First, I must brag: Michael Chanan, who is obviously smart enough to have been published in a book, if nothing else, has agreed with me that "the change in the name [of the film]... changes the emphasis from the personal to the public, and shifts the sense from the subjective to the historical." (3) That was my best guess for the implications of the name change in class last Friday! (Hooray.)
Chanan also brings up an interesting question: what is are the implications of naming a character after the actor who portrays him/her? How does that choice effect the reality of the fiction, and what does it say about reality itself? This may be stretching a bit, but it seems to me that this convergence of fact and fiction challenges the 'truth' of reality itself - what is the difference between the character we play every day and the characters actors portray? I realize this may sound a bit silly or overly existential, but it's worth considering. Chanan says that this naming technique is a "familiar kind of play upon the identity of the author that is a typical trait of modernist narrative." (4) If this is a modernist tendency, it must reflect a certain fascination with or anxiety about the (lack of) stability of identity within modern culture. Borges plays on names "to set up metaphysical conundrums about the human condition," while Desnoes' purpose is "to capture, in the labyrinths of language, certain elusive aspects of the identity crisis of the artist within the revolutionary process... the ideological rupture with the past."
Here, we are brought back to the original question of what the title change implies: If part of Desnoes' aim was to weigh in on the effects of revolution on individual identities, "Memories of Underdevelopment" is an apt title, implicating both national and personal histories at once.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Your comment on the title change was, of course, excellent. (And Chanan is the author of 4 major books on film and music).
ReplyDeleteThe name change is probably Gutierrez Alea's responsibility. I'm not sure, however, that I agree with Chanan--despite his four (excellent) books--that Borges's use of his own name as a "character" in his stories is "to set up metaphysical conundrums." I think in Borges, as in Alea, as in Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, the purpose of giving characters the first or full name of the author or actor has to do with an attempt at blurring fiction and reality. (Grounding fiction in reality, but, at the same time, making reality appear, while reading the story or watching the film, fictitious).