Viewpoints: Theoretical Perspectives on Irish Visual Texts

Chapter Eight - FILM INTO NOVEL: KATE O’BRIEN’S MODERNIST USE OF FILM TECHNIQUES

Chapter Eight FILM INTO NOVEL: KATE O’BRIEN’S MODERNIST USE OF FILM TECHNIQUES Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka How normative are the boundaries of and between art mediums? Can we see the adaptation of film language into novels as a queer practice? The literary borrowing of filmic language questions given and static definitions of art mediums, as well as rigid understandings of clear delimitations between art forms. The term ‘queer’ has been used to refer to any confrontational disruption which challenges identity categories, and it can be applied in the same way to describe links between mediums (inter-medial) and between art forms (inter-art). In a novel such as Kate O’Brien’s Mary Lavelle,1 as we will see, there is a deliberate and complex hybridisation of artistic languages, a form of ‘mixed media’ which is characteristic of modernism, although it is regularly overlooked by critics. This queering of form in O’Brien’s novel is linked to a queering of identity, because cinematic techniques are used to encode a more radical narrative within a more normative one. My argument is that intermediality (not to be confused with intertextuality) is a modernist feature, seeking to merge media, disciplines, art forms. In this essay I consider one type of intermediality , the hybridisation of cinematic and literary language, in one particular author, Kate O’Brien, looking at this strategy through the lens of queer theory. Virginia Woolf, who was passionate about film, once described the alliance of film and the novel as ‘unnatural’, because the two mediums appeal to eye and brain in incompatible ways.2 However, there is a long history of cooperation, and it is in fact well 124 established that we can date the invention of the cinematograph, but not the cinematic.3 There was of course a narrative and technical language specific to film, and its adaptation into literature began as soon as the new art made its appearance, in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. This was a time when modernism brought about a productive identity crisis in fiction, a time when, suddenly, the novel seemed to be in transit, jolting between sculpture, film, music, photography; visiting everywhere, losing itself in everything. This restlessness was evident in both form and content, and it is misleading to focus on one of those aspects, as commentators tend to do. For example, discussing the visual arts in a broader context, Bernard Smyth has coined the term formalesque to emphasise the modernist ‘drive towards formalism’, claiming that the movement ‘reduced meaning to style and style to form’.4 Yet there were also new themes, such as sexuality, which required new modes of representation in literature. In fact, it is possible that the modernist upheaval regarding mediums, grammar, words, sprang in part from a need to speak of sex in a way that was discreet yet accessible.5 What is clear is that there is a frenzy of interconnectedness in modernism, a resolve to mix genres, re-shape or at least un-shape form, a determination to break free of linearity and compartmentalisation – an impulse exemplified by collage, a technique which caught the attention of modernists early in the twentieth century and was developed and embraced by surrealists in the 1930s.6 This intertextuality, intermodality and intermediality can be seen as a reaction to modern alienation, and as a friendly gesture expressing the will to share, embrace, exchange. Modernism is ‘a critique of Modernity’,7 and there is an implicit political impetus behind this repudiation of one’s own boundaries. This is not immediately obvious, because the most politicised years of the period are largely absent from canon and curriculum. One could think that the suffragette movement never happened, and that socialist ideas were circumscribed to the Soviet Union. Similarly, a normative bias on gender, sex and sexuality is noticeable in criticism dealing with the avant garde,8 despite the fact that modernist art is amenable not just to a queer reading but to an analogy with the disciplinary incoherence of queer theory itself. Accounts of modernism never deem relevant the debates on representation which were so crucial for the early feminist movement.9 Also, the Film into Novel 125 modernist intermarrying of modes (such as comic-historic), genres (such as erotic fiction-fairy tale), literary forms (such as poem-play) and art mediums (such as literature-film), may be linked to the pervading internationalism among writers and...