This text was published once on Friday, April 2 Décablog , Jaeglé Marianne's blog, on the occasion of waterbed.
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" I do not know where Kansas,
because I've never heard of this country.
But tell me, is what it is a civilized country? "
L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz , p.25
***
Somewhere in the middle of the United States of America is the State of Kansas, a nearly perfect rectangle of 340 km wide and 645 km long. It makes them the idea of a huge plain almost completely covered with large open fields where wheat grows. Small towns around which revolve isolated farms pierce the soil here and there along the straight roads running to the horizon always flat. What is known about the geography of Kansas, that is to say very little, its landscape and the occupancy of the inhabitants of the territory are, imagine that each of the locations in Kansas should be consistently and interchangeably referred to as "out there" as long as we do not live there himself - which, given the size of all the cities except Kansas Wichita, Topeka and Kansas City, is the situation of almost the entire population. Thus Truman Capote introduces the town of Holcomb in the early lines composure ( In Cold Blood, 1966): a backwater that others call "out there". Holcomb is in Kansas. There, 15 November 1959, four members of the Clutter family - father, mother, son and daughter - were killed with a resounding brutality.
Seriously, Kansas is certainly not as awful. In fact I would go, like everyone else. Everyone except perhaps the people of Kansas, who must dream than to leave. The problem with Kansas is that it knows almost nothing, that what one knows well that tells us knows almost nothing while Inviting little to bridging this gap. So in sticking to this brand of simplistic and mechanical remote area where everything and nothing happens, where the flatness of the area certainly offers great space but without their having any dramatic character ( these are not wilderness, they are great agricultural areas), which are confined to abstraction - from the near perfection of the rectangular draw its borders on the map to the obstinacy of roads and the horizon to stick inflexibly straight. A near-vacuum below which it would be in the desert arid Gobi type or on the ice. The position on the map of Greater Kansas City in the northeast corner of State unless it is in the top right, and the fact that the city is overwhelmingly located in the territory of neighboring Missouri , insidiously reinforces the idea of a territory that is evacuated, the people who crowded out of it and would rather not live in inhospitable landscape, giant-sized or combine rather than that of human being.
This ability of both to be mentally simplified and abstracted, provided by its geography, and other celebrity of some works it down or adding, which has in turn rendered proverbial, jointly and involuntarily moved out of Kansas field of reality physical - history and geography - for him to join the domain concepts. There is a concept, complex in Kansas. The existence of such a concept would certainly be denied by philosophers and by any serious person, because of the tremendous asset at its disposal: it is a concept whose existence depends on a formidable and delightful ignorance of what the foundation, a non-joint less necessary and quite inseparable from ignorance which makes it impossible. It is therefore very urgent to expose more detail.
***
" - And I want him to send me back to Kansas," said Dorothy.
- Where is Kansas? the man asked in surprise.
- I do not know, "replied Dorothy sorrowfully,
but my country and I'm sure it's somewhere. "
L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz , p.118
***
" Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore " (" Toto, I feel we're in Kansas anymore ") tells his dog the little Dorothy (played by Judy Garland) in the film The Wizard of Oz Victor Fleming (The Wizard of Oz , 1939). And for good reason, a tornado as it happens from time to time in the plains of Kansas has bled away his house with her and her dog Toto inside, and carried it all to the wonderful country of oz. When she was a familiar setting for plain and imperturbable monotone, Dorothy finds herself suddenly in the midst of a lush and beautiful, a landscape so rich that it seems obvious very quickly that this can not be Kansas. This reply (" Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore ") is the U.S. one of the most famous in the history of cinema, and as such there is a kind of saying. In the film Avatar, James Cameron (2009), a colonel and belligerent surviril welcomes trouffions recruited for a mission to shock with a quote from the reply, launching their " You're not in Kansas anymore " (" You're in Kansas anymore ). Story telling them they had to cut out, things became serious and upright guys wake up, he'll have to put a hit. That short, it does not laugh any more, they are no longer in Grandma is not to grease bread or sandwiches (sorry lack of an instant celebrity of expression from the francophone sphere, including more frequent use we may avoid some instances of far too vulgar, I think all would agree, " pull your fingers ass " and other " we will carve pipes later). This draws on the concept of negative Kansas: Kansas is also "so calm and normalcy, not requiring special vigilance and effort, and that there is no reason to expect surprises. Where as the Kansas region, certainly, but it bored when there is no fear of trouble and out of which the adventures is to say the problems began.
The concept of Kansas from the world of Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming's film but also the novel by L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900) whose film is based, also includes the notion of home, home to double the original sense of a place where people come and place of childhood, where there is never home because we grew up there, even though it is inhospitable. He even specifically articulates these two aspects is an inhospitable place where you are at home, which is its original home alone and as such we want to reach back home if adventure is the has left - as is the case Dorothy. The places of childhood for every child who grew up in Kansas are unsurpassable located in Kansas, as unbelievable as it may seem.
Where in the Land of Oz, the Scarecrow asks his companion to Dorothy to tell her his story, he follows this dialogue:
"She described So Kansas, how gray everything was there and how the cyclone had brought him to this strange land of Oz. Scarecrow he listened attentively and said:
- I can not understand why you want to leave this beautiful country, returning to this dry and gray as you call Kansas.
- Because you have no brains, "replied the girl. No matter whether at home, it's gray and gloomy, we who are made of flesh and blood would rather this stay in any other country, albeit the most beautiful. There is nothing like his country.
The Scarecrow sighed.
- Sure, I can not understand this, "he said. If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you probably prefer to live in beautiful places and then Kansas would be completely depopulated. This is fortunate for Kansas that you have the brains. "(L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz , pp.44-45)
" There is nothing like his country. "(" There's No Place Like Home. ") Even when his country is Kansas.
***
" - If we go far enough, "said Dorothea,
we will ultimately arrive somewhere, I think. "
L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz , p.178
***
But Kansas is also, in addition to all this, and the case becomes quite twisted, a place where crimes are perpetuated horribly bloody. As if the open space of this country as empty and endless left a great place where you can deploy the mad violence. Kansas participates very honorably in the imagination of rural crime. The fact is that very quiet regions, where very few events have any chance of fame, do often talk about them outside their borders and connection with crimes that occurred there, and so the visibility of Kansas is somewhat dependent on the impact of various facts which he is the theater. As well as many Californians had to discover that Oklahoma was not just a name on the cards at the exodus to the West Dustball Refugees in the Great Depression, it is likely that millions of Americans have greatly advanced their knowledge of Kansas - raising them from almost zero to very low - in 1959 and sporadically thereafter, at the quadruple murder of the Clutter by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the home of a family in Holcomb, Kansas. These particularly violent murders and virtually free, and their primary sequences were very long and beautifully narrated by Truman Capote in his "true account of a multiple murder and its consequences, " composure .
The concept of Kansas is also the place of childhood, and this also in his criminal side. They are children of the country who are killed, and while they are still children. This adds even more resonance public crimes, horror increased by young age and vulnerability of victims, even more sensational events. Of the four victims of family Clutter, there was Nancy, fifteen, and Kenyon, sixteen years old. The extent and posterity composure Capote make Kansas is promoted as an imaginary scene of horrific murders rural, whose victims are families with children. The victims families killed in their home, that is like murder in the home. Kansas is home, a home to be brutally murdered when one is still a kid. The recent novel Dark Places , Gillian Flynn ( Dark Places, 2009), for its shadow, adds a stone edifice of the emergence of mad and murderous violence in Kansas lost, against a family comprising children in their homes during the night (as in the quadruple murder of the Clutter).
***
Some would say that synthesis between these different elements (the plain almost abstract, home late, the rural country boring, monotonous and sinister place, the normal situation, the country of the child and at once the archetypal landscape in which a family perhaps murdered) would be somewhat difficult, so we just here to find the minimum unit that requires concept. I do not know how to contradict them. Maybe I'm slightly excited by following the thread of a story as incredible and amazing that the reliefs of Kansas. That said, an element of the film The Big Lebowski , Joel and Ethan Coen (1998) contributes to the synthesis of all the known wishes. It shows, in a second episode, a private detective (played by Jon Polito) have a mission to bring back their daughter with her parents, in Moorhead, Minnesota - the young woman (played by Tara Reid) recently married old Californian billionaire. The way he intends to use to cook is to make it nostalgic for his home region by using photographs. One of them is a picture of his family farm, black and white photograph showing a naked and endless plain earthy, with no vegetation, on which there are two thin buildings lost in the midst of desolation. It turns out that this image is a reproduction of an illustration of one of the editions of cold blood by Truman Capote .
***
References:
L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz ( The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ), 1900, Paris: Flammarion, 1995, Castor Poche collection, translated by Yvette Métral
James Cameron, Avatar , Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation - Dune Entertainment - Giant Studios - Ingenious Film Partners - Lightstorm Entertainment, 2009
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood ( In Cold Blood), 1966, Paris: Gallimard, 1972 , portfolio collection, translated by Raymond Girard
Joel Coen, The Big Lebowski , Polygram Filmed Entertainment - Working Title Films, 1998
Victor Fleming The Wizard of Oz ( The Wizard of Oz ), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer - Loew's Incorporated, 1939
Gillian Flynn dark places ( Dark Places ), 2009, Paris: Sonatina, 2010, translated by Heloise Esquié
Finally, an amazing journey, abundant, enjoyable and breathtaking in the world of Wizard of Oz through Kansas, it is imperative CosmoZ reading, writing Claro published by Actes Sud August 18, 2010.
Images: Map of Kansas, U.S. Geological Survey © - © Joel Coen, The Big Lebowski, 1998
© Anthony Poiraudeau - 2010
Images: Map of Kansas, U.S. Geological Survey © - © Joel Coen, The Big Lebowski, 1998
© Anthony Poiraudeau - 2010
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