Antonioni; or, The Surface of the World (review)

122 the minnesota review sisters' double wedding and their mother's suicide) to a celebration of marginal figures (homosexuals, artists, Jews), and finally to Miriam's identity not as wife in a heterosexual relationship, but as a writer within a Sodety of Friends boarding house. DuPlessis demonstates the recurrence of these revisionist strategies, what she calls the oscillation between boundaries and boundlessness, in Alice Walker and other Afro-American writers. By creating futuristic, Utopian fictions, writers Uke Gilman, Russ, and Piercy, challenge standard societal values. Raising questions about the future, these authors write beyond the ending, producing alternative, not acquiescent fiction. DuPlessis successfully walks that fine line between acknowledging and therefore authorizing traditional narrative conventions—that which is being written beyond—and defining and empowering the women who reject standardized tropes as the only tropes and choosing instead to produce alternative patterns. In this way, she explores the interplay between writing within the dominant ideological boundaries and writing beyond them, thus disclosing the consdous strategies behind these told stories while simultaneously making her reader all the more aware ofthe countless criticized and devalued narratives of disenfranchised, marginal experiences yd to be told. RUTH Y. JENKINS Antonioni; or. The Surface of the World by Seymour Chatman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. xi + 290 pp. $12.95 (paper); $35 (doth). Chatman's book is Uke a blow-up of the Antonioni chapter from a breezy history of Italian dnema. His Antonioni is a familiar one: more interested in image and emotion than narrative or plot; concerned with alienation, incommunicativeness, unhappy sex, and other modern UIs from an apolitical, mainly psychological perspective. Chatman tries to rejuvenate this stale interpretation with some theoretical baggage from his previous work on narratology, but he fails to advance our understanding of the director. Antonioni may be primarily concerned with the surface of the world, but his films cannot be treated superficially. Chatman's main thesis is that "the central and distinguishing characteristic ofAntonioni's mature films ... is narration by a kind of visual minimalism, by an intense concentration on the sheer appearance of things—the surface ofthe world as he sees it—and a minimizing of explanatory dialogue___ We fill in what is missing, to the Umits of our imagination and experience" (2). This, for Chatman, rules out any ideological dimension of the images. For ideology would dther impose an artificial symbolic dimension, or codify the sedhing mass of ambiguity that is the world's surface. Metonymy rather than symbol or metaphor characterizes Antonioni's use of objects and landscapes, for things remain themselves above all, just as the image remains an image. Chatman fails to distinguish narrating by means of images from rejecting narrative and substituting images. He ignores the philosophical dimensions of the distinction, and thus neglects to argue that Antonioni is doing the former rather than the latter. For example, one's attitude towards narrative is a direct reflection of one's philosophy of history. If Antonioni is seen as committed to weak narrative via images, then his philosophy of history remains basically historicist. If, on the other hand, he is substituting images for narrative, then he is rejecting historidsm more radically. Chatman's useofauthorial intention is suspect as weU as naive and inconsistent. Sometimes he quotes Antonioni as the last word. He will use a shooting script that diverges from the film as evidence for his interpretation of the film, then later dte the change from the script to the film as evidence for the superiority of the latter, for the development of on-site inspiration . Yd, strangdy, he steers completely dear of the autobiographical factor, which is especially important in // grido and Identificazione di una donna. One of Chatman's problems is that he is out of his element in discussing the ontology ofcinematic imagery.He oscillates constantly between two positions: (1) that Antonioni con- Reviews 123 structs an open text because the world is radically ambiguous, and so, therefore, the text is an accurate image of it; or (2) Antonioni has constructed an open text because he has deliberately dedded to use the image rather than the word to communicate specific mental states or character traits. Accordingly, Chatman's concrete...