Cinematic modernism and Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples.(Critical essay)

IN A SYNERGY PERHAPS NOT AS "FAMOUS" AS THAT OF WALKER EVANS AND James Agee, Eudora Welty worked within two registers, as both fiction writer and photographer. Those registers dynamically come together in The Golden Apples, a text, as we will see, heavily indebted to the visual. The Passionate Observer, a 2002 exhibition organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art, has suggested that had she not been turned down for employment in 1936 as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration, Welty may have very well become another Marian Post Wolcott. "If fate had made Welty a photographer," Michael Kreyling muses, "we would have lost a great writer but gained an equally great photographer" ("Free Eudora" 763). Intuiting her photographic sensibility, critics have continually explored her fiction's narrative time, its various "still moments," thus privileging a photographic discourse built on visual fixity and the instantaneous. Accordingly, her fiction parallels her photography, illustrating the process of embalming time imagistically, as is the case, one could argue, with the embedded history that emerges in Delta Wedding's descriptions of family photographs.

Katherine Henninger begins to challenge this view of Welty's fiction, noting that Welty rarely writes about photographers. Her fiction is strangely devoid of explicit references to photography and yet her writing is "framed around the act of framing, envisioning, and telling" (188), as Welty is interested in what lies outside of the picture's frame (189). Hers is a more mobile vision and in The Golden Apples, Welty-the-photographer transforms into Welty-the-cinematographer, as she continually experiments with the relationship between time, space, and movement in a complicated rendering of history. With its multiple points of view and "deep-focus" narratives, Welty renders her fictional Morgana in cinematic terms, where image meets word. Such a meeting is a reminder of the historically complicated and intertwined relationship of literary and filmic modernisms.

Welty came of age in a culture given over to the cinema, as movies played a dynamic roll in small-town life, in towns like Jackson or The Golden Applegs fictional Morgana. Movies, as pervasive as the scent of wisteria, saturated small-town fife. With Hollywood studios producing an average of fifty films per year, the local movie offerings were plentiful during the 1930s; given the individual exhibitor's arrangement with distributors, someone like Welty could, in theory, see a different movie every day of the week. Moreover, small-town businesses advertised the movies, and vice versa, creating an imbricated local film culture in which standardized Hollywood was balanced by the demands of local and regional audiences and businesses (Waller xvi). As a young woman, Welty could have walked by a local candy store whose window display constructed a diorama of "sweet" romance, using the movie promotional material distributed by local theater owners to town businesses. A cardboard cut-out of Jean Harlow eating chocolates in Dinner at Eight (1933) might have stirred a young Eudora Welty to take a bite at the movies. These storefront window displays, as well as other street-side promotional stunts, provided "interludes or fragments of diversion and entertainment" to all passersby (Waller 11).

As Leslie Kaplansky illustrates, Welty was an avid moviegoer, as the references to movies proliferating through her fiction demonstrates (579). Welty loved Chaplin movies and Keystone cops serials, both of which resonate in The Golden Apples (One 36; Schmidt 88). In One Writer's Beginnings, Welty elegantly describes the culture of small-town movie going:

 
   All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner 
   life going on in the movies. Whole families attended together in 
   the evenings, at least once a week, and children were allowed to go 
   without chaperone in the long summer afternoons. (36) 

In the South, as with much of early twentieth-century small-town America, movies formed a crucial part of the local imaginary. The vast inner and exterior life of the movies finds expression in the "interludes and fragments" o Morgana s hastory (Waller 11). In The Golden Apples, the cinema acts not only as a recurring narrative motif but also offers a lens through which we may read the cycle's reflexive narrative frames.

As if describing the undulating short-story-cycle structure of The Golden Apples, in 1946 film theorist Andre Bazin, writing at the same moment as Welty although on a different continent, described the cinema as the "synthesis of simple movements"--a series of reframings, of mise-en-scenes upon mise-en-scenes--wherein every object is an image and every image is an object or story (15). In one of his most startling metaphors, Bazin imagined that within the cinema, an "art of space," the "image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were." Movement in film is fluid, a repeatable flow like that of Morgana's Big Black River and the text's discrete yet connected narratives, constructing a montage of associations through narrative juxtaposition. In The Golden Apples, Welty asks us to enter into a series of fictional frames that render Morgana's history cinematically by using spatial and temporal elisions to create the text.