Consciousness and Chiasmus: Narrating Embodied Intersubjectivities

George Butte’s Suture & Narrative offers a searching reappraisal of the diverse narrative strategies that inform both fiction and film, drawing on the established resources of film theory and particularly a creative application of phenomenological thinking. Central to the argument is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “the chiasm” or “the intertwining” between individual consciousness and the perceptual world or other embodied consciousnesses, as explored in The Visible and the Invisible (first published in French in 1964). Butte’s account is rich and challenging, despite a few conceptual lapses in his engagement with his chosen philosophical material. The book is constructed as a cumulating sequence of case studies, each of which is aptly staged and developed. Butte’s fine attention to detail adds subtlety to his readings of astutely selected filmic images or passages from literary texts.

By “deep intersubjectivity” Butte means “the form in narrative of self-knowledge by way of others in an intricate set of encounters” that yield varying degrees of understanding and coherence (4). In this regard, he at once elaborates and strategically realigns the principal concerns of his earlier I Know That You Know That I Know (2004). His idea of “suture” takes its impetus from Lacanian film theory of the 1960s and 70s yet displaces that discourse in the direction of qualified presence and embodiment. The wounding of the body or the body-mind complex is anticipated by the epigraphs to chapter 1, which include a surgeon’s reflection on making his first incision as a student (1). In broad terms, “suture” is taken to involve the stitching together of human consciousnesses that are never entirely transparent to one another. This process presupposes the function of an enunciator, whose approach is more or less subtly oblique. In effect, an aspect of wounding both infuses the process of enunciation and is thematic to the literary and filmic works identified for discussion (6–9).

Butte contends that his version of suture theory is equally applicable to fiction and film because certain core concerns are “fundamentally similar for print and film narrative: who controls the construction of a diegesis, who moves across a fabula to [End Page E-20] piece together a specific syuzhet from its broader canvas, who shifts from one image to another . . .” (10). The primary technique for film is shown to be the shot/reverse shot sequence, whereas free indirect discourse is characteristic of fiction. While this position is balanced and reasonable, it seems to me to foreground similarity at the expense of difference. As Butte himself acknowledges in the course of his commentary, the films of classic novels (for example) cannot be construed simply as direct translations of those literary texts, because the new medium simultaneously makes its own demands and offers its own opportunities. The very multi-modality of film as a composite of script, visual image, the spoken word, music, special effects, and the like—not to mention the technical means of production and the accompanying commercial imperatives—must set it apart from a novel that functions predominantly as a tissue of language. At least at the level of meta-theory there might have been closer investigation of the innate incommensurabilities between fictional narrative, with its burgeoning formal freedoms, and the bricolage of narrative in film, especially as Butte’s practice nimbly enacts such divergences.

Butte begins to fashion his innovative orientation by taking issue with a film theory of absence, as influenced by the Lacanian perspectives of Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Pierre Oudart. Oudart’s preoccupation with the potential of montage for concealing the gap between individual shots, and especially the default of any grounding origin for the series, comes to be associated with the anxious longing of a putatively passive audience for a plenitude of viewing experience. By contrast, Butte focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s receptiveness to the Kuleshov effect, which recognizes a whole film as greater than the sum of its parts, thus facilitating a sense of intersecting lives in the representation of a common reality. This...