Page 346 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes temper? There is no psychological reason. My guess is that each time Curtiz was simply quoting,
unconsciously, similar situations in other movies and trying to provide a reasonably complete
repetition of them.
Thus one is tempted to read Casablanca as T.S. Eliot read Hamlet, attributing its fascination not to
the fact that it was a successful work (actually he considered it one of Shakespeare’s less fortunate
efforts) but to the imperfection of its composition. He viewed Hamlet as the result of an unsuccessful
fusion of several earlier versions of the story, and so the puzzling ambiguity of the main character
was due to the author’s difficulty in putting together different topoi. So both public and critics
find Hamlet beautiful because it is interesting, but believe it is interesting because it is beautiful.
On a smaller scale the same thing happened to Casablanca. Forced to imrprovise a plot, the
authors mixed a little of everything, and everything they chose came from a repertoire that had
stood the test of time. When only a few of these formulas are used, the result is simply kitsch. But
when the repertoire of stock formulas is used , the result is simply kitsch. But when the repertoire
is used wholesale, then the result is an architecture like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia: the same
9
vertigo,the same stroke of genius.
Stop by Stop
Every story involves one or more archetypes. To make a good story a single archetype is usually
enough. But Casablanca is not satisfied with that, it uses them all.
It would be nice to identify our archetypes scene by scene and short by shot, stopping the tape at
every relevant step. Every time I have scanned Casablanca with very cooperative research groups,
the review has taken many hours. Furthermore, when a team starts this kind of game,the instance
of stopping the videotape increase proportionally with the size of the audience. Each member of
the team sees something that the others have missed, and many of them start to find in the movie
even memories of movies made after Casablanca - evidently the normal situation fora cult movie,
Suggesting that perhaps the best deconstructive readings should be made of unhinged texts (or
that deconstruction is simply a way of breaking up texts).
However, I think that the first twenty minutes of the film represent a sort of review of the principal
archetypes. Once they have been assembled, without any synthetic concern, then the story starts
to suggest a sort of savage syntax of the archetypical elements and organizes them in multileveled
oppositions. Casablanca looks like a musical piece with an extraordinarily long overture, where
every theme is exhibited according to a monodic line. Only later does the symphonic work take
place. In a way the first twenty minutes could be analyzed by a Russian Formalist and the rest by
a Greimasian. 10
Let me then try only a sample analysis of the first part. I think that a real text analytical study of
Casablanca is still to be made, and I offer only some hints to future teams of researchers, who will
carry out, someday, a complete reconstruction of its deep textual structure.
1. First, African music, then the Marseillaise. Two different genres are evoked: adventure movie
and patriotic movie.
2. Third genre. The globe: Newsreel. The voice even suggests the news report. Fourth genre: the
odyssey of refugees. Fifth genre: Casablanca and Lisbon are, traditionally, hauts lieux [ favourite
places] for international intrigues. Thus in two minutes five genres are evoked.
3. Casablanca-Lisbon. Passage to the Promised Land (Lisbon-America). Casablanca is the Magic
Door. We still do not know what the Magic key is or by which Magic Horse one can reach the
Promised Land.
4. ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ To make the passage one must submit to a Test. The Long Expectation.
Purgatory situation.

9 Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926), Spanish art nouveau architect best known for his (still uncompleted) Church of
the Holy Family in Barcelona.
10 See note 4, p 441, above

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