Writing, Orality, Cinema: The 'Story' of Citizen Kane

I

With fiction film as with any other art form, if we wish to come to a critical understanding of meaning, we will likely consider on one level or another form in relation to content. Because of the nature of film as a representation, "form" involves an especially wide variety of possibilities: lighting, angles, acting, directing, audio, focus, and so on. As with drama, in fiction film (since the advent of sound) a particularly crucial element in presenting the story is spoken language. And the form of spoken language will always be essential to the content. We judge the quality of acting by, among other things, the convincing ways in which lines are delivered; for the form of the delivery will always be key to the "showing" that will make the spoken content more than simply "telling." But language appears onscreen in at least one other form besides speech: writing. We tend not to give writing anything like the kind of importance we give to speech. However, I want to argue that, because of the nature of writing as a communications technology, whenever writing does show up in a fiction film, it will always be at least as significant as speech. Further, any film that specifically foregrounds writing will call for and reward special interpretive treatment because of the significance writing carries as a communications technology. In what follows I will lay out some theoretical claims about the nature of writing both in general and specifically in relation to fiction film as a kind of narrative. Then, a look at Citizen Kane will help reveal what such theories can discover about a particular film.

Most contemporary literary scholars will likely have at least some awareness of the ways in which Jacques Derrida, most famously in Of Grammatology and "Différance," helped initiate poststructuralism through his discussions of alphabetic writing in relation to speech. Taking off largely from his rereading of Saussurean structuralism, Derrida made the deconstructive case that reversed and then dissolved the ancient understanding of writing as the secondary, parasitic representation of the signs of spoken language. This logical maneuver then became (apart from the specific case of writing and speech) a conceptual paradigm that enabled similar investigations of all manner of other cultural constructions. But there has existed, almost exactly contemporaneously with poststructuralism, another scholarly understanding of writing in relation to speech. This understanding has tended to be much more historically and empirically based. Since the nineteen sixties a substantial group of scholars in various fields has investigated the nature and effects of writing as an invented human technology (for instance: McLuhan; Olson; Havelock 1982, 1986; Goody 1977, 1986, 1987, 2000; Ong 1967, 1977, 1982). Both understandings of writing are grounded in strong theoretical arguments, but clearly enough the poststructuralist camp has been by far the most influential.¹ And yet as we shall see, if we understand writing not as an abstraction, but as an effective historical invention, we open different doors to literary interpretation.²

In all the considerations of writing, one primary fact is always foundational for other claims: writing takes language out of its original oral/aural cognitive realm and transforms it into the realm of the visual. With writing, we are enabled to "see" otherwise ephemeral verbal speech as a material object, in the way that other objects may be seen (McLuhan; Havelock; Clanchy). This materialization of speech has been essential to a truly broad and powerful array of effects. With writing, basic features of language such as storage capacity, preservation, and accuracy are vastly expanded, and the mechanization of writing by print amplifies all this even further. As a result writing has promoted all manner of change in human history. We have, for instance, convincing arguments that the technology of writing in a crucial way produced modernity itself (Eisenstein; Olson). Walter Ong writes that: "One consequence of [writing] was modern science" (1982). Jack Goody has argued that "the very nature of formal reasoning as [literate cultures] understand it (that is, in terms of Aristotelian 'logical' procedures) is not a general ability but a highly specific skill, critically dependent...