National Fictions

Literature, film and the construction of Australian narrative

Graeme Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000246629
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

National Fictions is a study of Australian literature and film. It is also a study of Australian culture, viewing the novels and films as products of a specific culture - as narratives with similar structures, functions, forms and meanings. It covers a wide range of texts, offering both close analysis and an account of their place within the system of meanings the book proposes as dominant in Australian culture.

The second edition of this influential work includes a new Afterword which traces recent changes in Australian literature and film, examining the growth of women's writing and popular fiction, as well as current trends in Australian cinema. Turner asks whether these developments really mark a shift in the Australian narrative, and whether it is still possible to speak in terms of a national culture.

'.a ground-clearing book. a seminal work, setting an agenda for cultural studies beyond the stockyards and croquet lawns of literary criticism.' - David Carter, Australian Literary Studies

'As a global syncretist, Turner is without peer.' - Stuart Cunningham, Media Information Australia

1 National fictions: film, fiction and national culture

The limitations on the comparative analysis of literary fiction and the feature film are dominated by the socio-political situation of the two forms and the disciplines which examine them. Literary fiction is an elite, privileged form,—one which is legitimated by its commitment to an objective of excellence, however that is defined; while the feature film is produced by a commercial industry which is unable to survive without creating a popular audience. Although there is government support for both forms, only with film is commercial success a major consideration. The discomfort of the literary critic with popular cultural forms has a long and distinguished history, where all sorts of arguments have been advanced about the survival of 'minority culture' against the threats of, 'mass civilisation' right from Matthew Arnold, through Leavis and Eliot,¹ to the pundits of today. Similarly, film studies' recognition of its situation as an area which has to establish its respectability has produced a jealous wariness of the imperialism of other disciplines—the literary appropriation of auteurs, for instance— as well as a dominant interest in theorising the medium in order to establish both its essential nature and the discipline's academic rigour. So the limited degree of intercourse that occurs between the two disciplines has to deal with suspicions of elitism and imperialism on the one hand, and accusations of 'trendiness' on the other.

As pointed out in the introduction, film criticism does largely originate in the extension of English studies into mass cultural forms, even though this was often (and paradoxically) accompanied by an elitist rhetoric which denied sympathy with such forms. The increasing interest in film which occurred during the 1960s is traceable to the expansion of the concern of literary critics with the modernist narratives of film-makers such as Godard, Fellini and Bergman. The trend has generally been one way, that of literary critics moving into film. It is still the norm for film theorists to possess a strong literary background, while the reverse is not generally true. This has a number of consequences not only on the kind of interrelationships that are usually examined—the establishment of the study of the 'novel into film',² for instance—but also on the kinds of analysis to which film is normally subjected by people from outside film studies. Usually dominated by essentially literary assumptions, film analyses which arise from outside the discipline often substantiate the film theorists' case for the special nature of their area. (It should be noted that there are cases, although more rare, of film theorists crossing into literary areas. The results there are similar. For example, Colin McCabe's discussion of realist cinema, for all its importance, contains an argument about the typicality of Middlemarch as a classic realist text and about George Eliot as an acceptable voice for bourgeois nineteenth-century 'truths' about reality that many literary critics would find hard to accept. Eagleton's account of Eliot in Criticism mid Ideology reveals, by comparison, the unexamined nature of McCabe's view.³) Analyses of film made by literary critics, and by psychologists or sociologists, often see film as an unproblematic medium. They ignore the necessity of enquiring very deeply into its structures in order to understand what a specific film, or film generally, might do.

The problem of making links between film and fiction, then, is not usually that of persuading film theorists to take literary fictions seriously as a separate narrative form. Not only do film theorists usually tend to have a literary background; but also they are inevitably in volved either in problems of language and communication (problems which take all communicative acts seriously) or in areas of film theory which bear some direct philosophical relation to literary theory (for instance, the area of characterisation). Rather, the problem lies in the fact that, historically, film has been 'systematically mistaken for litera ture', and that it has been treated as a literary text.⁴ Arguments about translations of novels into film, for instance, usually examine the two formulations of the 'same' narrative for differences of quality and effect.⁵ This type of approach intuits an 'ideal' version of the literary source, a narrative which is independent of its medium and which it is (a) film's task to materialise. It therefore tends to privilege the literary text—by valorising those of its functions which are difficult to duplicate on the screen. Consequently, we cannot address this particular problem and introduce the theoretical connections between film and fiction before first looking at the difficulties inherent in the application of literary criticism to the analysis of film. Only then can we suggest ways in which film and fiction can be interrelated without overlooking their formal differences; and only then can we go on to discuss the formal and ideological determinants of Australian film and fiction as products of a specific national culture. The obstacle which lies before literary critics who want to respond to their interest in film is that film and fiction are two different forms. The temptation is to ignore this by articulating film's structures and language in terms of those of fiction. Noel King has argued that most treatment of film in English departments in Australia simply substitutes the film text for the literary text without altering the critical practice at all; as he puts it, 'new object, same old discourse'.⁶ Implicit in King's criticisms is the proposition that literary training provides one with a set of assumptions and techniques which are exactly wrong for the study of film. Gerald Mast has talked about this in a useful and argumentative study where he develops a critique of the literary response as one inimical to film studies.⁷ First, he says, film is a new art form and one to which the more traditional modes of high art criticism are not always applicable. The nomination of a text as high art places it within particular cultural contexts, within particular audiences, and within particular conditions of production and reception— most of which are not those of the feature film. John Tulloch broaches this in his opening to Legends on the Screen, and uses it as an argument for the category of narrative within which discussions of popular culture can be usefully framed.⁸ The problem of the popularity of the form, the subsequent expansion of the role of genre and convention, and the manner in which the success of a popular art is (or is not) determined, are all aspects of film criticism which both Mast and Tulloch maintain are not easily addressed through a high art model. Further, the socio-economic placement of film is different from literary fiction; there is some truth in the proposition that those who spend their leisure time watching films occupy a different class position to those who spend their leisure time reading novels.

Both Mast and Chatman⁹ have suggested that there are assumptions absorbed with a literary training that need to be recognised, because they are there and because they often operate unconsciously—as prejudice rather than judgement. For instance, literary training creates a respect for the integrity of the text that motivates resistance to translations of a text from one medium to another. In their dealing with texts, literary critics also develop a preference for the reflective, contemplative and intellectual pleasures over the more passionate, sensual and stimulating ones. This can take the form of a somewhat puritanical distrust of the senses. Film takes words out of narrative and replaces them with sights and sounds, appealing directly to the senses; in Mast's words, film offers us a 'sensuous metaphor for the experience of an event'¹⁰ rather than an ironic or reflective understanding of its significance. An important and debilitating consequence of this preference for intellectual pleasure is the common disregard for films which are clearly conventional and which operate comfortably within the boundaries of their genre—such as virtually the entire output of Hollywood. It is this disregard for genre that prompted in the 1960s the modernist preferences of early film criticism, which was attracted to European films while American films simply attracted audiences.¹¹ There was a sense that genre films (such as westerns, thrillers, detective films and so on) were inherently inconsiderable because they made so few claims for their own uniqueness; and this was part of a range of attitudes which accompany a respect for the literary and a discomfort with the popular. As we shall see in a later chapter, the gulf which divides the critical responses on the one hand and the popular responses on the other hand to such films as The Man From Snowy River and Gallipoli is comprehensible within this framework. In many cases, the discomfort with the popular is a theoretical blind spot: the distinction between the literary and the popular is invoked rather than analysed, and there is little understanding of the different ways in which the various modes construct their meanings. So the literary preference for a greater illusion of ambiguity and a multiplicity of reading positions, and its valorisation of the idiosyncrasies of the individual text is used to privilege the literary form over that of film.

There are, of course, real differences between the forms—they are not all the perjorative inventions of the literati: film does not use narrative point of view in the same way that fiction does. Visually, irony is difficult to achieve while symbol is difficult to avoid. The clearly asserted description of scene and of setting which is customary in the novel gives way to a more generalised depiction in the cinema: the camera's proliferation of information creates a problem of focus as a result of highlighting those aspects of setting which are crucial to the film's meaning. Moreover, character in film is radically different in its construction; while some may deplore the star syndrome, film stars do have an important ontological function in film. As Richard Dyer points out, stars are semiotic systems—signs—and carry a detailed and precise range of meanings with them.¹² They present an important advantage to the film-maker in that they provide a reservoir of significances which can be drawn upon in the representation of particular types and values. Further, the film-maker has the advantage of pre senting a concrete, physical presence which can then be overlaid with nuances and accretions of meaning—whereas the novelist starts in the reverse position, building collections of traits, features and values in the hope of eventually establishing a concrete-like physical presence for the character. Even if this is achieved, there is not in fiction that physical particularity in our reception of character; hence the disagreements in translations of novels into films which occur about the casting, disagreements where the choice of actor or actress fails to mesh with our mental image of the character as drawn from the prose. This disagreement is a legitimate one, because the face of the star is part of the characterisation and not separable from it: the Phillip Marlowe played by Humphrey Bogart is not the same character as the Phillip Marlowe played by James Garner or Robert Mitchum.¹³

The genuine problem of formal comparisons is often exacerbated by discussions of film as possessing a visual 'language' which is more or less comparable to verbal language. Unfortunately, while this is a helpful metaphor in explaining the way film communicates in a general way, film language is not analogous in any detailed way to verbal language. Despite Eisenstein's assertion that the shot is equivalent to the word, it is not. There have been films compiled with as few as twelve shots, and some shots in conventional films can last for many minutes; this suggests that shots relate more accurately to the sentence or paragraph rather than the word. The most we can say with any certainty about the grammar of film language is that two successive shots are clearly related in some way. And the understanding of this connection—which can be various—is more akin to understanding a poetic trope than understanding a word or a sentence of prose. ¹⁴ Some attributes of verbal language—metaphor, irony—seem to be intrinsically literary and are difficult to reproduce in film, certainly within the dominant mode of realism. Metaphor in film becomes symbol or convention, and filmic irony tends to occur through dialogue or dramatic structure rather than in the manipulation of the camera's narrative point of view. The effects of verbal irony can be duplicated by visual means—by the manipulation of identification through close-ups and reaction shots, for instance—but the verbal complexity of an ironised narrative voice in the novel would be almost impossible to achieve by other than verbal means in film without departing from the realist mode.

This brief glossing of some of the differences between film and fiction is partly to shoot down some fallacies still airborne, but primarily it is to establish the inadequacy of regarding film innocently as fiction with pictures. The relation between literary fiction and film is interesting but not uncomplicated, and we are not justified in feeling that we can move easily between the two forms without making some adjustments to our approach. In other words, we need to make the connection between film and fiction a theoretical as well as a practical one.

To start at the most rudimentary level, what film and fiction have in common is that they both tell stories—they are narrative forms. And developments in the study of narrative provide us with a rich body of theory that can assist us in our attempts to explore the interrelation between film and fiction. The work of the Russian Formalists and of various structuralists and structural anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss provide us with ways of reading narrative that do not depend entirely upon a literary or visual orientation. To simplify a very disparate group of theories (and for essentially introductory purposes at this point) the salient feature common to all these schools is the examination of narrative through its most primitive forms as a particular use of language; simply, narrative as a culture's way of making sense of itself. Narrative is argued to serve the same functions in all cultures; the studies of folk tales, of myths and legends in Propp and in Levi-Strauss¹⁵ lead towards the articulation of a universal grammar of narrative that structures all story. Levi-Strauss underlines the universality of narrative structures, but he also insists on the cultural specificity of this or that particular structure in each culture. Wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction
• 1 National fictions: film, fiction and national culture
• 2 The Australian context: nature and society
• 3 The self in context
• 4 Characterisation and individualism
• 5 Representing the nation
• 6 Complications and conclusions
• Afterword
• References
• Index