Anxious Affinities: Text as Screen in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim

Anxious Affinities: Text as Screen in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim T. Jefferson Kline N OWHERE IS THE STATUS of the text as an object for analysis at once more translucent and more opaque than in the realm of the cinematic, for there it enters a domain which is curiously parallel to the theory of psychoanalysis itself. If psychoanalytic theory itself originates from a strong desire to observe and represent sexual origins, moving in a kind of specular spectacle between analyst and analysand, so, it can be argued, is cinema born of a need to interpret the world from a voyeuristic position for a spectator who becomes mirrored in that world. Cinema and psychoanalysis would thus share a common ontology in “ un désir de savoir sexuel et désir sexuel de savoir.” 1More­ over, psychoanalysis and cinema (co)operate in a kind of double articula­ tion of reality and fantasy: whereas the analysand realizes a discourse based on a representation of remembered and fantasized images, the cineaste represents in images a fantasy constructed as a photographic (i.e., real) discourse. Both discourses are troubled and doubled by illu­ sion and allusion. For the analysand, dreams and “ screen memories” often simultaneously hide and reveal an absent presence at the nexus of a particularly tangled complex. In cinema, that absent presence is con­ stituted not only by the ontological nature of the medium, but is itself often doubled by allusions to the “ other scene” of literature. Because of its inevitable functioning as absent presence in cinema, the literary inter­ text thus occupies a place analogous to that of the dream in psycho­ analysis, constituting a kind of “ royal road” to understanding textuality. Indeed, if J. B. Pontalis is right in ascribing to dreaming an unconscious attempt to “ figurer l’inaccessible et le maintenir tel,” then screening a text would make it, likewise, “ un type particulier d’objet qui rend présent . . . certaine absence, et qui double tout visible d’invisible” (p. 76). Nor is the doubling that binds the dream (or intertext) to discourse (or filmic narrative) merely structural; Freud was categorical in his insis­ tence that the figures of the dream function as doubles not only of the dreamer but o f each other. It may be argued, by analogy, that when a text becomes a filmic intertext, it therefore undergoes an onirizing trans­ formation in structure and in content. It follows then that the figure of Vol. XXIX, N o. 1 61 L ’E s pr it C r éa teu r the double at the heart of the intertext operates not merely at the level of structural analogy but also at the level of (psycho-)analysis. François Truffaut’s films make a particularly fruitful field for intertextual analysis, for, as François Ramasse noted recently, all of the New Wave filmmakers were deeply rooted in literature, especially Truffaut, whose early work reveals “ an obsession with the book.” 2Indeed, Jules et Jim allows us to appreciate the force of Ramasse’s term “obsédé,” for the film contains a complex of allusions to a panoply of literary and filmic texts that seem not only to obtrude themselves on the director’s consciousness, but whose role in the work appears to be designed more to reconcile ambivalent attitudes and virtually to “ cancel each other out,” than to contribute to the narrative development of the work.3While the most obvious intertext in Jules et Jim is Truffaut’s adaptation of HenriPierre Roche’s novel of the same title, that adaptation is certainly as much what Bloom would term a “ misprision” as it is a “ translation” of the literary antecedent. For one thing, Truffaut collapses virtually all of Roché’s women into a single character, Catherine, while at the same time virtually screening off the more violent and schizophrenic aspects of Roché’s principle heroine, Kathe. By contrast, Truffaut reasserts in his film an equilibrium between Jim and Jules which is thoroughly lost in the second half of the novel. Close analysis of the film will demonstrate that these two effects are profoundly linked, and that Truffaut’s repression of the double configuration in Catherine succeeds in diverting the viewer’s...