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Egoyan’s films are almost like books. You don’t feel passive when you watch them. —Russell Banks STORYTELLING AND THE INEFFABLE Russell Banks’s novel The Sweet Hereafter (1991) tells the story of the devastating emotional effects of a school bus accident on the people of the small upstate New York town of Sam Dent.¹ In the accident, children from almost every family in town drown or freeze to death at the bottom of a reservoir when their school bus skids off the road into the man-made lake during the winter freeze. Through the novel’s five chapters, four different witnesses relate and analyze the event and its effects on them in first-person narrations , revealing, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, their strategies for coping with grief. In some ways, then, the novel is about “the ineffable” (that which is incapable of being conveyed in words), about coping with and expressing the pain and desperation of death and grief in something other than words. Through the process of understanding death, grief, and pain, the narrative analogously reveals other “ineffable” topics, specifically the trauma of incest and sexual abuse. In The Mind of the Novel, Bruce Kawin identifies and analyzes certain tendencies of fiction that address or call attention to the difficulty of expressing the ineffable. There are emotions, experiences, fears, and desires that are too complex, too difficult, and for which the conventional forms and uses of language prove inept or inappropriate. As Kawin writes, “literature’s attempts to confront or describe the ineffable . . . at some point generate (as a function of the frustration of those attempts) a sense of their own limits as 5 “STRANGE AND NEW . . .” Subjectivity and the Ineffable in The Sweet Hereafter /////////////////////////////////////////// Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz 132 ernesto r. acevedo-muñoz texts,” becoming “self-conscious” or reflexive fiction. Kawin poses the problem in the form of questions: “What are the limits of language? How does an artist’s sense of being embattled with these limits affect his (or her) sense of form?”² In his quiet, beautiful, and sensitive 1997 adaptation of Banks’s novel, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan seems to ask himself the same questions. Faced with the ineffable, what are the limits of cinematic language? And how do these limits affect form? While Banks’s novel emphasizes the subjectivity of experience in its narrative structure, Egoyan’s film suggests that same subjectivity by distancing the spectator from the events. By violating conventions of classic editing, story time, and identification, the film allows the characters themselves to mediate the telling and judgment of the events for the spectator, without resorting to a false omniscience that may suggest objectivity. Besides the dramatic content of death and incest, the novel treats the topic of subjectivity itself, addressing the difference between reality (the actual events) and truth (how these events are perceived or interpreted by witnesses ). Banks approaches this topic by juxtaposing four different accounts or perceptions of the same and related events. Each of the five chapters is narrated in the first person by one of four witnesses. Alternately we read, as if they were legal depositions or journal entries, the testimonies of Dolores Driscoll, the bus driver; Billy Ansel, a widower and father of two of the dead children; Mitchell Stephens, a New York City lawyer who is interested in representing the townspeople in lawsuits against potential guilty parties; and Nichole Burnell, a sexually abused teenage girl who survives the accident but is left paraplegic. Each of the characters interprets the accident and assesses its meaning and effects on the community according to his or her perspective and beliefs, giving the novel a kind of “Rashomon”effect.³ Paradoxically, from the four first-person narratives, each different in content, style, and tone, there surfaces an omniscient, arguably objective account of the events and their meaning. In the novel’s narrative and formal experimentation, within the interplay of subjectivity, opinion, and absolute truth, lie some of the key questions raised by Banks: What is the truth? What is judgment? And especially , who has the authority and the knowledge to answer those questions? The novel deals directly with the redeeming lessons that we learn from loss, grief, and tragedy. Indirectly, it shows how the subjectivity of personal experience may lead to the discovery of some universal moral truth. Egoyan’s film is visibly faithful to...

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