ABSTRACT
The empyrean, which is not spatial at all, does not move, and has no poles. It girds with light and love, the primum mobile, the utmost arid the swiftest of the material heavens. In Hector Babenco's translation of William Kennedy's novel Ironweed, people are aware that an ear is missing and that other extremities have been carved, but they still encounter a work sufficiently powerful to make people think Ingmar Bergman is too austere in his magisterial pronouncement. The critical response to the book and the film has made much of the connections between Kennedy's character and Dante, and, to be sure, the connections are manifest and many. Having spent twenty-two years in guilty flight, Francis Phelan finds it incredible that his wife, Annie, has not castigated him for Gerald's death. But in addition to providing material to bind the family together, the national pastime may do more in Ironweed.
