PART II—
NARRATIVE'S WAY:
D. W. GRIFFITH
Chapter Two—
Repressing the Source:
D. W. Griffith and Browning
In the preceding chapter it was suggested that the quotation as a specific textual fragment is not essentially linked to authorial intent; rather, it is constituted in the process of reading. The reader or viewer, not the author, is in this sense responsible for creating the quotation as a textual layer. Of course this situation obtains only when the author refrains from naming the source of the quotation directly, so that the quote exists in the text without quotation marks, as it were. When identified as such by the author, quotations can even perform a normalizing role within the text, as indeed can those that are discovered by the reader. And yet this layer of authorial quotation can also fulfill an entirely different function, one that is often diametrically opposed to that just mentioned. Not only can the authorial quotation fail to "normalize" a text, but, on the contrary, it can serve to introduce further anomalies, thereby making the text harder rather than easier to read.
Any kind of quotation that brings further anomalies into the text can be called misquoting. In cinema, misquoting can be most readily found wherever a literary source is indicated as the basis of a film. The tradition of basing a film on a literary source (the "adaptation") itself has the effect of turning the film as a whole into a huge quote, creating a kind of "global" intertextual link between the film and the literary work. Critical readings of such adaptations are numerous and quite revealing in their shared assumptions: they place the film alongside its literary source and locate much of the film's semantic potential in its fidelity to or divergence from its literary origins.
Yet films have been made to misquote their literary source. We see a source misquoted most clearly in films such as Carl Theodor Dreyer's Leaves from Satan's Book (1919). Dreyer declared his film to be the screen
version of Marie Corelli's Sorrows of Satan, a book to which the film in fact bears no relation. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was said to derive from the novel Jeanne d 'Arc by Joseph Delteil, with which the film has nothing in common. Vampyr (1932) was proposed as the screen version of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly, a book that in fact provides the film with only a few minor details.
Something similar, although in a different form, can be found in the vast cinematic corpus of D.W.Griffith. To take one example, Griffith made three attempts at a screen version of the Tennyson poem Enoch Arden. The first version, After Many Years (1908), acknowledges its literary source but alters the title of the poem and the names of the main characters. For instance, a John Davis takes the place of Enoch Arden in the film. The second version, The Unchanging Sea (1910), is falsely traced by Griffith to a poem by Charles Kingsley, "The Three Fishers," that is in fact related to another film by Griffith called The Sands of Dee, made two years later. In this version the characters remain nameless. The third version finally makes an open acknowledgment of its connection to Tennyson and is in fact called Enoch Arden (1911).
Clearly, this technique of misquoting the source can hardly be said to facilitate the task of understanding. On the contrary, it smuggles a puzzle into the text that is nigh impossible to solve. Siegbert Salomon Prawer, for example, has expended a great deal of effort to discover at least some traces of Le Fanu's book in Dreyer's Vampyr. Prawer's conclusions have not proved very convincing, but his effort is itself an indication of the felt need to find some basis for the reference to a misquoted source, in order to remove the anomaly created by the reference itself.[1]
But finding the basis for a misquotation within the framework of intertextuality has turned out in essence to be an impossible task, and understandably so. Intertextuality functions as a logic-generating mechanism only when a similarity between texts can be discovered; wherever there is no such similarity, intertextuality cannot function effectively. A misquotation itself creates a quite specific phenomenon. It generates an anomaly that cannot be solved by linking a given text to any other; it blocks through its own misleading nature (its negativity) the very mechanism of intertextuality.
In this extraordinary situation the reader-interpreter has essentially only one way out: he or she is forced to invoke the figure of the author that can be easily ignored in cases where intertextuality is working normally. The logic behind invoking the author in the context of a misquotation is clear at least to the extent that the author is made answerable for the misquote. Thus the search for an explanation moves into the realm of authorial psychology. This is how Dreyer's biographer Maurice Drouzy explains the misquoted sources that occur in Dreyer's films:
Why does he not dare to admit to having made up the whole story himself? For me the answer is simple: it is because he is frightened of betraying himself, of leading the viewer on to a secret that he cannot and will not reveal to anyone. It is for the same reason that he ordinarily does not dare to write his own screenplays: he fears that his unconscious might play tricks on him, that the drama of his origins which he strives to repress in some way or other might suddenly appear in the stories he could come up with. This is why he prefers to hide behind a writer who is more or less well known, hiding the problem that haunts him behind the work of another.[2]
Drouzy has established that Dreyer, who had been adopted as a child, had always concealed the story of his parents and why they had given him up. The heroes of the film Vampyr appear to Drouzy as disguised figures from Dreyer's childhood drama. For Drouzy, the vampire Marguerite Chopin is Dreyer's "false mother," whose name was Marie (the similarity lies in the root shared by the names Marie and Marguerite). Dreyer had identified the servant on his estate as Joseph, but in the screenplay he figures as Bernard. Dreyer's real mother had been called Josephine-Bernhardine, and so on and so forth.[3] A psychological motivation thus gives Drouzy a way to establish his own intertext for the film Vampyr —the biography of the director—which thereby explains (normalizes) the misquote.
Yet the logic behind Drouzy's interpretation of Dreyer's intentions can hardly be considered convincing or irreproachable. Formulations of the kind "he is scared that his subconscious will betray him" cannot be verified to a high degree of probability. We can never know what psychological motivations made Dreyer refer his readers to the book by Le Fanu. Any other author might just as successfully have produced another psychological conflict in the director's conscious mind or subconscious. But it seems hardly possible in this case to avoid some recourse to an authorial psychology. Where misquotes occur, intertextuality is almost inevitably reconstituted by means of psychologizing fantasies. However, we must fully realize that this psychologizing is no more than one of the many strategies of reading needed to unblock the mechanism of intertextuality. In this sense any recourse to the author's psychology in fact sheds no real light on this psychology and is rather entirely part of the reader's interpretation of the text. It is true that any emphasis on psychological motivation highlights the figure of the author, which thereby becomes a guarantor of the text's meaningfulness, acquiring the semblance of an active presence in the text. The pseudofigure of the author somehow unites with the semantic anomaly that becomes its condition of representation. The misquotation thus becomes an effective way of transforming the authorial figure into a meaningful element of the text.
A significant if controversial contribution to the theory of intertextuality, particularly in its positing a role for the authorial figure in the workings
of the intertext, has been made by the critic Harold Bloom.[4] Working primarily with texts from the Anglo-American poetic tradition, Bloom sees any poem as an author's "act of reading" the poems of his or her precursors. This has the effect of transferring the burden of intertextuality away from the reader as addressee onto the author as reader. This act of creative reading is realized by the poet as a complex system of substitutions that undermines existing "representations" in favor of still newer ones. Within Bloom's model of poetic creation the figure of the precursor thus acquires an extraordinary importance.
The creative act (reading or, in Bloom's terminology, misreading) passes through six stages. The first stage—the choice—establishes the figure of the precursor. The second stage—the signing of the contract—involves establishing an accord between the poetic vision of the precursor and that of his or her successor. The third stage—the choice of a competing source of inspiration necessary for the displacement of the first source (thus Wordsworth, who is oriented toward Milton)—posits a second axis of orientation, nature itself as the origin of the text. Then follow the stages of misreading, which revise the texts of the precursors, and the positing of a poetic Self through a system of substitutions.[5] In the creative process the precursor emerges as the poet's second Self, with whom complex relations of opposition and identification are established. Bloom views poetic creation as "a solitary struggle against the precursor-principle, but struggling in the visionary world of the precursor."[6] It is precisely in this struggle that the mechanism of repression begins to take effect. The masking of one's relation to one's predecessor becomes one of the primary conditions by which the poetic Self can be asserted. All true poets conceal both from themselves and from their readers the influences they undergo, and seek thereby to create the illusion of an unmediated relation to reality, the "truth," or, speaking more metaphorically, the Muse. "We can define a strong poet," writes Bloom, "as one who will not tolerate words that intervene between him and the Word or precursors standing between him and the muse."[7]
Bloom's work reviews the mechanisms by which a literary source can be defensively repressed and the modalities by which its repression is realized. According to Bloom, the traces of repression, misreading, and revision are imprinted as poetic figures or tropes that become signs, as it were, of the creative process.
Bloom's position invites many possible objections. Above all it collapses the entire process of literary evolution into a psychology of creation and reduces it to the artist's aspiration to be original at any price. Laurent Jenny has rightly noted that Bloom's concept is founded on a "true Oedipus complex of the creator" in which the role of the father is played by the precursor.[8]
It seems to me that Bloom's theory is best understood not as a genuine theory of artistic creation but as a specific reading strategy that allows us to resolve a range of contradictions as they emerge in the text. Bloom shows us how the strong author can be textually constituted as a figure by revealing the mechanism of repression on which he rests.
Bloom's theory also allows us to rethink the patterns of literary history. In an essay called "Kafka's Precursors,"Jorge Luis Borges once wrote about a range of writers whom he saw as having anticipated Franz Kafka. He pointed to the obvious moments of similarity between Kafka's work and that of Zeno, the ninth-century Chinese prose writer Han Yu, Kierkegaard, Leon Bloy, Lord Dunsany, and Robert Browning. Borges observed that Kafka's precursors in themselves had nothing in common; their commonality was rather brought out by Kafka's own work. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors," observed Borges, thereby radically inverting our traditional ideas about literary history.[9] For Borges evolution is constituted by each new artistic phenomenon, moving not from past to present but from the present to the past. Borges's paradox finds a possible echo in Bloom's theory to the extent that Bloom also believes it is a writer's task to establish his or her precursors and then mask their existence. But insofar as the process of uncovering the concealed precursor is a result of the reader's effort to "intertextualize" the text, so art history can also be understood as a product of intertextual reading. Borges's own essay is a perfect example of this: while Borges asserts that Kafka alone can make his precursors, in fact it is Borges as reader who does it for him, by showing Han Yu or Kierkegaard to be his precursors. The notion of intertextuality thus emerges not only as a potential theory of understanding but also as a theory of art history.
In the pages to come I propose to examine the mechanism by which literary sources are repressed by looking at D. W. Griffith's film adaptations of Robert Browning's play Pippa Passes. Griffith's first version of 1909, in an explicit reference to Browning, is called Pippa Passes. The second version, Home, Sweet Home (1914), is derived from the title of a popular song by John Howard Payne, who is himself made to appear in the film as one of its protagonists. The film is declared an adaptation of Payne's biography, with which it has little in common.
Griffith thus plays a kind of hide-and-seek with his own source, now revealing it and now hiding its identity. This game serves to turn the spotlight on the author, making him the main guarantor of the film's meaning: Griffith becomes a "strong author," something he had certainly striven to be. Griffith's own statements are constantly marked by a prophetic tone: the director had understood his work as a kind of mission aimed at creating an unprecedented universal language that would be capable of resolving the most acute social contradictions. The representational image was a
universal symbol, and the moving image a universal language. Griffith declared that cinema, in the opinion of many, "might have saved the situation when the Tower of Babel was built."[10] Elsewhere Griffith's universal language would be expanded to the proportions of a social utopia: "With the use of the universal language of moving pictures the true meaning of the brotherhood of man will have been established throughout the earth."[11]
As Griffith's prophetic sensibility intensified (particularly from the second half of the 1910s), so too did his tendency to privilege modern art for its harking back to the origins of language, to a pre-Babelic world. This led to a negative contrast between modern and older forms of art and allowed for an extraordinarily powerful repression of the most essential sources of his own art. This may be why references to the theater, to which Griffith devoted a full twelve years of his life, were systematically eliminated from his work.
Griffith in fact continued to borrow significantly from the theater throughout his creative life. His early film versions of classical epic poems and novels, made for the Biograph Company, were based primarily on their theatrical adaptations, popularly performed as one-act plays.[12] A large number of Griffith's most celebrated cinematic effects, particularly in his later films, were borrowed directly from the theater. Russell Merritt lists a series of such hidden quotations: the baptism of the dead infant in Way Down East (1920) was taken from an adaptation for the stage of Tess of the D'Urbervilles; the sequence in Orphans of the Storm (1922), where Jacques-Forget-Not counts off the enemies he has avenged on his fingers, repeats the equivalent episodes from the theatrical adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, and so on.[13] John Fell and Rick Altman have found innumerable instances in which Griffith borrowed from the theater of melodrama.[14] Interestingly, Altman shows how critics of Griffith's day were content to ignore the theatrical origins of Griffith's films: They identify the dramatic version from which the film author directly borrowed, but assume that little is to be gained by comparing the film to an ephemeral and undistinguished stage adaptadon. More often, critics blithely postulate a direct connection between film and the novel from which it is ostensibly drawn, when even minimal research clearly identifies a dramatic adaptation as an important direct source for the film."[15] The blindness shown by critics worked in direct accord with Griffith's own aspirations. Russell Merritt notes with astonishment that the more extensively Griffith took from the theater, the more aggressively he would deny any connection to it: "But perhaps the most singular feature of Griffith's debt to the theater was his fixed refusal to acknowledge its existence. The elaborate pains he took to cover his tracks went far beyond the usual requirements of artistic camouflage."[16] It is perhaps revealing that Merritt himself seeks to explain Grif-
fith's negative attitude to the theater on the basis of a psychosexual trauma the director suffered while working with a theater company, thus retreating to the same psychological model of motivation we saw operating in Drouzy's account of Dreyer.
Once we abandon the notion of psychological motivation, we are immediately in a better position to grasp the specific strategy of textual organization that regulates the intertextual links in a film. Griffith himself would stubbornly deny any continuity between theater and cinema. In the June 1914 issue of the journal Theatre he declared, "Moving pictures can get nothing from the so-called legitimate stage because American directors and playwrights have nothing to offer." In the same year, in a response to Robert Graw, Griffith again denied that theater could have any productive influence on cinema: "The stage is a development of centuries, based on certain fixed conditions and within prescribed limits. . .The motion picture, although a growth of only a few years, is boundless in its scope and endless in its possibilities."[17] And further on Griffith mused on what might become of the cinema when it had completely exhausted the repertoire of world theater. For Griffith it was this posttheatrical future that would inaugurate the golden age of cinema. In this sense cinema, according to Griffith, develops in a situation where intertextuality has been exhausted and total creativity unleashed. "Unlimited possibility" is equated with the overcoming of theater as a legacy. Griffith consistently emphasizes that the cinematic language he is in the process of creating is, in its each and every element, a negation of the language of theater. The history of cinema becomes the history of its emancipation from older forms of art (this view is still doing the rounds in film criticism).
Griffith came simultaneously to the obsessively held conviction that theater was the embodiment of a strange and blasphemous state of sin, a Babylon, Sodom, and Gomorrah combined. In his later autobiographical writings Griffith would exaggerate the feeling of shame he had felt on entering the stage, a motif that would also appear in his Browning cycle: "Even now, I can feel the humiliation of that moment. . . . I was ashamed to cloud my father's reputation by letting his friends know I was his son. . . . I was ashamed to go home and ashamed to be seen on the streets."[18]
Clearly, then, Griffith chose to disavow with a marked ferocity his nearest and most systematically utilized source. At the same time, he began to seek a "competing source of inspiration." Initially poetry or literary language was proclaimed to be this source. This turn to literature was able to mask the theatrical sources of Griffith's cinema through the introduction of a third text into the system of intertextual relations. We have already called this the interpretant, a term to be understood very broadly to mean a whole field of artistic creation, a kind of "superarchitext."
The revelation of Griffith's theatrical sources in essence does little to enrich the semantic possibilities of his films: the play and its film adaptation are too similar for any juxtaposition of the two not to result in a tautology. The third text, the hyperinterpretant, does not simply rescue the film from a blandly secondary status: it provides the depth of meaning the film needs to be a fully fledged work of art. In this context Griffith's declarative strategy and the blindness of critics work together to facilitate the viewer's search for a third text that might enrich the film's meaning. To conceal one's debt to history thus appears to be a means of organizing strategies of reading. This moment is particularly significant for us because it allows us to bring together the level of textual reading and the mechanisms by which cinema has evolved.
This moment is also important because it gives us a way out of the interpretive dead end generated by misquotations. In this context a misquote can be understood as indicating the presence of a true quote that it is masking or concealing. The misquote spurs us on to seek out another quote, an intertext that might resolve a given anomaly. In most cases a misquote acts as an effective spur to the intertextual process, all the more significant for its evidently and irreducibly aberrant nature.
Let us now turn to Griffith's screen adaptations of Browning. October 4, 1909, saw the release of Pippa Passes, a film that played an enormous role in changing the attitude of American society to cinema. On October 10, the New York Times, in its first article on a motion picture, published a review of Pippa Passes. From being a form of fairground entertainment, the cinema had become a respectable art. The basis for Griffith's movie, Browning's poetic drama, is rightly considered one of the most complex pieces of dramatic art in nineteenth-century literature. So dazzling was Griffith's success that the reviewer in the New York Times was moved to prognosticate somewhat extravagantly that "there seems to be no reason why one may not expect to see soon the intellectual aristocracy of the nickelodeon demanding Kant's Prolegomena to Metaphysics with the 'Kritik of Pure Reason' for a curtain raiser."[19] Griffith's wife, Linda Arvidson, recalls the effect produced by both the film and its review: "Suddenly everything was changed. Now we could begin to lift up our heads, and perhaps invite our lit'ry friends to our movies!"[20]
Griffith remained proud of Pippa Passes to the end of his life. In his final interview, he was to choose his film of 1909 over Birth of a Nation and Intolerance as the greatest achievement of cinema: "'There has been no improvement in movies since the old days. . . . We did Browning and Keats then, Pippa Passes. Today you don't dare do those things. Imagine anyone doing Browning today. They have not improved in stories. I don't know that they've improved in anything.'"[21]
Throughout his life, then, Griffith came back to dwell on Pippa Passes, but he never mentioned that the immediate stimulus for the film was a production of the Browning play staged in 1906 by the Henry Miller troupe. E. Giuliano and R. C. Keenan, in an article devoted to the Griffith adaptation, have argued convincingly that Griffith knew the Miller production. The play had its Broadway premiere on November 12, 1906; three days later, also on Broadway, Griffith made his debut performance at the Astor Theatre in Salomé On November 24, the New York Dramatic Mirror reviewed both Salomé and Pippa Passes. Griffith also could have come to know of the Miller production from his own actor Henry Walthall, who had worked with Miller in 1906, playing Gottlieb in the Browning play. James Kirkwood, who acted the part of Jules in the film, had also worked with Miller in 1906.[22] Yet perhaps the clearest evidence of Miller's production influencing Griffith is the fact that both Miller and Griffith chose to eliminate the episode with Luigi (although this is not the only alteration Griffith was to make to the Browning play).[23]
It would be useful at this point to rehearse the play's basic plot. The play is set in the Italian town of Asolo. The prologue introduces us to Pippa, a young girl who works in a silk-weaving factory. She joyfully greets the sunrise to which she dedicates a song. It is New Year's Day, the factory workers' only day of rest. Pippa walks out onto the streets of Asolo and wanders merrily through the town. The remainder of the film is structured into four episodes connected only through the song Pippa sings as she walks through the streets.
In the first episode—morning—we see two lovers, Sebald and Ottima, who have just killed Ottima's aging husband, Luca. Pippa's song induces in Sebald a sense of horror at his actions and a feeling of guilt and revulsion toward Ottima. In the second episode—midday—we see a group of friends play a trick on the artist Jules. They have penned a series of rarefied letters to him in the name of an illiterate and rather ignorant woman called Phene, moving him to declare his love for her. When the deception is revealed, Jules is enraged, but Pippa's song suddenly awakens in him a sense of compassion and even love for Phene. In the third episode—evening—we see Luigi, a member of the Carbonari, taking leave of his mother. About to depart for Austria on a mission assigned to him by the secret society of which he is a member, for a moment Luigi falters. Then Pippa's song hardens Luigi's resolve to sacrifice himself for his country's freedom. The fourth episode—night—depicts an encounter between a monsignor who has come to Asolo and Ugo, the superintendent who had managed the properties of the bishop's deceased brother. It turns out that fourteen years earlier Ugo had killed the elder of the two brothers and kidnapped his young daughter Pippa, holding her in the factory owned by the
prelate's younger brother, from whom he hoped to extract a ransom. Ugo had suggested that they send Pippa, who stands to inherit the estate, to a brothel in Rome, where she would be unlikely to survive for long. The monsignor now hopes to redeem the past sins of his two brothers. The bishop appears to waver in his resolve, but once more Pippa's song puts an end to his doubts, and Ugo is arrested. The play ends with an epilogue: Pippa returns home and, entirely unaware of the good deeds she has performed, falls into an innocent slumber.
Apart from the scene with Luigi, which is dramatically the weakest, Griffith also removed the crucial nighttime episode that is effectively the play's culmination. He replaces it with the morning episode, which undergoes a further melodramatic change: Sebald and Ottima do not actually kill Luigi; instead, Pippa's song stops them dead in their tracks. Yet perhaps the strangest aspect of these changes and shifts is the insertion of a new episode that is entirely Griffith's own. This episode takes place in a tavern, where a drunk hears Pippa's singing and, feeling instant remorse, returns to his family.
This episode, thoroughly inappropriate to Browning's play, does not appear in the film by chance. It is essentially a variation on a theme developed in Griffith's earlier film A Drunkard's Reformation, released on April 1, 1909, and discussed in chapter 1. The different treatment of the same theme in these two films is itself suggestive. In the earlier film the drunkard is taken by his daughter to see a performance of Zola's L'Assommoir. The play's edifying message about the evils of alcoholism has the appropriate effect, and the drunkard instantly reforms. In Pippa Passes, the drunkard's moral reformation is brought about by a song. In this second film, Griffith seems to be correcting the older version of an identical theme, while leaving the formal structure of the episode unchanged. Both variants are given in a crosscutting that, according to Tom Gunning, functions symbolically: in the earlier film, shots of father and daughter alternate with the shots of the stage; in the later film, shots of the drunk in the tavern alternate with a vision of Pippa singing. Both episodes include an innocent child (in the first film the child appears in Zola's play). It seems reasonable to say that Griffith's revision of the theme of the drunkard is the result of the privilege accorded in the first film to theater as the locus of moral values, in direct contrast to the director's increasingly systematic attack on theatrical motifs in his own work. A Drunkard's Reformation, moreover, establishes theater as a locus of influence. In the words of the Biograph Bulletins, we feel the play's message "sinking deeper and deeper into his [the drunkard's] heart, until at the final curtain he is a changed man."[24] This self-quotadon reads ambivalently: however unintentionally or subconsciously, it points back to the theater as the film's true origin.
The forced introduction of this third episode to some extent exposes the strategy underlying Griffith's adaptations of Browning. Browning's poetry serves to conceal what is in fact a shift in the axis of influence away from theater toward literature; it serves also as a pretext for rewriting a narrative that had pointed too openly to Griffith's true sources. At the same time, we witness an escalation of the "heraldic construction": Pippa Passes enters an existing cluster of texts, including L'Assommoir, La Curée, and A Drunkard's Reformation. Pippa Passes, in fact, complicates still further Griffith's relationship to the theater, which had been ambiguous enough even in the intertextual context of his earlier film. More than any other film, it is Pippa that allows Griffith to establish himself as a "strong author." He can borrow from Miller's stage production and then hide behind the name of Browning, planting a somewhat masked but easily revealed quotation in the movie's plot. This quote acts like a curtain, both revealing and concealing the theatrical stage behind it.
Pippa Passes undermines theater by song, displacing one source with another—in this the film follows Browning's own example. This reorientation, first toward song and then generalized to language as such, carries too great a significance for Griffith's work as a whole to be neglected.
The motif of singing had in fact been important to Browning, corresponding to a particular intertextual strategy the poet himself was to deploy. Harold Bloom has observed that Browning's main precursor was Shelley. The masking of this influence is one of Browning's most important motifs, as is particularly evident in the dramatic monologue "Cleon," which Bloom himself quotes:
I have not chanted verse like Homer, no—
Nor swept strings like Terpander, no—
Nor carved and painted men like Phidias and his friend;
I am not great as they are, point by point.
But I have entered into sympathy
With these four, running these into one soul,
Who, separate, ignored each other's art.[25]
Although it is possible that the real prototype for Cleon was Matthew Arnold, Browning himself saw the monologue as a means to overcome the anxiety of influence by shifting from one aesthetic form to another. The shift from word to music or painting absolves him of the sin of succession. The same motifs are further elaborated in Browning's long poem "One Word More."
Among all the forms working intersemiotically to recode and thereby mask the burden of influence, music emerges as the most important. In fact, music is seen as not subject to influence, and it appears therefore as
the supreme art in a cycle of poems Browning devoted to the subject: "A Toccata of Galuppi's," "Abbot Vogler," and "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha."[26] Particularly suggestive in this context is one of Abbot Vogler's monologues, spoken after an improvised organ recital:
All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,
Why there it stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth:
Had I written the same, made verse—still effect proceeds from the cause,
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,
Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled.[27]
We are struck here by the opposition between music as an art that can rise to the divine and painting and poetry as "mediated" forms.
Browning's views are based on the romantic tradition. Romanticism, as James Anderson Winn has pointed out, formulated the myth of music as the direct language of the passions, free of syntactical and other formal constraints. The materials of music "can acquire their meaning entirely from musical context, while poetic materials, though greatly affected by poetic context, bring their dictionary meanings with them into the poem."[28]
The cult of music as a form of immediacy impelled the romantics to idealize the "untutored" or "primitive" forms of folk music, which they perceived as being the closest analogy to the language of nature. The German philosopher and critic Joseph Görres spoke of music as an echo of external nature, to which our inner nature then responds.[29] In the Anglophone tradition, it was Walter Pater who formulated the most authoritative view on the subject. For Pater, all forms of art save music address the reasoning mind; music alone appeals to the essence itself, to "pure perception," and overcomes the rupture between form and content. For this reason, all forms of art aspire to music as their ideal. "Yet the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realises."[30] Singled out for attention within this tradition was the folk music of Italy, hailed by romantics from Achim von Arnim to Pater himself as the ideal of immediacy.[31]
Browning took great care in elaborating the same myth—first in the poem Sordello, which ends with the poetry of the meditative hero being transformed into an anonymous quasi folk song sung by a "child barefoot and rosy" as he runs up the hill:
Up and up goes he, singing all the while
Some unintelligible words to beat
The lark, God's poet, swooning at his feet.[32]
In these final lines of Sordello poetry attains its highest point as the incomprehensible words to a child's song. To approach the essence, then, is to
transcend language in music. It is worth noting that Sordello, like Pippa, is set in the Italian city of Asolo.
The "child barefoot and rosy" introduces yet one more shared motif—the sun. The poet as author is displaced by nature and the elements; poetry begins to emanate like sunlight. In Browning's Pippa Passes the solar symbolism underlying the girl's passage through Asolo is quite obvious. It is made explicit in the first lines of her monologue within a prologue that is essentially a hymn to the sun. Later on, in the evening episode, Pippa sings a song about the Sun King, and at the end of the nighttime episode the motif of song as sunlight reappears. Here the song itself is equated with the voices of the birds and beasts:
My childhood had not learned to know:
For, what are the voices of birds
—Ay, and of beasts—but words, our words,
Only so much more sweet?[33]
Here the child is the sign of a proximity to nature, a symbol of remote beginnings.
Alongside the myth of music and song as a kind of magical protolanguage, Browning elaborates another myth concerning the instantaneous and incantatory effect that music can exert on consciousness. The instantaneousness of music's influence (we recall the rather artificial deus ex machina that was Pippa's singing) can be explained by the fact that the effect of music on the human psyche is unmediated, readily connecting the mind to the sphere of universal harmony.
Wordsworth had already called music "but a stream that flow'd into a kindred stream, a gale."[34] Walt Whitman's "A Singer in the Prison," a poem that in many ways recalls Browning's Pippa, is set in a prison containing hardened criminals and murderers. Suddenly there appears a "lady . . . holding a little innocent child by either hand." She starts strumming an instrument and singing a "quaint old hymn" that has an instantaneous and irresistible moral impact on the prisoners:
A hush and pause fell down a wondrous minute,
With deep half-stifled sobs and sound of bad men bow'd
and moved to weeping,
And youth's convulsive breathings, memories of home,
The mother's voice in lullaby, the sister's care, the happy childhood,
The long-pent spirit roused to reminiscence.[35]
Song is the poetry of origins, and as such it brings consciousness back to a primordial human innocence. Here the lullaby becomes a symbol of this return.
An astonishingly original reworking of this situation can be found in Matthew Arnold's poetic drama Empedocles on Etna. In the first act,
Empedocles' friend Callicles asks Pausanias, a young musician and a pupil of the philosopher, to assuage Empedocles' pain by singing to him from afar: "But thou must keep unseen; follow us on, / But at a distance! in these solitudes, / In this clear mountain-air, a voice will rise, / Though from afar, distinctly; it may soothe him."[36] The remainder of the play is structured as the alternating sequence of Callicles' invisible voice and Empedocles' monologues. The singing, however, produces an unexpected result. It strengthens Empedocles' view that human beings have moved too far from their foundations, the four elements, and it finally moves him to return to the element of fire by throwing himself into a crater. So, paradoxically, song and fire (sun) are once more joined.
The status of music as the metalanguage of nature grants it a unique role in the dynamic of source repression. Any word is connected to its past usage and possesses it own cultural memory. Its repression as an anterior source can thus be realized through its substitution either by an inarticulate Ursprache or by music and song. The figure of the Other as precursor is displaced by a god figure or by the symbol of the sun as the originary source. The distance between poet and muse is thus drastically reduced.
This recourse to song, music, or solar imagery at the same time provides an illusory solution to the problems raised by quotation, since neither music nor light can be invoked citationally in a verbal text. They signify differently and thereby seem to escape the confines of intertextuality, although their external status is an artistic convention: after all, music and light cannot exist in poetry in any immediate way except as linguistic motifs. Yet on the level of plot they generate within the text the motif of an intersemiotic recoding, a translation of language into the nonlinguistic, which, however illusory, remains crucial to any reading. This motif is clearly evident in Browning's own play, which effects a complex chain of displacements: from language to visual representation (sculpture, painting) to music (song).
The morning episode already contains a critique of verbal expression, which is said to lose its meaning through repetition or constant usage:
Ottima: Best never speak of it.
Sebald: Best speak again and yet again of it,
till words cease to be more than words.
"His blood"
For instance—let these two words mean,
"His blood"
and nothing more. Notice, I'll say them
now,
"His blood."[37]
In the episode with Luigi, the critique of language takes on another form. Here the issue is Luigi's inability to translate his knowledge into
words. In both cases Pippa's song eliminates the semiotic blockage. Pippa seems to push Sebald to take a step beyond verbal repetition toward a truth or essence, just as she helps Luigi to overcome his verbal break.
Yet Pippa's musical power is exerted most curiously on the character Jules. To start with, the midday episode itself derives from a series of literary sources. We know that Browning took some details from Hugo's Ruy Blas and others from Diderot's Jacques le fataliste. Yet the most immediate source for Browning's Pippa was a play by his friend Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Lady of Lyons: Or, Love and Pride.[38] Browning had been envious of Bulwer-Lytton's theatrical success: although Pippa Passes carefully conceals any overt reference to The Lady of Lyons (in fact symmetrically inverting its plot), it nonetheless betrays clear traces of Bulwer-Lytton's work.
Browning's Jules is a sculptor, while Melnotte, the analogous character in The Lady of Lyons, is a painter. The wealthy Beausant, who initiates the play's intrigue, is hoping that the heroine Pauline will marry a wandering actor. Pauline, on the other hand, dreams of marrying a rich singer capable of celebrating her beauty in song. The plot's intrigue thus embraces several forms of art. Melnotte has difficulties with his medium: "I shall never be a painter. I can paint no likeness but one, and that is above all art."[39] Melnotte's artistic weakness lies in his inability to move beyond his sole theme, which he takes from nature. Endless repetition condemns him to artistic mediocrity. Browning's Jules is a sculptor equally incapable of grasping the essence of things. Pippa's song does more than awaken his love for Phene; it opens up a new artistic vision: "I do but break these paltry models up to begin Art afresh."[40]
This scenario appears to have held such significance for Browning that he came back to it in the nighttime episode, when the bishop somewhat anachronistically mentions a sculptor, Jules, who had once lived in Asolo (as if the two episodes take place years apart instead of a few hours). I quote the bishop's words:
He never had a clearly conceived Ideal within his brain till to-day. Yet since his hand could manage a chisel, he has practised expressing other men's Ideals; and, in the very perfection he has attained to, he foresees an ultimate failure: his unconscious hand will pursue its prescribed course of old years, and will reproduce with a fatal expertness the ancient types, lest the novel one appear never so palpably to his spirit. There is but one method of escape: confiding the virgin type to as chaste a hand, he will turn painter instead of sculptor, and paint, not carve, its characteristics. . . . but if there should arise a new painter, will it not be in some such way, by a poet, now, or a musician (spirits who have conceived and perfected an Ideal through some other channel), transferring it to this, and escaping our conventional roads by pure ignorance of them.[41]
This monologue throws a great deal of light on the figure of Pippa—pure, unknowing, yet capable of effecting changes in all who hear her, especially Jules. The same passage also clarifies another crucial motif: the source that gets repressed as the text is itself translated into another expressive medium. Music, then, is not simply an ideal language that masks a source; it is also what provokes the intersemiotic shifts that repress the source. In order to repress evidence of his intertextual dialogue with Bulwer-Lytton, Browning does more than reverse the dramatic scenario of The Lady of Lyons: he also effects a further shift of plot within the hero's profession. Melnotte, who keeps drawing the same portrait, finds a clear parallel in Jules, who keeps reworking the ideals of his precursors. Browning's repression of his source provokes a change in Jules's method of working. In changing his expressive medium, he stops repeating the work of his precursors, finally breaking through to what is essential and at the same time regaining his artistic innocence.
A few years after the appearance of Browning's Pippa, Bulwer-Lytton published the novel Zanoni, in which the dilemma of Browning's hero Jules was elaborated even further. The principal characters in Zanoni are a mute violinist by the name of Gaetano Pisani, who is compelled to express himself through his music, and his daughter Viola, an outstanding opera singer. The novel is also based on the demonization of theater, which it depicts as a Sodom posing a threat to Viola's innocence. Viola is in love with Glyndon, an artist who is unable to realize his ideals. Glyndon is finally granted a vision of the essence under the influence of Viola and her music, as well as the enigmatic Rosicrucian Zanoni, a walking repository of higher truth who knows all languages, even the prehistorical. It is worth noting that Zanoni is endowed with solar attributes: his name is derived from the Chaldean root zan, meaning "sun."
In Bulwer-Lytton the linked elements of source repression and inter-semiotic recoding grow into a veritable aesthetic myth in which each hero personifies a specific artistic idea. Zanoni was written in 1845, which itself indicates the extent to which, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the intertextual dilemma here described was an acknowledged and productive part of Western culture.
Let us now, after this lengthy digression, return to Griffith. The appearance of cinema had pointed to the realization of the long-cherished dream of creating a radical rupture in art. This rupture was expected to renew our relation to the world and overcome the automatism of verbal repetition. An art form had appeared that effectively lacked precursors. In the cultural context of the new century, cinema began to aspire to the function that had been accorded to music. The myth of music was projected directly onto film: the latter was repeatedly described as a young baby (hence its innocence) and hailed as a universal and natural language, a status en-
joyed previously by music. The notion that music could reconcile all contradictions by bringing us into contact with a universal harmony is repeated almost word for word by Griffith himself: "I believe one hundred years from now the pictures will have had time to educate the masses away from discord and unharmony."[42]
It is hardly fortuitous that Griffith called his adaptation of the Browning play The Song of Conscience. The term most likely refers to the movie as a whole and not just to Pippa's song. Nor does it appear coincidental that in 1910 Griffith made another film called A Plain Song, which, despite its title, does not thematize music in any way. The film is about the manager of a theater company who tries to seduce the hapless daughter of an aging couple. Just as she is about to yield, the voice of her soul speaks to her as follows: "'Remember thy father and thy mother.' And she does remember, seeing them most vividly in her mind's eye. This thought so impels that she at last realizes that she is playing with fire, and turning on her heel, runs back home."[43] The musical title is simply a reference to the same sudden illumination of consciousness that had also been central to Pippa Passes. In this film, the already familiar opposition of theater as sin and music as the sphere of moral awakening now borders on a cliché: once more the external vision of theater is contrasted with the inner vision of music.
Between 1909 and 1910, Griffith made several films that were effectively plot variations on the same Browning scenario. In The Voice of the Violin (1909), a music teacher with anarchist convictions is assigned by a terrorist organization to blow up the house in which his favorite pupil is living. The teacher, von Schmidt, approaches the house, "while there the melody of his own violin composition floats out on the night air, and ascending the stoop he peers through the window and beholds Helen playing the violin. The realization of what is about to happen for the moment rivets him to the spot."[44] Von Schmidt suddenly experiences a revelation and turns to attack his erstwhile terrorist colleagues, saving the young woman. This is practically an inversion of the Luigi episode in Browning's play, which Griffith had eliminated from his film version. Another film, To Save Her Soul (1909), deals with a young woman who is heard singing in her village church choir by the manager of a vaudeville troupe. She is taken to the city, where she falls prey to sin, but as she is about to fall she is rescued by a young priest named Paul Redmond.
In 1909, Griffith was to make one more film with a "musical" theme, adapted from François Coppée's poetic drama Le Luthier de Crémone. Essentially, the drama concerns two violin makers from Cremona, the hunchback Filippo and the handsome Sandro, both rivals for the hand of the young girl Giannina. Coppée's melodrama is founded on the contrast between Filippo's repellent external appearance and his inward purity as it
is manifested in his divinely gifted violin playing. In Sandro's monologue Filippo is compared to Philomela, the daughter of the Thracian king Pandeon, who was transformed into a nightingale. The classical motif of metamorphosis in this case serves as a kind of metadescription of the plot device that allows for the transformation of phenomenal reality into essence. Furthermore, the motif essentially recapitulates the myth of the repressed source. It is worth noting that Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni also contains a reference to Cremona ("As Shakespeare among poets, is the Cremona among instruments"),[45] which occurs precisely at a point of transition from poetry to music, as well as a detailed exposition of the myth of Philomela, which is the basic plot of Gaetano Pisano's last opera.
Griffith's Pippa Passes, then, emerges as one of a series of variations on the same theme. Together these works elaborate a symbolic lexicon through which they repress their own theatrical origins. In the nineteenth century this lexicon enjoyed a near-universal currency, as the coincidence of motifs between Coppée's French drama and Bulwer-Lytton's English novel indicates. Pippa Passes occupies a central place in this series, above all through its direct reference to the primary or "strong" source—Browning's play and the tradition on which the play rested. Browning's discourse appeared as an alternative to Griffith's theatrical sources. But this discourse was marked by its own displacements and repressions: it posited music as an alternative source for what it in turn took from other texts.
Along with music came its visual equivalent, sunlight. In the prologue and epilogue to the film, Griffith applied a special system of additional lighting to create the illusion of sunrise and sunset. Tom Gunning has linked these lighting effects to a then prevalent tendency to end a film with an aesthetically charged image. But at the same time he himself acknowledges that special lighting "carries clear thematic meanings. Most frequently the use of a directional light illuminating figures in an otherwise darkened area carries the association of spiritual devotion."[46] J. Pruitt, in an article devoted specifically to the use of lighting in films made for Biograph, has also pointed to the role of light in conveying "a mystical feeling of hope and reconciliation" in films such as Fisher Folks (1909) and A Cricket on the Hearth (1909).[47] Pruitt attributes particular significance to the "scenes by the window," where a man stands bathed in sunshine, yearning for a better life. The abrupt nature of his illumination, like the sudden effect of music, is visually realized through the instantaneous use of lighting (e.g., a brightened room), as in Edgar Allan Poe (1909).
It is worth recalling that Griffith's A Drunkard's Reformation ends with a vision of a happy family sitting by the hearth and framed by a marked use of lighting. In their use of lighting, both A Drunkard's Reformation and Pippa Passes are "revelatory" films, in the sense that they make language (Zola's theatrical language and Browning's literary language) yield to the nonver-
bal—that which cannot be quoted but can be embodied in light. Even where a (literary) source is repressed through the very positing of influence, as in the case of Griffith's relation to Browning, there is an increased emphasis on what lies beyond quotation, on what appears, however illusorily, to escape the web of intertextuality.
Even beyond the Browning play, Griffith's work betrays a steady escalation of influences, which appear like the perpetual regress of a mirror reflected within a mirror. Each one of his films represses its own source. Griffith's thematic variations become truly meaningful only within this infinite specular perspective. The existence of these variants suggests that, even in 1909 and 1910, Griffith had begun to conceal his relation to Browning—every plot variation being an attempt to disconnect the very same motif from its source. This means that language is posited as the primary competing source of inspiration and yet also initiates the mechanism of its own repression as the basis of intertextual reference. This mechanism, moreover, is present in Browning himself, whose text is objectively oriented toward the displacement of language by music and light.
At a later stage in his career, Griffith would overcome the very dependence on literature that he had earlier affirmed, repressing, through a series of masks, any reference to literary language. This process went hand in hand with the director's growing ambitions as an artist, as evidenced in his elevation of film into a universal language.
In 1913, Griffith again turned to a Browning text for inspiration. The film The Escape, released on May 3, 1913, has been described in the most recent critical literature on Griffith's career as a remake of Pippa .[48] Tom Gunning describes its plot as follows (I have been unable to view the film myself): "In this later film a wandering flute player (Henry Walthall) has a beneficent influence on a number of characters through the pure tones of his music as he passes by. He reconciles lovers, prevents a peevish young girl from throwing away a crucifix, and, in the clearest parallel to Pippa Passes, stops a pair of adulterous lovers from murdering the woman's husband."[49] As should be clear from this description, in Griffith's second remake of Pippa, song is replaced by wordless music, pure melody. This musical element, in opposition to language, becomes even stronger in The Escape.
In the following year, Griffith returned once more to the Browning play, this time concealing the source quite thoroughly. In 1914, he made the film Home, Sweet Home for the Reliance Majestic and Mutual production companies. In the existing critical literature, Home, Sweet Home is taken to be a free adaptation of a biography of John Howard Payne, although the actual biography has never been identified.[50] R. Schickel, in what is the most authoritative biography of Griffith to date, has defined the film as "a highly colored version of the life of John Howard Payne, author of the
song from which the title of the movie was borrowed."[51] Schickel's conclusion not only betrays an ignorance of Payne's actual biography but also ignores so authoritative a witness as Griffith's own cameraman Karl Brown, who has indicated the film's source directly: "Home, Sweet Home was virtually a remake of Pippa Passes, only instead of having the voice of a gay young girl bring cheer and faith to a despairing mankind, the music of Home, Sweet Home changed the lives of a set of different characters, a sort of multiple story dominated by a single thematic idea."[52]
The plot of Home, Sweet Home is, briefly, as follows. In the first of four episodes, the film's hero, Payne, leaves his mother and his sweetheart to go to the city, where he hopes to become an actor. Once in the theater, he lapses into a life of sin. He is seduced by a woman from the city, falls into debt, and dies abandoned by his friends. As he lies dying, he composes the song "Home, Sweet Home." In his hometown the sweetheart he had abandoned also dies. In the second episode, a country girl called Apple Pie Mary falls in love with a boy from the East. The boy, however, meets a dazzling woman from the city. Just as he is about to forget Mary, he hears Payne's melody. At once realizing the full horror of the betrayal he is contemplating, he returns to the country girl. In the third episode we see a mother who has raised two sons who have hated each other since childhood. In a fight over money the brothers kill each other. In despair at her loss, their mother contemplates suicide but hears the melody, which restores her faith in life. In the fourth episode a philanderer tempts a married woman to infidelity. At the brink of what would seem to be her inevitable fall, the woman hears the strains of a violin playing "Home, Sweet Home." She leaves the philanderer and stays with her husband. The film ends with an epilogue showing Payne in purgatory. He tries to clamber up a rocky slope but is pulled back by various personifications of sin. The figure of his beloved then appears in the sky, and their souls are united in an embrace.
We can see that the structure of Pippa Passes is almost fully reproduced in Home, Sweet Home. Even the number of episodes—four—is the same. Griffith used the same actors who had worked on Pippa, and of the three actors who worked on both films, two—Walthall and Kirkwood—had acted in Miller's theatrical production of the play in 1906.
One might ask of this later and freer adaptation why Griffith chose the figure of Payne as a means of repressing the Browning play as its true source. Payne's real biography is quite remote from the screen version. In 1813, at the age of twenty-one, Payne left New York to make his reputation on the English stage. Even at this stage Payne could hardly be considered the hero of a provincial rural idyll. He had acted since childhood and as a young boy had published a free translation of August von Kotzebue's Lovers' Vows, or, the Child of Love. At fourteen he was owner and editor of
the theatrical paper the Thespian Mirror. In London Payne entered the salons of the artistic elite, meeting Coleridge and Southy. After a brilliant debut in Drury Lane, he enjoyed great success from 1813 to 1818. The financial difficulties that beset him in 1819 were not due to any dissolute lifestyle on his part but were the result of a failed enterprise called Sadler's Wells Theater. In the 1820s Payne lived in Paris, from where he would send his adaptations of French melodramas, which ran in Drury Lane and Covent Garden. He also coauthored several plays with his friend Washington Irving. The most celebrated object of Payne's passion was Mary Shelley, whom he wooed assiduously, only to discover that she was in love with Irving. In 1832 Payne returned to America to a rapturous welcome. He died in 1852 in Tunisia, where he had been appointed American consul.
Clearly, Payne's real-life story diverges sharply from its purported film version even at those moments where both evidently coincide. In Griffith's film, for example, Payne's death in a generic Arab country is seen to signify his utter ruin: nowhere are we told of his legitimate reasons for being in Tunisia.
In reworking Payne's biography, Griffith in fact sought to bring it closer to his own. He was fascinated by the figure of the vagrant actor who becomes drawn into a kind of theatrical Sodom (which was precisely how he would describe his own theatrical career in a later autobiographical account), only to be saved from the abyss by a song he himself composes (Griffith's song would, of course, be cinema itself).[53] Griffith also sought to bring out those motifs in Payne's life that were close to Browning's: his career in England and his theatrical failures. It is worth noting parenthetically that Payne's famous song had been intended for Sir Henry R. Bishop's operetta Clari; or the Maid of Milan, whose Italian heroine could be readily associated with Pippa from Asolo.
The figure of Payne once more fulfills the complex task of both masking and revealing the film's true source. On the one hand, it is a concealed reference to Browning; on the other, it subconsciously projects Griffith as its author, who is clearly identified with Payne himself. Here we have a particularly eloquent case of what Bloom has called a relationship of "opposition-identification" with one's precursor. One further aspect of Payne's life is relevant here. Insofar as Payne reworked the plays of other writers, he was repeatedly accused of plagiarism. In 1818, at the end of his English stage career, his play Brutus, or the Fall of Tarquin met with considerable success on Drury Lane. Nonetheless, critics were to attack him mercilessly for plagiarism.[54] In Bloom's terms, then, Payne suggests the figure of a weak writer, the successor who follows tradition. His moral decline and final death can be understood as punishment for his lifelong commitment to the theater and the epigonal status to which theater had relegated him.
The entire first episode of Home, Sweet Home, devoted as it is specifically to Payne's life, can be seen as a vigorous repression of theatrical sources, onto which the further repression of a literary source, Browning, is then superimposed. Let us see how this gets worked out in the text. Payne's mother and sweetheart both receive letters from him informing them that he has become an actor. At this point the film has already depicted Payne's entry into the theatrical world in a scene in which his acting is shown to be fake and affected.
Both women decide to save the sinner Payne. They go back to his empty room, where their discovery of a copy of the Bible provokes a scene of tenderness. They then pass into the adjacent room, where they can hear the voices of some actors speaking through a partition. The mother remarks that their speech is "disgusting"; Payne's sweetheart responds that they're "just rehearsing." When Payne's actress friends appear, his moral decline becomes evident. It is essential to note that all the evidence of sin is produced in the very room where the Bible had been found. But now the Bible is gone. When Payne awakes the next morning slouched over a table, the Bible is once more lying beside him. Now Payne begins to compose his song. He stares emptily a little to the right of the camera (always the sign of a vision in Griffith). His mother and abandoned sweetheart emerge from the shadows. Payne returns to the song he was composing; as he writes, the lyrics appear as captions.
This entire episode is constructed out of the opposition between texts of different kinds and their sources. Vulgar language is equated with the theater; a life of sin is seen as a play. The theater is denied the privilege of a literary source. A song is a different matter. Its sources are directly related to the Word, indeed to the sacred Word, the supreme book that is the Bible. Analogous to song, serving in fact as its second source, is vision. External sight—the theater—is thus opposed to inner sight, a cinematic vision that harks back to the revelations of the Holy Writ.
In the lyrics to the song that appear in the caption we read the following words:
An exile from home, splendour dazzles in vain!
Oh, give me my lowly thatch'd cottage again!
The birds singing gaily that came at my call
Give me them!—and the peace of mind dearer than all!
(p. 53)
The song is once more seen as analogous to the singing of birds, rising heavenward toward God and bearing a message of peace and harmony.
Interestingly, what this cluster of oppositions excludes is the normal book (such as Browning's text). From this point Griffith will refuse to confront any literary source, preferring to replace it with the Book of all be-
ginnings, the sacred Word as opposed to the profane discourse of literature. This is a kind of secondary repression, which finally denies literature any place whatsoever.
In a customary paradox, however, the repression of theater in turn amounts to its unexpected return, and in the most hypertrophied form, as an epilogue filled with allegorical representations of sin and of souls reuniting. Karl Brown is right to note the highly quotational nature of this final scene, invoking as it does an entire theatrical tradition from Greek tragedy to the pre-Elizabethan moralities.[55] What is most curious, however, is that the epilogue also contains a reference to a play by Payne himself, Mount Savage, a plagiarized translation of a work of the same title by Pixérécourt. Just as Payne is seen to languish on the cliffs of purgatory, so we discover the hero of the play, the Solitary, on some cloud-covered mountains: "A shade appears to come out of the earth. With one hand it points to the background and in the other bears a lamp." We then see allegorical representations of sin, war, and the angel of death: "Seized with frightful convulsions, the Solitary repels these horrible images. . . . he lifts toward the sky his supplicating hands. At his prayer the picture changes color. Sweet chords are heard. All which bore the marks of sadness and of mourning vanishes." A procession can be discerned moving toward the Solitary—old men, women, and children to whom he had once given assistance. Among the children is a baby he had rescued, now in his mother's embrace. Finally the entire crowd raises its arms, pointing into the distance at "the figure of a young female who resembles Elodie," the Solitary's beloved, from whom he had been separated on account of his sins.[56]
Herein lies the paradox of theater as a theme serving so obviously as a framing device for the entire film: Griffith presents his visions as arising without a source, as texts revealed rather than written, while at the same time relying on the existing tradition of theatrical visions. The resources deployed in repressing the source are derived from the very medium that is being repressed. By putting Payne in the place of Browning, Griffith replaces a strong primary source with a weak near-anonymous figure mired in rewriting and plagiarism. Eternal repetition becomes the paradoxical equivalent of an endless beginning. It is natural that the failure to establish a true origin must be masked by the hunt for a word as anonymous and repetitive as a dictionary.
The film Home, Sweet Home betrays a marked tendency to repress the profane written word. This tendency is seen most clearly in the film's unusual recourse to letters. In early cinema, letters served as an effective way of communicating information within a film's diegetic structure. Any number of letters and notes made their appearance in cinema before captions became established along with the incorporation into film of the
"external narrator." Home, Sweet Home contains a flood of correspondence, but, with one exception, these letters are never materialized on the screen as written text. Their content is conveyed either in a caption spoken, as it were, "by the filmmaker" or as the voice of the person reading the letter. Griffith's treatment of letters differs markedly from the narrative strategies common to his day. This anomaly can perhaps be understood as part of the elimination of the written word from the film's diegetic structure.
Griffith's manipulation of the letter partly recalls the use of the letter as a motif in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch painting. The period is surprisingly rich in representations of women reading letters; these representations are all the more intriguing for their refusal to show us the content of the letters they depict, allowing it to remain an enigma for the viewer. As A. Maier-Meintshel has shown, the original text available for reading was the Bible, whose reader was the Virgin Mary. As the motif of reading became secularized, the content of writing came to be conveyed more indirectly, through persistent iconographic representations, such as a view of a ship at sea placed within an interior, or musical instruments symbolizing love, or even coarse eroticism.[57] The iconographic shift turns out to have produced another shift away from the Supreme Book (whose content does not need to be specially explained) to the profane text (the letter).
Interestingly, Home, Sweet Home betrays the traces of such an iconographic shift, albeit in a rudimentary form. In the film's second episode Mary marks her impending separation from her beloved by giving him a Christmas card, explaining that, while she lacks an image of herself, this picture resembles her. Mary identifies with the Virgin (that they share the same name is hardly fortuitous). Thanks to this symbolic gift, the whole story begins to acquire biblical resonances. The young man from the East returns the gesture with a gift that is no less surprising: he gives Mary his own glasses—another sign of visual displacement, the exchange of sight.
The repression of language in Home, Sweet Home is also evident in the gradual transformation of Payne's song into a pure melody devoid of words. In the second and third episodes, the melody is played by a street musician; in the fourth, by a violinist. Music definitively represses language.
The last and most significant variation on Browning's theme is the film Intolerance (1916). This assertion may come as a surprise, insofar as the film's plot would seem to be quite remote from Pippa Passes. Yet the two films are undoubtedly linked, although their commonalities have been painstakingly masked.
Griffith himself betrayed something of this work of concealment in an article of 1916, which he wrote immediately after completing the film (Intolerance was released on September 5, and the article was published in the Independent on December 11). Here Griffith returned to the subject that
had become his obsession—the relationship of theater to cinema—to denounce the theater once more for its limitations: "Within the confines of the old theatre it was not possible to relate more than two stories in order to illustrate a particular phase of the action; actually, even two stories would have been difficult to stage. But in my film Intolerance —this is the first example that comes to mind—I tell four stories."[58]
Griffith forgets here that the Browning play had also contained four episodes, a magic number that Griffith took pains to reproduce both in Home, Sweet Home and now in Intolerance. This four-part structure is perhaps the clearest indicator of the film's link to the Browning play. But that is not all. Intolerance almost entirely avoids any allusion to music so particular to Browning on the level of plot (what remains is the rudimentary figure of the rhapsode in the Babylonian episode).
Each new stage in Griffith's reworking of the Browning play is thus based on the repression of a source acknowledged at a prior stage or in older variations and on its replacement by another source. In the 1909 film, a theatrical source was repressed and Browning's written work inserted in its place. In the 1914 version, Browning's written work was itself repressed, masked by the "weak" figure of Payne. Two years later, in Intolerance, it was music's turn to be repressed. But here as before, a source, previously acknowledged and now repressed, acquires a special significance for the new text. The film, in fact, eliminates only the external manifestations of what remains of crucial importance.
How is the influence of music still felt in Intolerance? Above all formally, in its typically musical elaboration and transposition of motifs. But that is not all. All of the four episodes in Intolerance —set in Babylon, Palestine, Paris, and modern America, respectively—are linked by the image of a woman rocking a cradle (Lillian Gish), to which we shall return in the next chapter. This image is in fact taken from Walt Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," which compares the swaying cradle to the sea. As Leo Spitzer has observed, poetic tradition has always linked the music of the sea to the singing of birds and to a choir of human souls calling to Jesus Christ. Spitzer has also pointed to the intimate link between the tragic fate and final metamorphosis of Philomela and the passion and transformation undergone by Christ.[59] In Whitman the connection between the sea-as-cradle and the singing of birds becomes part of the poem's declared theme. Furthermore, the counterpoint to the birds' song and the roar of the sea is meant to reveal a certain unique "word" to the poem's hero:
A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
The word final, superior to all,
Subtle, sent up,—what is it?—I listen.[60]
It is this word that Griffith's film finally reveals. Seven times the film will link the image of a cradle to that of a book that Griffith will term the "Book of Intolerance." The captions that follow each appearance of the book appear against a background of different systems of writing—hieroglyphs for the Babylonian episode, Hebrew for Palestine. Along with the musical motif of the cradle (and the lullaby), we see a new kind of written word—the hieroglyph, which signifies the Originary Word, impenetrable to mere mortals, the same word that was known to the Rosicrucian Zanoni.
Intolerance in fact radically expands the sphere of references to an Originary Book that had already been noted in Home, Sweet Home. Suppressed as a source, music survives in the form of a coded subtext that finally veils the film in a kind of mystical hieroglyphics that is essentially incomprehensible to the modern mind. This is the final gesture of repression: all references to intermediary sources, the long line of precursors, are now eliminated. As Griffith's "strongest" film, Intolerance openly acknowledges its proximity to the Primary Source, the Originary Book or Word. Here Griffith shows his reliance on Whitman, who had regarded his own Leaves of Grass as a new Holy Writ deriving from the Source of all things.
This drama of repression has yet another ghostly player, Browning's greatest poem, The Ring and the Book, which elaborates a very similar conception of the source. Relating how he took the poem's subject from an "old yellow book," Browning unexpectedly traces his poem back to the book of Genesis and insists on the existence of a Supreme Book capable of galvanizing all life-forms.[61] Griffith's Intolerance and Browning's poem have a great deal in common. The very tide of Browning's poem The Ring and the Book seems amply suited to Griffith's film, with its closed ringlike construction and its constant reference to an Originary Book.
Miriam Hansen has shown how the film Intolerance is marked by the opposition between "allegory (hieroglyph)" and "the profane written text." Furthermore, the film's principal allegory, a kind of superhieroglyph, represents the figure of the mother (the source of life), and in the episode set in modern America the profane letter is associated with sterile old maids. Hansen convincingly shows how the hieroglyphic layer of the film serves as a constant commentary on the contemporary episode. Thus the three Fates spinning the thread of life in the background to the cradle correspond to the three ladies from Miss Jenkins's milieu who pursue the young mother, as well as the three hangmen carrying razors in the execution scene. Modern history thus constantly discovers allegorical analogies to itself through which it can hark back to the symbolic origins of the text.[62]
But the most significantly innovative aspect of Intolerance lies in what might be viewed as the unexpected qualitative leap it makes in transforming the specific procedures of source concealment into the structure of a new cinematic language. What had elsewhere been the suppression of a
source on the level of plot here becomes its spatial distancing. We might recall the strange request made by Pausanias in Matthew Arnold's Empedocles on Etna: "Yet thou mayst try thy playing, if thou wilt, / But thou must keep unseen; follow us on, / But at a distance."[63] It is important for Griffith that his protagonists are all scattered, separated. In Home, Sweet Home, for example, visual contact is constantly replaced by hearing. People hear but cannot see each other.
Structurally speaking, this distancing becomes the motivation and precondition of the mechanism of successive or parallel montage for which Griffith's work is justly famous. In Intolerance the source is eliminated entirely from the film's diegesis. Both the allegorical book and the woman with the cradle are located outside the stories being narrated, allowing for their linkage to occur from within an extradiegetic space. It might even be said, in the final analysis, that the marked distancing of the source in Intolerance is what allows for the masterful montage of its layers scattered variously in space and time.
This long story of sources repeatedly repressed finally ends with the transformation of these repressed figures into the elements of a new cinematic language. It may well be that the history of art as a whole, based on the endless repression of one's precursors, aspires to this moment as an ideal. At a given moment the chain of repressions ends with a triumphant linguistic mutation, the appearance of new linguistic structures that allow the artist to crown himself with the wreath of the "strong" poet.
Griffith's work provides us with a unique source of material. The sheer quantity of his films and the frequent variations on the same plot, motif, or linguistic structure allow us practically to touch the hidden mechanisms of repeated quotation, as well as their semantic content.
We have come to believe that the repeated quotation of the same intertext does not merely create the "heraldic construction" with all its attendant semantic consequences. Each subsequent quote can serve to mask the preceding one, to conceal the paths taken by the movement of meaning. The repeated rewriting of a source can in some instances become the basis for understanding film history. This intertextual model of film history breaks with traditional conceptions of cinema's historical development in several ways. Traditional conceptions can be reduced to two dominant tendencies. The first can be called the theory of borrowings; the second posits the slow growth and ripening of film's constitutive elements out of a broader cultural soil. According to the first theory, film borrows structures that have evolved in other cultural spheres and adapts them to its own needs. According to the second, culture as a process itself slowly gravitates toward film, creating quasi-cinematic features within itself. This model of maturation in general betrays a teleological bias, since it posits cinema as a kind of prior given toward which culture must aspire. Both
evolutionary models are in fact closely related and share common flaws: neither can explain why cinema chooses to address specific cultural phenomena, such as literature.
More specifically, neither model can provide a rationale for Griffith's use of Browning. The play, scarcely performable in its own right, cannot even be said to contain any specifically cinematic traits. Typically, the critics Giuliano and Keenan, while remaining within a traditional frame of analysis, are effectively forced to discover a hidden cinematic quality in the play, a "cinematism," to use Eisenstein's phrase.[64] This kind of approach finally leads to cinematic traits being found in any and all aspects of past culture that have fallen into the cinema's sphere of activity. Practically any detail can be dubbed cinematic (as analogous to large scenes), as can a discontinuous style (as analogous to montage), or its precise opposite, a demonstratively chronological construct (as analogous to the ribbon or a cinematic memory). As this kind of approach expands its sphere of application, the entire realm of culture retrospectively acquires a cinematic character. In the final analysis, the reasons for borrowing this or that stylistic feature become highly nebulous. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the cinema here performs the same role as Kafka in Borges's essay, converting entirely heterogeneous phenomena from previous historical epochs into its own precursors. But in the Borges essay it is Borges himself who takes on the task of seeking out Kafka's precursors, while according to the "maturation" theory this function devolves imperceptibly onto culture as a whole. What remains obscured here is the fact that this theory is itself the product of a subsequent reading of an entire past culture. In eliminating the reader, the theory is able to transform the result of reading into a functional mechanism of culture as a whole.
The other theory, based on the notion of influence, seems equally unproductive. It provides no real answers to the fundamental question of why influences are felt and how they function. Influence is seen as the mechanical transferral of some related elements from one receptacle to another. If we were simply to postulate Browning's influence on Griffith (or Griffith's debt to Browning), we would be circumventing the basic problems involved by opting for a kind of Neoplatonic model of art history. This model suggests a center from which all force emanates, a center that translates and transforms itself into its future. The primary question is thereby made irrelevant: the agency of those who inherit the past, here reduced to the role of its passive recipients. Whether later texts can have a transformative function is a question this theory cannot answer.
Influence theory cannot even be applied to derivative texts or to cases of open plagiarism (Bloom's "weak texts"), since the latter are also products of an authorial choice—a choice directly linked to the text being cited, and hence without any desire to be innovative or original. The same theory
is even less useful in dealing with "strong writers" who avoid openly acknowledging their intellectual debts.
"Strong works," as well as their authors, constituting the real fulcrum of art historical evolution, establish their intertextual relations in an entirely specific way. Their quotations are not just anomalies seeking normative status. Rather, they both reveal and hide an evolutionary attitude to precursor texts. A quotation thus becomes a paradoxical means of asserting one's originality. An obvious or acknowledged quote can refer to a text that in fact serves to conceal a given work's real debt to its precursor, thereby becoming a sign of originality. At the same time this process "twists" the simple sense of continuity in art history. New and unexpected "precursors of Kafka" can be created, distorting our reading of cultural history and thus shifting its course.
Intertextuality, then, works not only to establish precursors but also to deny them, a denial essential for any text to become "strong." For this reason, the initial moment must always involve the positing of at least two precursor texts (cf. the intertext and the interpretant in chapter 1). The text that impinges more heavily on its successor is repressed, becoming the object of aggression. The other text, less relevant insofar as its connection to the artist is not profound, is promoted as the repressor of the first precursor text. The connection to the first text is masked by acknowledging the connection to a second "unthreatening" text. Pippa Passes was chosen by Griffith precisely because it was considered to be a play unsuited for the stage and because it lacked any traces of what Eisenstein called "cinematism." The absence of "cinematism" here guarantees the absence of any real link between Griffith and the text whose influence he acknowledged as paramount.
It is in precisely this way that quite diverse texts, containing little if any cinematic traits whatsoever, can be drawn into the cinema's sphere of activity. This process alone, by which structurally heterogeneous texts are drawn into the strong artist's field of vision, constitutes the principal mechanism for cinema's enrichment. The rapid growth of cinema is due not to its capacity to assimilate whatever resembles it but to its ability to assimilate things that bear no similarity to it whatsoever.
At a later stage, however, these dissimilarities are retrospectively found to possess filmlike qualities that were in fact acquired only during this process of assimilation. In this way the entire culture of the past gradually becomes "cinematic," producing the illusion that cinema has grown out of the soil of an entire older culture. This illusion has become the ritual point of departure for later attempts to explain the specificity of cinema.
In an article characteristically entitled "Visionary Cinema of Romantic Poetry," Harold Bloom notes that "the burden of Romantic poetry is absolute freedom, including freedom from the tyranny of the bodily eye."
Bloom shows how the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley, predicated on a negation of visuality, began with the advent of cinema to be perceived in visual and even cinematic codes, undergoing a kind of subsequent "cinematization."[65] (For the sake of fairness, it should be noted that this "cinematizing" process began long before the emergence of film: in the nineteenth century, the poems of Milton and Wordsworth served as a constant source of inspiration for painters and artists.)
The assimilation of diverse sources leads to a change in the way misquotation functions at a subsequent stage. Now the intertext, which had served to conceal the initial borrowing, itself becomes a threat to the artist who had assimilated it in order to avoid appearing derivative. Here we have a further twist, involving the repression of this text as well (in our case Pippa ), and yet another repressor text has to be drawn from a different sphere. So Griffith was to draw on music, an art form that would seem to be somewhat remote from the silent film. Yet this new moment of repression also contains a mechanism for the assimilation of music into the poetics of cinema, however alien it might be to the film medium.
The strongest repressive mechanisms do not operate just on the level of one signifying form but attract different forms of expression that form new layers in the cinematic structures that are newly emerging. The linear repression of a source takes place hand in hand with other intersemiotic shifts and recodings through which a new artistic idiom is forged.
This complex mechanism is generally made explicit as the search for a mythical Originary Source, Primary Language, or Originary Image: to reconnect with them is to eliminate the entire chain of intermediate precursors, granting access to an essential truth or reality. In this search for an Originary Source, the Book occupies a special place (it is hardly a coincidence that among all the repressive strategies deployed in Griffith's Intolerance, even those directed against language itself, the Book has pride of place as the supreme symbol of origination). The privileged place accorded to the Book is of course linked to an entire Judeo-Christian tradition, for which the Word is primary, and God the author of the One Book. The transformation of the Book into the "hypertext" of strong cinematic texts is also connected to the fact that the Book in Western culture embodies the) "Text" as such with its typically teleological and narrative biases.
In addition, the cinema needs to refer to the Book as its source in order to legitimate its own textual status. A text acquires social authority only if it is produced by an author who enjoys a specific social and cultural credibility. The literary text has a particularly close link to the authorial instance. Unlike literature, a film produces photographic texts whose index of authorship is lower. Its credibility is based on the photographic self-evidence of what it shows. Yet this photographic self-evidence is not enough, within the framework of traditional cultural assumptions (above all in the early
stages of film history), to secure cinema its legitimacy. It is precisely this that might explain, at least to some extent, why films generally acknowledge the book and writer that inspired them: both project onto the film the aura of additional legitimacy that written texts have enjoyed in our culture.
Where an author is repressed and replaced by the symbolic Book as such, this book functions as a kind of "impersonal cause" that dictates the film's narrative. This is exactly what happens in Griffith's Intolerance, as well as in practically all of Dreyer's films, where the symbolic Book is systematically invoked.[66] The photographic text, lacking any mechanism for producing relations of cause and effect, acquires narrative status by referring to a Book beyond its confines.
Cinema's deeply rooted need for a symbolic origin or source is far more profound than any analogous need felt by literature. After all, literature readily finds an originating source in the figure of the author, whose presence is far more muffled in cinema. Nonetheless, the obsessive presence in films of the theme of a primary source or cause serves to mythologize cinema as a system. The longing for an absolute beginning can be satisfied in culture only by myth, which organically thinks in terms of origination.
One cannot help noticing that this search for origins has been pursued at a time when culture as a whole is oriented toward constant innovation and the search for the unprecedented. As Mikhail Gasparov has observed, if up until the end of the eighteenth century European culture had been characterized by rereading (perechteniia ), then romanticism and its wake inaugurated a culture of new readings (pervochteniia ), along with a cult of originality.[67] Significantly, the earliest signs of the culture of new readings during the Renaissance were marked by a refusal to imitate the great masters and a reorientation toward nature as the true source.[68] Basil Willey has noted the unforeseen consequences of the disavowal of authority that took place in the seventeenth century: "In its effort to throw off authority, the seventeenth century discovered, in each sphere of interest, an Ancient still older than the Ancients; in theology, the Ancient of Days; in science, Nature herself; in ethics, and in literary theory, 'nature and reason.'"[69]
The desire for originality, for new readings, and the refusal of precursors and all authority figures universally go hand in hand with the discovery of origins, among which nature and reality figure predominantly. Realism, then, is readily framed by an ideology of novelty. From this flows the characteristic ambivalence attending every search for origins (this ambivalence is also evident in cinema—indeed, cinema may well be its fullest expression). On the one hand, this search pushes cinema into closer and closer contact with reality as the origin of everything, leading it to cultivate an ideology of realism. On the other hand, cinematic realism is constantly asserted on the basis of a myth, the myth of an absolute, the myth of origins. Cinematic realism is inseparable from cinematic mythology.
Equally significant is the fact that this obsessive search for reality, based as it is on the repression of intermediate sources, serves only to increase the number of assimilated and repressed texts, thus widening the gamut of intertextual relations. The essential paradox involved in this process is that while the artist is constantly affirming his desire to overcome the derivative nature of his text and enter into an unmediated contact with existence, this march toward realism must be made along an ever widening path of quotations, an increasingly complex intertextual chain involving the screen adaptation and subsequent mythologization of literary texts. Cinema seeks reality by increasing its textual links to culture. And it seems no other avenue is open to it.
Chapter Three—
Intertextuality and the Evolution of Cinematic Language:
Griffith and the Poetic Tradition
In the preceding chapter I looked at ways in which certain parameters of film history might be examined in the light of a theory of intertextuality. In this chapter I will seek to throw light on some of the classical figures of cinematic language and their genesis.
The intertextual problematic can be legitimately projected onto the question of cinematic language and its genesis. The fact is that any new figure of cinematic language, from the moment it appears to the moment it becomes mechanical and is finally assimilated, is perceived as a textual anomaly and as such seeks clarification and normative status. It is not surprising, therefore, that the intertext is constantly invoked in order to normalize new figures of cinematic language. Strange as this assertion may sound, I would suggest that every new figure in cinematic language is essentially a quote that asks to be clarified through an intertext.
As proof of this, one could invoke Sergei Eisenstein's well-known essay "Dickens, Griffith and Film Today," which brilliantly demonstrates how Griffith's use of close-ups, as well as certain figures related to montage, can be clarified by referring to the works of Charles Dickens. In this way Eisenstein seems to elevate Griffith's linguistic innovations to the status of Dickens quotations. The Dickens intertext has provided Griffith's formal innovations with normative status. Eisenstein himself had based his search for the Dickens intertext on prior accounts, including a section from the memoirs of Griffith's wife, Linda Arvidson, who recalls a conversation her husband had had with some unknown person. In this conversation Griffith apparently defended his use of "cutbacks" in the film After Many Years by referring to Dickens: so fundamental did this acknowledgment seem to Eisenstein that he republished the piece in the Russian Griffith volume that he himself edited.[1] ne can surmise that Arvidson's memoir is just a
picturesque reworking of a comment made in Griffith's own article "What I Demand of Movie Stars" (1917), of which Eisenstein was probably unaware. Griffith had said, "I borrowed the 'cutback' from Charles Dickens."[2] Griffith was to make this declaration once more in 1922, which was then quoted in the English-language version of Eisenstein's article.[3] Whatever the circumstances surrounding Eisenstein's acquaintance with Griffith's sources, all this points to his obvious concern to ascertain documentary evidence in support of his own intertextual analysis.
Eisenstein's analysis has crucially influenced our own understanding of Griffith, with Dickens being promoted as practically the primary source of Griffith's inspiration. That Griffith was interested in Dickens is beyond question. Yet we have no reason to believe that Dickens occupies a unique place in the plethora of quotes to be found in Griffith's work. This privileging of Dickens, however, can certainly be seen as symptomatic. It is Dickens, who embodies the principles of narrative development in prose, whose adaptation for cinema has been ascribed to Griffith. Among Griffith's cultural precursors, Dickens has been necessarily singled out as the figure who best corresponds to current notions about Griffith's pioneering role in film.
The history of this recourse to Dickens merits our attention for more than one reason. The cutback, a device legitimized through the precedent of Dickens, had first been worked out in the film After Many Years, which is in fact an adaptation of the Tennyson poem Enoch Arden, to which Griffith would return repeatedly and with an astonishing insistence. The celebrated "cutback" was transposed directly onto the screen from this poem. In accordance with his broader strategy, however, Griffith repressed the immediate source for this montage device, allowing the all too willing Eisenstein to follow Linda's Arvidson's indications and ignore the Tennyson poem. It is possible that Tennyson held less appeal for Eisenstein as a possible precursor of Griffith. Dickens, as a writer central to the classical novelistic tradition, must have seemed more suited to this role.
The case of a quotation taken from one author being ascribed to another is quite indicative. It suggests that the resulting intertextualization has a tendency to gravitate toward the source that best corresponds to subsequent and established notions about how art evolves. The reader-interpreter is more apt to locate the source of a quote in an intertext that closely resembles the film being discussed and that most readily falls into the art historical narrative that is being reconstructed after the fact. In the previous chapter I attempted to show that the most openly declared borrowings are made from sources formally remote from the text being created. I also suggested that these openly declared quotations facilitate the assimilation of foreign texts within cinema as a system. Nevertheless, this subsequent assimilation is far from inevitable. Openly acknowledged bor-
rowings may remain warehoused as part of cinema's unused reserve, only to fall out of subsequent accounts of film history. This reserve might be called "dead stock." Although highly productive at a certain stage, it is nonetheless subsequently ignored by historians as insignificant, ephemeral, to be rejected as not pertinent to our notions about art history. In later studies it is replaced by another intertext that is seen to be historically productive.
As examples of the dead stock of intertextuality in film, one could point to such genres as poetry and song. Although it is well known that many early Russian films were screen adaptations of popular songs, subsequent film history was to deny the song any role in the evolution of the poetics of cinema. The song as intertext was gradually eliminated from consciousness to become a typical case of dead stock.
Something similar happened to poetry. Cinema has evolved along a path dictated by narrative genres, to the point of being popularly perceived as analogous to the novel. As an evolutionary intertext the novel displaced poetry that, in turn, has become, like songs, a form of dead stock. Dickens has taken the place of Tennyson. An intertext's repression can happen, therefore, not only within an individual text but equally within the confines of an entire genre or form of art, within the framework of an architext. This chapter will deal precisely with how a forgotten or repressed "dead" intertext—in this case, poetry—can participate in "inventing" and normalizing new linguistic structures. We will be dealing with certain forms of intertextuality that have had an active role in the genesis of cinematic language.
To begin with, it is worth recalling that in his youth Griffith had dreamed of becoming a poet. His idols had been Browning, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman, who inspired him to write a vast quantity of imitative verse.[4] Apparently, Griffith had identified directly with Poe, seeking to imitate him even in external details, and early on had perceived his own fate as a repetition of Poe's literary career. In his memoirs Griffith describes his own participation in a theater group in the following way: "We had one fellow in our company who was poetically inclined. . . . his face resembled that of Edgar Allan Poe. He had been told this latter fact so often that he now dressed the part and recited poetry by the yard. He was forever quoting homemade rhymes that got him nothing but the Bronx cheer from the boys but made quite a hit with the ladies."[5] In 1909, Griffith made the film Edgar Allan Poe, an account—with a clearly autobiographical subtext—of the poet's relations with various publishers who refused to print his work.
Griffith himself succeeded in publishing only one of his poems, "The Wild Duck" (in Leslie's Weekly, January 10, 1907), and this is practically all we know of his poetic efforts. The publication of this single poem was of
immense significance to Griffith, who later would recall, "I scanned the table of contents . . . but the only thing I could see was 'The Wild Duck.' There it was, as big as an elephant and utterly dwarfing everything else in the list of contents. And there, in type, flaming at me in letters of fire, was my name. My very own name—DAVID WARK GRIFFITH." The letters of fire, which refer to Daniel's prophecy and to the Babylonian theme in Intolerance, serve as a kind of presentiment of Griffith's future cinematic "poem." The importance that attaches to Griffith's "real name" is connected to the pseudonym Lawrence Griffith, which the director had adopted in the theater and during his earlier years in the film industry. The pseudonym served to deflect the theatrical career of the future director onto someone else's life, reserving his real name for his literary output. On marrying Linda Arvidson, Griffith, then still an actor, characteristically noted "writing" as his occupation in the church registry, thus disavowing his actor's persona as false.[6]
Even after acquiring a solid reputation in film, Griffith never abandoned his hope of returning to literature. After the success of the adaptation of Browning's Pippa Passes (1909), a film that had symbolized for its maker the inextricable bond linking his films to poetry, Griffith organized a dinner party in the hope of reviving his literary career, to which he invited several literati, including Sleicher, publisher of "The Wild Duck." Linda Arvidson recalls what Griffith said to Sleicher during the dinner party: "'They [the motion picture studios] can't last. I give them a few years. Where's my play? Since I went into these movies I haven't had a minute to look at a thing I ever wrote. And I went into them because I thought surely I'd get time to write or do something with what I had. . . . Well, anyhow, nobody's going to know I ever did this sort of thing when I'm a famous playwright. Nobody's ever going to know that David W. Griffith, the playwright, was once Lawrence Griffith of the movies.'"[7]
Thus even at the height of his success at Biograph, Griffith saw literature alone as affording prestige and possessing cultural value, a value that in his mind eclipsed not only his dieatrical past but also his present work in cinema. In this light his orientation toward literature, and specifically poetry, even in his earliest films, is readily understood. Griffith wanted to effect a kind of illusory metamorphosis, transforming his films into works made in some other artistic medium. One might surmise that Griffith's symbolic renunciation of his pseudonym amounted to a positive reassessment of his work. To some extent, the cinema would indeed become for Griffith the equivalent of poetry. His recourse to the high literary canon would become a significant means of overcoming a deeply held sense of cultural inferiority. Griffith would note with some pride: "'In succession we made Macbeth, Don Quixote, Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, Kingsley's Sands of
Dee. We even had poetry in the screen titles. We also produced Blot on the Escutcheon and Pippa Passes from the difficult Robert Browning.'"[8]
After the release of Intolerance, Griffith's period of reevaluation was complete. Nothing now remained of the director's longing to be a playwright. In 1917, he declared cinema to be a new stage in the development of poetry and hence essentially its equivalent: "Already it is admitted that as to poetic beauty the Motion Picture entertainment is far ahead of the stage play. Poetry is apparently a lost art in the regular theater, but it is the very life and essence of the motion playhouse. We have staged most of Browning's stories, many of Tennyson's innumerable Biblical and classical fables. Not only beauty but thought is our goal, for the silent drama is peculiarly the birthplace of ideas."[9] Such a declaration betrays Griffith's deeply held conviction that in film he had succeeded in finding both an aesthetic and an intellectual equivalent to literary language. In the 1921 article "Cinema: Miracle of Modern Photography," he quotes a letter whose views he shares completely: "From now on we shall have to divide History into four great epochs: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Age of the Printing Press, and the Age of Cinema."[10] Griffith thus came to understand the cinema as a new progressive stage in the development of culture. The argument Griffith provides to buttress his position merits our attention:
A certain scholar tells us that in viewing a film we perform the easiest of all possible actions at least with respect to the intellectual reactions provoked by the presence of the outside world. The cinematic eye is the most primitive eye that exists. One might almost say that the cinema was born from the slime of the earliest oceans. To view a film is to return to a primitive state. . . . Images were the first means deployed by humans to transcribe their thoughts. We find these primitive thoughts engraved in stone, on the walls of grottos or on the sides of high cliffs. It is as easy for a Finn as for a Turk to grasp the image of a horse. An image is a universal symbol, and a moving image is a universal language. Someone has said that cinema "might solve the problem posed by the Tower of Babel."[11]
Such an "ideology" of cinema, linking the "extralinguistic" status of film to the thought processes of prehistoric man, is well known to us from Eisenstein'swork of the thirties. Yet in Griffith this ideology comes out of a context quite different from Eisenstein's. In the preceding passage he merely adopts certain romantic ideas that were popular particularly among poets, including the nineteenth-century poets Griffith himself cherished. Griffith thus represses poetry with the help of an ideology derived from poetry itself. It is not a coincidence that Griffith's crucial statement about the cinema and the Tower of Babel (which he ascribes to someone else!) can be readily traced back to Whitman's "Song of the
Universal," a poem filled with similar declarations, which Whitman himself had intended to resonate in opposition "to the mad Babel-din."[12]
Insofar as the idea of film as a universal language has an older history than cinema itself, it may be worth making a brief digression to retrieve its genealogy. In America such notions were projected onto poetry during the first half of the nineteenth century by the so-called transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Peabody, and others. The roots of transcendentalism lie in the religious movement of the Unitarians. A definitive influence on the formation of Unitarian doctrine was the figure of John Locke, who had argued in favor of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign.[13] For Locke, our human knowledge of the world derives from experience, while language, as the product of a social contract, cannot be considered a source of knowledge. Locke's theory of language posed serious problems in the field of biblical exegesis and led, at least within Unitarian thinking, to the loss of belief in the sacred texts as the source of some higher knowledge of the world.[14] Where the Bible as text had once stood, the transcendentalists now posited the existence of a universe or nature which they interpreted as a text written directly by God in the unmediated language of nature's metaphors.
This notion of nature as a kind of primordial book can hardly be thought of as unique to the transcendentalists—it belongs to a venerable tradition going back to Plato's Cratylus.[15] According to the transcendentalists, the text of nature could be understood by applying Swedenborg's theory of correspondences. For Swedenborg, between divine or spiritual reality and the material world there exists an intimate connection—a correspondence . God created the book of nature—the world of matter—on the basis of pure correspondences that are waiting to be uncovered. The path of knowledge for the transcendentalists involved a search for correspondences between the spiritual and the material, which could reveal the symbolism of nature, its "natural metaphors." In the United States the idea of nature as a language was probably first formulated by the Swedenborgian Sampson Reed in his work Observations on the Growth of the Mind (1826):
There is a language, not of words, but of things. When this language shall have been made apparent, that which is human will have answered its end; and being as it were resolved into its original elements, will lose itself in nature. The use of language is the expression of our feelings and desires—the manifestation of the mind. But every thing which is, whether animal or vegetable, is full of the expression of that use for which it is designed, as of its own existence. If we did but understand its language, what could our words add to its meaning?[16]
Reed had a profound impact on Emerson, who was to deploy the ideas of Swedenborg and Reed in his celebrated essay "Nature" (1836), where the notion of an "Adamic" language of pure poetry is elaborated:
Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, that the idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as this is the first language, so is it the last.[17]
Griffith naturally knew Emerson. At the time he was making Birth of a Nation, Griffith once mentioned Emerson as one of the greatest figures in world culture, alongside Shakespeare and Goethe (the importance of Goethe for the transcendentalists, and Emerson in particular, should be noted). Griffith's conception of the evolution of culture, from a protolanguage to the universal language of cinema that is in fact nothing more than the original protolanguage revived, doubtless goes back to Emerson. Yet well before Griffith, Whitman had already made this idea fully his own. The great goal of his Leaves of Grass was an Adamic "poem of the world." The Bible Itself was outshone by a new "writing of nature," which the poet had re-created not on sheets of paper but on leaves of grass from the Garden of Eden. The poetry of Whitman is a direct reworking of Emerson's theories. For instance, Whitman's endless lists of things can be understood as the Adamic feat of nominatio rerum. According to Emerson, "The poet is the Namer or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence. . . . The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. . . . This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree."[18] The leaf for Emerson resembles a letter from the primordial alphabet of nature. (Significantly, Emerson borrowed this idea from Goethe's Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen [1790]).[19]
For Emerson and Whitman the resurrection of an Adamic language was also the visible coming together of word and thing, so that the whole world became a collection of words that could be seen and touched, a dictionary of symbols: "Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind. . . . We are symbols and inhabit symbols: workmen, work and took, words and things, birth and death, all are emblems."[20] Griffith fully shared the transcendentalists' view of nature as a huge lexicon of words and symbols. The world was filled with words, he said, recalling his literary efforts: a dictionary alone contained thousands.[21] Elsewhere he wrote,
repeating Emerson and Whitman: "In our drama the trees bend in the breeze and blades of grass gleaming with real dew are significant enough to participate in the action. An attentive director, you see, has the world for his studio."[22]
Emerson's wish to "fasten words again to visible things"[23] acquired a particular significance in the context of cinema, which for Griffith became a means of realizing the cherished Utopia of the transcendentalists—to create a visual poem of the universe. From this arose a decisive equation of language and visual representation: "I think that everyone would agree that cinema can be seen as a mode of expression that is at least equal to the spoken or written word."[24] It is curious to note that Emerson had equated poetry with a magic lantern show (a comparison that would have arisen naturally in a precinematic era): "The poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and progression."[25]
The transformation of cinema into a metaphor for a poetry of the future also might have found some justification in Emerson's polemic with Swedenborg. Emerson had criticized Swedenborg's compilation of a "dictionary" of strict correspondences, according to which a tree, for example, signified perception and the moon stood for faith: "The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. In nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle of matter circulates in turn through every system. The central identity enables any one symbol to express successively all the qualities and shades of real being. In the transmission of the heavenly waters, every hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves."[26] Elsewhere Emerson added: "Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes odd and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive."[27] In opposition to Swedenborg's static, immobile sign Emerson posited the flux of life and the notion of meaning as perpetually "becoming." Hence Emerson's privileging of metaphors involving the movement of water. In Emerson's essay "Art" (1841) the dynamics of life are presented in opposition to the stasis of painting and sculpture precisely in the context of fluid, metamorphosing correspondences. As against the painted canvas, Emerson envisions "the eternal picture which nature paints in the street, with moving men and children, beggars and fine ladies, draped in red and green and blue and gray; long-haired, grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish,—capped and based by heaven, earth, and sea."[28] One year before the publication of Emerson's piece, the image of the living canvas created by passersby made an appearance in Poe's story "The Man of the Crowd," in which the narrator attempts to establish the connection between a fleeting chain of images and the hidden meaning of existence (i.e., he interprets
an analogous vision according to the theory of dynamic correspondences): The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before me prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years."[29]
The invention of film would allow people to reinterpret these statements by Emerson and Poe as prophetic visions of an art to come. The first American efforts to produce a theory of the cinema were clearly allied to these earlier "prophecies." In 1915, Henry MacMahon was among the first to expound the principles of what was a kind of "transcendentalist" poetics of cinema. MacMahon called the cinema a "sign language" that he took to be "iconic," and he asserted, quite in the spirit of the transcendentalists, that film was a "symbolic art": "Every little series of pictures, continuing from four to fifteen seconds, symbolizes a sentiment, a passion, or an emotion." MacMahon also recommended that these symbols be endowed with speed of movement, pointing out that "the position of the motion-picture spectator is that of one who looks out of doors from an open window upon the whole of Life spread as on a panorama, seeing swiftly, understanding swiftly."[30] Characteristically, MacMahon based his theorization on the example of Griffith's films.
Even more indicative in this sense is the American poet Vachel Lindsay's book The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), another "transcendentalist" poetics of cinema that was also the first fundamental attempt at a theory of the cinema. Lindsay knew Griffith and based his theories on Griffith's work. One chapter of Lindsay's book is called "The Picture of Crowd Splendor." For Emerson, the moving crowd had been a transposition onto everyday life of the transcendentalist symbol of flowing water, the everchanging river or sea. Lindsay developed the Emersonian metaphor (which was Whitman's too) as follows: "The shoddiest silent drama may contain noble views of the sea. This part is almost sure to be good. It is a fundamental resource. A special development of this aptitude in the hands of an expert gives the sea of humanity. . . . Only Griffith and his close disciples can do these as well as almost any manager can reproduce the ocean. Yet the sea of humanity is dramatically blood-brother to the Pacific, Atlantic or Mediterranean."[31] We shall have occasion to return to this metaphor and see how it is further elaborated by Griffith himself.
Lindsay's debt to Emerson amounts to an almost word-for-word transposition. Emerson, for example, had introduced the opposition of sculpture and "man in motion": "There is no statue like this living man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture."[32] Lindsay too wrote a chapter entitled "Sculpture-in-Motion," in which he gave an elaborate characterization of the motion picture through the prism of Emerson's dynamism.
In the same year, 1915, Griffith would take up Emerson's metaphor made current by Lindsay to declare that "the most beautiful statue ever sculpted is no more than a caricature of real life when compared to the shifting shadows of a film."[33] This negative myth of sculpture would in part be worked out in the Babylonian episode of Intolerance.
Another major theoretician of early cinema, the Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, also had close links to Griffith.[34] According to Lindsay, Griffith had devised Intolerance to illustrate certain of Münsterberg's theoretical principles.[35] Münsterberg had been invited to Harvard by William James, whose father had been well known for his prominent role in the Swedenborgian church in America. James himself made use of Swedenborg's metaphor of the cyclic movement of water in working out his psychological concept of "stream of thought," which closely resembles Emerson's metaphors of water and the circle.[36]
That Emerson also influenced Münsterberg is beyond question. From Emerson's perspective, the "dynamic symbol" in a work of art undergoes a kind of isolation to which he attributed the greatest importance: "The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. . . . The infant lies in a pleasing trance, but his individual character and his practical power depend on his daily progress in the separation of things, and dealing with one at a time. Love and all the passions concentrate all existence around a single form."[37] Münsterberg saw in the isolation of a closeup an analogue to the psychological process of isolating objects through concentrated attention. He was to attribute a primary aesthetic significance to this psychological capacity to isolate an object: "The work of art shows us the things and events perfectly complete in themselves, freed from all connections which lead beyond their own limits, that is, in perfect isolation."[38] Moreover, Münsterberg also attached an enormous significance to movement: "The events are seen in continuous movement; and yet the pictures break up the movement into a rapid succession of instantaneous impressions. We do not see the objective reality, but a product of our own mind which binds the picture together."[39] The stream of moving images on the screen mimics the stream of thought in James and Swedenborg. But for the mimicry to succeed, all representations must be preliminarily isolated from any links that bind them to objective reality. In his book on film, Münsterberg consistently elaborates a psychological theory of the symbol. This theory, directly connected to transcendentalist aesthetics, principally stresses the dynamism of the symbol and its correspondences.
It is hardly fortuitous that Lindsay, whose deeply held commitment to Swedenborg had been formed during his years in the Swedenborgian circle
in Springfield, held Münsterberg's theory in great esteem and was happy to echo its general position: "I am delighted to have so much common ground with Münsterberg," he wrote to Jane Addams on October 15, 1916.[40] For Lindsay, it was indisputably true that Griffith's films Judith of Bethulia, The Avenging Conscience, and Intolerance on the one hand served as models of "good Epic poetry" and on the other "confirm[ed] some of the speculations of Münsterberg's Photoplay: A Psychological Study, his last book."[41]
Griffith, of course, was well aware of these early attempts at theoretical synthesis. Lindsay tells us that Griffith had specifically invited him to the premiere of Intolerance in addition to buying a hundred copies of Lindsay's book to hand out to his studio employees as a working manual.[42] While making Intolerance, Griffith had quite consciously made use of the works of Münsterberg and Lindsay (including Lindsay's theory of the hieroglyph). Nonetheless, Griffith's first efforts at applying the poetics of transcendentalism to film in fact precede the appearance of these works. Indeed, I would suggest that it was precisely these early efforts on Griffith's part that served to draw the attention of theoreticians toward the cinema. The most significant experiments that Griffith was to make in this area involved the screen adaptation of a series of lyric poems on the sea. Among these works, made during Griffith's years at Biograph, are three versions of the Tennyson poem Enoch Arden: After Many Years (1908), The Unchanging Sea (1910), and Enoch Arden (1911). Mention might be made of a fourth version, entitled Enoch Arden (1915) but rereleased as Calamitous Elopement, and directed by Christy Cabanne under Griffith's supervision.
Enoch Arden provided the vehicle through which Griffith was first able to realize the device of parallel montage. Griffith had already applied the principal element of this montage, the cutback, in 1908, then barely five months into his directing career (in the film After Many Years). It was this feature that Griffith would later justify by invoking Dickens.
The Tennyson poem recounts the fate of a shipwrecked sailor. His wife, Annie Lee, awaits her husband for many years by the seashore. Richard Schickel has commented on Griffith's adaptation as follows: "The film lacked a chase, in itself a considerable novelty, and indeed it contained very little action of any sort. Moreover, he risked a pair of parallel shots: Annie Lee at the seaside, visualizing her shipwrecked husband on his desert isle (how she knew he was on an island was never explained); Enoch on that barren strand, visualizing the long-gone comforts of home."[43]
These "risky parallel shots" involve the unexpected sequencing of Annie Lee by the seashore and Enoch Arden stranded on a faraway island. We are dealing here with a conscious linguistic anomaly that brings
together camera shots that are spatially at some remove from each other.[44] This anomaly nonetheless finds a convincing motivation in Tennyson himself, whose poem contains the "visionary" scenes that interested Griffith. The Tennyson poem functions as an intertext motivating the linguistic innovations of the film and thereby removing the reasons for Schickel's perplexity. It is important to note that a full explanation of the film's linguistic obscurity is provided by the literary source alone: the film itself fails to do so and remains, at least in this episode, somewhat unclear.
In the Tennyson poem Annie Lee receives a vision while trying to tell her fortune with the aid of the Bible, just as her hand touches the line that reads "under a palm-tree." Thus, in Tennyson, the vision is motivated by a book, the Holy Writ (cf. the scene from Griffith's Home, Sweet Home, discussed in chapter 2, in which the Bible stimulates Payne to see a vision). Tearing herself away from the Bible, Annie Lee suddenly sees "her Enoch sitting on a height, / Under a palm-tree, over him the Sun."[45] The vision is then disturbed by the sound of wedding bells that gradually draws her back to reality.
Enoch's vision is given in a more discursive form. On the seashore he hears the constant roar of the waves and the wind rustling in the foliage. Gradually the sea's dazzling gleam induces a kind of hypnotic effect:
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise—but no sail.
There often as he watched or seemed to watch,
So still, the golden lizard on him paused,
A phantom made of many phantoms moved
Before him haunting him, or he himself
Moved haunting people, things and places, known
Far in a darker isle beyond the line;
The babes, their babble, Annie, the small house,
. . .
And the low moan of the leaden-coloured seas.
Once likewise, in the ringing of his ears,
Though faintly, merrily—far and far away—
He heard the pealing of his parish bells . . .[46]
Tennyson's poem motivates Enoch's vision by making it the physiological effect of a prolonged contemplation of the sea's immobile surface. The sea becomes a mirror revealing visionary sights, a role that corresponds readily to its acknowledged hypnotic effects.[47] Curiously, in all these ver-
sions of Enoch Arden, Griffith places Annie Lee by the seashore just before her vision, eliminating Tennyson's scene of fortune-telling by the Bible. Her vision is instead shown to be the result of a concentrated contemplation of the sea.
This episode from Tennyson was of particular importance to Griffith, perhaps because the sea is a motif central to the romantic poets whom the Swedenborgians particularly cherished. Still earlier Winckelmann had written of a poet who "lies on the shore of a sea, in which ideas and feelings at times undulate here or there, and at times come to rest upon its mirror surface."[48] In the Anglophone world, the persistent conjunction of the sea with visionary motifs goes back to Coleridge and particularly to Thomas De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium Eater became the chief source for an entire mythology of visions, dreams, and reveries assimilated by romanticism.
De Quincey describes the insistent presence of water in his hallucinations: "The waters gradually changed their character—from translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they became seas and oceans." He then describes how the face of his lost beloved Ann (cf. Annie Lee) appears through a vision of the sea: "Now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to reveal itself; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens."[49]
Charles Baudelaire wrote a detailed commentary on De Quincey, at one point pausing specifically to note the hallucinatory power of water: "Water then was the focus of an obsession. We have already remarked, in our study of hashish, the mind's amazing predilection for the liquid element and its mysterious seductions. Have we not reported a unique relationship between the two stimulants, at least in their effects upon the imagination."[50] Baudelaire directly links the effect of narcotic and "aqueous" visions to Swedenborg's theory of correspondences, and points out that visions alone have the power to realize the sought-for fusion of word and thing: "And grammar, even arid grammar, is then endowed with the evocative power of sorcery; words are reborn, clothed in flesh and blood. . . . And music, that other language so cherished by idlers, or by those intellectuals who seek from it a repose amid their varied toil, unfolds the capabilities of your intellect and recites for you the poem of your life; it enters within you, and you mingle with it."[51]
In America the transcendentalist symbol of the sea was elaborated in the poem "The Ocean" by Christopher Pearce Cranch (1813–1892). Cranch describes "Spirits bathing in the sea of Deity" and contemplating the waters as "Symbols of the Infinite."[52] Also present here is the image of the sea as the cradle and grave of humankind, an image later elaborated by Whitman. At the same time as Cranch, the notion of water as the primary locus of correspondences was developed by one of the leading tran-
scendentalists, Henry David Thoreau, who in Walden describes water as a mirror that reflects the air: "It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky."[53] Swedenborg's idea of worlds being duplicated, with the sky reflected in the world below, is centered on the motif of water. More than once Thoreau speaks of dissolving in the ocean; he writes of walks on the shore of the "resounding sea, determined to get it into us. We wished to associate with the ocean."[54] For Thoreau, "the seashore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world."[55] In reflecting the sky, the sea creates an infinite perspective and becomes the ideal place of entry into the transcendental world. It is offered to humans as a "window" to divine visions.[56]
Yet it was Whitman, Griffith's favorite poet, who made the motif of the sea essential to his work. In his recollections Whitman formulated his relation to the sea as follows. "Even as a boy, I had the fancy, the wish, to write a piece, perhaps a poem, about the sea-shore—that suggesting, dividing line, contact, junction, the solid marrying the liquid—that curious, lurking something, (as doubtless every objective form finally becomes to the subjective spirit,) which means far more than its mere first sight, grand as that is—blending the real and ideal, and each made portion of the other."[57] Whitman spoke of his poetic mission as the project of creating "a book expressing this liquid, mystic theme."[58]Leaves of Grass was in many ways to be such a book. Roger Asselineau considers Leaves of Grass to be an apotheosis of water, where "life is an irresistible current which circulates through all things."[59] The leading scholar of American romanticism, F. O. Matthiessen, rightly points to the fact that the sea became for Whitman a metaphor for poetry, with the rhythm of the waves imitating the cadences of verse: "Its verses are the liquid, billowy waves,. . . hardly any two exactly alike in size or measure (metre), never having the sense of something finished and fixed, always suggesting something beyond."[60]
For our purposes this identification of the sea with poetry is crucial, but perhaps no less significant is the motif, constant in Whitman and among the Swedenborgians, of a heavenly mirror as the site where many images are combined and reflected. Also significant is the idea of the shoreline as the place of "division, contact and unification." In Whitman's poem "On the Beach at Night Alone" we read:
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song,
. . .
A vast SIMILITUDE interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets,
asteroids,
All the substances of the same, and all that is spiritual upon the same,
All distances of place, however wide,
All distances of time—all inanimate forms,
All Souls—all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different
worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes—the fishes, the brutes,
All men and women—me also;
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages;
All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe, or any globe;
All lives and deaths—all of the past, present, future;
This vast similitude spans them . . .[61]
In Suspiria De Profundis De Quincey recalls a woman who in her childhood fell into a river and sunk to the riverbed. This immersion in water had a strange effect on her: "Immediately a mighty theater expanded within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, every act, every design of her past life, lived again, arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a coexistence. . . . Her consciousness became omnipresent at one moment to every feature in the infinite review."[62] Contact with water thus provokes a shift from a consecutive chain to a corresponding but simultaneous picture, that is, it carries latent within itself the elements of a parallel montage.
There exists one other literary text that in its own way elaborates the scenario we have seen in Enoch Arden, reflecting equally the ambiguous character of Griffith's montage. This is Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's story "Claire Lenoir" (1887). Here the dying Claire Lenoir dreams of her deceased husband on the shore of a tropical island in the middle of the ocean (the experience of separation is thus here pushed to the point of irreversibility). "He was standing, alone, among the deserted rocks, looking afar, at the sea, as if expecting someone."[63] After Lenoir's death, the story's hero, Tribulat Bonhomet, studies the retina of her eyes and uncovers the clear contours of a picture (or cinematic?) frame containing the startling image of a solitary man by the seashore. The astonished Bonhomet comes to the following conclusion: "The VISION had really to be outside, to some imponderable degree, in a living fluid perhaps, in order to be refracted the way it did on your clairvoyant pupils."[64]
In Villiers's story a vision has the power to materialize itself when it is seen by the eyes of a visionary, practically assuming the form of a photographic imprint. The vision has the capacity to bring together spaces that are absolutely heterogeneous. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the shoreline also functions here as an essential border between distinct worlds, becoming a persistent attribute of such visions. The sea as medium of the universal connectedness of things and creator of a universal language—a motif common enough in romantic poetry and philosophy—creates an intertext that throws adequate light on the meaning of one of
Griffith's montage figures. The shoreline in Enoch Arden becomes for Annie Lee the line of contact with and separation from her husband, serving as the junction line connecting two images in a montage.
In Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," the image of the sea is superimposed onto a singing bird, which creates a kind of double register. Whitman exclaims: "Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations, / Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me."[65]
Christopher Collins has called Whitman's poetic method one of "resonating correspondence" and derives the production of sound in Whitman's poetry from the effect of a double echo.[66] Curiously, in the Tennyson poems quoted earlier, both visions are accompanied by the chiming of bells, and in one case by the noise of the sea superimposed onto the sound of the bells. The vision in Enoch Arden seems to be produced by this "corresponding reverberation." Another writer who attributed a special significance to echoes within a theory of correspondences was Thoreau. In De Quincey the echo unfailingly stimulates visions. It appears to him as the sonorous equivalent to the hallucinations he sees mirrored on the sea's surface, when certain lines and contours emerge through the cluster of reflections, creating a kind of palimpsest, made visible through the limpid mass of water. In the vision of the dead woman expounded in the essay "Vision of Sudden Death" De Quincey elaborates the motif of bells and speaks of "funeral bells from the desert seas" and of "echoes of fugitive laughter, mixing with the ravings and choir-voices of the angry sea" as they descend from the heavens to the rippling surface of the sea.[67] In the chapter "The Palimpsest of the Human Brain" from Suspiria De Profundis, De Quincey again writes of "the echoes of fugitive laughter, mixing with the ravings and choir-voices of an angry sea."[68]
The generation of visions from the reverberations of the sea is characteristic of the romantic literature oriented toward Swedenborg even outside Anglo-American culture. In Balzac's work, which had been strongly influenced by Swedenborg, we find the story "L'Enfant maudit" whose hero, Étienne, establishes a unique form of contact with the sea: "The sea and the sky recounted admirable poems to him. . . . He had finally ended by divining in all these movements of the sea his intimate link with the wheels of a heavenly mechanism, and he saw nature in its harmonious entirety."[69] As a result, the contemplation of the ocean makes Étienne privy to a kind of superhuman knowledge, and he is able to see an image of his mother in the clouds above the sea: "He spoke to her, and they truly communicated through heavenly visions; on certain days, he heard her voice, he admired her smile, and there were finally some days when he had not lost her at all!"[70]
Something quite analogous can be found in Griffith. The famous cutback in After Many Years, a moment of great importance for Griffith, can be understood as being the first attempt at creating a cinematic analogy to the
transcendentalist poetic text. More specifically, it is also the first bold attempt at a visual reconstruction of an Adamic language on the basis of correspondences at sea—the language of superior vision and knowledge, potentially the universal language of all humanity.
From 1910 Griffith began to travel regularly to the Pacific Coast in southern California (the future site of Hollywood), and the sea became a constant feature of his films. In California, adaptations of "maritime poetry" became more common and more fashionable over time. As early as 1912, outside Biograph, there were two film versions of de la Motte Fouquet's Undine and one of Sir Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake; in 1913, Heine's Lorelei was made into a film, and so on right through to the beginning of the 1920s, when Kingsley's Unchanging Sea was filmed in 1921, many years after Griffith's own version of the same text. These poetic "seascapes" became the medium of a new film language, and Griffith's films played a special role in its making.
Let us now look at one of the most significant films from Griffith's own series of films set at sea, The Sands of Dee (1912), an adaptation of an eponymous poem by Charles Kingsley. Griffith turned to Kingsley twice for inspiration: first in 1910, when he adapted the poem "The Three Fishers" under the title The Unchanging Sea, and second in 1912. Both adaptations deploy the theme of the sea in a similar way, with plots that converge around some kind of catastrophe at sea.
The first and last stanzas of "The Sands of Dee" read as follows:
O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee;
The western wind was wild and dank with foam,
. . .
And all alone went she.
They rolled her in across the rolling foam,
The cruel crawling foam,
The cruel hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea:
But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee.[71]
Griffith's film involves sixty-five montage shots and an uncomplicated melodramatic plot. The girl Mary has an admirer named Bobby but is seduced by a visiting artist. After she marries the artist, it is revealed that he has another wife. Expelled from her family home by her father, Mary wanders onto a deserted shore and commits suicide. Bobby discovers her body, buffeted by waves. In the film's last frame, Mary's ghostly silhouette appears on the sea's horizon.
The film's plot displays a considerable autonomy with respect to the poem. Its development is marked by repeated interruptions in the form of intertitles quoting the Kingsley poem, so that the plot intrigue emerges as a kind of narrative link between several key insertions of poetic text. The film begins with an intertitle asking Mary to "go and call the cattle home" across the sands of Dee. In this line we find embedded a loose anagram of the word echo: "And call the cattle home." Here not only is the word "echo" approximated twice, but the very superimposition of repetitive patterns is itself imitated. The tone of the film is thus set at the very beginning by a "resonant reverberation." It is no coincidence that this sound element, which gets oddly visualized at the end of the film, is connected to the River Dee. During high tide, the River Dee would suddenly turn back on its course and rise up with an infernal roar and terrifying speed. Here is a typical quote from De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which compares the narrator's rendezvous with a woman to the growing uproar of the River Dee and the sea clashing downstream: "Her countenance naturally served as a mirror to echo and reverberate my own feelings, consequently my own horror (horror without exaggeration it was), at a sudden uproar of tumultuous sounds rising clamorously ahead."[72]
The film has two close-ups, both of an incoming wave. The first time, the wave appears before an intertitle, which describes how the rising tide slowly approaches Mary on the sand. Then we see her body on the wave. These three shots take us to the film's concluding moment, when Bobby carries Mary out of the water and Mary's weeping parents approach her body. As it hits the shore, the wave symbolizes the finality of separation, as well as the possibility of an imminent unification. At the very outset this motif appears as part of the plot intrigue, but it is then repeated in a way that is in greater consonance with the spirit of transcendentalist poetics. two fishermen on the shore listen intently, as the intertitle explains that even now men at sea can hear Mary calling the cows home. In the distance we see the blurred figure of Mary, who is shouting something. The wave reaches the sand. We now see that the heroine makes her final appearance as the pure visualization of an echo. We are once more dealing with a vision at sea manifesting itself out of the reverberations of sound, the rhythmic beat of the poetic text and the steady crash of waves.
R. Tommasino, in an analysis of The Sands of Dee, has pointed out an obvious anomaly here. At the film's end the fishermen hear Mary (this is emphasized by the caption also) but cannot see her. The phantomlike figure of Mary shouting, Tommasino concludes, is visible to us alone as the film's audience, a visual rendering of an invisible echo.[73] From the perspective of contemporary narrative strategy, this episode strikes one as a real anomaly, while the vision that befalls Enoch's wife, Annie Lee, can be read as a classical crosscutting. Yet it is possible that in the second decade of the twenti-
eth century both episodes were linguistically equivalent: both reenact the appearance of the symbol from a corresponding reverberation. In this sense the repetition of the film's ending acquires a certain significance, the film ends first on a narrative level and then on the plane of transcendent meaning. Both endings are separated from the main text by symbolic planes of waves (the film's final plane occupies a place symmetrically related to the first title, which introduces the theme of the echo and is thus structurally its equivalent). The first ending provides a key to reading the second (the separation and reunion) and seems to be linked to what Swedenborg would have called the material world, while the second ending is connected to the corresponding spiritual world.
The Sands of Dee and Enoch Arden show us two ways of normalizing linguistic anomalies. In the first instance, the normalization takes place by means of a literary intertext (the Kingsley poem). In the second instance, the alternating montage can be clarified by referring to a large group of texts deriving from the transcendentalist tradition, but this clarification itself becomes superfluous, since the subsequent evolution of film normalized Griffith's device as the classical form of montage. In the latter case, the literary intertext thus performs a different function. It explains the genesis of a specific figure of montage, its earliest meaning, whose origins no longer appear anomalous. This intertextuality can be eliminated by the subsequent tradition, and this itself can be crucial to the history of cinema. To a large extent film history can successfully integrate cases of anomaly or quotation into a linear pattern of cinematic evolution that appears logical. Intertextuality, then, is replaced in later historiographies of film by an analysis of the evolution of cinematic language, which is understood narrowly to mean the responses of a director to the ongoing challenges posed by film narrative.
Yet the film version of the Kingsley poem, in which the visual image is "born" from an auditory reverberation, shows that some figures of cinematic language, particularly those that appear somewhat unorthodox from today's perspective, are not necessarily intended to resolve narrative dilemmas. They can also, for example, be the result of a search for forms of representation that provide equivalents to the poetic voice (the Swedenborgian tradition relevant here generally equates sound and visual representation). Poetic vocalization, the reverberation of sounds, and the anagram all can function as real intertexts for cinematic figures.
A poetico-philosophical intertext can also throw new light on Griffith's narrative strategies, which are far less orthodox than is commonly assumed. In my analysis of The Sands of Dee, for example, I suggested that two layers of film are present, a kind of double plot, one of which develops on the level of a melodrama, the other in some "spiritual" dimension. A legitimate question thus arises: How are these two levels of narrative connected?
If we look at the story line of Griffith's films at their simplest level, we uncover certain common features that tend to escape detection and yet reveal the general direction of Griffith's own evolution. As early as 1909, in the film The Drive for a Life, Griffith makes use of a special kind of alternating montage, which he will then employ in many films (including Intolerance ). The Drive for a Life is a classic melodrama in which a woman, abandoned by her fiancé, sends poisoned chocolates to his new bride. The film's central episode is structured on two levels of plot: in the first, the fiancé, learning of the woman's intentions, rushes to his bride to prevent a catastrophe; in the second, the bride, suspecting nothing, receives the chocolates, removes their wrapping, and prepares to taste the candy. Griffith's technique of montage works by interrupting the action of each level at the most dramatic moment, irrespective of whether it is completed (this kind of montage is today utterly normal). Tom Gunning has observed that the narrative traditions prevalent in cinema before Griffith's The Drive for a Life had tried to re-create the effect of continuous action, as evidenced in films with frequent chase scenes: if the individual being pursued moved out of a frame in the previous scene, then he or she would necessarily appear in the next. Griffith, by contrast, violates this continuity (whose elaboration he is normally credited with) by splitting the action into numerous arbitrary fragments.
In this way the plots of this and other films by Griffith are constituted by two heroes who have moved closer by the end, but whose movement is constantly and artificially violated by montage. The dramatic collision at the heart of many of Griffith's films is rooted in classical melodrama: people are brought together and then moved apart, yet their psychological bond survives spatial separation or the distantiation of montage. The sundering of planes at the film's climax serves to underline the drama inherent in this scenario, which is of immense importance to Griffith's film technique. The very constitution of the narrative through montage reflects the same range of ideological concerns as those treated in Enoch Arden and The Sands of Dee. Yet in The Drive for a Life these concerns are absorbed into the plot. The success of such absorption can be measured by the quality of the montage devices Griffith deploys, all of which seem completely hackneyed today. The transcendental layer of his films can thus be felt only where one senses a linguistically illogical moment or a visual anomaly.
It should be said that Griffith did not invent these visionary scenes: they go back to a tradition popularized in the nineteenth-century culture of spectacle by the magic lantern shows. An early example of a theatrical vision can be found in The Frozen Deep (1857) by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, in which a traveler to the North Pole, warming himself by a campfire, suddenly sees the sweetheart he left behind at home.[74] The
similarity between this scene and others found later in Griffith is obvious. Visions in the theater were staged through a transparent veil suspended as a backdrop. In the early cinema of Méliès or Porter (The Life of an American Fireman, Uncle Tom's Cabin ), visions were depicted as if hovering in the clouds, often appearing on the uppermost section of the screen, or isolated in a special circle or frame. This appearance of visions in the form of masking gives them a certain affinity with shots of eavesdropping or spying, which were also depicted in frames (depicting a keyhole or eyeglass, etc.). These shots of eavesdropping, like visions, created an insuperable distance between the hero and the object of his (often sexual) desire.[75] In all cases, visions would be delineated sharply against the broader narrative flow, and their distance from the viewing subject would serve only to provide this process of delineation with an obvious motivation. Sometimes the visions were presented as frozen tableaux vivants, in a stark contrast to the mobility of cinematic representation. These frozen images began to appear in Griffith's work as early as 1909 (in The Corner of Wheat ). Visions furnished the most elementary means of introducing the remote and unreachable—be it as an erotic object or a transcendental one—into a world marked by spatial proximity and material concreteness. In this sense Griffith's use of visions is nothing out of the ordinary. What is unusual is Griffith's deployment of montage in constructing these visions in his films.
The earliest cinematic work in which Griffith was involved, Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker (March 1908), was probably filmed by Wallace McCutcheon, with Griffith, not yet a director, providing the screenplay. The film has one shot that seems astonishing for its time. The plot involves the usual melodrama: a gravely ill woman and her children have been threatened with eviction. The woman's little girl sets out to raise money from various charitable organizations but is able to borrow only from an old Jew, the pawnbroker Isaacs. In consistently following the movements of the little girl, the entire film develops with an unbroken continuity of narration. Yet suddenly, when the girl finds herself in an office and reads a piece of paper given to her, the action is interrupted and we see her mother, gasping in a fit of coughing and then falling exhausted onto her bed. Further on the action continues from the point at which it was interrupted. The shot of the mother cannot be reconciled with the temporal development of the film, but it lacks any of the familiar markers of a vision (there are no veils, frozen movements, masked frames, or other conventional signifiers of a shift in narrative mode). Eileen Bowser, struck by the strangeness of the film's montage, has in fact concluded that we are dealing with a vision, but her conclusion is based primarily on the anomalous nature of the montage used in this episode. Unable to integrate the shot into the story line,
Bowser—who here differs little from the "naive" viewer—feels compelled to relate the shot to a more abstract level of the narrative, the realm of visions, the idealized sphere of plot construction.
Historians of early cinema have studied these narratively unintegrated shots—the visionary scenes, and those of spying and eavesdropping—to conclude that they are linked to the theatrical tradition, the culture of spectacle in which showtime was not yet story time. The collapse of the show system and the beginnings of a narrative system have been traced back to 1906.[76] André Gaudreault has even felt compelled to introduce the distinction between narrator and demonstrator, as two divergent authorial instances in cinema.[77]
These visions, related more to spectacle than narrative, in fact behave exactly like quotes, isolated within a text by their heightened representational quality (they are presented by a demonstrator rather than by a storyteller). They fall out of the general process of film mimesis, reproducing those phenomena discussed in chapter 1 in connection with Antonin Artaud. When in 1933 Artaud wrote of his disappointment with cinema, he maintained that the new art did not reproduce life but rather showed "stumps of objects, segments of views, unfinished puzzles made up of things that it combined together forever."[78] Artaud here seems to be projecting onto the entire body of cinema the poetics of those frozen visions unincorporated into the filmic text that form such a palpable part of early cinema.
In negating the legacy of theater, Griffith had to find a new strategy for integrating such unresolved puzzles into a film's narrative montage, to replace the theatrical intertext that had served the same function. This is why the unintegrated shots—so characteristic of Griffith, to the point of typifying his artistic ideology—remain so ambiguous. The transcendental plane is not excluded from the story line as before but is inserted into it with all its semantic instability. In this way two layers of the film are separated (as anomalies created by montage) but also brought together. The melodramatic theme of unity and separation is thus further strengthened in the partial division of the film into a transcendental and a "real" level of narration.
Let us now go back and analyze the intertext underlying Griffith's linguistic innovations. The close links between The Sands of Dee and Enoch Arden are further confirmed by a fact that to this day has remained unexplained. The second version of Enoch Arden, entitled The Unchanging Sea, was declared by Griffith to be an adaptation of the Kingsley poem "The Three Fishers."[79] Significantly, while "The Three Fishers" has almost nothing in common with the plot of Enoch Arden, it does to a considerable degree rehearse the plot of The Sands of Dee: three fishermen go to sea, and their wives and children await their return, but in vain. Only when the tide
recedes do the sands reveal three dead bodies. That Kingsley's poetry has profound links to Tennyson's Enoch Arden is further confirmed by the frequent appearance in Kingsley of the motif of a "corresponding vision," and its privileging as the essential element of a new universal language, a kind of protosymbol of cinema.
Nonetheless, considerable differences in meaning also separate Enoch Arden from The Sands of Dee. Enoch Arden has a happy ending, in which husband and wife are reunited, whereas the heroine of The Sands of Dee dies tragically. The poetic tradition connected with the sea treats death in such a way as to allow for a characteristic duality of transcendent and earthly realms (as when someone singing unites with a spirit that inhabits the heavenly spheres). Death thus creates the tension between two realms necessary for the generation of correspondences.
In romantic poetry, especially Poe, the sound of the surf begins to be read systematically as the "words" no more or never more . These "words," says Poe, emerge on the line dividing sea and shore, which is also the line dividing two metaphysical realms (cf. Whitman's idea of sundering and reuniting). In Poe's sonnet "Silence," which is something of an illustration of the idea of correspondences, we read:
There are some qualities—some incorporate things—
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence —sea and shore—
Body and Soul. . . .
(And further on Poe clarifies: "his name's 'No More.'")[80]
Poe repeats the same motif in "To One in Paradise," a poem that frequently echoes Griffith's adaptation of The Sands of Dee (in it the poet addresses a woman who is dead, possibly drowned).
"No more—no more—no more—"
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore).[81]
The same ideas can also be found in "To Zante":
How many visions of a maiden that is
No more—no more upon thy verdant slopes!
No more! alas, that magical sad sound
Transforming all![82]
The poets Shelley, Tennyson, Cheevers, Lowell, Longfellow, and others had all used the phrase "never more" or "no more" in analogous contexts. But it was Whitman who fixed the interpretation of this "magical sad sound / Transforming all" as the sea's echo, the reverberations of the surf;
In the poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," the "thousand echoes" of the surf whisper to the poet:
never more shall I cease perpetuating you
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me. . . .[83]
It seems likely that Whitman's poem is somehow connected to The Sands of Dee, since both texts involve an appeal to the beloved who is no more: "Loud! Loud! Loud! / Loud I call to you, my love!"[84] But the echo of the surf brings back just one word in reply—"death."
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,
Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word Death;
And again Death—ever Death, Death, Death,
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird, nor like my arous'd child's heart,
But edging near, as privately for me, rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears, and laving me softly all over,
Death, Death, Death, Death, Death.[85]
In this way, the shift from the optimism of Enoch Arden's ending to the tragic finale of The Sands of Dee can be understood as the assimilation of the romantic poetic topos of the sea. Typically, Griffith would never again return to Tennyson after 1911. The persistent semantic connection between the sea and death allows the sea to widen its range of symbolic reference. It is not just the reverberating source of visions, a semantic cluster linking space, time, the living and the dead; in other words, it is not just the generator of a poetic montage constructed on the principle of correspondence. The sea is the bearer of a natural language, yet its voice can utter only the same few words unceasingly—"Never more" and "Death." The fluid locus of endless transformations gradually becomes a hieroglyph, drawing into its primordial, Adamic nature the semantic, auditory, and iconic properties of the sign, although, unlike language, it never freezes them into a fixed state.
The view of the world as a book written in hieroglyphics was typical of the American romantics. Emerson, Poe, Cranch in his "Correspondences," and others all write about the hieroglyphics of nature.[86] Even in his early films, Griffith had begun to develop a system of symbolic meanings, a sui generis iconological structure. But this attraction to hieroglyphics acquired a real meaning for Griffith and his work only after he became acquainted with Vachel Lindsay's book The Art of the Moving Picture .[87] This book expounds a Swedenborgian and hieroglyphic theory of contemporary art, instantiated primarily through references to Griffith's
own work, in which Lindsay found the cinematic model he had been seeking.
The visionary dimension was of immense importance to Lindsay's theory of hieroglyphics, insofar as it was a means of realizing the Swedenborgian link between material form and a higher meaning that the artist-prophet glimpses in revelation. The notion that a hieroglyph's meaning could be grasped only through revelation was proposed long before by Emerson: "For the interpretation of hieroglyphs we were asked not to cipher or calculate but simply to depend upon 'Reason' or spontaneous moments of inward revelation when answers come effortlessly and astonishingly clear."[88] Endowing the film director with the role of a "prophet-magician" who is able to see through to the inner meaning of the universe, Lindsay wrote: "People who do not see visions and dream dreams in the good Old Testament sense have no right to leadership in America. I would prefer photoplays filled with such visions and oracles to the state papers written by 'practical men.'"[89] Later Lindsay would return to further elaborate on this theme in a commentary on the work of Swedenborg's greatest adepts: "They were unwilling to see their thoughts as splendid visions in the air. The most ordinary movie magnate goes further into this than Howells and Henry and William James. Swedenborg should be re-written in Hollywood. We want to know the meaning of all those hieroglyphics that they are thrusting upon us, for the present is as unsolved, in many phases, as the hieroglyphic ruins of pre-historic Mexico and South America. The American mind has become an overgrown forest of unorganized pictures."[90]
In 1914, Griffith released one of his most interesting films, The Avenging Conscience, an adaptation of two works by Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "Annabel Lee." Griffith filled the film with a large number of visions, bringing together the experience he had accumulated in Enoch Arden and The Sands of Dee. Poe's "Annabel Lee" tells Griffith's favorite story of a young woman who dies and is buried by the seashore:
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side,
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.[91]
But the opposition of earth and sea is further enriched in Poe's text by a third element—the sky, peopled by "seraphs of heaven." In his film, Griffith introduces a suicide scene absent in Poe, in which Annabel hurls herself off a cliff into the sea. The film's hero (a youth who dreams of becoming a writer, passionately involved in Poe's writing and apparently modeled on Griffith himself) is haunted by visions and hallucinations. The film's
key episode is presented as the hero's dream. The Avenging Conscience thus seems to illustrate Poe's maxim: "Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?"[92]
Poe's "Dreamland" is situated at the point where sky and water meet:
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging unto skies of fire . . .[93]
The film contains a wide range of celestial visions represented with a naiveté worthy of Swedenborg. Leona Rasmussen Phillips tells us that the cameraman Billy Bitzer "photographed the skies—in order to get many shots of various types of clouds: Big, white, puffy, whipped cream clouds, and then the opposite type: long, thick, dirty, black, menacing clouds. The different skies were used as a background for angels (the white clouds) and demons (the dark clouds)."[94]
Vachel Lindsay was also to describe these visions in rapturous tones. There are three of Annabel Lee: in two "she is shown in a darkened passageway, all in white, looking out of a window upon the moonlit sky," and in another she is "mourning on her knees in her room."[95] Lindsay also describes more somber visions featuring a man murdered by his nephew. He is particularly enthusiastic about the celestial visions at the end of the film, with its animals, angels, and Cupid and Psyche hovering in the clouds.
It is worth noting in passing that Griffith maintains in The Avenging Conscience the same dualism of worlds that was already evident in The Sands of Dee. The entire symbolic plane of death, with its panoply of Gothic horrors, is relegated to the realm of dreams and visions. The film's mundane plot intrigue is resolved happily enough, yet finds a more tragic visionary analogy that becomes a repository for occult meanings.
For Lindsay such a structure is ideal for creating a cinematic form of hieroglyphics, thanks to its capacity to elaborate metaphor into a bifurcating plot. Lindsay, not coincidentally, discovers real hieroglyphs in the film: a spider devouring a fly, and ants devouring a spider.[96] Lindsay gives examples of several Egyptian hieroglyphs that he believes have passed readily into the cinema. Among them is the hieroglyph of a duck that unexpectedly echoes Griffith's own poem "The Wild Duck," a poem about a duck that, unable to resist the cold wind, perishes at sea. Lindsay's interpretation of the hieroglyph is close to Griffith's (something that might have astonished the latter): "In the motion pictures this bird, a somewhat z-shaped animal, suggests the finality of Arcadian peace."[97]
More important, however, is the fact that scattered in Lindsay's book are several elements that will reappear in one way or another in Griffith's film Intolerance. Among these elements, the most significant is the notion,
persistent in Lindsay, of the city as hieroglyph. Lindsay's fantasy had transformed his native Springfield into a mystical cipher; San Francisco too become a visionary space. The very appearance of a film industry in California is transformed by Lindsay into a prophetic moment. "The California photo playwright can base his Crowd picture upon the city-worshipping mobs of San Francisco."[98] The cities of America were always for Lindsay signs of yet other cities, hieroglyphs, metaphors of a beyond. 'The principal towns of Southern Illinois are Cairo, Karnak, and Thebes, and the swamp-bordered river moves southward past Memphis, Tennessee, named for the town of King Menes, first King of Egypt. There is a parallel between the psychology and history of the Mississippi delta and the famous delta of the old Nile . . . And I beg all my readers to look into Swedenborg's theory of Egyptian hieroglyphics."[99]
According to Swedenborg, the earthly city corresponds to a heavenly city in the spiritual realm; there the dwelling places of the angels were organized "in the form of a city, with avenues, streets, and public squares exactly like cities on earth."[100] In the United States this idea gained a certain currency: Joseph Hudnut, for example, wrote of an "invisible city":"Beneath the visible city laid out in patterns of streets and houses there lies an invisible city laid out in patterns of idea and behavior."[101] Lindsay was close to this idea:"The signs in the street and the signs in the skies / Shall make a new zodiac."[102] In Arthur Schlesinger's popular book The Rise of the City (1910), American cities were directly interpreted as analogues to symbolic cities of the past:"The City had come, and it was clear to all that it had come to stay. Was its mission to be that of a new Jerusalem or ancient Babylon?"[103]
Griffith's Babylon in Intolerance was most likely conceived of in this spirit, as a kind of hieroglyphic city (Intolerance is also based on the opposition of Babylon and Jerusalem). In 1923, in Memphis, Tennessee—a hieroglyphic city that toponymically combines Egypt and America—Lindsay published a poem entitled "Babylon, Babylon, Babylon the Great," with a picture of the city as a kind of hieroglyphic epigraph".[104] Lindsay's poem is clearly connected to Griffith's film, which it freely reinterprets.
At one point in Lindsay's Art of the Moving Picture, we find a screenplay describing a kind of dream that is meant to take place in a phantasmagoric Springfield. The central scene involves the appearance before the people of a huge statue, a female figure made of marble and gold, sent down to the inhabitants of Springfield from the heavens:
The people come running from everywhere to watch. Here indeed will be a Crowd picture with as many phases as a stormy ocean.
The important outdoor festivals are given on the edge of her [the statue's] hill. All the roads lead to her footstool. Pilgrims come from the Seven Seas to look upon her face that is carved by Invisible Powers. More-
over, the living messenger that is her actual soul appears in dreams, or visions of the open day, when the days are dark for the city, when her patriots are irresolute, and her children are put to shame. The spirit with the maple branch rallies them, leads them to victories like those that were won of old.[105]
The same vision inaugurates the Babylonian episode in Intolerance. First the intertitle tells us that "all the nations of the earth sat at the feet of Babylon"; then we see crowds of people and a vast procession carrying a "gift from Heaven" into the city—a huge marble statue representing a seated female figure, Ishtar, the goddess of love. Her appearance is accompanied by the dance of the vestal virgins. The heroine of the film, the Mountain Girl, is a kind of double of Ishtar herself: she symbolizes love and strives to save the city. Curiously, a young rhapsode who is in love with the Mountain Girl is inserted into this part of the film's plot line. The young poets who appear in Griffith's films are generally doubles of the director himself. We find ready confirmation of this in an episode, already cited, from Griffith's memoirs concerning the love of a young poet not unlike Edgar Allan Poe for a girl Griffith calls the Snow Angel (cf. the Mountain Girl). Griffith was to recall his sweetheart in the following way:
She brought a vision of ancient pagan temples of passion . . . temples turreted with oriental gargoyles and with naves cut in the phallic symbol. You could almost see men in the dim temple halls, straining forward, all eyes on a great raised dais where ancient priestesses postured and posed in attitudes of seduction—spinning one's head with heavily perfumed incense and soft, seductive music. Then, through the minor devotees to Love, Ishtar herself appears . . . Ishtar, the goddess of Love, gliding out with slow, alluring gestures, swaying rhythmically with the music, . . . slim, perfumed hands loosing the silver veil from her luminous body.[106]
Griffith later reproduced this erotic vision in the "temple of love" scene, in which the half-naked priestesses of Ishtar dance about the altar in a cloud of burning incense. This scene was of great importance to the director, who went to the extent of expelling from the set all the "uninitiated," so that the very act of filming the scene acquired the aspect of a sacred rite.[107]
Lindsay's vision allows us to give a purely symbolic interpretation of the image of Ishtar, but the latter is in fact informed by purely individual, subjective experiences that for Griffith acquired the dimensions of a fairy-tale vision. Ishtar herself is a hieroglyphic symbol that emerges as the massive materialization of a visionary insight. Lindsay himself had called upon his readers to "build from your hearts buildings and films which shall be your individual Hieroglyphics, each according to his own loves and fancies."[108]
There is, however, one "superhieroglyph" in Intolerance that is of crucial importance for the film's structure as a whole: the celebrated vision of a
woman rocking a cradle. It occurs at the beginning of the film, immediately after the quotation from Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." The vision of the woman with the cradle appears repeatedly at the intersection of different episodes and threads of plot, bringing them together.
Lindsay immediately understood this scene to be a key hieroglyph.[109] Other critics were of the same opinion, although they generally found it to be a failure as a hieroglyph. Terry Ramsaye's reservations are in this sense typical: "To Griffith, the scenes of Lillian Gish rocking a cradle did mean 'a golden thread' denoting the continuity of the human race and binding his fugue of period pictures. But to the movie audience a picture of a cradle is a hieroglyph meaning: 'there is going to be a baby,' 'there is a baby,' or 'there was a baby.' It does not mean the continuity of the race, and it does not suggest intolerance—rather the opposite."[110] Eisenstein, who for obvious reasons rejected the notion of a cinematic symbol not based on montage, wrote that Griffith "made a blunder because of non-montage thinking in the treatment of a recurring 'wave of time' through an unconvincing plastic idea of the rocking cradle."[111] And again: "The Whitman lines on 'out of the cradle endlessly rocking' . . . served Griffith unsuccessfully as a refrain shot for his Intolerance ."[112]
Today we no longer need to involve ourselves in a purely evaluative debate on the merits of Griffith's symbol. It is more important to grasp its meaning. Harold Dunham recalls how the idea came to Griffith: "It is said that some twelve to fifteen years before, Griffith was walking with Wilfred Lucas, when they were both working in a road show, when Lucas caught sight of a woman rocking a cradle, and reminded Griffith of Walt Whitman's lines from Leaves of Grass: 'Out of the cradle endlessly rocking' and 'Endlessly rocks the cradle Uniter of Here and Hereafter.'"[113]
The Whitman quote serves as the subtext of several Griffith films made at Biograph (as I have tried to show earlier). In Intolerance it is invoked unabashedly as the key explanatory text to the entire film. Griffith accorded the role of the woman by the cradle to his favorite actress, Lillian Gish, itself an indication of the importance he attributed to this brief but recurrent episode. Whitman continued to function as the essential subtext even during the actual filming of the scene: "We went back to the studio and did some shots of Lillian Gish rocking a cradle, all to the tune of Walt Whitman's poetry, which Griffith recited with great feeling. . . . It must have been one of his good days."[114]
Mention has already been made of the crucial role of echo and sound reverberation in this poem. Griffith was so committed to rendering this aspect of Whitman's text that he sought to visualize the poem's second line: "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, / Out of the mocking bird's throat, the musical shuttle"[115] Toward the back of the frame, behind Gish, Griffith had
placed the symbolic figures of the Three Fates spinning the thread of life (cf. Whitman's "musical shuttle"). During the shooting, on hearing the sound of the spinning wheel and the creak of Atropos's scissors as they cut the thread, Griffith was heard to exclaim: "Gahhhd! If we could only get that sound ![116]
The woman by the cradle harks back above all to Whitman's series of images—the eternally rocking sea, the cradle, and the grave—but it also suggests the cradle of language, the reverberating mirror of visions. She is the sea, but also the generative force behind all visions. For Lindsay, visions are hieroglyphs. In this sense the cradle in the film's insistent refrain can be seen as a kind of supreme hieroglyph, the force that generates a text of other hieroglyphs.
Just as obvious is the role, openly announced in the intertitles, of the sea as cradle in creating correspondences, linking—as it had for the transcendentalists—all worlds and abolishing distinctions of time and space. "Today as yesterday, endlessly rocking, ever bringing the same joys and sorrows," the caption says just as we see Gish on the screen. The linking of "here" and "there" is a transcendentalist way of expressing the principle of a twofold (or even threefold) world.
Significantly, this is precisely the intellectual context in which the same image of the cradle appears in a poem by Victor Hugo entitled "Éclaircie" (1855):
L'horizon semble un rêve éblouissant où nage
L'écaille de la mer, la plume du nuage,
Car l'Océan est hydre et le nuage oiseau.
Une lueur, rayon vague, part du berceau
Qu'une femme balance au seuil d'une chaumière,
Dore les champs, les fleurs, l'onde et devient lumière
En touchant un tombeau qui dort près du clocher.
Le jour plonge au plus noir du gouffre, et va chercher
L'ombre, et la baise au front sous l'eau sombre et hagarde.
(The horizon seems a dazzling dream where
The scales of the sea and the feather of the cloud float,
For the ocean is a hydra and the cloud a bird.
A gleam, an obscure ray, is emitted from a cradle
Which a woman rocks on the threshold of a cottage
And gilds the fields, the flowers, the wave and becomes light
As it touches a grave that sleeps close to the belfry.
The day plunges into the darkest part of the abyss and goes seeking
The shadow, and kisses it on the brow below the sombre and gaunt water.) [117]
Here, too, the rocking cradle is a metaphor for the sea, which can reflect a shimmer of light back into the sky and yet also repress light near the seafloor: it symbolizes birth and death, and functions as a kind of nodal point for all correspondences.
Hugo turned to the image of the cradle many times in his life. To him it came to symbolize a kind of universal connectedness and the generative force guaranteeing the future of humanity. In the poem "Fonction du poète" he writes:
Comme l'océan sur les grèves
Répand son rále et ses sanglots,
L'idée auguste qui t'égaie
A cette heure encore bégaie;
Mais de la vie elle a le sceau!
Ève contient la race humaine,
Un oeuf l'aiglon, un gland le chêne!
Une utopie est un berceau!
De ce berceau, quand viendra l'heure,
Vous verrez sortir, éblouis,
Une société meilleure . . .
(As the ocean hurls on the shore
its death-rattle and its sobs,
The august idea that delights you
Is still stammering at this point;
But it possesses the seal of life! Eve contains the human race,
An egg the eaglet, an acorn the oak!
A Utopia is a cradle!
From this cradle, when the time comes
you will observe, bedazzled,
A better society emerge . . .[118]
The cradle signifies the same primordiality, the same capacity for origination, that characterizes the ocean, whose speech, impenetrable and inarticulate, is the origin of every human language. To return to the ocean is to return to a pre-Babelic stage of human speech. In Hugo's collection Les Contemplations, from which "Éclaircie" is taken, we find another poem that encodes the symbols of water and cradle, transforming them into hieroglyphs of a vast mystical book of being:
L'eau, les prés, sont autant de phrases où le sage
Voit serpenter des sens qu'il saisit au passage.
(The water, the meadows are also phrases, in which the wise man
Sees meanings slither which he seizes in passing.)[119]
An individual capable of discerning this vast cipher in the phenomenal world is himself transformed, and gains the "higher purity of the cradle." (It is hardly a coincidence that Leo Spitzer found a clear link between Whitman's poem and Hugo's poetry.)[120]
Long before Griffith, then, the sea-as-cradle serves as the motivating impulse behind visions (hieroglyphs) of different historical epochs in a range of texts from the romantic period. If the sea is the resonating surface that mirrors the sky, and if heavenly visions originate from contemplating the sky in water, then the kingdom of heaven must naturally correspond to an underwater kingdom, its inverted and—for Swedenborg's followers—degraded double.
Intertwining visions of the city and the sea are typically found in De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium Eater contains a vision of Liverpool superimposed onto a vision of the sea. For De Quincey, Liverpool symbolizes the earth, and the sea symbolizes consciousness. At this very juncture, De Quincey adds that opium-induced visions of cities surpass ancient Babylon in their beauty.[121] In his commentary on De Quincey, Baudelaire calls his visions of Liverpool and the sea "a great natural allegory."[122] De Quincey's Suspiria De Profundis contains a vision of the city Savannah-la-mar: "God smote Savannah-la-mar, and in one night, by earthquake, removed her, with all her towers standing and population sleeping, from the steadfast foundations of the shore to the coral floors of ocean." The city seems to be asleep under the smooth surface of the sea, "fascinat[ing] the eye with a Fata-Morgana revelation, as of human life still subsisting in submarine asylums sacred from the storms that torment our upper air."[123] De Quincey describes his fantastic descent into this underwater city, where he walks among its silent bell towers.
A similar vision appears in Poe's "The City in the Sea," a poem that Griffith knew well:
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
. . .
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
. . .
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
. . .
But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.[124]
It is especially curious to see the contours of Babylon emerge from this reflection of the sky on the water's rippling surface. As the light streams from the "lurid sea," it illuminates the "Babylon-like walls"—hence the readily understood motif of the towers of Babylon. Tennyson's "Sea Dreams" also develops the theme of Babylon, whose destruction by flood is foretold by an angel, the spirit of the Apocalypse.
Another relevant text here develops the motif of the city underwater—Victor Hugo's La Légende des siécles, whose tendency to link different nations and epochs may well have served as an important intertext for Griffith's Intolerance. Hugo's work contains one chapter, "La Ville disparue," that echoes the Babylonian episode in Griffith. It tells the story of a city "built entirely of brick":
On y voyait des tours, des bazars, des fabriques,
Des arcs, des palais pleins de luths mélodieux,
Et de monstres d'airain qu'on appelait les dieux.
. . .
On y chantait des choeurs pleins d'oubli, l'homme étant
L'ombre qui jette un souffle et qui dure un instant;
De claires eaux luisaient au fond des avenues;
Et les reines du roi se baignaient toutes nues
. . .
Mais un jour l'Océan se mit à remuer
. . .
La lune le front blanc des monts, les pâles astres,
Virent soudain, maisons, dômes, arceaux, pilastres,
Toute la ville, ainsi qu'un rêve, en un instant,
. . .
Crouler dans on ne sait quelle ombre épouvantable;
Et pendant qu'à la fois, de la base au sommet,
Ce chaos de palais et de tours s'abîmait,
On entendit monter un murmure farouche,
Et l'on vit brusquement s'ouvrir comme une bouche
Un trou d'où jaillissait un jet d'écume amer,
Gouffre où la ville entrait et d'où sortait la mer,
Et tout s'évanouit; rien ne resta que l'onde.
(One saw towers there, bazaars, mills,
Arches, palaces filled with melodious lutes,
And monsters of bronzes that were called the gods
. . .
Choirs sang there full of oblivion, Man being
The shadow which gives a sigh and lasts a moment;
Clear waters shone in the recesses of avenues;
And the queens of the king bathed quite naked
. . .
But one day the Ocean began to move
. . .
The moon, the white forehead of the mountains, the pale stars,
Suddenly saw houses, domes, arches, pilasters,
The whole city, as if in a dream, in an instant,
Collapsed in I know not what terrible shadow;
And while all at once, from bottom to top,
This chaos of palaces and towers fell down,
One heard a ferocious whisper rise up,
And one saw opening up suddenly like a mouth
A hole from which a jet of bitter foam was thrust up,
An abyss which the city entered and from which the sea came forth,
And everything disappeared; nothing was left save the wave.)[125]
A vision of an underwater city also appears in Balzac's "L'Enfant maudit": 'Through a light brilliant like that of the heavens he admired the immense cities of which his books spoke; he saw, with astonishment but without desire, the courts, the kings, the battles, the men and the monuments."[126] Gérard de Nerval gives us a similar description: "And I gazed dreamily into the water's clear mirror, looking deeper and deeper, until I discerned on the bottom of the sea—initially like a mist at twilight, then in gradually more distinct colours—cupolas and towers, and then finally, illuminated by the sun, an entire ancient Belgian city filled with life and movement."[127]
In Griffith the sea and the city fuse into one (we recall how Lindsay obsessively returns to the analogy between water and the urban populace). Griffith's hieroglyphs do not carry a stable meaning, although this was precisely what Griffith's detractors saw as their principal flaw. Rather, they resonate meaning, layers of correspondences, which they unify into signification. This is precisely how it generates the protolanguage, the single language of a united world. Babylon, symbol of linguistic dispersal (the Tower of Babel), collapses into the ocean, which dissolves all languages once more, only to create a supreme unity of meaning.
The book Le Collier de griffes by the French poet Charles Cros contains a poem entitled "Hiéroglyphe" (1886) that is startlingly close to the transcendentalist conception of the symbol:
J'ai trois fenêtres à ma chambre:
L'amour, la mer, la mort,
Sang vif, vert calme, violet.
Ô femme, doux et lourd trésor!
Froids vitraux, cloches, odeurs d'ambre.
La mer, la mort, l'amour . . .
(I have three windows in my room:
Love, sea, death,
Hot blood, calm green, violet
Oh woman, sweet and heavy treasure!
Cold window-panes, bells, smell of amber
Sea, death, love . . .)[128]
The constant refrain "l'amour, la mer, la mort" (cf. Poe's "nevermore") reproduces the endless crashing of the waves on the beach. In itself the poem "Hieroglyphe" lacks a concrete or fixed meaning: it is rather a meeting point of several meanings, much like the room that it describes, with its three windows that let in sights (the glazed panes), sounds (the sea and the tolling bells), and smells (the aroma of amber). Griffith's hieroglyphs are similarly structured: they organize intratextual correspondences.
The hieroglyph unifies the diverse phenomena of the material world into the general denominator of a transcendental vision. The final scene of Intolerance is revealing in this sense: four threads of the same plot are transposed into a series of Swedenborgian celestial visions. A host of angels appears in the sky over a vast battlefield. The angels multiply and slowly crowd out the world below, which is displaced by an idyllic vision of the empyrean. The film's ending recalls Emerson's idea of two histories, one of the earth in all its heterogeneity, and one of the spirit, with its singular and timeless meaning: "Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gideon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?"[129]
Intolerance, however, does not actually end with an "immortal sign" hanging in heaven. The Swedenborgian visions are in turn framed by the final scene of the cradle rocking, the symbol of the sea. It is not a coinci-
dence that this ending practically reproduces the closing moment of Balzac's classically Swedenborgian work Séraphita, in which an elaborate depiction of the kingdom of heaven suddenly ends with an abrupt return to the sea, the motif with which the novel began: "The vast ocean that gleams out there is an image of that we saw above!"[130]
My hypothesis concerning the meaning of Griffith's search for a new cinematic language forces us to reconsider the traditional understanding of parallel montage as a purely narrative device. Tom Gunning's careful study of Griffith's cutbacks has already pointed to the conclusion that they play a "double role. . . . they express the thoughts of the characters and serve as a parallel montage of autonomous and separate events."[131] Griffith often does organize his films on two levels. The narrative level is drawn out into a single thread that respects the logic of spatiotemporal connections and the relations of cause and effect. Yet above this narrative level Griffith creates another textual layer (although it is sometimes fragmentary), with which the plot-generating events are linked along a kind of vertical axis. It is precisely these vertical links that constitute meanings as correspondences.
As if anticipating the structure of Intolerance, Hugo Münsterberg had written: "We think of events which run parallel in different places. The photoplay can show in intertwined scenes everything which our mind embraces. Events in three or four or five regions of the world can be woven together into one complex action."[132] But to weave together different facts assumes not a linear but a cyclic development of motifs. Cyclic recurrence and repetition in the spirit of Emerson's transcendent circle of meanings are very close to the principle of repetition and stanzaic refrain in poetry. Not so long ago Eileen Bowser, a specialist in early film, discovered to her own surprise this circularity of structure—unexpected from the perspective of classical narrative—in a great number of Griffith's films.[133] These structures, producing repetition and parallelism, serve to layer and concentrate meaning upon meaning, creating what Iurii Lotman has called a "cluster of structural significations."[134]
Bowser has linked the cyclic nature of the films made at Biograph to Griffith's deep immersion in poetry. But what is important for our purposes is not the simple imitation of poetic structures. Harold Bloom has pointed out that romantic poetry, even as it gravitates superficially toward visual sensations, in actual fact negates the capacity of the seeing eye to embrace the world and its essence. Bloom thus contrasts the visible with the visionary. Taking up a poem by Blake, he writes: "With an eye made active by an awareness of cinema, we see what Blake gives us in his passage, a se-
ries of shifting views that are not in continuity with one another, and whose juxtapositions suggest an intolerable confusion between an inward world rolling outward and an outward world that stands apart and is objectified as a mockery of our visual powers."[135]
The hieroglyph can be readily understood in Bloom's terms, as belonging to a visionary realm that actually negates the merely visible. It is a layered structure of meanings, significations, and intertextual connections that are often irreducible to a whole. Griffith's hieroglyphs are more specifically layers of intertexts. That is how the symbol of the woman by the cradle is created: it becomes a hieroglyph through its capacity to mobilize the vast intertext of Swedenborgian transcendentalism. The city—Babylon—becomes a hieroglyph in the same way. Intertextuality, when raised to the level of hieroglyphics (the multilayered juxtaposition of intertexts within the same sign) can generate a new language, which is in turn organized as a series of texts placed in a parallel montage. Parallel montage, when seen in this perspective, becomes a way of re-creating on a narrative level the same intertextuality that exists as a "lump" that we have called the cinematic hieroglyph.
This also explains the opposition between hieroglyphic stasis and a relentless narrative march that is typically found in Griffith's films. Meanings seem to come to a halt in hieroglyphic form or get dissipated in the movement of different intersecting threads of plot. The structure of intertextuality acquires from this a pulsating quality. The opposition "rushing crowd/ immobile city" merely expresses this pulsating shift from hieroglyph to narrative. It is not a coincidence, then, that the supreme hieroglyph of Intolerance, the woman by the cradle, is isolated from the narrative flow and cloaked, as it were, in the image of a woman. Mary Ann Doane has noted that "the figure of the woman is aligned with spectacle, space, or the image, often in opposition to the linear flow of plot. . . . The transfixing or immobilizing aspects of the spectacle constituted by the woman work against the forward pull of the narrative."[136] In many of Griffith's films, a woman is the passive object of aggression; in the turbulent intersection of crossing images, she is saved by a man. In such a structure the depiction of a woman is particularly apt to become a symbol.
An initial state of idyllic stasis typically begins many of Griffith's films. This stasis, subsequently violated by the irruption of hostile forces, can, broadly speaking, be likened to a hieroglyph. Miriam Hansen has made the perceptive point that the hieroglyphic system of writing, identified with Babylon, represents "by synecdoche, the Utopian unity in all spheres of life."[137] Babylon-as-hieroglyph reflects a general plenitude of connections and correspondences that is powerfully intertextual. It embodies that idyllic stasis that is subsequently broken with the irruption of the linear story (writing that is linear, narrative, and alphabetic)—in terms of actual
plot, the invasion of Cyrus the Great. Hieroglyph falls victim to aggression, being undermined both by modern life (where older correspondences and connections have been shattered) and by modern linear narrative.
But if the hieroglyph can be seen as static or immobile in its symbolism, it is by no means some ossified allegory. The struggle between different levels of meaning and multiple intertexts make for its inner dynamism. Griffith's cinematic hieroglyphs are not examples of the symbol criticized by Eisenstein. They point to a field of "mutual attractions," a "room with many windows." This explains the tendency for Griffith's stories to fall readily into two worlds, the real and the visionary, in which the city of God is reflected in others, located on earth or underwater. This also explains the occasional layeredness of Griffith's endings, as in The Avenging Conscience and The Sands of Dee.
In this sense one can speak of Griffith's hieroglyphs as dynamic "signs" as Emerson would have understood them. Just as Griffith was beginning his work at Biograph, the American sinologist Ernest Fenollosa elaborated his own notion of the poetic hieroglyph, the so-called theory of the pictogram, that exerted some influence on the development of the imagist school of American poetry. Fenollosa, like Griffith, saw the world as made up of "actual and entangled lines of force as they pulse through things. Thought deals with no bloodless concepts but watches things move under its microscope. . . . Like Nature, the Chinese words are alive and plastic, because thing and action are not formally separated."[138] Fenollosa and Griffith were men of their time and reflected its poetic thought.
Griffith's universal Adamic language is above all a language of dynamic correspondences; it begins with the symbol but is not completed there. The universality of Griffith's new language lies in its capacity for transcendence, culminating in a single and higher meaning.
The difficulties involved in understanding Griffith's parallel montage are largely due to the fact that it is seldom deployed in such an abstract and pure form as in the more intellectual cinema of Eisenstein. Based on the notion of correspondence, Griffith's montage constantly weaves its threads linking traditional narrative structure, psychological interest, and a search for transcendental meanings. This shuttling up, down, and back up again makes it difficult to define how Griffith's montage signifies, as one might when dealing with a single textual level. Now a symbol comes to the fore, now a vision, now a simple narrative section. It is their alternating presence that conceals the hieroglyphic writing system of a great director, a system that aspired to be universal but often has been perceived as simply eclectic.
Cinema history has privileged the narrative dimension of Griffith's films. A shift in critical emphasis onto the syntagmatic level of narrative has transformed Griffith into the cinematic equivalent of metonymic, linear
prose.[139] By restoring the hieroglyphic, intertextual dimension in Griffith's work, we have been able to evaluate his linguistic innovations in a new way. Intertextuality, moreover, emerges as more than an effective means of rereading the history of cinematic forms. It is also cinema's own mechanism for evolving a new language. Crosscutting, parallel montage, shot/reverse shot, and the transcendentalist hieroglyph as it evolves in the Enoch Arden cycle and culminates in Intolerance have been shown to be substantial effects of complex intertextual processes that take place in the texts themselves. Intertextual reading, the reduction of linguistic anomalies to a normative logic, can be projected onto the history of cinema and seen as one of its generative mechanisms.