Faustian Reparation in Ikiru and Eternity and a Day

Abstract

LORNA FITZSIMMONS Faustian Reparation in Ikiru and Eternity and a Day "How does a man die? Strange no one's thought aboutit." George Seferis, "The Last Day" The Faust legend has fascinated filmmakers since the earliest years of experimentation with the new medium of motion pictures. In 1896, the magic aficionado Georges Méliès brought Faustian figures to the screen in such films as Le Manoir du Diable, and, indeed, the cinema is directly descended from traditions of magical performance hypertrophied by nineteenth -century developments in electricity, lighting, and mechanics.' Traces of the primal-scene phantasy inflecting Faustian love of conjuration are thus palimpsestuous within the primal-scene2 pleasures of the cinematic regime. Engaging this alchemy, my focus is not upon the issue of textual fidelity, which, as Brian McFarlane observes, has often "bedevilled" adaptation studies ,3 but rather the complex tissue of transtextual4 relationships that obtain between Faustian film and literature, in this instance with respect to two films that are exceptional examples of the post-World War II turn toward Faustian analogies.5 Ranging from the baseball musical Damn Yankees (George Abbott and Stanley Donen, 1958) to the stock-exchange comedy Limit Up (Richard Martini, 1989), such films deploy distilled Faustian figurations semantically and pragmatically transformed within nanatives set in present times. My particular concern at present is with the transposition of Faustian melancholia and reparative phantasy in the Japanese film Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952) and the Greek Palme d'Or winner Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos, 1998).6 In Gautier's ecphrasis on Dürer's engraving Melencolia I, the speaker is at a loss to think of anything greater, "more filled with revery and profound pain," than the austere angel with folded wing, so sunk in reflection that he hardly seems to breath.7 To Gautier, Melancholy, who has taken all roads of learning and climbed every ladder, carrying the heavy keys by which to unlock Nature's mysteries, is a Faustian figure. Sunounding him are the "emblematic circle," the "mystical table / Faust's study, full of Goethe Yearbook XI (2002) 348 Lorna Fitzsimmons nameless things." The angel's black eyebrow, writhing bitterly "like a wounded snake," is linked to the "beams of a great, utterly black sun," against which the hypnotically pitiful child, sitting on the millstone below, has lowered his lashes, "Leaving the viewer in doubt if he's awake / Or if, lulled in a dream, himself asleep." Gautier's reading of the child as doubling the viewer thus sets into abyme the infernal splitting of the "open wound" which the woeful grieve. As Julia Kristeva argues, the narcissistic visage of depression masks the "shadow cast on the fragile self, hardly dissociated from the other, precisely by the loss of that essential other. The shadow of despair."8 Bathing in choler noir, of ophidian temptation drawn, the melancholic ambivalently mourns the maternal object or preobject Thing, taunted by persecutory phantasies that Burton tropes, above all, as the "mighty hand of God" to which the inflicted "must submit" and thus make reparation.9 The concept of reparation is important within Melanie Klein's theory of the "depressive position." In her 1937 essay "Love, Guilt and Reparation ," she draws the conclusion that "making reparation" is a "fundamental element in love and in all human relationships. . . ."'" Love and the reparative drive develop in relation to destructive phantasies crucial for the growth of the child's imagination. The good breast is loved, but in its absence the frustrated child, vengefully phantasizing about hurting it, fears his/her own aggression has destroyed it, causing guilt and persecutory anxiety. Even prior to the onset of weaning, the infant mourns the loss of the good object, succumbing to ab ovo melancholia—the depressive position, reactivated during later states of grief—against which omnipotence , idealization, and denial are manic defenses enabling the restoration of good objects and protection against bad objects split off in the throes of ambivalence. Compensating for injurious phantasies, reparative tendencies are "the driving forces in all constructive activities and interests, and for social development" (294); they stimulate creativity, exploration, and the desire to be a good parent. Their intensity is correlated with the degree of anxiety...