3 Boredom on the Beach: Triviality and Humor in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot it He is capable of filming a beach scene simply to show that the children building a sandcastle drown the sound of the wave with their cries. He will also shoot a scene because just at that moment a window is opening in a house away in the background, and a window opening—well, that's funny. That is what interests Tati. Everything and nothing. Blades of grass, a kite, children, a little old man, anything, everything which is at once real, bizarre, and charming. Jacques Tati has a feeling for comedy because he has a feeling for strangeness. —Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Codard, 1972 THE DOMINANT In Chapter 1, I suggested that the dominant is one of the neoformalist critic's most important tools. The basic definition of the term is simple enough: the dominant is a formal principle that controls the work at every level, from the local to the global, foregrounding some ;Se_E*~ devices and_subordinating others. As Tynjanov put it, '\Ajy^tejri.does wjjjtiKMJ, no(; mean coexistence of components on the basis of equality; it presupposes the preeminence of one group of elements and the resulting deformation of other elements."1 In practice, however, the dominant can be a difficult concept to apply; using various statements on the subject by the Russian Formalists and later commentators, I shall attempt in this chapter to provide a more clear-cut view of how the analyst can go about formulating a dominant for a work. At first, the dominant would seem to be simply another word for unity, for a structure that pulls together all the devices of a work into i1 *«Cr mk. . . , t , , , , . r . .„„ c, , or a configuration of them comes to the fore and assumed a leadin^role All 7^«l-~~T~TT "" —r~Tt.--n------:----~; T-~-, — -— w~lr„ ........----------- ---.....--- ------------ & * ^ - il^Sdt^ingfte constructive roe, there is no fact of art. The co-ord nation of factors J KoV-0 Other Formalists elaborated this idea. Roman Jakobson's discus-ofc sions are perhaps the best known, though his definition retains a touch Ue \ h,, of the initial, relatively static, organicist concept; he considers the ^ i dominant to be "the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components.""1 A more dynamic version was worked out by Tynjanov; writing in 1923, he declared (the translators substituted thelerm^constructive principle" for dominant"): This dv eip bv Jynamism [of form] reveals itself in the concept of the constructive prin- , ... j-'Ple. Not all factorsjjf a work are equivalent.,Dynamic form is not generated ^ J / ^-means of combination or iVlerger (the often-used concept of "correspond- • . E,. ~-- F»rmil'C .fi"s's'"" F»rm„!i.sm. p. IT.Sn: Peter Steiner. Three Metaphors of Russian 1 r» , S'",M"- Poetics Today 2. no. II) (Winter 1980/8D: 93. WUk^T 4 Rne"ler' 'Tllree Metaphors.'' p. 93. - Poetics'"1"1! Jakol,son- "The Dominant," trans. Herbert Eagle, in Readings in Russian 19711 " LMislav Matejka ka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 90 is a type of negative characterization of the constructive principle." V. Shklov- ^->-o cSs.J sky) If this sensation of the interaction of factors disapp''^l>yJlJd\J?.'-^inii»s "Jl^C- ikl the compulsory presence of ttco features: thejiukordinating and the subordi-nated\ the fact of artis obliterated. It becomes automatized."' ~ __tnotj This passage suggests that the dcmiinant..is.bj^^ the defiimi----J- iarizing properties of the work. Ann Jefferson's commentary on the Russian Formalists argues that this was indeed Tynjanov's view. do. . A given workwill include passive or automatized elements which are subser- X yot». \: vient to the defamiliarizing or "foregrounded" elements. The term "fore- 0?*ft£$£w-t' it *^-_' grounding" was developed (chiefly by Tynjanov) as a necessary consequence pook^e fv h"^ t)«-'.-7>of the view of the literary text as a system composed of interrelated and inter- Seui^'^ pji, vxU*.^ ail ^ting e'ements- in orcler t0 distinguish between dominant and automatized U O^cia;; JactHs- ■ • ■ Botn sets °^ elements are formal, but the work's interest for the oUkcW<^ factors. q|, r Formalist (or rather, the specifier) will lie in the interrelationship between the foregrounded and. subservient elements. In other words, the active compo- nents of a work are now differentiated not only from practical language but also from other formal components which have become automatized, (jj^j the dominant then, has come to mean the concrete structures ^t^^A*" within the work of foregrounde"dT~ defamiliarized devices and func- ^ ^ tions, interacting with subordinated, automatized ones. From the . ' ) ------ , ■■ -------- - .................l>(u^r, I p| spectators perspective, we might say that the dominant governs the H ' perceptual-cognitive "angle" that we are cued to adopt in viewing a ~2 ckta>. \ • \ film_ag.ainst its backgrounds. p£H£phy; Uoa ^ r ^ The dominant is thus crucial in relating an artwork to history. Ac- ,'py> ]/eA j^; '■'"'■cor(Jing to Tvnjanov: f.U \ew assumption that some elements or structures are more important in a work than others. But the dominant as a tool allows us to examine such relations explicitly and systematically. As we have seen, it also enables us to perceive a dynamic rather than a static interaction between the subordinating and subordinated devices. As this Tym'anov passage suggests, the dominant as a concept can keapplkd-tij individual works, to audiors. and even to general artistic modes, such as poejjx^r„rlie.*myej. The "foregoing discussion of the dominant has been abstract, and it would be helpful now to look at some actual examples of dominant structures discussed by the Russian Formalists. ^ULo Shklovsk>' analyzes Dickens's Little Dorrit as a mysterv story, even i«i th°Ugh the °ne line of action in the novel that we usually would con* sider to be a conventional mystery constitutes only one subplot among ^ several. Yet, according to Shklovsky: ha kit 'S mterestin« to notL' that in Little Dorrit Dickens extends the device of mystery^)juMjhe parts of the_noyel. " ' ' Wjtf- Evcn the facts which a,e Pla"'d belore our eyes at the beginning are pre-^5(^l,sented as mystL*ries. The device is extended to them. He mentions specifically the love of Little Dorrit for Clennam and of Clennam for Pet—especially the latter, with the novel's persistent presentation of Clennam as not being in love with her, primarily through the expedient of referring to him as "Nobody" (e.g., in Book 7 Yuri Tvnjanov. "On Literary Evolution," trans. C. A. Luplovv, in Readies in Russian Poetics, pp. 72-73. 'Ik® i 7 LES VACAXCF.S OF. MOSSIELR UULOT the First, Chapter xxvi, "Nobody's State of Mind").s One might add that this dominant governs the remarkable first chapter of Book the Second, the narration of which describes a large group of travelers gathered in an Alpine convent as if they are all being introduced for the first time, even though it is perfectly apparent to the reader that the group is made up of many of the main characters from the first half of Little Dorrit (e.g., Mr. Dorrit is referred to as "the Chief" and Little Dorrit as "the young lady"). At the end of the chapter, one minor character glances into the register book and reads all the names, an elaborate motivation for the clearing up of a "mysterv" \vhich_has really not been a mystery at all. Thus in Little Dorrit the structure of mLsieJiy_An.„211^.jyu?het line subordinates the non-mystery syuzhet lines, and in doing so provides die meansjgr fionsjderajile jdefemiiiar.-ization in those other lines. Eikhenbaum's essay on Gogol's "The Overcoat" finds the device of skaz governing the whole. (There is no equivalent term for skaz in English; it means any writing that imitates speech patterns—the most obvious example being dialects.) By concentrating on spoken language, he argues, Gogol minimizes syuzhet complexity. The devices foregrounded by skaz construction include puns, imitations of sound effects^and. ultimately the entire grotesque tone of the novella, jnclud-ing its puzzling lapse into fantasy at the end.9 In the previous chapter, our examination of stairstep construction in Terror By Night centered around a dominant structure composed of a , . mixture .pil^enre_eojj.yentipns. We saw how the mystery elements " G^f' which seemed to govern the narrative were actually deformed by the "•^i ""^W hidden operations of the film in order to generate suspense. As a result, all the devices in the film—comic subplots, set design, camera movement, and so on—organized themselves around the need to delay progress in the rather simple hermeneutic line. In Terror By Night, a set of narrative inconsistencies resulted from inadequate motivation of these deformations. Most, if not all, of the other films I will be analyzing exploit the tension between dominant and subordinated structures for more systematic aesthetic ends. Since an artist frequently uses similar dominants from one work to the next, we often can generalize about the dominant of his or her s Victor ChklovsK-i. Sur la theorie dc la prose, trans. Guy Yerret (Lausanne: Editions I'Age d'honune. 197.3). pp. 190-191. » Boris Eikenbaum. "How Gogol's Overcoat' Is Made," trans. Beth Paul and Muriel Nesbitt. in Dostoecskij and Gogol, ed. Priscilla Mayer and Stephen Rudy (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979). pp. 119-135. 3 92 93 ANALYZING THE DOMINANT overall output as well (though there will always be some differences V a,nong works, and we may usefully find variant dominants differentiating Periods within a career, or other subcategories within an artist's output). ^Wienbaum characterizes Tolstoys early dominant as "the t[cU destruction of psychological proportions, the"c"oncenfnij^»njn^n,,^/7tf.^: nesiT"nrfiere, as with the theoretical discussion of the dominantTwe cU>& <•, see Eikhenbaum treating it not as a placid unifying factor, but as the^T^ ;' suppression of the familiar structures in favor of a new and defamiliar- "-~~' i/.ing one. Eikhenbaum's historical-critical essay on O. Henry investigates the dominant of the surprise ending. By concentrating on such n D*U endings, he claims, O. Henry's works are pushed toward irony andpV parody. Eikhenbaum analyzes the characters' lack of psychological fav^; depth—how they act purely in accordance with the mechanics of the > action. He looks also at the author's use of language: "O. Henry's basic Y^t La stylistic device (shown both in his dialogues and in the plot construction itself) is the confrontation of very remote, seemingly unrelated j. and. for that reason, surprising words, ideas, subjects or feelings. Sur- ^ 7? prise, as a devicejjfjjarod^th^sjerves as the organizing principle of ^ J° the sentenee_ itself."u thus sjy^se,gov:eir^ form—from the overall wv^ shape of the plot down to the Ievel_of the individual sentence" ' ~^ Finally, groupings larger than a single artist's works are often made around dominants, and the basic features of those dominants tend to be widely recognized elements. For example, the dominant of verse was for aJongjime_J?oujidjjp^vXtJh_iiu£tne, though theblank and free verse forms have challenged that traditional view. Dominants provide the means of studying historical changes in large-scale modes. Shklov-sky's Theory of Prose deals extensively with the introduction of the novel form and with the evolving attempts by authors to deal with the difficult organizational demands of the long prose form. He traces the \o^ii^ r> shift in the novel from the early form, composed of a frame situation l>* «koc/\ and a series of embedded stories (e.g.. The Decameron), to the pica- S'd, ff/,' resque novel, unified as a£ontiiuiing protagonist's adventures (e.g. | ^ Don Quixote), and finally to the nineteenth-century-stylenovel with f^W^ f its interweaving of simultaneous plot lines (e.g.. Little Dorrit). I have ^Ui k«i tried to do a similar kind of history of early film, comparing the nar- I rathe structures of very short primitive films, of the longer one-reel" IWis KikluMihaum. Tin- You,,-: Tolstoi, trans. David Boucher et a] ed C irv kVrn n'^»V'f* . \">i ArW: Ardis. 1972). p. 63. ' ' ' I " B. M. K|\(Mi!.aiini. O. Ilcnnj and the Theory of the Short Story, trans. I. R. Titunik ^iin Arlior: Michigan Slav ic Contributions. 1968). pp. 1.5-16. , LES YACASCF.S OF. MOSSIEVR III'LOT fa'lov*. ers, and of the feature-length film standardized in Hollywood bv the mid-1910s.12 THE DOMINANT IN LES VACANCES DE MONSIEUR HULOT V'tW- t: f»K* jbotTI How do we go about constructing a dominant for a film like Jacques ~~ Tati's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot? On first viewing, Les Vacances may appear to consist simply of a series of individual comic incidents loosely strung together. It does not strike one as a typical, tightly constructed narrative comedy of the Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd variety (though as a mime Tati is often compared to these performers). By specifying the distinctive traits of Les Vacances, we can tease out a notion of a dominant. The film's small comic scenes involve a succession of different characters, take place in different locales, and often follow each other with unspecified time lapses in between. Indeed, most are not causally connected in linear fashion, so that many could be rearranged considerably without affecting the basic minimal proairetic line. Perhaps equally striking, however, is the film's insertion of moments when nothing—humorous or otherwise—seems to be happening. Shots of nearly empty beaches, streets, and seascapes punctuate the humorous action, and sometimes when we do see characters, they are performing habitual, unfunny actions. We might dismiss these moments as subsidiary to the real business at hand—the jokes. Perhaps they create a "low-key" type of humor, or perhaps they are there to make the action more realistic. These are undoubtedly among their functions. But given that such moments often come at the beginnings and endings of segments of the film, they would seem to perform a more important structural function across the whole. NoeJJBiirfih's brief but perceptive analysis of Les Vacances in Theory of Film Practice singles out these nearly actionless moments as very important to the film's form. 94 Here the contrast between sequences, simultaneously involving duration, tempo, tone, and setting (interiors or exteriors, night or day) is under constant, meticulous control, determining the whole progression of the film and constituting its principal source of beauty. Aside from the broken rhythms of ; ftOf^,,, the gags, so perverse and yet so perfect, the principal rhythmic factor is an ''^if> ht^th alternation between strong and weak moments, between deliberately action- David Bordwell. Janet Staiger. and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). chaps. 14 and 15. 95