Burning: silenced rage in Lee and Faulkner

Abstract

This article presents a cognitively informed cross-cultural study of how rage is silenced in two narratives: Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 film Burning and William Faulkner’s 1939 short story “Barn Burning” that Lee’s film is inspired by. While earlier readings of Burning have privileged the individual aspects of the violent rage that is central to the film, a cognitive reading expands the scope by revealing how emotions are always embedded within social systems beyond the individual. This article draws on neurocognitive research as well as feminist investigations of affect to argue that such an expansion is needed to imagine non-violent expressions of rage. Tracing the violent and patriarchal genealogy of silenced rage from Lee to Faulkner, this article offers a comparative reading of intertextuality that focuses on how emotions are expressed in the father-son relationships in the two stories. Specifically, it considers how legal systems and the patriarchal family shape how characters express emotion. By exploring the possibilities for non-violent expressions of rage, the article ultimately considers the political ramifications of considering rage as primarily individual and suggests that we can discern relationships between social systems and expressions of emotion by attending to how complex and culturally situated emotions—like rage—travel across global translations and adaptations.