THE OTHERS: WORKS BY JOYCE CAROL OATES E ALEJANDRO AMENÁBAR UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF HENRY JAMES

Abstract

This paper comments on the sensation of estrangement while reading the short story “The Others”, by Joyce Carol Oates, and watching the film The Others, by Alejandro Amenábar, both texts written under the regency of Henry James. Having total control over the narratives, Oates as well as Amenábar create surprising fictional  universes. Oates’s narrative has as its conducting thread four moments of the protagonist’s life; Amenábar’s narrative establishes an implicit dialogue with Oates’s text and an explicit dialogue with the film The innocents, adapted from the Turn of the Screw. The film The Others also presents a surprisingly chocking ending, in which the spectator sees himself in an unknown situation which makes him go back mentally to the beginning of the film to remake the narrative thread. The question that remains is: Who are the others? To answer this question, we will use some aspects of Tzvetan Todorov’s and Felipe Furtado’s theories about the fantastic. The narratives subvert empirical reality when they include elements from the supernatural world. Amenábar potentializes this subversion. The film as well as the short story plays with our perception of reality e our relationship with the world which can only to be apprehended by imagination, while we suspend our disbelief in face of the unbelievable “realities” created by the fictional and filmic narratives.