Spirit of the Border, Picturized Edition of Classic Western Novel (36 Scanned Photos)

Jackie Chan's parody, Shanghai Noon , humorously overturns many such derogatory genre conventions see chapter For example, Ron Howard's film The Missing undercuts the cinematic possibilities of a strong woman's surviving alone in the wilderness with the convenient reappearance of a long-absent father. This lack of truly revisionist Western movies demonstrates just how fiindamental Turner's mythic vision remains for the film industry. Despite attempts to reinscribe American history to include traditionally marginalized stories, and in spite of any politically correct agenda for moviemakers.

Western genre conventions remain entrenched in the American psyche. As noted previously, representations have also appeared in novels and short stories, in oft-told and retold legends and traditional tales, even on radio, where, for example, the Lone Ranger got his start as early as see chapter 3. Several of the earliest memorable film productions were Westerns, including, arguably, the first Edison film to tell a story. The Great Train Robbery , and one of the earliest productions by director D. Griffith, The Battle at Elderbush Gulch One of the best-remembered early feature films of the sound era.

Western symbols had become common in the culture, even in that most ubiquitous of American institutions, the TV commercial. How many youngsters were tempted to begin an unhealthy smoking habit by the macho image of the horseback-riding, rough-and-ready "Marlboro Man"? And how many Americans were converted to environmentalism in the s Marshal DiUon of Gunsmoke endorsing "smokes. The Western offered numerous opportunities for delving into social issues — in the frontier town taken over by outlaws, for example, in The Magnificent Seven dir.

Some stories, including this one, were borrowed from other cultures. There was also the anthropological observation of Native American cultures in films such as Delmer Daves's Broken Arrow, which brought viewers inside Native American societies to portray their authentic beliefs about the land and about leadership styles — often surprisingly tolerant of dissent and disagreement. Unlike these and the more recent PBS series Frontier House , which tried to reproduce the everyday experience of ordinary settlers in s Montana, earlier film productions that were promoted for their accuracy to detail, films such as Iron Horse and Union Pacific , concentrated on re-creating great moments in history, such as the driving of the final spike in the transcontinental railroad, completing the connection between east and west at Promontory Point, Utah, only four years after the Civil War.

There was also the drama of the landscape itself. One contributor to the companion volume to the PBS television series The West described a sunset reverie he had experienced in the company of a busload of foreign tourists looking out on Monument Valley on the border between Arizona and Utah.

He reflected on the many Western films that had been photographed there, including John Ford's Stagecoach, the first "talkie" shot on location there in Since then scores of other films, perhaps most recently Thelma and Louise , and dozens of television commercials have made use of that dramatic landscape — a wilderness topography that has become an archetype of the American frontier experience Ward Consider the TV series Death Valley Days , which opened every program with a bearded "old-timer" setting the stage for that night's story by introducing the current host over the twenty years of the series, the torch was passed from Stanley Andrews to Ronald Reagan, to Robert Taylor, and finally to Dale Robertson.

There was Dustin Hoffman as the year-old "yarn- spinner" in Little Big Man, remembering the Indians' struggle to defend their cultures, culminating with a satirical Native American perspective on "Custer's last stand. There is no shortage, of course, of actual historical characters to be treated in Western films.

Many of these heroes served as masculine role models for Americans — both on a personal level and in terms of a "cowboy" outlook on foreign policy. There were Western characters transported into other times and other genres, such as Dennis Weaver Marshal Dillon's deputy from Gunsmoke as a horseback- riding urban detective in television's McCloud In another type of chronological and genre shift, the oil-rich Ewing family of Dallas constituted the subject of a prime-time Western soap opera; in , the entire world was left from one season to the next wondering "Who shot JR?

There was the worldly Miss Kitty of Gunsmoke, and her near opposite, the innocent teenage Penny, niece of Sky King, the TV rancher of the seasons, who tended his "spread" and chased desperadoes in his private plane, the Songbird. Other characters included Gabby Hayes, riding along with Hopalong Cassidy, and Pat Brady, Roy Rogers's sidekick, who preferred his stripped-down jeep, "Nelly-belle," to four-legged transportation — an obvious nostalgic allusion to the most beloved form of military transportation of World War II.

If Gabby Hayes and Pat Brady were poking fun at individual Western characters, another series of films made fiin of the entire genre. As recently as , Rustlers' Rhapsody spoofed the B Western and its conventions, with emphasis on the transvaluation in American mores from the s to the Age of Aquarius; in each case a new generation has challenged and modified a traditional genre see chapter But comedy notwithstanding, producers honored certain traditions and institutions time after time, starting with the selfless sheriff or marshal who brought law and order to the wilderness.

There was the pony express; regardless John E. There was the U. Cavalry agent of federal authority , stationed at frontier posts throughout the West and ready to come to the rescue at a moment's notice. The cavalry was best memorialized in a trio of John Ford films: Challenged with lawlessness, settlers or townspeople in numerous Westerns invoked "Judge Lynch," taking justice into their own hands.

William Wellman's Ox-Bow Incident was a definitive statement against lynching released at a time when Americans were acutely aware of Nazi repression in Germany ; following it came a series ofWesterns that addressed liberal issues of the post- World War II period. Cooper's character, Marshal Will Kane, takes his stand against a just-released- from-prison criminal who had previously terrorized the town of Hadleyville, but he has to do so alone because the cowardly townspeople wiU not support him.

Attacking community panic and conformity. Foreman suggested that his story was also about McCarthyism in Hollywood. As Michael Coyne observes. Foreman "scripted High Noon as a left-wing parable damning Hollywood's moral cowardice in the face of the witch-hunters" This interpretation has problems in that High Noon was the most-watched film in the White House between and and is evidently a film viewed by presidents whenever they feel they are leading without sufficient national support [Bravo]; see chapter 8.

Howard Hawks, , plays a lawman who stands firm, holding accused murderers in jail despite the threats of their cohorts and turning down offers of assistance from the townspeople. Wayne, of course, unabashedly supported anticommunist causes in Hollywood Wills , John E. Although these Westerns certainly reflected the times in which they were made, others addressed issues of the day even more directly.

Consider Bad Day at Black Rock dir. John Sturges, , a "contemporary Western" in which the protagonist, John McCreedy Spencer Tracy , comes to an isolated desert town not on horseback but on a railroad liner — symbol of an urbane, post- World War II America. McCreedy is a wounded World War II combat amputee left arm intent on visiting a Japanese-born farmer to deliver his son's posthumously awarded Medal of Honor, but he finds that the farmer was killed early in the war, during the wave of anti- Nisei repression and internment. Tracy's character seeks justice as the locals try to thwart him in his quest.

The film clearly evokes comparison with High Noon, but the criticism is directed against regional prejudice and the national movement to place Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. As Westerns of the s reflected cold war concerns, so films of the s and s addressed contemporary issues. With a different perspective, Michael Coyne believes that Western films of the s were centered on the estrangement and alienation of traditional heroes, "lionized men who had outlived their time and stood poised at the edge of the sunset," citing "three superb elegiac Westerns" of Westerns of the late s and the early s displayed an increasing cynicism and violence that reflected the national experience of war, assassination, riot, and Watergate.

The thirteen chapters in the present volume have been arranged in four chronological groups, intended to relate both to the then-current development of film art and production as well as to the social, political, and cultural concerns prevailing at the time — and therefore likely to be reflected in the works discussed. Further research is always encouraged. Merlock begins with a distillation of the classic writings on the Western and then focuses on more recent studies written after The filmography by John Shelton Lawrence is of infinite usefulness and, just by objectifying the chronology of the genre on paper, will suggest all kinds of research ideas to students and scholars.

We know this result based on our experiences with the filmography by Lawrence for our earlier book Hollywood's White House []. Early Sound Era Westerns, — Cimarron , produced during the first decade of sound films, was based on the eponymous popular novel by Edna Ferber, an author of epic fictions noted for her detailed historical research. In chapter 1, Jennifer Smyth's perusal of the RKO production files at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences uncovered screenwriter Howard Estabrook's annotated copy of Ferber 's book; along with other documents in the file, it revealed how he had probed the historical aspects of the story, intending to bring an authentic "epic" to the screen — one that reflected Oklahoma's actual experience of settlement and growth rather than merely echoing genre conventions and cliches.

In the process Estabrook and director Wesley Ruggles may have presaged our current interest in the New Western History, questioning the mythic vision of Frederick Jackson Turner by bringing forward questions of race and gender and the expropriation of tribal lands.

As Smyth observes, Cimarron may even be said to have introduced a new "film historiography" to the screen. Not all Westerns conformed to formula. Miller explains in chapter 2, Jed Buell produced films that clearly deviated from the norm. Perhaps the most bizarre of BueU's alternative Westerns was The Terror of Tiny Town , with a cast drawn entirely from a theatrical troupe of midgets. Despite a lot of "novelty-driven humor at the expense of little people," Buell also burlesqued the dominant John E.

Harlem on the Prairie promises six- guns and swing. Not until John Ford's Sergeant Rutledge and the Mel Brooks parody Blazing Saddles would a black hero stake a claim in an environment traditionally allotted for Anglo-Saxon cultural heroes. Chapter 3 on the early sound era Westerns considers not a specific produc- tion but a well-known Western persona. The Lone Ranger got his start as a character created for radio in the s; later, he made the transition into film and eventually into a long-running television series.

John Shelton Lawrence analyzes how the elements of the Lone Ranger's juvenile Western image became "defining markers" for his character and those of subsequent "superheroes" in American culture. As part of Lawrence's prizewinning study of American culture, this chapter has many applications beyond the particular franchise and beyond the genre of the Western, using a landmark popular culture artifact to examine the mind-set of America's moral imagination.

She argues that these films — in which the Europeans sought "to bring the benefits of civilization to the colonized indigenous people as a duty, as the 'White Man's Burden'" — can be compared to John Ford's classic Westerns after the war about "taming the land and containing or exterminating savage elements, either Indians or outlaws, who threaten the well-being of the settlers. Calling them "regimental women," to distinguish them from other Western roles played by "domesticating women," McDonough finds these characters to be central to the narratives.

She also discusses the reintegration of erstwhile adversaries such as former Confederate soldiers into cavalry units and the failure of former Native American opponents to make that same transition. According to McDonough, all these details of characterization have direct relevance as subtle commentary on the need for a strong military during the early days of the cold war.

Another film from the same notable era for the Western is addressed by John Parris Springer in chapter 5. Ironically, although Hawks 's view of the feminine becomes central, it is in one of the most masculine of his films. The issues arise from both Tom Dunson's John Wayne and his adopted son Matthew Garth's Montgomery Clift relationships with women — one's opportunity lost at the outset of the film and the other's fijlfiUed at the end.

And these are not the only important females in the film. Robert Sklar has stressed that, although Dunson owned a prize bull, the heifer brought to the partnership by Garth was essential, "the indispensable feminine" Two films from are treated in the last two chapters in this part. Played by non-Indian Robert Taylor, he is a Native American returning to Wyoming from the hazards of Civil War service duties only to find himself embroiled in a "race war.

After considerable background research, Hearne concludes that the film is "a case study of the corruption, prejudice, and greed that pushed forward an agrarian American dream' of homestead land and immigrant opportunity. As Monique Baxter reveals in chapter 7, the treatment of the Hispanic minority of the state, the "Tejanos," came under the microscope in a nation that had fought for the "Four Freedoms. Board of Education decision by the U. Supreme Court, the film was more of a confirmation of trends in American culture than a radical critique.

While sympathetic to the position of Mexicans and critical of Jim Crow, the film portrays the solution to the problems as being in the hands of sensitive and progressive Anglos — a message that was less radical than what readers would have found in Ferber's novel. The Cold War Western, The third part of the book deals with Westerns from the s through the s.

In chapter 8, Matthew J. Costello posits that Fred Zinnemann's High Noon was the progenitor of a series of "law-and-order films" to follow, films that serve as a spiritual barometer of their times: The Tin Star , Warlock , and Firecreek After his wife and son die, Hickman mentors a new young sheriff Anthony Perkins through a crisis much like Hadleyville's in High Noon. Indeed, Costello argues that the entire film is an updated commentary on the earlier production, one that emphasizes the loss of personal integrity rather than High Noons broader theme of the individual's responsibility to society.

The community of Edward Dmytryk's Warlock is a mining town terrorized by a gang of rustlers and murderers. The town hires a vigilante again Henry Fonda to restore order. Dymytrykwent to jail for one year as part of the Ten but later became a "friendly witness" to the committee. On another level it undoes the lesson of High Noon as the Fonda character, having tutored the town's young sheriff into a capable law man and then personally killing the town's chief desperado, decides to move on rather than face off against his protege. Costello suggests that this development reflects a decline in confidence in liberal values.

The third film, Firecreek , released during a particularly traumatic year in American history, also casts Henry Fonda, this time as a "bad guy" in a "town of losers," and suggests that the "vital center is dead, but just doesn't realize it yet. Furthermore, in contrast to an enduring theme of the Western film, there is no hope for "building a civilization. In chapter 9, Winona Howe describes The Professionals as a man's film that also reveals a "stratification of class" and the "narrow range of choices for women of Hispanic ethnicity in the West.

Like the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in , the social uprisings John E. With a somewhat mixed vision in , The Professionals evokes the contemporary concern with gender roles and vulnerabilities; as one of the critics cited by Howe explains, the film is '"the halfway house between the altruism of the Seven [i. Matthew Turner explains how much of the humor in Western parodies is based on a reversal of expectations built up in a presumed lifetime of viewing Westerns.

In a larger sense, although its days were numbered and its vision bleak, the Western after still served as a canvas on which contemporary American issues could be engaged. Most scholars share Matthew Turner's view that parodies come during the twilight of an art form — and, indeed, many parodies have certainly emerged as a form becomes outmoded and tired. In contrast, many other scholars have discovered, in recent days, that parodies of the Western not only flourished during the supposed demise of the genre but were a contemporary echo from the earliest days. One ofWill Rogers's earliest films.

Two Wagons — Both Covered , was a parody of the ambitious epic The Covered Wagon , directed by James Cruze during an era when most Westerns sought to be paeans to America's founding myths. The parody has a long lineage in the history of Westerns — such films have delighted audiences for decades. The Postmodernist Western, — The final part of the book brings us closer to the present.

In chapter 11, Alexandra KeUer discusses two sets of historical assumptions about the frontier: Frederick Jackson Turner's proposal of "an area of free land," the settlement of which "explains American development," and "Buffalo BiU Cody's more violent scenario in which 'the bullet is the pioneer of civilization. She goes on to discuss questions of "material accuracy" versus "discursive accuracy," in which, for example, "historical personages may be combined to create a single character, events may be likewise conflated or compressed, but the spectator's sense of the episteme may in fact be stronger for doing so," and concludes her contribution with comments on John Sayles's Lone Star This important film closes with characters talking in a parked car at a deserted drive-in movie and suggests a liberated fiiture for the younger generation with its concluding line, "Forget the Alamo.

Lone Star is a film of the s that steps beyond the cliches in a way that Cimarron did for the early sound era Westerns see chapter 1. Finally, David Pierson's analysis of Turner Network Television's TNT made-for-TV Western films in chapter 13 concentrates on what he terms "the construction of authenticity," by which he means not only historical correctness but also a set of "standards of authenticity" that are "negotiated between producers, writers, directors, actors, fans, and the public.

Americans yearn for the nostalgic reassurances of Nick at NightTY classics from the s while, perhaps in the same evening of viewing, assuaging a postmodernist mind-set on cable subscription options such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central or reruns of HBO's Sex in the City. Westerns and America's Future Popular culture in the United States presents an apparent chaos, but scholars who have taken films seriously know that movie Westerns are a touchstone to understanding the nation's concerns.

At the mythic level. Westerns explore America's self-image as unique because of a proximity to nature, what Harvard scholar Perry Miller called an identity as "Nature's Nation. What has become known as "sexual politics" has been an integral part of the Western as gender representations have evolved and changed both inside and outside the theater. Even international politics and policy have a place in our study of this popular culture form — how Native Americans, Mexicans, and other minorities are treated gives clues to the pendulum swings of the nation's mood between isolationism and internationalism.

The pervasive violence — indeed, the increase of it from the traditional Westerns to the balletic treatments by director Sam Peckinpah in the late s to what might be called "the banality of evU" approach of HBO's Deadwood , where a customer's head is calmly dispatched like a dirty towel to the local laundry for disposal — says volumes about the nation's declining respect for human life and perhaps its increased voyeurism in a media age. Almost every issue in our contemporary existence surfaces in Westerns. This magnetism for American concerns and anxieties accounts for the title of John Cawelti's groundbreaking study of the Western.

He called it "the six-gun mystique" to focus on a lonely hero and his quest to conquer evil — often using the antisocial option of violence. From Natty Bumppo of Cooper's novels to the Lone Ranger of the s, solitary figures of integrity have stepped outside the bounds of law and order, paradoxically, for the sake of civilization. During the cold war , President Ronald Reagan was labeled a "cowboy" for his solo leadership style in the s, a style that led to the demise of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the Berlin WaU in ; after the preemptive attack on Iraq by the United States, President George W.

Bush was branded as a "cowboy" in foreign affairs. In the part of the country where one of our editors lives, the cowboy label is a negative designation meaning someone who acts on his own without asking for help from others; in the part of the country where another of the editors lives, the cowboy image is a positive one denoting contact with nature by someone with a firm and clear grip on the difference between right and wrong. Perhaps neither or both are accurate descriptors.

The point to be made is that issues of the frontier, the West, justice, and violence are interconnected inextricably in the American mind — even after the classic era of the Hollywood Western. Thus, the study of the evolution of the Western is not a detached, academic endeavor; it is a chance to look at the potentials of our nation as they have been explored by some of our best literary and visual artists. Valid Interpretation of American History"? Holt Rinehart and Winston, A History of the American Frontier.

Bravo Channel's All the Presidents' Films. Broadcast August 8, Bowling Green University Popular Press, The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel. American National Identity and the Hollywood Western. Edited by Albert E. The Encyclopedia of Westerns. How Hollywood Invented the Wild West: The West of the Imagination. Confronting Modern America in the Western Film.

University of Illinois Press, The Legacy of Conquest: Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. Mansfield, Harvey C, and Delba Winthrop, eds. Introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. University of Chicago Press, Errand into the Wilderness.

Harvard University Press, Mitchell, Lee Clark, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and in Film. Abundance and the American Character. Rollins, Peter C, and John E. The American Presidency in Film and History. University Press of Kentucky, A Life in the Twentieth Century: Interpreting the Hollywood Image, edited by John E. O'Connor and Martin A. The American West as Symbol and Myth. Letters of a Woman Homesteader.

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The Frontier in American History. American Historical Association, The Filming of the West.

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The Politics of Celebrity. Simon and Schuster, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. University of California Press, Even before the film's completion, the Hollywood motion picture community anticipated Cimarron as innovative American historical cinema, and following its premiere, the studio and the trade papers presented the film as both an authoritative historical document and a landmark of American cinematic achievement. The film became a talisman of artistic achievement for an industry traditionally credited with a short memory.

Years later, Paul Rotha would remember the film as "the American cinema's one accurate study of social history" Yet until recently, film scholars have virtually ignored the industry's former masterpiece. Cimarron did not fit within the traditional critical framework for the classical Hollywood Western.

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According to the critical tradition, classical Hollywood Westerns were not supposed to possess any self-conscious attitude toward history or to be capable of making their own historical arguments. Over the years, scholars have persisted in dismissing Cimarron as a Western myth and a frontier-glorifying epic, a passive historical artifact reflecting the fortunes of the big-budget Western during the Depression Slotkin ; Stanfield But a closer 38 The NewWestern History IN examination of the film's production history reveals both its nuanced historical structure and active engagement with Western historiography and criticism.

In , Cimarron's screenwriter, Howard Estabrook, confronted the tradition of written history, placing the structure and rhetoric of historiography in counterpoint with the cinema's potential visual history of the West. Estabrook's redefinition of projected historical text, his rigorous engagement with a revisionist conception of western history, and his ensuing critical acclaim as a historical screenwriter succeeded in introducing a new filmic writing of American frontier history to classical Hollywood cinema.

Almach, and Carey McWilliams, contradicted Turner's proclamation of the closed frontier in , deprecated his magisterial tone, and focused on his neglect of eastern values in molding the American character. Yet no accredited historian was willing or able to synthesize a developed alternative to the Turner thesis. Ironically, the first widely read "revisionist history" of the West was published by a popular American novelist, Edna Ferber. When she published Cimarron in early , Ferber acknowledged in her foreword that while the novel was "no attempt to set down a literal history of Oklahoma," it chronicled the experience of a fictional pioneering couple from to the present day and was supported by extensive research in the state historical library in Oklahoma City.

Although Ferber later claimed that Cimarron was a revisionist account of the American West, depicting Oklahoma's multiethnic and multiracial settlement and development, she concentrated her historical critique within her fictional protagonists, Yancey and Sabra Cravat. Writing in , literary critic Percy Boynton understood the novel only as a popular reconfirmation ofTurner's frontier thesis, as a culmination of twentieth-century western nostalgia v-vi, Other reviewers were more pointed in their criticism of Ferber 's history. In Dorothy Van Doren's review for the Nation, tellingly entitled "A Pioneer Fairy Story," she concluded that, while Ferber's highly colored Western novel was poor history and trite literature, it might be the basis for an exciting film Contemporary popular historian E.

Douglas Branch was particularly anxious to separate his written historical territory from the encroachments of Holly- wood. He asserted that whereas he and other serious historians chronicled complex historical events and movements, the glorious evolution and repetition of the white frontier experience, the cinema was interested only in flashy individuals. BiUy the Kid is now in the photoplays, where, so far as I am concerned, he belongs" v.

The Hollywood motion picture community's expectations for Cimarron could not have been more different. Although Ferber's works were always screen-bankable, by late the future artistic and economic credibility of American historical cinema depended largely on Cimarron's national reception. The advent of sound in and its industrial takeover in had Hollywood critics and filmmakers worrying about the quality of the nation's historical cinema and especially its mainstay, the Western. This hesitancy meant that by , few prestigious historical sound films had appeared.

Griffith released his long-awaited Abraham Lincoln in August, most critics were appalled by its sentimentality and old-fashioned, static treatment of history.



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The most famous, emblematic moments of Lincoln's life were strung together in a collection of tableaux and deliberately enunciated epigrams. Harry Alan Potamkin of the New Masses was more direct in his criticism of the sentimentalized eulogy, in his words, "a mooning idyll. A film about Lincoln required an astute historical perspective conveyed through language and argument, not the folksy images and symbols of silent cinema, the mawkish scenes of rail-splitting and sickbed moments with Ann Rutledge.

Rather than reviving the American historical cycle he had helped to create fifteen years earlier with The Birth of a Nation , D. Griffith's work on Abraham Lincoln proved that silent techniques were no match for the historical complexities and sophistication demanded by sound-era viewers and critics. That year, even the Western was not exempt from such criticism.

A few months later. A meticulous chronicle of national expansion, the film opened with a text title that honored "the men and women who planted civilization and courage in the blood of their children. Although Variety's Sime Silverman called it "a noisy Covered Wagon," a poor relation of the silent Western epics, he did praise The Big Trail's historical aspects as the "single interesting part" 1 7, There was a subtle awareness on the part of some contemporary film critics that history's multiple associations and complex narratives competed with and even counteracted the power of the traditional, clearly defined and uncomplicated screen story.

RKO had other worries. Founded only in after the financial instability of its parent companies necessitated its consolidation by the Radio Corporation J. Smyth C 41 Producer William K. Vice President Charles Curtis. It emerged with the technological revolution of sound and grew in the midst of the Depression. The studio had the fewest capital resources of all the major studios and the most invested in the as-yet- unperfected, new film form.

Despite their ominous economic situation and the criticism leveled at both sound films and historical productions by leading New York and Hollywood critics, RKO executives immediately hired William K. LeBaron to oversee the production and then former stage producer and writer Howard Estabrook to create Cimarron's screenplay. He seemed the ideal choice to adapt Cimarron for the screen. Not everyone at the studio shared this enthusiasm.

RKO story editor Paul Powell still worried about his studio's great gamble with another historical epic, even after the completion of Estabrook's shooting script. Although Cimarron had sold well as a historical novel, he and others feared that the history Howard Estabrook transferred to the screen would not be palatable to a popular motion picture audience.

The specter of The Big Trail hung over the studio. The fictional narrative codes of the cinema might again compete with the forces of history and lose; in this worst-case scenario, RKO would then sink under the cost of another historical millstone. Yet Estabrook refused to minimize the historical elements in favor of the fictional story, like Ferber, he did extensive research on traditional texts and more recent publications in western history. While Estabrook's research bibliography included a fair share of popular histories by Walter Noble Burns and Courtney Ryley Cooper, and even Emerson Hough's historical novel The Covered Wagon, he was not going to pattern Cimarron after the triumphal chronicle of white westward expansion.

To MacLeod, "Every frontier has two sides. To understand why one side advances, we must know something of why the other side retreats. Historians are to blame for romanticizing these "pioneers": But the masses were no better than the masses of any society" vii, MacLeod's work was largely unnoticed in academic circles Klein , but Estabrook was certainly influenced by the maverick historian's approach.

Estabrook also refused to emulate the one major Hollywood precedent for Oklahoma history, W. Hart's Tumbleweeds , which had no interest in the opening of the Cherokee Strip beyond its role as a backdrop for romance. While Tumbleweeds ignored the Indian perspective and focused exclusively on the impending dispossession of the Strip's free-range white cowboys, Estabrook retained Ferber's revisionist picture of a multiracial and ethnic West, a dynamic space settled by Indians, mestizos, black and white southerners, Jews, and Anglo-Saxon northeasterners.

But then, with the ensuing support of director Wesley Ruggles, Estabrook completely transformed and emphasized Cimarron's projection of history, moving Ferber's acknow- ledged site of historical contention from bigoted pioneer Sabra Cravat to a J. The two principal filmmakers introduced the idea of re-creating the land rush that Ferber only alluded to in her novel ; of inserting historical expositions, dates, and documents within the narrative; and of introducing the film with an extensive opening title, or text foreword Estabrook, Cimarron shooting script; Estabrook, Cimarron continuity.

Titles were an indispensable component of silent films, articulating dialogue and giving continuity to changes in time and place. But the opening titles had the greatest length and importance, particularly in silent historical films. Some of the most elaborately planned, constructed, and marketed silent histories. The Birth ofaNation, The Covered Wagon , and The VanishingAmerican , made extensive use of text prologues to lend historical authenticity and com- plexity to their fictional narratives.

With the advent of sound, one might have expected titles to disappear, since they were merely continuity crutches for an obsolete art form. By and large, text did vanish from sound features — with one considerable exception. History films retained titles as a recognizable visual attribute, thereby self-consciously allying their narratives with the more traditional and respectable forms of written history. Filmmakers compounded the relationship, calling the opening text insert a "foreword.

It even went so far as to include a footnote after the credits; like Ferber 's historical novel, Estabrook acknowledged a Western memoir as an invaluable resource Sutton and MacDonald. Howard Estabrook's vision for wedding text and image was an original component of his adaptation: With Ruggles on board by August , the two then superimposed a series of dates to punctuate the shooting script. Remarkably, almost all of the text and other historical iconography survived postproduction and exhibition. For Cimarron, text was an essential component of the historical narrative, not a postproduction afterthought used to unify a disjointed narrative like MGM's work on The Great Meadow The latter film, based on a historical novel by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, was a eulogy to the eighteenth-century women pioneers of Virginia and would be Cimarrons historical competitor in early Like many silent epics, Charles Brabin's scripts had no interest in the historical material beyond its weak support of fictional melodrama, but late in postproduction, MGM hired dialogue writer Edith Ellis to add a historical 44 O' The NewWestern History IN dedication to the "women of the wilderness" and a few text inserts chronicling the stages of the grueling journey to Kentucky Brabin; Ellis.

The foreword was undoubtedly added to dress up a floundering production, but Ellis's textual inserts were modeled on The Big Trail. The Hal Evarts-Raoul Walsh epic used several text inserts, but only to summarize the protagonists' moods or unspecified passages of toil and time. The Big Trail and The Great Meadows use of text was determined by the sUent technique of elucidating the fictional narrative. In contrast, Cimarron's filmmakers used text as the medium for conveying an established view of American history.

Cimarrons narrative begins with a two-shot foreword: This text expresses the dominant academic and popular view of western expansion derived from Theodore Roosevelt's five-volume Winning of the West and particularly Turner's essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History. It is a history of egalitarian white settlement sanctioned by the authority of the president, a panegyric to the government and the people who transformed "raw land" into a great nation. As in Turner's view, the previous occupants of the "raw land," the Indians, have been almost entirely written out of the history of the West.

The "vast Indian Oklahoma lands" are opened up to white settlers by the government; there is no mention of broken treaties or territorial displacement. Estabrook conceived Cimarron s projected text titles in his preliminary draft. The past wars with "the weaker race" that Roosevelt documented in The Winning of the Wesfhave given way to triumphant settlement Roosevelt 1: The late nineteenth-century generation descends from the "distinctive and intensely American stock who were the pioneers.

According to the film's prologue, as Oklahoma grows from territory to state, Cimarron's settlers fulfiU Roosevelt's prophecy of national expansion. Inscribed within the text is Turner's belief that "American social development has been continually beginning over and over again on the frontier" and that the "true point of view in the history of the nation Turner and Roosevelt shared a faith in the western frontier as the definitive source of American national identity and history, and Cimarron's prologue, containing the rhetoric of progress and supplemented by presidential decree and the historical specificity of the date, April 22, , appears to arrogate historical authority to the film narrative and to legitimize the established histories of Roosevelt and Turner.

Following the text prologue, Cimarron dissolves to shots of the settlers J. Smyth O 47 preparing for the land rush. Two Indians approach a tradesman's wagon. Seeing them reach for his wares, the white merchant attacks them, yelling, "Hey, drop that, red skin, and get out! This initial contrast between text and image, between a triumphant view of American history that stresses homogeneous white settlement and the more complex reality of racism, dishonorable government policies, and brutality contained within the filmed images, is a strategy repeated throughout the film's narrative that consciously subverts traditional views of western history.

Yancey may praise the expansion as "a miracle out of the Old Testament," but his rhetoric is ironic. Yancey is a mixed-blood Cherokee. George Seitz's production of Zane Grey's Vanishing American, released to great popular and critical acclaim by Paramount, may have prepared the way for Cimarron. But while Cimarron's hero is not the archetypal, pure-blooded Anglo gunfighter cleansing the West of Indians, neither is he a noble, equally pure-blooded Indian condemned, like Nophaie, the "vanishing American," to extinction in a changing nation.

He is not part of the binary formula of the western myth of the Indian: Yancey Cravat, also known as "Cimarron," has mixed blood, and he was the first of these new heroes to dominate and adapt to historical events and change. When Estabrook first read Ferber's novel, which hinted more than once that Yancey was half Indian, he heavily underlined and annotated the passages, determined to focus on them "in dialog. Yancey even has a voice in writing the history of the West; he is a news editor, and the headlines from his aptly named paper, the Oklahoma Wigwam, play an integral role in narrating Cimarron's written history of the West.

IliiLLtrcd you wirh hps lint cyos; he hf. The title reads, "The boomer town of Osage — a population of 10, in six weeks. A "half-breed" shoots a man in front of a saloon, a lawyer cheats his clients, and a pioneering husband and wife work through the night to erect their frame house.

Later, after the Cravats have moved into their new house, young Cimarron is chastised by his mother for accepting a present from one of "those dirty, filthy Indians. Yancey plays an ironic role in both of these scenes. Sabra's vitriolic attack on the Indians also denigrates Yancey's and young Cimarron's mixed blood and even Cimarron's name.

Sol is pushed against a grain scale by one of the town bullies, and when his arms lock around the balance, he resembles a crucified Christ. Yancey saves Sol and gently ancestry in the dialogue. Cimarron a Counterhistory J. The film presents two scenes of violent racial hatred, the mother teaching the son to hate and an incident of anti-Semitism, which, although part of Edna Ferber's historical novel, were rarely acknowledged in the accepted history and myth of the American West. Soon after "" fades in and out over a long shot of the growing town, the film introduces a new text insert: The headlines of the Oklahoma Wigwam are prominently displayed and announce former president Grover Cleveland as Harrison's possible successor.

In spite of the seriousness of some of the articles, the male voice- overs discussing the paper only joke about the editor's note at the top of the page — Yancey and Sabra have just had a second chUd. The paper documents a traditional view of American expansion concurrent with European political events, while undercutting the effects of that growth with the announcement of the close annihilation of the buffalo and the public's preoccupation with trivialities.

The film juxtaposes the text insert with the more critical social history revealed in the images.

Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, with a Few Observations by Dobie

Soon after the glimpse of the headline news, Osage witnesses another historic event. The famous outlaw, "the Kid," a former free- range cowboy who lost his job in the wake of the developing railroad, returns to Osage. When his gang tries to rob a bank, Yancey, one of the Kid's former associates, shoots and kills him. During the battle, the townsfolk cower in their houses, and only after the Kid is killed do they emerge from their doorways. Ruggles's unusual high-angle shot transforms the citizens into vultures crowding a carcass.

Although violence was an integral part of Roosevelt's West, the bank robber, the gunfighter, and the street duel were not part of either Roosevelt's history or Turner's agrarian visions; they belonged to another past. This scene in Cimarron references hundreds of Hollywood Westerns since their appearance at the turn of the century, and certainly Estabrook's scripted confrontation between the Virginian and Trampas two years before.

These codifiers of the Western genre have always been uncomfortable with Cimarron and have quickly dismissed it as an expensive failure. The only reason Cimarron has ever been mentioned in Western film criticism as a historical marker is precisely because it thwarts the mythical, transhistorical structures of genre The townspeople later decide to put the dead gunfighter on display in a storefront window. According to this critical heritage, the classical Western is composed of visual codes and themes, a recognizable iconography and a series of refined narrative structures.

These genre structures have a tendency to operate transhistorically Altman Therefore, even though Westerns are set in the past, the discourse of the Western presents generalized images evoking frontier nostalgia. It does not question American history. As with all myths, the Western is said to lack any self-reflexive relationship with its subject matter; it passively mirrors national myths rather than deliberately confronting and contesting those discourses. This classical Hollywood Western actively engages the structure and process of history — even the archetypal scene of the shoot-out is a specific moment prefaced by a date, , and a series of documented events.

After Yancey has shot the Kid, the townsfolk plan to put the outlaw and his gang on display in a storefront window. The next inserts occur in Again, a group of men studies the headlines, which now read, "August 17, Rush of Settlers Will Exceed Long Awaited News Stirs Country. She, like Turner, views the frontier as closed and sees a new, settled era beginning.

She is therefore stunned when news of further expansion inspires her husband first to criticize the government for its trickery and then to confound his criticism by cavorting off to the Strip with a group of white, gun-toting cronies. Here, Cimarron again challenges the Turnerian idea of a closed frontier in by showing yet another land rush about to happen in Oklahoma history proves that the frontier is still viable and that the lure of its rhetoric still blinds the nation to its own racism. But Sabra, as historian, refuses both to acknowledge her husband's 52 The NewWestern History IN need to go to the Strip and to amend her view of the past.

She remains trapped in her historiography while the frontier, her husband, and the film's history rush forward. More significantly, while the headline and documents proclaim the size and import of the expansion, Yancey's participation in that "new empire- building," that perennial last frontier, is scripted not as a national necessity but as a white man's lark and an escape from town life.

The fused argument of the newspaper and Yancey's search for new territory constitutes its own critique of the impulses that drove the country to expand. Historian Gerald Nash, who would write years later that the mythic West represented an escape from the real West, viewed Hollywood cinema as an unconscious expression of this need to elude the burdens of history Yet decades before Nash and other historians began to fathom the mythic undercurrents propelling the rhetoric of western history, Cimarron implied that the history of the West was a conscious retreat into myth.

Each historically specific title in Cimarron is superimposed over an expanding urban landscape, and throughout the second half of the film, it is a West from which Yancey, the mythic hero, flees. Yancey's disappearance, the passing of the Cherokee Strip, and the coming of the Spanish- American War in are united in the text of the next intertitle.

The film cuts to the front page of the Oklahoma Wigwam now capably run by Sabra , and male voice-overs discuss its headlines regarding the peace settlement. Yet Sol Levy and Sabra talk only of the elusive Yancey. As Sol remarks, Yancey has become "part of the history of the great Southwest.

Ironically, this historicizing implies Yancey's passing as a living force while he still lives in the film diegesis. In fact, Yancey has made the transition from southwestern frontiersman to Roosevelt Rough Rider: The titles' institutional history makes a similar analogy, noting the end of the Cherokee Strip expansion and the coming of the Spanish-American War as if they were natural progressions in American nationhood.

The headlines, which once reported the opening of the Cherokee Strip, now praise the winnings of American imperialism. In this sequence, Estabrook and Ruggles juxtaposed text and images to introduce one of the consequences of westward territorial expansion: With the conquest of the American West achieved, the frontier expanded beyond national borders.

Nevertheless, Cimarron's structural contrast between these two events is J. It is important to remember what is not shown in this sequence. One never sees that other frontier. Cimarron's historical narrative remains within Osage, and there is no narrative progression from the American West to Cuba and the Philippines. The diegesis circulates within the racial prejudices of Oklahoma. The actions of Sabra and Yancey Cravat also thwart any imagined narrative conflation of territorial expansion and imperialism.

Although Sabra's dislike of the "lazy" Indians' neglect of the land appears to sanction a Manifest Destiny view of continental expansion, she is no advocate of imperial expansion. Yancey, as a Rough Rider, executes the letter of American imperialism in Cuba, but he is not motivated by Sabra's racial prejudice or chauvinism. It is his childish love of adventure and personal glory that motivates his expansionist acts.

Yancey's conflicting thoughts and actions, his sympathy for and kinship with the Indians and his own lust for frontier adventure, may embody what Richard Slotkin has called the ideological ambivalence of the American frontier, most vividly expressed in the mythic forms of classical Hollywood cinema Yancey is the frontiersman who makes Oklahoma run, watches the town of Osage grow, and then leaves when civilization stifles him.

He is the archetypal "hunter hero" who destroys the wild frontier he inhabits and embodies America's ambivalence to expansion Slotkin 5; Stanfield By killing the Kid, Yancey unwittingly condemns his world and himself to the past. He understands the Indians, but goes on the Cherokee run. Slotkin's assertion of mythical ambivalence is misleading. In his analysis, myths disarm critical investigation 14 , their narratives are simple, and the language of myth is written with no greater complexity than as a series of binary oppositions and resolutions contained within the dominant, triumphant view of American history and the bland, happy endings of Hollywood films.

Yet Cimarron's self-conscious historical structure proposes that traditional texts on western history present a bombastic and reductive version of the past. Yancey's exaggerated "last frontier" rhetoric and Sabra's mimed use of his words to historicize Oklahoma's early years are both parodies. At one point, as Sabra strikes a pose and mimics her husband's initial speech about Oklahoma's miraculous history in a suitably deep voice , Yancey smiles, both genuinely amused and wistflil.

In Estabrook and Ruggles's film. Turner's rhetoric defining the essential national character and Roosevelt's faith in American expansion are not the foundations of another heroicized tale of the American past; they 54 The NewWestern History IN Sabra's frontier rhetoric elicits a sad smile from Yancey. Rather than memorializing America's myths, Cimarron confronts them. The next series of titles begins in , announcing Oklahoma's statehood, and then cuts to a close-up of Roosevelt's grim portrait and signature on the document.

This unusual series of images recalls Roosevelt as both president and historian. Both men affected Oklahoma's history. Yet Roosevelt's histories of the West endorse the industrial progress and unproblematic, racially justified expansion that Ruggles and Estabrook's film contests. Roosevelt's evolving West sanctions the eventual extinction of the Indians, the triumph of the white race, and certainly does not admit the immigration of non-European ethnic groups Slotkin Osage's oil-rich Indians and immigrant Chinese would not fit into Roosevelt's West. Within the film, the president's endorsement of Oklahoma's statehood makes no great changes to Osage.

Roosevelt's belief that the frontier had to end as a natural step in the industrial progress of the United States is contrasted with the film's visualizing of the persistence of class and race prejudice, government corruption, and the obsolete Yancey's refusal to disappear entirely from the history of Oklahoma. Accessed February 1, Zola figure 2. This lithograph shows the head and shoulders of Rushdie, cross-hatched in black, white, and sepia lines, set in front of a second portrait, framed on the wall behind him, of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French Officer who was falsely accused of treason by the French army in , and incarcerated for a number of years in a penal colony in Guiana.

Why has the highly-recognizable, because much broadcast, image of Salman Rushdie been coupled with a name that, as almost every con- sumer of media in the world at that time would know, is not his own? Who is Jack Hughes, and what does Rushdie have to do with him? Arguably, this initial bafflement is one of the intended effects of this picture puzzle: The choice of name in this portrait is not purely arbitrary, however. Zola, following his open letter was tried in a French court, fi ned, and sentenced to prison for libel—a sentence he only escaped by fleeing to England.

Rushdie, likewise, has been unjustly persecuted for his writings, and has been forced to escape persecution by going into hiding. The portrait is, thus, at once an expression of sympathy with Rushdie for the situation in which he found himself Rushdie as Dreyfus and a celebra- tion of his symbolic role as a defender of liberty and free speech Rushdie as Zola. Rushdie, appropriately, appears at the conjunction of these two places, acting as a join across cultural divides as well as the locus in which both cultures, already hybrid in themselves, blend. The image of the nudes in the top left corner is balanced by the silhouette of a mosque in the top right.

The immediate logic of the canvas suggests that these two images are opposites, held apart from each other in creative tension at the top two corners of the painting. Like the cityscape of London and the terrain of India, however, these two images are also implic- itly blended in the person of Rushdie, from whose imagination they are issuing. TWO BOOKS Since the completion of these portraits of the early s, Phillips has con- tinued to reflect upon the political predicament of Salman Rushdie, and to use his artwork as a means of expressing solidarity with Rushdie.

A Questschrift for Salman Rushdie. Page figure 2. Here, visually rendered, is a reflection of the meeting of traditions that has preoc- cupied Rushdie, formally, thematically, and culturally, in all of his works of fiction. This page makes a more direct allusion to Rushdie, however, in the Mendes 3rd pages.

Together, these allusions to Rushdie serve to give specific meaning to the defense of poetry expressed in the verses: The fragment of verse used on this page further consolidates the compari- son of Rushdie and Dreyfus by identifying them both as figures who have been tested by catastrophe it reads: This page is dominated by an arched portal surrounded by a calligraphic design, and inscribed into these graphic representations of sacred spaces and sacred writings, in bubbles of verse, is a profane and comic rejection of inflexible and absolutist forms of orthodoxy: Phillips defends Rushdie, laments the attack on his freedom, satirizes the forces that have condemned him, and celebrates his tenacity.

In these respects, his interest in Rushdie seems to be focused primarily on the single issue of the fatwa and its conse- quences. These shared concerns would take a separate essay to explore fully, but they include, briefly: In conducting this exploration they seek to understand how the meaning of a text or image is transformed as it is translated between different mediums of representation. How does a visual text change if it becomes words? How does a verbal text change if the words are seen as images? What remains of the original meaning, and what changes?

What is lost in translation? And what is gained? These speculative interrogations are approached from different locations by Rushdie and Phillips. The very act of defi ning them in these terms, however, draws attention to how inadequate such rigid categorizations are; for though, in a reductive sense, Rushdie is a writer and Phillips is an artist, it is simultane- ously apparent that both of them meet in a hybrid space between, where image and text become a composite form, and the categorizations that hold them apart blur. As will be obvious to all viewers and readers, Phillips, in each of the compositions described above, acts as both Mendes 3rd pages.

On a figurative level, as is well established, Rushdie plays with language—with the sound and shape of language and with the structures of sentences, paragraphs, novels; but this figurative transformation of words rarely translates into a literal manipulation of fonts, word-sizes, or the positioning of text on the page, as it does in the work of more graphically experimental contemporary writers such as the poet Kamau Brathwaite.

His texts are, in this respect, not tame or static, but inventive and unruly, and their unruliness derives to a significant degree from the fact that Rushdie exploits the plasticity of his language in order to shape and reshape the way we read and hear it. The effect of the presentation of the words in this form is to recreate something of their aural quality as they would have been encountered by Rashid in the cinema: Butt, and Ahmed Sinai to the bottom of the walls of the Old Fort to reclaim their bribe money that has been spilled by monkeys, readers understand that there is a connection between their motion and the motion of their two forerunners, Rashid and Emerald.

Butt, Mustapha Kemal, and Ahmed Sinai, meanwhile, is caused by the fact that they, as Muslim businessmen, are being forced to pay money to a fanatical anti-Muslim movement known, after the demon king in the Hindu epic The Ramayana, as the Ravana gang, in order to prevent their warehouses being burned to the ground.

Most notable, in this regard, is his employment of the three-dot caesura, which occurs throughout the novel, and is in evidence in the very fi rst line of its fi rst page, where it marks a performative hesitation by the narrator and so helps establish the improvised character of his narration: The time matters, too.

On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Mitchell observes, however, it is never enough simply to observe the presence of interactions between images and texts. To refuse an aesthetics of purity by allowing words to peep through the screen of the artwork, or by allowing concrete images to loom up through a web of words, is also to challenge dividing practices in society, to argue for an acceptance of and tolerance for the complexity of culture, and for the imaginative strength to endure messiness without trying to reduce it artifi- cially to clarity and certainty.

The cross is a prominent and potent figure, for Phillips, because it represents the contestation of a line. For Rushdie as for Phillips, therefore, the cross symbolizes the refusal of the existing lines of culture, the rejection of the lines that have been drawn by established discourses, and it offers the utopian and radical hope that these lines are never absolute, that they never fully enclose a defi nitive space, in spite of the powerful forces of history, custom, and politics that have brought them into being and sustained them in their existence. In their collaboration, as this essay has shown, Rushdie and Phillips engage in an act of crossing: This dissolution of the strict line between visual art and novel, I would suggest, is a symbol—perhaps it is the sym- bol—of all the other transgressions that Rushdie and Phillips engage in throughout their work.

In rejecting the distinction between visual and tex- tual work, and in rejecting the very distinction that defi nes them as art- ists, they anticipate—and lay the formal groundwork for—their assault on binary distinctions of all descriptions: If a text cannot be pure, then the identities, nationalities, and ethnicities it reflects cannot be pure. If the borderline between novel and picture cannot be absolute, then no borderline—no line of control, wall of force, national border, or color bar—can be absolute.

They can now be viewed in an electronic copy of the catalogue for this exhibition. The interview was originally held in London on May 11, in preparation for a news broadcast. Jonathan Cape, , The Art of Tom Phillips. Margaret expresses the belief that it is possible to overcome the fragmentary character of experi- ence: For Phillips, as for Rushdie, experience remains intractably fragmentary, and the most that can Mendes 3rd pages. Every- man, , Thames and Hudson, , n. Saleem represents, or believes he represents, the children of independent India, and seeks to bring his people together using his telepathic powers.

Cassell, , iii. Kortenaar, Postcolonial Ekphrasis, See, for a discussion of this, James L. University of Mississippi Press, , Granta, , 9— Essays in Verbal and Visual Representation Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, , University of Mississippi Press, A Treated Victorian Novel. Accessed July 20, Jennings, Jeremy and Tony Kemp-Welch, eds. From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Essays in Verbal and Visual Representation. Thames and Hudson, A Treated Vic- torian Novel. Thames and Hudson, Mendes 3rd pages. Phillips, Tom and Salman Rushdie.

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Step Across This Line: Jona- than Cape, Studies in British Literature Rather, as I will suggest in this essay, the artwork or visual text provides Rushdie with a conceptual space for exploring the pressures and contradictions of postcolonial modernity: Consider the trajectory of the artist Marcel Duchamp, for instance.

By moving from futurist painting to the readymade in his artistic practice, Duchamp conveyed the relationship between the work of art and the age of mechanical reproduction and scien- tific innovation. In this comic scene, Rushdie draws attention to the way in which cinema as a representational form constructs historical events and manipulates cause-effect relations. The destruction of the plane and the miraculous survival of Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta develop this philosophical dimension of the novel further by rais- ing questions about the possibility of reincarnation or life after death.

By transporting this song from Bombay in s India to London in the s, Rushdie reframes the imperial metropolis as a global city that is transformed by the migrant citizens who inhabit it. The responses of Gibreel and Saladin to their apparently miraculous survival are significant because they represent two different ways of thinking about religion in the novel. It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, Mendes 3rd pages.

But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to pro- found uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. There are of course problems with such comparisons.

Like Saleem Sinai, Moraes is Mendes 3rd pages. As well as being the son of the Zogoiby family, a family that descends from the fifteenth-century Portuguese colonist Vasco da Gama, Moraes Mendes 3rd pages. By invoking the history of the Jewish diaspora to India, Rushdie also draws a parallel between the experience of other minority groups in India, such as Muslims, and the experience of the Jews in twentieth-century Europe.

For while the Jewish population of Cochin have historically co-existed with other ethnic groups in India, such as the majority Hindu population, they have also defi ned their ethnic identity as separate. One of the ways in which Cochin Jews attempted to defi ne their identity as separate, as Nathan Katz explains, is to become accepted as a caste within mainstream Indian society.

Yet, as Abraham subsequently discovers from reading an old Spanish manuscript, the Zogoiby family is itself the product of an exogamous relationship between the exiled Sultan of Boabdil and an ejected Spanish Jew: After it we were Christian Jews.

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As Aamir Mufti puts it, Mendes 3rd pages. One of the formative movements in the emergence of modern Indian art was the work of the Progressive Artists Group in Bombay during the s and s. Rejecting the orientalist and realist conventions of visual representation associated with the Bengal school of painting, this loose grouping of paint- ers was overtly individualist in its approach to art practice and sought to develop a hybrid style that negotiated with the internationalist style of western modernism while also addressing the conditions of social and cul- tural life in post-independence India.

It was perhaps in response to such criticisms that Souza asserted a modernist belief in self-expression: I believe with all my soul that he paints solely for himself. I have made my art a metabolism. I express myself freely in paint in order to exist. I paint what I want, what I like, what I feel. For artists such as Souza, the autonomy of the artist was symboli- cally linked to the independence of the Indian nation state. In an essay on the work of Francis Newton Souza, published in the Indian magazine of architecture and art Marg , the art historian Hermann Goetz situates F.

Souza as a rebel artist by virtue of his identity as a religious minority—for Souza was from a Goan Catholic background. Their cultural background is broad and variegated enough so that they may fi nd some convenient niche in tradition. Islam has also been democratic and despotic, orthodox and freethinking. Hindu tradition permits of even wider interpreta- tions. And both have found national states expressing their individual ideas. But not so the minorities, Parsis, non-orthodox Muslims, Jews, indigenous Christians. They have been loyal to the country and are today children of its soil, but they have preserved their identity only as closely-knit groups which leave little liberty to their members.

Thus the dissenters have attempted a revolution from within and formed more liberal groups which stand in the front ranks of Indian modernism. The Austrian painter Walter Langhammer provided an informal training for many of the artists in the Progressive Arts Move- ment; the German businessman Emmanuel Schlesinger became one of the main collectors of Indian art in Bombay during this time; and Rudolph von Leydon worked as an art critic for the Times of India.

We are products of our immediate environments and want to establish our identity by being contemporary. This detail may appear to parallel the biography of the Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, who may also have had an affair with Nehru. During the naval strike in Bombay of , for example, Aurora directs the driver of her imported American motor car to the heart of the action, or, rather, of all that grand inaction, being set down outside factory gates and dockyards, venturing alone into the slum-city of Dharavi, the rum-dens of Dhobi Talao and the neon fleshpots of Falkland Road, armed only with a folding wooden stool and sketchbook.

However, once the Congress Party leadership calls off the strike—a decision that prompts the anger of the sailors—Aurora realizes that her position as an artist is unten- able: Such a representation might suggest that the painter inhabits an elite position in relation to the working class subjects depicted in the painting. Just as the Spanish Catholic monarchy expelled Moors and Jews from Alhambra in the fifteenth century, so groups such as the Shiv Sena attempted to expel Muslims from Bombay in the early s. In the contemporary U. One of the problems with this state discourse of Mendes 3rd pages.

Nehruvian secularism is not dead but preserved as a damaged ideal that brings hope and com- fort to the banished narrator, suggesting that Rushdie is all too aware of the limited agency of political idealism to effect social change. Viewers are encouraged to interpret these photographs as images of the dispossessed children of Palestine who lost their country in Installa- tion photograph courtesy of the artist and Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario.

The sculpture is a solid bronze bath, formed of two boxes, which are joined together by a crude seal of red wax. One of the boxes contains a solid mass of bright red synthetic red wax evoking the blood of the title figure 3. By inscribing some of Mendes 3rd pages. And by reframing the story of Scheherazade in the context of the twenty-fi rst-century global con- juncture, Kapoor, like Rushdie, suggests that art has the capacity to redeem the failures of a secular, democratic and tri-continental politics in the face of the violence precipitated by the forces of neo-liberal globalization and religious fundamentalism.

This essay expands and develops some of the arguments presented in my criti- cal study Salman Rushdie and Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity Palgrave Macmillan, I would like to thank Jamelie Hassan for permission to reproduce a photograph of The Satanic Verses installation and Nicole McCabe of the Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario for providing me with a copy of this photograph. I am also very grateful to Anish Kapoor for permission to repro- duce a photograph of the sculpture Blood Relations, and to Melissa Digby-Bell and Clare Chapman for providing me with a copy of this image.

Duchamp, Notes and Projects for the Large Glass, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Contexts: Princeton University Press, , xxi. Picador, , Vintage, , 9. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 9. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, MIT, , 2. Demos, Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, 3. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism —, London: Granta, , Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures London: Verso, , — See Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism: Vintage, , Oxford University Press, , Nathan Katz, Who are the Jews of India?

University of California Press, , Katz, Who are the Jews of India? Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Postcolony: Princeton University Press, , Mufti, Enlightenment in the Postcolony, — Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life New Delhi: Viking Penguin, , 94— Rustom Bharucha, In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India Delhi: Oxford University Press, , 4. Essays in Political Criticism Delhi: Oxford University Press, , — Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Princeton University Press, , 6. Oxford University Press, , 33 Hindutva and the Mis rule of Law New Delhi: Oxford University Press, , xvi.

Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories Stan- ford: Stanford University Press, , — Cambridge University Press, , Dunlop Art Gallery, , In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India. Oxford University Press, Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton University Press, Essays in Political Criticism, — Cossman, Brenda and Ratna Kapur.

Hindutva and the Mis rule of Law. The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp. Notes and Projects for the Large Glass. Ham- ilton, Cleve Gray, and Arturo Schwarz. In Jamelie Hassan, Inscription Regina: Dunlop Art Gal- lery, Yash Raj Films, Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. Who are the Jews of India? University of California Press, Accessed September 15, Cam- bridge University Press, Salman Rushdie and Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity. Enlightenment in the Postcolony: The Discovery of India. Stanford University Press, Essays and Criticism — Dunlop Art Gallery, Bombay, in particular, and the urban trope, more generally, undergo a series of artistic transformations Mendes 3rd pages.

The city is thus doubly represented through the media of visual and verbal narratives. The concept of the diptych relies on a correspondence between the media of text and painting, between the linguistic and the visual arts. In Ancient Greece and Rome, diptych stood for a book or a notebook, consisting of two writing tablets hinged together as well as to a hinged pair of painted or carved panels. As artistic formats, diptychs involve the construction of meaning through the pairing of images, such as double portraits, tapestry panels, altarpiece wings, images in manuscripts, printed books, or sculptural groupings.

Both diptychs and triptychs can be interpreted as visual books that may or may not include an outside image, painted on the reverse of the two side wings. The urban cartographies of the novel open up the order of the map, which is no longer a horizontal surface, but a dynamic, folding and unfolding, configuration. Moor begins his story at a fortress in the Andalusian village of Benengeli, where he is imprisoned by the artist Vasco Miranda in the early s.

Like the side panels of a pictorial triptych, Cochin and Benengeli flank Bombay as landscapes inviting historical and aesthetic comparisons with the central urban panel. The title of the novel points to the legend of the Christian reconquest of Granada in which the Moorish ruler, Boabdil, sighed in despair as he cast a last glance at the city he had lost to the Catho- lic Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. The visual event has been posited as the constituent element of visual culture,15 the effect of a network of cultural meanings, values, and power relations that both constitute and are articulated by par- ticular agents of sight.

The two groups are emphatically distinct, further separated by a rut- ted track. It is also interesting to Mendes 3rd pages. This tripartite schema was explicit in much British writing, and it often underlay even anti-colonial Indian nationalist historiography. As Richard Fletcher notes, although the interaction between Islamic and Christian civilizations in the medieval West was extremely fruitful, Moorish Spain was more often a land of turmoil than it was a land of tran- quillity.

Whereas El Cid has been extolled as a crusading warrior who waged wars of recon- quest against the Moors, in his time, there was hardly any sense of nation- hood, crusade, or reconquest in the Christian kingdom of Spain. The protagonist and narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, embodies elements from both myths. He is also a Moor figure, nostalgically recreat- ing his city in narrative. The text appropriates confl icting myths of the medieval Spanish past alongside components of their official, historically verified versions, thus problematizing both the authenticity of historical accounts and the sentimental wish for return to the golden-past city.

Iron- ically, what breathes life into the story within is a sigh, an expression of grief and desperation. The novel, then, parodies the nostalgic myth of a Golden Age of peaceful Muslim-Christian-Jewish co-existence. It situates the story at a moment outside the longed-for city of Granada, but at the same time, fi xes the gaze upon it.

First, while the leadership of the country respected British political tra- ditions, some especially Jawaharlal Nehru were also influenced by the Soviet model. Secondly, while the leaders quite self-consciously maintained many features of the colonial legacy, they realized those had to be adapted to the social structure of Indian society. Thirdly, many politicians, who proclaimed their adherence to secularism, actually harboured Hindu com- munal sentiments.

Finally, although soon after independence, the leading opposition parties were the Communists and the Socialists, these ideolo- gies bore little relation to the social structure of Indian society. Rushdie shows the blind spots of both positions: Camoens, a veritable personification of Indian political life around inde- pendence, tries on various roles.

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Rushdie looks for the roots of Hindu-Muslim hostility in the secular ideology existing at independence. Historically, secular nationalists empha- sized the need to remove religion and the sense of community from the center of Indian politics and to establish the independent Indian state as a Mendes 3rd pages. The city is partitioned in this way into two mutually hostile fictions, the articulations of exclusivist urban discourses. Though Bombay is central within the triptych, its centrality is problema- tized by the urban split. Rushdie caricatures Hindu nationalism by portraying it as empty politics of game-playing, as a team involved in a meaningless war game that needs to undermine the value of sportsmanship in order to win.

While in a formal sense, the narrative of Bombay occupies a central posi- tion in the text, its centrality proves to be an impossible goal. Rachel Trousdale notes that as a secular western-educated Muslim, Rushdie is both vehemently opposed to and unwelcome among the Hindu national- ists. In the novel, the figure of Vivar is reduced from the legendary status of the Cid to the Mendes 3rd pages. A series of stand-ins frustrate expectations. The image of Benengeli as an impostor replaces the ideal of Mooristan.

Benengeli is a fraud, a geographical and historical elapse. In Benengeli, the idea of the cosmopolitan city of cultural hybridity is reduced to the trope of the discourse of globaliza- tion—the global village—and seen against the effects on place of contem- porary multinational capitalism. It is flanked by a lot of expensive bou- tiques, bearing international brand names, and eating places that offer all the national cuisines of the western world.

The Benengeli section of the text experiments with and deliberately exaggerates a variety of narrative conventions, such as those of the genre of detective fiction, to parody this culture of empty pastiche. By juxtaposing the Granada precedent and the destruction of Bombay, Rushdie offers a broader critique of Hindu and Mendes 3rd pages. Souza, born in Portuguese Goa, in a Roman Catholic family. These Mendes 3rd pages. The paintings parody the familio-political rule of Nehru-Indira as an Oedipal self-re-imagining of an effectively dynastic period of Indian history. In another painting of the period, parent and child swap roles, so that Aurora is the young Eleanor Marx and Moor her father Karl.

We have poured ourselves into this story, inventing its characters, then ripping them up and reinventing them. In our inexhaustible specula- tions lies one source of their power over us. We became addicted to these speculations, and they [. It encapsulates the dynamic relationship Mendes 3rd pages. As we have seen, however, it employs hegemonic visual structures and forms in order to interrogate them rather than to posit itself as a return to a purity of origins or a modern, secular mobili- zation.

Working through these processes, postcolonial living art negotiates its modernity in the moments between canvases. A version of part of this essay previously appeared in Commonwealth Essays and Studies 31, 2, Vikas, , Routledge, , , Subsequent references to the novel will be cited parenthetically in the text. Cambridge Scholars, , , Oxford Univer- sity Press, , accessed December 9, , http: Rushdie, Moor, , 3.

Metcalf and Thomas R. Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain London: Phoenix, , Reder, Conversations with Salman Rushdie Jackson: UP of Mississippi, , Hutchinson, , 4. Brass, Politics of India. Rushdie, Moor, Jonathan Cape, Rushdie, Step Across, Catherine Cundy, Contemporary World Writers. Salman Rushdie Man- chester UP, , Essays and Criticism London: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, ed. Iwona Blaz- wick London: Tate, , British Film Institute, , 23, Museo Camon Aznar, Saragossa, The Politics of India since Independence.

Wordsworth Editions, [].

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Manchester University Press, The Quest for El Cid. The Birth of Fundamentalism and the Necessity of Pluralism. Kapur, Geeta and Ashish Rajadhyaksha. A Concise History of India. Palacio del Senado, Madrid. Sigh of the Moor Conversations with Salman Rushdie. University Press of Mississippi, Step across This Line. British Film Institute, Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Towards a Polycen- tric Aesthetics.

Accessed December 9, Museo del Prado, Madrid, These overlap and contradict each other, yet they both evolve around the possibility and necessity of palimpsest reality. Repro- duced with permission. This is one of the key moments in the novel, laying out the underlying idea of the palimpsest. Already in Grimus , his least successful novel, Virgil Jones contem- plates on the possibility of multiple dimensions of reality existing simulta- neously: In fact, that an Mendes 3rd pages.

As a history graduate from Cambridge, Rushdie is well versed in this aspect of theoretical appli- cation of the palimpsest. Neil ten Korte- naar comments on the ekphrastic nature of this representation: It both is and is not imaginary, just like history in general. Thus the ekphrastic representation in Rushdie embodies the palimpsest reality—reality as a palimpsest.

They do not present the world in straightforward binaries but vacillate between alternatives, alternative interpretations that are, nevertheless, interwoven: Often she painted the water-line in such a way as to suggest that you were looking at an unfi nished painting which had been abandoned, half-covering another. But was it a waterworld being painted over the world of air, or vice versa?

Impossible to be sure. It is the decisive impossibility to decide between two alternatives, the essential resistance to enter the world of Manichean bina- rism. The space-time between the different realities is the truly unknown moment of the present. At one point Aurora illuminates her vision of the place of her paintings as follows: Water-gardens and hanging gardens, watch- towers and towers of silence, too.

Place where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. To say that this place, Mooristan or Palimpstine, exists in Spain would be distorting reality. There are a number of points where the link with Andalusia can be established, but then again, it is infiltrated with Indian and other elements.

It is both not-quite-Alhambra and not-quite- Chowpatty. Next I will discuss how these two devices feature in that documentary fi lm. The story goes like this. The artist stored the picture in the studio of a friend of his, another artist, who, running out of canvases one day, painted a picture of his own over it. This description of the line of events is very close to the opening of the film in which Rushdie Mendes 3rd pages.

According to this account, the portrait was allegedly painted by the Indian painter Krishen Khanna, and the can- vas was re-used by the painter M. Anyway, the picture was rejected and Krishen left it in the studio of another friend of his, another young artist starting out who grew up to become distinguished Indian painter M.

So now somewhere floating around Bombay or India is this picture [. Still under the fatwa issued by the late Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini in , Rushdie is himself unable to travel to India. Therefore it is Krishen Khanna who takes up the task to look for any traces of the painting. The fi lm records this search to libraries, galleries, and specialists.

One person who is interviewed in the fi lm is Husain himself, the painter whom Khanna claims to have used his portrait as a canvas for another painting. The issue evolves into a kind of contest between Khanna and Husain as Khanna claims that Husain had once said that he might know where the painting might be: However, Husain is reluctant to cooperate and fi nally says: Because he could be sensitive Mendes 3rd pages. I have a suspicion as to why that was. I think the color was [. There is no way of ascertaining the original moment of refusal—if indeed there was one—and the diverging stories remain there as a palimpsest portrayal of the issue.

One further delineation of the matter is to be found in the novel itself. Her full left breast, weighty with motherhood, Mendes 3rd pages. Similarly, in the fi lm, Rushdie consid- ers the writing of his novel as a solution for the quest for the portrait: Neither the palimpsest art nor reality divulge their layers for a singular translation.

The possibilities are judged meager as another interviewed expert comments in the fi lm: You have to decide which are to keep and which are to sacrifice. I will fi nally turn to consider how The Lost Portrait chooses to come over this impending, inevitable failure. It means a longing for a past that never existed, a recreation of a lost moment in time. Translated into the social and politi- cal sphere of postcolonial nations, it means an overcoming of the traumas of colonial past.

The film The Lost Portrait appears as another attempt at Mendes 3rd pages. The result is not a palimpsest as such but a kind of a narrative mural, even a cartoon-like chain of overlapping multitude of simultaneous events. Towards the end of the fi lm, Khakhar is looking at the painting with Rushdie and they talk about how it will be fi nalized. The central figure is a solitary male figure in a pensive mood. Whatever the fact in this matter might be, in the picture Rushdie is wearing a see-through garment.

The film ends with Rushdie freeing the painting from its mailing wrap- per in the National Portrait Gallery. Upon his fi rst view of the completed work, Rushdie comments: Oh, I think it is every bit as astonishing as I thought it would be. Standing in front of the picture, content and moved, Rushdie pays special attention to the bottom left corner of the painting where there is a figure of a painting woman: I think it clearly is both in a way. And in the end—when the portrait is named Salman Rushdie: The Moor—it is both.

These narratives overlap and contra- dict each other, yet they both evolve around the possibility and necessity of palimpsest reality. The quest itself demonstrates that the past is not retrievable as Rushdie comments nonchalantly on the fi nal failure to locate the portrait: I am grateful for the permission to use the pic- ture for illustration here. Salman Rushdie, Shame London: Picador, [] , Penguin, , ; for the use of palimpsest in postcolonial criticism, see also Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, Sec- ond Edition.

London and New York: Routledge, [] , — This expressive term is coined by Sarah Dillon in Palimpsest: Continuum, , 3. Houghton Miffl in, , epigraph n. A Hand Book of Greek Derivatives: Morang, , Salman Rushdie, Grimus London: Paladin, [] , 52 emphases added. Joel Kuortti, Fictions to Live In: Layered narrative structure and questions about narrative truth can be found in texts from many periods, by various writers and from diverse literary traditions: Rushdie, Shame, 85—86 emphases added. Discovering and Constructing the Unknown in Anglophone Literature, ed. Matt Kimmich, Offspring Fictions: Rodopi, , Here, the single quotation marks denote the anti-essentialist non-singularity of the references.

Books on Demand, , — Routledge , University Press of Mississippi, , second italics original. Muqbool Fida Husain — and Krishen Khanna born in are central figures in contemporary Indian art. Essays and Criticism — Harmondsworth: Selected Passion Pieces St. Hungry Mind Press, , 3—62; and Greg Lanning dir. Bandung for Channel Four, Although the interviewees are not named in the fi lm, this is most likely the art critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, who says he appears in the fi lm in his discussion of the fi lm in Husain: Riding the Lightning Bombay: Popular Prakashan, , — On autobiography and Rushdie, see e.

Autobiography in Salman Rushdie and V. Language and Culture Atlantic, , Chhatri is Hindi for an umbrella or, here, a canopy see MIT Press, , —; cf. The New Penguin English Dictionary. Augsburg University, Dis- sertation. Books on Demand, A Minimum of Greek: Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie. Accessed August 27, Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 85— New York and London: Thomas Cautley Newby, Grove Press, [—]. Litera- ture and the Emergence of National Identity, — Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Excerpts from a Conversation with Salman Rushdie.

Boston and New York: Houghton Miffl in, Literary Dude, Half Nude. Accessed September 7, BBC documentary, transmission Septem- ber 11, Accessed Sep- tember 7, Amsterdam and New York: Fictions to Live In: The Painter and the Pest. Bandung documentary, transmis- sion June 2, Rushdie in Velvet Pants. The Boyhood of Raleigh Accessed June 27, Questions for Postcolonial Pedagogy.

In Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Essays and Criticism —, — Salman Rush- die on Autobiography and the Novel. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a His- tory of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, Accessed Septem- ber 7, Selected Passion Pieces, 3— Hungry Mind Press, Both of these artists transform the subject by painting them: By reading these translations into art through the framework of visual culture, the postco- lonial urge to transform through retelling becomes clear: The construction of the tower of Babel, leading to the subsequent division of human speech, was caused by human transgression: The division of human speech gave birth to a temptation to translate, hard to resist, just as the tower of Babel was constructed when the temptation to transgress became too strong to resist.

This idea, equating translation with migration, has been the focus of much of the work published on Rushdie which alludes to translation in any way. In this role, she becomes Mendes 3rd pages. Appropriate to dominant imaginings of an unob- trusive translator, Aoi is invisible throughout the majority of this text the reader only becomes aware of her in the last chapter of the novel. He realizes that in order to correct the effect of this contamination, he must disrupt the Eurocentric assumption of linearity in his verbal text and recreate it in visual form: Her task means that she becomes a priest figure, working in the invisible, separate space where the translator is meant to reside, a space resembling purgatory: Two worlds stood on her easel, separated by an invisibility.

In fact, revealing the first painting is an act of translating invisibly, because what becomes apparent is the original: This later work is a translation in every sense: In this sense, she is the ultimate translator. Spe- cifically, Dashwanth is instructed to paint the stories told by the wandering messenger Vespucci, stories of a princess who had been lost from the his- torical records. Yet even though the painter has a power that his patron, without him, could never achieve, he remains trapped by the invisibility required of translators. He conveys this by creating an image of the princess and her relationships with others.

The three girls are painted in a circle, each one grasping the wrist of the next: History could claw upwards as well as down. The powerful could be defeated by the cries of the poor. Often, the result is a sanitized or inoffensive text or painting, and certainly a piece of work that reflects the world-view of the patron. Dashwanth is permitted this and other reckless acts of the paintbrush in The Enchantress of Florence because of the persuasive power of the stories his canvases tell.

The impact of all three resulting works tells history in a particular way, and tells history for public consumption. There are, for Venuti, constraints other than ideological ones at work between the translator and their patron. Traditionally, the transla- tor is not fairly compensated for their work, either in terms of recognition, or in the amount that they are paid.

Dashwanth is also constrained: Emperor Akbar commands Dashwanth to produce artworks under threat, but this is also his only way to be protected following the graffiti caricatures he created. Here the similarity of this partnership to the relationship between Moor and Vasco again comes to mind: Working in the visual medium, artists can fi nd ways to fight back: Working in the textual medium, Moor is less able to resist, and so his text is produced for his patron and reader until he is able to overthrow Vasco, and then in that moment the text becomes visual: The Emperor Akbar epitomizes the power of patronage: The original and the translation are mutually dependent.

It should never call attention to itself. At night when he was sure nobody was looking he covered the walls of Fatehpur Sikri with graffiti. Rather than translation being impossible, then, instead, translation without transgression is impossible. This kind of editing practice resembles the way that Frank Kermode describes the Jewish tradition of rewriting religious material, known as midrash. This interpretation aligns midrash with colo- nial translation, suggesting that in both colonial and midrashic revisions the translator gains extraordinary power to alter the text, motivated by ideological justifications or in an apparent attempt to render a more com- monsensical version of a text to a contemporary readership.

Negotiating his Catholic and Jewish heritages informs the revisionary process by which he rewrites and re-presents the story of his life. This image is entirely textual or linguistic instead of visual: Moor Mendes 3rd pages. Aoi is also transgressive, but she unwillingly transgresses against her own professional principles: The text created by Moor fills the gap left by the missing child in the painting which Aoi uncovers. Transgression may be a form of textual self-defense, performed in order to permit the pro- duction of a translation.

As George Steiner argues, there is often a connection between textual alteration and self-preservation: The relevant framework is not one of morality but of survival. Dashwanth becomes trapped in his art due to the forced act of transla- tion, and in this way, his story too conveys the combination of visual and Mendes 3rd pages.

In both texts a forced act of translation enables visual and textual cultures to combine. Though the translator is instinctively transgressive, he or she is restricted by their patron to produce work to order. Moor narrates and writes down his complete life story from inside the prison cell, which he enters in the last chapter of the novel. His fellow painters feared for his health. In spite of this, the patrons are preoccupied with lan- guage and textuality, and in addition, the novels are both self-consciously concerned with textual structure.

In The Enchantress of Florence, this is played out in linguistic uncer- tainty, in questioned, halted, or repeated language. The novel is con- structed to convey an underlying sense of repetition and the sense of linguistic uncertainty by the pause that begins each new chapter: The reader is forced to read the same words twice as each new chapter begins and in this way the textual structure is made explicit, and the pause between each chapter is tangible while it is also a repetition.

There is a need for the novel to be explicitly textual and self-consciously about uncertainty in textual and linguistic matters because of the visual subject matter, which cannot necessarily be contained or described adequately by the text. Names and terms of address are also problematized: He was— what else could he be? He had been born into plurality. The products created in both texts are at once textual and visual, ulti- mately.

Visual culture is employed and this renders her verbal; it corrects a prior lack of text. If this is the case, the translator loses her invisibility. The translator becomes visible in order to perform her heroic role, and is assigned characteristics and motivations like any other character in the text. The painting which is discarded was itself a revi- sion in midrashic terms, because it was painted in order to hide but also to revise and re-present what was offensive.

The prison cell hosts a con- tinual restaging and retranslation of the same text to omit what offends. The prison cell also heightens the emotional connection between translator and text: