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Overview
William Solomon charts the origins and evolution of what he calls slapstick modernism--a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, Solomon embarks on an intellectual odyssey from the high modernism of Dos Passos and Williams to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, he shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252098468 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 507 KB |
About the Author
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Slapstick Modernism
Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop
By William Solomon
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09846-8
CHAPTER 1
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical transportation
It was as though, despite his lifelong ramrod-stiff and unyielding opposition to, refusal even to acknowledge, the machine age, Grandfather had been vouchsafed somewhere in the beginning a sort of — to him — nightmare vision of our nation's vast and boundless future in which the basic unit of its economy and prosperity would be a small mass-produced cubicle containing four wheels and an engine. So he bought the automobile. — William Faulkner, The Reivers
Henry Ford's fiercely prescriptive, religiously impassioned adherence to the disciplinary principles of economic rationalism is on display throughout the first volume of his autobiography, My Life and Work, first published in 1922. Vigorously defending hard labor as the "natural thing to do" and as the primary means of obtaining "prosperity and happiness," he also identifies it as the indispensable basis of a moral existence, as the condition of "our sanity, salvation and self-respect" (3, 120). Arguing at times with prophetic fervor, Ford proclaims that commercial enterprises are worthwhile not because they furnish the owner with profits, but because the businesses contribute to the well-being of everyone: "There is something sacred about wages [... and] there is something just as sacred about capital which is used to provide the means by which work can be made productive" (163). The spread of merchandising endeavors across the globe is desirable, since "what will happen when the world is put on a production basis" is that the quality of life will be improved for all. It is essential that problems in industry be solved scientifically and that work get done "better and faster" (98), for "the purpose of a factory is to produce, and it ill serves the community in general unless it does produce to the utmost of its capacity" (107). Manufacturers thus justify their existence as "instruments of society" when they increase "the degree of comfort of the people at large" (135), a task best accomplished by the elimination of waste and controlled use of the wealth they have accumulated for the collective good. "The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more service for the betterment of life" (194). For Ford, then, the fate of modern civilization rests on the willingness of the masses to believe in the effort to mechanize work as an admirably inspired collective project: "What this generation needs is a deep faith, a profound conviction in the practicability of righteousness, justice, and humanity in industry" (105).
This chapter examines the degree to which William Carlos Williams's The Great American Novel (1923) and two Mack Sennett films — Lizzies of the Field (1924) and Super-Hooper-Dyne Lizzies (1925) — endorsed values that were diametrically opposed to those the successful businessman promoted. Both the motion pictures and the literary text indicated their ethical opposition to the priorities informing economic rationalism by integrating the Model T into decidedly destructive undertakings. Canonically associated with the development of the assembly line, and thus with a highly systematized mode of manufacturing commodities, the vehicle obviously served as a touchstone for Sennett's ongoing expression of his disdain for the governing criteria of Fordism. In contrast, Williams's articulation of his defiance of capitalist modernity was more tangential; yet the aggressive dismantling of the automobile in the comic films mentioned above ultimately finds an aesthetic and ideological corollary of sorts in Williams's critically oriented cancellations of the generic conventions of the novel, as well as in his brutal dismemberment of discourse at the level of the sentence and the word. This is not to say that the sociocultural interventions in question were identical, for whereas Sennett's films featured numerous representations of the sacrifice of the Tin Lizzie to the gods of wild play, Williams's almost unreadable enterprise went much further, sacrificing representation as such in the name of artistic integrity. Indeed, his extreme acts of linguistic negativity occurred at the expense of communicative coherence; the cost of his trying to do something entirely new was that his work barely made sense. However, as partial compensation for his destructive labors, he managed to make a vital contribution to the development of an arguably more sophisticated rhetorical technique — collage — one that has proved indispensable throughout the twentieth century as a means of contesting the persuasive force of discourses designed to delude and manipulate unsuspecting persons.
Importantly, although late in life Williams described The Great American Novel as having been "a satire on the novel form in which a little (female) Ford car falls more or less in love with a Mack truck" the formally recalcitrant text is not especially funny, and this fact might seem to exclude it from a study devoted to the growth and development of a slapstick modernism (Autobiography 237). My argument, however, is that a historical investigation of this phenomenon must first reckon with the fact that in the 1920s the two cultural practices (silent comedy and experimental writing) tended to coexist without commingling, Crane's "Chaplinesque" being a singular exception to this rule. Only by attending to this initial state of affairs can we properly understand the significance of what began to happen in the Depression era when certain modernist writers began to incorporate into their novels aesthetic traits that were associated with the popular type of cinematic entertainment. One reason for this eventual convergence was undoubtedly that slapstick filmmakers and modernist writers alike were seeking viable solutions to the set of problems that urban-industrial modernity perpetually posed to its inhabitants.
Notably, it was also in the 1930s that Georges Bataille began to reflect on the social significance of certain types of artistic wastefulness in ways that prove applicable to both Williams's avant-garde venture and Sennett's popular (and commercially profitable) enterprise. For instance, in "Notion of Expenditure" (1933), an article influenced by Marcel Mauss's The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925), Bataille praises a kind of poetry that goes beyond the regulatory "principles of classical utility" and in so doing stands in excess of socioeconomic procedures narrowly oriented toward the necessities of acquisition and conservation (Bataille, "Notion of Expenditure" 116). The primary investment of such poetry, he continues, is in that "immense travail of recklessness, discharge, and upheaval" that constitutes the "most appreciable share of life" (117). Existentially essential gestures of this sort are liberating in that they dispense with "the ordered and reserved forces" that have pertinence only within closed and well-balanced systems of production and exchange. Enthusiastically embracing ostensibly dangerous states of disequilibrium, acts of unconstrained consumption give free rein to the "irresistible impulse to reject [the] material and moral goods" that it would otherwise be "possible to utilize rationally" (128). Such a perspective readily brings to mind critical assessments of Sennett's output as having "in an era of determinedly materialistic values [...] celebrated the orgiastic destruction of goods and possessions, of cars and houses and crockery" (Robinson 43). More recently, Rob King has reiterated this evaluation. Invoking the mechanization of the labor process at Ford's Highland Park automobile plant, he describes Keystone Studios as having "supplied compensatory spectacles of disorder, of bodies unable to perform according to the requirements of a task"; for King, the film studio's "carnivalesque resistance to the industrial virtues of discipline and orderliness" amounted to a "cheerful proclamation of the values of disorder and spontaneity (Fun Factory 48). Somewhat similarly, David Jarraway once referred to The Great American Novel as a textual "potlatch" (26). That Bataille's ideas resonate with claims made on behalf of Sennett's version of silent screen comedy and with attitudes toward Williams's initial foray into "high" modernist prose suggests that certain formal and functional affinities did indeed structure the relationship of the two cultural practices even before they began to coalesce.
Mack Sennett's visions of Slapstick Excess
This was still that fabulous and legendary time when there was still no paradox between an automobile and mirth [...]
— William Faulkner, The Town
In The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick, Lisa Trahair convincingly demonstrates the feasibility of applying Bataille's philosophy of laughter (as unknowing) to silent screen comedy. The opening chapter of her study draws on Jacques Derrida's "Restricted and General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve" to elucidate Bataille's concept of the comic as a sovereign operation, and this paves the way for her analysis in subsequent chapters of portions of Keaton's cinematic oeuvre. Trahair's guiding thesis through the first half of her inquiry is that the categories of restricted and general economy may be respectively correlated with (while also complicating) the distinction — central to previous critical discussions of slapstick film — between narrative and gag. For her, the dialectical procedures of narrative belong to the realm of restricted economy to the degree that narrative is a "form of exchange that makes meaning possible" (36). Arranging events in space and time in causally coherent fashion, narrative as it logically unfolds allows the existential conflicts it dramatizes to be overcome or synthesized intellectually. Conversely, although gags do not serve exclusively as devices interfering with orderly narration, they do tend to function in accordance with the conditions of general economy ("sacrifice, waste, play, excess, and expenditure without return" [103]), thus instigating nonsensical slapstick processes that in effect transgress the conceptual closure that narrative representation seeks to impose on material reality.
One can find additional support for Trahair's assertion that Bataille's thought is well suited to the practice of silent comedy at the end of his "Sacrifice," an essay drafted in the late 1930s. At the start of the piece he acknowledges that he should explain his previous assertion that "the bloody fantasies of sacrifice" possess a "meaning" (61). He admits that in making such a claim he runs the risk of legitimating such ritualized cruelty, but this is not his intent, for he believes that it is possible today to satisfy in less savage ways the needs that this custom fulfilled in antiquity. Nevertheless, due to his commitment to inducing a sense of the "sacred horror" that remains outside the emotional range of those invested in the ethos of rational production, Bataille feels compelled to interpret the enigma that "massacres of men and beasts" pose to contemporary humanity. To be reasonable and to attain a state of rest in the world, one must first confront the appalling fact that through mutual agreement living beings were put to death in the past. Identifying what "forced men to kill their own kind in religious ceremonies" may disclose the secrets of "human existence" (62). The problem of sacrifice, then, has to do with group living, with social or collective being, or rather with the tension between the self and a community of others. If death is a warning to the "I" that the conviction that the self alone matters is a falsehood, then the tragic consequence is that "I" can live only by "relinquishing this life of mine" (66). "Each man must consider both confining himself in isolation and escaping from that prison." Torn between these "irreconcilable poles," man must endure on a daily basis the dispute "between tiny enclosure and free space," between a "selfish and empty," because solitary, existence and fusion with a world "of communicating elements" (66). Importantly, but perplexingly, "the bottleneck" connecting inner being with the external realm of the many is said at this point to be "rarely death itself, but always its adumbration or its image" (66).
The essay's final section, titled "Laughter," proposes to clear up the mystery of sacrifice, albeit via a circuitous path that twists through silent screen comedy. Having already mentioned laughter in the context of communicative processes through which individuality is superseded, Bataille reiterates this point decisively: "Barriers collapse, and the convulsive moments of those laughing break free and reverberate in unison. Not only does each man participate in the limitless streaming of the universe but his laughter mixes with that of others, so that a room will contain not several laughs, but a single wave of hilarity. The icy solitude of each laughing individual is, as it were, refined: all lives are waters flowing into a torrent" (69). Nevertheless, according to Bataille, laughter remains "a facile form of communication" when compared to "major" sorts such as violent sacrifice (68). To explain this curious distinction he returns to the classic example employed in so many theories of comedy: the sight of someone tumbling to the ground and the mirthful reactions such a spectacle engenders in the spectator. Here we are told that the "man who unwittingly falls is substituting for the victim who is put to death," and "the shared joy of laughter is" therefore "that of sacred communication" (68). Revelation and ecstasy occur when we burst into "a full, remorseless, laughter" at the expense of someone else; in such circumstances of overwhelming emotion or communal "transport" (69), we become "one" with those around us, which in turn enables us to penetrate "into the secret place of things" and thus partake in "the joy of living" (70). The suffering that gravity causes to another releases a wave of guiltless hilarity in which the witnesses of pedestrian awkwardness come together as a harmoniously unified entity. Bataille then adds a crucial component to his model of comedy: to the extent that laughter begins when anguish arises, the former can be understood as a method for dispelling the paralysis that feelings of distress might otherwise cause. Concocting a misogynist (and ageist) scenario to convey his point, Bataille imagines a scenario involving reckless driving rather than inept walking: "If, in a car, I laugh on reaching maximum speed, it is because within me the pleasure of going fast is far greater than the valid anxiety about danger (I would not be laughing if I were more accustomed to speed or if wholly closed to fear). I can laugh a lot, if it is not my fear that is involved, but that of someone else, such as a pretentious old lady, wholly antithetical to that world of intense movement which is to my taste." The more the woman protests, the faster Bataille drives the imaginary car, for the "anguish at stake" is something he could feel, but because of his "hostility" it remains something that belongs to "another" (70). Exuberant happiness derives from the capacity to frighten someone else by making her anticipate a disastrous accident. An act of aggression aimed at scaring an elderly woman allows the youthful operator of a motorized vehicle to transcend his own worries about the possibly grievous consequences in the future of rapid spatial movement.
Bataille turns next to a scene he recalls from Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925); the philosopher's ostensible purpose is to address the effects of artificially as opposed to naturally generated laughter, but reference to the motion picture also provides him with an opportunity to refine his overall argument by distinguishing subtly but sharply between the awfulness of serious acts of sacrifice and comically inflected depictions of terrifying events. The scene, in which the Tramp and another character are said to fight each other inside a shack that is teetering on the edge of a precipice, exemplifies a case in which "the convulsion of uncontrollable laughter impels him who has provoked it to go to the limit, to the point of vertigo, of nausea" (71). As the characters flail about endeavoring to keep the precariously balanced shack from plunging off the cliff, the laughing members of the audience are presumably propelled into a state of mind that shatters illusory notions of individual particularity. The threat of capsizing uproots the viewer, forcing him toward a "beyond" in which "he is no longer separable from death, from that which is mortal to him, since by an inextinguishable, rending laugh he has crossed the threshold, entered into this dreadful unison" (72). But Bataille then abruptly retracts his bold claim, confessing that this is not exactly what happens, for a "ruse was needed" to "lighten the anguish" such events inevitably entail. The trick or subterfuge rests on the fact that the potential catastrophe has been represented inside "the disparaged world of the comic," has been transformed into a comic spectacle, which allows the spectator to gain weight, so to speak, as he looks and laughs at the antics of the clownish performers imaged on the screen. The effect of the "redoubled laughter" the film solicits makes it seem as if the difference between lighthearted fun and serious agony has been eliminated, yet in truth the latter has been surreptitiously evaded. Consequently, there can be no "balance of accounts between profit and loss" (72). The momentum of the scene takes one "relatively far in the direction of loss," but in the end when viewing a comedy one consents to only a moderate degree of awareness of one's possible demise. To overdo the amount of consciousness one attains of the threat of self-destruction would be too displeasing, and to the degree that one does not reach the requisite level of affective torment one is not absorbed into the sacred sphere of the divine. Comic mediation is a makeshift maneuver in relation to the authentic experience of anguish, and this ensures that when one inevitably returns to a condition of seriousness the feelings in question will prove to have been "null and void." The impression while laughing of being "carried away into the 'immeasurable, limitless beyond'" is temporary, lasting for only a few, preciously irradiating moments (72).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Slapstick Modernism by William Solomon. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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