Abstract
Boris Vian’s passing narrative, I Shall Spit on Your Graves, was written under the pseudonym of an American black writer, Vernon Sullivan. The chapter contextualizes the questions of cultural translation and racial essentialism often focused on by critics of the novel but is more concerned with looking at its American-style cinematic. Drawing on James Baldwin’s assessment of the film as well as Douglas Field’s discussion of the film’s film noir style, this chapter explores how Gast’s adaptation of the novel, by adhering to American cinematic tropes, inadvertently reveals those tropes as reinforcing invisible whiteness. His inability to use cinematic language to re-create the layered voices of the novel creates an even starker picture of white supremacy.
In spite of the book’s naïveté, Vian cared enough about his subject to force one into a confrontation with a certain kind of anguish. The book’s power comes from the fact that he forces you to see this anguish from the undisguised viewpoint of his foreign, alienated own.
—James Baldwin, on I Shall Spit on Your Graves
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Notes
- 1.
This quote is taken from Boris Vian, Les morts ont tous la même peau (Paris: Editions Scorpion et Christian Bourgois, 1973/1947), postface. The original quote from Vian has been truncated, and I have translated it liberally. The free translation of the quote serves the purposes of this chapter. The original quotation reads as follows: “Tristes individus, critique par la bande, Presque tous aussi idiots que Claude Morgan … Quand oserez-vous parler d’un livre sans vous entourer de références sur l’auteur…” (149).
- 2.
Doug Field, “Even Better than the Real Thing: Boris Vian, Vernon Sullivan and Film Noir,” African American Review 45, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 157–166. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Laurel, 1976), 45–52. I am dependent on Field’s analysis of the film due to his more in-depth critique of its film noir elements, since my argument hopes to expand on the ways in which film noir has been co-opted by Hollywood in 1959 and thus perhaps inadequately understood by Gast .
- 3.
Donald Bogle’s Toms , Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks offers valuable insight into the difficulties of black actors and actresses but also into the practice of casting white actors as blacks passing for white. Despite the slow progress of blacks in the Hollywood industry, such a practice was detrimental to actresses such as Fredi Washington, a light-skinned actress who played Peola in John M. Stahl’s 1934 Imitation of Life. As Bogle points out, “[T]he spectacular looks that had opened the door for an important film role ultimately closed that door in her face” (New York: Bantam, 1974), 85.
- 4.
The name of the protagonist in the novel is Lee Anderson. I primarily distinguish between discussion of the novel and the film by using the different names of the protagonists in the two.
- 5.
Most articles on the Vian controversy trace the issues concerning the Vian-Sullivan hoax in terms of this issue of translation, though particularly in-depth articles are Ralph Schoolcraft , “Boris Vian: bon chic, mauvais genres,” Europe 967–968 (Novembre–Décembre 2009): 61–71, and Stephanie Brown , “Black Comme Moi: Boris Vian and the African American Voice in Translation,” Mosaic 36, no. 1 (March 2003): 51–67. The positions taken by these two authors are contrasting, but their accounts of the hoax are consistent with each other.
- 6.
Boris Vian, I Shall Spit on Your Graves , trans. Boris Vian and Milton Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Tam Tam Books, 1998), 98. The translation was originally published in 1948 by Vendôme Press. Boris Vian, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (Paris: Editions Scorpion and Christian Bourgois, 1973/1947). When I have use of a direct quote, it will be taken from the English version of the novel.
- 7.
Vian, J’irai cracher, 210. In the English version, this phrase “un nègre” is translated as “a n***ger.” 177.
- 8.
As with James Baldwin, Rashida K. Braggs in “Hearing the Rage in J’irai cracher sur vos tombes,” Nottingham French Studies 43, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 100–107, suggests that the desire for revenge can be heard through the jazz music and the musical references throughout the text.
- 9.
For a detailed account of the pornography trials against Vian’s novel, cf. Ralph Schoolcraft , “Hard Boiled French Style: Boris Vian Disguised as Vernon Sullivan (Authorship and Pseudonymy),” South Central Review 27, no. 1 (Spring and Summer 2010): 21–38.
- 10.
Rashida K. Braggs , Jazz Disaporas: Race Music and Migration in Post-World War II Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).
- 11.
A video version of Gast’s interview with Alain Riou, “Sexe, Jazz et Violence,” is available on the DVD version of the film. C.T.I. Gaumont Tristar, Tristar home video (2006).
- 12.
Vian, I Shall Spit on Your Graves , xi.
- 13.
For the expanded and updated edition of Naremore’s text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008/1998). Another text dealing more explicitly with relations between film noir and German origins is Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 165.
- 14.
Bernard Tadié, “Enoncer L’Amérique: Les langues fantômes du polar,” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 80, no. 1, 1999, 56–58. 57.
- 15.
Orson Welles’s fifty-two-page memo to Universal Studios when they took him off postproduction for Touch of Evil is a case in point. Essentially, Welles accuses the studios of desecrating his film. Touch of Evil is ultimately an active challenge to film noir techniques. Universal’s changes are a textbook case in rendering the film more relatable to audience expectations from a genre that had well-defined norms by 1957. The memo was written on December 5, 1957, to Edward I. Muhl, vice president in charge of Production at Universal Studios, and is widely available. One available copy of the memo is also commented upon by Lawrence French, “Orson Welles Memo on Touch of Evil.” http://wellesnet.com/touch_memo1.htm. Paul Schrader’s comment on the film as the epitaph of noir appears in his 1972 “Notes on Film Noir,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen , Film Theory and Criticism , 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 581–591. 589.
- 16.
Eric Lott, “The Whiteness of Film Noir,” American Literary History 9, no. 3 (1997): 542–566. 545. This article came to my attention as result of reading Field’s article “Even Better than the Real Thing.” Manthia Diawara’s “Noir by Noirs: Towards a New Realism in Black Cinema,” African American Review 27, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 525–537, highlights the racial stereotypes of blacks in film noir and, in particular, analyzes the film adaptation of Chester Himes’s film A Rage in Harlem (Dir. Bill Duke. Forest Whitaker, Robin Givens, Palace Productions, 1991). Though the subject is outside the scope of this chapter, I maintain that Himes’s work is impossible to adapt cinematographically and hence the shortcomings of this film.
- 17.
Brown’s “Black Comme Moi,” is important for considering how cultural translation functions in Vian’s works published under the Vernon Sullivan pseudonym. Brown takes exception to the idea that a French white man should feel entitled to speak in the voice of an American black man. Her position is countered by Schoolcraft’s suggestion that Vian is not exclusively concerned with racial identities but rather with verbal puns on the difference between white and black on a broader scale. Ralph Schoolcraft, “Vian, Sullivan: bon chic, mauvais genres”, Europe, 967–968, Novembre–Décembre 2009, 61–71, 63. The most important for my purposes is that all of this gets lost in the cinematic “translation” of the text.
- 18.
André Bazin’s “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema” is in excerpt form in Braudy and Cohen , Film Theory and Criticism , 41–53. 53. The coining of the term “camera stylo” must be attributed to Alexandre Astruc, “Du stylo à la caméra et de la caméra au stylo,” L’Ecran française, March 30, 1949.
- 19.
Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 45. James Campbell , in Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), suggests that “a black American author” actually snuck into the theater to watch the premiere. He claims that “the ‘invisibility’ of the novelist in the Salle du Petit Marbeuf was due to the fact that the screen version of the story, directed by Michel Gast , was one he disapproved of but was powerless to prevent.” 238.
- 20.
Video version of Gast’s interview with Alain Riou, “Sexe, Jazz et Violence.” It is in this DVD interview that Gast claims Vian died before the film actually began. His earnest intent in making the film is much clearer in an interview conducted just after a public showing of his film on June 16, 2004, in France. Gast claims in the interview that he wanted his film to be seen, given, in his view, its relevance to contemporary problems concerning American racial tensions. Michel Gast Biographie et entretien, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes de Michel Gast, http://www.r7afr.st, webzine sur le cinéma indépendant.
- 21.
Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 49.
- 22.
“Biographie Michel Gast . Questions à Michel Gast.” webzine sur le cinéma indépendant. www.r7a.fr.st.
- 23.
Braggs , “Hearing the Rage in J’irai cracher sur vos tombes,” 104; Brown, “Black Comme Moi”; Field, “Even Better than the Real Thing”; Rebecca Brita Rubquist, “Paris, Race and Universalism in the Black Atlantic: Léopold Senghor, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian, Richard Wright” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2004).
- 24.
Schoolcraft , “Boris Vian,” 62–63.
- 25.
My translation. Gilles Deleuze, L’ île deserte et autres textes: testes et entretiens, 1953–1974. Ed. David Lapoujade (Paris : Editions de la minuit, 2002), 114–119. 119.
- 26.
Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 48.
- 27.
Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 45.
- 28.
Schoolcraft , “Boris Vian,” 66.
- 29.
Bogle , Toms , Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, 23. Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work.
- 30.
Brian MacFarlane, “Backgrounds,” 381–389. 381. Dudley Andrews, “Adaptation,” 372–380. 373–374. Both are excerpted Leo Braudy and Cohen , Film Theory and Criticism .
- 31.
Andrews, “Adaptation,” 374.
- 32.
Most critiques of the novel mention the real-life drama of the strangling that took place after sales of the novel began to take off. The initial jump in sales is attributed by many, notably, James Campbell , to the charges of pornography brought against Vian by Daniel Parker. Campbell’s rendition of the strangling episode can be found in Campbell , Exiled in Paris, 82. Campbell also draws parallels between Richard Wright’s Native Son and J’irai cracher sur vos tombes and suggests that the Wright novel most probably influenced Vian’s own novel. 17.
- 33.
Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Laurel, 1976), 48.
- 34.
Ralph Ellison , “The Shadow and the Act,” The Reporter, December 6, 1949. www.unz.org. 17–20. 19.
- 35.
Field, “Even Better than the Real Thing,” 165.
- 36.
James Naremore , “American Film Noir: The History of an Idea,” Film Quarterly 48, no. 2 (Winter 1995–1996): 12–28. 24.
- 37.
James Naremore , More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 26–28.
- 38.
Vian, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, 9.
- 39.
Vian, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, 141.
- 40.
Richard Dyer , “Homosexuality and Film Noir,” Jump Cut: a Review of Contemporary Media 16 (1977): 18–21.
- 41.
Mary Ann Doane , “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Braudy and Cohen , Film Theory and Criticism , 318–331.
- 42.
Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 53.
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Craven, A.M. (2018). Invisible Whiteness mise en abyme: J’irai cracher sur vos tombes. In: Visible and Invisible Whiteness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76777-2_8
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