’s book attempts to square postwar humanism with a certain form of emotive impersonality. This may seem odd for students of modernism, since we are accustomed to think of impersonality – the “external method” of Wyndham Lewis, say, or the Eliotic “escape from personality,” or the satiric types of Nathanael West – as an expression of modernist antihumanism. But in the context of Magny’s visual culture, this idea – that technique is most human when it is most objective – has a real currency, consistent with existentialist, phenomenological, Marxist, and Christian humanisms, and their various points of intersection.
Magny’s argument that the convergent changes in the modern French and American novel stem from “the imitation, conscious or unconscious, of the techniques of the film,” depends upon her sense of deeper affinities between these media (Magny 1948/1972: 3). There is, she argues, a “triple relationship – psychological, sociological, and aesthetic” between them from the start (p. 4). Psychologically, films and novels are empathetic media – they “satisfy the same basic need – our desire to live a different life for a moment, to identify temporarily with the nature or emotion of another human being. In short, they satisfy man’s curiosity about other men” (p. 4). Unlike theatre, which for Magny was currently working to prevent identification, the novel and the film “systematically seek out all means leading to the emotional fusion of character and audience.” They “must lay bare the human heart and face,” and they do so primarily through their typical constructions of personhood – characters and stars (p. 8). Following André Malraux’s argument in “Equisse d’une psychologie du cinéma” (Sketch for a Psychology of the Moving Pictures) that the face of the star “expresses, symbolizes, incarnates a collective instinct” (Malraux 1958: 326), Magny claims that the identificatory myths of stars, like novelistic characters, depend on their being like us and bigger than us, universal and particular, an “ideal being” brought down to “the level of average humanity” (Magny 1972: 13).
Strangely, though, while films and novels minister to a human need for empathy and identification, their sociological essence is a fundamental solitude. So, although it is common to think of a novel reader as honeycombed in privacy and the cinemagoer as a member of a public experience, for Magny, the cinema at its best is, like the novel, addressed “to those things that are deepest and most solitary in man” (Magny 1948/1972: 18). Although the experience of cinema unfolds collectively, once the story begins, “each person returns to the solitude of his own perception” (p. 18). “Emotional contagion,” Magny avers, “is minimal at the movies, maximal at the theatre,” and this relative immunity from infectious sentiment means that “it is incomparably easier to maintain one’s freedom of judgment in a movie house than in a playhouse” (p. 19). This difference between the cinematic and theatrical experience, which joins cinema to the novel, stems from the fact “that the aesthetic essence of theatre is spectacle” – a perception simultaneously apprehended and mutually conditioned by the audience members, and thus a collective witnessing that performatively reconstitutes community in mode of Greek tragedy. The movie, on the other hand, is “only slightly – or not at all – a spectacle; it is much more – like the novel – a story” (p. 19). The crucial aesthetic affinity between the cinema and the novel, then, is that they are both narratives, and as a result, feed individual, rather than collective, perception: the film, rather than external to its spectators, is “the very stuff of their dreams – materialized, enriched, made incarnate” (p. 20).
The stakes of this fleshy mode of perception shared by the novel and film are high for Magny. These art forms are “exactly suited to modern consciousness and its needs” because they embody
what distinguishes contemporary society from a more primitive society: the simultaneously particular and personal relationship of the individual to the collective soul in the former, as opposed to that individual’s more diffuse participation in the community in the latter. With the same danger: the barely conscious descent into absolute solitude and the loss of all objectivity by the substitution of what one wants for one what actually is – in short, the concrete equivalent of the attitude philosophers call solipsism. Modern man is alone in the movie house, though he is surrounded by a thousand spectators similar to himself. They too are lost in their own dreams, they too are hypnotized by the screen and what is happening on it – but each is for the moment a stranger to the others. One thousand consciousnesses become impervious to their neighbors, divided by what seems to unite them.
(Magny 1948/1972: 20–1)
In these existentialist terms, the cinema and the novel always share a visuality torn between empathetic participation in human community and radical solitude. Their sociological situation is framed, on one side, by a compensatory psychological essence (empathy) that satisfies “man’s curiosity about other men,” and on the other, by an aesthetic essence (narrative) that threatens to dissolve the objective world in the desiring imagination of a voracious subject. This perceptual mode is especially timely in a postwar social environment newly skeptical of the dangers of “the collective soul,” and yet aware that reactionary individualism may fall prey to a similar threat – the loss of objectivity and, indeed, of the self. “In the life of societies, Magny observes, “there are undoubtedly periods when the collective conscious is integrative and others when it is disintegrative” (1948/1972: 15). Wary of “the individual’s more diffuse participation in the community,” contemporary society is defined by the “disintegrative” character of collective consciousness that, Magny hypothesizes, may even explain the “star crisis” of the movies (p. 15). As “powerful collective instinct[s]” wane, so too the stars that embody them (p. 15). Mythic personhood thus gives way to the more uncertain modes of impersonality – neither fully collective feeling nor onanistic solitude – that Magny attempts to square with the “principles of a new humanism” and finds articulated in the specific “film aesthetic” of American fiction. “The Age of the American Novel,” then, is not an era in which the lymphatic body of French intellectual culture gets a transfusion of vital American sap, but a “period of transformation and disintegration,” where the glamorous and transcendent personalities of novel and screen – and the convergence of mass desire they organize – are supplanted by “neutral detectives without personality,” by heroes that “melt into” the story (pp. 15–17). Such minimal heroes testify to a pervasive characterological vagrancy symptomatic of a broader postwar concern about heroic personality and the novelistic “art of narration itself,” which ceases to be the story of a “personal destiny” or “a collective entity” and becomes instead a quasi-documentary “description” of action within dispersive situations (pp. 169–70).
For Magny, the “extreme modernity” of the modern American novel lies in two major technical innovations borrowed from the film: first, “absolutely objective” narration, “pushed to the point of behaviorism,” in which characters and events are “described only from the outside, with neither commentary nor psychological interpretation”; and second, “the more specifically technical innovations” of varied points of view – novelistic fades, superimpositions, crosscutting, close-ups – “made possible by the extension to the novel of the principle of changing the position of the camera, the discovery of which transformed the cinema by making of it an art” (Magny 1948/1972: 39). Magny’s humanistic trick is to connect these two techniques – to show that the subjective pole is just another modality of externalized description and that behaviorism, rather than narrowly deterministic, is something like a technology of human freedom itself. As a manifestation of psychological behaviorism, objective technique reduces the psychological reality of a person or thing to what can be perceived by an external observer, to a succession of acts and gestures, to “ ‘conduct’ in a given situation” (p. 40). Eschewing the transcendent narrative perspective Magny associates with the nineteenth-century novel, this “aesthetic of the stenographic record explains nothing and limits itself to placing the facts before us in all their ambiguity” (p. 42). Emotion isn’t felt inside so much as it is witnessed externally by the reader and by a world of others in which the characters act; they “exist so strongly that they can dispense with having an inner life” (p. 43).
Magny’s discussion of “the behavioristic view of man,” with its idiom of psychological “facts” and “acts” of characters within ambiguous “situations,” is clearly indebted to her mentor, Sartre, and also picks up on contemporaneous efforts to yoke behaviorist psychology, phenomenology, and cinematic perception. In his 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay, “American Novelists in French Eyes,” Sartre opposes the outmoded novel of intellectual analysis to “a psychology of synthesis which taught us that a psychological fact is an indivisible whole. [The analytical novel] could not be used to depict a group of facts which present themselves as the ephemeral or permanent unity of a great number of perceptions” (Sartre 1945: 119). Moreover, Sartre claims, the shortcomings of the analytical novel are political:
All around us clouds were gathering. There was war in Spain; the concentration camps were multiplying in Germany, in Austria, in Czechoslovakia. War was menacing everywhere. Nevertheless analysis – analysis à la Proust, à la James – remained our only literary method, or favorite procedure. But could it take into account the brutal death of a Jew in Auschwitz, the bombardment of Madrid by the planes of Franco? Here a new literature presented its characters to us synthetically. It made them perform before our eyes acts which were complete in themselves, impossible to analyze, acts which it was necessary to grasp completely with all the obscure power of our souls.
(Sartre 1945: 119)
What can American literature possibly have to do with the death of a Jew in Auschwitz? Sartre’s assumption seems to be that nonanalytical style is better equipped to account for brutal political realities because it locates the human in a space of action and the reader in an arena of witnessing. When Hemingway or Caldwell present a character who lives but doesn’t contemplate, the reader “sees them born and formed in a situation which has been made understandable to him”; when Faulkner or Dos Passos describe their heroes from the outside, the reader “is only the witness of their conduct. It is from their conduct that we must, as in life, construct their thought” (1945: 119). As in life. Objective technique, for Sartre, is a tool for living – an instrumental gizmo that builds before the reader’s eyes a stylized form of lived experience consistent with the open, ambiguous present and unforeseeable futurity of existential action. In fact, his “Existentialism is a Humanism” lecture defends existentialism against the charge of subjectivism in similarly moral and visual terms. In action and behavior, we “create an image of man as we think he ought to be”; when we choose ourselves, we choose all of humanity, “everything happens as if all mankind had its eyes fixed on us and were guiding itself by what he does” (Sartre 1945/1995: 37, 39). So, while we tend to think of Sartrean seeing as the condition of being fixed by the mortifying gaze of another (Jay 1993), the “Humanism” lecture redefines action as a kind of situated moral conduct bound to the gaze of a universal humanity created and affirmed in particular human acts and choices. And this is not, Sartre insists, a human essence but a human condition – those “a priori limits which define man’s condition in the universe. Historical situations vary … What does not vary is the necessity for him to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be there in the midst of other people, and to be mortal there” (Sartre 1945/1995: 52). Explicitly opposed to an “absurd” humanism that would – like the Kantian morality Sartre seems to invoke – take “man as an end and as a higher value,” existentialism sees the human as always in the making. Constantly “outside himself,” projecting himself into the future, Sartre’s human is properly ecstatic and impersonal (pp. 60–1).
Sartre’s claim for the American novel as a perceptual mode best suited to the political realities of the time depends both upon his existentialist morality and on the “psychology of synthesis,” a psychology which understands a psychological “fact” as an indivisible whole, grasped in action and gesture – in conduct before the eyes of others. This is a mode of Gestalt psychology central to the early phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s friend and then coeditor of Les Temps Modernes. Merleau-Ponty’s lecture “The Film and the New Psychology,” delivered in March of 1945 at l’Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, France’s state-sponsored film academy, echoes the terms of Sartre’s account of objectified emotion and perceptual situatedness, while implicating the cinematic presentation of the human as a privileged way of being in the world. Rejecting classical theories of perception that understood the visual field as the sum of sensations to be deciphered by the intelligence, Merleau-Ponty followed the Gestaltists in proposing a more primordial mode of seeing, that more complete (and more obscure) “grasp” described by Sartre above: “I perceive in a total way with my whole being; I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1964: 50). Importantly, this new psychology “brings a new concept of the perception of others” predicated on the rejection of both introspection and the notion that the meaning of emotion is readily available to inner observation (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1964: 52, my emphasis). Citing directly Sartre’s own 1939 essay on the emotions, an experiment in phenomenological psychology, Merleau-Ponty insists that anger, shame, or hate are not “psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another’s consciousness: they are types of behavior or styles of conduct which are visible from the outside. They exist on this face or in those gestures, not hidden behind them” (p. 52). Following Sartre’s theory of the emotions as purposive acts and ways of constituting the meaningfulness of the world, Merleau-Ponty argues that emotion is not “a psychic, internal fact but rather a variation in our relations with others and with the world that is expressed in our bodily attitude” (Sartre 1938/1995, Merleau-Ponty 1945/1964: 53). We see others, others become manifest to us, as behavior, because the human is defined by “a commerce with the world and a presence to the world that is older than intelligence” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1964: 52). If the new psychology reveals the human as a being “thrown into the world and attached to it by a natural bond,” then cinema is the instrument of a phenomenological humanism, a technology of intentional consciousness (p. 53). Films are not sum totals of images, words, or noises, but temporal or sensory gestalts irreducible to their component parts, primordially given to perception, and thus the aesthetic exaggeration of our lived experience of the tiniest perceived thing:
A movie is not thought; it is perceived. That is why the movies can be so gripping in their presentation of man: they do not give us his thoughts, as novels have done for so long, but his conduct or behavior. They directly present to us that special way of being in the world, of dealing with things and other people, which we can see in the sign language of gesture and gaze and which clearly defines each person we know.
(Merleau-Ponty 1945/1964: 58, original emphasis)
In these 1945 essays, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty turn away from the novel of introspection towards a phenomenological humanism – one predicated on a visual objectivity that bears witness to “the inherence of the self in the world and in others” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1964: 58). Sartre locates this objectivity in the perceptual mode of the American novel, Merleau-Ponty in the cinema’s way of seeing.
Magny’s study marshals both insights in her account of the humanistic objectivity that links the technical experiments of the novel and cinema. Objective description produces a gestural universalism – “the universality of mimicry” stretching from Steinbeck and Dos Passos to Charlie Chaplin – that restores
a certain idea of man, independent of the accidents of class and condition. Truly classic in spirit – classic in the same way as Chaplin’s movies, which make people laugh in Shanghai as well as in Romorantin – it is more nearly universal than our eighteenth-century literature because it truly encompasses all races and all classes. It is coextensive with the planet. It demonstrates the principle of a new humanism.
(Magny 1948/1972: 45)
At the risk of conflating important differences between the phenomenologies of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Magny, I want to underscore their shared sense that objective technique entails a visual idiom of gesture, action, and conduct that beggars analysis or intellection, given instead to aesthetic – sensuous – perception. Chaplin’s gestural mutism, which Magny will link to Dos Passos’s elliptical technique, is “truly international” because it is “apprehended rather than understood, it can affect men of all ages, of all classes, of all nations, and – especially – of all intellectual levels” (Magny 1948/1972: 58). These humane gestures, like those of the protagonists of the American novel described by Sartre or those that, for Merleau-Ponty, define our everyday way of being in the world, are both sensual and situated, embedded in a scene and always subject to the gaze of others.
The humanistic backdrop of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty thus helps to explain how, for Magny, the objective narration, which places the perceiver in a situation, and among others, is so suited to the second major technical innovation – multiple points of view – that, by her logic, the modern novel borrows from the film. Every scene in a movie is perforce photographed from a certain location, which means that the aesthetic essence of the film is to fragment reality into a “disconnected series of appearances”: the vision of the world offered by cinema refuses clinical disinterestedness and “ ‘pure’ vision, a vision of someone who would not have a point of view” (Magny 1948/1972: 88). Rather, the technique of the movies is “fundamentally engagé, inherently incapable of giving us … any image that is abstractly impersonal” (p. 88). Magny explicitly borrows Sartre’s contemporaneous phenomenology of engaged literature (littérature engagée). Writing, Sartre argues, is action that reveals human situatedness: “If you name the behavior of an individual, you reveal it to him; he sees himself. And since you are at the same time naming it to all others, he knows that he is seen at the moment he sees himself” (Sartre 1947/1965: 16, original emphasis). Having “given up the impossible dream of giving an impartial picture of Society and the human condition,” the engaged writer understands the word as a “a pact of generosity between author and reader” (pp. 17, 49). Such generosity requires the creative faculties and situatedness of both parties, and thus dialectically discloses the human freedom of each while underscoring the nature of art itself as “for and by others” – a subjective project completed outside the self, in the objectivity of an other’s act of reading (p. 37). In these terms, what Magny calls “objectivity” is another mode by which the cinematic novel acknowledges its place in the world, the situation in which it finds itself. Eschewing the godlike and disembodied abstraction of Cartesian perspectivalism, the objective technique of the American novel is concretely impersonal, humane, and committed.
I now want to explore more specifically the impersonal grammar of commitment spoken by the American novel, as Magny understands it, and to show how her suggestive reading of style draws on contemporary ideas in French visual culture about humanistic vision. Magny’s study is divided into two parts: the first, “The American Novel and the Movies,” which I’ve described above, sets forth her general meditations on the aesthetic affinities between the novel and the film, as well as her discussion of the technical innovations borrowed by the novel from film; the second, “Time and Impersonalism in the American Novel,” offers a series of author-specific analyses of impersonal technique in the work of Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner. As the title of the second part indicates, Magny now subordinates a focused discussion of the cinematic qualities of this style to its various modes of impersonalism, though this understanding of impersonality is everywhere enabled by vision, its technological agents, and their manipulations of temporality.
This is most evident in her best chapters – searching discussions of impersonality in Dos Passos and Faulkner. I approach these readings through the stylistic hallmarks that most interest her in these authors, ellipses and adjectives, respectively. A “kind of nonsubjective impressionism,” novelistic ellipsis is a manner of presenting events not “as no one except possibly God himself could ever have seen,” but “only as any given spectator might have seen it … a certain kind of ellipsis thus appears as a direct consequence of the objectivity that forbids the artist to show the public anything that could not have been seen by a recording apparatus” (Magny 1948/1972: 50). Magny’s two governing assumptions about ellipses – that the novel and the film are each, essentially, an “art of ellipsis,” and that the ellipsis is not just a formal strategy but one serving “to cloak a metaphysical meaning as well” – are endemic to a particular postwar moment in French film criticism known today as the nouvelle critique (Magny 1972: 49, 51). Buoyed by the post-Liberation renaissance of French film culture, and voiced by critics like Roger Leenhardt, André Malraux, Alexandre Astruc, and most importantly, André Bazin, this new critical line was marked by the belief that cinema was essentially a narrative medium, with close ties to the novel and the theatre; by the conviction that cinema was a fundamentally popular, indeed, commercial, art; and by a turn away from the dazzling formal strategies of the cinematic avant-gardes of the 1920s, as well as their recondite position within culture at large. Cinematic modernism, by carving into, shaping, or otherwise aestheticizing reality through its various montage experiments, was out, and increasingly seen as an aesthetic deformation of the real. “Realism” was back in, and with it a resurgent respect for the “profilmic” – that elusive chunk of lived reality preceding the imposition of the camera – and for editing strategies that would themselves find ways to preserve the spatiotemporal continuity of reality. One can understand Magny’s freighted appeal to the metaphysical dimension of ellipsis in this critical climate: in narrative ellipsis, cinema finds itself confronted with its own inevitable interruption of spatiotemporal continuity, with the vexing gap between representation and “the real.” Film is elliptical at heart.
In these terms, the challenge of ellipsis is phenomenological, and the question of editing ethical: how to cut into the dense texture of reality in a way that preserves its fundamental richness? It was, of course, the great film critic André Bazin, founding editor of the film journal Cahiers du Cinéma and godfather of the French New Wave, whose lifelong championing of cinematic realism offered the most complete meditations on this question, and for whom the question of ellipsis was always a metaphysical and humanist one. These concerns are most evident in two of Bazin’s famous essays on Italian neorealism, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism” and “De Sica: Metteur en Scène.” The first, published in 1948 like Magny’s study, aims to describe the realism of this new, post-Liberation Italian school of cinema, and to argue for its international importance. The essay is especially interesting for our purposes because it claims that “the aesthetic of the Italian cinema … is simply the equivalent on film of the American novel,” and because it finds in this cinema, and in its technical properties, an exemplary humanity:
What is a ceaseless source of wonder, ensuring the Italian cinema a wide moral audience among the Western nations, is the significance it gives to the portrayal of actuality. In a world already obsessed again with terror and hate, in which reality is scarcely favored any longer for its own sake but is rather rejected or excluded as a political symbol, the Italian cinema is certainly the one which preserves, in the midst of the period it depicts, a revolutionary humanism.
(Bazin 1948/1971: 39, 20–1)
While Bazin owes the opposition here between “humanism” and “terror” to Merleau-Ponty’s study, the notion of humanism he defends is rather different (Merleau-Ponty 1947/1969). We experience this revolutionary humanism in the Italian films’ relationship to reality: refusing to instrumentalize the real, to “treat this reality as a medium or a means to an end” or to foreclose reality by converting it into a political symbol, they remind us “that the world is, quite simply, before it is something to be condemned” (Bazin 1948/1971: 21). So too do these films attempt to restore to a moral audience of human beings who watch them something of their presymbolic, phenomenological thereness: “Nobody is reduced to the condition of an object or a symbol that would allow one to hate them in comfort without having first to leap the hurdle of their humanity” (p. 21).
The humane work of returning us to the world, and to ourselves, requires giving the spectator “as perfect an illusion of reality as possible,” and for Bazin, the more cinema follows its general “evolutionary trend” towards realism, the more it “comes ever closer to the novel” (1948/1971: 26). No naive realist, Bazin insists that realism can only “be achieved in one way – through artifice,” and he identifies as the two most significant events since 1940 in the evolution of realist artifice Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), and Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946), two films that, for Bazin, bear the stylistic imprint of the modern American novel (1948/1971: 26). Rather than using montage to abstract from reality, signifying it in advance by dividing it into “a series of either logical or subjective points of view of an event,” Welles’s signature deep-focus photography “takes in with equal sharpness the whole field of vision contained simultaneously within the dramatic field,” and thus allows the mind of the spectator to encounter the visible continuity of reality as structured by the frame much as we do in life, making our own perceptual choices within the dense fabric of the sensible (p. 28). Bazin’s discussion of Welles here condenses many of the same points he made in his earlier essay, “The Technique of Citizen Kane,” published the year before in Les Temps Modernes. In that piece, Bazin had connected Kane’s newsreels and the novels of Dos Passos and read this link as a sign of the “mutual influence that literature and cinema have on each other,” one which “does not diminish the uniqueness of their respective means of expression” (Bazin 1947/1997: 236). But there, as he does in the “Aesthetic of Reality” essay, and as he will do again later in his 1952 essay “In Defense of Mixed Cinema,” Bazin attempts to change the terms of the conversation altogether – away from “influence” or facile technical copying and towards the convergence, across media, of a common purpose, a metaphysic: “Rather than an influence one on the other, it is an accord between cinema and literature, based on the same profound aesthetic data, on the same concept of the relation between art and reality” (Bazin 1948/1971: 40).
In one of the most astonishing passages of “An Aesthetic of Reality,” Bazin explores this accord by connecting the elliptical narrative technique of Rossellini’s Paisà to the objective technique of the modern American novel – for him, the very apotheosis of style, where form becomes something like a force of nature:
The objective nature of the modern American novel, by reducing the strictly grammatical aspects of its stylistics to a minimum, has laid bare the secret essence of style. Certain qualities of the language of Faulkner, Hemingway, or Malraux would certainly not come through in translation, but the essential qualities of their styles would not suffer because their style is almost completely identical with their narrative technique – the ordering in time of fragments of reality. The style becomes the inner dynamic principle of the narrative, something like the relation of energy to matter or the specific physics of the work, as it were. This is what distributes the fragmented realities across the aesthetic spectrum of the narrative, which polarizes the filings of the facts without changing their chemical composition. A Faulkner, a Malraux, a Dos Passos, each has his personal universe which is defined by the nature of the facts reported, but also by the law of gravity which holds them suspended above chaos.
(Bazin 1948/1971: 31)
In the modern American novel’s objectivity, Bazin finds a nearly perfect identity between grammatical style and the temporal structuring of reality’s “facts,” an idealized management of the ineluctable ellipticality of the visible. If a “fact,” as Bazin later defines it, is “a fragment of concrete reality in itself multiple and full of ambiguity,” then objective style amounts to an ethical regard for the facts, where narrative assumes the purity of physics, artfully arranging the filings of reality without defiling their integrity (p. 37).
In a later essay on neorealism, “De Sica: Metteur en Scène” (1952), Bazin clarifies that Rossellini’s use of ellipsis is a moral “way of seeing” manifested in his “exterior approach,” which “offers us an essential ethical and metaphysical aspect of our relations with the world” (Bazin 1952/1971: 62). We can understand this as yet another example of the tendency in France to read American objectivity as a technology of human locatedness. Whereas “ellipsis in classic montage is an effect of style,” in Rossellini’s films it is “a lacuna in reality, or rather in the knowledge we have of it, which is by its nature limited” (p. 66). In the “Aesthetic of Reality” essay, Bazin explores more carefully how the narrative ethics of elliptical style – whose formal transparency allows it to pass as nonstyle – at once nurtures the mental activity of spectators and guides them to an awareness of their human limits. Like the American novel, Paisà’s fragmented narrative “reveals enormous ellipses – or rather, great holes,” and Rossellini’s strength as a filmmaker lies in the way his elliptical technique allows the scattered facts of the real to enter into relationships with each other, and thus to take on meaning in the mind of the spectator in a noninstrumental fashion (Bazin 1948/1971: 35). Facts become meaningful “not like a tool whose function has predetermined its form,” but “only after the fact, thanks to other imposed facts between which the mind establishes certain relationships (pp. 36, 37). Images, themselves “just a fragment of reality existing before any meanings,” are also “image facts,” brought by the mind of the spectator into centrifugal networks of significant relationships that testify to, as they recreate, the “concrete density” of reality itself (p. 37). In this rich phenomenal web, “man himself is just one fact among others, to whom no pride of place should be given a priori” (p. 38). Human being and mechanical image – both are concrete, situated facts, and Bazin insists that is the special gift of Italian filmmakers to portray human “action without separating it from its material context and without loss of that uniquely human quality of which it is an integral part” (p. 38). It is this sensitivity to human situatedness, and to the limitations of human vision’s total purchase on reality, then, that aligns ellipsis in Italian neorealism to “the very fabric of the narrative, the law of gravity that governs the ordering of the facts, in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dos Passos” (p. 39).
This is not quite the end of the story, since the concluding section of Bazin’s essay, “The Realism of the Italian Cinema and the Technique of the American Novel,” ends with a meditation on the very compatibility of these styles, and these nations, in the context of America’s postwar occupation of Italy. For Bazin, le style américain is so naturally suited to the Italian national context because of “the exceptional affinity of the two civilizations as revealed by the Allied occupation. The G.I. felt himself at home at once in Italy, and the paisan was at once on familiar terms with the G.I., black or white” (Bazin 1948/1971: 40). Transcending boundaries of nation and race, this stylistic fit embodies a perfect cultural marriage in a culture of occupation, of a piece with the “widespread black market and the presence of prostitution, wherever the American army went” – economic realities of the postwar period Bazin takes for humanistic exchanges, and “by no means the least convincing example of the symbiosis of two civilizations” (p. 40). Informed by a rosy Atlanticism that would do Malraux proud, Bazin’s analogy makes clear that the American army is as at home in the world as the American style, itself a force of nature. For how can we fail to read this stylistic compatibility politically, as either an index of American economic aggression or as the naturalization of America’s status as always at home in the world?
Bazin’s refusal to do so, his insistence that this stylistic affinity follows from a surfeit of basic human intimacy, is in fact consistent with his generally apolitical – or better, his prepolitical – reading of neorealist style. His essay on Vittorio De Sica, for example, credits the filmmaker with a persistent tenderness that consists in allowing humans and things “to exist for their own sakes, freely; it is in loving them in their singular individuality” (Bazin 1952/1971: 69). De Sica’s work contains a reservoir of “unattached love” irreducible to partisan politics; so, while both the Communists and the Christian Democrats have instrumentalized De Sica’s films to support their political platforms, bending its affect to their purposes, the very fact that “each party can with equal plausibility lay claim to being the proprietor of it” means that “much authentic and naive love scales the walls and penetrates the stronghold of ideologies and social theory” (p. 71). This, because for Bazin, there is an inexhaustible residue of human need that can never be alleviated or produced by a “given historical institution” or a “particular economic setup”; politics may promote the “objective conditions necessary for human happiness,” but not the subjective ones, which stem from “the congenital indifference of our social organization, as such, to the fortuitousness of individual happiness” (p. 74). In this idea that human feeling – happiness as well as suffering – stems from a metaphysical alienation, we see Bazin’s own Christian brand of existentialism, one that departs crucially from Sartre, an important early influence on Bazin’s aesthetic theory. Whereas Sartre’s atheist humanism retooled emotion as a form of action within the world fully compatible with his increasingly radicalized partisan politics in the 1950s, Bazin sees human feeling as finally irreducible to political instrumentality. This explains Bazin’s intentionally paradoxical formulation of neorealism as a “revolutionary humanism” in “An Aesthetic of Reality.” Its humanism inheres in what Bazin calls its prepolitical “communicative generosity,” which shows us not humanity in a mass, but as one fact among others in a dense thicket of reality, a human within “concrete social realities” freed of the “apriori values of politics” (pp. 21–2).
Magny’s reading of Dos Passos depends similarly on the metaphysics of ellipsis, but its understanding of elliptical technique is rather more “polymorphous” than Bazin’s. Like Bazin, though, Magny will strip the impersonal humanism of Dos Passos’s style from a specific political agenda. On the one hand, Dos Passos’s ellipsis is linked to the “aesthetic imperative of discretion and taciturnity” borrowed from the cinema, where words would burn with the sensual immediacy of images, and act more directly on their reader’s “sensitive soul” (Magny 1948/1972: 49, 60). In this sense, elliptical technique would reintroduce into literature “some purely aesthetic elements the functions of which are neither discursive nor narrative” (p. 59). By focusing on the harmonious timbre of voice rather than semantic content, the laconic “polyphony” of Dos Passos would be “resolutely nondiscursive,” part of “a total art addressing itself to man as a whole – not only to the most intellectual, the most lucid, and yet the most limited part of his being” (p. 60). Even more oddly, Magny locates the potential nondiscursivity of Dos Passos’s style in his very “aesthetic of redundancy,” the way key themes from the character-based narratives in USA (of Charlie Anderson, Margo Dowling, J. Ward Morehouse, and the like) are musically echoed in the Newsreels and Camera Eye sections so that the trilogy as a whole lends itself to an “absentminded reading,” where the reader doesn’t so much understand the novel’s themes as “hear” them accrue, intuitively, almost unconsciously (p. 115). Ellipsis in these terms would function as a kind of nondiscursive, sensory image addressing a “total” rather than narrowly rational human being. And yet on a more sustained level, Dos Passos’s ellipses are linked to a host of literary strategies testifying to pervasive characterological impersonality in the USA trilogy: “consciousness without solidity”; “emotions, desires, and wishes” that don’t belong to a self; as “vacillating” or “drifting” “beings without inner consistency”; in sum, “the novel of a people dispossessed of themselves” (pp. 118–23). Here, ellipsis is “the only technique adequate to the experience of nothingness” (p. 63). Thus, Magny understands ellipsis as at once the communicative means of addressing a fuller human being and the literary expression of the very abdication of the human condition. Ellipsis, we might say, is the dialectical technique of a humanity that would, in the act of reading, find its essence affirmed in proportion to its alienation from it.
The “profound truth” of Dos Passos’s novel of objective technique is “the nonexistence of the psychological,” an evacuation of the inner life of the human that Magny observes in some of USA’s most famous features (Magny 1948/1972: 67). Its experimental “visual” techniques, the Newsreel and Camera Eye sections, work in conjunction with the narratives to blur the personal and the public, the particular and the anonymous. In the scraps and fragments of Dos Passos’s Newsreel montages, Magny hears “the completely impersonal monologue of the collective unconscious,” and in the impressionistic Camera Eye segments she sees this disembodied monologue alight for a moment in an anonymous individual (p. 113). The narrative traffic between character narratives of named individual characters and these more experimental visual sections only further underscores the nullity of the inner life, since the characters’ “personal” feelings are mockingly doubled in the Camera Eye sections just as the jingoistic clichés, scraps of popular song, or bits of adspeak so artfully juxtaposed in the Newsreels insinuate themselves into the thoughts and utterances of the characters, who, much like Nathanael West’s characters, talk in headlines.
Here and elsewhere, Magny’s reading of impersonality in Dos Passos follows the lead of Sartre, who, in a suggestive essay on 1919, noted how speech in USA “comes from afar … It is as if there were a Platonic heaven of words and commonplaces to which we all go to find words suitable to a given situation” (Sartre 1938/1962: 100). The problem of utterance and authenticity, for Sartre, is the problem of time, which is fully reified and deterministic in Dos Passos: “Each event is irreducible, a gleaming and solitary thing that does not flow from anything else, but suddenly arises to join other things” (p. 96). Like Sartre, Magny observes how Dos Passos’s curious use of the preterit, normally “the best tense for expressing things in the process of happening,” allows characters to narrate events of their lives as if they were never possessed, but always already dead (Magny 1948/1972: 117). Characters describe themselves “objectively, a little as if [their lives] were being projected on a screen,” but this narration is not “entirely objective,” since characters have access to their “feelings,” however clichéd and ready-made they may be (p. 117). The “recording apparatus – which is, instead of ordinary introspection, a ‘lens’ in the true sense of the term – is in [their] consciousness,” and as a result characters can never be intimate with themselves (pp. 117–18). As such, the preterit in Dos Passos is “terrible,” deadening events as soon as they happen so as to prepare us for the trilogy’s main character, Time, “the inexorable and monstrous time of capitalist society as it incoherently unwinds in the Newsreels” (pp. 127, 128). As for Bazin, Magny’s understanding of time is explicitly Bergsonian: Dos Passos’s characters are deprived of time’s “organic rhythm, the dense continuity of living tissue,” moving instead in the “dead” time of “Society – objective, inexorable, and spatialized” (pp. 129–30).
Stripping the human of its constitutive elements – freedom, dignity, expressive authenticity – and reducing it to “the triple determinisms of hunger, sexuality, and social class: Pavlov, Freud, and Marx,” Dos Passos’s elliptical technique “proposes a completely different conception of man, and thus it is scandalous” (Magny 1948/1972: 67–8). Magny insists that Dos Passos’s radical impersonality be seen as “a revolt against the essence of the human condition rather than against this or that form of society. It is Man, or Being, and not Capitalism or American society that is taken to task” in his novels (p. 67). In a historical and intellectual climate dominated by fears about the new American economic hegemony on the continent, and of globalization under the rubric of Americanization, how should we understand Magny’s insistence that Dos Passos’s critique of capital is really a critique of Being? The subsumption of a nation-state’s specific mode of economic aggression by a general metaphysics, or a canny awareness of Americanization’s global reach and violence, despoiling Being itself? Magny suggests the latter, I think, when she observes that “the inexorable pulsation at the heart of Dos Passos’s work is that of the basic, regular rhythm of the transmission belt in the heart of a factory – invisible, omnipresent, all-powerful. The rhythm of the modern world itself” (p. 130). If the subsequent impersonality is a form of “metaphysical satire,” then one might reasonably assume that Dos Passos would value, in negative fashion, some normative humanness absent in the world of USA. But Magny insists that Dos Passos cannot judge because judgment presupposes “some organized system of positive norms,” whereas Dos Passos “offers nothing positive, nothing affirmative.” Instead, “he is just angry, that is all. Very simply, he says no” (p. 139). And yet in this passionate negativity, Magny finds Dos Passos’s technique the apogee of a novel that “will have made itself so impersonal that it will no longer be a work of fiction, a work of imagination perhaps capable (who knows?) of transforming the world” (p. 143).
But how would such a transformation be brought about, and why must it be impersonal? This claim, that in Dos Passos total impersonality becomes a mode of Sartrean committed writing, only makes sense in light of earlier claims about the communicative potential of ellipsis – its sensual address to a fuller, more total humanity. Magny is, in short, invested in two interrelated modes of elliptical impersonality in Dos Passos: a characterological impersonality that is the global, metaphysical product of American capitalism and its inexorable temporality, and a readerly or, if you will, spectatorial impersonality that happens in acts of communicative generosity like reading or watching movies. The former impersonal mode registers a kind of dehumanization; the latter activates, in a phenomenological sense, the human faculties of a witness that involves the reader in the world. Magny again follows Sartre in the way she measures the alienated essence of the total human being – like Bazin’s, situated in an organic continuity of living tissue, experiencing the eventfulness of lived, personal time – by its distance from the vagrant beings of the USA trilogy. Sartre’s reading of Dos Passos hinges on a fine description of the act of reading his fiction that anticipates his literary phenomenology in What is Literature? Sartre proposes that in the act of reading Dos Passos our very freedom comes into relief through an emotional encounter with inhumanity, a “hybrid creature, an interior-exterior being” whose “vacillating, individual consciousness” wavers and is diluted in the “collective consciousness” (Sartre 1938/1962: 102). If, in Bazin’s reading of De Sica, the affective yield of our spectatorial encounter with the human is an abundance of prepolitical, unattached love that inheres in the human being’s singular individuality, our encounter with Dos Passos’s creatures, for Sartre, produces disgust, revolt, and indignation at their “statistical determinism” (p. 102). Reading Dos Passos’s work, the reader experiences a strange impersonality in which he or she becomes at once a member of an anonymous, public “they” (what Heidegger calls “the everyman” of the public realm) hostile to individual possibility and its critic:
In order to understand the words, in order to make sense out of the paragraphs, I first have to adopt [the everyman’s] point of view. I have to play the role of the obliging chorus. This consciousness exists only through me; without me there would be nothing but black spots on white paper. But even while I am this collective consciousness, I want to wrench myself away from it, see it from the judge’s point of view, that is, to get free of myself. This is the source of the shame and uneasiness with which Dos Passos knows how to fill the reader. I am a reluctant accomplice (though I am not sure I am reluctant), creating and rejecting social taboos.
(Sartre 1938/1962: 101)
Following, then, the Sartrean logic of committed reading and writing that Magny assumes, the more we encounter the “passionate negativity” of Dos Passos’s revolt against the human condition, the more fully we experience our humanity in the communicative act of reading.
Magny puts this sort of readerly phenomenology to practice in her fascinating reading of William Faulkner, one rooted in the stylistic production of fascination itself, and in its etymological sense – as a magical phenomenon, a kind of sacred spell or enchantment cast upon the reader. For fascination is the fruit of Faulkner’s style, seemingly perverse in its linguistic obscurity: its tendency to begin stories at their ending, or to tell at least two stories at once, or to occlude the shadowy events of the past that seem to lock his characters in their tragic obsessions, or to surround his fulsome, inexorable, imponderable nouns with a dense thicket of adjectival qualification. This neuromancy of style, for Magny, is the essence of a narrative method that is “enveloping and implicative rather than developmental and discursive” (Magny 1948/1972: 181, original emphasis). Faulkner’s adjectival excess is a technology of envelopment that turns the reader into an “involved witness,” establishing a crucial parallel between the scene of reading and a narrative whose order of events tends to be reconstituted by a spectator of the drama (like Horace Benbow in Sanctuary or Quentin and Shreve in Absalom, Absalom!) (p. 195). Like the enveloped reader, the textual witness “is at first external and indifferent to it but … quickly becomes immersed – and by the end of a few pages, implicated – in these affairs that do not in any way concern him” (p. 193). Encroaching on the limits of discursivity, the superabundance of adjectives is sensual. When we lose ourselves in Faulkner’s sentences, “we literally get entrammeled,” and as a result, “we end by seeing much less distinctly those things that the author believes himself to be describing, but we feel them better” (pp. 198, 197).
This entrammelment is humanistic, and contrasted to the technology of the photograph:
An adjective is not a photograph or a mold; it cannot in any way claim to explain the essence of something (a role semantics reserves to the substantive). A beach is not in itself “desolate” (as in Gracq) or a September afternoon “weary” (or “dead” or “long”) – except through the intermediary of a human consciousness. Even the fact that something is blue or red implies at least the presence of a retina. To charge “things” with more “qualities” than current language can bear is simply to provide them with so many handles by which we can, when we wish, catch them, control them, make them serve our own ends. It is obvious that a certain kind of writer might use epithets to present things to the reader in a magical way, to suggest them rather than truly to describe them – in short, to force them to appear, which is the strict meaning of the word “evoke.”
(Magny 1948/1972: 199, original emphasis)
Adjectives, unlike photographs, are tools of human agency, extending “our power over things, things that are re-created by us in our image, things that are given particularities that make no sense except in relation to ourselves” (p. 198). Magny’s comparison implies her awareness of Bazin’s famous claim for the “essentially objective character of photography” in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945/1967): “For the first time, between an originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time, an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man … All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence” (Bazin 1945/1967: 13). Against photography’s inhuman purchase on things, Magny credits the adjective for precisely the sort of sympathetic linguistic anthropomorphism whose rejection, 10 years later, will ground the novelistic antihumanism of the French nouveau roman. Alain Robbe-Grillet, for example, will substitute the humanist work of metaphor and analogy and its attendant metaphysics for a “sense of sight” that refuses to appropriate a world of things, but is instead “content to take their measurement … without attempting to penetrate them since there is nothing inside, without feigning the least appeal since they would not answer” (Robbe-Grillet 1958/1989: 52–3). Magny insists that the experience of adjectives produces a double reversal: things become human, but human consciousness, plunged into syntactical darkness, also “congeals and becomes more obscure, tends towards the opaque, blind, and totally self-oriented mode of existence, which is doubtless that of the inorganic, of the thing … To use Sartre’s language, the ‘en-soi’ and the ‘pour-soi’ exchange their characteristics in Faulkner” (Magny 1948/1972: 198–9).
The point of this “magical exchange” between the consciousness of beings (“pour-soi”) and the inner matter of things (“en-soi”) produced in the matrix of adjectival fascination is the human communication it enables across the radical gap between imagination and the material world. Across this break, novels can’t communicate any things at all but only their “human significance – that is, the impression they have produced, the emotion they have given rise to … in short, the contents of [the author’s] own consciousness” (Magny 1948/1972: 201). And this emotional transfer happens through a structure of shared fascination: “the Witnesses, the Mediators, are charged with the task of communicating to us, by a kind of contagion, what they feel. It is because they are fascinated that we will see with their eyes and be fascinated in turn” (pp. 205–6). For Magny, the way Faulkner’s adjectives produce humanistic involved witnessing is a powerful example of his desire for a “total identification” with his reader (p. 206). In effect, the adjective is the engine of a “truly ‘Marxist’ and cooperative literature” in which the reader is a producer, implicated in the structure of mutual responsibility that, as Sartre argues in What is Literature?, constitutes the very objectivity of the literary object (Magny 1948/1972: 207).
Perhaps most striking is Magny’s implicit claim for the role of Faulkner’s modernist style in the reciprocal event of reading, since the more convoluted or opaque Faulkner’s style – given as it is to the “indispensable shadow” of meaning, to the “element of madness” or the “inkiness” of narrative events – the more it envelops the reader in a sensual, nondiscursive mode of narrative (Magny 1948/1972: 208–9). In other words, Faulkner’s modernism attaches the reader to the density of the phenomenological real that so obsessed Bazin, while avoiding the rhetorical violence Bazin associated with certain forms of cinematic modernism: his style “keep[s] reality from being attenuated and eroded by the very means used to describe it – discursive narration, which is necessarily analytical” (p. 210). Faulkner’s sentences “are like webs, like nets thrown over a too-rich reality that the novelist has no right, lest he betray it, to analyze or sift” (p. 218). Magny’s Bazinian idiom becomes even more clear when she compares the complexity of Faulkner’s narration to Welles’s deep-focus reformation of cutting: reacting against “everything analytical and dissociative that is necessarily part of both narrative and speech,” both offer us “a vision not so much of an absurd world as of a universe in which everything coexists, in which all beings are simultaneously perceived” (p. 219). In doing so, the adjective becomes a path to the “total world” of the terra Faulkneriana, a “synthesized universe,” a “whole bloc of humanity” where plot prevails over character, events over humanity. If for Bazin, the revolutionary humanism of neorealism understands humanity, impersonally, as “one fact among others,” so too for Magny, the real hero of Faulkner’s work is “a social entity of which men and women are constituent elements” (p. 219).
Through the supposed nondiscursivity of narrative, Faulkner’s style forges a world community that joins readers and characters in an enveloping fascination with the past “Abbild,” the image of a “great immobile Event that hangs heavily over their heads and has made, so to speak, a hole in the monotonous succession of similar days” (Magny 1948/1972: 221, 222). Magny’s conception of a captivated humanity is eschatological: the traumatic hole in time which the characters experience “can in no way be different until, with the Incarnation … the marriage of Time and Eternity takes place” (p. 223). Faulkner’s fascinated community is thus a fallen one, sinners all, but by sketching, in negative fashion, the conditions for salvation, Faulkner’s fiction participates in “the reconstruction of a Church” (p. 232). And yet it can be no historical accident that Magny’s best examples of this “malady of the modern spirit” are the “Negroes of the Southern plantations” and “the entire Jewish people” (p. 222). So, while Magny’s rapt humanity may indeed be holding out for a messianic event to restore the human into a meaningful temporal continuum, it is also poised on the other side of historical catastrophe – both the recent Holocaust and America’s long history of racial violence – and thus, while waiting, bears witness to the traumatic exclusions from the human community.
At stake here is the relationship between Magny’s conception of history and the version of cosmopolitan humanism she offers. In some ways, her Christian idiom of Eternity and her citizenship within the total, “synthesized universe” of Faulkner’s world seem bound to a Hegelian notion of historical progress as the teleological unfolding of human destiny, and appear to echo a familiar reading of the Faulknerian human as a Cold War hero. In the conservative mid-century domestication of the avant-garde, when the New Critics and the New York intellectuals enshrined an aesthetics of difficulty and so made bad modernism good, Faulkner became America’s reigning postwar moralist. His reputation burnished by the postwar liberal consensus, Faulkner, much like Jackson Pollock, was read as exemplary of the freedom of the individual under capitalism, and of the power and plight of human will amidst a lapsed modern world of social and moral decay (Schwartz 1988, Guilbaut 1983). Faulkner’s humanism of suffering and enduring, like Pollock’s expressionist vitality, thus became a sign of the moral virtues of American-style capitalism over the inhuman depredations of communist totalitarianism. Lawrence H. Schwartz, who has told this story well, sees the French existentialist reading of Faulkner, and Magny’s in particular, as of a piece with that of American critics like Malcolm Cowley and Robert Penn Warren. Like the Americans, Schwartz claims, the French celebrate the same heroic “literature of freedom” and the same heroic “fundamental man,” albeit inflected through a local tradition of Resistance humanism that values individual dignity, justice, and the conquering of despair and nihilism (Schwartz 1988: 142–8).
However, Magny’s visual culture, as I have argued above, allowed her to find in le style américain a rather different version of humanism, and used it to imagine an impersonal observer skeptical of Americanization rather than its literary avatar. Magny turned to the so-called “objective” and cinematic technique of the modern American novel to construct a properly cosmopolitan observer, for whom cosmopolitan humanism informs both a communicative and epistemological ideal. As a communicative ideal, the visual objectivity of the American novel convokes a moral audience of seers in which human action, emotion, and behavior is always subject to the eyes of others, always seen by other involved witnesses; at the same time, objectivity enacts a sensual or nondiscursive mode of address to what is most human in that audience. As an epistemological ideal, visual objectivity requires a way of seeing oneself, impersonally, as situated in the world, of seeing one’s point of view as limited and partial rather than transcendent or universal, and of seeing one’s human actions as located in a dense phenomenological texture in which everything coexists and in which acts of political instrumentality and decisionism will always cut violently into the coimplicated order of things. Amidst rising concerns on the continent about America’s role in the world, Magny refashions American style as a form of humane vision that would be subject to a global moral community, and that would act modestly in that world, seeing itself as a contingent historical actor in an ever more proximate and interconnected global stage. If the modern American style, in France, is less a formal fetish than an anxious hope for a more humane and cosmopolitan superpower, then Faulkner’s fascinated community – traumatized by historical violence, awaiting a more humane order, and looking anxiously at America – is but a novelistic microcosm of a broader global wish image.
In the service of a postwar cosmopolitanism, the French retooled a cool modernist technique, warmed it up, and asked it to speak a visual esperanto. That this strange episode seems less odd today probably owes something to the resurgence of calls within the academy for a new and improved humanism, as well as the rising prestige of modernist style in critical returns to a humane cosmopolitanism. Shortly before his untimely death, Edward Said, for example, called for a “different kind of humanism” that would be “cosmopolitan and text-and-language bound” (Said 2004: 11). Freed from its Eurocentric and imperialist misappropriation, humanism, so Said hoped, might be restored to its role as a fundamentally “modernist theory and practice of reading and interpreting” – a technology of uncertainty and ongoing critique (p. 55). Rather than consolidate or affirm the always known, humanism, as a modernist “technique of trouble,” enjoys a constitutive relationship with the new, the alien, and the innovative, and serves as a “means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties” (pp. 77, 28). Drawing both on Said’s own discussions of modernism and on Sartre’s theories of reading and writing as acts of human recognition, another critic has recently explained the experimental forms of modernist novels as models of democratic community built on nonconsensual reciprocity and the exchange of difference, models that turn reading into a political training ground for cosmopolitan citizenship (Armstrong 2005). Perhaps most suggestive in this regard is Rebecca Walkowitz’s new study, Cosmopolitan Style (2006), which finds in the hallmarks of modernist narrative a practice of “critical cosmopolitanism” (p. 2). By critical, Walkowitz means, first, a general skepticism about political instrumentality and collective agency that finds stylistic expression in challenges to violent purposiveness, heroic agency, and nationalistic teleologies of history; and second, a welcome “suspicion of epistemological privilege,” a kind of self-conscious modernist thoughtfulness about thought that understands knowledge claims as always contingent and historically located (p. 2).
What contemporary critics find ethical about modernist form, of course, looks a lot like what Magny, at mid-century, found so promising about the cosmopolitan objectivity of modern American style. Now as then, modernist style becomes good, becomes downright necessary, when it puts a human face on the real inhumanity of globalization and its economic engine, liberal capitalism in le style américain. Rather than marking the end of the spell cast upon the American academy by the French theoretical tradition of so-called antihumanist thought, our new modernist humanism testifies to that tradition’s most crucial insight – that humanity and its freedoms are structured by global forces, powers, and forms of political instrumentality that operate in excess of human agency or will. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the historical parallel between the postwar “Age of the American Novel” and our own critical moment, it is that we find the more human and cosmopolitan modernism we need in the gap between America’s actual action in the world and what we would like it to be. And this critical pathos is especially acute today, when, once again, the American global footprint seems far too large and too certain.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Armstrong, Paul B. (2005). Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bazin, André. (1945/1967). The ontology of the photographic image. In What is Cinema?: Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (pp. 9–16). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bazin, André. (1947/1997). The technique of Citizen Kane. In Bazin at Work, trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cadullo, ed. Bert Cadullo (pp. 231–9). London: Routledge.
Bazin, André. (1948/1971). An aesthetic of reality: Neorealism (Cinematic realism and the Italian school of the liberation). In What is Cinema?: Vol. 2, ed and trans. Hugh Gray (pp. 16–40). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bazin, André. (1952/1971). De Sica: metteur en scène. In What is Cinema?: Vol. 2, ed and trans. Hugh Gray (pp. 61–78). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Elsaesser, Thomas. (2005). Two decades in another country: Hollywood and the cinephiles. In European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (pp. 233–50). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Guilbaut, Serge. (1983). How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hansen, Miriam. (1991). Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jacobs, Karen. (2001). The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Jay, Martin. (1993). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kelly, Michael. (1989). Humanism and national unity: the ideological reconstruction of France. In Nicholas Hewitt (ed.), The Culture of Reconstruction: European Literature, Thought and Film, 1945–50 (pp. 103–19). London: Macmillan.
Kuisel, Richard F. (1993). Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Magny, Claude-Edmonde. (1948/1972). The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction Between the Two Wars, trans. Eleanor Hochman. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.
Malraux, André. (1940/1958). Sketch for a psychology of the moving pictures. In Susanne Langer (ed.), Reflections on Art: A Source Book of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers (pp. 317–27). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press.
Malraux, André. (1945). An interview with Malraux. Horizon 12: 70, 236–44.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945/1964). The film and the new psychology. In Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (pp. 48–59). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
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Robbe-Grillet, Alain. (1958/1989). Nature, humanism, tragedy. In For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard (pp. 49–76). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Said, Edward W. (2004). Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1938/1962). John Dos Passos and 1919. In Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (pp. 94–103). New York: Collier Books.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1938/1995). The emotions: Outline of a theory. In Essays in Existentialism (pp. 189–254). New York: Citadel Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1945). American novelists in French eyes. The Atlantic Monthly 178: 114–18.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1945/1995). The humanism of existentialism. In Essays in Existentialism (pp. 31–62). New York: Citadel Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1947/1965). What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Harper & Row.
Schoonover, Karl (forthcoming, 2009). Neorealism at a distance. In Temenuga Trifonova (ed.) European Film Theory. New York: Routledge.
Schwartz, Lawrence H. (1988). Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press.
Smith, Thelma M. and Ward L. Miner. (1955). Transatlantic Migration: The Contemporary American Novel in France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Trotter, David. (2006). T. S. Eliot and cinema. Modernism/Modernity 13, 2: 237–65.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. (2006). Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press.