ATDTDA (11): Chance meetings

[Monte Davis]

Tore:

> He clearly 
> wants us to pay attention to them and to the fact that the 
> world of AtD is a 
> Small World (my suggestion for an alternative title to AtD).

This made me think of the "theater is a little world" [lille velt?] theme
running throughout Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, and explicit in a speech
(I think it's Oscar's) at an Ekdahl family banquet. Or think how many have
read Shakespeare's voice into Prospero's farewell: "my so potent art... this
rough magic I here abjure... I'll break my staff... I'll drown my book...
Let us not burthen our remembrance with a heaviness that's gone... [I]
promise you calm seas, auspicious gales..."

To the extent that movie was Bergman's envoi, it leads me to think in turn
of Pynchon's pastoral endings in Vineland (Traverse picnic), M&D (the boys
will fish in America) and ATD (the Inconvenience that need never land). The
revelation of "someone... pulling the novelistic strings" is usually treated
as a modernist maneuver, breaking the fourth wall, that is inevitably
distancing --  but it's an old, old trick and in skilled hands it can be
deeply moving.