Reframing Persona and

Adaptation

Paul Coates

Introduction
The following piece has two aims: one is to recontextualize
Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), in the first instance by following
the trail of one of its explicit intertexts - the classical drama Electra -
further than has been done hitherto. This seems worth doing because
the split between two of the key characters ofthat drama - Electra and
Clytemnestra - can, I would argue, be aligned with the ones within
and between Elisabet Vogler, Bergman's mute actress, and Alma,
the nurse charged with her care. Such pursuit of an intertext invoked
explicitly by a text, however briefly, is, of course, a traditional method
for examining literature-film relations, and I only hope the reader will
find this particular one illuminating.
More controversial is a related claim: that Persona can be
illuminated by juxtaposing it with two texts Bergman may well not
have knov/n, and to which no links of any kind are made in his film:
Stefan Zweig's Chess Novella (1942) and Carson McCullers' The
Ballad of the Sad Café (1943). These juxtapositions cast light on some
of his work's key procedures and preoccupations, particularly its
purposeful use of black-and-white and its concem with the face. The
justification for drawing on these texts, irrespective of one's knowledge
of Bergman's knowledge or ignorance of them, is in part that any

28
contextualization capable of advancing understanding of his riddling
film, however partially, should be assayed. One's mind may well retain
its imprint, even when confronting texts of a very disparate nature,
such remembrance being either deliberate, a reaction to an unsolved
case, or the inevitable consequence of the haunting quality of any
work experienced as major. If the classical text with which Persona
is cross-referenced here arises through an intertext invoked explicitly
by the film, the intertexts considered later enter far less predictably,
and with far less obvious justification. Despite this methodological
contrast, the two sections are linked by their address of the doubling
many critics have deemed central to Persona - most famously, Susan
Sontag, who discemed in Persona a series of "variations on the theme
of doubling" (Sontag 1969 135). Moreover, and paradoxically, the
play Electra, although explicitly cross-referenced by Bergman, in a
sense resonates with Persona from a distance even greater than that at
which most would locate the texts of Zweig and McCullers.
The least uncontroversial element of this article lies in the
methodological consequences of its juxtapositions, which propose
a way of doing adaptation studies capable of dispelling some of the
derision poured upon them by Robert Ray (Ray 2001): of tuming a
branch of criticism with a reputation, deserved or not, for stodginess
and literalism in the possibly redeeming direction of the surrealism
whose Exquisite Corpse game is a touchstone for Ray. Finding the
names of McCullers or Zweig on a piece of paper first folded after that
of Bergman is indeed unexpected. In this context, even niy article's
more conventional enlargement of the intertextual significance of
Electra might practice an inversion of customary proportions that is
as surrealist as it is psychoanalytic, treating textual moments as just as
potentially condensed as key, obscure details in dreams.
If this article hosts both a form of traditional adaptation studies
and a candidate for the post-modem, surrealist one demanded by Ray,
it follows Adomo in denying that two halves necessarily add up to a
whole. It draws conclusions from the open diffusion of intertextuality
across a field of variable dimensions, pursuing even echoes whose
remoteness suggests location near the edges of such a field. In
Kieslowskian terms, Polish Weronika may have a double in French
Véronique. The relationship need not be one of doubling, but may
be as unconscious as that between the two women. The intertextual
field responds elastically to the ricochet of cormections within it.

29
Moreover, it contains many subordinate force-fields, each arguably
linked to a particular identity among the many interlocking ones we
all possess. Thus affinity between Bergman and Carson McCullers
may be ruled out on grounds of nationality, gender and language, but
become plausible when the space is defined differently, though not
necessarily more broadly: say, as that of mid-twentieth-century artists
influenced by Romanticism and the Gothic. Most radically of all, a
Jungian might seek to unify all sub-fields under the aegis of a collective
unconscious accessible to all humanity. The balladic mode ofthe one
work might indicate a subsidence into a pre-individualistic form of
culture dramatized through doubling in the case ofthe other one (with
Bergman's own earlier interest in the balladic, in The Virgin Spring
[1960], possibly relevant). Such a collapse into pre-individualism,
in the case of Bergman's work, is one cause of the fruitfulness of
its Girardian analysis by Paisley Livingston (1982), for although
one strand of Girard's thought posits human progress through the
reverberation of the Gospel Word, another declares victimization and
scapegoating fearsomely perennial, the result of mimetic processes
that liquidate differences in a sacrificial unanimity.
For all that, though, the comparison is less one of Bergman and
McCullers than of parts and wholes of texts. As one voyages between
texts and textual moments, discovering some to be potential intertexts
for each other, the possibilities of relationship may be actualized in
unexpected places. This article, therefore, seeks ways of fostering the
unpredictable flashes of intuition without which reason has nothing to
work on, and without which its pre-knowledge of fields is ignorance
oftheir underground ferment. The resultant chance encounters of texts
(and chance too is central to the surreal) might just throw up useful
slivers of insight, shooting forth sudden light, like a glazed, sun-stmck
shard whose emergence under a plough discloses other civilizations,
other times.

Conscious intertexts
Two literary texts are usually adduced as intertexts of Ingmar
Bergman's Persona. One is August Strindberg's one-act play The
Stronger (1889), with which Bergman's film has much in common, as
it too is one woman's monologue in the presence of a stubbomly silent
counterpart, raising questions of the relative power of silence and
speech. The other is Electra, in which Elisabet Vogler is performing

30
when suddenly afflicted by the silence that leads her into professional
medical care. (The role possibly played by A Hero of Our Time, the
short Lermontov novel perused by the boy in the pre-credit sequence,
lies beyond the scope of this essay.) If Bergman's indebtedness to
Strindberg is usually mentioned only briefly in the most influential
or authoritative English-language criticism (Adams Sitney 1990;
Johns Blackwell 1997; Livingston 1982; Sontag 1969; Wood 1969),
with only a self-identified Swedish "native" likely to make more of it
(Steene 30-37), the question of his film's relationship to Electra - even,
whether the Electra is Euripidean or Sophoclean - is accorded little
attention. Adams Sitney comments: "Bergman does not tell us which
Electra Elisabet Vogler was performing when she first broke down. It
would hardly have mattered; for the difference between the plays has
no relevance for Persona" (Adams Sitney 143). Robin Wood, for his
part, bypasses the two dramatic texts in order to concentrate upon the
Freudian interpretation ofthe myth they refract (Wood 1994 61).
Although the work of these critics is indubitably important,
their elision of the drama Electra arguably causes their readings to
miss both an important dimension of the doubling that reverberates
through Persona and the possible depth of the role played by Electra
in Elisabet's imagination. Paisley Livingston begins the task of going
further, briefly linking that play's thematics to the idea of sacrifice that
is central to his Girardian reading of Bergman's work in general. He
contends that "[i]t is (...) significant that Vogler's discovery of art's
'falsehood' and her refusal to continue with her role occurs during
Electra, a play in which the violences of revenge and sacred purification
converge (this is explicit, for example, when the sacrificial blade with
which Aegisthus kills a bull is taken up by Orestes to murder him)"
(Livingston 218). The following sub-section seeks to document the
ferment aroused in Elisabet by the play, arguing that it does indeed
matter whether the version was that of Sophocles or Euripides.

Elisabet between Clytemnestra and Electra

If doubling shapes the relationship that unfolds between Alma
and Elisabet in Persona, there is also a duality within Elisabet that
matches her simultaneous relationship to the two key female figures of
the plays entitled Electra: Electra herself and Clytemnestra. In order
to determine the nature of that relationship, however, one must ask
first whether one or the other ofthe leading extant versions of Electra

31
is more relevant: that of Sophocles or Euripides? Since Sophocles'
work thematizes silence extensively, it becomes the better candidate,
regardless of whether it is played more or less frequently than the
Euripidean version (Bergman himself never directed either). Thus the
Sophoclean Clytemnestra speculates that Electra and Orestes may
silence her, with Electra replying, "we are silenced, much less should
we silence you" (Sophocles 55); and, a moment later, Clytemnestra
comments to the tutor who has reported Orestes' putative death, "Your
coming, sir, would deserve large recompense if you had hushed her
clamorous tongue" (Sophocles 55). The reader may conclude that if
Bergman did indeed intend to suggest that Elisabet's muteness was
prompted by a particular Greek drama, the Electra in question is
likely to be Sophocles'. Other links between film and play include the
attention paid to the face, particularly in Electra's pleas to Orestes
not to deprive her of the comfort of his face (Sophocles 67), or
her sense that she is "as nothing" and wishes to enter nothingness
(Sophocles 64).
Equally telling is her statement to Clytemnestra, "Do not
blame my voice, for I shall speak no more" (Sophocles 52), which
describes exactly what Elisabet has done (indeed, going forther
than Electra herself, who does not fall silent, whose word does not
predict her deeds, whose continued speech precludes silence). This
line presents an Electra with whom Elisabet appears strongly to have
identified, anticipating her foture carer's intensity of identification
with her. In similar mood, Electra will later speak ironically of her
sister Chrysothemis's desire to deliver good news: "Speak on then,
if you find pleasure in speaking" (Sophocles 58). Elisabet's apparent
determination to enter silence may even accompany a death-wish, as
Electra informs the chorus that she would happily be immured; and
the grave is, of course, proverbially tacitum. However, a few pages
after Electra's comment to Clytemnestra, one may be startled to
read the following one by Clytemnestra herself: "There is a strange
power in motherhood; a mother may be wronged but she never
leams to hate her child." (Sophocles 55) This statement suggests that
Elisabet nourishes an equal, or possibly primary, identification with
Clytemnestra: after all, the question of her relations with children, both
real and represented, pervades the film. She tears up the photograph of
her son; Alma accuses her of wishing his death (rather as Clytemnestra
may view the death of Orestes as the precondition of her own safety);

32
and she dwells on (in a sense, "in," her gaze moving around inside)
the famous picture of a boy with hands raised in the Warsaw Ghetto.
(Richard Raskin enumerates some of the many contexts into which
this image has been inserted, but notes that Bergman did not respond
to his question conceming his reason for using it [Raskin, 2004]).
As her eyes move among the different protagonists of the Warsaw
Ghetto photograph of a child surrounded by other Jewish deportees
and lifting his hands in surrender to Wehrmacht soldiers - an image
of heart-breaking irony, as the "war against the Jews" is unlike those
other, "normal" ones in which surrender would ensure prisoner-of-
war treatment - it is as if to transform the fragmentation of "tearing
up" into an editing process that restores at least the shadow of life to
the "dead" image that is the photograph by granting it the status of
an interplay of looks, restoring in skeletal form the continuity system
of life itself. It then becomes possible to see the real tearing up of the
other photograph as an implicit form of editing, and as paradoxically
creative as well as destructive, resembling also a director's distribution
of roles. Elisabet's shifting look also tries out each figure as a possible
object of identification, briefly acting out such roles as "persecutor"
and "victim." Within that image, she is everywhere and nowhere, her
ghostly embodiment of "everything" entailing the possibility of being
nothing.
Some comments on this image by Susan Sontag may be
relevant here, especially since her essay on Persona is one of the
key ones. In Regarding the Pain of Others she remarks: "Certain
photographs - emblems of suffering, such as the snapshot of the little
boy in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, his hands raised, being herded to the
transport to a death camp - can be used like memento mori, as objects
of contemplation to deepen one's sense of reality; as secular icons, if
you will. But that would seem to demand the equivalent of a sacred or
meditative space in which to look at them" (119). However, she adds,
"there seems no way to guarantee contemplative or inhibiting space
for anything now" (121). But insofar as sacred space is by definition
"holy," i.e. "set apart," it may be represented by a space outside normal
life. The unconscious Freudian "gain" in illness for Elisabeth Vogler,
whose contemplation of this image Sontag might have mentioned here,
may be its usefulness as a way into such a space amidst an unremitting
desacralization, Bergman's own Winter Light having exhausted his
interest in entering the space of a church, perhaps because it limits

33
the infinity represented more concretely in the human face, and more
abstractly in the chessboard to be discussed in the next section.
The face in an icon confronts one directly; in this respect
the Warsaw Ghetto photograph's image of a boy looking vaguely in
our direction, rather than directly at us, becomes the crucial dilution
of iconic frcntality that creates the secular icon. It is as if frontality
harbored the monstrous, a machine-like symmetry that devolves
all-too-easily into such inhuman manifestations as the Spider-
God of Through a Glass Darkly (1961) or the fusion of two "tom"
photographs that yields the deformed face of Alma-Elisabet. Usually
the face classified as sacred is placed above one, while one at one's
own leveL, or lower, is framed in documentary fashion. Bergman,
however, appears to locate himself in the tradition exemplified by
Dreyer's representation of the face of Joan in The Passion of Joan of
Arc (1928), which is often shot from above, its placement suggesting
a humility and a suffering that both sacralize. That face placed below
is related to that of the communicant at the rail in Winter Light (1963).
(In each case, both that of Dreyer's film and Winter Light, it is as if the
face that looks down - the official face of religion - in fact belittles,
abusing its authority, a notion that would chime with Bergman's view
of the imbrication of Lutheran Protestantism with patriarchy.) In
Persona the belittling face is matemal, the mythically enlarged one
created by and as cinema in the pre-credit sequence. Bergman's self-
reflexive interest in the photograph links his examination of cinema
to one of the image of the mother, while also anticipating his short
meditation upon a passport photograph of his own mother in Karin 's
Face (1984).
The tearing up of the photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto child
matches a duality of identification pervading the film. The doubling
many critics have discemed in the Elisabet-Alma relationship
culminates in a vertical "tearing" of their faces into two halves fused
in one deformed image. This duality does indeed appear to appear to
match a restaging within Elisabet of the animosity-laden encounter
of Electra and Clytemnestra. It is as if Elisabet fell silent because her
ability to perform a role collapsed in consequence of her inability
to identify fully with the one assigned her, perhaps both in life and
on the stage, as the words of both Electra and Clytemnestra chime
with her own experience, tearing her apart. The reversibility of her
identity between those of Electra and Clytemnestra suggests the one

34
ascribed by Freud to the murderous impulse itself, which one can
see replicated in Electra: the death-wish grows with the demise of
her hopes for vengeance on her father's murderers, but is redirected
towards killing with the reappearance of Orestes. Bringing Bergman's
film into conjunction with Sophocles' play puts flesh on the bones of
Paisley Livingston's fine distillation ofthe film's dynamic: "the artist
tums upon her role but discovers, in her inwardness, only another
scene where the same violence is repeated" (Livingston 221).
Because Adomo's notion of negative dialectic, of constitutive
non-resolution, may be even more relevant than his aesthetics (Adomo
1966), which Livingston has applied to Persona, it is worth reverting
briefly here to the film's other prototype, Strindberg's chamber drama
The Stronger. Strindberg's title is ironic, as his play dramatizes the
impossibility of determining whether a silent unmarried woman or her
garmlous married friend is the more powerful within the relationship;
whether strength lies in speech, as is usually assumed to be the case,
or in the silence which can seem mocking and resistant. If Electra
is unafraid of death, identifying with its silence, might she be "the
stronger"? And yet she is an outcast at the court of Aegisthus, and
rational calculation would attribute greater strength to Clytemnestra.
In the context of Sophocles' play, the exiling and desired death of
Orestes rhyme with the placement outside the main body of the film
of the boy of the pre-credit sequence. "Inside" Persona, meanwhile,
the Electra-Clytemnestra split may be said to mn both between and
through both protagonists, as Alma too participates in a pathology of
failed matemity.

Incalculable reverberations: the unconscious ofthe text

Robert Ray's strictures on adaptation studies, mentioned at the
start of this article, propose a remedy: an awareness of intertextuality
(Ray 124-6). For Ray, however, a concem with intertextuality is
rather one with word-image relations than with individual texts;
with theory rather than criticism. Robert Stam brings one closer to
the materiality of texts, arguing, like Dudley Andrew (Andrew 96-
106), that adaptation should be central to Film Studies: as Stam puts
it, because "virtually all films, not only adaptations (...) are mediated
through intertextuality" (Stam and Raengo 45). Nevertheless, Stam
remains vulnerable to Ray's critique, as his reference to "source-model
hypotexts" (Stam and Raengo 45), although far more theoretically

35
sophisticated than adaptation studies' long-standing prioritization of
a fidelity that is in one, possibly key, sense unattainable (due to the
semiotic difference between the two media), displays an intertextuality
that is less thoroughgoing than the "polycentric universal history"
he lauds elsewhere (Stam 15), for it retains the "original-copy"
distinction criticized by Ray (127). Although the emphases of
traditional adaptation studies are attenuated, they remain in place: that
single hypotext is a model and primary point of reference reflected or
refracted in a later text of texts. The second half of this article seeks
to break that emphasis by conjoining texts in a double or multiple
exposure. In each case, the works paired with one another should
cast light upon one another, like facing mirrors. Under this model,
Bergman's work itself illuminates, or forms a significant constellation
with, another work, with which traffic is two-way. While recognizing
the validity ofthe tradition Stam continues and imaginatively renews,
it insists on that tradition's limitations, which it marks by overstepping
them.

Nothingness, black-and-white, and doubling

"The more one limits oneself, the more - conversely - one
approaches the infinite" (Zweig 292): thus the narrator of Stefan
Zweig's Chess Novella, commenting on chess and the degree to which
monomaniacal devotion to it can narrow commitment to more usual
human concems, while also implicitly suggesting a source of the
aura of the metaphysical often associated with it. With this quotation
as a leitmotif, Bergman's tum to chamber drama in the early 1960s
becomes understandable as possibly just such a self-limitation pointing
in the direction of the infinite, rendering unsurprising its address of
the question of the existence of God, or the way the separation of
face from the body in its frequent close-ups evokes a material form
of transcendence. It also becomes the logical next step from the
death-delaying, Scheherazade-like chess of The Seventh Seal and the
brief opening appearance of a chess-set in the mise-en-scène of Wild
Strawberries.
Zweig's meditation on the effects of limitation assumes
another form later in his novella, which recounts the experiences of
Dr. B., an Austrian loyalist subjected to the "soft torture" of prolonged
incarceration in a single hotel room by National Socialists eager to
extract from him the details of secret, pre-Anschluß state transactions.

36
The restriction to a single room may recall the situation of Bergman's
chamber dramas. Even more relevant is the expedient to which the
Doctor resorts in an effort to maintain his sanity, and the way he frames
it: as a battle against Nothingness, the "Nichts" haunting the pages
describing his situation. The battle seems to be lost - until he discovers
a book of grand master chess games, which he begins to replay,
altemately assuming the roles of black and white. Juxtaposition of this
situation with Bergman's Persona allows one to see it as transposing
into another key the chess match of The Seventh Seal, while the hotel
room suggests that of The Silence (1963), that visceral prologue to
Persona. Zweig's doctor remarks - in a sentence worth quoting in
German for reasons that will soon become apparent -: "ich mußte
versuchen, mit mir selbst oder vielmehr gegen mich selbst zu spielen"
(I had to attempt to play with, or rather against, myself) (Zweig 291).
The double formulation is the formula of a doubling that is also a
splitting, as the differing personal pronouns indicate the difference
within doubling's repetition: between the softer, dative "mir" and the
more aggressive accusative, "mich." The splitting spirals towards
the pathological once the Doctor, excessively familiar with all the
games in the book, is compelled to devise new ones to combat mental
numbness. Altemating between the moves of black and white, he
splits himself. In the end, the void against which he had fought could
be said to reassert itself in the effects of this splitting. The overcoming
of nothingness by a splitting into black and white, an echo of many
creation stories and their step out of chaos through a separation of dark
and light, is not permanent. Indeed, Persona may make one wonder
whether a film genuinely conscious of the power of such nothingness
requires shooting in the black-and-white that borders upon it, and
whether it thereby in a sense keeps the negativity that is its predecessor
and adversary permanently both at bay and in play, as both black and
white can represent death and the void, the Nietzschean abyss that
stares back at one as one stares at it, pondering one's next move. After
all. Persona begins in the primal chaos of a pre-credit sequence whose
continual shadowing of the subsequent narrative is underlined when
the film "bums out" and part ofthat sequence recurs.
Zweig's Doctor describes his state of mind as involving
a need both to know and not to know, both to act consciously and
to be unconscious of one's own action in order to treat the other's
moves as genuinely those of another player. This is surely very

37
close to the "double-think" oí Persona, Sontag's "variations on the
theme of doubling," which similarly participates simultaneously in
consciousness and the unconscious. The Doctor describes this double
state of mind as an absurdity: as in Bergman, the void conduces a
theatre of the absurd. It is the paradoxicality rightly associated
with masking - that phenomenon invoked by Bergman's title - by
David Napier (Napier 1-29). The consequence is a mutation of the
initial situation that may be inexplicable: no wonder that the Doctor
doubts his ability clearly to depict what followed (Zweig 292). The
movement into self-splitting is described as one "ins Bodenlose" (into
the bottomless) (Zweig 293): the ground gives way beneath one's feet.
In the end, the Doctor comes close to madness, as Bergman's film
itself might be said to do. Bergman himself may well have seen it
as going dangerously far, as never again would he broach quite such
dense thickets of enigma.

The uncanny face and the shadow

The lover craves any possible relationship with the beloved,
even if this experience can cause him only pain. (McCullers 1977 27)
If a connection between Sophocles' Electra and Persona is
signaled by the film itself, and a comparison with Zweig's novella is
justified by a common concem with splitting, self-doubling, and the
interface of black and white, a comparison with Carson McCullers'
The Ballad of the Sad Café may seem plausible on grounds of the
relationship between that splitting and Bergman's "face-work." The
comparison is particularly illuminating in relation to McCullers'
text (and oeuvre, as uncanny experiences of the face dot her other
stories also, as when we leam of one figure in The Member of the
Wedding [1946] that "there was a brightness where his face should be"
[McCullers 1973 2]). The complex of interrelated elements partially
buried under, and underpinning, these stories, is blasted closer to the
surface in Bergman's attack upon linear narrative. Those elements'
capacity to destroy narrative becomes apparent in Personals attempt
to dam them up in its pre-credit sequence, and in the effects of that
dam's collapse when the film "bums out" following Alma's setting of
a trap for Elisabet. These elements resemble Miss Amelia's treatment
of her first marriage in The Ballad of the Sad Café, which she never
mentions and which becomes a "troubling undertone" (34), almost as
if her ex-husband's penitentiary cell is located below the café. He is as

38
it were the "hidden message" (11) mentioned by the narrator, written
in invisible ink and brought out by fire, that symbol of the sexuality
Miss Amelia denies, even though her whisky elicits the secrets of the
souls of its drinkers (10) (does "fire-water" replace the fire applied
to the invisible message or encountered in Persona through the
simulated ignition of its celluloid mid-way?). Such elements might
be described as representing the chaos, the undifferentiated prima
materia, discussed above in connection with Zweig's work. It swirls
around faces deemed "exceptional" (cf. McCullers, 20 and Alma's
view of Elisabet): faces perhaps rendered so by separation from a
body that acts within time.
One haunting passage offers the first gateway into the space
within which the texts of McCullers and Bergman resonate uncannily
with one another. The face that splits into a composite of those of
Alma and Elisabet at the end of the former's monologic projection of
Elisabet's experience of childbirth suggests a dreamlike extrapolation
from McCullers' enigmatic initial characterization of the face of the
protagonist of the story-to-be. Miss Amelia, looking out of a window:
"on the second floor there is one window which is not boarded;
sometimes in the late aftemoon when the heat is at its worst a hand
will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town.
It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams - sexless and
white, with two gray crossed eyes which are tumed inward so sharply
that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret
gaze of grief ' (McCullers 1977 3-4).
In the light of the shot-counter shot shaping Alma's monologic
reimagination of Elisabet's experience, which is presented twice (once
from Alma's side, once from Elisabet's), the idea of an exchange of
looks between two faces, when juxtaposed with Amelia's crossed
eyes, suggests a co-existence of two faces within one, collapsing any
possibility of suture. This collapse also affects the distinction between
face and mirror, those key elements of filmic and film-theoretical
vocabulary presented as linked, yet separate, by Thomas Elsaesser
and Malte Hagener (2010 55-81). Uncannily, and somewhat as in
the post-Cubist work of Picasso, the face becomes both face-in-itself
and its own mirror, its fusion of self and other sterilizing encounter
with the outer world to yield sexlessness. This synthesis might be
compared with the "face-work" of Erving Goffinan, which is the
"line" represented by the individual: "that person's face clearly is

39
something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather something
that is difïlisely located in the flow of events" (Goffman 7). Elisabet's
rejection of the "lines" constituted by her lines, of the persona they
impose, becomes a rejection of flow itself Her dislocation resembles
the absent-minded condition entered by McCullers' Miss Amelia
when, unsure how to react, she starts acting self-contradictorily
(53-4). The initial description of her cross-eyed face suggests a self-
contradiction extending further, into self-splitting. In the context both
of Persona and McCullers' Ballad ofthe Sad Café, GofEhian's term
"face-work" happily echoes those Freudian neologisms, "dream-
work" and "mouming-work," the dream and the mouming involving
the shame so central both to Bergman's oeuvre and to McCullers'
story, where Miss Amelia's catastrophic loss of status arguably begins
with her body's linkage to that of a hunchback who climbs upon her
back in actuality after having fused with her already as a shadow.
Unlike Goftman, however, both Bergman and McCullers discem a
potential contradiction between "face" and "line," focusing on the
face precisely because of its potential separation, by frames, from the
body that acts and the (time)-line of its action.
The motif of the uncanny face involves a lack of face that
is also a loss of face. Moreover, it summons forth other elements of
McCullers' work, prompting, for instance, the appearance of twins,
those entities often deemed uncanny in the folklore represented by the
ballad mode. The Ballad of the Sad Café, like Persona, offers a set of
variations on doubling. (The twins themselves are doubled in a detail
whose momentariness a psychoanalyst would deem significant, the
later appearance of an old couple who "had lived together so long (...)
that they looked as similar as twins" [42].) Moreover, like Persona,
McCullers' story is interested in the photograph: the mention of the
twins is followed closely by that of a photograph of two children of
near-equal age whose faces seem to be indeterminate, "tiny white
blurs" (8). That blurring perversely facilitates the establishment of a
relationship between the apparently solitary Miss Amelia, all the more
solitary inasmuch as her femininity bears many of the hallmarks of
stereotypical masculinity, and a woman in another town. This blurring
of identities resembles that of the faces of Elisabet and Alma, as
perceived by the boy in the pre-credit sequence, before whom one
melts into the other and back again. Is the triangle formed by the boy
and the two women, that afterimage of The Silence, a transformation

40
of the differently-gendered triangle of McCullers' work, one woman
and two men, with each outsider the baffied witness to a homosexual
relationship they cannot decode as such? Does Miss Amelia's
sexlessness render her like that child, not comprehending what she
sees and so unable to defend herself against it?
At the same time, the relationship between Miss Amelia and
the hunchback who claims kinship with her (and whom she addresses
as Cousin Lymon), being one of love, resembles that between Singer
and the deaf-mute Antonopoulos in McCullers' début novel The Heart
is a Lonely Hunter (1940): it is as if, by an immanent thematic logic,
mutism and physical deformity are translatable into one another across
the novels, and within the imagination in general; as if they could be
superimposed upon one another to yield Persona, which places on its
surface the signifiers of speechlessness and deformity, as the splitting
of Alma's face into a lopsided composite in which neither Liv UUman
nor Bibi Andersson recognized herself destroys Alma's capacity for
articulate speech, in a sense muting her too. The appearance of that
monstrous face may even be seen as a traumatically delayed revelation
of the cause of Elisabet's silence (much as the initial appearance in
McCullers' text ofthe uncanny face of Miss Amelia at the window is
a consequence of the earlier fact revealed later in the text, that "As a
rule. Miss Amelia was a silent woman" [36]).
When the hunchback first followed Amelia up the stairs of
her dwelling he "hovered so close behind her that the swinging light
made on the staircase wall one great, twisted shadow of the two of
them" (12): the fusion ofthe faces of Alma and Elisabet is just such a
distorted shadow. Similarly, at one point readers are enjoined to "see
Miss Amelia bend down to let Cousin Lymon scramble on her back"
(25), as if he himself is a hump she has adopted in order to be like
him. A Jungian would term him her shadow indeed, bom perhaps of
the self-splitting linked here, as if in a folk ballad, to the crossed eyes.
Is the crossing of eyes the result of a fissuring ofthe visual field? Can
it be correlated with the self-contradictoriness of action into which
Miss Amelia falls, unsurprisingly, as McCullers' narrator has stated
very early on that a cross-eyed person, when thinking deeply, has "a
look that appears both to be very wise and very crazy" (11)? As in
much of Persona, in which Alma adulates Elisabet at first and seeks
to resemble her, McCullers' concem is with the relationship between
liking and becoming like, and its capacity to feed vampirism and the

41
Bakhtininan double body of the grotesque (Gleeson-White 96-118).
The image is echoed fatally when in the end Lymon leaps on Amelia's
back to save her ex-husband from defeat in his wrestling match with
her, after which the two men plunder her belongings and leave her
as the devastated face encountered at the story's beginning, hanging
uncannily outside the narrative, in the timelessness of a dream (or
a ballad, whose date of composition is not clear, whose lines recur
in circular fashion...), like the face in Persona. And, much as in
Bergman's film, we end more or less where we began.

Conclusion
To take seriously the intertextual method is to mle out preset
limits on the comparability and compatibility of texts. One cannot
predetermine where sparks will leap from one text to another, be
it between part and part or part and whole. There are no obvious
roadmaps or formulae. Thus, for example, although someone
interested in Bergman's work may, if also a passionate reader, light
upon McCullers' work sooner or later (for instance, after reading
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, whose focus on mutism suggests
possible relevance to Elisabet Vogler's silence, or on the basis of the
correspondence between the title of her late novel Clock Without Hands
[1961] and a key dream image from Wild Strawberries), equally well
they may not (I do not know of anyone having done so hitherto). All
the same, using keywords might increase the likelihood of positive
juxtaposition (Strindberg's The Stronger might lead to a combination
of woman and strength, and so to McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Café,
which concems a woman who is deemed strong by her neighbors and
wrestles men successfolly, but is finally defeated by trickery, arguably
as patriarchy allegorically becomes the monkey literally on her back,
or because she unwittingly surrenders the strength that distinguishes
her, rubbing the hunchback in an effort to make him stronger (24)).
One's best recommendation therefore might be a negative one: a taboo
on the disciplinary compartmentalizations which dull awareness of the
intertextuality (the increasing, hyperl inked connectedness) of culture,
as its words, fed into real or imaginary search engines, all become
potentially subject to reclassification as keywords: a taboo, in other
words, on the habitual separations that close the mind.

42
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