Cartografias do espaço: as narrativas de Cormac McCarthy traduzidas no cinema

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation maps the West as space based on the novels All the pretty horses (1992), No country for old men (2005) and The road (2006), by Cormac McCarthy, and the films adapted from his books. Inscribed as the main space in the culture of the United States, the West is characterized as a rhizome-space (DELEUZE; GUATTARI, 2011), a border landscape that translates itself into multiple imaginaries in the intermingling of word and image. McCarthy builds this geography in his works as an extension of language itself, which unfolds in a territory both of belonging and displacement of identity. The author also unveils the transformation of frontier space and its influence on human erosion. Hence, this dissertation questions how the film adaptations translate this space and recreate the iconography of the West from the novels based on the hypothesis that the films draw narrative procedures from the western as a genre in order to rewrite and resignify the literary works, thus establishing new discourses and dramatic figurations as compared to the source texts. Under the effect of the West as mythology, literature and cinema activate discourses and meanings that contribute to keep the expansion of this imaginary space in contemporary times. In this context, this research works as a diligence, a stagecoach connecting the conceptual places as an open map with the objective of producing a critique that intertwines theory with the literary works and their film adaptations. Hence, the conceptual play introduces the theory of literary space with the contributions of Bachelard (2008), Bakhtin (1998), Foucault (2015), Harvey (2014), among others, and establishes connections with film studies, from the points of view of Aumont (2004; 2012a; 2012b), Casetti e di Chio (2007), Bordwell e Thompson (2013), Jacobs (1977), Burch (2011) and Cruz (2004; 2014). With this map in mind, West as space comes into play through Worden (2016), Frye (2016), and Shohat e Stam (2006). By the same token, the critical views on McCarthy’s works, represented by Owens (2000), Ellis (2006), and Peebles (2017), organize the textual diligence. Thus, the analyses of the literary texts and film adaptations are concentrated within an intermedia and intertextual perspective, in which the domains of the West as space are mapped in both language systems. In conclusion, the research identifies that the films All the pretty horses and The road operate resignifications to reactivate the characters’ sense of belonging and redemption in relation to space. No country for old men, however, translates McCarthy’s novel by reinforcing the sense of loss and powerlessness of the man of the West, rewriting the western genre in contemporary cinema.