O Skorcezeovom Filmutišina ng2019

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.
1093/litthe/frz024/5543464 by University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh user on 27 October 2019

Literature & Theology, Vol. 0. No. 0, July 2019, pp. 1–17
doi:10.1093/litthe/frz024
OF FAITH AND FAITHLESSNESS:

ADAPTIVE FIDELITY IN
SHUSAKU ENDO’S AND MARTIN
SCORSESE’S SILENCE

Teng-Kuan Ng
Abstract
Adapted from the 1966 novel by the Japanese Catholic writer Shusaku Endo,
Martin Scorsese’s Silence offers a timely occasion for expanding the critical
discourse on adaptive fidelity. This article explores the ways that both texts
draw from historical and scriptural sources within the Christian tradition—
most notably the biblical tale of Judas—to clarify the meaning of faith in their
respective contexts. Employing Andre Bazin’s theory of adaptation, I argue
that alongside their source texts, both novel and film compose an intertextual
‘ideal construct’ of religious fidelity as dynamically lived across time and
place, a fidelity paradoxically performed via various modes and tropes of
adaptive infidelity.
Keywords: Adaptation Studies, Fidelity Criticism, Intertextuality, Martin

Scorsese, Religion and Film, Shusaku Endo
I. INTRODUCTION
Up till the turn of the millennium, film theorists did not seem to hold the
study of adaptive fidelity in particularly high regard. In his landmark study of
adaptation in Concepts in Film Theory, Dudley Andrew flatly described dis-
course on fidelity as ‘unquestionably the most frequent and most tiresome
discussion of adaptation’.1 Likewise, in Novel to Film, Brian McFarlane averred
that ‘many kinds of relations may exist between film and literature, and fidelity
is only one—and rarely the most exciting’.2 As a rule of thumb, such criticisms
disparaged studies of fidelity for their essentialistic and evaluative assumptions:
namely, that ‘the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of some-
thing essential about an original text’, and that cinematic adaptations of pre-

Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC.
Email: tn415@georgetown.edu
Literature & Theology # The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press 2019; All rights
reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/litthe/frz024/5543464 by University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh user on 27 October 2019
2 TENG-KUAN NG
existing literary works should be judged based on the success of this
reproduction.3
There appears, however, to have been a significant reappraisal of fidelity
criticism over the last two decades. In a detailed and expansive state-of-the-
field review, Casie Hermansson observes that contemporary scholarship on
film adaptation has increasingly affirmed the promises of approaching fidelity
as a conceptual topos, especially with an eye toward constructing ‘a pluralistic,
intertextual vision of adaptation’s critical strategies’.4 Scholars such as Jarrell
Wright, Thomas Leitch, and Christine Geraghty argue, for instance, that
rather than viewing an original source as a normative yardstick for adaptive
fidelity, it proves far more fruitful to pursue research on how and why specific
works seek to be faithful to their sources.5 On this view, though fidelity
criticism is but ‘one tool among many, and sometimes not the right tool of
the job’, it is also sometimes ‘the only one that will do’ because ‘some film
adaptations and their contexts insist on it’.6
Within this post-millennial resurgence of fidelity studies, perhaps the most
intriguing development has been the turn towards Andre Bazin’s theory of
adaptation, as articulated in his 1948 essay, ‘Adaptation, or the Cinema as
Digest’. In his introduction to Film Adaptation, a seminal anthology in
which this essay is included, James Naremore declares that ‘it is high time
that writers on adaptation, however they might label their methodology,
recognize what Bazin saw in 1948’.7 Naremore locates the core of Bazin’s
vision in his quasi-prophetic proposal:
to imagine that we are moving toward a reign of adaptation in which the notion
of the work of art, if not the very notion of the author himself, will be destroyed.
If the film that was made of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men . . . had been successful
. . ., the (literary?) critic of the year 2050 would not find a novel out of which a
play and a film had been ‘made’, but rather a single work reflected through three
art forms, an artistic pyramid with three sides, all equal in the eyes of the critic.
The ‘work’ would then be only an ideal point at the top of this figure, which is
itself an ideal construct.8
This conception of a composite ‘ideal construct’ is taken up as a central

‘topic worthy of proper investigation’ in True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and
the Question of Fidelity. In this 2011 volume, film scholars no less than Colin
MacCabe, Tom Gunning, and Andrew rethink the question of fidelity, con-
sidering how Bazin’s diachronic, intertextual theory of adaptation affords a
broader appreciation of the complex relations in which both texts and their
sources are embedded.9
Based on the 1966 novel by the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, Martin
Scorsese’s recently-released Silence (2016) presents a timely context for
OF FAITH AND FAITHLESSNESS 3
furthering this critical discourse on fidelity. How might Bazin’s theory of
adaptation shed light on the dynamics of fidelity in a cross-cultural project
where ‘an Italian-American Catholic adapts a Japanese Catholic’s novel about
Portuguese Catholics for a Hollywood movie’?10 Given J.D. Connor’s tren-
chant suggestion that the topos of fidelity can be productively employed as a
heuristic for approaching fundamental issues of authority, ‘knowledge and
being’, what is the relationship between inter-media adaptive fidelity and
the religious and existential dimensions of Endo’s and Scorsese’s works?11
And if we are to take seriously Bazin’s contention that ‘faithfulness to a
form, literary or otherwise, is illusory: what matters is the equivalence of meaning
of the forms’, might there be a certain meaning to which both films and novel
seek to be faithful, and how is this meaning embodied within their respective
formal, cultural, and historical contexts?12 These are some of the questions that
this study seeks to explore. By comparatively examining the contextual and
intertextual dimensions of Scorsese’s film alongside Endo’s novel, I argue that
both texts point beyond themselves to earlier historical and scriptural sources,
altogether composing a Bazinian ‘ideal construct’ of Christian religious fidelity
as lived in the world. As we shall we see, this fidelity is paradoxically per-
formed via various modes and tropes of adaptive infidelity, resisting transhis-
torical stasis in favour of dynamic, transformative adaptation across time and
place.
II. ENDO’S SILENCE AND ITS CONTEXTS
Taking heed of Andrew’s call to use specific instances of adaptation to ‘under-

stand the world from which it comes and the one toward which it points’, let
us begin by considering the sociohistorical context in which Endo’s novel was
produced, and the ways in which this context relates to that of the early
modern Jesuit missions.13 On one level, as historical fiction, the plot of
both Silence texts revolves around the lives of Jesuit missionaries and their
Japanese converts during the 17th century, a time when Christianity has
been outlawed under the Tokugawa shogunate. To avoid violent persecution,
Catholics during this period are driven to conceal or camouflage their faith;
for this reason, they are known as the kakure kirishitan, or ‘hidden Christians’.
Hearing rumours that their mentor (and erstwhile superior of the Jesuits’ Japan
mission) Cristovao Ferreira has renounced his faith, two young priests,
Sebastian Rodrigues and Francisco Garupe, travel to Nagasaki to search for
him. After some time, they are separately apprehended by Masashige Inoue,
the Lord of Chikugo, and ordered to apostatise. If they refuse, their adherents
will be killed. Garupe staunchly refuses and follows a few Japanese Christian
peasants to their drowning. Rodrigues, however, is taken to meet Ferreira,
now living in a Buddhist temple under a new identity as ‘Sawano Chuan’.
4 TENG-KUAN NG
Convinced that western Christianity simply does not take root in the ‘swamp’
of syncretistic Japanese culture and religiosity, Ferreira urges Rodrigues to
abandon his missionary aspirations. Eventually, through monstrous internal
struggles, Rodrigues publicly renounces his faith as well by symbolically step-
ping on a fumie, a bronze plate bearing the image of Jesus. He lives out the rest
of his days, with local wife and child, as the ostensibly non-Christian ‘Okada
Sanemon’, inspecting foreign imports in Dejima (the only place where for-
eigners are allowed contact with the Japanese) to ensure that Christian items
are not smuggled into the country.
On another level, when understood as a mode of discourse, Silence speaks
volumes about the historical and cultural forces that drive its double incarna-
tions. When the novel was published in Japan in 1966, Catholics around the
world were living in the wake of the epochal Second Vatican Council (1962–
1965). ‘Endo’s literary opus,’ Christal Whelan notes, ‘needs to be situated
within this great transformative moment in the history of the Catholic
Church in order to be properly understood.’14 Among the various constitu-
tions, statements, and decrees that were generated over three years of ecu-
menical dialogues, Nostra Aetate (Latin: ‘In our Time’) was undoubtedly one
that would soon have the most far-reaching significance and influence. As
suggested by its name—its full title is the Declaration on the Relation of the Church
to Non-Christian Religions—Nostra Aetate decisively articulated an irenic em-
brace of the world’s various faiths. It avowed that Catholicism ‘rejects nothing
that is true and holy in these religions’ and ‘regards with sincere reverence
those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which . . .
reflect a ray of Truth which enlightens all men [sic.]’.15
In the course of adapting the church’s theology of religions to the modern
world, the declaration contained a clause that would have had an especial
impact on the conditions in which the novel was created: the explicit affirm-
ation of Buddhism ‘in its various forms’ as a way ‘by which men [sic.], in a
devout and confident spirit, may be able either to acquire the state of perfect
liberation, or attain, by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme
illumination’.16 Unwillingly initiated into Catholicism by his mother when he
was 11, Endo sought, through his life and work, to reconcile his indigenous
religious-cultural identity with the western Christianity that had also become
part of his lifeworld. In interviews and discussions of his novels, Endo often
likened the Catholic faith to a suit, tailored by and for Europeans, that felt
uncomfortable on his Japanese body.17 But despite inward urges to cast the
entire suit off to remain Buddhist, he instead sought to re-tailor it—to adapt it
to his life-world—through his writing: ‘I came to think that I should alter the
European suit of clothes my mother had bestowed to me into something
Japanese, something that fit me.’18
This biographical and sociocultural context provides a crucial starting point
for approaching the discourse on intercultural and interreligious adaptation at
work in the novel, a discourse exemplified in Rodrigues’ and Ferreira’s first
meeting in a Buddhist temple. In this episode, Rodrigues attempts to refute
the idea of Christianity’s unsuitability for Japanese soil by citing the thriving
church—numbering hundreds of thousands—that existed prior to the perse-
cutions. In response, Ferreira chides him for ‘only looking at the externals’.19
Referring to the Jesuit missionary pioneer Francis Xavier’s early mistranslation
of the Latin ‘Deus’ into ‘Dainichi’, the name of the sun deity in Shingon
Buddhism, Ferreira explains that ‘the Japanese did not believe in the Christian
God but in their own distortion’.20 And as a concluding defeater of
Rodrigues’ distraught protest (‘Isn’t even that our Deus?’), Ferreira maintains
that such a monistic and anthropomorphic conception of divinity ‘is not the
Church’s God’.21
Historically, Xavier’s use of the term ‘Dainichi’ around 1550 did not ne-
cessarily constitute an unwitting mistranslation. Rather, it probably reflected a
knowing willingness to adjust to and dwell within the conceptual universe of
Japanese Buddhism, and laid the groundwork for the Jesuits’ subsequent,
gradual ‘process of discovery and understanding of Japanese Buddhism’.22
Further, as the first and archetypal Jesuit missionary, Xavier’s efforts were an
avant la lettre instance of ‘cultural accommodation’, the Society of Jesus’ sig-
nature method of contextualising the Christian gospel according to varying
local idioms, in each instance determining ‘what was essential to the kerygma
and what was not’.23
In Endo’s Silence, these issues of cultural accommodation are taken up and
reworked via the topos of adaptive fidelity. On the one hand, the novel’s
literary form gestures at a certain fidelity to historical narratives. The novel
opens with a historiographical prologue announcing how ‘today we can read
some of the letters of Sebastian Rodrigues in the library of the Portuguese
‘‘Institute for the Historical Study of Foreign Lands’’’, before continuing to
four chapters of narration told via these putatively actual letters.24 Chapters
five to nine employ the third-person narrative perspective. The final two
sections of the novel are respectively composed of excerpts from the diary
of Jonassen, a Dutch clerk working for a foreign firm based in Dejima, and
from the logbook of an anonymous Japanese officer at the residence where
Christian missionaries live under house arrest. By mimicking (or maintaining)
these historiographic literary forms, the novel suggests an ‘intersecting’ mode
of adaptation, deliberately leaving its original sources ‘unassimilated’ so that
they are allowed their ‘own life’ as the new text.25
On the other hand, the fact that these letters and diary entries are clearly
imaginative extrapolations indicates the fundamentally ‘transformative’ mode
of adaptation adopted in the novel.26 On Endo’s own account:
6 TENG-KUAN NG
[T]o me the most meaningful thing in the novel is the change in the hero’s image
of Christ. The hero, a foreigner, believed in a Jesus of majesty and power, an
orderly Jesus who was even governed by order. This was the image conceived by
Western artists . . . . After suffering many trails and frustrations, however, he was
caught at last and brought before the Fumie . . . . Standing there he saw an image
of Christ he had never seen before, an image shaped by Japanese hands. It was not
the orderly, European, but the worn out face of a Christ suffering as we suffer.27
On Ferreira’s view of theological accommodation, the translation of ‘Deus’

via the conceptual language of Japanese Buddhism represents a ‘twisted’ per-
version of the true Christian God.28 By these standards, the misshapen, un-
kempt, and ‘ugly face of Christ’ on the fumie would probably not pass muster
either.29 Rodrigues’ desperation, though, opens in his mind the possibility of a
dynamic correlation between the Christian God and the ‘beautiful, exalted
man’ that Japanese Christians worship as ‘Dainichi’.30 Rodrigues’ evolving
faith culminates in his willingness to administer the sacrament of confession
to Kichijiro even in their apostatised state toward the end of the novel: ‘No
doubt his fellow priests would condemn his act as sacrilege; but even if he was
betraying them, he was not betraying his Lord. He loved him now in a
different way from before.’31 Employing Andrew’s (recent) Bazinian elabor-
ations on transformative adaptation, we might say that the novel upholds
Rodrigues’ external infidelity as a mode of ‘genuine fidelity [that] abandons
vain and simple-minded matching for creative transformation’.32
III. SCORSESE’S SILENCE AND ITS CONTEXTS
Finding synergistic affinity in the early modern Jesuits’ journey of cultural

accommodation, Endo’s Silence creatively adapts, via form and philosophy,
historical data to navigate the interreligious pluralisation of global
Catholicism occasioned by the Second Vatican Council. In many ways, the
conditions that produced the novel intersect with those in which Scorsese’s
film has been made as well. For though each text qua discourse is always
informed by its ‘horizontal’, synchronic context, the ‘vertical’, diachronic
connection between them is also mediated by structural correspondences be-
tween the worlds from which they come.33
In a 2011 interview, Scorsese explains his decades-long resolve to adapt
Endo’s novel:
Questions, answers, loss of the answer again and more questions, and this is what
really interests me . . . . The very nature of secularism right now is really
fascinating to me, but at the same time do you wipe away what could be more
enriching in your life, which is an appreciation or some sort of search for that
which is spiritual and transcends? . . . Silence is just something that I’m drawn to in
that way. It’s been an obsession, it has to be done and now is the time to do it.34
Here, Scorsese frames the film as a means by which he grapples with ques-
tions of personal religious fidelity: the loss of faith, attachment to it, and the
possibilities of meaning-making in both situations. Yet, as Scorsese’s own
words suggest, these individual preoccupations are inextricably linked to the
contemporary sociocultural conditions of the postsecular west. In A Secular
Age, Charles Taylor thematises secularisation in the North Atlantic world as
the change ‘from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe
in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human
possibility among others’.35 Postsecularism, in turn, refers to the condition of
societies where the ‘hegemony of the mainstream master narrative of secular-
ization [is] challenged’.36 Taylor clarifies that whether in secularised or post-
secular societies, ‘belief’ and ‘unbelief’ are not diametrically opposed, but are
instead alternative modes of lived experience by which life may become
comparatively ‘fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable,
more of what it should be’.37
Given that ‘every adaptation takes place within a ‘‘horizon’’ of contempor-
aneous values’, Rodrigues’ fideistic evolution in the film emerges as a mirror
of the west’s secularising transitions.38 During his first official inquisition under
Inoue, Rodrigues adamantly repudiates the samurais’ view that the Christian
God, though relevant in the west, proves irrelevant in Japan, akin to how ‘a
tree which flourishes in one kind of earth may decay and die in another’. In
triumphalistically asserting that ‘the truth is universal’ and ‘common to all
countries at all times’, Rodrigues effectively functions as the voice of pre-
secular Christian exclusivism, incapable of conceiving how the faith of ‘infi-
dels’ could possibly be valid. But by the end of the film, having formally
apostatised and assimilated into Japanese culture, he arrives at an experiential
understanding—as Taylor succinctly says of pluralistically-conscious secu-
larised societies—that ‘belief in God is no longer axiomatic’.39 To be sure,
the film’s final segments follow the novel in clearly depicting Rodrigues as
having kept his faith in some way. For example, when his (now-)servant
Kichijiro is found having an amulet of Saint Paul and Francis Xavier, we
are led to infer that he had received it as a contraband gift from Rodrigues.
Even so, a closer analysis shows that Rodrigues’ faith has been substantially
transformed in its adaptation to a new context.
The transformation of Rodrigues’ faith is perhaps most clearly manifest in
the film’s final scene, where Rodrigues’ coffin is readied and transported from
his house to a forest for cremation. In its closing lines, the novel conveys this
detail via the form of a nondescript official statement appended in the diary of
a Japanese officer: ‘After examination, the corpse of San’emon was buried in
8 TENG-KUAN NG
Muryoin Temple at Koishikawa. From Muryoin came a priest called
Genshuhe. San’emon’s corpse was sent there on a vehicle, and was cremated.’40
In the process of cinematic adaptation, this perfunctory bureaucratic narration
becomes a 22-second long take imbued with a distinctly Buddhist visual aes-
thetic. Scorsese discloses that he envisioned the contemplative ‘quiet and
purity’ of Buddhist aesthetics when composing and shooting the funerary
procession, so as to evoke the ‘peacefulness and acceptance’ with which
Rodrigues lived out the final season of his life.41 Indeed, whether through
the measured slowness of the bier-bearers’ gait; the austere cleanliness of
straight, still lines across various wooden architectural structures; the restrained
distance of the high-angled long shot, gently tilting down before unobtru-
sively tracking to follow the procession just a little; or the low, threnodic chant
of the nembutsu, punctuated pensively by the ringing of a struck handbell:42
this scene presents a picture of Buddhist ritual as much as it performs a ritual act
of ‘seeing like the Buddha’, that is, a placid, attentive, non-discriminatory
vision of phenomena that ‘goes beyond conventional labels and comes alive
to the nature of things’.43 In this way, the aesthetics of this scene betokens the
hybridisation of Rodrigues’ faith, and in that, the postsecular recognition that
non-Christian worldviews prove perfectly tenable for experiencing the rich-
ness of life as well.
Without a doubt, the denouement in the film’s concluding shot composes
Scorsese’s most dramatic statement on Rodrigues’ fideistic evolution. Prior to
the aforementioned funerary procession scene, the Dutch physician Dieter
Albrecht (the adapted incarnation of Jonassen from the novel) narrates via a
fabular voice-over that apart from three guards, only Rodrigues’ wife was
allowed to view Rodrigues’ body after his death. A medium close-up
shows the lifeless body seated in a wooden, barrel-like coffin; we see his
wife’s arms reaching forward ‘to place there a humble mamorigatana [charm]
to ward off evil spirits’. Then, as if from Rodrigues’ point-of-view, the film
cuts to a medium close-up of her face: apparently impassive, yet somehow
conveying a tinge of secrecy in the faint raising of her brows, the hint of a
quiver on her lips, and the infinitesimal trace of intent in her gaze. Before we
are afforded the time to scrutinise her expression more carefully, the film cuts
back to the medium shot of Rodrigues’ body, as his wife gingerly and perhaps
hesitantly places the charm—enfolded within a piece of plain, white paper—
in his hands, clasped and resting on his chest. What is going on in this se-
quence? What is it trying to show? Is Rodrigues’ wife saddened by his death,
but trying to restrain her grief? (The voice-over here ends laconically: ‘there
was no indication that she wept’.) Are the nuances of her ritual performance
simply part of her disposition and personality? (The film reveals virtually
nothing about her.) Or might she have placed something else in Rodrigues’
hands? At this point of the film, none of these questions can be answered with
certainty.
After Rodrigues’ coffin is transported to a clearing in a forest, it is placed on
a pyre and methodically lit. To Albrecht’s somber voice-over—‘The man
who was once Rodrigues ended as they wanted. And as I first saw him, lost
to God’—the film’s final shot commences. Starting as an extreme long shot of
the ceremonial site, the camera zooms closer and closer into the licking flames,
progressing until it penetrates into the enclosure of the coffin. After a pregnant
pause, the voice-over resumes: ‘But as to that, indeed, only God can answer.’
At this point, the shot transitions seamlessly into a dim-lit close-up of
Rodrigues’ aged face, and continues to zoom and tilt downward to his clasped
hands. The shot finally comes to a rest as an extreme close-up of Rodrigues’
palms, curved into a crucible of sorts—revealing a tiny, crudely-carved
wooden crucifix.
According to Van C. Gessel, Endo’s adaptation of the history of Japan’s
‘hidden Christians’ was significantly influenced by the philosophy of the
mukyokai (‘Non-Church’), an anti-institutional religious movement that stres-
ses personal connection with God apart from traditional forms of church. On
this reading, Rodrigues’ final mode of faith, though outwardly heretical, is
‘freed from institutional constraints and focused on his true conversion in the
wake of the personal encounter he has with Christ when he hears the voice
speaking from the fumie’.44 Working off the sparse, clinical entries from the
Dutch clerk’s and Japanese officer’s diaries, the film’s concluding scene brings
the novel’s vision of radically inward Christian faith to imaginative fruition via:
the startling shot that approximates Rodrigues’ point-of-view from the coffin,
as if offering a glimpse into his subjectivity; the enigmatic micro-expressions
and micro-gestures his wife makes while ritually preparing the body, intimat-
ing their unspoken faith; and the steady zoom from an extreme long shot to an
CGI-mediated extreme close-up, mystically revealing a concealed icon of
faith visible only to the filmic ‘eye of God’. At the same time, by concluding
the film on a note of adaptive infidelity—the crucifix in Rodrigues’ hands is a
detail absent in the novel—Scorsese intimates a view of religious fidelity
generous enough to encompass ‘unfaithfulness’ as a possible expression of
good faith. In these ways, developing and varying upon the novel’s diary
entries (which may prove oblique even upon repeated readings), the
Hollywood aesthetics of the film’s final scene, as Bazin would put it, adap-
tively ‘emulsifies’ the latent non-institutional religiosity such that it becomes
more ‘digestable’ and accessible to a film audience.45 And while this religiosity
finds its source in the early 20th-century mukyokai movement, its operations in
the film are also arguably driven by contemporary western trends towards
‘minimal religion’, a form of postsecular religion where ‘spirituality [is] lived
in one’s immediate circle, with family and friends, rather than in churches’,
10 TENG-KUAN NG
and where ‘the coexistence of plural forms of spirituality and worship is taken
for granted’.46
IV. SILENCE AS INTERTEXT
‘Film adaptations,’ Andrew writes, ‘are icons of canonical literary creations.

With Literature replacing Religion as a source of transcendence, scholars are
today’s priests of inherited spiritual wealth.’47 That Scorsese’s Silence functions
as a contemporary icon of Endo’s canonical work seems clear enough. But
Andrew’s second contention that literature has supplanted traditional religi-
osity as a site of transcendence raises interesting questions. Could Endo’s
Silence itself be an icon of an antecedent, canonical religious-literary creation?
If so, is the relationship between these two texts one of ‘replacement’? What,
then, becomes of the film adaptation in this iconographic chain? And if
scholars are indeed priestly stewards of ‘inherited spiritual wealth’, how
might a study of Silence through the prism of adaptive fidelity do justice to
what Andrew colourfully calls ‘the great fructifying symbols and mythic pat-
terns of civilization’?48 With these concerns in mind, this final section delves
into the intertextual dimensions of Silence, approaching it as a tripartite
Bazinian ‘ideal construct’ comprising ancient scripture, modern novel, and
contemporary film.
Scholars of Silence have produced important work on the novel’s intertexts
and influences. Some have noted the persistent presence of two prototypical
characters within Endo’s oeuvre: Rodrigues, the apostate priest figure of
Silence, who appears in some form in works as early as ‘Yellow Man’ (1955)
and as late as Deep River (1993); and Kichijiro, the wretched, fallen ‘relational
protagonist’, who features in various guises in novellas like ‘White Man’
(1955) and ‘The Day Before’ (1963).49 Others have observed the substantial
influence of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940) on the novel,50
and have located Endo’s religious imagination within the broader global re-
naissance of Catholic literary arts in the 20th century.51 However, it seems that
surprisingly scant attention has been paid to situating the novel’s intertextuality
within the one seismic event in 20th-century Japanese history: Japan’s crush-
ing defeat during the Second World War.52 In light of Yoshikuni Igarashi’s
insights on the artistic-cultural milieu of postwar Japan, the novel’s adaptation
of the history of hidden Christians—who resiliently survived persecution
through the entire Edo period (1603–1867)—reflects how the blighted
nation ‘desperately sought narratives of historical continuity that could en-
compass and transcend the loss it had endured’.53
Yet, via this chapter of early modern Japanese history, Silence simultaneously
forges a sense of intertextual continuity with biblical myth and history. Traces
of Christian scripture can be easily found throughout the novel. When
interrogating the silence of God toward the suffering that he and the Japanese
Christians have faced, Rodrigues compares himself to ‘Job in his leprosy’,
unable to affirm the justness of his ordained trial.54 Later, upon learning
about Inoue’s ingeniously grotesque methods of torture designed to induce
priests to apostatise, Rodrigues sees in his mind’s eye a picture of King Herod
dining leisurely while Christians are gorily killed.55
The novel’s fundamental biblical leitmotif lies in Rodrigues’ mimetic iden-
tification with Jesus—and his attendant casting of Kichijiro as Judas the be-
trayer. Anticipating that Kichijiro will soon sell him out to the shogunate,
Rodrigues tries hard to sublimate his rage and revulsion by envisioning himself
as a soon-to-be crucified Christ. Concurrently, he dehumanisingly frames
Kichijiro as ‘no more than the unfortunate puppet for the glory of that
drama which was the life and death of Christ’.56 But Rodrigues’ vainglorious
vision is thwarted when he apostatises to save the Christian peasants who are
being bled dry on his account. Rather than becoming a Christ-like martyr, he
finds himself playing the roles of Peter, denying Jesus to a rooster’s crow at
daybreak (‘And far in the distance the cock crew’), and of Judas, the archetypal
traitor of the gospels.57 By ultimately affirming Rodrigues’ compassionate
decision—a decision that has led to his transformation from saint to apos-
tate—the novel’s ‘unfaithful’ adaptation of the biblical account of Judas alle-
gorises the importance of understanding religious fidelity as a matter of
adaptable ‘spirit’ and not of rigid ‘letter’.58
Echoing the early modern Jesuits’ accommodation of western Christianity
to Buddhist cultural idiom, at distinct points Scorsese’s film translates the
novel’s biblical allusions via the film style of Japanese master directors. In an
early scene where Rodrigues is ferried to minister in another village, Endo’s
dark, silent, sea—which Frances McCormack reads as steeped in Hebrew
Bible symbolism—is rendered via explicit homage to Kenji Mizoguchi’s
Ugetsu (1953). In the sense of foreboding and mystery evoked by the thick
fog, this cinematographic intertext aptly conjures the polyvalence of the bib-
lical ‘tehom’ (Hebrew: ‘the deep’): ‘the sea is a reminder of distance, both
spiritual and geographical; it is a portent of impending disruption; it is a mirror
of psychic states; it is an ever-present theological symbol; it is unfamiliar and
precarious’.59 Meanwhile, as Scorsese discloses, the later scenes where
Rodrigues is held in jail cells are deeply influenced by Yasujiro Ozu’s signature
camerawork in small, confined spaces.60 In the novel, Rodrigues perceives the
prison cell as Gethsemane and Golgotha, a site of grief and devastation that he
must sadly embrace.61 With economy and precision fostered by the fixed,
acute camera angles, the Ozuesque shot composition of these scenes perhaps
foreshadows the sense of clarity that arises after Rodrigues’ infelicitous attach-
ment to spiritual heroism is finally stripped away.
12 TENG-KUAN NG
Ultimately, the tale of Judas stands as the core intertext in Scorsese’s adap-
tation of the novel. In his foreword to the recent Picador movie tie-in edition
of Silence, Scorsese expressly articulates his reading of Endo’s novel:
For me, it is the story of one who begins on the path of Christ and who ends up
replaying the role of Christianity’s greatest villain, Judas. He almost literally
follows in his footsteps. In so doing, he comes to understand the role of Judas . . .
Endo looks at the problem of Judas more directly that any other than I know. He
understood that, in order for Christianity to live, to adapt itself to other cultures
and historical moments, it needs not just the figure of Christ but the figure of
Judas as well.62
Where Endo’s novel presents Rodrigues as a Peter figure as well, Scorsese’s

interpretation of Silence squarely takes Judas as its fundamental hermeneutical
lens. Indeed, it appears that Scorsese regards the novel’s portrait of Judas as the
typological fulfilment of various characters from his earlier works, such as the
doubting, human Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) who contem-
plates forsaking the cross, and the painfully flawed Jake MoLatta in Raging Bull
(1980). ‘When I read that last section [of Endo’s Silence], whatever I wanted to
find in making Last Temptation, or Raging Bull,’ Scorsese explains, ‘I knew I
had to find it here.’63
More pointedly, while the novel’s final image of Judas remains subordinate
to the image of Christ, Scorsese’s adaptation arguably holds up Judas as the icon
of lived Christian faith. In Rodrigues and Kichijiro’s last exchange in the
novel, sometime after they have both apostatised, Rodrigues hears the latter’s
confession, forgives him for his betrayal, and tells him to ‘go in peace’.64
Kichijiro then leaves, almost as swiftly as he had found his way to
Rodrigues’ house barely moments ago. (We only learn later, from the
Japanese officer’s diary, that Kichijiro eventually becomes Rodrigues’ attend-
ant.)65 Here, Rodrigues finds the strength to forgive Kichijiro when Christ
explains his own compassion toward Judas’ anguish about the betrayal. Endo’s
Kichijiro-Judas thus remains a figure of humble receptivity to divine grace.
Indeed, by famously likening himself to Kichijiro (‘Kichijiro is me. His weak-
ness is my own weakness.’) while embracing his identity as a Christian writer,
Endo invites persons of faith and doubt alike to consider not only the ‘pos-
sibility of salvation in sin’, but also the indivisibility of fidelity and infidelity
along faith’s journey.66
In the film, the brief final exchange between Rodrigues and Kichijiro is
notably expanded into a poignant three-minute scene that begins with them,
both visibly older, conversing like old friends over hot tea. Almost spontan-
eously, Rodrigues turns to Kichijiro, kneels before him in honorific Japanese
decorum, and says in a pensive, heartfelt tone: ‘Thank you. Arigatou gozaimasu
[Thank you].’ Startled, Kichijiro sets aside his cup, adopts a similar kneeling
posture, and politely demurs in Japanese: ‘You have nothing to thank me for.’
Rodrigues looks down, as if collecting himself, then continues: ‘For being
here with me. Issho ni itte kurete arigatou [Thank you for being here for/with
me].’
Far more than signalling the fluency that Rodrigues has acquired in Japan’s
culture and language, these simple gestures and words are soon revealed as
bearing profound theological-humanistic significance. As Rodrigues (now
half-kneeling) prepares to absolve Kichijiro (now fully kneeling) of his sins,
we hear his apostrophe to God through a voice-over: ‘Lord, I fought against
your silence.’ And at the very moment when the voice of Christ speaks—‘I
suffered beside you. I was never silent’—the camera cuts from a close-up of
Rodrigues to a close-up of Kichijiro clasping his hands before his forehead in
earnest prayer, before returning to a close-up of Rodrigues once Christ’s
words conclude. The identification of Kichijiro-Judas with Christ in this
shot/reverse shot/shot sequence is underscored by the compositional sym-
metry between the close-up of Rodrigues looking down at Kichijiro and
that of Rodrigues gazing down at the fumie of Jesus right before he steps on
it. Equally noteworthy is the fact that these are the only two occasions in the
film where God speaks through the ‘silence’. While the exchange between
Rodrigues and Christ in the scene we have just analysed is a near-verbatim
transcription from the novel, the film draws out the theology of dohansha
(Japanese: ‘companion’) adumbrated in Endo’s Kichijiro,67 in the process
demonstrating an adaptive fidelity ‘that goes beyond appearance to truth
that is present in its absence from the [original] image’.68 Recalling contem-
porary Catholicism’s stress on the ‘art of accompaniment’ as a key mode of
faithful praxis,69 this theology of companionship finds its fullest iconographic
representation in the scene’s concluding shot: of Rodrigues and Kichijiro
kneeling before each other, their heads touching, quietly weeping together.
On Scorsese’s view, by the end of the film Rodrigues has ‘found the truth of
Christianity’ contained in ‘the idea of selflessness and compassion’.70 But far
from being an idea per se, this truth is enfleshed and encountered through
Kichijiro, the Judas figure who, precisely because of having experienced the
suffering of infidelity, offers a most honest and healing gift of presence.
V. CONCLUSION
Commenting on the interpenetration of literature and theology in the poetry

of Dante Alighieri, John Milton, and Edmund Spenser, the late eminent
comparatist Anthony C. Yu writes: ‘Their distinctive elucidation of scripture
and embroidery of tradition render these articulate canticles part of Christian
exegesis and theology, for they participate as much as any work of ‘‘the
14 TENG-KUAN NG
doctors of faith’’ in seeking to comprehend and interpret the original mystery
of faith, of revelation itself.’71 As we have seen, in much the same way as
canonical works of religious literature, both Endo’s novel and Scorsese’s film
reach boldly and creatively into earlier sources in Christian history to illumin-
ate the meaning of faith in their respective sociohistorical contexts. Both texts,
in particular, ‘unfaithfully’ reinterpret the archetypal biblical tale of religious
infidelity, recasting Judas as a paradigm of humble receptivity and compas-
sionate presence. As Andrew writes of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country
Priest (1951), we might say that both Silence texts achieve a ‘deeper fidelity’ to
the ‘spirit’ of Christian faith by being ‘subservient to their source, but not
slavishly mechanical in rendering it’.72 And in enfolding the Judas source text
into a larger ‘ideal construct’, the intertextual Silence not only participates in
the contemporary discourse on inter-media adaptive fidelity, but also enlarges
the forms that religious fidelity might take when dynamically lived in the
world.
REFERENCES
1
Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory Murray, and Rick Warner (eds), True to
(New York: Oxford University Press, the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question
1984), p. 100. of Fidelity (New York: Oxford University
2
Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Press, 2011), p. 8.
10
Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation Paul Elie, ‘The Passion of Martin
(New York: Oxford University Press, Scorsese’, The New York Times Magazine,
1996), p. 11. 21 Nov. 2016, https://www.nytimes.
3
Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, p. 100. com/2016/11/27/magazine/the-passion-
4
Casie Hermansson, ‘Flogging Fidelity: In of-martin-scorsese.html (accessed 20 Apr.
Defense of the (Un)Dead Horse’, 2017).
11
Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on J.D. Connor, ‘The Persistence of Fidelity:
Screen Studies 8 (2015) 147–60, p. 147. Adaptation Theory Today’, M/C Journal
5
Ibid., pp. 156–7. 10 (2007) 19 Aug. 2012, http://journal.
6
Ibid., p. 156. media-culture.org.au/0705/15-connor.php
7
James Naremore, ‘Introduction: Film and (accessed 20 Apr. 2017).
12
the Reign of Adaptation’, in James Bazin, ‘Adaptation, or the Cinema as
Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Digest’, p. 20.
13
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, p. 106.
14
Press, 2000), p. 15. Christal Whelan, ‘The Catholic Shift
8
Andre Bazin, ‘Adaptation, or the Cinema East: The Case of Japan’, in Mark W.
as Digest’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Dennis and Darren J.N. Middleton
Adaptation, trans. Alain Piette and Bert (eds), Approaching Silence: New
Cardullo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Perspectives on Endo’s Classic Novel (New
University Press, 2000), p. 26. York: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 110–11.
9 15
Colin MacCabe, ‘Introduction: Bazinian Pope Paul VI, ‘Declaration on the
Adaptation: The Butcher Boy as Relation of the Church to Non-
Example’, in Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Christian Religions’, Nostra Aetate, 28
Oct. 1965, http://www.vatican.va/arch- Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner
ive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/docu (eds), True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation
ments/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_ and the Question of Fidelity (New York:
en.html (accessed 5 May 2017). Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 38.
16 33
Ibid. Andrew, ‘The Economies of Adaptation’,
17
William Johnston, ‘Translator’s Preface’, pp. 27–8.
34
in Shusaku Endo, Silence, trans. William Mike Fleming Jr, ‘Martin Scorsese To
Johnston (New York: Picador, 2016), p. Make Noise On ‘‘Silence’’ At Cannes;
xvii. Emmett/Furla Funding The Film’,
18
Elizabeth Cameron Galbraith, ‘Agape Deadline Hollywood, 19 Apr. 2013,
Unbound in Silence and Deep River’, in http://deadline.com/2013/04/martin-
Mark W. Dennis and Darren J.N. scorsese-to-make-noise-on-silence-at-
Middleton (eds), Approaching Silence: cannes-emmettfurla-films-funding-the-
New Perspectives on Endo’s Classic Novel film-479101/ (accessed 4 May 2017).
35
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 126. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
19
Shusaku Endo, Silence, trans. William (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007),
Johnston (New York: Picador, 2016), p. p. 3.
36
159. Ibid., p. 534.
20 37
Ibid. Ibid., pp. 4–5.
21 38
Ibid., pp. 159, 161. Andrew, ‘The Economies of Adaptation’,
22
Hisashi Kishino, ‘From Dainichi to Deus: p. 32.
39
The Early Christian Missionaries’ Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 3.
40
Discovery and Understanding of Endo, Silence, p. 212.
41
Buddhism’, in Antoni J. Ucerler (ed.), Martin Scorsese, Conversation and Q&A
Christianity and Cultures: Japan & China with Martin Scorsese, Public Conversation,
in Comparison, 1543–1644 (Rome: Georgetown University, Washington
Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, DC, 11 Apr. 2017.
42
2009), p. 45. In Japanese Pure Land Buddhism, the
23
M Antoni J. Ucerler, SJ, ‘The Jesuits in nembutsu refers to a salvific mantra that
East Asia in the Early Modern Age: A literally means: ‘I take refuge in Amida
New ‘‘Areopagus’’ and the ‘‘Re- Buddha.’
43
Invention’ of Christianity’’’, in Thomas Francisca Cho, Seeing Like the Buddha:
Banchoff and José Casanova (eds), Jesuits Enlightenment through Film (Albany, NY:
and Globalization: Historical Legacies and State University of New York Press,
Contemporary Challenges (Washington, 2017), p. 18.
44
DC: Georgetown University Press, Van C. Gessel, ‘Silence on Opposite
2016), p. 30. Shores: Critical Reactions to the Novel
24
Endo, Silence, p. 10. in Japan and the West’, in Mark W.
25
Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, p. 100. Dennis and Darren J.N. Middleton
26
Ibid. (eds), Approaching Silence: New
27
Shusaku Endo, ‘Anguish of an Alien’, Perspectives on Endo’s Classic Novel (New
The Japan Christian Quarterly 40 (1974) York: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 33.
45
179–86, p. 181. Bazin, ‘Adaptation, or the Cinema as
28
Endo, Silence, p. 160. Digest’, p. 26.
29 46
Ibid., p. 182. Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 534. The con-
30
Ibid., p. 160. cept of ‘minimal religion’ was developed
31
Ibid., p. 203. by Mikhail Epstein in his study of post-
32
Dudley Andrew, ‘The Economies of atheist spirituality in modern Russia. Cf.
Adaptation’, in Colin MacCabe, Mikhail Epstein, ‘Post-Atheism: From
16 TENG-KUAN NG
58
Apophatic Theology to ‘‘Minimal Observing that Endo wrote Silence with
Religion’’’, in Mikhail Epstein, the desire to adapt Christianity to
Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Japanese readers—whose deep acquaint-
Vladiv-Glover (eds), Russian ance with shame and failure occasioned
Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post- his betrayal of patriarchal theological
Soviet Culture (New York: Berghahn orthodoxy for a more ‘maternal’ under-
Books, 1999). standing of God—Philip Yancey gives
47
Andrew, ‘The Economies of Adaptation’, Endo the striking, quasi-oxymoronic epi-
p. 35. thet of ‘Japan’s faithful Judas’. See Philip
48
Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, p. 99. Yancey, ‘Japan’s Faithful Judas, Part 2’,
49
Kevin Doak, ‘Before Silence: Stumbling Books & Culture, January–February 1996,
Along with Rodrigues and Kichijiro’, in https://www.booksandculture.com/art-
Mark W. Dennis and Darren J.N. icles/1996/janfeb/6b103b.html (accessed
Middleton (eds), Approaching Silence: 8 Aug. 2018) and Soul Survivor (New
New Perspectives on Endo’s Classic Novel York: Doubleday, 2001), pp. 273–92.
59
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 1– Frances McCormack, ‘‘‘And Like the Sea
24. God was Silent’’: Multivalent Water
50
Darren J.N. Middleton, ‘Endo and Imagery in Silence’, in Mark W. Dennis
Greene’s Literary Theology’, in Mark and Darren J.N. Middleton (eds),
W. Dennis and Darren J.N. Middleton Approaching Silence: New Perspectives on
(eds), Approaching Silence: New Endo’s Classic Novel (New York:
Perspectives on Endo’s Classic Novel (New Bloombury, 2015), pp. 227–8.
60
York: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 61–76. Philip Horne, ‘Martin Scorsese: Catholic
51
Mark Bosco, SJ, ‘Charting Endo’s Tastes’, Sight & Sound (February 2017) 24.
61
Catholic Literary Aesthetic’, in Mark W. Endo, Silence, p. 147.
62
Dennis and Darren J.N. Middleton (eds), Martin Scorsese, ‘Foreword’, in Shusaku
Approaching Silence: New Perspectives on Endo, Silence, trans. William Johnston
Endo’s Classic Novel (New York: (New York: Picador, 2016), p. vii.
63
Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 77–92. Horne, ‘Martin Scorsese: Catholic
52
For a rare study of Endo’s literature within Tastes’, p. 19.
64
the postwar context, see Zhange Ni, The Endo, Silence, p. 203.
65
Pagan Writes Back: When World Religion Ibid., p. 207.
66
Meets World Literature (Charlottesville, VA: Shusaku Endo, Response, trans. Keiko
University of Virginia Press, 2015), pp. Nakano, The Journal of the Association of
122–42. Ni focuses on Deep River instead Teachers of Japanese 27.1 (1993) 87–8.
67
of Silence. Still, her description of Endo as Cf. Jeff Keuss, ‘Literature as Dohansha in
an ‘antiwar writer’ who frequently Silence’, in Mark W. Dennis and Darren
struggled with the devastation that the J.N. Middleton (eds), Approaching Silence:
war brought to Japan and the rest of Asia New Perspectives on Endo’s Classic Novel
proves instructive for our present purposes (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Keuss’
(pp. 133, 124). perceptive study sees the novel’s ‘poetics
53
Igarashi Yoshikuni, Bodies of Memory: of Christ’ in the ‘constant companion of
Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese the text that suffers with the reader’ (p.
Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: 189), but he does not extend his discus-
Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 12. sion to the character of Kichijiro.
54 68
Endo, Silence, p. 99. Andrew, ‘The Economies of Adaptation’,
55
Ibid., p. 156. p. 37.
56 69
Ibid., p. 80. Cf. Pope Francis, ‘‘Apostolic Exhortation
57
Ibid., p. 183. of the Holy Father to the Bishops,
70
Clergy, Consecrated Persons and the Lay Horne, ‘‘Martin Scorsese: Catholic
Faithful on the Proclamation of the Tastes,’’ p. 22.
71
Gospel in Today’s World,’’ Evangelii Anthony C. Yu, Comparative Journeys:
Gaudium, November 24, 2013, http:// Essays on Literature and Religion East and
w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_ West (New York: Columbia University
exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_ Press, 2009), p. 14.
72
esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudi Andrew, ‘‘The Economies of
um.html (accessed May 7, 2017). Adaptation,’’ p. 38.

O Skorcezeovom Filmutišina ng2019

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

O Skorcezeovom Filmutišina ng2019

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/litthe/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.

1093/litthe/frz024/5543464 by University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh user on 27 October 2019

OF FAITH AND FAITHLESSNESS:

Keywords: Adaptation Studies, Fidelity Criticism, Intertextuality, Martin

This conception of a composite ‘ideal construct’ is taken up as a central

II. ENDO’S SILENCE AND ITS CONTEXTS

Taking heed of Andrew’s call to use speciﬁc instances of adaptation to ‘under-

On Ferreira’s view of theological accommodation, the translation of ‘Deus’

III. SCORSESE’S SILENCE AND ITS CONTEXTS

Finding synergistic afﬁnity in the early modern Jesuits’ journey of cultural

IV. SILENCE AS INTERTEXT

‘Film adaptations,’ Andrew writes, ‘are icons of canonical literary creations.

Where Endo’s novel presents Rodrigues as a Peter ﬁgure as well, Scorsese’s

Commenting on the interpenetration of literature and theology in the poetry

You might also like