This will be a relatively short post but I wanted to point something out.
After reading Spivak and her idea of the subaltern, it made me think of the movie, "Stranger than Fiction." While the ideas of her "subaltern" is complex to a fault, I can't help noticing that Harold Crick could be considered a subaltern. Harold Crick is trapped in Karen's story. While the antics that he is trapped in this story are at times pretty funny, the ending that he was originally destined to is an example of the destiny that real life subalterns hold. These subaltern hold no voice, hold no power, and are ultimately subject to a "written" destiny. Does Harold Crick hold the image of a true subaltern? Well, not in the end for Karen ends up feeling sorry for him but it's interesting that up to that twist ending, Crick was being subject to a constant battering. No matter what he did, he was coming up to dead ends and chose the path to accept his fate. Even though he ended up living, the power to save him was from Karen, a figure who holds power in saying things and having people listen. Furthermore, Karen notes that her previous writings must have also killed other various individuals such as Harold. Does the death of the various individuals and the system of the subaltern show parallels?
1 comment:
I can see how the two interact with each other, and might be able to be extended further. Jules (Dustin Hoffman) might also potentially represent a mechanism of discrimination which keeps the subaltern (who is, as suggested, Harold) from having a voice. Jules insists to both Harold and Karen that, even though a real life would be lost, the ending of Karen's novel must remain as is--despite Harold's initial refusal to accept this, until he is soothed and encouraged by Jules to quietly accept his fate. Jules' passionate insistence for compelling fiction, then, is a source of silencing.
Spivak asserts that "Part of our 'unlearning' [...] is to articulate our participation [...] by measuring silences" (805), and I wonder how that might apply to the taciturnity that Harold takes upon. Ultimately, though, just as Spivak concludes that the "middle class" woman "with access, however clandestine, to the bourgeois" is "not a 'true' subaltern," Harold might not be a "true" subaltern either, as not only does he have figures who hear him, but is also in direct communication with the one writing his fate (whom, through his communication, he persuades.)
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