616
PARTISAN REVIEW
disbeliefmore easily in a movie theater than anywhere else. How then explain
one hour , fifty-odd seat-shifting minutes in the dark, disbelief in a perpetual
state of raucous rebellion?
The Passenger
could not more ostentatiously pro–
pose itselfas a modern parable. To be sure, one does not judge the protagonist
ofa parable by the standards of realism, but to the degree that
The Passenger
obviously does not-could not-achieve conviction over one scrap of what it
claims
to
be saying, meaningful illusion is repeatedly demolished. The film
wobbles madly between the claims of realism and the austerities of a more
purely envisioned form , failing in both.
The protagonist of any parable, ancient or modern, is indelible to the
landscape in which he moves. His is invariably
apaysage mora/ise.
It is easy
(though of course pointless) to imagine a fully realistic character outside the
immediate situation of the work. One can, without difficulty, feature Pierre
Bezukhov, for example , making a trip
to
London , though he does not do so in
War and Peace.
On the other hand, it is out of the question to imagine the
Prodigal Son, or
mutatis mutandis
,Joseph K. anywhere but in the landscapes
they animate, because those landscapes have been moralized into an essential
condition of the protagonists' imaginative existence. This crucially deter–
mines , among other things, the matter of narrative detail : the realist uses
detail to particularize his character into" independent life," while the para–
balist invariably uses detail to more deeply moralize his character into an
emblematic irreality.
It
would be absurd-it would be comic-to wonder if
the Prodigal Son prefers this or that type ofwine or women , or ifJoseph K. is
partial to roast beef. But we are told the Prodigal Son is sent into the fields of
" a far country" to feed swine, because the fact universalizes his disgrace as a
wayward Jew.
Of course the modernist parable is "universal" only in a very special
sense. Among the most impressive achievements of modernist narrative-an
achievement in which Antonioni's
best
work holds an honored place-has
been the creation of an entirely new kind of moralized landscape with an
entirely new kind of relation
to
the real. The Prodigal Son is indeed universal
man , confronting a universal temptation. Joseph K. is not . The Prodigal'S
departure and return are a simplified emblem of events, conceived in its
simplicity to' 'cover" with interpreted relevance an infinite number of events
in real life .Joseph K. 's transactions in his nightmare landscape serve no such
function. For one thing , they are not simple but elaborate, even fancifully
elaborate. They acquire their coherence and power from a whimsical but
imaginatively unbroken proximity to perfectly real contortions of the spirit
(fixated guilt, overwhelming self-loathing, massive depression), which we
know in real life are perfectly capable ofmashing the personality into the same
faceless , poisoned existence suggested on the page . But these states of mind
