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Gregory Betts 95 Dialogic Phantasy in Bruce McDonald’s Adaptive Narratives Gregory Betts Bruce McDonald’s literary adaptations consistently undermine the singularity and authority of his own narratives. His embrace of what he calls “split screen crazy [and] expressionistic” techniques in The Tracey Fragments and Hard Core Logo break up the finality and closure of the narrative (Halfyard n. pag.). In this way, the films use their medium to trouble narrative certainty, mirroring the film’s simultaneous troubling or de-authorizing of adapted sources. Of course, the texts McDonald works with are already characteristically open works. Screenwriter Noel Baker describes his first encounter with Michael Turner’s experimental book upon which the film Hard Core Logo is based: “Question remains: what the hell is it? Not a novel. Not exactly a poetry collection and not precisely a prose poem. It’s more of a collage of fragments ” (Baker 10). The book tells the story of a band breaking up, forced to confront their own narrative dissolving into multiple perspectives. The Tracey Fragments is based on a Maureen Medved stream-of-conscious novel from the perspective of a traumatized girl. Tracey Berkovitz comes from a broken home, is alienated and alone at school, and was partially responsible for the disappearance of her beloved brother (whom she had hypnotized and turned into a dog). As her world collapses, her perception of reality dissolves into fragmented memories and fantasies with varying degrees of connection to the world. Contradictions between her real and fantasy lives abound and blur throughout the text. McDonald’s adaptation captures Tracey’s alienation from the world and her retreat from reality. The result is that an open text resists the cinematic tendency for over-determined closure and retains the source text’s radical, postmodern openness. Obviating this tropic resistance to closure, Hard Core Logo concludes with the off-camera question, “Is it for real?” McDonald plays fast and loose with his source texts, but—strategically— avoids the charge of infidelity by destabilizing the authority of his own version Dialogic Phantasy in Bruce McDonald’s Narratives 96 of the narrative. Acclaimed critic Robert Stam rejects the discourse of fidelity as a legitimate criticism of cinematic adaptations, but concedes one important exception to his post-fidelity theory: “[T]he notion of the fidelity of an adaptation to its source novel does contain its grain of truth. When we say an adaptation has been ‘unfaithful’ to the original, the term gives expression to the disappointment we feel when a film adaptation fails to capture what we see as the fundamental narrative, thematic, and aesthetic features of its literary source” (Stam 54). This feeling of “outraged negativity” caused by the infidelity , betrayal, deformation, violation, vulgarization and desecration of an adapted text that occurs as the private phantasy of symbolic representation is externalized and rigidified in the mimetic representation of mainstream cinema . In the habitual shift of adaptations from symbolic to illusionistic modes of representation, the closed, public realization of the phantasy overwhelms and deposes the open, private imagination. Our personal imprint on the narrative as we experience and imagine it, as we fill in the openness of text with that turbid store of individual anxieties, dreams and experiences, is excised and replaced by the closed specificity of the film. In the case of many adaptations of Canadian novels, most notably in The English Patient and The Handmaid’s Tale, this closure is enacted at the expense of political radicalism, including the ideological resistance strategies and the deliberate ambiguity of the texts. In the climactic scenes of The English Patient, Ondaatje’s central character Kip condemns the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a racialized violence that would never have been visited upon “a white nation” (Ondaatje 206). In contrast, Anthony Minghella’s peripheral character Kip is personally traumatized by the loss of his good English friend Hardy; the politics are marginalized. Even more dramatically, in The Handmaid ’s Tale, Volker Schlöndorff manages to turn Margaret Atwood’s radical postmodern troubling of American religious fundamentalism and secondwave feminism into a Harlequin romance complete with pregnant damsel left waiting for her marauding hypermasculinized hero battling the forces of fascism . Beyond the violations of the radical politics of these literary texts, the private phantasies—the personal contributions, and intimate significations, that the audience brings to a narrative—are also pushed aside even within their own experience of the same story: Ralph Fiennes supplants the various possible characterizations of Almásy, and Juliette Binoche supplants...

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