Double-Takes: Intersections between Canadian Literature and Film

Loser Wins: The Rhetoric of High Modernism in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Bradley D. Clissold 199 Loser Wins: The Rhetoric of High Modernism in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz Bradley D. Clissold Happy Bar-Mitzvah, Bernie, the film-within-the-film in Ted Kotcheff’s 1974 filmic adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1958), provides a satirical, yet informative, glimpse into the elitist rhetoric and cultural intimidation necessary to sustain the niche market economies of modernist cultural production (Rainey 1996; 1998; 1999). Duddy’s intense desire to be “somebody” is simultaneously shaped by his perversion of his grandfather’s words about possessing land and his cultural status-anxiety in the face of difficult modernist aesthetics. While Richler’s novel constantly references modernist figures in order to set the rhetorical stage for the comical screening of Peter John Friar’s experimental ethnographic versioning of the bar-mitzvah ceremony, the same degree of allusive modernist texturing and preparation is not needed in the film adaptation. Because the film version actualizes the defamiliarizing power of the modernist montage sequences in Happy Bar-Mitzvah, Bernie on screen (as opposed to the novel, which relies on film ekphrasis), it negates the necessity for providing these prefiguring allusive modernist contexts. Film’s capacity to represent multiple audio tracks playing simultaneously over alternating visual images—that is, film’s capacity to represent the filmic experience—is foregrounded in the screening of the bar-mitzvah film-within-the-film, a scene of embedded comic reception that betrays the tensions of modernist reception, and solidifies Duddy’s commercial exploitation of modernist anxiety. While many important variations occur between the novel and film versions of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, both effectively stage how avant-garde modernist cultural production creates its own socio-economic demand through a marketing of symbolic capital—the honour, prestige and recognition that accompanies elite cultural products and functions to legitimize their privileged cultural status (Bourdieu 75–76, 112–141). As a work of narrative fiction written as a novel and later adapted into a film High Modernism in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz 200 version for theatrical release, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a productive case study in various forms of adaptive cultural practice and representational reframings. Richler adapts materials from his childhood spent in the St. Urbain district of Montreal to provide a richly textured, mid-twentiethcentury , Canadian urban-ethnic backdrop against which to set the tragi-comic rise and fall of his Bildungsroman protagonist. He also adapts his novel-text into a film screenplay—an adaptation involving the concretization of linguistic signifiers, stylized literary conventions and focalized narrative points of view into fluid-moving audio and visual signifiers, capable of simultaneity of effect and a variety of artful synchronizations—an adaptation for which Richler won the Screenwriters Guild of America Award for Best Comedy and was nominated for the 1974 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (he was beaten by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo who won for The Godfather Part II). Ted Kotcheff’s film version is thus another concretized adaptation of Richler’s screenplay adapted from his novel, and one could even argue that each of the performances by the actors involved in the film was a work of Stanislavskian adaptation involving role-playing identifications. However, it is in the filmic adaptation of Richler’s novel’s film ekphrasis—his prose descriptions of the bar-mitzvah film—where the shock of modernist aesthetics and the niche marketing of modernist difficulty and inaccessibility find concretized material expression. Even before the dynamic cultural process occurs by which the rhetoric of high modernism transforms Happy Bar-Mitzvah, Bernie into a coveted objet d’art and an economic investment, Richler’s allusive use of recognizable modernist signifiers in the novel version raises the threatening spectres of modernism ’s elitist and hyper-educated cultural values. Appearing as resonant narrative detailing, these signifiers call into intertextual play the default cultural assumptions about modernist production and reception. Put simply, this implicit rhetoric of high modernism is basically a vernacular sensibility or folk understanding of modernist aesthetics, one that identifies modernist works with radically subversive and esoteric content, as well as alienating experimental artistic forms—according to this reductivist view, modernism often becomes synonymous with inaccessible avant-garde practices. As a result, one of the defining characteristics of this vernacular sense of modernism is the positing of difficulty as an aesthetic value, something that effectively bifurcates reception into those who either have the necessary shibbolethic cultural capital to understand and appreciate modernist artefacts and those...