The Anatomy of Harpo Marx 9780520951983

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
I. Early Ecstatic Emptiness
II. Later Astonishments
III. The Idiot Tumbles Back to the Beginning of Time

Citation preview

The Anatomy of

Harpo Marx

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

The Anatomy of

Harpo Marx Way n e Ko e s t e n b au m

U n i v e r s i t y o f Ca li f o r n i a P r e s s 

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koestenbaum, Wayne.   The anatomy of Harpo Marx / Wayne Koestenbaum.    p.  cm.   isbn 978-0-520-26900-2 (cloth : alk. paper)   isbn 978-0-520-26901-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)   1. Marx, Harpo, 1888–1964.  2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography.  3. Comedians—United States—Biography.  I. Title.   pn2287.m54k84  2012   792.702´8092–dc23   [B] 2011024490 Manufactured in the United States of America 21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/ niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Any classification you read provokes a desire in you to put yourself into it somewhere: where is your place? At first you think you have found it; but gradually, like a disintegrating statue or an eroding relief, its shape blurs and fades, or better still, like Harpo Marx losing his artificial beard in the glass of water he is drinking out of, you are no longer classifiable.  —roland barthes, Roland Barthes

This page intentionally left blank

contents



Acknowledgments  /  ix

I Early Ecstatic Emptiness

The Holy Fool Flees Language’s Stink Bomb: The Cocoanuts (1929)  /  3 Pinky, the Pointing Scapegoat, Lags Behind: Duck Soup (1933)  /  27 The Mad Mohel’s Goo-Goo Eyes of Monomaniacal Attunement: A Night at the Opera (1935)  /  49 Poppy Power; or, The Thick-Enough Art of Zombie Dumbfoundment: Animal Crackers (1930)  /  74 II Later Astonishments

Fake Dead Jew as Cute Zoo-Idiot: Room Service (1938)  /  99 Passé Punchy’s Humiliated Buddy Huddle: At the Circus (1939)  /  120

Freeze Rusty’s Anal Rage in a Cozy Void: Go West (1940)  /  141 Lonely Wacky’s Incremental Lines of Flight: The Big Store (1941)  /  164 The Bubble-Blowing Demarcator Tickles Totality: A Night in Casablanca (1946)  /  182 Bulge, Glaze, Pause, Shock; or, The Bushy-Haired Ragpicker’s Burnt Offering: Love Happy (1949)  /  202 III The Idiot Tumbles Back to the Beginning of Time

The Undeliverable Ice of Pinky’s Mom-Mouth: Horse Feathers (1932)  /  227 The Kippering, Bopping, Shushing, Bear-Hugging, Beard-Pulling Bustle: Monkey Business (1931)  /  252 The Pretzel Glimmer-Eye of Stuffy’s Stuttering Surge: A Day at the Races (1937)  /  273

Acknowledgments

My gratitude and affection go to Mary Francis and Ira Silverberg, and to my treasured collaborators in California, especially Rachel Berchten, Nicole Hayward, and Joe Abbott. Remarkable friends encouraged this adventure: Robert Boyers, Clifford Chase, Harry Dodge, Andy Fitch, Peter Halley, Christian Hawkey, Paul Holdengräber, Myung Mi Kim, Rachel Kushner, Rebecca Mead, Nancy K. Miller, Maggie Nelson, Jacqueline Osherow, Alexandra Penney, George Prochnik, Jonathan Rabinowitz, Lisa Rubinstein, David Shields, Lynne Tillman, and Benjamin Weissman. Sina Najafi kindly published an excerpt, “Harpo’s Bubbles,” in Cabinet. Glenn Mitchell’s The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia was a trusted guide. Bruce Hainley understands everything. Steven Marchetti welcomed Harpo into our household as an intimate, permanent guest. I dedicate this Anatomy to my mother and father, who knew me before I could speak, and who are familiar with my excesses and indiscretions.

ix

This page intentionally left blank

Early Ecstatic Emptiness

I

This page intentionally left blank

The Holy Fool Flees Language’s Stink Bomb

The Cocoanuts (1929)

He was attached to sounds and because of his attachment could not let sounds be just sounds. He needed to attach himself to the emptiness, to the silence.  —john cage, Silence

I Entrance  At the studios of Paramount Pictures in Astoria, Long Island, in his first scene, his first major film, 1929, six years before the Third Reich passed the Nuremberg Laws, Harpo enters honking. Honk honk. Pause. Honk honk. Lemming-like, he pursues a woman who doesn’t realize that a kook is shadowing her. What does Harpo want? He wants to honk, copy, play, irritate, smash, point, lean, and rest. He wants to find a double, to be useless, to recognize, and to be recognized. He wants to greet the void. He wants to go blank. Or maybe he wants nothing. Pillow Books  Originally I intended to write a book about Harpo’s relation to history and literature. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Hegel. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Marx. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Stein. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Hitler. Then I drafted a novella, The Pillow Book of Harpo Marx. The narrator, Harpo, was a queer Jewish masseur who lived in Variety Springs, New York, and whose grandparents had starred in vaudeville with Sophie Tucker.

3

Then I decided I didn’t want to waste Harpo’s name on a novella. So I set out to write the book you are now holding—a blow-by-blow annotation of Harpo’s onscreen actions. My aim? Assemblage. Homage. Imitation. Transcription. Dilation. Last night I dreamt that my typewriter’s ribbon expatriated from the machine and curled onto the floor. Dreams are evidence I can’t omit from my pillow book. This opening chapter has the fewest pictures. At first I didn’t realize how pleasurable it was to interrupt the movie and seize proof that Harpo was god-like, exemplary, in danger of vanishing if I didn’t capture him. I won’t go back now and resee The Cocoanuts and grab more pictures; I won’t doctor my experimental anatomization of Harpo’s anti-melancholy body, whose materiality suffuses me with physical contentment, as if I were rocking the infant universe to sleep. When I first fell in love with Harpo, it wasn’t, however, his contentment that struck me; I was moved by his hyperkinesis. Other actors handled plot doldrums, while, in the corner, Harpo, unregarded, unspeaking, busied himself with rapid oscillations of head, eye, and hand, self-pleasuring vibrations that sometimes struck sparks in other players, though, mostly, Harpo’s butterfly gyrations woke no one else to his centrality. I, as viewer, was responsible for granting him primacy; and I could do so only by slowing him down and giving words to these muscular mutations, these gestures of mouth-opening and wrist-bending that were, on the surface, merely funny but, below the surface, were uncannily empty. The idiosyncrasy—Harpo’s nod, or cavern-mouth, or mica-eyes—appeared fleeting and subverbal; and I developed a need to convince strangers that Harpo’s hyperkinetic emptiness had metaphysical dimensions.

Concentration, Abstraction, Seriality  Harpo is the silent brother. Could he really talk? Yes, but never onscreen. Later, I’ll explain why. The Marx Brothers had a stage career (vaudeville, Broadway) before their act immigrated to Hollywood; I will limit my attentions to Harpo’s film embodiment. Watching his screen adventures, I don’t laugh; I concentrate. Concentration is a sadly dwindling cultural resource; opportunities to pay attention— even going overboard and fastening monomaniacally to a single object— deserve advocacy.

4   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

Art, whether visual or literary, may choose to operate in serial fashion, composing its tricks by lining up similarly timed or similarly spaced modules. In Harpo’s performances, one gag, or incremental piece of comic business, follows another. His gestures obey a mysterious nonlogic of mere adjacency. The schtick’s fragments stack up like cubes or buttons—impropriety’s rosary-beads. His performances, like the ocean’s, are abstract. We observe the ebb, but we don’t expect an explanation. Behaving as a serial artist, Harpo lines up his self’s pieces, one by one, in a row: he gathers comic bits into a transparent assemblage, hieratic as Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, but without didactic baggage. The seeming continuity of Harpo’s performances disguises their origin in separable flashes of comic perception. Walter Benjamin described the art of Charlie Chaplin in similar terms: “Each single movement he makes is composed of a succession of staccato bits of movement.” In a different context, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, attuned to pieces, theorized an ego’s tendency to be “in bits.” Sequentially, bit by bit, this book will point to Harpo’s screen gestures. My procedure courts overthoroughness, and therefore stupefaction—an interminability I consider Novocain. As Andy Warhol filmed a man sleeping, and called it Sleep, I want to commit media-heist, to steal a man from his native silence and transplant him into words, if only for the pleasure of taking illusory possession of a physical self-sureness that can never be mine. The Marx Brothers were not part of my star-infatuated childhood; I fell in love with Harpo only recently. Without foreknowledge, I found myself hypnotized by the curly-wigged man who stared erratically, with a glazed expression, in a direction that was neither toward nor away from the other; his gaze seemed to evade reciprocity, yet also to invite response. Harpo, I discovered, moved more quickly, and more elusively, than I could account for. If I slowed down the film, his gestures could unfold under a different planetary dispensation. I wanted to figure out how he put together “cuteness” from scratch, and how he coined, with tools of no one else’s devising, a grammar of adorability, affection, stupefaction, giddiness, sleepiness, shock, and other category-defying moods. I wanted, above all, to figure out how he seduced me into relinquishing my own thoughts, for a few years, to concentrate, instead, on his gestures, which didn’t need my annotations. Harpo made thirteen films; because my goal is homage and replication,

The Cocoanuts   |    5

I’ve written thirteen chapters. Anatomizing rather than synthesizing, I bed down with entropy and disarray.

Family Characteristics  The Marx Brothers film career officially begins with The Cocoanuts (1929). I take 1929 personally: my mother was born in 1930, my father in 1928. Though my father is certainly a talker, and a master of esoteric words and abstract concepts, in my childhood he was often silent—either sulking, or bitter, or contemplative, or outshouted. I interpreted his silence as a comforting antidote to my mother’s explosiveness, although now I can conceive that her liveliness and candor offered a different kind of comfort, a tactile realm of figuration, a warm materiality, apart from the bodiless void of my father’s abstraction. But when I was growing up, I felt sad that my mother didn’t decode or translate my father’s muteness, and I idealized (and blamed myself for) his gloom, passivity, or nonreactivity, as if we four children had conspired to deprive him of speech. In Harpo’s first scene, I glimpse his major gimmicks. I note his rouged lips; his thirst; his appetite; his laziness; his musicality; his whistling; his marveling relation to words as material objects; his plug hat’s height and élan; his pants, not as ragged or droopy as in later films; his belt, not connected to the function of upholding pants; his gaze, riveted to any passing woman; his bulbous taxi horn, phallically protruding, and providing protest or emphasis; his willingness to fight against women rather than merely to romance them; his cheerful distaste for regular channels of communication; his large eyes, rapt, like a painter’s or bird-watcher’s, seizing transitory visitations. Harpo’s eyes are bigger than a regular person’s. That is an anatomical fact I can’t prove. His eyes, which tend to brighten and pop, dramatize the attempt to recognize (or to seek recognition from) another person. Harpo’s bug eyes do more than beseech: they attest, grip, sign, declare, accuse, renounce, and mourn. Deadness  I offer verbal attunement to a dead man—a man already “dead” (or abstracted) when alive. We consider his stupefaction funny. By misinterpreting deadness, we wound him; we misread his incapacity as a joke, and we admire his fanatically precise reassembly of woundedness into action. Bullied, Harpo fled school during second grade and never returned. His onscreen silence rebukes an America that refused him an education.

6   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

Shouldn’t a New York City truant officer have knocked on his family’s door, 179 East 93rd Street, and demanded that little Arthur—pronounced “Ahtha”—go back to school? In his act’s staccato periodicity, I hear a percussive, repeated complaint, unspecified in content and in addressee. He is rebuking himself for failing to speak, rebuking others for speaking, and rebuking the social contract for ignoring his existence. Watching, we, too, become wounded. Stars mar us; we receive vicarious illumination, but they outshine and therefore humiliate us by reminding us of our nugatory status as nonparticipants in screen existence. Let’s revise the public discourse that considers us vultures, feeding on celebrity carrion; stars damage us by colonizing our consciousness and by persuading us that being cinema-worthy is the only way to shine. I will concentrate on moments when Harpo’s eyes shine, as if they were trying to articulate a desire on the threshold of awareness.

Birth Order  Harpo is the second brother. (So am I.) Actually, Harpo is the third brother. The very first Marx child, Manfred, died as an infant. (I, too, am the third child: my oldest sibling was stillborn.) After Manfred came Leonard, a.k.a. Chico, in 1887. Chico is the wheelerand-dealer, the charming gambler and schemer, the dolt with a stereotypical Italian accent. In 1888, Adolph was born. He later changed his name to Arthur. We know him, however, as Harpo, the silent one. In 1890, Minnie Marx gave birth to Julius Henry, who grew into Groucho. Loudmouth with a cigar and painted mustache, he is the most educated of the brothers, and the most celebrated. Deposing Groucho from vocal sovereignty might have been Harpo’s covert aim. The youngest child, Herbert, born in 1901, ended up as Zeppo, the conventionally handsome, matinee-idol brother, the straight man, the only plausible love-interest. I’ll ignore the second-to-youngest, Gummo, who doesn’t appear in films. I have two brothers, one sister. Maybe one day I’ll write about sisters. But my subject here is brothers, or the sensation of losing identity amid fraternal haze.

The Cocoanuts   |    7

Duck-Mouth  Harpo, in his first scene, juts out his lips to compose an indignant chute, like a piggybank slot, or a vacuum-cleaner attachment: I call this mannerism duck-mouth, or chute-mouth. I will often mention it—because it attracts me, and because it confuses me, and because its repetition (again and again the duck-mouth) might have comforted him. He doesn’t want to be a duck, but he seems to realize that duck-mouth brings results. Harpo is a pragmatist, though the fruits of his actions are often ephemeral—trifles like satisfaction, attention, recognition, surfeit, stasis, excess, magnification. As soon as Chico says, “We sent you a telegram,” Harpo faces forward, greeting the Broadway audience, the camera, or some offscreen presence. Seismic processes—gravity, time, sequence—transpire without intervention; we needn’t manually turn causality’s wheel. Harpo proposes liberation from the need to push reality into prescriptive, fixed formations. Consuming the Inedible  Harpo sits on the couch. Beside him, at attention, gazing upward to the ceiling, and not looking at Harpo, stands a hotel porter in white tux jacket. Harpo removes one of its silver buttons, holds it at a distance to identify its nature, polishes it, and pops it in his mouth. He turns toward the camera, smiles, and nods: tastes good. The experiment succeeded. Eating a button, he violates dietary laws, and ingests the forbidden, the inedible: Judaism calls it “treif.” Harpo plucks another button, chews it, and wipes his mouth with the stooge’s bow-tie. Sacrilege intensifies: loafing on the couch, Harpo rests an ankle in the lackey’s hand. The poor guy, demoted to furniture, ignores the insult and stands stiffly at attention, forced to obey a fool. Groucho calls Harpo a “groundhog.” Button-eating has turned him into an animal, an escapee from a Kafka story. Becoming an animal (or, as theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put it, becoming-animal) is a laudable human tendency. Harpo may, in fact, represent a semi-utopian condition of permanent ascent into animality, a variety of exalted consciousness. All this talk of “exaltation” shouldn’t make you forget that my topic is a dead man. I began writing about Harpo in the months after the death of my favorite singer, the soprano Anna Moffo, who is famous for having a voice of unusual voluptuousness and lightness, and also famous for having lost

8   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

that voice prematurely. She died on March 10, 2006. The word anatomy, in the title, accidentally refigures her name: Anatomy is “Anna to Me.”

Harpo’s Emptiness  Emptying myself, I try to become as erased and vigilant as Harpo, who, sitting on the couch while Chico and Groucho talk, maintains a spy’s posture, eyes attuned to ambient frequencies. The porter tries to take Harpo’s suitcase. Harpo, thinking himself robbed, fights back. In the scuffle, the suitcase opens and proves to be empty, like Harpo’s wordless mind. His blankness lacks presuppositions and forbids reciprocation. If you don’t interfere with Harpo, and you satisfy his oral needs (give him coat buttons to chew, and ink to drink), he will be a glad groundhog; but if you thwart him, he will bop you over the head with his honker, a subaltern’s scepter, providing a merely playpen sovereignty. The title’s “cocoanuts” refers to the Marx Brothers, whose Jewish “nuts,” their testicles, their masculinities, have a suspect, pigmented, tropical undertone; but the fruity title especially applies to Harpo, a sweet nothing with a hollow noggin that promises a forbidden medley of milk and meat. Excommunication: The Third Letter  Harpo, baby monster, sits on the desk and methodically tears up mail. Excommunication delights him. Advocating witless increase, magnification for magnification’s sake, Harpo is overjoyed to repeat the same action: reach into the mail cubicle, retrieve a letter, rip it up, remove another letter, rip it up.  Ω  His eyes flash as he probes the postal beehive; his other, unoccupied hand hangs suspended, conducting a phantom orchestra. Enthralling, the speed and efficiency of Harpo’s reverse factory, an assembly line that destroys rather than produces. His gaze pivots between letters and Groucho, to whom the maildestroying feat is a potlatch obediently offered. When a hotel employee hands Groucho a telegram (actually, a bill), Harpo intercepts and shreds it. Harpo, bookkeeper, performs his favorite function, erasure, canceling debt in medias res. If asked to perform a three-part task, he skips the middle step. If ordered to deliver a message, he destroys it.

The Cocoanuts   |    9

Comedy’s rhythm: do anything, however trivial, three times. Make a motion; repeat it; repeat it again. Harpo’s eyes flash when he tears the third letter. The first two gestures are exploratory. With the third letter, he moves from experiment to ecstasy. Like an anteater examining its prey, or like an absorbed infant contemplating a rattle, Harpo glances at the letter-about-to-be-delivered. By ripping it up, he reenacts the destruction of his own voice.  µ  Toward his voicelessness—as toward the letters he aggressively destroys— he exhibits no pity, no chagrin. We might consider language’s disappearance a nightmare, but Harpo finds it Lethean.

Ratiocination Is Funny  Harpo sees what resembles a potato but is actually a sponge; he prongs it with a pen, as if with a fork, and chews experimentally, slowly, quizzically. (We can see him think. For our sake, he exaggerates ratiocination, and turns it into a joke.) With Butoh-precise gestures, he spreads paste on the sponge and drinks the ink from the jar, a mock-teacup. Fussy Harpo examines a bouquet before choosing the ideal blossom to eat, and almost “cracks up” at his own preposterousness. The Instant of Eye Contact with the Viewer  Note Harpo’s distended, glowing, mesmerized eyes, peering, out their corners, toward the camera. His gaze, no longer shy about confronting us, implies: I know that you see my misbehavior. I like being caught. Harpo recognizes the viewer recognizing him.  µ  After bliss, an attack of autohypnosis seizes him and shuts down pleasure; glazed eyes, turning away from the camera, sever our momentary bond. Harpo Wants More of the Same  Harpo defines appetite eccentrically. Give me more of the same. Let me keep biting. Aesthetic process—creating and receiving—also obeys this accretive motion. When the phone rings, Chico answers it, and Harpo makes musical mischief by ink-stamping any available surface: each time the stamp con-

10   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

cussively strikes, it produces a different pitch. Sometimes he hits the bell’s bull’s-eye, inadvertently calling a hotel maid: “Did you ring, sir?” she says, saluting, and then, with each accidental ring, another girl appears. Seeing the first maid arrests Harpo: he has discovered a magic switch but doesn’t understand the cause-effect relation between bell and Being. And thus Harpo is entitled to live in the entranced gap between cause and effect, off samsara’s wheel.

Waving Good-bye to Someone Who Can No Longer See You  Harpo doesn’t mind being rejected. He waves good-bye to the girls, already out of sight. A Harpo trademark: waving to someone who can no longer see you. He acts chummy with the void. His wave dignifies the useless communication, the for-nothing. Demonstrating a pointless, antiutilitarian beauty, he puts effort and artistry into a motion unseen by companions. Thus Harpo, an autoerotic autocrat, denies that affectionate actions need recipients. Kinesis Precedes Thinking  Move, then think. Act, then contemplate. Obey the body’s innate intelligence, its wish to move. Writing is kinetic. These sentences obey my movement-based desire to concentrate on a vanished subject. Chico and Harpo take turns spinning around a crook—played by Cyril Ring, who also appeared in Bette Davis’s Mr. Skeffington and Barbara Stanwyck’s The Lady Eve and Judy Garland’s Babes in Arms. (Hollywood intertextuality is important: kabbalah-like, it confirms cinematic kismet.) Men aren’t supposed to dance together, but Harpo’s kinetic momentum prevents the comrade from understanding the act’s compromising nature. Let me be clear. I’m not saying that Arthur Marx—the real Harpo—was queer. I’m not saying anything about the sexuality of the real Arthur Marx. How could I? (Oh, I could say a few things: he was happily married to actress Susan Fleming. They wed in 1936, when Harpo was forty-six years old. His closest friend was the theater critic and Algonquin Round Table wit Alexander Woollcott, who happened to be queer, and who happened to be, as Groucho put it, “in love with Harpo in a nice way”—a relationship about which there has been a certain amount of intriguing though ungrounded speculation.) Nor am I saying anything about what Harpo, the character, wants. “Harpo,” onscreen, is a fiction. And fictions don’t have desires. They

The Cocoanuts   |    11

have actions. Harpo’s actions I choose to take queerly. Don’t accuse me of outing anybody! I’ve never outed anyone in my life. I’m simply watching Harpo dance with a man.

Turn a Shame Word (Bum) into a Repeatable Musical Object  Cyril—bully, snob, Gentile—calls Harpo a bum. “Come, Penelope, let’s get away from this .  .  . bum.” Tramp. Rear end. The word bum, though it stuns and shames, provides ammunition. Here is a word that Harpo can handle—a juicy, containable morpheme, an almost onomatopoeic syllable, whose low, corporeal sound reinforces its sense. Again he mouths the word: “bum.” It may mean nothing to him, but it offers a pretext for testing out repetition, for moving his lips, for enunciating. Bum—insult—turns into kernel of song. Harpo mouths the word to Chico, who provides sound. And as bum repeats—“bum, bum, bum”—it accretes into a rhythm, an abstract pattern. Chico sings and Harpo mimes “bum-bum-bum” while exiting, Harpo holding a phantom flute and audibly whistling. (Words may be out of bounds, but nonverbal noises are kosher.) I’ve Accomplished Another Transformation  Pleasure, for Harpo, lies in transformation for transformation’s sake. Why not be thrifty, and make use of every inanimate scrap? (Gertrude Stein’s credo: Use everything.) Harpo takes part in the grand tradition of art (from Marcel Duchamp to John Cage to Dieter Roth, and beyond) that recycles—or transubstantiates—debris. At the hotel’s registration desk, Harpo sniffs the telephone, scrutinizes it, tries to interpret it, to cozy up to it, as if it were human. Then he chews the phone and looks toward the camera; his eyes, alight with pleasure, signify it tastes good or else I’ve accomplished another transformation; I’ve metamorphosed phone into food. The ink jar, like a precious thurible, glistens; pinkie in air, he drinks. Harpo’s face, a scientist’s, evaluates. With a receptivity to the strangeness of the ordinary as radical as Thoreau’s or Wittgenstein’s, Harpo treats existence as a sequence of experiments, none fatal. He puts down the ink jar, smiles, and nods. Job well done, another foodstuff pilfered, another item of garbage transformed into treasure. When Chico enters, Harpo’s face remains immobile—arrested by panic—but his alert eyes try to figure out whether the universe is sanely functioning. Hyperawareness of atmospheric dangers is an opportunist’s, a

12   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

paranoid’s, or a traumatized soul’s—a shtetl mentality, transmuted to Paramount.

The Switch Trick  One of Harpo’s trademarks is the “switch trick”—instead of giving his hand to someone who wants to shake it, Harpo offers a leg. The detective unconsciously grasps the leg and then angrily thrusts it away when he realizes the ruse. This trick always satisfies Harpo. It gives him a chance to rest his leg. It eroticizes the handshake’s masculine formality. It amplifies the offering. It confuses the enemy. It stuns—stops—time. It stymies the equivalence, the fake parity, of hand and hand. It interrupts grammar. Everyone accepts Harpo’s thigh, because the switch trick happens quickly and unexpectedly, and because it lacks apparent logic. Why protect yourself against a nonsense assault? The switch trick blends aggression and intimacy, and proposes substitution as an aesthetic category. Notice the pleasure that hits when one thing replaces another. You expect a fist. You receive, instead, a flower. Throwing a Gookie  The detective (played by Basil Ruysdael, a basso who sang in Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète with Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera) recognizes Harpo’s face, and flashes a “wanted criminal” photo. Reciprocating, Harpo throws him a Gookie.  Ω  In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks, he calls this trademark expression “throwing a Gookie”: crossed eyes, bloated cheeks, protruding tongue. The gesture originated in cruelty. Mr. Gehrke, in Harpo’s childhood, was an ordinary man who rolled cigars in a store window. Imitating Mr. Gehrke’s expression of rapt, foolish absorption in a task, Harpo stood in front of the window and yelled, “Gookie!”—the Yorkville pronunciation of “Gehrke.” Onstage, the Gookie was a crowd-pleaser. With this trick, he could stimulate a restless vaudeville audience. Onscreen, the Gookie safeguards Harpo’s identity by making him monstrous. Gookie rhymes with two other treats: cookie and nookie. Harpo flashes a Gookie to freeze the villain, as the Medusa’s head turned the viewer to stone. The Gookie, snake-haired, recapitulates the excited

The Cocoanuts   |    13

stiffness of the penis it wants to embody, or to avoid, or to cut off. (So said Freud—controversially, charismatically.) The Gookie has an affinity with castration, but I can’t make the connection foolproof.

Harpo Acts Easily Offended  Harpo playfully fingers Chico’s knish-like face. Chico slaps away the exploring hand—leave me alone! Offended, Harpo gives duck-mouth, pushes Chico, and wheels fists into the fight position. (Twice, at the moment a slug is expected, Harpo surprises by kicking Chico’s rear.) Not genuinely angry, Harpo enjoys stepping onto the assembly line of taking offense, a comprehensible sequence: he protrudes lips, kicks Chico, greases comedy’s wheels, advances to the next bit of business, and defends his own chivalric honor. His formulaic set piece—being offended— offers the comfort of imitable units, a Parcheesi pleasure, like Alhambra mosaics or Donald Judd shelves. Baby-Romancing the Law: The Nod  Basil the basso-detective intervenes again, breaking up the fight. Now Harpo baby-romances the law by leaning; collapsing, Harpo pushes the horn into the law’s gut, and thereby honks.  µ Harpo has forced the law to operate the farting noisemaker. The honker glues the guys together: they slowdance. Harpo satisfies a wish to cuddle by turning punishment into cozy roundelay. The basso-detective says, “I’m going to keep watching”—and Harpo, looking him directly in the eye, nods. Whether or not Harpo agrees, he nods. Reflex actions, mimicking compliance, protect him from the law: you can’t arrest or abuse a nodding man. Let’s take Harpo as emblem of flight from punishment and categorization, including the categories I impose on him. Harpo steals the basso’s blazer and puts it on Chico. Harpo steals to please his family. Like Oliver Twist under Fagin’s charge, Harpo presents theft’s gleaning to an underworld boss—not to garner acclaim, but to remain securely in the position of tolerated little brother. Brotherliness has a queer energy that Walt Whitman called “adhesiveness”: the democratic desire to attach.

14   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

Immunity to Coquetry  Harpo may chase women, but he foils their advances: heterosexuality, for Harpo, doesn’t compute. And yet Kay Francis, the film’s vamp (soon she’ll star in George Cukor’s Girls about Town and Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise), tries to snare Harpo’s libido. They seem an unlikely match: she’s tall and not Jewish. Flirtatiously, she drops a handkerchief, but he mistakes love-gift for plunder, which he pockets. “Did you see a handkerchief?” she asks. He shakes his head “no” and mimics coquetry by acting femme, while his teeth extract a scarf from her bodice.  Ω  Earlier, he played this trick on the detective, but Kay’s hankie is longer than the Law’s, and comes from a more intimate hiding place. Harpo mocks private property, puts his mouth to improper use, and interrupts other people’s insincerity. His mouth considers Kay’s hankie an abstract prize, which he hides in his pocket, an almost anatomical safe-deposit box. Why Harpo Looks Directly at the Camera  Later, he will learn not to look at the camera. But now, in this primal film, he commits the sin of acknowledging our presence. Mincing, hand on hip, like Mae West, he looks directly at us.  Ω  His lapse allows me to argue: Harpo, expressing a naked need-for-audience, smashes the diegesis (the technical word for everything that takes place within a film’s fictional world). And by smashing the diegesis, Harpo carves a covert for reverie and for threshold experiences beyond conventional moral accounting systems, including regimes that divide useful and useless acts, and regimes that compel us to choose sociability over introspection. His horn, colliding with the shutting elevator door, squawks, and he steps backward, arrested, unsmiling, slack-faced. He has failed to prime his features with a signifying expression.  Ω  Blankness propels him toward music-making; going blank, he relinquishes

The Cocoanuts   |    15

interaction. Harpo may wish to attach himself to others—especially brothers—but because he lacks speech, he will only thrive when solitary. His contemplative episodes seem like locales rather than merely moods. Consider Harpo a homesteader. Not necessarily a Zionist. (However, at his death, he bequeathed his harp to Israel. I assume that Israel accepted the gift.) Onscreen, he seems a man concerned with escape and territory; his musical solos represent benign, nonviolent flight from the demands of the Other. Harpo, despite clannish chumminess, thrives when abandoned, and when he interacts with his instrument. When I was young, I loved Charlie Chaplin because, clumsy and pallid, he invited us to watch him sulk. Harpo never sulks, and rarely feels sorry for himself, and yet he leans toward emptiness, as if hunting for an echo.

II Harp as Homeland  Seriousness descends. (A rule of Harpo Existence: you can’t make music while kidding around.) Stranded, he has no companion, only a clarinet: he can shove no one else’s body into his transformation factory. He empties himself of alacrity; he needs to purge himself before he dares to perform. His grave face illustrates the pleasure of evacuated meaning. When he plays clarinet, his right cheek expands, but not the left: asymmetrical sign of effortful, onanistic pathos. Clarinet is just a warm-up; his real instrument is the harp. His harp adventures never change, though their meanings deepen with reiteration: repetition allows us to discover what was immanent in an experience the first go-round. How can we understand Harpo’s harp playing, unless we visit every instance? In this inaugural experiment, Harpo prepares for solo by posing as bogeyman—looking at the viewer through harp strings, and making a scary face, Hollywood’s idea of a savage. Change of mood: serious, he sits down at the harp, an instrument not meant for men. Harpo’s seriousness butches up the suspect effort. Digital aplomb confirms sexual expertise: this guy knows how to use his fingers. Comedy dies: nap time begins. We can turn away from interaction, moneymaking, cadging, aggression, and garrulity; we can focus, instead, on Harpo’s lushly arpeggiated “soul”—the realm of Jewish feeling, Harpo’s version of singing the blues, a wail with a histori-

16   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

cal core. The solo’s spiritually assiduous style, a Covenant, is cut off from hijinks. The Marx Brothers never rest; arrivistes, they gate-crash other people’s estates and institutions. Only Harpo’s harp episodes broach the question of homeland. Finally, he gives up hectic transit and failed encounter; finally, he pursues an unbroken, self-generated line of thought. A medium shot narrows to a close-up, framing Harpo’s face; the viewer presumably wants to spy on Harpo’s private musings, his necromancy—a spell aimed at himself, not at others. Like Garbo, Harpo at his harp is starry, alienated, commodifiable, contained, worth studying and collecting. We see Harpo’s nose in profile.  Ω  We see how a Jew behaves in secret—an Orpheus with an overlarge, stolen lyre. Harpo, the Jewish fool, plays the instrument that signified, for the British romantic poets, and for anyone influenced by them, the strings of the imagination. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” nature is a harp, waiting to be plucked by the “intellectual breeze.” Harpo has a lot of responsibility: the fate of Western lyricism rests in his capable, gummy hands.

“Why Bother?”  Harpo goes down on all fours, like a baby or a dog, and crawls under Kay’s bed. He loves nooks. He can play marauder without posing a sexual threat. He also possesses the virtue of being empty. He escapes sexual grids; he likes sequestration (pockets, hideaways); he tends toward the animalistic and the puerile; and he prefers to rid actions and objects of their meanings, rather than pile up new meanings. Leaving his under-the-bed hiding place, Harpo swims like a seal, a watery jet squirting out his mouth: arms make undinal motions, and he wiggles across the floor. Toward humankind he says, “Why bother?” He becomes animal not merely to transgress but to unwind. Jack-in-the-Box: Sudden Manifestation  Harpo knocks and enters Margaret Dumont’s room. Margaret Dumont—where do I begin?—is the dowager, the goalpost, the butt of jokes, the consoling maternal presence, the pillar, the wailing wall, the frame, the woman with kind eyes and haughty voice, the woman who bars the brothers from high society but also ushers them

The Cocoanuts   |    17

into it. Toward Margaret, the cure-all and guardian, the ripe-toned enunciator with a heart of schmaltz, Harpo carries a pitcher of ice water: erotic indifference? Margaret tells him to put the pitcher on the bureau. Instead, Harpo goes to her bed, lies down, and pats the mattress as invitation. When she indignantly refuses, he waves good-bye and exits. Knock knock. Margaret says, “Come in.” It’s Harpo again—programmed, with a mechanical, tick-tock rhythm, to pop into framed spaces. But then, discovering his mistake (wrong room!), he flees. Harpo, jack-in-the-box, enacts a rhythm of sudden emergence: I’m-here, quickly followed by I’m-not-here. Harpo is happiest when he first appears. Soon afterward, identity falls prey to dilution. The blitzkrieg instant of arrival finds him most “Harpo.”

Groucho’s Third-Person References to Harpo  Groucho says that he doesn’t want to see that “red-headed fellow” running around the lobby. (The film is black-and-white; we’ll take Harpo’s hair color on faith.) Groucho, rarely speaking to him, refers to him in the third person, and holds him within the pincers of adjectives and pejoratives. Later I will describe this effect as the “coziness of interpellation.” It is cozy to be invoked (“that red-headed fellow”) by your brother, even if the reference is negative. It is cozy to be named, and thus summoned into existence. Pleasure of the Instant before Categories Click into Place  Harpo has little sense of good or evil; freedom from categories accords him cognitive cleanliness. When he does a good deed—he retrieves Margaret Dumont’s stolen necklace—he tampers with the action’s merit by playing a dirty little game; for the pleasure of desecrating someone else’s desired object, he wraps the necklace around his waist and wiggles in a womanly Watusi dance. Ignoring the impropriety, Margaret rewards him with a promotion: “You dear man,” she says. Man? When questioned by Basil-the-basso-detective, Harpo smiles, oblivious to cross-examination, happy to earn anyone’s attention, savoring the threshold instant of surcease from cruelty, before dread categories click into place, before he understands that the law considers him garbage.

18   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

Biting the Finger  Harpo’s mouth: I can’t get enough of it. Nor could he. Though wordless, he put it to good use. He opens it wide, whenever he gets the chance. He bites the detective’s pointing finger, and won’t let go. Shirking blame for the bite, Harpo gives duck-mouth, imitating normal people’s blah-blah-blah, their chattering doxa. As a child, I gave vent to rage by biting my right hand’s second finger— the fat place below the knuckle. The gnawed spot developed a callus I feared would cause cancer. The Language of Harpo’s Horn  Sometimes Harpo uses his taxi-horn— which sticks provocatively out of his waistcoat, like a misplaced codpiece or a grotesquely swollen belly-button—to announce his entrance and desires, or simply to provide all-purpose indication. As a pronoun points to a prior noun, so Harpo’s horn points to an event in the future or past, or to something manifest that no one else has yet noticed. The horn-honk, intemperate and impertinent, interrupts other people’s speech by making an emergency declaration whose unspecificity is alarming but whose occasional specificity (sometimes we know exactly what Harpo means when he honks) is uncanny. The horn-honk functions equally as unspecified and specified meaning—and we’re never sure which function is being exercised. When called a dummy, Harpo acknowledges disparagement by honking his horn twice. The horn blast contradicts (or confirms!) any statement that precedes it. It performs contradiction and confirmation simultaneously. The honk wipes out—or amplifies—the discourse around Harpo. If you want to be articulate, stay away from Harpo; or else, enjoy nearness to his annunciating honk, and learn how to give blissfully mixed messages. The Intermediate Gaze  Curious, Harpo approaches the weeping heroine, played by Mary Eaton, who appeared onstage in the Ziegfeld Follies and died of alcohol-related liver failure in 1948. His face is immobile, but his outstretched eyes look between Mary and the viewer, to an intermediate area that becomes home. He wants to avoid companion or camera, so he focuses on the neutral, interstitial zone, a blankness he recognizes. Has he visited it before?  Ω  Unable to comfort this fellow loner with words, he provides

The Cocoanuts   |    19

empty presence. He offers a lollipop that at first she doesn’t see; he gently taps her arm with the candy and mock-licks it, in demonstration. Here is an object he holds orally dear and will provisionally share: this silent kid has transcended the hoarding phase.  µ  She refuses the sugary lump on a stick but hugs him in gratitude. (Don’t accept candy from strangers: she has reason to reject a pervert bum’s lure.) Hugged, he looks again at the intermediate quadrant of respite; arms at his side, posture rigid, he steps back from intimacy, as if to intellectualize and frame it. He recognizes his lollipop-oriented bootlessness. Mary lays her weeping head on his shoulder, but his blank gaze renounces reciprocity.  µ  The lollipop scheme failed, and now his stony remoteness—his abstraction—won’t budge. Blankness, however, is soothing, a container for Mary, for melodrama, for failures of every kind, including mine.

Chico’s Fanny  Harpo, mistakenly offended, rotates his arm as a warm-up to a fistfight—but then he interrupts arm gyrations to surprise-kick Chico’s buttocks. With this predictable, repeatable gesture, Harpo gravitates toward the brother’s bottom, reinforces humiliation, and reroutes a fistfight into a butt-kick that conveys no emotion, as if Chico’s fanny, immune to insult, were manufactured from supernatural, nerveless material. Tongue between Teeth: Coziness of Confinement  Locked in a prison cell, Harpo honks his horn (Rescue me!), and flashes a distressed Gookie. No one sees it: Harpo quickly exhausts his repertoire of attention-getters. He tries again: when he bends the prison-cell bars, he giddily sticks tongue between teeth and looks directly at the viewer to say, “Lookie, I did it!” Later I’ll say more about why Harpo sticks his tongue between his teeth. Later I’ll say more about his love of confinement. His goal: to find again a situation he can recognize, and to be recognized, in turn, by that situation, that box, as if it were a human interlocutor. What is recognition? I’ll experimentally define it as a return to a place where one has been known. And yet, by re-

20   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

turning, Harpo conjures an original scene of acknowledgment that might never have existed. We give precedence to words as the proper way to authorize a self. I confess . . . I swear . . . I witness . . . Harpo’s silence gives us “self” as a composition of visual codes—limited, stereotyped, patched together from odds and ends. His father was a tailor. Apparently, not a good one. A tailor’s trade includes piecework, hemming, alterations, and measurements. My father’s father, in Berlin, was a grain middleman. A middleman buys goods and sells them to others, at interest, in installments. Like a pawnbroker, a middleman deals with economic appreciation. My mother’s paternal grandfather, in Brooklyn, was a part-time scholar; in a methodical, fastidious act of mimicry, he translated the first five books of the Bible into Yiddish, and published it as a study book for yeshiva students. Are my mental tendencies—mimicry, middle-manning, appreciation—inherited?

Extracting Objects: Making Dents in Nearby Consciousness  Harpo, with no apparent comprehension of the written word, hands a deposition to the effete straight man, played by Oscar Shaw (originally Oscar Schwartz), who appeared onstage with Gertrude Lawrence in Gershwin’s Oh, Kay! and died in 1967.  Ω  Harpo, his lipsticked mouth a Clara Bow rosebud, stands proudly adjacent to a text he didn’t instigate and can’t understand, a document that calls out for his arrest: “Silent, Red, Wanted by the Police.” Objects, including cutlery and an alarm clock, start falling out of his pockets. “I hope I still got my underwear on,” says Groucho, and lo and behold Harpo hands it to him, with a merely informational calm and directness. You asked for it, here it is. I bear no responsibility for the obscene object I’m transferring. Miracle: he steals intimate paraphernalia from Groucho’s body without touching him. After extracting a hankie by biting it, Harpo looks at Oscar to ascertain: Did I make a dent in his consciousness? Harpo, like an image on a photographic negative, wants to register. A dry-drunk Puck, he leans into Mr. Schwartz and plays fort-da (my favorite game) with the hankie—making it appear and then disappear, for the pleasure of asserting control over an

The Cocoanuts   |    21

object’s vanishing. To its proper location Harpo restores the hankie and then immediately removes it again. Mid-theft, post-theft, Harpo’s face is empty, passive: he watches his plundering but doesn’t seem to instigate it, as if he were a neutral agent who accidentally catalyzed chaos.

Master and Slave, Harpo and Hegel  Harpo doesn’t want to humiliate others: he wants, like Circe, to undo, inconvenience, discombobulate, and disorient them. His tie is longer and fatter than Groucho’s: brothers mercilessly size each other up. A Harpo rule: lock eyes with the person you’re swindling. His gaze announces to Groucho: I have stolen your tie. I see your shame. Harpo returns the missing tie before Groucho notices its absence. When scolded, Harpo’s mood shifts from satisfied glee to shame or guilt; for an instant, his eyes cast downward. (Harpo’s pattern: head bowed, he laterally pivots his eyes, while other people measure his crimes.) Subordinate once more, Harpo obeys a slave ethic and waits his turn. Important, no doubt, to Hegel, and to those under his domination, was the notion that a master and slave dialectic drives Western history. Harpo’s body dramatizes these swerves. His up-and-down movement between slave and master acts out a reading of history; the Marx Brothers—conspicuously Jewish, and nominally Marxist—enjoy cinematic fame at a moment in history when the Jews were being tragically thrust downward. Gruesome report: Hitler loved the Marx Brothers. Can one say Hitler loved? Hitler, with his eye of toad, watched Marx Brothers movies. Harpo steals Groucho’s teeth. While the victim palpates the hollow place in his mouth, the thief smiles, eyes gleaming: in his proud hand he clasps the dental booty, and thus reascends the “topping” or mastery ladder—not just for the pleasure of being a top, but for the pleasure of seeing someone else behave as a bottom. Harpo’s Fort-Da Yo-Yo Automatism  At the fancy party, a servant officially announces Harpo’s identity: Ambassador. Of what wandering nation? A jumbo cigarillo hangs out his mouth. In accordance with his fort-da schemes (never let go of an object you can’t immediately wheedle back), his hat, when he drops it, bounces up again with yo-yo automatism. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud used the phrase fort-da (German for “awayhere”) to describe a child’s game of making a toy disappear and then ex-

22   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

pressing delight in its staged reappearance. The child pretends that beloved objects have disappeared into exile, when in fact the child has sent them packing; fort-da is a code phrase for the self’s foundational dependence on vanishing. Objects, to become desirable, must disappear. Existence obeys this periodic rhythm: disappear/appear, there/here. Intermittent invisibilities are the alphabet blocks of my false sense of securely existing here.

Chico’s Handsomeness  Harpo reaches into a punch bowl, scavenges fruit, and slops it into his bacchic mouth. Chico, noticing ingestion, suddenly seems a touchstone of handsomeness.  Ω  Sexiness, appearing unexpectedly, unsettles; I prefer it to predictable, room-tone, hit-me-over-the-head Hollywood pulchritude. Sexiness should arise from surprise. Harpo Gives Himself Breasts  Harpo reenters, wearing Basil-the-bassodetective’s shirt, as the gathered assembly sings “He Wants His Shirt” to the tune of Carmen’s “Habanera.” Harpo’s chest, proudly puffed out, imitates a mammary shelf; with thumbs he further stretches his shirt into fake breasts, although, with honker protruding and cigarillo in mouth, he stakes a phallic claim. He removes the shirt, gives it to Basil, and reaches out to shake his hand—but the offended party doesn’t notice the peace offering. Accustomed to rebuff, Harpo with cigarette/ lollipop in mouth gazes perplexedly into his intermediate sliver of respite.  Ω  How to describe this home-region? Harpo’s gaze always wants to deviate toward that neutral destination, a corner of truce, requiring no eye contact. The comic height difference between Basil and Harpo paradoxically favors the shortie: knowing his smallness, he can make use of it. Basil may be tall, but Harpo, undeterred by his own apparent insignificance, dominates with

The Cocoanuts   |    23

sombrero and cigarillo. He inconspicuously inserts a bubble in his mouth (I notice only because I’m advancing frame-by-frame); he blows the bubble, which, more Bazooka than smoke ring, steers Harpo back to playland, away from nicotine adulthood.  µ  Observe Harpo’s oral inconsequence: while Basil sings, out Harpo’s mouth the compensatory gum-globe protrudes, explanatory as a cartoon’s “thought bubble.” Harpo looks downward at the sphere—a mini-artwork—he happily blows. He looks like an entranced boy in a Chardin painting (The Soap Bubble)—an image of suspended time, of art’s effort to deter movement by making material interventions (bubbles, paint-marks) that seem insubstantial but that convey, in their ephemerality, a buried power. A bubble is the extent of Harpo’s accomplishment, and it is, I believe, monumental.

Harpo’s Codpiece  Harpo finesses “crotch,” that difficult zone. Strange sashes, gathering below his waist, mark his crotch but also turn it into a miasma of visual confusion and excess, prompting the question: what’s going on down there? Harpo’s clothes comically emphasize his phallic side but also reformat it. His sash looks like a postcastration bandage—or a disguise to keep the penis invisible—or a device to emphasize it—or an inventive, unclassifiable development in haute couture. Fleeing Someone Else’s Stink Bomb  Listening, at the dinner table, to Groucho’s speech, Harpo finds it so cheesy that he stiffens his shoulders (the “I’ve taken a dump” look), grimaces, chews a cigarette, and eases offcamera, as if holding his nose against the fumes of oratorical offness. He inconspicuously returns to the table and wipes his mouth; off-camera, he took a swig. As Margaret Dumont declaims her speech in stickily operatic recitative, Harpo rises with a semi-Gookie, shoulders hunched, and stands to leave again, moving a few steps toward the exit and then slowly pivoting to look once more at Margaret, whose verbal inauthenticity appalls him. He seems frozen in a wince, as if someone threw a pie in his face—but Harpo himself hurled the banana cream. He holds the wince for an abnormally long beat.  µ  Language sickens him. All he wants is food and

24   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

drink, objects to suck and hold, tasty appendages, costumes he can bend and reinvent. I love Harpo’s “I’m fleeing your stink bomb” semi-Gookie, his face a fixed mask of displeasure, arms monkey-stretched and pendent, fag dangling from his lips, sombrero incongruous. Harpo’s stink bomb– fleeing posture offers a model for righteous, visible protest: he authorizes anyone to skulk away from unpleasant harangues and overblown festivities.

The “Shove-Off” Gesture  Cyril-the-crook stands to give a toast, whose pomposity Harpo can’t bear: rouged lips spread, teeth clenching a cig, shoulders tightened and hunched, he escapes to the punch-bowl table and aims back to the orator a dismissive “aw shucks” hand movement, which goes unseen. From TV reruns of the Little Rascals, in the 1960s, my little brother learned a similar gesture: Froggy, a runty, croak-voiced Rascal, waved his hand at an ignoramus and said, “Aw, raspberries,” as if saying “fuck off” or “go fly a kite.” Once, in seismic revolt, my brother said “Aw, raspberries” to my mother. “Aw, raspberries” undermines the potentate with a remark so puny, so comically mismatched to the occasion (raspberries aren’t Molotov cocktails), that the Law can only mope and retreat. The Stacking Game  Harpo again returns to the banquet table. His lipstick— reapplied between takes?—looks fruity. He hits his own knee to test its reflex. Then he hits the vamp’s knee. Out pops her leg, which Harpo lays on his lap. Recanting, he gives the “Aw, raspberries!” hand gesture and rests his leg on Chico’s lap instead. Chico refuses the gift, but Harpo tries again. The stacking game has commenced, a pleasurable chance for limbs to echo and confuse: hand, hand, leg, leg. Chico puts a leg on Harpo’s, and Harpo an arm on Chico’s, and eventually their extremities are mutually entangled—an instance of pretzel consciousness.  Ω  The brothers cram together in symbiotic homeostasis, gaily amniotic, like Tristan and Isolde, or Siamese twins, or death-drive doppelgängers. To the crowd, Groucho says, “I want to present a charming young lady”; in response, Harpo stands, takes off his hat, and bows,

The Cocoanuts   |    25

although Chico, disgusted, tells him to sit down. The silent lad eagerly claims any stray designation, even “young lady.” Inappropriate behavior: last night I dreamt that I threw a filthy party. An unwanted guest dropped food on my grand piano’s keys and clogged the toilet with mechanical objects—hardware not meant to be flushed down.

Recognition  Last cameo: all four Marx brothers together face the camera and wave, greeting us. Harpo waves with a limp wrist—signal of babyishness, comfort, soggy boundaries, “cuteness,” exemption.  µ  (The gods have granted Harpo amnesty from stiffness.) Limpness causes him no remorse. Waving, the hand moves independently from the wrist. I admire his well-differentiated joints; his body’s tuned elements can wiggle separately, with a temperate, inverted bravura that masquerades as foolishness but transmits unspoken wisdom. Intercut with the Marx brothers waving is goody-goody Oscar “Schwartz” Shaw embracing Mary Eaton while she sings “When My Dreams Come True.” The film ends with Harpo’s unspeakable dream-wish fulfilled: chance and intrepidity have reunited the far-flung brothers. We celebrate their reabsorption into recognition’s home-like echo chamber. (They recognize each other, and we recognize them: a domino-effect of nods and suturing complicities.) Harpo has traveled safely through his first talking picture’s terror-strewn terrain. What did he accomplish? (More than I can say.) Harpo proved his flexibility. Harpo demonstrated multijointedness. Harpo threw a Gookie. Harpo stole a hankie. Harpo blew a bubble. Harpo deflected mockery. Harpo transformed humiliation into musical opportunity. Harpo fled someone else’s stink bomb. Harpo stared into space. Harpo looked directly at the camera. Harpo ripped up other people’s letters. Harpo invented a new language.

26   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

Pinky, the Pointing Scapegoat, Lags Behind

Duck Soup (1933)

An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor. —cervantes, Don Quixote

I Max und Moritz  As a child with an appetite for abjection, I gobbled up Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz, an illustrated German tale (1865) about a pair of rotten mischief-making boys who end up shoved into a grain mill that pulverizes their bodies. Had my father, as a boy in Berlin, read that book? He bought me its English translation at Meyberg’s Delicatessen, which also sold miniature cheese triangles. The bodies of Max and Moritz repulsed me (they looked like lard), but I knew where they were coming from: I understood their distaste for compartmentalization. Pinky  Harpo’s name in Duck Soup—Suck Dupe?—is Pinky, which refers to pink hair we can’t see as pink (the film is black-and-white) and must believe is pink, based on the word alone. The name Pinky points to Harpo’s revolutionary (antimasculine) difference from regular color. Pinky also might mean pinking shears—or the fifth, puny finger, the pianist’s bane. When other characters address Harpo as “Pinky,” they legitimize baby talk: if they hail him as Pinky, then he must be Pinky. We say “Pinky” if we approve of

27

Harpo’s pink nature and wish to bless him with a diminutive. Pinky never disgusts; he is to disgust what ipecac is to Mt. Parnassus.

Harpo’s Rabbi Disguise: The Will to Cease  Entering, Harpo wears (on the back of his head) a long rabbinical beard and spinning-pinwheel glasses, whose whirling circles echo our obsessive practice of getting lost in him. A phone keeps ringing, but it’s not a phone: Harpo reaches into his pocket and pulls out an alarm clock. Smiling and nodding in self-acknowledgment, he points to his joke as a space already traversed. Leaning back in the boss’s chair, Harpo finds another ready-made occasion to loaf. Like Stein, Warhol, or Cage, Harpo encourages arts of laziness and ease; labor-intensive process paradoxically demonstrates the will to cease. Yo-Yo of I-Thou  Harpo lights a cigar with a blowtorch and then makes contrition legible: after committing a crime, he sheepishly seeks eye contact with the master. Fretful about human relationships’ tendency to fail, Harpo plays the yo-yo of I and Thou. He cranes his neck to stare at the Carole Lombard–esque secretary, a few inches away. (She is the actress Verna Hillie, who had a bit part as bridesmaid, the year before, in the movie Madame Butterfly.) Verna and Harpo could be twins—her curly blonde hair matches his pink mop. Like a caged animal, he gazes curiously at human visitors.  µ  Each time he sees a woman, he studies—as if for the first time—what “woman” means. His eyes, a metal detector, scan her for secret weapons. Is she treif? She backs away; he follows. By taffypulling I-Thou relations, he defamiliarizes run-of-the-mill social intercourse. Expressionless Nods: Distractibility  Chico fake-praises Harpo, who nods quickly, blankly. He nods without expression when he wants to italicize what the other (usually, Chico) says and when he wants to beef up the brother’s credibility by diminishing his own. Attention deficit disorder and horniness combine: distractible, Harpo looks away because there might be a girl on the horizon, and because he

28   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

can only pay attention for a few seconds before another mischievous episode enthralls him.  Ω  His “cute” willingness to ditch one object for another, rapidly, without qualm, makes him a fit role model for anyone wanting to prize lability, switch-hitting, instant metamorphosis—and for anyone impatient with pomposity, law, linearity, or group behavior. Of course, I’m idealizing Harpo, and making him more serious than he’d wish. Why not? I don’t plan to give up my idols, especially if they’re silent or dead and can’t contradict me.

Why Does Harpo Love to Scissor?  Harpo, with trusty scissors, snips loose ends from the boss’s hair, who remains unconscious of plunder. Big question: why does Harpo love to scissor? Might as well ask: Why do I love writing and interpreting? I’m driven to mess around with the fringes of others, to castrate them lightly: dolce castration, snip snip to propriety’s tassels. Scissoring, Harpo sweetens castration, makes it nonlethal, nontraumatic. The fraught word castration flamboyantly dramatizes the stakes of Being. I can’t abandon the sexiness of symbolic castration, the term’s effectiveness as shorthand for first loss, for the hunger to invade and destroy, for a finicky, scissoring approach to borders. By taking castration seriously as aesthetic and psychological category, we acknowledge the levity of possessions, their drive to ditch location. Harpo dramatizes the wish to be a tailor, or artist, to “make nice” the edges of his dispossession. Prayer as Shame  The boss proclaims disappointment in Harpo and Chico. Like drooping buds, in tandem, the heads of the losers sink: they dwell at the intersection of prayer, bashfulness, and shame.  Ω  Harpo’s abasement is more convincing—perhaps because of his foolish wind up hat and his mismanaged tie, or because he savors downfall’s speedy arrival. Harpo might enjoy any emotion, as long as it strikes and departs quickly. (Are the brothers ashamed of being short?)

Duck Soup   |    29

“I entrusted you with a mission of great importance—and you failed,” says the boss. When he says mission of great importance, the brothers’ heads rise—mechanical tropism, lifted ego, Mother loves us again. At the words you failed, down again go their heads. And at the word however (“However, I’m going to give you one last chance”) their heads rise, like a penis snapping to attention. Infinite reappeasement of the Jews! I recognize the chill of exile, and the relief (I can’t call it joy) when disapproval abates. I’ll hover on this masochistic edge between being shunned and being embraced, to enjoy the temperature mélange—like sunbathing after plunging in the sea. Mixing a cocktail of shame and relief, Harpo lingers, stunned by conjugation, on the threshold.

Cutting for Cutting’s Sake  The boss (played by Louis Calhern, who later appeared in Elizabeth Taylor’s Rhapsody and Grace Kelly’s High Society) bends down, sticking his butt in the air. Harpo, a tramp, stands behind him— as, on a subway, my hips and a stranger’s butt accidentally touch. Harpo takes scissors to male authority’s large, flat, flabby ass, facing upward like a serving tray. With gusto, our little mischief-maker from East 93rd Street leans into the task; oversized scissors in hand, the chimney sweep performs a castration mission on the elders. He gathers the boss’s jacket-tails like a pigtail, and snips them off with scissors that have grown larger since their last use. Harpo writes with scissors; he marks territory by cutting off a piece, as if he were claiming all of Italy by excerpting its Calabrian boot.  µ  Don’t ignore the provocation of Authority’s pin-striped butt, thrust backward, and Harpo’s fool-offense of dethroning the king, not because Harpo desires Authority’s rear end but because he resourcefully exploits every stray moment. In this tableau of defacement, we prize Harpo’s intrepidity, not the sharp scissors or the obscene butt; we prize his shameless and full-bodied willingness to throw himself into the anarchic task, without fear of retribution—like the time I threw a water balloon in my seventh-grade math teacher’s open window. I considered him a “fag,” and courted him, covertly, through a balloon’s illegible, wet graffiti. Harpo and I may not qualify as political revolutionaries, but we seek the thrill of demotion: cutting for cutting’s sake.

30   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

Bingo-Eyes Moving Left and Right  Who slugged Harpo? Batty bingo-eyes oscillate; tongue protrudes. Lacking gravity, he stumbles behind Chico’s peanut-vending cart and, like an anhedonic somnambulist staring at death’s bull’s-eye, Harpo pockets handful after handful of nuts while his head wiggles. Peanuts are merely the pretext: he loves to steal. Before Chico can bite a hot dog, Harpo clips it with scissors and then awaits a verdict. Does he expect a spanking or a smile? He tucks the scissors back into his pants, beside his taxi-horn, which looks like a syringe, a bulb, a phallus, or an enema.  Ω  I’ll enlarge the list of comparisons. Harpo’s horn resembles a lekythos—a flask for storing the libations that survivors in Greek tragedies poured on thirsty graves. Harpo’s three bulbs (udders, enemas, phalli) constitute a belt-level castration chemistry set, a compensatory tool kit. Any future scapegoating will find him equipped. He’ll convert emergency into an occasion for pranksterism—for Nietzschean, philosophically motivated mischief. Harpo pushes outward his scapegoated status, the way an uncircumcised penis-head pokes through foreskin. Harpo, responsive to rebuke, scans the horizon, his shifty gaze teetering between Chico and the unseeable outside, off-camera: a restless desire to travel, beyond confining scenes, toward thought’s periphery. Scapegoating  When questioned by Chico, Harpo acts like a kid who hasn’t done homework, or who doesn’t understand the local dialect, or who lives in a country where open-mindedness is a crime: pivoting eyes brand him as guillotine-worthy. Without explanation or apology, without nodding yes or no, staring poker-faced and mirthless, Harpo hands his leg to Chico.  Ω  The leg trick, responding to an unanswerable question, fills the test’s blank with a nonsensical mark that neuters the Grand Inquisitor. Victim-seeking, Harpo strides—his piggy-bank mouth a platypus bill of mock-outrage—toward the other vendor (a dumb sop played by Edgar Kennedy) and bumps into him. Kennedy sells lemonade. Kennedy will go down

Duck Soup   |    31

in history as “king of the slow burn.” I like the fact that his name is Kennedy. I like the fact that a funny Marx picks on a slow-burning Kennedy.

“Butt” as Category  Harpo unconditionally loves Chico but also quickly takes offense; at the first sign of disrespect, Harpo slides into fisticuffs, swinging his right arm, warming up for a slug, and then delivering a buttkick instead. His lower lip juts out, impersonating pique. Chico says, “Up the stairs this time, no downstairs” (don’t kick my ass): he acknowledges Harpo’s buttward transgression. I make a big deal out of the occasions when straight men acknowledge “butt” as category. Limp Shyster Hands  Harpo’s limp hands flamboyantly advertise indifference to standard opinions of how men should behave.  µ  Harpo’s hands, a shyster’s, refuse masculinity: he offers slapped knuckles, silenced fingers. And he flaunts these rebuffed tools: engines of reprisal. By hanging flogged hands out to dry, Harpo sends Kennedy a shame valentine. Yarmulke Peanut Cup  With ever-ready scissors, Harpo snips Kennedy’s pocket, creating a yarmulke-shaped cup for pilfered peanuts.  µ  The cap-cup also resembles a diaphragm or condom. In the man’s trousers Harpo finds a vagina, an opening, and snips it away to create a portable amphora. I will explain, in subsequent chapters, why “vagina” is an important conceptual part of Harpo’s armature; here, suffice it to say that Harpo creates a little yarmulke-shaped vagina because he is nondogmatic. Like Chaplin’s tramp, or a Pentateuchal exile, Harpo is adept at constructing tent-like enclosures in dire circumstances. Exchanging Hats: Water Sports  Kennedy’s and Harpo’s hats fall to the ground. Harpo watches him carefully pick up the wrong hat. Our hero engenders hat confusion because he wants the other toy, the forbidden pos-

32   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

session. (Hat exchange has queer pedigree: the Elizabeth Bishop poem “Exchanging Hats” features an “unfunny uncle” who tries on a lady’s hat.) Kennedy realizes that hats have been exchanged; Harpo nods briefly to propose restitution. But as he hands over the proper hat, Harpo drops it and looks tauntingly at his victim. I argue: humiliation is reversible. You think it goes in one fixed direction—from you to me—but I can flip its trajectory. We can trade humiliation, like baseball cards. Water sports begin. Harpo uses his horn as turkey-baster vacuum, to suck lemonade out of the open vat, and then tucks the engorged horn into his belt. Harpo suggestively leans into Kennedy, two groins dry-rubbing: pressure sends water spuming into Kennedy’s face. Harpo seems happy to escalate prankishness and to humiliate a Gentile. Kennedy, stumped, laughs, and Harpo catches on, mouth wide open in a rictus of hilarity, mockery disguised as comity. Laughter is an excuse to touch the enemy’s shoulder. Intimacy requires two steps. Step one: laugh with the other. Step two: touch the other. While Harpo laughs, Kennedy reverses the horn; he points its spigot downward and squeezes the bulb, which sends liquid flooding Harpo’s pants. Sudden emission stuns him, but he still touches Kennedy.  Ω  (The first time Harpo appeared in vaudeville, he wet his pants onstage. His mother had forced him to perform, to fill a gap in the fraternal act—the Nightingales, a singing group. Don’t forget stage fright’s primacy: Harpo began his career by pissing himself in public.) He moves away, whistling, from the shame puddle, and lifts his feet gingerly, to disavow mess. Faux urination brings out the piss-and-testicles innuendo of the rival carts: Kennedy sells lemonade, Chico sells nuts.

Look at My Holocaust!  Harpo sticks Kennedy’s hat in the glass case’s peanut-roasting fire. The fire, a holocaust, horrifies, though Harpo has reversed the atrocity vector: Jew persecutes Irishman, neighbor immigrant, hardscrabble guy trying to sell his way to security. Harpo taps Kennedy, whistles, and points to the flame: Look at my holocaust! The pointing thumb

Duck Soup   |    33

(hitchhiker’s gesture) expresses pride: see my achieved trickery.  µ  Also the thumb disperses humiliation, directs it elsewhere, toward the scapegoat. The formal name for pointing, in linguistics, is deixis. Children learn that pointing is rude, yet, like a teacher, I point to Harpo, himself a pointer. Harpo’s prankster nature relies on a mobile gaze. Briefly he looks toward the camera, away from hat and Kennedy: Harpo wants to ascertain that we witnessed the crime. At Kennedy’s fiery martyrdom, Harpo warms his hands, as the frame grows black.

I Like Saying “Castration”  Groucho, at his desk, writes with a long quill. Harpo’s horn, a codpiece, sticks out of his pants. Compare endowments: horn, pen.  µ  Which communicative machine is bigger? To equalize, Harpo scissors the feather and then smiles, as if blind to crime. Voiceless Harpo eagerly spreads castration around; he spills it onto others. He doesn’t consider castration a problem. Remember: I like saying “castration,” a useful critical toy. Harpo’s Tattoos  “Who are you?” asks Groucho. Harpo shows an arm tattooed with a self-portrait. (Jewish law forbids tattoos.) Groucho says he doesn’t go for modern art; he asks for an old master. Harpo, excited, shows the other arm’s tattoo—a woman in a bikini—and undulates the image. Groucho asks for her phone number: it’s tattooed on Harpo’s abdominals. (Tattooed numbers point to the Holocaust.)  µ  Harpo, flashing flesh, grins with unseemly width—proud of virtuosity, or pleased to comply. His gesture—lifting up his shirt—recalls my mother ducking into the bathroom with my father to discuss private disease worries. “Where do you live?” asks Groucho, and

34   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

Harpo responds by spreading open his shirt, as if for heart surgery, to show on his chest a fantasy home—a doghouse, domicile for the loyal and languageless. Dominating the screen, he looks directly at us. (Added treat: we see Groucho’s thinning hair.)  Ω  Harpo shows us his doghouse: come in! This sudden invitation—revealed stigmata—doesn’t embarrass us; instead, we note his mocking mastery of home-sweet-home values. Groucho miaows. In surreal puncture, a dog pokes its head out from Harpo’s painted chest. Kafka predicted Harpo’s literalist compliance. In the penal colony, Harpo is the drilled-on, human page—or else a stripper who offers his body as the customer’s sketchpad. Groucho wants to one-up Harpo: “Bet you don’t have a picture of my grandfather.” With an excited nod, Harpo thrusts off his overcoat and lifts up his shirt, as if ready to receive injection. Groucho reluctantly confronts Harpo’s exhibitionism—imminent “mooning.”  Ω  Perhaps the final tattoo—Grandpa’s image— was inscribed on Harpo’s buttocks. Genealogy goes back to the butt. He tries to flash it, though Groucho aborts the unveiling.

Harpo’s Exiting Salute, Its Melancholy Prowess  Harpo’s palm of farewell, as he hastily exits, may be a clown tradition, but it also alludes to the Führer’s salute, to Sicilian gestures, to kiss-offs, papal blessings, mysterious Christ-like manifestations, and to sign language. (The gesture, half good-bye, half fuck-you, combines vendetta-provoking rage and cheerful farewell.) Speechlessness is humiliating, a denigration that Harpo’s good cheer unwrites.  Ω  I’m haunted by his upraised hand, its generosity, its willingness to communicate—even if it expresses nothing personal or specific. Harpo’s exit anticipates Chaplin’s late film Limelight, a clown’s

Duck Soup   |    35

melancholy departure. Obsolescence is exile: Harpo, ashamed of untimeliness, hides his face. Immediately, Zeppo enters, half his hat missing. Harpo, exiting, scissored it. Deletion is his signature. He despoils not because he has found a use for fragments but because it suits him to deprive people of their endowments. Zeppo angrily throws down his fragmented hat, as if he were Gregor Samsa’s father, a patriarch disgusted by the buggy son, cowering and loafing in his fecal bed. Zeppo, assimilated, disowns Harpo’s ethnic freakishness.

Loafing as Laboring  A few moments later, Harpo metamorphoses into dedicated chauffeur. Groucho enters the carriage, secretly composed of two separate vehicles; Harpo drives away on the sidecar, a motorbike—as if unaware that he left Groucho behind. By ignoring the job’s purpose, Harpo enacts Michel de Certeau’s concept of la perruque (the wig)—a worker’s revolutionary technique of goofing off, stealing company time for private creative forays that have nothing to do with paid labor. Like a Solomonic surgeon splitting conjoined twins, Harpo divides hats, cars—to differentiate himself from the fraternal horde, to proclaim unlikeness. Arduous, to assemble a self so that a brother can recognize me, consider me legible: “That’s Pinky, the lazy one.” Staring at a Zone Half-Audience, Half-Nothingness  Harpo looks at Groucho and then at the camera. He should be paying full attention to Groucho: but Harpo needs to balance his bossy brother’s words with what can be gleaned only by staring blankly at a zone half-audience and halfnothingness.  µ  Harpo peers straight ahead, toward a hidden explanation. Attentiveness displaces its purported object: Harpo methodically looks elsewhere, a ghostly nonlocation. The Mom-Mouth  When the lemonade vendor reappears, Harpo points excitedly: his wide-open mouth resembles my mother’s in a 1959 photo. She knelt on the floor. Infant, I lay, stomach downward, on the bed, and smiled

36   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

enthusiastically, with implausible, thrilled width. She imitated my smile: I call it the “Mom-mouth.” Stretched-open lips compress eyes into excited slits, mirroring but misrepresenting. Again, Harpo produces the too-wide smile, comic Greek mask, Mommouth,  Ω  a mother’s face replicating an infant’s, a face of repetition and ruse and mimicry, a face not at one with underlying emotion— the mouth, open as if to bite an apple; the eyes, distorted, condensed by the mouth’s excessive distension. Keeping the mouth open in simulated joy might lead to jaw cramp. (Oral sex ache?)

Kristallnacht Preview  I must avoid the word then. The “then” of sequence. This happened, then that happened. The word then implies that history is a stepladder rather than a chronology-defying inundation. I’m not arguing for predestination, simply for inklings, foreshadowings that appear when we view earlier artifacts in hindsight. Harpo puts Kennedy’s straw boater in the flame vitrine. Kennedy tips over the cart, and Harpo stands like a victim on Kristallnacht beside his wrecked shop.  Ω  Harpo apprehends catastrophe, imploding around him; step-bystep causality gives way to maddening simultaneity. He might be silenced by the din of the too much—too many events, too many brothers. Jew Pollutes Holy Water  Pants rolled above knees, Harpo climbs onto Kennedy’s lemonade vat, jumps in, and stomps, as if bike-riding or grape-crushing. Please observe the sequence. (1) Seeking recognition, Harpo looks at us with wide-open Mom-mask of fixed, unmodulated enthusiasm.  Ω  He wants us—vaudeville audience, eyewitnesses, jury—to see his prank. Recognize my wickedness, cuteness, violence, spinning-in-place. Recognize my

Duck Soup   |    37

mania so that it can cease. (2) He beams at Kennedy’s misery.  µ  Harpo’s face remains Mom-frozen in parodic, heightened excitement. I call his face uncontainable because I can’t contain it in words and it can’t withstand its bottled-up pressure, and so the expression freezes in a stylized ideogram of “excitement.” The face “erects” itself, refuses to be calmed, divided, or divined. (3) Leg motion stops. Harpo’s smile diminishes. Kennedy bows his head in shame and distress, hand on bald pate, and Harpo splashes water (baptism?) on him: blasphemous Jew pollutes holy water. Kennedy’s Job-like sorrow accords recognition to Harpo, stops his frenzied motion and dampens his joy. (Suddenly I remember not finding sufficient acknowledgment in Prague that Kafka had lived there and that his sisters had died in concentration camps.) My accretive method might be madness.

II “Shushing” as Fraternal Glue: Disobedient Literalism  Harpo zealously absorbs the command, “Be quiet,” initiated by others, and then sends it back. You told me to shut up. Rebound: now I’ll tell you to shut up. “Shut up,” a familial structure, nestles him: he belongs to a cozy Cosa Nostra of “shushing.” As Harpo and Chico approach stalwart Margaret Dumont’s house, Harpo ostentatiously shushes the void. He imitates Chico, originator of the “Shush!” patrol. Noisily Harpo plucks his check, snaps his finger, and falls back into fake compliance. “Ring the bell,” says Chico. Harpo, smiling literalist, removes a belland-clapper from his pocket and athletically rings it: I’ve followed your commandment to the letter and thereby disobeyed its aim. Chico scolds him, and unsmiling Harpo reorients by touching his hat. When commanded “Push the button,” Harpo flirtatiously pushes a low button on Chico’s jacket—as if playing around with their shared omphalos. Can all four brothers be appreciated at the same time? Is every brother equally loved? The youngest child at Passover asks the question. Why can’t everyone ask? Cain wins; Abel loses. Don’t demean this issue by calling it sibling rivalry. Call it, instead, international relations.

38   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

The Lag  Harpo lags behind. He remains loyal to the gesture of a moment earlier. Tenacious, slow, he pledges allegiance to the passé. Shushing, Chico puts his fingers to his lips, a gesture that Harpo imitates.  Ω  The moment passes. Chico stops shushing, and moves on to the next idea, the next urgency—talking policy with sexy Vera Marcal (actress Raquel Torres, born in Mexico, and star of The Sea Bat and So This Is Africa). Harpo, however, clings to the earlier gesture; refusing progress, he presses a finger to his lips—an instant after Chico stopped. Pleasurable palpation is the finger’s goal. Harpo remains attached to a gesture he’d performed at first merely as obedience.  Ω  Harpo’s slowness indicates morality. I wish to assert the ethical upstandingness of Harpo’s loyalty to the bit of stage business that Chico has bequeathed him but has now abandoned. Finger against lips is Chico’s gift, the inheritance of two seconds ago. Chico converses with a cover girl, while Harpo, incapable of conversation, must maintain involvement, instead, with his finger. Willing Executioners  While Chico tells him to stay put, Harpo’s eyes glaze, a somnambulist’s, hands held outward, bottom lip drooping. I’m in a trance.  Ω  Passive, I’ll execute orders. (Germany’s willing executioners?) Punished for noisemaking, Harpo returns to silent immobility. I find his enchainment “cute,” but I also find it frightening. I recognize the sensation of putting the soul in the ice compartment, of pushing the pause button on consciousness, of choosing abeyance: I decide to freeze, momentarily. And I freeze this still, from a moving picture: I freeze this instant of Harpo freezing, because I want to affirm my belief in nothingness’s wish to trammel me. Chico plays the role of nothingness. He acts as cudgel and storm cloud. Harpo is the deluged ground.

Duck Soup   |    39

Eureka versus Dumbfoundedness  Harpo snaps fingers to signify “Eureka!” (Inspiration: I’ll get dressed up as Groucho.) The difference between Harpo’s illuminated and stumped expressions exceeds your average Joe’s. Harpo either has a thought in his head, or he doesn’t; in his blank moments, he looks bovine. Circumstances thrust him into a physical act of concentration, like taking a dump or lifting a load. Harpo’s tenacity: I admire it. Or: I vicariously experience its sedation, its ice pack. I concentrate on Harpo, and I concentrate on what it means to concentrate, and why effortful concentration strangely resembles dumbfoundedness or arrest. Walter Benjamin, ruminating on technology and spirit, valued concentration over distraction: distracted people fall prey to ideology, while concentrated people undergo tense absorption in art. Harpo’s Hyperactivity: My Humorlessness  Hyperkinetic, Harpo wiggles; he can’t sit still. Nervously he jiggles legs, arms, and fingers to avoid immobility. Harpo inhabits antithetical states—trance and watchfulness—but his stupor involves not depression but a held, jellied condition, like aspic, or like a mind attuned to minimalist music’s repetitions. Writing about Harpo, I press my right knee against the desk’s underside to intensify concentration on his stunned, overkinetic act. Literalness—treating comic content as serious—either misses the point of the Marx Brothers or discovers a contrary undertone: removing Harpo’s humor, we discover historical catastrophe, or psychological states of numbness that bring welcome anesthesia and that offer room for aesthetic reparation. The still image replaces laughter with horror. Without movement, only the humiliating predicament remains. Freud’s Call for Overinterpretation: Overnaming  In a footnote to a passage in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud asserts that every neurotic symptom not only permits overinterpretation but insists on it: “every neurotic symptom, even the dream, is capable of over-interpretation, indeed demands it.” A film’s details, too, cry out for overreading—a process akin to what Walter Benjamin, in a 1917 essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” calls “overnaming,” which he cites as “the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and . . . for all deliberate muteness.” I overname because I’m melancholy. But the muteness I overname—Harpo—is himself mel-

40   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

ancholy. We commit a cruelty against existence if we do not interpret it to death. Harpo’s problem is presence. He halfway solves it by sacrificing his voice. To complete the suicidal project, he needs to get rid of his body. Never forget the suicide near his act’s happy surface.

Smack of Attestation  I call it “attestation,” proof, demonstration, the moment of pointing to a newly perceived manifestation—as when a family retainer in Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor sings, “Eccola!” announcing that the madwoman, nightgown drenched with her murdered bridegroom’s blood, has entered, ready to sing the mad scene. The chorus falls silent, beholding the freak’s extremity. Harpo, pointing, smacks reality on its back like a rediscovered friend: you’re still here. To mark excitement, Harpo hits, twice, the scrap of paper in his hand: his smack of attestation announces (to no one) the satisfaction of having arrived at meaning. He needs to reward himself for small tasks accomplished: instead of cash or praise, he receives wordless noise, “smack smack” on paper. Abhorring Doxa  The third spin of the safe’s dial activates the music. The safe, secretly a radio, plays “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Harpo, covering his ears, finds the patriotic tune physically unbearable. This silent, violent pacifist declines to spout doxa. Better to avoid political statements than to make stupid ones, or to sing obedient anthems. He shushes the safe—a crying baby. The dial, when turned, disengages, and the box falls apart, a dismembered body that Harpo must now disown, as in a nightmare of hit-and-run castration. (About the concept “phallus,” I refuse to apologize. It keeps coming up, especially when I talk about dismemberment, disposal, disowning, disengaging, disapproval, disgust, detritus, demeanor, derailment, digression.) Efficient killer, Harpo hurls the safe’s carcass out the window and waves “aw, raspberries” hands to signal “good riddance.” Fleeing the Double  Harpo’s beatific smile—job well done!—fades when he sees Groucho, or a Groucho lookalike, descending the stairs. Harpo, scooting away, runs smack into a full-length mirror. Because this scene is

Duck Soup   |    41

famous, and because it involves Harpo pretending to be Groucho, I will not offer much commentary. I prefer when Harpo relaxes into being Harpo, untroubled by wisecracker emulation. Harpo, shattering the mirror, dismantles the soundtrack: the last noise we hear, before total silence ensues, is the mirror breaking, its music abstract, like Pierre Boulez’s Éclat, which sounds like ego-integrity breaking into furious slivers, or like a forgotten moment in one of Francis Poulenc’s beguiling, brief pieces for piano, a repertoire often dismissed as “salon music”: in Poulenc’s “Caprice Italien,” the phrase that derails me is marked “éclatant,” lightning-like, as if the sky suffered what my mother called a “thickening,” a phlegmy cough that breaks up chest congestion. Harpo hides from punishment by pretending to be Groucho’s reflection.  µ  Harpo wants to erase his own presence—but also to intensify it through doubling. Harpo contains a fold, like a creased page. Eager to find ambiguous indentations in matteness, I invaginate reality by making it not simple.

Beats: Harpophilia  I call them “beats”—isolable fragments of business. Tiny gestures. Winks, pauses, offerings. Slowly watching, I stop the DVD at each beat, so I can write down Harpo’s motions—as my parents documented my older brother’s infancy. One photo my mother captioned “First Solids,” a breakthrough I’m still celebrating. I’m slowly killing myself by dividing scenes into bits, just as Harpo reneged on existence by pretending to be Groucho’s reflection. (Harpo never fell into what Lacan named the “Symbolic”: speechlessness prevents the nosedive into linguistic, fathermarked life.) Harpophilia leads to gloom. Annotating, I’m buried alive with Harpo, the two of us motionless—the death-drive stillness of hypervigilant observation, of standing mutely near fast-talking Groucho. If Harpo spoke, what he would say might destroy Groucho. One brother’s silence reinforces the other brother’s unthreatened literacy and eloquence.

42   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

Cogitators, Jazzmen, Doctors  Have you ever played the game “Great Thinker” with your father—staring at him in the mirror and pretending, like him, to be a cogitator?  Ω  Some of us consider “thinking” a hair shirt; we relish logic’s stoppage. My father, in a Buick station wagon, told me, shortly after the Vietnam War, about physics and philosophy, their unheralded interpenetration. Facing each other, Groucho and Harpo shimmy, an off-color joust, their jazzy motions sped-up—escalation to a full-scale dance number, quoted from vaudeville. Their ability to parody each other’s fake joy reveals a disturbing overabundance of animal spirits, mustered for assimilation and aggressive camouflage. Hands raised in hallelujah pantomime verge on minstrelsy. Their white hospital scrubs are fit for Bedlam or Bellevue. Jewish doctors? Freaky twins photographed by Diane Arbus? Removal Game  As marching soldiers pass, Harpo rhythmically scissors off their plumes, one by one, and then conks the final man’s head with a mallet. Harpo’s attitude toward military conformity: snip off the plume’s paintbrushpigtail, but express neither joy nor vengefulness.  Ω  Be businesslike, an efficient craftsman, coldly scissoring. (Clip bellicose pubes with a barber’s sangfroid.) Harpo concentrates on a meaningless task—a compulsive removal game—to exempt himself from presence and to demilitarize onward-rushers. Fleeing the Diegesis  United, the Marxes play banjo. In one telltale moment, almost unnoticeable, Harpo’s Einstein eyes kindly flash toward the viewer: he nearly steps out of character to smile upon his creation and to bless the brotherly endeavor. I highlight this instant of Harpo’s eyes lifting beyond the “diegesis,” into communion with the viewer or himself, because the ability to rise above schtick (and to observe it) gives him an omniscient aura. Diegesis sounds poisonous, like “digitalis”; primal, like “Genesis”; and predestined,

Duck Soup   |    43

like “genetics.” I want to rescue Harpo from the diegesis, his captivity by the film’s restrictions—as if there were a place beyond the valley of the diegesis where we could huddle together and discuss impersonation’s onerousness.

Texture, Bestiality  In one twin bed, a woman lies alone. In the other bed, Harpo snuggles a horse. He chooses horse over woman; he prefers texture to conversation. Consider him a god of palpation, of fingers reading the braille of the tangible world—bedspread, tablecloth, overalls, work shirt, grass blade, wood grain. Harpo’s willingness to pursue bestiality—even if only as a joke—wins me over, and leads me to appoint him ambassador of a principle I hold dear: regression can be its own reward. Not always a reward: in Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, the surfer-angelic-blond Timothy Treadwell (who resembles Klaus Kinski) thinks he can be boyfriends with grizzly bears, who end up eating him alive. Zeppo’s Handsomeness as Resonant Adjacency  Axiom: male handsomeness, when in the neighborhood of male not-handsomeness, sets up vibrations. Handsomeness summons overtones in nearby pitches. Musical relationships, like familial ones, depend on subterranean sympathies— electricities that fire without conscious prompting. For example: Zeppo (the handsome, unfunny brother), standing near the others, provokes, in me, a series of pestering, irreverent thoughts: how does Zeppo’s handsomeness, like tannins in wine, change the Marxian bouquet? Are the brothers jealous of Zeppo’s good looks? Is Harpo trying to upstage Zeppo’s handsomeness rather than Groucho’s verbal ferocity? Must I insist that Harpo upstages? Maybe he is just trying to thumb a ride on the conjugal Ark, or squat in Sodom. Sheer Amazement as Path through Existence  In a close-up of Harpo aiming a gun, his tongue sticks out, and his bug eyes exceed rational purpose. He looks like a man falling asleep on the job, a man we adore for derelict behavior, for sliding. Can warfare be cute? A bullet, skidding by his hat, reverses it. Confused, he touches the cap to verify its presence.  µ  Eyes

44   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

rise, lower lip droops: by enacting shock, he puts down roots in the world. Harpo feeds us this piece of counsel: express amazement, and thereby lay claim to existence. I admire Harpo’s dumbness, his dazed passivity: I seek his advice. Sitting with my father in the bloated Buick station wagon, I received lessons on how to structure time.

Dumbfoundment as Fane  Keats, in “Ode to Psyche,” wants to build a “fane” (a temple or shrine) for Psyche, his goddess; and the word fane, which he rhymes with pain, cuts me to the quick. “Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind, / Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain .  .  .” Fane, the archaic, odd word, invokes a speechless locale, not visualizable, open only to the dreamer. Harpo’s dumbfoundment—zero mind, mouth agape—is my fane; and dumbfoundment is Harpo’s fane, too, the nook where he can escape the duties of the diegesis (warfare, bookkeeping, sociability, gamesmanship). In the word fane, utopian tendencies hide; Harpo is my fane, and I am his priest, temporarily. I love to bolster the cases of dubitable divinities. Escalation as Identity  Harpo enters the hideout house. “Send two more women,” says Groucho in his radio broadcast. Harpo puts up three fingers: send three. Harpo always escalates. Escalation, like lust for girls, makes him legible: and so, through pantomime, he will advertise himself as he who asks for mindless escalation. Shamelessly he buries a passive hand in his trousers while watching Zeppo’s activity. Must I prove that Harpo demonstrates masturbatory virtues, or that his sexuality is rudimentary? Shushing the Bomb  A bomb drops: Harpo shushes it. Battles and brothers are noises Harpo must stop. Someone, a few scenes ago, told Harpo to shut up. The command impressed him, and he keeps spilling it onto others. He shushes anything in his vicinity: muteness virally spreads. Shushing the bomb, Harpo stares forward, finger to lips. Marxian humor aims to avoid the emotional consequences of standing on extermination’s brink. Harpo occupies the vantage point of the archangel Michael in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Michael, conversing with Adam on a hill above history, predicts original sin’s consequences, as if the future were geographically surveyable. Omniscient, Harpo levitates above the sine and cosine

Duck Soup   |    45

undulations of history’s dialectical waltz: he keeps secrets too awful, too encompassing, for brothers or audiences to hear.

Harpo Makes “Thinking” Visible and Thus Eroticizable  Drawing lots, Chico loses. Harpo smiles and points: he understands, a split second before the others, that Chico will be “It.”  µ  Thinking, as a physiological process, is attractive: I can eroticize thinking, or isolate it as a “beat” or “blip” of duration. Thus Harpo’s visible pondering is “smarter” than Groucho’s rodomontade. We can see the gears of thought move in Harpo’s face and upraised hand: reasoning makes an impression on his features, and because pantomime renders cogitation conspicuous, I can attach myself to it with a quasi-sexual urgency. Intelligence, Dangerous, Must Be Locked Up  Saluting, scissors raised like a rifle, Harpo stumbles (pushed by brothers) into the ammunition closet. Inside, he throws a lit cigar (he doesn’t like its taste) onto a keg, which explodes into fireworks. Groucho misinterprets Harpo’s frightened banging on the locked door as enemy gunfire, so he says, “We’ll barricade the rear”—natch, Harpo invades from the rear, or else Groucho, anal-phobic, singles out the rear as the vulnerable zone. (Only after someone shoots Groucho’s ass does Harpo manage to exit the curio-cabinet of explosives.) Fireworks exploding in the locked closet are visual signs of Harpo’s pentup articulateness and hyperexcitement—intelligence detonating randomly in a locked void, mind self-sabotaging, its scattershot illuminations lacking aim or cause. “They shut me up in Prose,” Emily Dickinson declared; conventional society—the “They”—couldn’t guess that her mind was a ticking bomb. Harpo’s brothers, authoritarian, lock up Harpo’s bomb-inclinations, his powder-keg fancies. I don’t need to invoke suicide bombers to convey the seriousness, for Harpo, of caged Being, of mind-as-ammunition. Thinking, a horrifying process, resembles not an Elysian meditation but a bullet ricocheting in a locked closet.

46   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

Uriah Heep  Groucho’s head is stuck in a vase, on which Harpo paints mustache and eyebrows. Now the loudmouth undergoes an imprisonment that equals the mute’s ordeal in the detonating closet: each Marx must stay in his legibly labeled box. Harpo, satisfied with the painted urn, rubs hands together.  Ω  The gesture recalls unctuous Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield: Uriah, figure of the Jewish usurer, enjoys exponential economic accumulation, based not on real objects or real labor but on money, an abstraction. When Harpo rubs hands together in delight, he parodically circulates the Uriah Heep stereotype, but he also cites Lady Macbeth, the most famous hand washer in the history of Western Civ. Her motives for stain removal were many: Harpo might be masturbatory, but he is never murderous. The Covert Political Necessity of Claiming That Harpo Is Butt-Centered  Harpo’s hands push Margaret Dumont’s rear; and when she protests, he points to her butt, as if its amplitude had been the instigator. Why assert that Harpo—or his character—is butt-centered? Because thereby I vindicate him, associate him with pleasure and punishment (their necessary entwinement), and link him to forces that speech sequesters in lunacy’s domain. Asserting Harpo’s butt-centeredness returns me to a critical stance I once occupied, a theoretical position derived from theorist Guy Hocquenghem’s 1972 book Homosexual Desire, which proposed that we might escape repressive structures if we focus on the ass rather than the potentially procreative genitals. Courtesy of the anus, we can imagine, Marxist-style, a path away from family and state. I no longer live in that conceptual universe, but I admit affinity with the punished, and with the bodily site where punishment primally occurs: the rear. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her essay “A Poem Is Being Written,” proposed a connection between poetry’s line breaks and the masochistic pleasure of being spanked. Pointing out cinematic butt, I make a formalist—not merely a prurient—gesture. When I mention butt, I’m behaving as a critic, an abstract thinker, an aesthetic assessor.

Duck Soup   |    47

Percussiveness as Pleasure  As each soldier enters the Marxian hideaway, Harpo lifts the entrant’s helmet and bops his skull with a brick, as, earlier, he’d methodically scissored off their upright plumes. What pleasure the repeated bop—a xylophone’s—gives him! Harpo softens existence’s percussiveness—the click, bang, thud, or thwack of impact that self makes when it butts against world. (Must self and world be antithetical?) Attack turns into smile; skull-and-bones turns into pillow. Harpo neutralizes Being’s violence—the trauma of encounter between will and world. (I like playing pick-up-sticks on Schopenhauer’s grave.) I glorify and dilate Harpo’s percussiveness by dividing his performances into beats; and yet, he also represents an escape from the hammerstroke of consciousness. In eighth grade I wrote a short story about a starstruck kid who attempted suicide. I found its title, “Tomorrow’s Sun May Never Rise,” in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which my father, alert to borrowing’s inevitability, suggested that I consult. My mother, whose specialty was language, proofread the story. After my teacher returned it with a good mark, I foolishly gave my only copy to a curious classmate, a girl who either lost or discarded the maudlin manuscript: failed transmission. Her last name, Germanic, sounded like “rum balls.” A few years later, she made out with my best friend; proud yet appalled, he told me about her aggressive tongue. I’m not sure how Harpo’s percussiveness enters this paragraph.

48   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

The Mad Mohel’s Goo-Goo Eyes of Monomaniacal Attunement

A Night at the Opera (1935)

Any other thinks, and then at once thinks something else. I cannot think something else, I think one thing all my life.  —fyodor dostoevsky, Demons

I Monomania: Tragedy Is Cute  Monotheistic, I stick to Harpo. My sentences bear a grudge against development: at one star, they statically stare. If Groucho, Chico, and Harpo are the Trinity, I ignore Father and Son, and put all my eggs in the Holy Ghost’s basket. Harpo, a tenor’s valet, puts on his boss’s costume (Madama Butterfly’s Captain Pinkerton) and salutes.  Ω  Harpo’s eyes bulge with pleasure at fitting into a category (“obedience”) while betraying it. Hand raised at military attention, he looks like JohnJohn saluting JFK’s coffin. We call such an image “cute” because it makes tragedy diminutive and comestible. Cuteness is an exempt island populated by kids, pets, and neuters. Indeed, I consider “cuteness” a philosophically resonant concept.  Ω  Kitty Carlisle comforts Harpo, who clutches himself. I refuse to demean this image by calling it corny or camp. Instead, I’ll call it cute, or catastrophic:

49

pathos hits the ecstatic spectator and folds consciousness, creating a complicated hinge. Harpo should be embarrassed to wear pajamas in Kitty’s presence. His vulgar shirt, popping out, matches his eyes. Call them speaking eyes, eyes that bring the other into existence, eyes that do not merely receive but that actively host the other. Kitty Carlisle Hart died in 2007; I’d hoped to interview her, but missed my chance.

Harpo and Chico Greet Each Other: Stylization of Encounter  By stylizing their reunion and breaking it down into steps, Harpo and Chico prolong the threshold of mutual greeting. The greeting begins with exaggeration. Harpo’s wide-open arms hail Chico and exaggerate encounter’s bliss. (No one tells him, “Down, dog. Don’t get so excited.”) We’ve seen them greet each other this way before. Their rapprochement obeys a fixed, inelastic structure. Harpo whistles and points when he sees Chico. By pointing, Harpo draws significance like a demiurge from a subterranean cave. After the hug, shame kicks in: Harpo prophylactically begins the shushing routine, finger over lips.  µ  Long ago, someone told Harpo to shut up. Afraid that Chico will say “shut up” again, Harpo shushes himself (selfmutilation, as if with a razor) in advance; and then, cheerful sprite, he forgets the self-silencing and restages the hug.  µ  Harpo’s rhythm: (1) hug, (2) shame-shushing, (3) hug, (4) shameshushing. Playing fort-da (reunion, separation, reunion), the boys make a sandwich of their greeting: two hugs contain a shameful filling. Fort-Da: The Desire to Be Conked Out  I repeatedly bring up fort-da: the scene, Freud’s concoction, of absence followed by presence. I know too well its

50   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

slap-slap back-and-forth, deprivation after gorging, disappointment after closeness. Fort-da. Gone, there. Har-po. Harpo bops his boss’s head with a mallet, knocking him out, and then revives him with smelling salts. Groucho says, “You feel sorry for what you’ve done, right?” Harpo nods repentance. When the boss reawakens, Harpo automatically conks him on the head again. (Being conked out is bliss.) Henri Bergson suggests that comedy depends on mechanical behavior; I see a connection between Harpo’s rote antics and the mechanical decor of Marcel Duchamp’s art, his Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or his spiraling-wheel film (Anemic Cinema). Surrealists drained feeling from sexuality by emphasizing its technological shapes, just as Harpo drains horror from violence through unthinking actions. His urge to wreak havoc is a harmless reflex, like yawning. It doesn’t matter which direction the amoral action proceeds; Harpo, a sluice, opens and closes with machinic will, like Nietzsche’s chthonic “spirit of music.”

Harpo as Kissing Machine  To call Harpo’s eroticism “machine-like” makes it seem intellectually acceptable, unsentimental: I don’t want you to think that Harpo is corny when he kisses Kitty and then kisses an old gent. I’d rather you think him mechanical. Harpo’s adhesiveness respects no categories (including gent versus dame). His impulse, programmed to continue, must exhaust itself through repetition, a rampage that climaxes when he kisses the captain.  Ω  No matter how many times Harpo releases tension, he still takes pleasure in repeating the infraction, the annunciatory nugget, be it a honk or a kiss. Harpo’s Persistent Sleepiness  Harpo hits the jackpot. We don’t know what the jackpot is—but we understand that he has the power to hit it. At this moment, his jackpot is narcolepsy, or an uncontrollable desire to drop dead. Gerard de Nerval’s Aurélia and André Breton’s Nadja—literary models for principled immersion in somnolence—lead me to claim Harpo’s drowsi-

A Night at the Opera   |    51

ness (or drowsiness in general) as omnipotence, the sleeper ruling an invisible domain. In the stateroom, Harpo stows away, snoozing in the luggage drawer. He finds the drawer comfortable, not cramping, as Moses enjoyed his bulrushes, or Jesus his manger’s cribbed containment—enclosures that belong to D. W. Winnicott’s category, the holding environment.  µ  Notice Harpo’s full, drooping hands, his thick fingers, his happiness at being upheld by Chico and Allan Jones (who fills Zeppo’s straight-man shoes and will star the following year with Irene Dunne in Show Boat). I remember pretending to sleep, on a boat in choppy Monterey Bay, while my Norwegian friend fished with his father. After throwing up over the rail, I feigned coma to avoid manly bait-and-tackle.

The Fantasy of Being Put to Sleep by a Handsome Fruitcake Tenor  Groucho calls Harpo a “bag of Jell-O.” Allan, the handsome tenor, tucks the bag of Jell-O into bed—a covertly epiphanic moment. Imagine Allan—or any other singer too lovely to qualify for conventional manhood—putting you to bed, or hiding you in a drawer. He fulfills my Gordon MacRae fantasy; Nelson Eddy will serve in a pinch. My student, an Allan Jones type, appearing in a college production of The Mikado, sang “A Wand'ring Minstrel I”: though I was the professor, I became the bag of Jell-O, tucked away in the drawer, because the soapily attractive student occupied a position (a category) of songful naïveté. I could greet the naïveté as if I were a foreigner saluting someone else’s native land. The student’s high voice made me the object-in-the-drawer, the tucked-away thing. John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and Grease also inspires my wish to be the ironed, folded object. Cute male songfulness sends me into a parallel category: sleep. Overordering Eggs  In the hallway Groucho orders food from the steward. Formulaically, repeatedly, Chico, from the stateroom, adds his own request, “And two hard-boiled eggs”; piggybacking, Harpo honks his horn. In response to Harpo’s request, Groucho increases the order: “Make that

52   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

three hard-boiled eggs.” Harpo expresses his greedy, automatic wish for food mechanically, via horn honks. Harpo, potentate, King Tut, laid out in state, honks from the dead: I want a hard-boiled egg. His needs don’t change. They can only be repeated, amplified. Does Harpo want an egg? Or does he simply want his sleeping presence to be noticed? Harpo’s infantile incomprehensibility sends forth an imperial demand. I don’t insist on his demand’s moral rectitude. I don’t celebrate its size. I celebrate its clear enunciation—and the paradoxical contrast between Harpo’s physical immobility (supposedly asleep) and his audible need (I want eggs). I praise not egotism but the unanswered. Harpo overorders eggs. I come from a family of overorderers. My mother’s mother crammed her refrigerator with food “it would be a crime not to eat.” Harpo’s reiterated demand for eggs remembers his mother Minnie’s multiple production of brothers.

Search for Stasis  Harpo leans, still asleep, against the maid making the bed—not merely because he wants her body, but because he wants a surface, any surface.  Ω  The maid—her white uniform nurse-like—tries to pry him off. She doesn’t consider him human. What’s this burden—leech or lech—on my back? Groucho interprets Harpo’s action—wrestling the maid— as groping. I interpret Harpo’s gesture as a search for stasis—a planet wanting to gird itself in the solar system’s loins. Like a corpse in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry or Rope, Harpo’s deadness encumbers and enlivens the plot. How can we deal with his stinking weight? Typological Interpretation  If this image were a painting, we might call it a “deposition”— a mannerist depiction of Christ, or Harpo, brought down from the cross.  Ω  I like to compare secular figures to Christ, who offers a metaphor for exemplariness itself. Leaning against a fat engineer, Harpo acts the part of Christ. Compositionally, as if in Caravaggio’s

A Night at the Opera   |    53

Deposition from the Cross, the diagonal object—Harpo—creates drama and swirl. Supported, he rides atop others; sleepy, he seems a dead body, the storm’s eye, the slash that cuts across the tumult and corrects it. Harpo’s dumb presence reminds me of the donkey in Robert Bresson’s film Au hasard Balthazar: Harpo, too, will be kicked, abandoned to die on a hillside. I have typological tendencies. (Typological criticism seeks analogues in the Old Testament for events in the New.) I take Harpo as type for something else. In a dream last night I played Harpo on a TV show, my costume a hodgepodge of available scraps. I lingered, waiting to hear my Harpo impersonation’s ripple effect on dowager consciousness: a grande dame lived in this liminal TV studio, a Mission-style mansion overlooking not one river but two . . .

Hypnotized by Maternal Death: Pointing Finger  Emerging from the trunk, Harpo looks dazed, hypnotized by claustrophobic maternal presence, or paralyzed by maternal death. Bug eyes show him to be a boy just this instant being born and already looking dead. He pretends to consider his emergence from this trunk (Judy Garland’s “Born in a Trunk”?) a joyous nativity, but he looks like Dracula rising from a coffin in the ship’s belly. Acolyte, Harpo holds his pilgrim staff as Parsifal held the eventually salvific spear. Harpo, like a pointing Christ, outstretches his finger.  µ  Chico, gabbing, has turned his back. Harpo gestures, with his finger, a second time, a gesture that Chico disregards, for he has the hubris of the speaking, the vocally agile, while Harpo has the sanctified innocence of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, or any role model whose naïveté combines intensity and ignorance. Head-Wiggle  Harpo’s head-bobbing—“head-wiggle,” I’ll call it—is not my favorite of his mannerisms: he bobs his head to feign indifference. I’d prefer him to acknowledge external impingements: when his head wiggles, he lowers himself to drum-major status, an extra in the “Before the Parade Passes By” number from Hello, Dolly!—a canned rendering of holiday spirit

54   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

and public ceremony. No one admires Harpo’s head-wiggle, though it provides immunity from pogrom.

Dumbfounded by Nourishment’s Phantom Prospect: Harpo as Muselmann, as Dirt  Suppertime for Harpo. The Italian chef hands him a plate. Dumbfounded, mouth agape, Harpo gazes blankly at the paralyzing offer. No one has handed him a plate before. Oliver Twist, too, wanted more. Finally, more arrives. Toward pleasure’s imminence Harpo maintains a deadened stance.  Ω  Pleasure is an event he can’t quite think. In line, receiving sauce, shocked Harpo recalls the figure in Auschwitz (as described by Primo Levi and other survivors) known as the Muselmann, the captive who has given up the will to live. Liberation’s bounty hasn’t broken through to Harpo, a Bedlamite who responds to plenitude’s arrival with a frozen double-take; he stares at the plate, at the man serving him, and then back at the plate. He tries to establish consequentiality, cause-effect relations: he tries to understand how the donor has a relation to the donated object. Harpo impersonates death-in-life: the face of the Muselmann, the vanquished. Harpo, emblem of the prankster, the giddy fool, who says “yes” to life, also embodies the “no.” Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, writes: “Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings—really, more weights than human beings—nothing does us as much good as a fool’s cap.” Harpo dangles within our reach a liberating fool’s cap—the opportunity to be permanently foolish. And yet he reminds us, when his stare goes dead, of the direness of becoming weight (stone, dirt) rather than human being. Paradoxically, the prospect of nourishment—of gratuitously offered food, heaped high on his plate—prompts Harpo’s free fall into Muselmann deadness. Rubbing  Obsessive thoroughness: Harpo wipes his plate clean with a heel of bread. He rubs the bread to death; he rubs past the point of no return. Once a motion starts, comic mechanicity takes over: the rubbing machine

A Night at the Opera   |    55

has its own logic. Wishful dreamers rub; Aladdin rubs the lamp to produce a genie. Continuous pressure, however, deadens pleasure. You need to alternate rubbing with not-rubbing. Harpo rubs and rubs until he kills the grain. So does the reiterating interpreter. Interpretation rubs without cessation. With persistent pressure, I rub Harpo to insist: he exists. Harpo bounces up and down on his seat as he plays the harp. Butt up, butt down. He devotes himself to repeated actions—to impress on others that he is a hard worker—but also to give himself the pleasure of repeated thwacking and rubbing. I feel Jewish when I praise hard work. I hope that my labor—gilding Harpo—isn’t pointless drudgery, like the scholarship of George Eliot’s Casaubon, compiler of the impossible key to all mythologies. Of my great-grandfather, Isaac Wolf Orgel, dead long before my birth, I know almost nothing, except that he translated (a fact I repeat) the first five books of the Torah into Yiddish—a study book published on Eldridge Street, New York City’s Lower East Side, in 1916, when Harpo was twentyeight years old. Through repeated, incremental acts of attentiveness, Harpo rubbed and polished his persona, a solidity he submitted to additive shinings. Do spectators believe that fools have complex inner lives, or do dramatic heroes and heroines hold the monopoly on emotional depth? Pamina, in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, profoundly suffers, but Papageno, like Harpo, merely pipes. Am I a piper or a sufferer? I dreamt I was a yogi, hiking barefoot through marshy and Germanic-sublime terrain reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich paintings: companions disappeared, but clouds compensated.

Humiliation: Dividing Harpo into Edible Bits  Seeking permission-to-exist, Harpo spins the piano stool—a self-spanking machine—and lifts his butt: the stool meets it.  µ  He swerves eyes to see kids loving his vaudevillian butt-trick. The crowd humiliates the clown, who retaliates by dragging spectators into his ass. Soon, he changes to a soigné mode, spits on his fingers, and rubs them together, ready to roll dice; he looks rakish, like a bombshell’s husband— Lana Turner’s Artie Shaw, or Marilyn Mon-

56   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

roe’s Joe DiMaggio. The kids around him form a C, an inlet, an Amalfi Coast, a half-moon enclosure. The keyboard lid falls on Harpo’s hand. While he sucks his sore fingers, I note the welldeveloped forearm muscle, an edible lump. Ω  (Cannibalistic fantasy: I imagine a link between humans and poultry.) The kids, laughing, neuter him with mockery, yet humiliation resexualizes him as the abject. Because humiliation baptizes Harpo anew, he invites shameful situations, which bring secret rewards, like the shivering glow of glass flowers in Harvard’s Museum of Natural History, flowers I’ve never visited, tourist-treasures that symbolize useless artistry. A former flame who praised them called me “Moose,” a nickname I pretended to consider a compliment. Harpo’s hand, a washrag, wipes the keys. The kids laugh at his loose hand, suspended from a limp wrist. I can turn my wounded state into comic material, into framed “business.” A comic “bit” is a repeatable morsel of laughable self-presentation. I divide Harpo back into the bits that he produced in order to exist.

Mentally Incompetent Woman in the Corner of Harpo’s Instrument  Ω  Is she mentally challenged, or simply toothless, old, and indigent? She looks uncultivated. Not a Carnegie Hall gal. An idiot worships an idiot: two versions of pastoral. She lacks teeth; he lacks words. You’d only notice her if you stopped the film to isolate this image and to look beyond Harpo’s transcendentally upward gaze and lumpen proletariat arm. (Or else consider his arm a cultivated musician’s, like the arm of Arnold Schoenberg, who played tennis in Hollywood with Harpo.) Harpo, gazing upward, might be studying the moon, or searching for his muse. The toothless woman in the corner undercuts his lofty aims. I need an idiot in the corner of my own canvas, to convey that I’m a simpleton, not a man of ideas.

A Night at the Opera   |    57

Sudden, Fetishistic Appearance of Anna Moffo behind Harp Strings  A moment later, when Harpo starts to play, the simpleton hermaphrodite disappears. Now, through harp strings, we see a dreamboat ingénue who reminds me of my favorite soprano, the late Anna Moffo—dimples, pale eagerness, dark hair, the coloration of Nastasya in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.  µ  That concatenation (midnight hair, blanched skin, raving eyes) warns us that nearby, in the ballroom, in the next paragraph, we will see doomed affections and a susceptibility to a fevered, socially irresponsible rampage of mental impressions. When we pay monomaniacal attention to one star, we open the door to adjacent fetishes. Focusing on Harpo, I’m ambushed by the soprano doppelgänger, dimpled and affettuoso, behind the harp-string scrim.

II Bug Eyes of Ecstasy  As Harpo plays, suddenly he goes bug-eyed. (Is this effect chosen or unconscious?) Eyes grow italicized—a night-driving car’s high beams. Don’t ask why his eyes pop out. Instead, ask why it gives me pleasure to notice them popping out. I’ll keep my eyes fixed and bug-like, to shield against trance’s termination. When his eyes go buggy, I have more chance of being seen by him. I, as Harpo, have more chance of seeing, recording, getting credit for being visionary and demon-possessed. Eye-shine signifies the fetish, at least according to Freud, who plays with the word Glanz—shine—when writing about a nose. Uncanniness concentrates in shiny places. Trace of Matrilineage’s Stolidity in Harpo’s Face  Harpo’s face reveals matrilineage: in his cheeks I detect the doughy contentment of a face I’ve only seen in photos—my father’s mother, Ilse Gutfeld, good field, from Berlin. I was told that her father owned a “candy manufactory.” Strange word: manufactory. Lost vocations, vanished taxonomies of labor: Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929, the year after my father’s birth, mentions obsolete, small professions (Apollo Linen Rent-

58   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

ing Agency, Feitel’s Grain Dealer, Adler’s Wet-Wash Service). In Harpo’s face I find the wet-washer’s willingness to be inanimate. My father’s face went dead when I watched him watching my mother; his face froze when I complained.

Is There Laughter in the Unconscious?  My method: remove comedy from images, and see what remains. What do Harpo’s scenes look like if we confront the material coldheartedly? Is there laughter in the unconscious? My hypothesis: it is possible, whether man or woman, to feel lighthearted about the state of being castrated. By castrated, I mean: deprived of viability. Deprived of one’s joy, one’s toy. It is possible to be lighthearted about the little death that castration represents, and to treat disenfranchisement as comedy. (If I continue to use the word castration, I might get in trouble.) Chico throws Harpo’s comb-harmonica out the porthole, which Harpo opens, ready to jump.  Ω  Happy man, halfway out the birthhole, experiences autonativity: giddily Harpo emerges from the ship’s orifice to refind his puny, beggared instrument. The Number Three Is Uncanny  Harpo lands in the cabin of three sleeping men—Jews, explorers, rabbis, with Pharaoh Hatshepsut beards. As in a fairy tale, where triads reign, Harpo confronts three brothers asleep in one grave-bed: these strangers might be communists, satisfied with homogeneity, individuality erased. Wrong room? He has actually landed in the right room, the room that will explain fraternity. In close-up, Harpo, shocked, greets an apparition already present in his unconscious: three brothers, devoured by sleep and sameness. The cutting game rebegins. Harpo lifts one man’s beard: a puzzling butterfly flies out, prompting Harpo to snap scissors midair. He’ll settle for any object—he remains loyal to the scissors, not to their prey.  Ω  Harpo wants to scissor the Angel of Death, the soul, the special effect, the fourth brother, embodied in a

A Night at the Opera   |    59

butterfly, whose flight reminds us that Harpo himself is flighty, not tethered.

Nods  When Chico speaks, Harpo nods, movements minimized, hands at his side: I agree with my brother. Strict rules hold me in place. I won’t budge. I enjoy bondage’s compos mentis. Cuteness saves Harpo from execution. Lacking judgment, I am your corroboration machine. Nods will accrue interest. Instants of emptied-out agreeability, of echo, will consolidate into ingot. I achieve transcendence sequentially, through a lifetime of nodding. When the emcee invites Harpo to speak, he shakes his head no; delaying, he drinks glass after glass of water, which dribbles down his chin and dissolves his fake beard— an image that Roland Barthes uses to describe identity’s unclassifiability. To avoid speaking, Harpo accepts the bearable humiliation of wetting himself. Harpo as Mad Mohel  The sticky beard travels among men. Now Harpo has it. But he passes it to a dignitary by hugging and kissing him. If you raze a man’s authority—with scissors or scapegoating—you steal his beard. The beard is the hot potato that no one wants. Take my false beard, my Jewish stain. Take my wife. Fact: borscht-belt headliner Henny Youngman married into my maternal grandmother’s family. Kinship binds me to funny Jewry. So many circumcision plots! Snip, snip: I write you, young Jewish boy, into your historic identity. Harpo is a mohel gone mad. Sancho Panza  I won’t abandon objects whose tenderness consists in their tendency to disappear. I remain loyal to Harpo, as Harpo remains loyal to Chico, as Sancho Panza sticks to Don Quixote. Sancho Panza says, “If I were a clever man, I would have left my master days ago. But this is my fate and this is my misfortune; I can’t help it; I have to follow him.” Sancho Panza can only think one thing; he can’t think something else. Loyal, he succumbs to monomania, to foolhardy single-mindedness. Girlie Tricks: Snack Break as Caesura  Breakfast hijinks: Harpo turns a pancake into a powder puff, a sugar jar into a makeup compact.  Ω  He’ll use drag to horrify his brothers. (Face powder resembles shaving cream, or whiteface.) Seeking lip rouge, he dips pinkie in ketchup and observes his reflection in a saucer’s mirror. Transforming a cruet into a perfume

60   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

bottle, he dabs behind his ears. He blows up his glove, a balloon-udder, and, impersonating the maternal fount, pumps milk into brotherly coffee. He feeds others, but mostly himself. As, in poetry, one inserts a pause, or a caesura, in the middle of a line, so Harpo inserts a snack break in the middle of a scene: while moving beds between rooms to gaslight a policeman, Harpo fixes himself a quick pancake sandwich.

Three versus Four: Harpo’s Wandering Eye  Harpo, Allan, Chico, and Groucho crowd onto a park bench. Harpo looks maximally melancholy. Four won’t fit on the bench. Abstract question: what is the difference between three and four, and how does this difference influence my emotions? Harpo’s eyes, digressive, stare off to the side, toward melancholy itself.  Ω  I like to reproduce images that show Harpo thinking, standing separate from adults whose conversation leaves him out. Note his meditative, calm remoteness from the gang. Note his staff: only Harpo carries a prop. His eyes, looking away, posit elsewhere as a superior though inaccessible location. Inattentiveness, not a pathology or a flaw, signals separation—chosen?—from socialized screenmates. Drifting toward uncommunicativeness, he stares into the sliver, the hallucinated dimension, parallel to the conventional universe. When a person gives up words, what replaces them? Imaginary comforts: Harpo must tether himself to a community of vibrations, aromas, and textures. Unpleasant isolation he must refigure as salutary abstraction or ethereal dispensation, like a field of forget-me-nots. He asserts the hallucinated as his cohort; he stares at nothingness and wills it into being. Keeping busy with phantasms, he angelically guards Chico. Hence the pastoral rod. Harpo’s Parsifal staff will ensure resurrection.

A Night at the Opera   |    61

Divergence for Divergence’s Sake  Harpo turns around to see an offscreen apparition.  µ  We don’t know what distracts him. All we see is his divergence, the bittersweet pleasure of divided consciousness. With kidnapped gaze, Harpo pledges allegiance to the something else: “I don’t want this. I want that.” I value monomania—always thinking the same thing—but I respect Harpo’s entropic, diversionary tendency to drift toward the invisible. The Melancholy of Being Caught in the Hallucinated Sliver  By sliver I mean: that transitional dimension between communicative reality (social intercourse with brothers) and solipsism, the privacy of being Nothing, No One. Harpo sometimes dwells happily in the integumentary border zone, where he is held by the nearby presence of brother or brothers (it hardly matters whether it is one brother or two; one is as hardy a “holding environment” as two), but where he is also not-held, aloof, at play, distracted, vanishing, drifting. In these transitional moments, Harpo experiences melancholy eddying. He occupies a topsoil of intermediateness: standing behind the gang, he is included and excluded. No one will talk to him. No one will give him a task. Unseen father, unrewarded mastermind, unfondled omniscience, he has a god’s or puppeteer’s responsibilities, without the worship.  µ  Note Harpo’s melancholy separation from the familial conspiracy’s inner circle. Note his blankly attentive stare toward dyspeptic Groucho. We can fully appreciate Harpo’s melancholy only if we isolate him from the group, and only if we freeze the unfolding film in a still. Harpo’s hypnotized stare contains panic; mere barometer, he attends more carefully to the outside event (Groucho’s threatened departure) than to his own mood. Ball Games  While the orchestra tunes, Harpo sneaks up and slips the score to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” inside the parts for Il Trovatore. No reason to be embarrassed about noticing anatomically resonant details: the Marx Brothers teach us why boys play ball games with each other. Think

62   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

of Little League (the horror of being forced to cooperate). Think of MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, partnerships, partner-snips. Snip, snip, the circumcision game. Mohel, c’est moi.

Wrist-Bend: Adaptability as Virtuosity  Harpo plays trombone with a violin bow. He brings the wrong stick to the wrong instrument.  Ω  He faces a stick problem, a commensurability quandary. Impossible tasks mesmerize Harpo’s fake-obedient eyes. He knows the incompatibility of bow and trombone. He knows that he doesn’t belong in this genre, or in a tux. I identify with the perpendicular angle his hand and forearm assume. Hinged wrist and hand, as if in sign alphabet, compose an L. Harpo contorts his body to fit into someone else’s lunatic system. The clown’s body— a puppet’s—proudly finds L-shaped perpendicularities of self-morphing obedience. And I admire Harpo’s pliability, his survival-of-the-fittest adaptability, adrenaline-jolted as a competing gymnast. (Turn your clown-body, through athletic virtuosity, into a symbol of the survival techniques a tribe needs. Pretend to take pleasure in accommodationism.) Static States Are Uncomfortable: Accelerate, Escalate, Intensify  Some of us pick fights, race cars, or dance. Some of us write. Some of us have as much sex as possible. Some of us stand apart from testosterone; melancholy, we observe its pliés. Using violin bow as sword, Harpo spars with the conductor’s baton. Cockfight: eager-faced Harpo wants to home in on an agon. Like sex, or any escalation: Harpo turns a static state into a process of increasing excitation—not because he has specific agendas (to play trombone, to destroy the opera house) but because he wants to accelerate. I overstate the case by saying “he wants.” Who knows what Harpo wants? We only see evidence of his momentum. The trombone’s greased slide plays loudly and irrelevantly, contra Verdi. Harpo intensifies for intensification’s sake. With chewing gum, he affixes sheet music to a fellow instrumentalist’s head. Harpo often chews gum, a pastime of repetition, of intensification. You don’t chew gum because you

A Night at the Opera   |    63

want gum. Who desires gum as a thing-in-itself? Gum is a pretext for persistent jaw-motion. When instrumentalists suddenly play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” Harpo smiles (surprised by his own trick, an unannounced switch between labor and leisure) and tosses a ball, with violin as baseball bat. Only after Chico has expressed approval (he compliments Harpo’s aim) can we retroactively surmise that Chico’s gladness was Harpo’s goal. Why bother pleasing Chico again and again? Like gum, to be chewed perpetually, the game of keeping someone’s approval in place is a lever—a sewing-machine pedal—that Harpo keeps pressing without experiencing release. If you crave perpetual intensification, you will not want to shut down the excitation process, even if your jaw hurts.

Bragging about Harpo  I brought my baby brother to school as my thirdgrade “show and tell” exhibit, and now I want to show off Harpo’s greatness, to watch your face as you notice his adorability and aptness. Always question the investments of the pointing finger. Harpo is my subject, but my subject is also attestation, demonstration, the wish to point out Harpo, to make you experience adulation. We were a family of show-offs. My older brother showed off the idiosyncrasies of great cellists; under his tutelage I listened to records of Zara Nelsova, Pierre Fournier, Janos Starker, and Gregor Piatigorsky. My big brother also showed off TWA; he bragged about its superiority to Pan Am. Harpo is my TWA. Fatty’s Magic Pants   The thuggish tenor whips Harpo’s butt. Harpo clasps it, mouth open in a pained O.  µ  (Harpo mimics pain but never seems to feel it: Bugs Bunny’s cartoon agony.) Harpo’s antics highlight the butt, always on the verge of getting spanked. I recall Fatty Arbuckle, a buttock-oriented fool, star of Fatty’s Magic Pants, an 8mm film I once owned. Minta Durfee, an actress less famous than Mabel Normand, co-starred. (Minta Durfee thus becomes someone to rescue, to idealize.) I liked Fatty’s pancake pallor, and the tendency of his pants to fall down. Over Christmas vacation, in 1967, I watched Fatty’s Magic Pants thirty times. I counted. I

64   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

wanted to show off my interest in Fatty’s fate. I wanted to prove the sacredness of Fatty’s Magic Pants. I could best prove its magnificence by watching it thirty times and by announcing to everyone that I had watched it thirty times—a feat I’m still announcing. Notice this progression: (1) Watch the film about a fat man whose pants fall down. (2) Watch it thirty times. (3) Brag about having watched it thirty times. I neutralize Fatty’s shame, but I also frame it: I enclose it in the container of accomplishment, of indefatigable viewing.

Amoral Intensification  A male dancer rips the cloak off a gypsy lass, and Harpo (amorally intensifying) tears off her skirt to reveal knickers. Flashback: in sixth grade I stood below a short-skirted classmate climbing a ladder, and I took a snapshot of her underwear. Earlier, we’d fought on the playground, and the teacher, breaking up our brawl, had criticized my unmanly battle-ploys: biting, kicking. Harpo, in his autobiography, explains why he quit school in the second grade: class bullies picked on him. He didn’t want to tell the teacher, and so he escaped out the classroom window and never returned. Harpo runs up and almost touches—not wishing to be singed—the dancer’s bare midriff. He’ll grab any unguarded sweet. Midriff might not arouse him. He might merely want to tickle it, to test its genuineness, to rid himself of a hovering contagion. Harpo routinely intensifies: he tears the skirt off one gypsy, and then another and another. Having found a good trick, why not repeat it, exhaust it? Thus, amorally intensifying rhythms of arousal—more, more, more— become metaphysical questions. Why do I want more? Why do I love the process of wanting more more than I want the “more” itself?

III The Pleasure of Seeing a Man Not Known for Sexiness Exhibit a Sudden Sexy Stigmata: Theoretical Digression on Scissors, Their Paradoxical Doubleness  I enjoy masculinity doubling itself, especially when it’s not very masculine to begin with. Example: Harpo has lost his socks. We see his sexy calves. He inserts himself between two half-unclad dancer bodies—male and

A Night at the Opera   |    65

female—and, framed by their limbs, as if by a scissor’s twin blades, he whistles and waves to the audience.  µ  Newly born, he emerges between the woman’s legs and approaches the male dancer’s naked chest. Harpo plunges into a triangle formed by two other bodies and desexualizes them. He lightens their appearance of athletic effort by indicating, playfully, “I’m here”—a silent insistence, directed at us. Scissors consist of two blades attached at midpoint. Scissors pose as One but signify Two. Scissors cause Solomonic separation (I cut thee in twain). Harpo epitomizes the One, but his weapon is a Twofer.

Harpo’s Cuteness as Incoherent Addendum: The Swinging Star’s Demand  Is it strange to call a glimpse of Harpo’s muscles an “incoherent addendum”? They flash by. They don’t contribute to the story. No one mentions them. But I imagine a mother noticing her child’s well-fed healthiness, his immunity to rheumatic fever or meningitis: I imagine a Jewish mother’s consciousness of the child as food, like edible Hansel and Gretel. Muscular calves (visible when Harpo climbs a rope) can’t be faked, can’t accommodate the wishes of others, can’t impersonate or pander. I see Harpo’s calves from his mother’s point of view. Harpo, like a monkey, swings in space, just as the tenor begins singing: the scene juxtaposes Verdi’s cultured melody with Harpo’s animal freedom, his lawless suspension. Harpo believes that the rope will hold him. Distortion: how big is this universe, this spacious field, in which Harpo madly swings? What is a swinger? Harpo performs, with his body, the musical leaps that the tenor performs onstage: a silent fool’s physical eruptions parrot operatic paroxysms. Harpo catapults toward us, as if into our arms. Thus, he makes a demand. The star, assaulting the audience, without warning, insists on being received. As compensation, the star—an ambience—provides a holding environment, a container, around the beset, impinged-upon beholder.

66   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

Harpo on the Lam: His Body Always Tells the Truth  Unfashionable, to claim that a body “tells the truth.” And yet Harpo’s body authentically defies society and family, the mad demands of the other, of conversation. Harpo scrambles for a foothold. The Phantom of the Opera knew this alienated, on-the-lam sensation, but Lon Chaney, unlike Harpo, didn’t wear cute bunched-up socks. Harmless fugitive Harpo might plummet to his death. Sorcery eases Harpo through the air; his animal migration, like Tarzan’s, depends on body weight and therefore can’t fib. Harpo’s body always tells its European, old-country truth: my body belongs here, even if you want to kick it out. The stubborn truth of the minority tribe? The truth of the maternal bone inside the flabby face of the son-turned-father? Again I remember my father’s mother’s features surviving in his face, as he stood in the kitchen or sat in his green Chevy or Jerusalem-artichoke-beige Rambler—the unreadable (stranger’s) face of the father, containing his mother’s trace. In Harpo’s flesh, I see that maternal truth, buried and articulate. I’ve been reading too much Lacan. I want to be punished, gently, for my intellectual sins, and shown the proper path—like the sentence meted out to Sancho Panza, who must endure countless lashings to exorcise the malign enchantment of Don Quixote’s nonexistent Dulcinea. Harpo’s Dulcinea is his mother—a wig-wearing figment floating on top of his own face, as Mrs. Warhola’s face seemed superimposed on top of Andy Warhol’s (a fact noticed by Hilton Als in his essay “Mother”). Eerily these men wear their mothers, like masks or housecoats. Harpo as Midrash: The “Rip” as Voice  Harpo, upside-down, makes his debut: on a rope, swinging, without logic, embarrassment, or noise, he annotates the operatic action, as Midrash comments on Hebrew scriptures. Swinging, Harpo (or his stunt double?) punctures a scenic flat. We hear the rip, which counts as one of Harpo’s noises. He needs racket. And we need it, too. When Harpo makes a sound, or causes an inanimate object (horn, scenery) to speak, he rips apart the assumption that the world around him is dead and unresponsive. His noise articulates refusal. (I won’t speak: I’ll squeak, rip, and honk.) Why do I make so much noise about rips? Drawn to destroyed property, torn-open language, I dreamt last night that I returned to New Haven and lent my flip-flops, ultracomfortable, to a woman who worked the cash register at a sleazy or all-purpose spiritual

A Night at the Opera   |    67

store, selling ruined trinkets that assisted one’s slow movement toward a nirvana beyond the whiplash of change and error.

Proof Shot: Harpo’s Economy of Surprise  Cinema, not only porn, depends on proof shots: the star exists. We won’t believe in Harpo’s verity without occasional shots that clearly aren’t faked—where his cuteness, or his curly preposterousness, or his energetic movements, or his disdain for work, or his sleepiness, or his selfishness, or his orality—where these character traits, lovable or fearsome, emerge without special effects. While performing high-wire flips, Harpo smiles and—surprised by a policeman swinging near—opens his mouth. Even amid circus virtuosities, he maintains his usual stance of amazement—a mannerism (acting surprised, gape-mouthed) that secures his floating self. In slow motion, this book investigates suddenness and surprise. Harpo Believes Any Sign: Credulity as Saintliness  Harpo walks through a scenic flat’s door and falls into space. He believes any door. He believes the invitation, the call, the greeting: though he rips sets, he will always take the sign literally, never suspecting its falseness. I can’t disavow the category of the saintly. “Cuteness” derives from saintliness. I advocate credulousness—trusting the void—trusting the rope to hold you aloft and swinging—trusting the “diegesis” not to crack, even if you try to shatter it—trusting the argument not to break apart, even if I stretch it into unrecognizable form. . . . If you don’t suspect that signs are false, then you trust words, even if you can’t speak them. You trust that words refer to things: you believe in language, even if you remain outside it, even if you are an idiot, or vulnerable to idiocy’s “cute” proof-shot. I see a photo in the adoption agency, the pound, and I decide, yes, I’ll take that idiot home with me. He seems genuine, though gape-mouthed. He won’t shatter, even if I ignore him. Harpo’s Vagina  This point may not be popular. It may not win me friends. But I must make it. Harpo, like most men, has a symbolic vagina, somewhere on his person. Harpo, a starry man, has many vaginas. One is his wig. Another is his silence. When Harpo falls through the opera scenery, he rips it with the scissors of his two legs. Right at his crotch, as if on a swing-set, he rides the

68   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

rip downward: like a descending zipper, he falls, splitting the scenic flat with his crotch, thereby creating a V-shaped seam, or an illusory, revocable vagina.  Ω  In the midst of the bravura aria “Di quella pira,” Harpo rips open the tenor’s status as central attraction, and receives the pleasure of wholesale cutting. Falling, Harpo cuts his own crotch: riding down a canvas must hurt the groin. The tenor, breaking concentration, turns around to see Harpo invaginate the set. Harpo will go to any lengths to capture male attention. In two-dimensional existence’s fabric, Harpo makes a seam, a disclosing fold. Possibilities flower. Reality, struck by Harpo’s scissor-body, opens up. If Harpo didn’t already have a vagina, I’d invent one for him.

Crossed Fingers: Pretzel Consciousness  As authorities gang up on Harpo, he crosses his fingers. Pretzel gyrations and contortions (compulsive inner ballets of cognition) ward off cops and pogroms: crossed fingers establish instant immunity. Pretzel consciousness: the self, folding its wings, tenses to simulate battle with the other, whether mother, father, or society. W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness” reflects this law of pretzel consciousness: keep two selves open at once. How can I find Harpo’s hounded status cute? Because he believes in the efficacy of crossed fingers. Someone once told him, “Cross your fingers, and no one can harm you.” Someone might have given him this advice on 93rd Street when he was growing up. It worked once, so he tried it again. Eventually the replayed ritual struck audiences as funny. He became known as the person who anachronistically maintained belief in outdated devices. Harpo’s Vagina Schism Equals the Tenor’s Performance of Masculine Emergency  Manrico, the tenor in Il Trovatore, must sing a treacherously exposed aria. The high C tests his operatic manhood but also breaks it open, exposes it as a hole. (Light pours into the shaft of the tenor’s maleness, as if into Rome’s Pantheon: letting yourself go vacant and empty is a valid, Ovidian way of being monumental.) This high note coincides with Harpo’s climb back upward along the rip. The tenor’s exhibitionistic display (“Look,

A Night at the Opera   |    69

ma, I’ve got a hole, a high note, a castrato-point”) coincides with Harpo’s body articulating, through an upward climb, the figurative vagina that his crotch carved into the scenic flat’s fantasy membrane. The tenor looks behind him at the schism, and so does Azucena, his gypsy Mom. They both look at Harpo audaciously climbing back up his own seam.

Hanging Is a Form of Song: Harpo as Pinup  Allan Jones begins singing the operatic tenor’s aria. Chico says, “That’s real singing,” though Allan may be lip-synching. Reaction shot: we see Harpo swing diagonally, in pinup pose, sultry, looking over his shoulder.  µ  This pose hazards Harpo as the tenor, the agent of “real singing.” The pleasure he takes in disrupting norms, in simply hanging, approaches song. Simply to hang: to suspend one’s body from backstage ropes: notice Harpo’s pendency, his belief (like flying Satan’s) that the Father, God, will catch him, and so he can float weightlessly into evil, without fear of falling into oblivion, because annihilation doesn’t yet exist. Harpo operates in a region of trust and confidence, like Satan at the end of book 2 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan at his best, a stunt pilot who is also a credulous Bottom, willing to trust emptiness (his Top) or vastness or what Milton calls “the emptier waste, resembling Air,” through which Lucifer “weighs his spread wings” and floats: the archangel “wafts,” without struggle. Consider Harpo as an infernal hero, his trust-in-the-void carrying a demonic undertow, a link to the fecal and foul realms of “emptier waste.” In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud discusses dreams of flying, which recapitulate childish joy in being suspended in air yet caught eventually by the uncle. Why does Freud insist that the uncle, rather than the father, plays flight games with the boy? The uncle queerly operates the arousal switch of fly-and-fall. Everyone knows, says Freud, with his strangely definitive (“look at my hole, Ma!”) tone of authority, everyone knows that sensation of being thrown up in the air by an uncle and then being caught—the safety of knowing that avuncular arms will recapture one’s falling body. Freud writes: “What uncle is there who has not made a child fly by rushing through the room with him, arms outstretched, or playing ‘falling’ by

70   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

bouncing the child on his knees and then suddenly stretching out his legs, or by lifting the child up high and then suddenly pretending to take away his support?” Harpo, by playing rope tricks, by hanging suspended, backstage, summons this imaginary uncle-who-will-catch-me. And I seem, in this book, to be falling, too, hurling myself downward into the abyss while hoping that beneath me there remains a trampoline, the net of Harpo, solid subject.

Harpo’s “Jelly” Nature  Arrested for wrecking the opera, Harpo turns to jelly: civil disobedience. He wiggles his loose head. Can’t get hold of Harpo, who fluently evades scapegoating. We can trace this fluidity to his jelly-like neck. Openness to experience makes him an ideal revolutionary, falling, like spongy protoplasm, into any party line. Writing—a physical act—tenses up the body, so I appreciate Harpo’s jelly state, his recumbency: he implies, even when standing at attention, that he secretly rests, leaning against someone invisible. That invisible friend, sometimes embodied as Chico, is the du, the familiar. Harpo’s Eyes Wander toward the Speaker: Attunement  Arrested by a policeman, Harpo looks lovingly and liquidly at him. Harpo’s trick: his eyes gravitate mechanically or neutrally (without premeditation) toward whoever acts or speaks in his vicinity—even a pogrom-instigator. In panoramic tour, Harpo looks at adjacent bodies and demonstrates flexibility, bending, open-mindedness—responsiveness as a mode of rebellion. I don’t claim that Harpo’s responsiveness has political efficacy, but it genially performs attunement, a happy-go-lucky readiness to receive or to be in synch with anything. His eyes, as if lip-reading, or mood-reading, or other-reading, surrender to every nearby dynamism. His attunement avoids expressing (except toward Chico) a particular loyalty or crush. Attunement can quickly change to suspicion and mock-rage: but first, Harpo’s eyes wander to the policeman and commit an act of passive, absolving discernment. The Nod: Agreeability, Panic, Just-in-Case  One of Harpo’s last gestures in the film: a nod. Someone else says, “And don’t forget, I get 10 percent, too,” and Harpo nods: underscoring appendix, underscoring agreeability, an insistence (Jewish, émigré?) on getting a fair share.

A Night at the Opera   |    71

Not a wholehearted nod. Just a vibration. Like a coiled spring tentatively activated. The nod is a test. Not signifying agreement. Just an attempt to see if the neck operates, if the decision apparatus functions. The nod, a jelly response, lacks the decisiveness of deixis, of pointing. The nod doesn’t demonstrate, convict (“I’m guilty, you’re guilty”), captivate, or commit. It refrains from dogma or categorization. Unlike the pointing finger, which always threatens to signify “I’m Jesus,” or “You’re Jesus,” or “You’re Judas” (pointing participates in Christian themes of salvation, judgment, and witnessing), Harpo’s nod—a minimal quiver, like a sleeping dog’s leg— merely announces that electricity, after a period of sad abeyance, once again flows through existence’s filaments.

The Invagination Campaign Continues  Competence, Harpo argues, is intrinsically laughable; it conceals a bottom layer of incompetence. With scissors, Harpo attacks adult assumptions of seamlessness and capability. He wages war against continuity—the arrogance of fabric that has the effrontery to claim uninterruptedness. Harpo forces others to leak—metaphorically to drool, dribble, and deliquesce. By ripping the back of impresario Gottlieb’s coat, Harpo encourages us to shout, inwardly: “Go ahead, Harpo. Sodomize authority. Ruin the boss from behind. Fleece him. Apportion or percentile him. Make 10 percent incursions into his sanity and security.” Finale: The Moment of Invagination Precedes Goo-Goo Eyes  When Gottlieb turns around and notices that Harpo has invaginated him, Harpo makes goo-goo eyes (pupils swerving upward) and embraces him in a parody of swoon, of infatuation—but also of the not-real: he uses love-gestures to avoid punishment for his subversive (backhanded, butt-handed) act of ripping Gottlieb’s coat.  µ  (Gottlieb is played by Siegfried Rumann, who fought in Germany’s army during World War I and also appeared in Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka.) Incredulous brothers watch flexible Harpo hug the enemy. Harpo’s hands, fat and comfy, don’t grasp Gottlieb’s angry coat, but seem to pluck it, like harp strings, or some pricey fabric a clown can’t openly molest.

72   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

While Harpo makes goo-goo eyes, we hear again Kitty and Allan onstage singing the Verdi melody (“Di te scordarmi”), though now we can’t see them. Harpo’s victory: he has achieved soundtrack, he has achieved “di te scordarmi”—with the conquered adversary. To achieve “di te scordarmi” is to reach a pinnacle of onstage heterosexual soprano-and-tenor bliss. Harpo wants to be noticed—a fact I’m nearly afraid to mention. Noticed for what? Noticed for summoning, in his silent body, the virtues of two singing individuals (man and woman); noticed for stealing other people’s characteristics; noticed for being a ham. Harpo-as-ham fakes amativeness. Fakery conceals his dangerous wish to lean on every nearby body—even a bully, even a German crook in a business suit. Harpo’s urge to lean, to depend, to fall asleep while standing upright, to recline, to loosen: this extreme responsiveness and attunement, carried almost to the point of promiscuity (I’ll touch anyone, in skirts or pants), has a valor and tenderness halfway between a whore’s and a teddy bear’s. I wouldn’t trust Harpo with nuclear secrets.

A Night at the Opera   |    73

Poppy Power; or, The Thick-Enough Art of Zombie Dumbfoundment

Animal Crackers (1930)

Every extremely shameful, immeasurably humiliating, mean, and, above all, ridiculous position I have happened to get into in my life has always aroused in me, along with boundless wrath, an unbelievable pleasure.  —fyodor dostoevsky, Demons

I Why Dreams Must Be Part of Serious Thinking  I dreamt that Barbra Streisand, whose Jewfro in A Star Is Born looks like Harpo’s wig, dictated her memoirs while riding in a limo. Honk, honk. Harpo’s horn-honks take a detour around speech—as dreams, in writing, replace exposition. Dreams, inserted into discursive prose, demonstrate an incremental, patchwork aesthetics: bit by bit. Harpo, named “The Professor” in Animal Crackers, spoofs intellectual matters. Mentioning my dreams, I deplete vocal credibility: pleasurable, to smudge an authority I only half-hold. Animal Crackers premiered in New York on August 29, 1930, two weeks before my mother’s birth. I recognize 1930 as if it were my middle name, my Hebrew name, the secret and unlikable one I never pronounce. Margaret Dumont’s Horniness as a Pedal Point of Harpo’s Silence  We take Margaret Dumont’s horniness as a given. And we apprehend her vocal plumminess as a pedal point. Her social entitlement, height, and largeness

74

establish basso credibility. Consider this equation: Du Mont = You Mount (Me). Dumont wants Groucho; she doesn’t want Harpo. But the presence of female desire, housed in a body we’re not supposed to find sexually attractive, places a joke sexuality (Margaret’s) next to a joke voice-box (Harpo’s): two implausibilities, two dead ends.

Zeppo’s Nose: Distraction, Desire as Sidebar  I can imagine desire only as a supplement to the object I’ve sworn to stare at: if I’ve vowed to stare at erotically neutral Harpo, then to his side I’ll see, mote-like, points of sex appeal. “Spacing out” in Harpo’s vicinity, I bump into rock-like presences. One of these lumps, these indigestibles, is Margaret Dumont’s sexuality (its risibility, its reality); the other lump is Zeppo’s attractiveness, centered in his nose. I isolate not his nose-in-itself, but his nose as digression. Zeppo’s nose ruins my concentration on Harpo and pulls me out of line: that condition—being thrown off-course—embroils me in an aesthetics of the swerve. Block Ladies  Harpo’s head, a puppet’s, wags. Head-wiggle links him to women who lived on my street when I was young (I called them “block ladies”). Their heads wiggled as they smoked, walking in flip-flops down the hot sidewalk. Perhaps nicotine produced head-wiggle? Harpo’s headwalk has purgatorial and pasha aspects. Head-walkers have been through the wringer. The Glance Back and Forth  Though Harpo reigns with scissors, he also sews people together by glancing back and forth between Person A and Person B. Ocular oscillation expresses tenderness: Harpo invents “family” out of bystanders by drawing sight lines between them. By glancing at “A” and “B,” Harpo lassoes together stray particles of reality that would otherwise be in pieces—a fragmentation that object-relations theorist D.  W. Winnicott attributes to psychotic states. Harpo cures a psychosis induced by cinema: if firm mechanisms (plot, editing, the star system) were not in place to moor the viewer, the experience of watching narrative film might splinter the self into bits. Harpo orients reality, makes it centripetal, by the psychosurgery of his Scotch-taping gaze.

Animal Crackers   |    75

I Have Performed an Action: Harpo’s Near Nakedness  After blowing a smoke bubble, Harpo looks surprised and pleased at his own accomplishment: he remarks on the fact that he has performed an action. Eyes widen and pivot. Eye-widening signifies (1) I did something naughty; (2) you noticed that I did something naughty; (3) I notice that you notice my naughtiness; (4) I don’t consider it naughty. Margaret Dumont tells the butler to take Harpo’s hat and coat, and the butler complies, in the process removing everything but hot pants, tanktop, hat, and shoes. Harpo’s near nakedness has a Ziegfeld Girl’s will to charm the audience, and a baby’s absorbed purposelessness. Harpo’s Blustery Offended Look  When miffed (or mock-miffed), Harpo sticks out his lips. Blusteriness makes his face plump and duck-like; he displays morph-ability, proving himself a plastic plaything. His blustery look encourages a viewer’s ownership mentality (I own Harpo-as-pet, Harpoas–beach ball). Seeing his duck-mouth, I grow territorial, satisfied with my own toy-like endowments. Watching Harpo is a consolidation project: I turn my self’s debris into a coherent position—a viewer’s. Winnicott might have called this defragmenting process “integration.” Harpo’s duck-mouth is (in Melanie Klein’s phrase) a “part-object,” a fragment, like a breast, an eye, or a desire. Harpo’s Butt Cleavage  I invite you to participate wholeheartedly, without condescension, in exploring the aesthetic dimensions of Harpo’s rear. His starry exceptionality originates in debasement: he dwells at the bottom. Punishment buoys up the star’s body, lays it out for us. Tick-tock go the hands of the Deco clock, and Harpo’s raised rifle flutters in sympathy. Without compunction I will point out Harpo’s butt cleavage, a V, through his shorts.  µ  With compunction I will call it—this V, this rear vista—Harpo’s vagina. Remember, every man has several. Autohypnosis  Harpo turns around to face us—with the glazed eyes of the autohypnotized, the druggie, stunned by his own adorable criminal-

76   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

ity.  Ω  Gun in hand, he resembles a dangerous pervert whom police would bar from playgrounds, yet his hairless, prepubescent softness doesn’t qualify as mature. Consider him Baby Huey, grown man in nappies, eyes communicating absence of intelligence and surplus of intelligence, simultaneously. An actor mustn’t gaze directly at the camera: Harpo not only recognizes the camera, he compounds the error by acknowledging that he has seen the camera and that it sees him. A “juvie” judge would brand him incorrigible.

Harpo as Idyllic Germanic Naturist  Alone on the soundstage, Harpo cocks an ear toward birdsong, as if he were a landscape aficionado, turning civilized haunts into stylized wilderness. Harpo could be the narrator of Schubert’s Winterreise—a melancholy, fitfully joyful wanderer. Listening to birdcalls, Harpo heads toward Germanic high culture and names himself nature boy, whether Papageno or Siegfried. It’s 1930, in the USA, and a Jewish guy named Marx (in underwear, a Coney Island bathing costume) is cocking his ear to the bird-like announcement of his own mock-godhead. He holds a joke gun, proving his rage recreational, nonlethal. Harpo’s Problem Is Brothers: Lightness, Tension, Uncertainty  Harpo fires at a tableau vivant silver sculpture, a still life of two silver-coated men, like a Balanchine dance duo photographed by George Platt Lynes.  Ω  The dancers join in agon or cooperation, that median zone of play, a delicate exercise diagnosed by Johan Hui­ zinga: “lightness, tension and uncertainty as to the outcome .  .  . ” (If I want to play with Harpo, I must do so lightly, uncertainly. I must not force conclusions or push too hard, lest the subject shatter.) Harpo shoots his rival mimes because they are two—like the surfeiting presence of Chico and Groucho. Harpo may fear this silver couple’s lovemaking, or their inanition. Batman and Robin, they fire back at Harpo, lone sniper in a leotard: superheroes (whether Aryans or Africans)

Animal Crackers   |    77

face off with the wandering Jew. Harpo’s hot pants don’t prepare him for warfare. Only the tall antagonist—Batman—has a pistol. With muscular chests, both ciphers are gay-seeming athletes. I call them gay because of their cloned buffness, their silver near-nudity, their physical intimacy, and their Attic abstraction. After wounding Harpo, they return to posed motionlessness.

Harpo’s Mock Compliance with Military Body Language  To the tune of a fifeand-drum, Harpo marches off, rifle behind shoulder, one leg stiff, the other high-stepping, a toy’s gait: Harpo pretends to be a troupe’s wrongly behaving member, the laggard whose conspicuous wrongness upstages dogooders. Let’s not overemphasize uprightness. Perhaps Harpo wants to lie down and sink into autohypnotic trance, a dream of neutral Geneva. Harpo’s Development: When Play Collapses  Within a single scene, Harpo undergoes development. He progresses from shooting at a pair of women (Harpo distrusts couples) to pursuing women. And yet development is a dubitable notion. Sometimes I respect movements toward sociability and integration—and yet I prefer Harpo’s hovering on the borderline between the nascent and the achieved. Winnicott says that the ability to play determines mental health and inner agility. In Homo Ludens, Huizinga quotes another theorist’s definition of play as “a representative act undertaken in view of the impossibility of staging real, purposive action”; and then Huizinga pipes in: “Are the performers mocking, or are they mocked?” That question we ask of Harpo. At least he never falls prey to the “collapse of the play spirit,” to “sobering” or “disenchantment.” May Harpo as fairy elf of enchantment never fly away! Don’t leave me stuck with my sole self.

II Assimilation: Shaming Abie the Fish Man  Playing piggyback, Harpo hops on the back of snobby, wealthy Roscoe (actor Louis Sorin, who appeared, one year earlier, as Mr. Bumble in Mother’s Boy and as a tailor’s assistant in Glorifying the American Girl). Chico recognizes him as Abe Kabibble from the

78   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

old country. Chico taunts the fellow Jew by chanting “Abie the fish man.” Chico and Harpo manhandle him and find, on his arm, a birthmark, which identifies him as shamed Abe. A moment later, Harpo rolls up his sleeve to reveal the stolen birthmark, miraculously migrated.  Ω  Harpo—genealogy-catcher and filth-catcher—stole the birthmark to give Chico something to point at, and to give the audience a jolt of explosive closure. The mobile birthmark marks the Marxes as the dregs, but kleptomania assists their rise, a class ascent up the Paramount staircase. Harpo looks not at the birthmark but at Chico, to see him absorb the arm’s flash card. Harpo enjoys enclosing one word or image (“horse,” “birthmark”) in its box. As a teacher points at the word, solemnly Harpo points at his new possession. He doesn’t need to teach himself the birthmark’s existence; he needs to teach us. The pedagogic finger shirks blame and casts invective outward.

The Leg’s Relation to Dumbfoundment  Harpo chases an unnamed girl and decisively squeezes the horn. Honk-honk. (We have a word—deixis—to describe pointing; we need a word to describe squeezing.) Chico: “That’s all you do, chase the women.” For an instant, Harpo seems dumbfounded or contrite—but then he gives Chico the leg. When this gift is refused, Harpo offers it again; his stare dares Chico to retaliate.  Ω  Harpo presents the unwanted limb for several reasons. (1) Harpo is sleepy. (2) Harpo’s feet are sore. (3) Harpo wants to shock. (4) Harpo wants retraversal: to deal a familiar card. (5) Harpo wants to misplace his body parts. (6) Harpo’s thigh is an erogenous zone. (7) Harpo wants to dispute his woman-chaser identity. The Switch: Harpo Moves, without Transition, from Dumbfoundment to Joy  “Next thing you know we go live in an old ladies’ home,” says Chico. “How do you like that?” Harpo nods, searching for the elemental, binary switch

Animal Crackers   |    79

that will push disappointment into elation. The switch flips; Harpo, misinterpreting, attains joy, and offers a preposterously goofy and pointless smile not because of new information but because of misinformation. Misdelivered messages flip the happiness switch, hidden in words. The old ladies’ home may be a mirage, but language’s hinged coffers open onto oceans.

Prior Preparation for Gags  Chico says, “We play lots of games—black jack, soccer.” At the telltale word soccer, Harpo pretends to “sock her” over the head with an umbrella-like implement. He’d removed it from his pocket a moment before; the dumb look concealed premeditation. A pianist’s finger arrives at the key a split second before the note is played. We call this trick— this advance contact—“preparation.” I like to imagine Harpo savoring his technical ability to touch props before they appear. The Pile Up Game: Overexcitation Leads to Collapse  Harpo kicks out his leg and rests it on a woman’s knee; she pushes it off, but his limb automatically returns. Off she pushes it, and back again it goes. He repeats the trick on Chico, who plays along by putting his leg on top of Harpo’s. Leg, leg, leg, leg: leg piles upon leg, and, surfeited by accretion, the brothers collapse onto each other. Themes, like crocuses, poke to the surface: (1) Chico will participate in Harpo’s physical games but will never initiate them. (2) Harpo introduces new pleasure centers (i.e., legs instead of pricks). (3) Excitement leads to downfall. (4) Harpo sets an example of camaraderie: piling up instead of attacking. (5) Aesthetically, Harpo validates incremental techniques (collage, seriality, cataloguing) as formal processes that avoid victory. No one wins the pile up game. Lick, Gaze  “Just a minute: I’d like to cut those cards,” says Margaret. In shock, up go Harpo’s wrists, detaching themselves from his hands: noli me tangere.  µ  Wrists dissociate themselves from errant fingers. Margaret tries to teach him etiquette: how to eat, or how to wipe himself. Though appalled, she can forget the offense and clean up after him. Cautiously, suspiciously, Harpo deals, bot-

80   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

tom lip jutting; between cards, he thumbs his bottom lip and gazes laterally. Lick fingers. Gaze left. Lick fingers. Gaze right. Binary rhythm: lick, gaze, lick, gaze. Harpo licks as a compulsive gesture of magical banishing. I hate dry fingertips, a Judea condition of collapse and scattering: to conquer this Osiris state, I lick my fingertips or dowse them in tap water. Grocery shopping, I dip fingers in tofu tubs; visiting European churches, I exploit holy water.

Drag: Pleasure of Transportation  Harpo methodically repeats actions; with every repetition, he intensifies. He flips the playing card onto the table, each time more aggressively. Finally he stands to toss the foul card. (Why not make crescendo my creed?) Dissatisfied, Margaret Dumont quits the game; the other woman (Margaret Irving, who appeared in the silent film The Broadway Boob, and who specializes in being baffled by Harpo’s badinage) says, “Where are my shoes?”  Ω  Her pumps have migrated to Harpo’s feet. Laughing, he lifts his pants to demonstrate the climactic, lunatic theft. Drag reveals no desires. Its raison d’être is appropriation—and transportation, the pleasure of relocating personal property. Harpo doesn’t want the Fish Man’s birthmark or Margaret’s high heel. He simply wants to tamper with ownership. A low-key Jean Genet, Harpo compulsively steals to stay calm. Harpo’s Prosody  When we measure a poem’s prosody, we notice beats, stresses, and pauses. When we observe a film’s prosody, we remark on its rhythms, not on its content. We can study any star’s prosody, not merely a silent star’s, and not merely Harpo’s. I respond to Harpo’s prosody, not merely to his personality. Thus I look abstractly at patterned movements accreting and repeating. He prolongs and interrupts, with syncopations and caesuras. Moods have rhythmic characteristics. I don’t seek a systematic way of talking about Harpo’s prosody, but I want to convince you that this discussion, even when it seems most psychological, has abstract aims. Freud gestured toward a prosodic approach when he commented on the rhythm of absence and presence

Animal Crackers   |    81

in child’s play, and when, seeking unconscious meanings in verbal associations, he slowed down the patient’s dream and broke its narrative into pieces.

III Zombie Dumbfoundment: Arrested Thought  While Chico talks, Harpo’s eyes play zombie. Behind idiocy’s mesh, he secretly coalesces.  µ  Fear produces attentiveness— Roland Barthes called it panic listening, a wild animal’s vigilance. Listening with crossed eyes and limp hands, Harpo occupies a miasma that mixes stupidity with rapture. When Harpo exhibits zombie dumbfoundment, he becomes an emblem of arrested thought: and I, engaging in Harpophilia, stop my own thinking. Avant-garde Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905–88), whose music, at its most idiosyncratic, focused on a single note and explored its vibrations without ever moving to another note, described the place of not-thinking (dreaming, drifting) in artistic creation: “When someone can stay for hours in front of a piano without knowing what he is doing and you stop him in his tracks by thinking of a counterpoint or of the resolution of a seventh, you achieve nothing. That is what made me ill for four years: I was thinking too much. From then on I completely ceased to think. All my music and my poetry have been made without my thinking.” Scelsi refused to be photographed: Harpo refused to be heard. Pinching His Own Cheek: Harpo as Franz Biberkopf  Chico asks, “Where’s the flash?” (Flashlight.) The word flash confuses Harpo. He offers a fish, a flask. . . . He climbs the rungs of similar sounds, toward the finish line of comprehension. Flesh? Harpo pinches his own cheek. Body is his first recourse. I exist, the pincer fingers imply. I’m flesh. Do you doubt it? Self-verification is no joke.  µ  He treats his own flesh as a mechanical, obtain-

82   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

able other; his pinched cheek, a foreign object, is a tailor’s commodity, like the “yard-goods” in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Map”: “These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.” Aside: Harpo resembles the one-armed criminal Franz Biberkopf, played by Günter Lamprecht in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s thirteen-part epic Berlin Alexanderplatz. Harpo, like Biberkopf, combines penury and ambition, morality and expedience, hopelessness and optimism, the skids and the heights, plainness and handsomeness, fleshiness and gauntness: he might secretly be starving to death, but he seems healthy, suckled. Franz Biberkopf purses his lips, like my father’s father, a defeated striver in a decent suit. Harpo, like Franz, is a sad-sack hero we follow loyally through thirteen episodes. Harpo made thirteen films; Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz has thirteen installments (plus epilogue). From his pocket, Harpo pulls a fish and then a flask. With bacchanalian bonhomie he smiles, but after Chico pushes him, his eyes go dead—chastened, after his three-pronged (flesh, fish, flask) journey into pun and play. The eyes go dead. Then they enliven. Then they go dead again. I watch this periodicity—dead, alive—as some people watch a lunar eclipse or a baseball game.

Linguistic Sliding: Flashing  Harpo produces a royal flush of oversized cards, then a “Flits.” (Flit gun: “hand-pumped insecticide sprayer.”) Then a flute. Harpo wants to slide from word to word. His glissando between similar sounds (fish, flesh, flask, Flit, flute) turns incomprehension into free fall. He lacks a home in language, so he must take the pulse of Chico’s punishing rebuke and transpose it into his own tune. Harpo produces a huge flashlight, and he flirts with periodicity by shining light into his eyes and then covering them.  Ω  Harpo hides from self-aimed light: a shy baby-coquette, he plays “here/not-here” games. Lights go off, but charades continue: “where’s the flash?” asks Chico, in the dark, and Harpo produces a fish, then a flute. Harpo looks for the “flash” with the flashlight’s futile beam. Walter Benjamin used the word

Animal Crackers   |    83

aufblitzen to describe history’s sudden flashing up, its shocked and gnomic gleams. Moral: Harpo has no destination. Intransitive verb, he mutely flashes up.

Harpo Kisses the Fish: Claiming the Dead Object  Exegesis demands ritual observances. I gloss Harpo; I kiss Harpo. I imitate his own process of kissing. Harpo finds his lost fish and kisses it.  µ  Aside: I eat herring not merely because I happen to like herring but because I want to participate in a tradition of men and women who like herring. I remember my father eating it, and my mother’s parents eating it; I remember herring in the refrigerator as a predictable, landed category. Harpo shamed Abie for being a fishmonger, but now Harpo kisses a fish—not because he loves it but because he’d lost and then found it. Any flotsam counts as treasure. Harpo might as well be kissing his tallis: fringed prayer-shawl. (Is “Jew” a fishy concept?) Harpo’s Prop Library  He puts the fish in his pocket, a prop library, an ambulatory dictionary, a reliquary of gags. “Three cheers for Captain Spaulding,” shouts the disguised Abie. Literalist, word-fumbler, Harpo brings out three chairs. He shatters Groucho’s idyll of réclame. Margaret shoos Harpo and his three chairs away. He can’t join reigning economies—Chico’s word system, or Margaret’s uppity household. (Choosy as Abraham, she admits one Marx brother into the fold, and scapegoats the other.) Fishy Abie, arriviste, ethnically erased, says, “Go on with your chairs,” as if to a ragpicker. Lips puffed out, Harpo blows an air bubble at him—one Jew to another. The Mystery of Harpo’s Butt  Harpo rotates the stool, leans against the piano, and thrusts his butt outward, waiting for the stool to rise. Abie stares down at Harpo’s offered-to-be-spanked butt, its affront recalling Barthes’s

84   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

allusion to the revolutionary act of mooning the Political Father.  Ω  To Harpo’s butt, I attribute sacred expectancy and doggy patience. Harpo stands up at the piano, shimmies his butt, and slaps it—a minstrel flexibility of hip and rear end.  Ω  Groucho ribs: “He plays them both well.” (Both cheeks.) Harpo quotes black styles. (The “crackers” of the film’s title allude, in slang, to white folk.) Fingers rub the dirty piano-lid’s edge, like a glass harmonica; wrinkling his nose at filth, he pretends to be a fussbudget.

Facing the Viewer  Sight, not action, brings Harpo to a forbidden apogee. Sitting at the piano, he violates the taboo against looking directly into the camera: in three-quarter profile, eyeballs torqued, elbows outward, minx-like, he emits a joke-potentate’s impish satisfaction.  Ω  He preens over his power to face the camera. He earned the right to hail it only by first hailing it—by confronting its insectoid unresponsiveness. (Perhaps Paramount’s camera resembled a trench soldier wearing a gas mask.) Extermination: Proleptic, Phobic  Harpo kicks Chico’s butt. Groucho says, “They might exterminate each other, that’s the best thing.” The word exterminate, in 1930, gestures toward ethnic cleansings, past and future: extermination’s Flit gun applies to bugs and Jews, and to those, like Gregor Samsa, who incarnate both sects. Groucho, dreaming of a world without Harpo and Chico, pretends not to enjoy their levitations, which spoil his passage into the antiseptic. Prolepsis, the rhetorical figure of anticipation, is not the same as clairvoyant prediction. Groucho can’t predict the Holocaust, but he can anticipate it. By saying “exterminate,” he gestures toward its arrival, in the realm of the joke, where no responsibility lies. Aesthetic Bliss and Death Come Together When the Customer Stops Breathing  Harpo crosses his fingers to make the sign of decontamination. He has

Animal Crackers   |    85

heard the word exterminate; Groucho wants him gone. Finger-crossing, Harpo looks toward us for confirmation.  µ  He won’t rely on Margaret and Chico; offstage, in us, in the camera, he finds recognition. Seeing his crossed fingers, I hold my breath, anticipating the moment’s shattering, but it stays aloft, as in the last line of Frank O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died”: “and everyone and I stopped breathing.” Everyone and I stop breathing when Harpo crosses his fingers.

Staggering, Lag: The Art of Not Coinciding with the Other  Harpo clangs horseshoes together, slowly, pedantically. He means: buddy, move on to the next number (Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus”). The brothers stagger their routines; Harpo starts the next bit of business while Chico remains stuck in the previous morsel. I’d like to isolate this lag—to turn “lag” into an aesthetic principle as well as a psychological characteristic. Harpo doesn’t coincide with others; instead, he leaps a step ahead of them, or lags a step behind. I am not my brother; I am the one behind him, in his shadow. A pianist playing Chopin may complicate the melody’s initiation by starting it a split second before or after its accompaniment. By delaying or anticipating, the melody penetrates with a distinctive “ping,” a declamatory emphasis. The songful note, not coinciding with the harmony, acquires endangered, pointed fullness. I call that effect staggering.

IV The Thick-Enough Father  Winnicott’s concept of the “good-enough mother”: I’ll extend it to the “thick-enough father.” Harpo is the thickenough father, his presence a tree stump for me to expatiate upon.  µ  Harpo whistles, accompanying himself, as if to simulate a friend’s presence. Downward he stares at harp strings and hands. Finally I get a good long

86   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

look at his face, nose, jowls, and thick-enough fingers. (Usually he moves too quickly.) I recognize his nose’s bump; fleshy cheeks align him with my father’s mother, Ilse Gutfeld, dead in 1943. The thick-enough grandmother: the thick-enough genealogy: if it’s not thick enough, I’ll bolster it with fantasies and film-stills.

Ecstatic Door outside Time: Wig as Elegy for Lost Hair  Satyr, Harpo leans into the harp, his exaltation recalling Emily Dickinson’s moments of “Degree,” when she feels herself lifted to a higher power, an emotionally transported state of inner wealth, of “Dower.” Harpo, in Dionysian frenzy, lowers his face to the harp and tries to meld with it.  Ω  He can’t exit the role or the film, but in the seemingly static solo’s aporia, its unsmiling stitchmark, he can attempt flight. Harpo’s wig fits. It never wiggles or threatens to fall off. My great-aunt Alice Gutfeld’s synthetic wig nearly slipped off her scalp when disturbed by breeze through our Rambler’s window; her wig, ill-fastened, ill-considered, was a compromise, a bet she lost when playing for high stakes against time. A wig is an elegy for lost hair. Harpo’s baldness, if seen, would cut into the comedy, would prevent him from being thick enough. The Switch Trick  Harpo escalates provocativeness, to force a reaction from an unresponsive world. The switch trick (Harpo giving leg instead of hand) always gets a discombobulated reply. When he gives leg, he stares at the other, as if to urge retaliation. The switch trick expresses rage at the other’s impassivity. Isn’t the other always impassive? The fool exhumes a reaction from the other’s dead countenance. Margaret Irving, wearing flapper culottes, tries to seduce him. (Faker, she wants something out of Harpo. No one wants Harpo for himself. No one says, “Harpo is a prize.”) To deflect seduction, he offers his leg. Disgusted, she throws it down, but he maintains eye contact a beat longer than he should, past the gaze’s logical expiration. Never imagine that he is lazy or stupid: his tenacious stare testifies to Will, whether the will to power, the will to live, or the will to escape extermination.

Animal Crackers   |    87

Shutting Down When Faced with a Proximate, Dishonest Demand  Together, Margaret Irving (who looks like a combination of Amelia Earhart and Rosalind Russell) and a blank, confused Harpo sit on the bench. “Don’t you like me?” she asks, deceitfully. Expressionless, shaking his head no, he shuts down when overstimulated by a nearby demand. Inside silence he finds a second level of muteness, a fold, a seam, like the ridged crack where a peach pit subdivides.  µ  Emily Dickinson, chronicler of the “numb” (the formal feeling that follows great pain), has a posthumous kinsman in Harpo, whose rehearsals of visible numbness, alleviated by comedy, convey a metaphysical attention to the virtues of going blank. Babyishness as Camp: Gertrude Stein, Baby Snooks  Margaret says, “You’re just a baby, aren’t you!” and laughs. He mimics her mirth, to prove himself infantile and to mock this categorization. He reminds me of Fanny Brice’s radio persona “Baby Snooks,” a grown woman who acts like a baby in order to express keen sexuality. Because mainstream audiences wouldn’t perceive Brice, a Jew, as conventionally beautiful or sexual, she used baby tactics, which fall into the ken of camp. Harpo, too, contributes infantilism to camp culture: a grown-up man behaving like a baby is a drag artist, not a dictator. Gertrude Stein, whom Alice B. Toklas and Carl Van Vechten called “Baby Woojums,” made a similarly camp use of babyishness: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, cornerstone of her fame, came out in 1933, three years after Animal Crackers. Gertrude Stein (born 1874), Fanny Brice (born 1891), Harpo Marx (born 1888): these three Jewish comics used babyishness as a front for inappropriate sexuality, or for an erotic voracity that no audience would accept unless the performer cloaked it in puerile drag. Bestiality: The H of Forbidden Self-Interrogation “All joking aside,” Margaret says, “Isn’t there anyone you like?” He reaches into his pocket to produce true love’s image, which he kisses, before flashing it—not to her, but to us.  µ  He loves a horse. Not a specific horse. A generic, alphabetbook horse, a Platonic form. Maybe Harpo finds

88   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

this specific horse lovable, and fails to realize that it is an all-purpose image. Or maybe he fell in love with the flash card itself. I recall the deprived, languageless girl depicted in Russ Rymer’s investigative book Genie: A Scientific Tragedy—a victim locked in a dark room, like Kaspar Hauser, during her developmental years. The only visual stimulation available was a plastic raincoat, so she fell in love with plastic. Harpo looks at Margaret, but the equine flash card greets us: we, in Harpo’s classroom, learn to read desire’s alphabet. H is for horse. H is for Harpo. Loving the horse, he admits self-love. He says to Margaret, inauthentic interloper: I don’t want your body, I want my body, the H. I want immunity from demand—a state of protection as socially proscripted as having sex with a horse. “You love a horse?” she says, laughing: dismissive levity, as lashing as a homophobic slur.

Harpo as Lollipop: The Outie  To a bit-player blonde, Harpo offers a lollipop, probably not real. It might be fur. Genuine lollipops don’t taste good, either. Lollipops are a fake pleasure. We pretend to love them because we want to be perceived as agreeable. At Dr. Watson’s office, as a kid, I’d receive a lollipop as reward for an injection. We pretend to consider candy a joy; we pretend to care which variety of lollipop we pick from the receptionist’s stash, as if color matched flavor. Harpo’s lollipop looks shaggy, like a stuffed animal. It is a prop lollipop, false and theatrical.  Ω  Maybe the same lollipop, oft-licked, appeared in other films. The lollipop’s falseness is my invention: I consider Harpo my lollipop, and I am forever licking him. He licks the lollipop and points it toward the now-vanished girl, as if this sticky candy, a poor man’s replacement for presence, might serve as bait. The lollipop rhymes with his protruding taxi-horn, situated at his navel. I once had an outie belly-button—round as a cloche, but tiny as a thistle’s tip. The alien outie, a shrunken UFO, landed on my abdomen and took up residence. Time passed; my outie became an innie.

Animal Crackers   |    89

Harpo as the Never-to-Be-Ruined: The Thick-Enough Dictionary  Harpo still holds the lollipop, always-to-be-licked: like John Keats’s urn figures, the lollipop will never run out of substance. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats addresses the “happy melodist” who will never stop piping tunes (“For ever piping songs for ever new”): Harpo will always be holding the lollipop forever unlicked, a lollipop he will never desire though he will always pretend to want it. Harpo hides a stolen painting under his expansive, accordion-like jacket. His torso is thick with the theft—thick enough with the theft. I looked up lollipop in my father’s old dictionary, which he gave me thirty years ago: Thin Paper Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Fifth Edition, copyright 1945. The dictionary may be out-of-date, but lollipop hasn’t changed. Definition: “A kind of candy, often in the form of a lump on the end of a stick.” Lollipops are hobo candy: a hobo carries property in a bandanna-wrapped lump, tied to a stick. If I were to look up lollipop in a larger dictionary, I might discover a lumpier meaning. But my dictionary is thick enough.

V Rabbi Walk: Anesthetic  Harpo, walking like a duck, escapes the police. Hebrew walk, rabbi walk: familiar insults. Harpo splays his feet in first position, a ballet maneuver the opposite of pigeon-toed: freakish difference from pedestrian norms. Duck-walkers rush: go-getters, avaricious, they lack a stroller’s leisure-class time. (Is my internalized anti-Semitism eradicable?) Harpo pours an etherizing substance—chloroform?—into his Flit gun and sprays his own face, to enjoy Emily Dickinson’s numbness—her “Stopsensation,” when she “felt a Funeral” in her brain, and heard the funeral’s drum beat “till I thought / My mind was going numb . . . ” When sensation vanishes, Harpo’s vocation begins. Shame Moments as Energy-According Emblems  Another axiom: when shame appears (Harpo’s buttocks, exposed), I grow energetic. We may legitimately wish to bask in the vicinity of someone else’s shame: a contact high. “This program is coming to you from the House of David,” says Groucho,

90   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

and Harpo steps forward in a filmy garment— incoherent drag that Judaism (“House of David”) can’t explain. When he turns around, we see—through his schmatta—the outlined buttocks.  Ω  The crowd—Chico, too—witnesses Harpo’s “wedgie,” his exposed crack. Harpo’s buttocks: I’m not making them up. Plump, outlined, they emerge. (I don’t mean to overemphasize anality.) He turns around and becomes the crowd scene’s shame centerpiece, fanny protruding in a pose dancerly yet refugee. Dancerly yet refugee: my father’s forebears, too, had solid rear ends. Mine shares this outcast DNA: I stuff my rear into pants to enter civilized society. My nuclear family fixated on the large ass of a relative who’d survived Theresienstadt. His buttocks survived: their size became our Holocaust displacement, as if it were shameful to be singled out for starvation and extermination. Focusing on butt-fat, we drove our ecru Rambler to visit this wide relation. No one loved our Rambler, and yet it lasted. What can’t be discussed, as Wittgenstein suggests at the end of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, should be left unmentioned: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” (Wittgenstein’s treatise seems haunted by his brother Paul, pianist, whose right arm was amputated after a WWI wound.) And I, contra Wittgenstein, suggest: what can’t be discussed should be turned into comedy. Harpo flashes his behind in 1932, before the Nuremberg laws, yet the structure of shameful showing is already locked into place. Any gluteus maximus potentially transmits abject, spanked significance. Chico looks directly at the off-color roundness, while Groucho, snob, turns away from besmirchment. Conundrum: is Harpo humiliated, or is he proud? His ill-fitting schmatta droops, as if a load he’d dropped in his drawers had sent them sagging downward.

Cathexis  Am I emotionally committed to Harpo, or am I hiding from other loyalties, and using Harpo as hope chest or dump site? My motto: displace. I substitute Harpo for other calamities. Not the Holocaust—instead, Harpo. Not my father—instead, Harpo. Not comfort—instead, Harpo. Not

Animal Crackers   |    91

deadness—instead, Harpo. My subject is bruised relationship, or failed interaction—a deadness resembling anticipation, apprehension, a hovering state I call “Harpo.” How can I talk about the dead, the bruised, and the attentive, except through the screen of Harpo’s lovability?

Zombie Eyes of Self-Containment: Parsifal  The policeman says to Harpo, “You’d better come with me, young fellow.” Earning the appellation “young fellow” counts as an accomplishment. Bliss, to be called “young fellow” when one is neither young nor a fellow! Better to be wrongly named than never to be named at all. His pants droop; although he shakes the cop’s hand, Harpo’s frozen eyes, a delinquent’s, stare at nothingness. Every nearby glance fixes him as its center.  µ  Harpo assumes the zombie expression (I alone must house the mystery) when, reprimanded, he enters inauthenticity’s Siberia. Thumb upholds ragamuffin pants—or inches them downward. Chico stares at something amiss in Harpo’s lower body: incontinence? Hide it from the sniffing Furies. Harpo nods and smiles at the officer’s inquisition—which resembles the catechism that Parsifal undergoes in anti-Semitic Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, one of the great Western depictions of the holy fool. When Parsifal first appears onstage, an elderly knight asks, “Where are you from,” and the fool responds, “I don’t know.” “I don’t know,” he again replies, when asked, “Who is your father?” Parsifal bears the heavy load of incomprehension, and yet this “innocent fool” achieves “enlightenment through compassion.” Harpo might feel compassion for others, or he might simply feel dead, a stupor we can treat as a stepladder to intensified consciousness. Stolen Cutlery  “Do you want to be a crook?” asks the policeman. Harpo nods yes and smiles. Crook implies no moral stain. He merely wants to match his brothers, and to be the word that the other pronounces. Seeking correspondence, dead-faced Harpo yearns to say yes to authority, to any-

92   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

one. Meanwhile the stolen cutlery, like offal, creeps forward from Harpo’s sleeve, and falls to the floor: silver droppings, shame-icicles, reprise of Harpo’s primal scene of performance, wet pants on the vaudeville stage.

Harpo Destroys the Erection: Poppy Power  The Parsifal theorem: one man’s simplicity means another man’s castration. Just as Richard Strauss’s (and Oscar Wilde’s) Salome ends with the notorious line “Kill that woman!” Animal Crackers nearly ends with the image Kill that erection! Groucho’s leg sticks straight up after his body has fallen. Harpo wants to complete the anesthetization or extermination project, so he uses his Flit gun to topple Groucho’s erect leg—pale thigh, sockclad calf.  Ω  I’ll call Harpo’s Flit gun—his joy machine, his death kit—an “Ether-I-Zer,” like Vaporizer, which suffused my childhood bedroom with Vicks VapoRub, congestion loosener. Harpo’s ether might be poison gas, or opium, or the narcotic of film itself—the morphine of pretend-muteness. I give Harpo credit for embodying a poppy. Blank-faced pawn of the state, Harpo uses his trusty Ether-I-Zer to spray a policeman, some extras, and—pièce de résistance—Groucho’s leg. Flitty Harpo may always have wished to fell his brother. As Groucho’s leg wilts, Harpo smiles, and then he chloroforms Chico, too. Harpo doesn’t realize that by getting his way, by imperially dominating, he loses companions and becomes lonely as Klaus Kinski’s Fitzcarraldo in the Werner Herzog film: the zealot’s mad quest to spread opera to South America destroys his fellow travelers, as Harpo’s zealous Ether-I-Zer slays playmates. Groucho’s knee-socks are embarrassing. I, too, disdain his leg, and want it diminished. Harpo’s fratricidal machine suggests a cock pump, avant la lettre. Two phalli engage in combat; Harpo’s exterminator battles Groucho’s indefatigable boner. The Final Finger-Wiggle  Harpo tries to lift from the ground a sleeping lass, felled by his ether, but she won’t wake. Postextermination, Harpo is murderer and sole survivor, the only insomniac in a kingdom of sleepers. (At

Animal Crackers   |    93

ease with snoozing women, he wears a wig suitable for Garbo’s Camille or Norma Shearer’s Marie Antoinette.) To join the damsel in happy, suicidal swoon, he sprays his face: autoeroticism, autoasphyxiation. Thus the film will end with Harpo lying unconscious beside his Juliet—postcoital sweethearts paralyzed by war wounds. (Or else, like Isolde, he has sipped the love-philter so that he could meet Tristan in death.) Harpo rarely pursues a named or vocal woman. He prefers wordless targets—horses, birds, and extras. Look at Harpo’s quiescent Ether-I-Zer, ample in his sleeping hand.  µ  Supposedly the phallus is the logos, the word, but here the Flit gun acts as not-word, as sleep agent. In the last second of the film, Harpo’s sentient finger, touching the Ether-I-Zer, wiggles—a slight, unconscious tremor. This vibration, presumably unscripted, tells us that Harpo is not really knocked out: he remains an alert performer, attentive to his props. The final finger-wiggle is a moment no one should notice. Had the filmmakers been vigilant, this moment might have been cut or reshot: the continuity supervisor would have noticed, watching the rushes, that Harpo’s finger moved. A Paramount honcho would have said, “Redo.” If Harpo’s finger wiggles, the film is not really ending, and he is not really asleep; he has seized a last molecule of pleasure from this flitty machine, this prop he is forced to hold so that he might remain a plausible character with a history, a motive, and a future. The film is ending. Darkness settles over the frame. An instant before extinction, Harpo’s finger wiggles—a mistaken, idiotic, wordless moment of diegetic error, of framework breakdown. Plausibility collapses. The film stutters, makes a last plea for existence: don’t force me to end. This moment is supposedly insignificant, indescribable. We should pass over it in silence. The body is not dead; I notice its aliveness. I see a pile of dead bodies: or are they simply sleeping it off? If I see trembling motion in a comatose body, then I must pass over it in silence. As Wittgenstein instructed. If you can’t explain it, shut up. Guilt and compunction surround the act of interpretation. Shutting up sometimes seems the smart solution. To notice details and find meaning

94   |    Early Ecstatic Emptiness

in them, even if the meanings are ridiculous, is heresy, like flouting God by fussing over His aura’s fringe. By noticing Harpo’s finger moving, infinitesimally, along the Ether-I-Zer, we stand up for the quixotic adventure of asking questions about anything.

Animal Crackers   |    95

This page intentionally left blank

Later Astonishments

II

This page intentionally left blank

Fake Dead Jew as Cute Zoo-Idiot

Room Service (1938)

If in that second, that is, in the very last conscious moment before the fit, he had time clearly and consciously to say to himself: “Yes, for this moment one could give up one’s whole life!”—then, of course, that moment was in itself worth the whole of one’s life. However, he did not insist on the dialectical part of his conclusion: stupefaction, mental darkness, idiocy stood before him as the vivid consequence of those “highest moments.”  —fyodor dostoevsky, The Idiot

I The Moment before the Fit Begins  In the instant before the epileptic fit begins, Dostoevsky’s idiot experiences sacrosanct concentration. Harpo communicates a similarly exalted self-consciousness: simplicity mixed with excitement. The difference: Dostoevsky’s idiot undergoes concentration and then stupefaction, while Harpo’s gestures reflect concentration and stupefaction at the same time. Harpo epitomizes the easily likable. Why pollute him with the foam of commentary? Tie Behavior: Duck-Mouth  Let’s change the subject to nudism, and Harpo’s tropism toward it. I refuse to stop paying attention to Harpo’s body.  Ω  Harpo, playing Faker Englund, enters topless—but wearing a tie. Much about the Marx Brothers can be gleaned from their off-kilter ties. A tie is a circumcision motto, a trace of forsaken skin. By mismanaging ties, the brothers

99

declare phallic comportment an upside-down and arbitrary game. Each time Harpo produces duck-mouth, he seconds me: consenting to be my crabby compatriot, he transforms crankiness into memorizable code. Pursed mouth asserts squatter’s rights: duck lips stake a claim in the Real, in the propertied realm of speakers. If we find the duck-mouth cute, we might not notice its painful distance from articulate citizenship. Consider this book a treatise on cuteness—its cost, its covenants. A moat of disenfranchisement surrounds the cute and the darling, Harpo’s population, who endure, like dogs, a terrible division from competence, from compos mentis. Like Harpo’s Faker, my father’s father, Ernst (who changed his name to Ernesto José when he emigrated from Berlin to Caracas), was a redhead. I can’t prove it: no color photos remain. I’ll take my father’s word.

Promiscuous, Bloated Intake  Harpo would never belong to a twelve-step program; he has no guilt about compulsive intake. Forget the Higher Power—Harpo practices extreme absorption of available substances. He splashes a bottle’s contents, like cologne, on his suit; then he flashes his brothers a look that says give me permission to engage in my obscene act, my selfish ingestion.  µ  Imperiously I wish for totality: I want to grab the bottle—the image—and make it permanently mine. Harpo nods, briefly, twice, as if receiving permission to continue exercising dipsomania. No one watches him nod—a secret sign of self-consolation. Checking to See If the Thick-Enough Writer’s Buttocks Are Intact  Harpo greets the playwright, Davis, played by a handsome-enough (cf. “thickenough”) actor named Frank Albertson, whose hairy chest we will see in a few minutes and who, decades later, will have a bit part in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Frank, a new species, stupefies Harpo, who keeps his gaze frozen, unaltered (Harpo’s secret is don’t move), while other men converse. (I dreamt

100   |    Later Astonishments

last night that Caroline Kennedy, at a bookstore, recited a tribute to Jackie Onassis. I can’t resist crossing the threshold between stupefied subjects.) Frank says, “I’ve burnt my bridges behind me.” Harpo, stupefied by Gentile pulchritude, lifts up Frank’s jacket-tails to see burnt bridges. (Bridges, in Harpo-language, translates as “britches.”)  Ω  Harpo, the Buttocks Patrol, the Shame Squad, eagerly checks to see if someone else’s rear has been harmed. The brothers snooker Frank; Harpo, participating in the fraternal shyster operation, touches the Gentile to seal the deal and to convey contagion. Harpo’s kvelling gaze reminds me of Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother, or any Broadway stage mother, curly-haired and grinning.

Harpo Inserts Himself into the History Painting  Shots of Harpo and his brothers resemble religio-historic paintings, like Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates, or a crowded Caravaggio scene (The Calling of Saint Matthew?) in which we can’t tell who is saint and who is thief: a tableau of men jammed together, striving for intimacy or primacy. Harpo pushes himself into a tempestuous religious configuration, sooty as Gethsemane, by touching handsome-enough Frank’s shoulder—the shoulder not of an ego-ideal or a hunk but of a pabulum boy-next-door. (I’m not arguing that Harpo’s a homo. I’m pointing out his voracious tendency to touch, his nervous probing of the other’s resistance.) The camera doesn’t move; its proscenium imitates a nonempathic gaze. The brothers must elbow their way into the frame, and Harpo remains on the fringe. Second-Tier Handsomeness: Spasm  Truism: no woman in a Marx Brothers picture is ever very pretty. Nor is any man very handsome. And yet I love a second-tier handsomeness: beefy actuality. Lack of top-rung beauty keeps the comedy on the level of family fun, and defuses the threat of a Jewish man seducing a Gentile woman. My retreat into verbal mannerism—including backwards (Yiddish?) syntax—corresponds to moments of ecstatic clarity preceding the epileptic’s fit. This digression is a spasm I include for liberty’s sake. Thus I down-

Room Service   |    101

grade language from flight to spasm, in honor of the Idiot, in honor of every stammerer. Double speaking—speaking about Harpo, and then speaking about speaking-about-Harpo—is a treacherous trait I don’t shirk: “Two thoughts coincided,” says Dostoevsky’s Idiot; “that very often happens. To me, constantly . . . it’s terribly difficult to fight those double thoughts.” I’ve stopped fighting their forked onslaught.

Stripping the Handsome-Enough Co-star  The brothers decide that Frank, the handsome-enough co-star, the Gentile, must play sick, and therefore must be stripped and put to bed. With a Shelley Winters smile, Harpo manhandles the nerdy man of words and touches his butt crack.  µ  We presume that RKO, a morally upright studio, disavows the vulnerable eroticism of Frank’s naked chest, matching Harpo’s earlier toplessness. Benny the Eel  With measles fakery fluid, Harpo puts dots on Frank’s face. “What are you going to do to me!” Frank shouts to Harpo, malpracticing doctor. (In 1938, the year of Room Service, the year Mengele was admitted to the SS, bad medicine had genocidal overtones.) In Turning On Is Copping Out, a Super 8 movie my friend Cliff made in seventh grade, I played a drug pusher, Benny the Eel, whose name evoked Benzedrine, Benny Goodman, and New York’s “El” trains. With a hypodermic (an Ether-I-Zer!), Benny the Eel injects heroin into a milk bottle. Once, Cliff’s father said, “I wonder how Wayne’s parents can deal with him: he’s a Mexican jumping bean.” Assignment: translate erratic body movement into prose. “Stop-Sensation”  The judge will expunge from the record the following image: inadmissible evidence.  µ  Harpo paints measles on the undressed, straitjacketed stranger’s face. Harpo’s Jewish contagion spreads to the playwright, a man in thrall. Don’t underestimate the sex appeal of Harpo’s victims. He commits

102   |    Later Astonishments

sadistic acts against topless Gentile men. (Or blonde Jews “lucky” enough to pass as Gentile.) Frank Albertson: not a blonde Jew. Does it matter? I needn’t figure out who is Jewish. But I insist that Harpo, blinding a strongman, performs a Delilah scissoring: terrorist, he pulls a David on this Goliath mensch. I stopped the film to freeze this close-up. Dostoevsky, The Idiot: “He stopped for a moment. This is how it is with people sometimes: sudden, unbearable memories, especially those connected with shame, usually make them stop for a moment where they are.” I stopped the film to seize this image of the naked man, subjected to Harpo’s dot-making machine. Stop-action thought, like stop-action photography (Muybridge): one origin of photography may be this attempt to break down a naked man’s horselike motion into delectable, unfamiliar stages. By stopping frequently while watching Harpo’s films, I am paying attention to stopping itself, what Dickinson called “That Stop-sensation—on my Soul—”: she means the sensation of stopping (what it feels like when thought or emotion stops, when Being loses continuity) as well as the stopping of sensation. Stopping is itself a sensation. What do you feel? I feel stopping. That’s not the same as saying I’ve stopped feeling. I feel something tangible: that tangibility is called stopping. What Harpo has illuminated, by his decision to stop speaking, is the Stopsensation, a category of presence that lodges at inhibition’s doorstep.

Perfume: Movement from Sickness into Decoration  Out of pathology (how others pathologize us, how we pathologize others—the vocabularies of AIDS, syphilis, anti-Jew, anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, antiwoman, antiweak, antigay, antifreak) come decoration and other despised modalities, including makeup and mime, digression and promiscuity. Out of the measles dots, the points that Harpo applied to Frank’s cheeks, come self-decoration and self-pleasuring: now, Harpo uses the paintbrush as perfume-bottle stopper, as rouge rod. Like a figure from Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, Harpo employs the stigma stick to tart up his own face. Chico looks aghast at this masquerade. Harpo “girls it up” because he craves nourishment (the old sources are depleted); the best place to turn for new thrill and new salvation is his own body. My discourse, like Harpo’s relation to the world, resembles a cul-de-sac, a U-turn, self-consuming: not a through street, Harpo can only silently recirculate his materials. The deeper

Room Service   |    103

I go into Harpo, the more the “Stop-sensation” ambushes me: the impulse to stop discussing Harpo. To drop him.

Defacing: Point, Beseech  Harpo sprays fake measles through a pasta colander onto the playwright. Into Chico’s culinary instrument, Harpo pushes his face: head-in-colander looks like a pigsnout shoved into a trough. Bottoming out, rimming, he tunnels into the world’s backside; identity disappears.  µ  Paint spews out the colander. Harpo points to his handiwork (Frank’s newly pocked face) and then looks at Chico for confirmation. Often, Harpo performs this double movement of pointing at the proof, and then looking at the other for approval. Harpo’s sequence: (1) point; (2) beseech. First the finger entreats: am I good enough? Then the face follows the finger. Period, Punctuation Mark: Berlin  Groucho gives Harpo a hot-water bottle and says, “Slip this to him.” Wanting warmth, Harpo first puts the bottle against his own cheek. The first destination of any device is Harpo’s own body, inviolate and secure as Wagner’s Sigmund-sword in its ash tree. No Jewish jumping bean can rival Harpo’s mix of volatility and gravity. Harpo and Chico put a sign (“Measles”) on the door. I see a period after the word “Measles.” The dots that Harpo sprayed onto Frank’s face are periods, punctuation points, stop-sensations, but I won’t make too much of a “point” of this coincidence. In a few days, I fly to Berlin, my father’s natal city. Interrupting this chapter creates a Stop-sensation on my soul, like the periodic fits undergone by Dostoevsky’s idiot, those sudden moments of clarity (for which he would give his entire life) right before the interruption.

II Sudden Need to Interrupt  As a child I never waited my turn to speak. I still interrupt. (As I write this sentence, I am staring at a Delta Airlines crossAtlantic flight menu: Willkommen, it says, its Teutonic, oversalted arms

104   |    Later Astonishments

opening wide.) I feel Jewish when I interrupt. It is Jewish, according to Freud, to upset discipline, to wreck hierarchy. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud describes a Jewish joke “meant to portray the democratic mode of thinking of Jews, which recognizes no distinction between lords and serfs, but also, alas, upsets discipline and co-operation.” I should be more systematic in my use of Freud. Harpo is my Dulcinea: he may not entirely exist. Harpo is also my Don Quixote—addle-brained, simple, valiant. From Don Quixote’s epitaph: He did not esteem the world; he was the frightening threat to the world.

Harpo did not esteem the world: the world, however, didn’t understand that it should be frightened by Harpo. The world forgot to be frightened by Harpo.

Does Harpo See Me?  Walter Benjamin writes that when we look at objects and they seem to look back at us—when they appear to see our humanness—they become credentialed with aura. Last week, in Berlin’s Tiergarten, I imagined that the heavy-footed elephants saw me. Harpo, a zoo animal, lifts his eyes toward me, and thus acquires meritorious aura. Benjamin: “The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us.” (Benjamin wrote that essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in 1940, two years after Room Service.) Harpo sees me because I write about him; but Harpo saw me before I began writing about him. I am writing about Harpo because he saw me, because his inquisitive presence, like a gondola, advances toward me. The caged elephant in the Tiergarten reached a fat foot over the moat’s edge. The longer I write, the greater grows the risk that I will fail to communicate, that the moat between writer and reader will continue to widen, and that one of us will drown. Dostoevsky described incommunicability as an exquisite sensation, an autointoxication (I am drunk with the failure to communicate, drunk with the gulf between you and me): “There always remains something that cannot be conveyed to other people, even though whole volumes were written and your idea explained for thirty-five years

Room Service   |    105

. . . so that you will die without perhaps ever having conveyed to anyone the most important part of your idea.”

Pregnant Harpo: Plasticity of Internal Positions  Immediately after Chico fibs that Frank has been sent to the maternity hospital, Harpo enters with a turkey in his jacket: he looks preggers.  µ  Harpo’s inner life, if we can discern it, reveals mobile psychological positions. Simultaneously he plays top, bottom, mother, father, baby, persecutor, persecuted. In sixth grade I stuffed my shirt with crumpled paper towels to simulate breasts. Treif: The Danger of Becoming a Machine  Harpo’s gluttony receives a close-up—repeated fork-motions, a deadened, compulsive motion, stuffing a mouth that lacks time to consume the gift.  µ  Cheeks puff with vittles, including bacon: treif. He arranges his next bite of toast while consuming the first. Harpo shovels food, forkful after forkful, into his mouth, the rhythmic repetition (ingest, ingest, ingest) taking precedence over pleasure. Husbanding for later, he ignores what his stomach feels. Such automatism—making oneself a machine—is the root of comedy. On this topic, everyone quotes Henri Bergson’s essay “Laughter,” a doll-sized classic; even Freud calls it “charming.” We laugh at a mechanical person, but becoming mechanical is also a trait of the psychologically rigid and the spiritually numb—a trait, as well, of fascism, the assembly-line extermination camp, the military complex. Harpo’s rhythmic ingestion bespeaks not only scarce resources (eat while you can, there might not be food tomorrow) but moral impoverishment, deadened sympathies. Harpo Sees Chico Seeing Him Eat  Harpo’s binary motion: (1) I eat; (2) I observe you observing me eat.  Ω  At Chico, who can’t keep up with the consumption, Harpo steps out of character to smile conspiratorially, to recognize his own virtuosity, and to acknowledge a double consciousness, which the other

106   |    Later Astonishments

brothers lack. He displays mannerlessness, etiquette breakdown, food-as-ritual: a “Jewish” approach to eating. He mocks the alimentary system’s assembly line. Pleased that Chico, the less deft brother, is watching him, Harpo stands above glee and comments on it. Dimples are commentary: he annotates his own effects, surrounds himself with accolade, choirs himself, by supplying an unnecessary tincture of gleam, this supplemental glint residing in the cheekbone’s dimple-like crease.

The Aesthetics of Gorging  Harpo proposes the following aesthetic formula: art allows us to shovel liquids and solids into our being. Harpo, comically gorging at the table, receives the artwork he produces: he playacts the spectator’s greediness. Watching a film—or reading—is a one-way street. Ungenerous, we don’t give anything back. The gusto of Harpo’s consumption brings to mind Benjamin’s flâneur, who walks the streets for aesthetic stimulation and chance encounters. Harpo plays the flâneur as pig: he takes the universe’s goodies straight into his mouth. If Harpo were walking down the rue Jacob in Paris, we’d say, “He’s greedy for experience.” But Harpo is not walking down the rue Jacob; he is shoveling food into his mouth. Aesthetic consumption, like eating, takes energy, and moves in only one direction. In an essay on Sartre’s Saint-Genet, Susan Sontag defined the word cosmophagy as “the devouring of the world by consciousness.” Sontag had a cosmophagic voracity for aesthetic experience. Harpo, gently cosmophagic, wants to eat the world, but he will start with the plate of food in front of him. Never underestimate the seriousness of Harpo’s hunger. Being Censored: Theories of The “Book”  Harpo avoids censorship. He declares everything in bounds. His cosmophagic mouth devours totality. Let’s call Harpo’s repetition compulsion and his oral greed bookish instincts: they reach toward the Book as a structure of impossible inclusiveness—a Book in the sense that Edmond Jabès or Stéphane Mallarmé meant, the Book that will never be bound and can only be approximated, the Book begging to be holy though it will settle for being banal and profane.

Room Service   |    107

Harpo reaches across the table to snatch a pancake—in one forkful’s swipe—from Groucho’s plate. Food protrudes from Harpo’s mouth: he stands up again, reaches over, and forks a second pancake from Groucho. When Harpo reaches over a third time, Groucho slaps his hand. This scene dances around stereotypes of Jewish greed, Jewish hunger, Jewish badmanneredness. We aspire to the asymptotic Book, which we can never attain. Harpo— greedy, oral, uncensorable—gesturally participates in a mystical (Judaic?) poetics of the Book. The Book must be interpreted. We unwittingly reproduce the Book. The Book will indict us for our crimes. By domiciling us, the spacious Book forgives our piecemeal pettiness.

The Technique of Jokes Is Digressiveness  The foundation of my technique is digressiveness, which means I’m a joker. According to Freud, jokes protect thoughts from conscious criticism. He described the joke’s libidinous ease, its shortcuts, the pleasure it takes in weaving incommensurables together, in behaving like a combination of a lap-dancer (I’ll grope anyone who pays me) and a flâneur (I’ll get excited by anything I encounter on my urban stroll): “it cannot be doubted that it is easier and more convenient to diverge from a line of thought we have embarked on than to keep to it, to jumble up things that are different rather than to contrast them.” Illogical enjoyments—forbidden by consciousness’s censors—flourish in the joke’s demimonde, where Harpo thrives. Like a digression, he swerves to evade the censor’s command not to fork another repeated mouthful into the always open, cosmophagic, bookish mouth. Eating, he invokes Book-as-plenary-structure, permitting all. I looked up plenary in my father’s Thin Paper Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, copyright 1945. Plenary means full, entire, complete. This paragraph is a digression.

III Me Only, Only Me  Narcissism isn’t evil: it’s ordinary. Contained, framed inside his body’s Botticelli-cartoon-outline, Harpo, narcissist, happily points to himself. Without words, he says, “Me only, only me,” as if echoing Ezra Pound echoing Sextus Propertius: “Me happy, night, night full of brightness.” This Pound line is my touchstone for joyful self-containment; I don’t

108   |    Later Astonishments

spill into your territory, and you don’t spill into mine. Instead of saying “I am happy,” Pound/Propertius writes “Me happy.” Me happy, Harpo, night full of brightness. Though I sit, says Harpo, at the table with the four, I point to myself and call myself the principality, like Luxembourg or Monaco, a tiny country with a gambling economy but no army.  Ω  Groucho says, “Once I’ve eaten, I see things in a different light,” and Harpo points to himself and nods agreement. Stealing another’s speech, he acquires the pleasure of elucidating reality and of saying “me”: enjoyable, to point to oneself, while a rival watches. Harpo points to the ringing phone: his finger behaves autocratically while exercising a cute zoo-animal’s authority.

A Zoo-Animal’s Panic: Sips of Passover Mani­ schewitz as Items in a Collection  We listen because we want to defend against attack. Closeup: eyes radiating panic, monkey-like Harpo begins a second banana.  Ω  He may not want to eat it, but his role requires him to repeat, to force-feed himself, to announce to others, “I’m an eater.” As a kid, I took repeated sips of Manischewitz at a seder, to prove I was a drinker. I counted the sips. Twentyseven! I announced, to the assembled guests—including my father’s uncle Werner, stocky as Walter Benjamin—that I had attained a plateau of ritual ingestion: I had attained learning, like mastering a set of gendered nouns, die, der, das, each sip of Manischewitz a step, incremental, toward what? Not toward inebriation: toward a portfolio, an archive, a collection of pennies tightly fitted into blue sleeves, a book. The Squeaking Doll  “How about you, Faker,” asks Chico, “was you ever in love?” From his jacket’s inside pocket, Harpo extracts a tiny doll and squeezes it in his hand, as King Kong held up Fay Wray.  Ω  This doll may be Harpo’s true love or merely a portable symbol. Only a pervert could mus-

Room Service   |    109

ter this loony grin. Banana and doll are parallel prostheses. The doll speaks on Harpo’s behalf: squeak. Harpo has both genders covered— in right hand, banana; in left hand, doll. He kisses the doll and tucks it back in his pocket. Still he holds the banana, a more active interest; the doll is a backup. He grins lasciviously at Chico. Harpo, no longer cute, has become a mad scientist, a Dr. Moreau, using scissors to tamper with human boundaries.

Harpo’s Shadow  Harpo aggressively bites into a wax-paper-wrapped sandwich. By freezing this image of Harpo’s eating, I bite it. Harpo casts an extreme shadow on the wall.  µ  Shadows grant metaphysical dignity. Dr. Caligari, Bogart, titans, crooks, and emperors earn shadows. Usually Harpo is himself the shadow; he rarely achieves the Empire State Building’s deco solidity. A jumping bean, he bobs up and down as he eats—and then (in sudden panic) gazes toward the door, a split second before we hear the knock. Clairvoyant Harpo elicits sound; he doesn’t merely respond. I love giving Harpo credit for being haunted. Harpo as Norman Bates’s Mom  Dr. Glass, played by Charles Halton, who appeared three years later in Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, examines Harpo. “He’s hungry all the time,” says Chico. Harpo smiles, as if in a fairy tale of deception—Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf, or Norman Bates, forging Mom, in Psycho. Like the wolf, cozy, Harpo wears a hat in bed. His eyes play the back-and-forth game: look at Chico, then look at Dr. Glass. Invent society: use the gaze as a needle to sew unrelated people together. Harpo expresses panic by a pivoting checkup operation between articulate authorities. Well might Harpo worry: World, are you still there? Have I shattered you, through my playful oral insurrections, my banana-lust, my immersion in alimentary process?

110   |    Later Astonishments

Chico’s and Harpo’s Under-the-Covers Session with the Doll-Pet: Jewish Doctors  “Say ‘Ah,’ ” commands Dr. Glass. Pressed to speak, Harpo needs his Betty Boop squeaking doll. Chico reaches into Harpo’s jacket, surreptitiously reclaims the poppet, and sneaks it under the covers.  Ω  Exchanging family jewels, Harpo and Chico enjoy an under-the-covers jack-off session with chicanery’s totem. Dr. Glass wraps Harpo in linens, like a mummy, and stands him upright. Dr. Glass’s presence broaches the theme of Jewish doctors, Jewish hypochondria. I lean on Dr. Glass not only because the Marx Brothers make merry with looking-glasses, and not only because Harpo resiliently creates silent opera out of the damaged self he sees in the other’s mirror, but because of synchronicities set off by the name Glass, which leads to Seymour Glass, J. D. Salinger’s creation— Salinger himself a Harpo-like silent act. Last week in Berlin—around the corner from the Workshop where Otto Weidt hid blind Jews during the Third Reich by employing them to make shoeshine brushes—I saw, embedded in the sidewalk, a brass plaque, commemorating a murdered Sal­ inger. Drawing connections between unlike points is a style of elucidation more magical than historical. Amble  Led by Dr. Glass, Harpo waddles out of the bathroom. Because Harpo never walks decisively, he avoids confrontation with absolutes; he slithers between fixed qualities; he escapes the fate of zoo animals; he becomes the flâneur who finds the other’s forgotten footsteps. Walter Benjamin had an idiosyncratic walk, rushed yet listless. Harpo’s directionless amble suggests that he waits for attention and will not rush away from any encounter, however ill-advised. Call it the amble of the interpreter in ill-fitting clothes. Harpo as Harmless Asexual Sidekick  Harpo will stage “encounter” with any unspeaking object. Promiscuously befriending, he waves at the birdie, his pal in the land of the vocally disenfranchised and monotone. He looks out the window at Ann Miller and her boyfriend, Frank, on

Room Service   |    111

the park bench below. (We can classify Ann Miller—who will co-star, in a few years, with Judy Garland in Easter Parade—as a misfit, her leggy eagerness unreciprocated by onscreen men.) To see Ann and Frank kiss, Harpo extends and then trains at them a telescope—another of his toy pals, his protuberances. Because he has no ostensible erotic life, and no speech, he plays sidekick to straight couples.

Pathos of the Father’s Mother-Body: Harpo as Bubble  Harpo’s height, according to one source: 5'5". That’s my height. (Other sources claim he was 5'4".) Lucille Ball, his co-star, looms over him. So does the hotel’s mastermind, Wagner (played by Donald MacBride, who later appeared with Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch). Harpo’s shoulders slump: turkey-chasing fatigued him. Whatever the weather, he’ll wear an overlarge coat: his outfits are all-purpose exile-hobo’s garb, Walter Benjamin’s high-waisted pants cloaking the mother-body of my patrilineage—a body without angularity or upward thrust, a body resembling not the Chrysler Building but a jar of herring or a Webster’s dictionary, well-thumbed, the page-corners soiled from overuse. Never get a new dictionary. Stick with the old meanings. Definitions cram Harpo’s glossary-body, the father’s mother-body, all receptacle and no jet. And yet Harpo finds magical peace with his smallness; self-contained, he responds to insults by ricocheting between men and by substituting plasticity for solidity. Lacking comportment, height, speech, and membership in the senate of the strong, he bounces, slides, floats, expands, hops, and subsides; like soap bubbles in the art of Joseph Cornell or Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Harpo performs the role of the evanescent, the iridescent, the quivering, the misleading. His insufficiencies, reinterpreted as metaphysically resonant, serve as magnification procedures. Head-Tilt of Fake Shame  Harpo smiles too widely, head listing to the side: the head-tilt of fake shame. Oops, you’ve caught me in a misdemeanor. Aw, shucks, I’ve committed a horrible aggression against you. He highlights shame’s fakeness by tilting his head. Much surveillance falls upon speech. Harpo seems to have avoided surveillance by avoiding speech altogether. But avoidance only casts him deeper into shame. An adult performs the head-tilt of fake shame when confronting a baby-

112   |    Later Astonishments

stranger: “You cute little thing!” Tilt stiffens the neck, stylizes the head, makes it mannerist. Harpo, treated coldly, responds with a head-tilt that delivers ice elsewhere.

Harpo’s Tolerance for the Ad Infinitum  Exiting a closet, Harpo holds many canes and wears a stack of hats. Multiplicity: the brother-function, a fire hydrant, spews. Harpo has a Carmen Miranda command of the piled-up headdress. (Lucille Ball will wear a similar getup when she appears with Judy Garland and Fanny Brice in Ziegfeld Follies.) Harpo seeks refuge in the ad infinitum. Pile up the instances, kindling, then light a match, and destroy them. When Harpo removes the hats—all at once—we realize that they are glued together. He places them on the bed with a mourning rite’s ceremonial gesture. Wearing several coats at once, Harpo overdresses, like an Orthodox Jew in heat-wave summer. Ignored, Harpo occupies the exile’s corner, the geometrical configuration’s scant, perjured edge. Circumference: Harpo as Book  Without facial expression, Harpo raises his hand: either to attest or to dismiss.  Ω  Harpo’s hand does the work of a Jesus or a St. Francis—someone in charge of birds, mutes, lepers. Why would you care that Harpo has religious dimensions? Maybe you, too, want to find room in secular life for the magical transports of what the British romantic poets called “Imagination,” what Emily Dickinson called “Circumference”—a going-outward of the mind, toward what can’t be specified or photographed. Harpo’s hand, trying to stop traffic, to appease the gang, and to reorient the plot, will fail. Let me share with you a fact about my trough and tunnel of Harpoidentification: I enjoy dwelling inside an architectural cell analogous (by my own fiat) to “Harpo.” Harpo is a book I live inside, a structure to house my identitylessness. I don’t want to take on mystical airs, by saying, with Edmond Jabès, “To be in the book. To figure in the book of questions, to be part of it”; but I want to lay claim to ineffability, and I want to exercise the cracked hope that a book is the place where speechlessness might make itself at home. Words trivialize the dimensions of Harpo’s raised hand, at-

Room Service   |    113

tempting to dismiss or to summon. (About this funny Jew, please allow me to be pathetically serious.)

Finer Forge  Harpo empties a wastebasket and ignites its papery contents. Bowing in prayer, he bends to incinerate: death to literacy. Dressed as a Mountie (a parody of Nelson Eddy in Rose-Marie?), Harpo warms his hobo hands at a self-created fire.  µ  His flaming workshop resembles Dickinson’s “finer Forge / That soundless tugs—within—”: an ingenious hermit’s fire, apart from worldly clamor. Harpo says: I’m on fire. With the “finer Forge.” With a concentrated, irreducibly metaphysical mania. And I’m on fire with the disease of commentary. I’m on fire with foolishness. Thus I impose mediation on Harpo’s magic. Walter Benjamin wrote, in a letter to Martin Buber, in 1916: “I can understand writing as such as poetic, prophetic, objective in terms of its effect, but in any case only as magical, that is as un-mediated.” In that same letter, Benjamin writes, “Only the intensive aiming of words into the core of intrinsic silence is truly effective.” At least I’m aiming words, whether futile or fruitful, into Harpo’s silence. Interpellation as Love: My Dream of Containment in a Circle of Men  Marxist theorist Louis Althusser used the word interpellation to mean an individual or category coming into being as a result of ideology. Groucho, calling Harpo “Faker,” brings Harpo into existence; interpellation, when a brother does it, is an act of love. With a name, Groucho places Harpo into a category (“Faker”), as if into a fresh-from-the-dryer pair of jeans. The denim’s tight fit equals the metaphysical interpellation that Harpo receives when Groucho says “Faker.” Groucho says “Faker,” a stage name, as if it were genuine, and Harpo responds. Because together they participate in the “Faker” system, Groucho saves Harpo from deportation. “Faker, come here,” says Groucho, without kindness. Harpo, running onscreen, nearly dives into Chico’s arms. Off-balance, Harpo skates, lastminute, into this position. By accommodating other people’s bodies, he

114   |    Later Astonishments

truncates (and secretly nourishes) his own.  Ω  Dancing with Chico, Harpo lets himself fall and then snap back. His rear nearly nestles into Frank’s crotch. Harpo here achieves containment in a circle of men who have no sexual interest in him but who do not mock or ignore him. In college, a frizzy-haired lumberjack type with a plaid flannel work shirt and the eyes of a religious zealot, beady behind dirty wire-rims, offered brotherly advice: after I got drunk, he encouraged me, in the bathroom, to throw up. He said, “You’ll feel better afterward.” I put my finger down my throat. I threw up. And, indeed, I recovered. I stopped spinning. This technique I owe to the hunk across the hall.

IV Praise Neurosis  Suddenly Harpo, Groucho, and Chico appear together in one frame, their faces same-sized.  Ω  At last, Harpo has established parity with the betterdressed brothers, Groucho in tux, Chico in gangster leisure-suit. If Harpo’s goal were simply equality with the brothers, he needn’t have undergone the purgatory of Harpo-behavior. Axiom: a personality’s tics and torments, its baroque involutions, waste energy. “Harpo” is structured like a neurosis. Praise neurosis, for allowing us to turn our personalities into cathedrals, uselessly ornate and dank. No One Watches Harpo’s Semaphore: Poignant, Isolated Code  Harpo pats the bed and points to it: sit here. He stands on the sidelines, the bed separating him from men. He points to it, but no one sees his semaphore. Harpo’s costume sends forth pajama stigma—nightmares of attending school in bedclothes or naked. White bed divides him from men in black tuxes.  Ω  I

Room Service   |    115

wish to emphasize Harpo’s in-a-void attentiveness to a masculine colloquy he can’t enter. Upholding a mechanical, solitary style, he remains faithful to the doctrine of plaid work shirts, flame hats, and stiff posture. Harpo’s pants pulled up high give him Benjaminian Mittel-European stockiness. Harpo’s flame—I can’t avoid this analogy—strikes the note of Holocaust: the fool will go down in flames. Harpo seems aware of his sacrificial status: he doesn’t bother crossing the Styx of the bed.

Patting the Enemy’s Arm  Harpo’s enemy’s name is Wagner—not Richard Wagner, the anti-Semitic genius, just an ordinary hotel honcho, an American fool, whom Harpo can outwit. Harpo, taking a glass of milk from Wagner, pats his arm—to acknowledge receipt, to appease, to achieve physical contact.  µ  Touching Wagner’s shoulder, Harpo’s hand commits its customary excess. To the encounter he appends an instant of palpation, like an asterisk or addendum. Wagner functions as maypole—a catalyst of motion as well as a destination for dumping contagions. Inhabiting Categories for Comprehension’s Sake: Skipping the Middle Step  Harpo’s assignment: bring a glass of milk to Frank, sick in bed. Failing to capture the patient’s attention, Harpo drinks the milk himself. Once more, he applies his principle of detour or digression, and exercises oral voracity— not because he actually feels thirst but because he needs to prove to us that he is thirsty or to prove to us that he occupies a legible category: the one who is always hungry and thirsty. Harpo goes back for a refill. This time, returning to the bed, he doesn’t bother offering the glass to the patient, but immediately drinks it himself. The game has three prongs: (1) Steal milk. (2) Offer it to someone else. (3) Drink it yourself. Harpo learns: don’t bother offering it. Skip the second step. Economy—the exercise of cutting—provides psychic pleasure, says Freud, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Jokes economize by cutting linguistic corners. Dreams function the same way. From jokes and dreams we receive pleasurable payoff, the bliss of a skipped motion.

116   |    Later Astonishments

Harpo in Tears  Harpo has dead aspects. Certain stars display a cauterized mien—something absent in the eyes. At his most lively, Harpo contains a killed-off presence. He wraps this slaughtered quartile with a bow, a curly ribbon. A baby boy in my dream last night wrapped his arms around me and said, “Wayne has a fever.” Harpo, crying, joins Lassie and Shirley Temple in a peculiar pantheon of novelty acts: stars frozen in childhood, animality, and cuteness.  Ω  We don’t see the tears begin. He weeps before the close-up starts, transforming him into emblem. What prompts his tears? Perhaps more than one thing. Perhaps three things. As in a fairy tale. Harpo cries because he has made a mess, because of the long history that conspired to make him Harpo, and because of a fake death in his vicinity. Frank isn’t really dead. Only Harpo takes the fake death literally. And only I commit this mistake of dilation—of close-ups, moods cropped away from context. Harpo as Caricature, Deepening: The Sforzando of Mood Change  As men say funeral words, Harpo solemnly holds his fire-hat. This blitzkrieg movement from comic amorality to sentimental morality recalls a Charles Dickens caricature deepening instantaneously. Suddenly Harpo whistles, salutes, and runs to fetch a wreath. I enjoy Harpo’s ability to change moods swiftly, and prematurely to announce the mood shift (by whistling or pointing) before he experiences the change. He declares newfound joy without actually experiencing thaw: he exhibits the satisfaction of sforzando, of bright, surprising attack. Sieg Heil Meets Swing Low: Double-Jointed Jewish Male Hand  Groucho begins singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Chico joins; Harpo plays harmonica. Hands raised in salute, the brothers combine minstrelsy and mock-Nazism.  Ω  Harpo, looking down, folds himself inward, glad to stand passive beside

Room Service   |    117

verbal brothers. Hand maladroitly holds harmonica: fingers cave in, a double-jointedness I wrongly associate with Jewish men. (I dreamt last night of kissing—slow-motion, in a vestibule—a half-Dutch, Jewish, photogenic student. He almost refused to recognize me, but I insisted on moist reconnaissance.)

Death, Dummy, Disproportion  Wagner opens the door to see plaid-shirted Harpo, slumped at the threshold, eyes glazed open. A knife in his torso attaches a suicide note.  µ  This photo accidentally includes a glimpse of my single-spaced first draft. In the next shot, a close-up, we see Harpo’s note: “Wagner drove me to my death just as he drove Leo Davis.” (Wagner drove me to my death. Some Europeans might have said the same.) Wagner and Groucho dump the sacrificial dummy by the stage entrance. Harpo’s long hands signal secret virtuosity.  µ  To a policeman, Groucho describes Harpo as “one of my actors, passed out from the excitement.” To pass out from excitement, to pass into another state, a stiffened-dummy ecstasy, is the province of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, whose hero endures an exalted five minutes before his firing-squad execution is revoked: “He said that those five minutes seemed to him an infinite length of time, an immense richness; it seemed to him that during those five minutes he would live so many lives that there was no point in thinking about the last moment yet.” Dostoevsky describes the death’s-door intensity of the dummy, the man for whom consciousness has become excremental, a matter of discards and exiled materials; this annihilated yet heightened consciousness I attribute to Harpo, body left as garbage by the stage door. Harpo teaches disproportion, time shoved out of scale, brevity (five minutes) experienced as eternity. Harpo was not born a dummy; he made himself a dummy by performing internal deportations, east/west reversals we can only imagine.

118   |    Later Astonishments

Harpo’s Sacrifice: Passive-Aggressive Muteness  Onstage, the Russian waiter praises “the sacrifice of our comrade, who gave his life, so we might win”: Harpo will serve as the revolutionary sacrifice, the brother who forfeited speech so the family act could prosper. Why make Harpo melodramatic? I share my father’s sentimentality—an out-of-bounds fondness for homelands and origins. I like to take credit for his birthplace, Berlin, to claim the signature of a grand, lethal city, a zoo of dummies. And now, onstage, the realm of the fake, Harpo/Faker, with dagger in heart, is carried out on a stretcher. Theatrical spectacle demands this idiotic sacrifice. Playing possum, Harpo keeps hands stiff at his side, obedient fingers parallel. College muteness episode: in bed with a woman, I faked speechlessness (“protest muteness,” like a “protest vote”). Lumpish dummy, I imitated my father’s mouth, closed in its role-model slot-mode. Harpo, virtuoso of martyred stillness, looks creamy and digestible.  Ω  We ritually ingest Harpo’s dead body, erect knife plunged in his core. Even in jest, a dead Jewish body in 1938, a stake in his vampire heart, is no joke. Even a fake dead Jew is real. Harpo lies pretend-dead on the stage. Lucille Ball stands over the man whose murder is cute, not tragic. Wearing a dirndl, she is not yet Desi’s wife, not yet a TV mogul, not yet funny. She officiates at Harpo’s death: the comic torch is passed. Long ago, playing with my sister, I pretended to die. The game, which I’d invented, demanded that the leader say, “I’m dead forever”; melodramatically, I elongated the word forever, its three syllables a descending dirge. Sometimes I assigned my sister the coveted role of saying “I’m dead forever.” I hadn’t yet heard of Harpo, but I was already playing dead.

Room Service   |    119

Passé Punchy’s Humiliated Buddy Huddle

At the Circus (1939)

These humiliating moments of the human soul, this journey through torments, this animal thirst for selfsalvation, are terrible and sometimes evoke trepidation and commiseration even in an investigator!  —fyodor dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I Plural Badges: Paranoid Overpacking  You can’t emigrate, or escape pogrom, without a badge. Harpo opens his jacket to show at least eight: his daffy expression implies, I won a sweepstakes I can’t understand.  µ  He belongs to many trade unions; populism is his coat’s secret lining. Multiple badges assert comic defense against lack. Resourcefulness-unto-sleaziness: witness Harpo’s pawnshop plurality, the more the merrier, too much food on the table. Abundance revolts against absence: when we see the presence of many things, we may understand that at bottom there lies nothing. When I travel, I overpack: what if I run out of underwear? My father kept many pens in his jacket pocket. How many pens does a thinker need? The Number Three  With a formalist analysis I could go haywire; I’m a numerology nut. The Marx Brothers, without Zeppo, present the number

120

Three as an object of philosophical, kabbalistic study. (The fraternal triangle is an enigma Dostoevsky wrestled in The Brothers Karamazov.) Harpo, separable from Chico and Groucho, brings up, for investigation, the problem of Two versus One. Harpo plays checkers with a man; a seal watches. Duck-mouthed, Harpo glares at his aquatic accomplice: Don’t bother me. I’m absorbed in checkers, a heavy intellectual sport.  Ω  The seal’s presence assists our investigation of the number Three. Harpo and the checker-playing companion are One and Two. The seal is Three. “Seal” also means insignia, authorization, as in Dickinson’s phrase “ ’Tis the Seal Despair.” Agony instills pride; she claims ontological superiority by embracing gloom.

Identification Kit: The Middle Distance    Ω  Put this photo into the Identification Kit, my repertoire of gestural defenses. Can I make Harpo’s dumbness my own? Can I steal his shocked refusal to recognize a brother’s superiority? Harpo seems to be looking at the camera, but he is looking at nothingness, or at matter’s refusal to manifest. Harpo turns himself into wisp, into vapor, by staring too intensely. I recognize this evacuation trick, a revolving door into mystical experience: Harpo uses downfall as a passport into a middle distance reinterpreted as salvation. The Pleasure of Being In-between  Harpo wants to be an “in-between”— an identity Judy Garland bemoaned, singing, “I’m just an in-between.” He juts his head between Groucho’s and Chico’s; head-jut reflects in-betweenness, wedgeability.  Ω  The tension between the Marx Brothers lies in Harpo’s bottomed-out relation to Groucho: fraternal disparity—one brother talks, the other doesn’t—produces sexual unease or tick-

At the Circus   |    121

lishness, a constant, unnerving arousal. If you can’t “come,” you can’t calm down.

Citing: Harpo as Père-Lachaise  Groucho starts singing. Harpo silently imitates: reenactments pay Pavlovian tribute to nearby occurrences. Harpo enters Being by citing what has happened, whether or not he loves these events. He cites for the pleasure of existing in Being’s afterglow. I cite, therefore I am. Walter Benjamin gestured toward a work of historiography consisting entirely of quotations: to bathe in Benjamin’s portly afterglow, I assemble here a work composed entirely of snatches from Harpo’s films. Can this investigation strive for charm by lacking a program? I won’t leave the cemetery until I’ve deposited a small pebble on each gravestone. My pebble is language. Jewish obligation: place a stone on the grave. Hermeneutical obligation: place a sentence on every gesture of Harpo’s, even if my avalanche buries him alive. Prowling for detritus, Harpo finds a small dark lint-object and stealthily pockets it. We can’t verify its identity. And now we hear for the first time Harpo’s name: Punchy. Chico, uttering it, accords Harpo the bliss of being named, even if it is a degraded, joke name, not biblical or heroic. Enema or Douche?  The horn-prosthesis— tucked into Harpo’s pants, above the belt— sticks out, like a Victor Talking Machine horn or a lightbulb, signaling “idea.”  µ  The douche or enema looks like a soap bubble; a black gumball has replaced his penis, which, not hidden in underpants, blossoms into a round demon that doesn’t distress him. The last time I saw a douche was in the crawl space beneath my parents’ bathroom sink. Was it a douche or a syringe? Shiny or matte? Rubber or plastic? I admired its pouch, flat as a gin flask, and its status as out-ofbounds treasure, without a revealed function. I presumed that my mother owned it, and that it had a secret, aristocratic relation to her body, which exacted obediences from tucked-away objects.

122   |    Later Astonishments

Romancing the Brother: Harpo’s Lack of Homophobia  Romeo-style, Harpo’s kissing mouth climbs the trellis of Chico’s arm.  Ω  Harpo farcically playacts homo. He lacks homophobia. He lacks phobia, period. And yet, if you stigmatize him, he will react with lightning-force. Quickness is ghetto. Displaying mood ESP, he exhibits a virtuosity of attunement. Doubting Thomas, Pointing  Why does Doubting Thomas point? He doesn’t believe in Christ’s resurrection until he touches the wound; he points to it, probes it, and is convinced. I like a pointing finger’s severity and minimalism. Harpo points. I point to Harpo. Doubting Thomas pointed and touched. If I take Doubting Thomas as ur-pointer, then I am, by pointing to Harpo, pointing to a wound, a resurrection: I animate a dead body. I dreamt, last night, of a performance artist, unclothed, discussing nudity. Her vagina behaved as a pointer—a compass, aimed toward my next invention. The Dead Brother  Punchy, belying his belligerent name, sweetly sleeps on a train cot. He pantomimes somnolence to secure a trait we can recognize and love. Staying comatose protects the simpleton from danger. Harpo wants to be recognized, at whatever cost, even as the dead brother—mortified, incompetent. Whose dead body shadows the Marx Brothers? Axiom: a corpse lies behind any artistic creation. Through silence, Harpo maintains the skeleton’s sacred intactness and keeps worship circulating. “Aye, Aye, Skipper” Routine  Ω  Ignored, Harpo salutes Chico’s and Groucho’s backs. Soldierstiff walk and reflex salute respond to expired stimuli: he reacts to an event—Groucho’s flag—already in the past. Harpo salutes as a way of noting that the other’s back is turned. The salute doesn’t impugn or rebuke the other. But it measures the moat of nonrecognition

At the Circus   |    123

surrounding Harpo, whose gestures calibrate increments of separation and closeness. How aloof are we? How attached? I call this salute the “Aye, aye, Skipper” routine, in reference to the TV show Gilligan’s Island, which ran from 1964 to 1967. Gilligan loves his plump boss, the Skipper; I recognize this chummy erotics—an underling (Harpo), adopted by an older man (Chico) who is exasperated by the younger fellow’s clumsiness but won over by his cuteness. Gilligan’s loyalty to the Skipper has a demonic, Jonestown excess. Toward grammar-school teachers I felt Gilligan’s dumb servitude—and I still feel toward authority, including my own, a “fake” (striking a false note) tenacity, unto shrillness. Stoplessly I salute, even if the salute and the Skipper are fake.

Being Passé as a Matter of Principle  Stick to obsession, even after its occasion has passed: remain passé as a matter of principle. Harpo continues to march, though the occasion for marching—the justification for his queer conduct—has lapsed.  µ  Marching in a void, Harpo retires from plot by retreating into a limbo zone of reflexive pantomime. He keeps performing an action that has proved ineffective but that still excites his muscles. Didn’t Kant define art as purposive purposelessness? I nurse a shadow purpose: to restore continuity (even if I splinter Harpo’s work into fragments); to claim the right to be preoccupied; to experience the shipwrecked pleasure of being the only person to consider my subject central.

II Mimicking Another’s Worry: A Gesture I Love  Harpo enacts a diasporic strategy of psychological and political survival. We mimic excess worry and become known as worriers, a neurotic tribe. Harpo feigns neurosis, has none. His eyes cross and glaze—manipulations he performs to make his eyes, as objects, more readable, more alarmed, and to please tired, sag-cheeked Chico. Like a mourner waking a corpse, Harpo slaps Chico to announce a new routine beginning. I love Harpo’s frenetic salute, its confident athleti-

124   |    Later Astonishments

cism, inaugurating a cogs-in-wheel sequence, an oiled future.  Ω  Chico always moves at one stolid tempo, while Harpo can freeze, accelerate, and attack.

Chiasmus Eyes  Harpo glances backward to Groucho, then forward to Chico. Harpo’s gaze sutures: he stitches two flaps of a wound. He doesn’t keen over family disunity, but his ricocheting glance—look at Chico, then at Groucho—repairs damage. With his eyes, Harpo trills: Chico and Groucho are two adjacent pitches, half-steps, joined by an oscillating gaze. It takes a nervous temperament to gather scattered kindred, kindling. Is Harpo cross-eyed? My mother calls herself cross-eyed. Harpo could cross his eyes, when needed, as part of his suturing kit. The poetic term chiasmus indirectly describes Harpo’s crossed eyes and his technique of uniting Chico and Groucho with a tremolo-glance. Chiasmus, according to the Oxford American Dictionary, is “a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order.” Harpo’s chiasmatic eyes fertilize the atmosphere with a festive mood of crossed wires and drunken doublings. A Gesture I Love: Backward Wave  Elizabeth Bishop, in her villanelle “One Art” writes, “—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) . . .” She sequesters the unspecified gesture in parentheses. She keeps it private, as if to prevent herself from losing it a second time. Harpo has many gestures I love, and each gesture, when I point it out, seems a vanished gesture, or one I will lose if I don’t describe or freeze it.  Ω  Thus Harpo presents his send-off wave, his trademark, the hand backward, like a “Heil Hitler” salute, or a mayor waving to a town he will soon cease to govern, or a vaudeville star acknowledging eclipse. Writing about this gesture, grabbing it, I say good-bye to it.

At the Circus   |    125

Babyishness as Buffer against Execution: Castration  Poetry permits babyishness; self-conscious prose violates etiquette. Deeper conundrum, deeper than wordplay (the lowest of the verbal arts, lower than mime): why value babyishness? Infantile gestures flee specificity; they decoy. Babyishness is not the thing itself, but the screen over the Ding an sich. Babyishness veils the tabernacle. When Chico proposes a cigar, Harpo’s leg appears out of nowhere and offers a light—match tied to shoelaces below striped, dandyish socks. Harpo’s body as a whole doesn’t enter the frame. Just the leg, and the shoe, holding a match. Studying Harpo’s films, I hunt for body parts, cropped. When a close-up renders a limb separate from the whole, we enter castration country. For a comic, castration can be an asset. Harpo reaps intangible benefits by allowing himself to be castrated (metaphorically), to become just a shoe, a prop. The viewer isn’t castrated; Harpo’s unpiecing reinforces the viewer’s wholeness. I can’t master this castration discourse, but bringing it up excites me, intellectually. Tongue between Teeth: “Oh Boy”  Harpo sneezes. He feels a second sneeze approach, but when it fails to arrive, he smiles.  µ  This close-up rewards a viewer who wants a good look at Harpo putting tongue between teeth. He smiles not to exhibit happiness but to prove himself thick-skinned, and to escape the shame of a promised sneeze that never came. Either he conquers shame or disguises it with jovial wallpaper. I, too, am guilty of smiling with tongue between teeth: a gesture I must say good-bye to? I certainly must say good-bye to the fantasy that someone will love my tongue-between-teeth propensity, my inability to smile correctly. I must say good-bye to the hope that my inability to smile normally will be appreciated. Harpo with tongue between teeth—fake smile—resembles my father’s uncle, Werner, a mailman, saying, “Oh boy.” Werner married a Catholic and stayed in Nazi Germany during World War II; though he was never sent to concentration camps (or so I believed), he was barred from bomb shelters during air raids. Werner said, “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy”—a fake

126   |    Later Astonishments

exclamation, undelighted—when opening our Christmas gift: a tie? Socks? He gave us, every year, a box of See’s Candies. Werner, growing old, repeated “oh boy” to feign enthusiasm. He said “boy” with a German accent, the o complicated and nasal. “Boy” sounded like “buoy.” Big pause between the words “oh” and “boy.” Oh, pause, boy. Harpo in motion is genuine, though Harpo cut into bits is fake. Excerpts belong to the “oh boy” regime of enforced happiness, simulacral reciprocity. I’m not really excited to receive this tie for Christmas, but I’ll exclaim, “Oh boy.” I’ll act surprised. I’ll parrot an idiom that’s not natively mine.

Harpo outside the Diegesis  Groucho directly addresses the audience— “There must be a way of getting the money without the Hays Office interfering.” He breaks the diegetic frame, our trust in film plot as a leak-proof structure. Harpo has already been banished from the diegesis. I shouldn’t say “diegesis.” Shame surrounds the inaccessible word. Linguistic self-consciousness is taboo: Roland Barthes writes, in Writer Sollers, “There is still a very powerful taboo (with the author as witch doctor) against making language into a subject, and doing so through language itself. Society seems as anxious to restrict language which deals with language as it does language which deals with sex.” Harpo’s silence prevents him from entering the diegesis; if he entered, he’d break it apart, so he stands outside, like Barbara Stanwyck in the last scene of Stella Dallas—melodramatic star ejected from propriety’s mansion. Groucho Upside Down  Groucho, wearing a ballerina costume, walks, with magnetic shoes, upside down on the ceiling. (I want to cast him in Bishop’s poem “Sleeping on the Ceiling”; or I’d appoint him the eerie insectman—“inverted pin”—who appears in Bishop’s “The Man-Moth.”) With a suddenly high voice, Groucho begs Eve Arden (a butch actress who undermines, with lithe snideness, the men around her), “Help, Pauline; how do I get down from here?” Harpo gets his wish: to unman Groucho, to reverse him, to undo his linguistic edge. Groucho’s sissy butt, sheathed in sateen, confronts the camera.  Ω  Harpo climbs up and unties white

At the Circus   |    127

ankle boots: when Groucho falls, Harpo, appalled, covers his face with his hands: a gesture I love. He plays peek-a-boo with crucifixion: now I see your martyrdom, now I don’t. My assumption: Harpo wants to see Groucho turn girlish and ashamed. It may be false to presume that Harpo wants something. Perhaps his gestures don’t reflect a psychological situation. Yet they kick off embarrassments and exaltations that it is my moral duty to investigate with sacrificial thoroughness.

III Harpo Knows Nothing: Inability to Understand Irony  “Brilliant deduction,” says Groucho, dismissively. Harpo nods, not understanding sarcasm, and we see a close-up of his incomprehension. Any close-up of Harpo provokes commentary. Why this tropic shadow, this fretwork of branches and abstract lines?  µ  (There needn’t be an answer.) Harpo’s face sags: aging, he sits isolated, separate, occupying an irony-uncomprehending vacuum. Pathos suddenly appears, apart from antics: we scrutinize Harpo’s divorce from an explanatory context, and his failure to grasp duplicity. (Poignant temporality: these films, spanning twenty years, allow us to watch brothers grow old.) Harpo, Chico, and Groucho pace—intercut with a shot of pacing monkeys. Perplexed, Harpo stares forward. His dilemma: he can’t fathom machinations he is forced to mimic. Adult language—Groucho’s and Chico’s blathering—upsets Harpo, and he needs the sedative of blankness. His horn’s ball is the communicative bubble he depends on, its language merely binary—honk, not-honk. Electroshock of Two-Way Recognition: Infantile Startle Reflex  An Orpheus, Harpo plays trombone to pacify circus lions. Here comes a racist scene that allies Harpo’s simplicity with African Americans. A chorus of black kids cowers under a tarpaulin and says, “Harpo doesn’t belong to the human race.” Jerry-rigging his honker into a flute, Harpo dances and

128   |    Later Astonishments

toots, a Pied Piper of Hamelin. His arrested gaze expresses astonishment at being noticed, and surprise at the children’s song-anddance.  Ω  Double electroshock of stupefaction comes from recognizing and being recognized. Metaphysical depths reside in Harpo’s silence. (Why must I insist on depth?) His startled face recalls the infant’s “startle reflex” as described by Stephen Greenblatt (quoted by Rosalind Krauss in Bachelors): “the ‘startle reflex’ one can observe in infants: eyes widened, arms outstretched, breathing stilled, the whole body momentarily convulsed.” My startle reflex, when I look at Harpo, echoes his astonishment at kids and camera, whose coldness he imitates. He mimics the surprise he aims to provoke. Perhaps Harpo has no intentions: startled babies have wishes, not purposes. Or maybe, lacking wishes, they merely experience stoppage.

Harpo Swings Toscanini  African American choristers convene to confirm Harpo’s magic; a ringleader mentions Toscanini. Harpo proudly plucks his own jacket: the reference anoints him. He accepts his role as maestro of the minstrels, Toscanini of the underclass. Simple Harpo enjoys other simple folk, as Judy Garland bonded with “retarded” kids in A Child Is Waiting. (For Judy, late in her career, the disabled population formed a plausible entourage.) Harpo disseminates speechlessness by sticking his horn, as mute, in a kid’s trumpet bell.  Ω  Harpo resembles Robert Preston as The Music Man’s Harold Hill, a quack bandleader who abuses kids with misinformation. Shirley Jones (or, in the Broadway original, Barbara Cook) straightens Preston up and prevents The Music Man from seeming queer: without this librarian ingénue’s presence, the transient bandleader who pals around with kids might seem pedophilic. Harpo reminds me of my first band-teacher, fourth grade, Mr. Tristan, enthusiastic about my cornet ravings. I chose cornet because it was smaller and cuter than a trumpet. A cornet, like a cheese Danish, could never be cruel.

At the Circus   |    129

Harpo’s Wide-Open Mom-Mouth  Harpo, with wide-open Mom-mouth, backs away from the choristers, who outnumber him, though they take him seriously as magic-worker. Harpo’s gaping mouth repeats my mother’s awestruck expression, photographed. She greeted me across her bedspread’s gulf, in a depressive, gray-blue house, which cost approximately $25,000 in 1959. Walter Benjamin had been dead nineteen years. He committed suicide forty-seven years ago today, September 26. Our house’s color struck an unsolid compromise between gray and blue. I regret that truce. Harpo’s Sideways Regime: Alienation Effect  Camera angles turn self-consciously jazzy and expressionistic, recalling The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner paintings. The composition’s tilted perspective— forty-five-degree, jazz-age, modernist—portrays societal norms gone sideways, Harpo’s slant exile into a black neighborhood, his dreamworld disengagement from gravity and whiteness. And yet Harpo instigated this askew regime.  µ  Harpo, interloper, inspired the camera’s alienation effect, its Circean syncopation. Does he promote alienation, or is he the victim-eye of its hurricane? Alienated prose interrupts a reader’s security. To refuse authoritarianism, Harpo instigates alienation. Camera-angle eccentricity enthrones Harpo as king of depositioning, of estrangement. He creates limbo with the harp; and yet, limbo (mongrelism, slumming, nightside-visiting) reunites Harpo with his harp-voice, the Jericho-sign of Jewish song. In the Bible, David plays harp, whereby he exorcises the evil spirit from Saul. Strumming against Goliath, Harpo shows off a witch doctor’s or Jewish psychoanalyst’s cathartic charms. All for Saul’s—or Chico’s—sake. All for the leader. Raptness, Concentration  Humming “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the black chorus congregates, fascinated, around Harpo. What goods will he bestow? He drives finitude’s chariot. Serious at the harp, he ignores the audience. We see, in profile, his Greek-coin handsomeness, his schnozz. Harpo’s polyglot, hi-lo music, like Cab Calloway’s, shifts between Heifetz and boogie-woogie, Rachmaninoff and Tin Pan Alley—but Harpo’s facial

130   |    Later Astonishments

expression never changes. He strums and plucks with the focus of a diamond-cutter: monocled tradesman, holy man, devoted to Jewish “learning.” I am learning Harpo. It is small-time Torah. I train my magnifying glass on his fraying shrine. Harpo’s rapt concentration, whether jeweler’s or learner’s, musician’s or simpleton’s, provides a model for how to resist marketplace noise. Praising the “sustained attention” of gazing at a painting, art historian T. J. Clark observes: “Pleasure and astonishment seem to me qualities that the world around us, most of the time, is conspiring to get rid of.” Harpo’s concentration at his harp serves as one example, long ago (1939), of pleasure and astonishment achieved through sustained attention.

Celan’s Speech-Grille as Harpo’s Strings  Through the disenfranchising scrim of Harpo’s harp, an African American girl listens, dwelling behind bars. (Paul Celan invoked a similar scrim in his poem “Sprachgitter,” which Michael Hamburger translates as “Language Mesh” and John Felstiner as “Speech-Grille.”) Harpo’s strings—parallel lines—are a prison web. Through the cage, he peers at the girl; as in a mirror, she stares back.  Ω  If we succumb to Harpo’s fakir power, we become this mesmerized girl. Or else we occupy Harpo’s vantage; we see the speechless girl across the harp-string Styx. Music can’t be visualized. However, we can see Harpo’s labor at the harp, and we can see the strings—a fretted threshold. The camera depicts strings as a filigree-wall, the hair-ribbons of Harpo’s wish to be an articulate Tos­ canini. Harpo’s Hands: Kaspar Hauser  In a close-up of Harpo’s hands, toward the piece’s Liszt­ ian climax, we see a blur of bravura fingerwork, a Kaspar Hauser idiot-savant dexterity.  Ω  Harpo sweats, behind bars; we press our noses against the aquarium and glimpse his numinous flailings. He embodies the poetics

At the Circus   |    131

of “let my people go” (let my people glow?): focused, stressed-out labor establishes Harpo as liberation-worthy. When I mention Kaspar Hauser, please imagine the actor Bruno S., deranged, playing the abused hero of Werner Herzog’s film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser: Bruno S., bruised, looks like a guy I slept with three decades ago, a businessman whose forehead seemed dented. He pretended to be straight, acted autistic, and handled my penis as if wishing to ruin it. His own organ seemed microtonal, too interstitial for ordinary nomenclature to capture. Kaspar Hauser, astonished in a Platz, intones one contextless line, Ich will ein Reiter werden (I want to become a rider). Bloodlines of Kaspar and Harpo might lead backward to emperors.

The Other Is Lethal  After performance, Harpo hides from applause by cowering behind his harp’s grille. Good-bye to mastery. In prehistory, he underwent efforts to make himself legibly Harpo, to align his humiliation with an audience’s laughter, to frame the harp solo’s unpandering seriousness with the fool’s people-pleasing antics. No one will pay to hear him play harp unless self-belittling business surrounds the solo. Right now I’m listening to jazz drummer Max Roach, who died in 2007. Theodor Adorno didn’t understand jazz, and didn’t understand that his friend Walter Benjamin was a ragpicker, not a Marxist theorist; Adorno didn’t understand improvisation, chaos, flux between texts, irregular citation, apparent disorganization. My assumption: the other is lethal. You, reader, qualify as an other. God forbid I greet you directly. If I knew what you wanted, I might be able to satisfy you. From Guilt to Craft: Misinterpreting How  Chico asks Harpo how many sheep must he count to fall asleep. In bed, Harpo raises one finger. Chico then asks, “How can you fall asleep at such a tense time?” As reply, Harpo reveals a sheep: black head, white body.  µ  Harpo misinterprets the pivot word how. Chico means, “How dare you fall asleep at such a tense time!” Harpo transposes accusation into a craftsmanship query: “what technique did you use to fall asleep?”

132   |    Later Astonishments

Harpo, like Jesus, is a shepherd, or else the family’s black sheep—like the hero of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Antoine, the boy who can’t help doing wrong, plagiarizing Balzac when he simply means to worship Balzac. The actor who played Antoine, Jean-Pierre Léaud, fourteen years old in 1959, will always be fourteen.

Being Interpellated as “Punchy”: Nachas of Being Named  Harpo gives me nachas. (Nachas: Yiddish for “joy, or pride, especially from children.”) Harpo gives himself nachas—especially when anyone calls him Punchy. Being called Punchy gives Harpo nachas, as if he were his own grandchild. A simple matter: to be proud of one’s plebeian identity. Every time Chico says “Punchy,” he acknowledges that Harpo proudly possesses a name. “You’re a coward,” says Chico. Harpo agrees, aims a (water) pistol at his head, and opens his mouth.  Ω  Harpo gladly impersonates suicide—to placate Chico, and to please himself by mechanically reverting to a masochistic position. He’d touch a hot burner, if only for the ease of bounce-back. Mechanicity: for a punchy constitution like Harpo’s, a plunge into hell is comforting. “Punchy” implies repetitive, aggressive, punching-bag reverberations. Threshold moods—resistant to words—huddle in the nooks of Harpo’s act. Babyishness as Estate  Truffaut’s 400 Blows predicted May 1968’s revolt. Harpo’s tiny revolts—each gesture, in its punchiness, an affront to ordinary speech, run-of-the-mill communication—predict revolutions that haven’t yet happened: psychological insurrections, transforming society. As Adorno wrote: “Only by sacrificing life did Benjamin become the spirit that lived by this idea: there must be a human estate that demands no sacrifices.” There must be a human estate that permits Harpo’s flock—babyish sleepers—to flourish. “He’s asleep like a baby,” says Chico of Goliath, a circus strongman played by profes-

At the Circus   |    133

sional wrestler Nat Pendleton. Harpo folds his hands in prayer formation and rests his head on their imaginary pillow.  µ  (Babyishness only works if Chico watches your charade.) To Chico and the audience, Harpo demonstrates that he understands instructions and has the power to translate them into sign language. Eagerly Harpo slips, an undetected thief, directly into the word sleep itself.

Literalness Produces Deviation  Dividing up the job, Chico says, “I look over here, you look over there, and if anything happens, we’ll meet right here in the middle.” He means “middle” in a general sense, but Harpo interprets the word literally, as if it signified an exact spot: he chalks a cross on the floor. Literalness creates a dilemma: if we’re supposed to meet at the chalk mark, how can we both fit? If we ignore the meaning (find each other) and follow the letter of the law (meet at this precise location), we’ll betray the intention under the guise of respecting it. Literalism produces deviation. By slavishly obeying orders, by copying, he swerves. Fidelity to Harpo’s performances lets my own deviation breathe. Harpo as Corpse: Goosing  Harpo hangs like a corpse from the coathook. With a gramophone’s automatic hand, he scratches Goliath’s curly head.  µ  Maybe Harpo feels an irrepressible wish to touch a strongman’s curls. Harpo randomly gooses. Not for eroticism’s sake. Simply because he requires the wiggy texture of someone else’s irritation. An itch drives Harpo to commit random (400 Blows) mischief, to spoof the teacher, to ruin clean surfaces with deviant scrawl. Prank: Hugging Himself  Pranks escalate: one mistake piles upon another, and the assemblage hardens into a destiny. Thus Antoine in 400 Blows turns criminal; tiny, prankish deviations accumulate. Harpo never goes to jail, but we’d be arrested if we imitated him. Harpo, smiling, scissors-open Goliath’s pillow. Cutting makes Harpo happy. He sees nothing when he pulls back shredded blanket flaps, but

134   |    Later Astonishments

nothingness fascinates rather than depresses. The task proves absorbing: momentarily he escapes the obligation of flashing a response. Why do I seek in a crowd-pleaser like Harpo a model for ignoring the audience and insulating my words from the other’s demand? Why treat a silent clown as a model for linguistic seriousness? The fan blows pillow feathers; gleefully jumping, Harpo hugs himself.  Ω  Who else but Harpo would understand the pleasure of being ablaze with valueless feathers, the pleasure of opening the pillow and creating, from naught, an illusion of snow? Who else would understand the pleasure of disemboweling Goliath’s cushion; of being Absolute Harpist, Absolute David; of serving as unacknowledged legislator of one’s people; of acting with scissors, as if scissors were capable of the stitch or stich of poetic speech? I imagine that Harpo’s self-hugging habit began as a child on East 93rd Street, though we needn’t seek antecedents for onscreen mischief. A porn actor, having sex on camera, experiences physical sensation; Harpo, hugging himself, jumping up and down, opening his mouth in glee at tumbling feathers, must actually be excited. Performers don’t always fake it.

Mise-en-Abyme: A Fictional Covert within a Covert Already Established as Fake  Harpo dresses up as Santa Claus, with white beard and Salvation Army bell. Back and forth he goes, whistling “Jingle Bells,” amid falling feathers: Harpo and Chico have created a simulacral blizzard in Goliath’s sleeping compartment, and Harpo believes this scissor-forged fiction of “White Christmas.” Harpo, believing his own fake storm, unleashes a miseen-abyme, a delusion with no “outside”: his comic gestures consume their frames and create a horizonless prankishness, without outlines or consequences. I was haunted, as a child, by Alexander Key’s fantasy novel The Forgotten Door, in which an extraterrestrial boy falls through a trapdoor and lands on earth. Amnesiac, he can’t find the door back to his former planet, though he temporarily adjusts to Kansas or Wisconsin, some midwestern prank of blankness. Surrounded by fake snow, Harpo forgets that he was the one who eviscerated the pillow and provoked the feathery psychosis.

At the Circus   |    135

Harpo and the No One: Lending a Hand  A lullaby startles Harpo: in his face I see no fatigue, no age, only laudable receptivity to Chico’s touch.  µ  Brotherly amorousness: tonal contrast between Harpo’s pallor and Chico’s swarthiness counts as gender difference. Harpo shifts his nincompoop gaze between Chico and camera, which serves as the No One. Harpo and the No One: sorry to bring up Paul Celan again. I hadn’t planned to emphasize poetry, difficulty, opacity, the impossibility of communicating traumatic experience. Celan, in his poem “Psalm,” heretically reverses psalmodic expectation by addressing God as “No One.” When Harpo stares near-directly at the camera, he looks toward us as the No One. Harpo is not blank—we are. Mirroring our blankness, he proves us a big No One. He “calls us” on our blankness. Illuminating our zero, he lends a hand: he doesn’t, Thomas-style, doubt our blankness. In Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein admits disinclination to lend a hand. Teachers instructed her to be helpful, but she remembers spending “our time at home mostly eating fruit and reading books,” and she “never could remember how we had lent a hand.” Lazy yet industrious, Stein and Harpo lend a hand unconventionally: their performances encourage recluses to avoid remorse. After scissoring up the mattress, Harpo burrows into its womb-innards, its catacomb—an escape from surveillance and from lending a hand. Limp Hands of Trickster-Victor  Chico slaps Harpo’s back, as if to burp him: “Punchy!” The name loosely describes Harpo’s effect on the world. He punches. Note his spasmodic fingers.  µ  Limp hands can serve a virile purpose: with trickster hands, this victorious baby ousted the strongman Goliath. Harpo’s face, contortionist, self-smothering, collapses in silent laughter. Hands that earlier played harp now hang helplessly; flags, they announce the nationality of Aufhebung, of rising from servitude’s ashes. Sorry to use that Hegelian word, Aufhebung, sublation, a word I can’t quite

136   |    Later Astonishments

define, though I’ve grown to depend on it, as I depend on Harpo’s limp hands dangling from his wrists. Aufhebung puts a shine on the position of dwelling at the bottom. Harpo scrunches up his eyes to occlude vision. My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Leaf, 1964, told the class that I wrinkled my nose and eyes when I smiled. Harpo died on September 28, 1964, the month I entered first grade. Today, September 28, the forty-third anniversary of Harpo’s death, I heard the New York Philharmonic perform Tchaikovsky, a composer whose emotionalism provoked homophobic disdain in Theodor Adorno. On today’s program: Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, which has flashy harp interludes and is based on Byron’s poem about a recluse incestuously tied to his sister. Manfred was Zeppo’s middle name—in memory of Manfred Marx, the oldest brother, who died at seven months old, on July 17, 1886. Coincidences! Forgive their skittering profusion. Stéphane Mallarmé describes himself as “a recluse,” “meditating, like a mystagogue, in the laboratory of my delight.” And he writes: “Now I breathe again, freed from a worry, a worry that in any case was less severe than the remorse I feel for having shared that worry with you.” I surround reflections on Harpo with reflections on the process of reflecting, and then feel remorse, and then tell you (No One) about the remorse, and then feel remorse for telling you. Self-conscious language, an unsocialized tendency, resembles auto­ phagia—taboo, like incest. Mallarmé’s persistent verbal self-correction satisfied a desire to evade categories and to intensify consciousness. The “mad” Swiss writer Robert Walser, who died, in 1956, while walking in snow, composed self-conscious prose not to pursue a dogmatic program but to express a temperamental trait—a wish to confide, and a fear of secrecy’s gangrenous consequences.

IV Hand Pleasures: Fit Elucidation  Playing tic-tac-toe on a horse’s hide, Harpo evinces a tactile love of chalk and of local, hand-centered pleasures. In his solid hand, performing “grasp,” I see a model for how to avoid inundation and how to flee the many. Existence needs explainers. Am I a fit elucidator? Today, avoiding elucidation, I visited the Russian-Turkish baths on East

At the Circus   |    137

10th Street—men’s-only morning—and saw nude geezers, whose nationalities and sexualities remained shadowy.

Pleasures of the Holdable, the Unitary: Being an Egghead  Harpo holds an ostrich’s oversized egg.  µ  The egg iterates Harpo’s own embryonic nature, his love of tactile possessions, currency—breasts, buttons, bells. The egg, like a lightbulb, embodies Harpo’s bright idea. Anything, no matter how puny and obvious, functions for Harpo as an explosion. He enjoys the One. (How many sheep does it take him to fall asleep? One.) One God. One penis. One egg. I’m an egghead, writing for other eggheads. Anti-intellectualism is rampant in the United States. The interpreter counts for naught. Kaspar Hauser: Ich will ein Reiter werden. I want to be a rider, reader. Heroic designation? Watch this book devolve into shorthand: semaphore, like a death wish, suffocates communication. Two-Step Humiliation: Feeling It, Saying It  Years ago in New Haven, my boyfriend overheard a sidewalk tussle between a middle-aged woman who wore sunglasses on cloudy days (we called her “the widow”) and a young male graduate student, her boarder, who shouted, in a high-pitched voice, “I’ve never been so humiliated and embarrassed in my life!” Had the widow accused him of reneging on rent? Why shout your shame on a public sidewalk? Two steps to humiliation. First, you feel it. Second, you say it. The boarder’s high voice deepened the shame. Harpo’s scissors set adrift the bandstand that holds a Wagner-playing orchestra. Maestro Jardinet complains, “Jardinet Symphony has never been so humiliated.” He should have kept silent about his disgrace. Bad enough to be humiliated. Worse to spread the news. As I do here. Fear and the Cannon: Jocular Distance from the Phallus  Harpo spies a gorilla. The open-holed cannon, erect, meets its match in frightened Harpo,

138   |    Later Astonishments

with Betty Boop eyes and off-the-shoulder apparel more Jane than Tarzan.  Ω  He spoofs detachment from the ever-ready phallus. Castration gives him mileage. His armpits, unlike the gorilla’s, are shaved—to convey prepubescence? To avoid seeming a hairy Jew? To comply with decency codes, Hollywood whitewashing?

Harpo as Betty Grable: Eye-Swerve as Signal of Incommunicable Pleasure  Ω  In this sideways shot, Harpo, looking at the gorilla, poses as odalisque: flirtatious, hand behind head, tongue between teeth, smiling, Harpo simulates Betty Grable, wartime pinup. Eyeballs pivot to the far right, producing an athwart gaze, like Anna Moffo’s in a record-cover photo for Puccini’s La Rondine (RCA, 1966): pupils of her large eyes swerve to their corners, a swerve I seize as a sign of her superiority. Manifesto of the Baby-Men: Reinterpreting Bullying as Tickling  The gorilla’s foot tickles Harpo’s chest, as if in Marlene Dietrich’s Blonde Venus.  Ω  Harpo smiles: he likes playing Baby with whatever Mama or Papa comes along. Harpo lies back, closes his eyes, silently laughs, and receives intimate bedroom thrill from a fake beast’s hairy paw; Harpo, a delighted baby-man, reinterprets bullying as tickling, and interrupts a social code that gives short shrift to unclassifiable pleasures. Moral: consider the bully a flirt. You’re not persecuting me, you’re fondling me. Buddy Huddle  Always happy to join a gang, Harpo jumps into a nest of firemen holding a net. Harpo, sore thumb, wears a flamboyant jungle sarong.  Ω  We receive the de rigueur butt’s-eye view. Elevated to a buddy

At the Circus   |    139



huddle, as in football, Harpo dares the butch men to toss him out. The Marx Brothers are a buddy huddle with a country club’s exclusivity and a hammam’s heat. Abu Ghraib photos of humiliated, piled-up prisoners are a tortured buddy huddle. Harpo’s comic presence turns buddy huddle into nonsense. Entropic device, disorganizer, he pollutes the crammed congregation.

The Meaning of “Punchy”: Ointment at the Baths  In the final credits, quotation marks surround Harpo’s dubious name: “Punchy.” Punchy means pugilistic. Punchy means he needs his bottle. Punchy means he punches a time clock. Punchy means he likes spiked punch. Punchy means he sticks out. Punchy means playful. Harpo is a punch line, Algonquin Round Table–worthy, that he will never utter. Most customers at the Russian-Turkish baths, this morning, were silent. In the locker room, one man caught my fancy: an Orthodox Jew, nude. His ballooning stomach forced the belly-button into an outie; testicles hung somberly earthward. Meditatively, he rubbed medicinal ointment on his irritated penis, which had retreated, whether from timidity or dermatological distress, into a diminished nub. (This paragraph opens a can of worms.) Why feel guilty about my comic quest to see nude straight (or in-between) men who might have genealogical links to New York Jews of Harpo Marx’s era? I’m no historian. I merely investigate buddy huddles.

140   |    Later Astonishments

Freeze Rusty’s Anal Rage in a Cozy Void

Go West (1940)

That no one may discern my ground and ultimate will, for that I have invented my long bright silence. —friedrich nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I Unspeakable Coziness of Being Led by Chico: Interpellation  Why make such a big deal out of the Jewish penis? That’s a question I’ll answer later. Meanwhile, this chapter will avail itself of several theoretical allusions, but don’t be alarmed. We’re going west; we’re fleeing ratiocination and, while we’re at it, extermination; we’re in the middle of Harpo’s film career; the films, though more elaborate, permit Harpo fewer innovative lunacies. Nonetheless, every Harpo gesture is sacred and equal: each bears witness to his actuality, even if the actual seems to take a backseat, in this book, to the imagined. We could easily mistake Harpo (who, in his role as “Rusty,” is staring fixedly at the camera and holding a carpetbag, like Walter Benjamin’s mysterious briefcase, which disappeared after his suicide, and which contained a manuscript he valued more than his own life) for a stupefied beast, a “retard,” or a stranded, disoriented refugee.  Ω  Exile leaves

141

him stunned and motionless, yet he seems happy to be held—Winnicott called it a “holding environment”—by incomprehensible etiquette-systems that Chico, who leads his confused pupil through language’s hazings, has mastered. Harpo, a grown-up baby, exhibits neoteny—the presence of childish remnants in adult facial features. Neoteny boosts box office. Chico cozily interpellates him by saying “my brother”: “Is this the right way for my brother to get on the train for the West?” (We owe “interpellation” to Althusser, the hard-core French Marxist who went crazy and killed his wife.) Ideology hails me, even if I don’t want to be greeted. Harpo’s bovine placidity resembles the quiescence of the subject mutely awaiting ideology’s call. Harpo, when branded as “my brother,” enters definition’s cattle-pen.

Say Tune a Me (“C’est une amie ”)  Here’s what goes on between pockets of brothers habituated to each other.  µ  Like a fork or fishing rod, Harpo’s scissors retrieve money from Groucho’s pocket: this suggestive close-up shows how Jewish men penetrate and swindle each other. Is it my life’s project to ennoble and enshrine Jewish brother-brother incest? I used to play a “c’est une amie” game with my older brother, who learned the phrase in seventh-grade French. He’d shout, “Say Tune a Me!” (Sit on Me.) And I’d assume flight position. Riding his legs, I pretended to be an airplane; he pretended to be the runway. We’d dash into our bedroom for a “Say Tune a Me” session after noticing troubling idiosyncrasies, like a babysitter’s elbow or a crouching neighbor’s butt crack. Moffo Eye-Swerve, Its Dubitable Relevance to Harpo  Anna Moffo’s dramatic eyes swerve: in a 45-rpm-rec­ ord-sleeve photo (Ennio Morricone songs from the film Menage Italian Style), her irises move far to the left, though her face doesn’t follow suit.  µ  When I attended Moffo’s master class in 1987, I parroted her eye-swerve, though I lacked the big eyes necessary to pull off the stunt—a delusional instant of trying to

142   |    Later Astonishments

convince her, from my front-row seat, that I was her emissary. Harpo—a five-letter word ending in o, like “Moffo”—also pivots his eyes. Are alphabetical analogies off-limits?

Uriah Heep Gesture  Harpo makes the Uriah Heep hand-washing motion and draws money from Groucho’s pocket with a fishing wire. The name “Uriah Heep,” emblem of Jewish hoarding, sounds like “heap of usury” or “urine.” This creep fascinates David Copperfield: “I found Uriah reading a great fat book, with such demonstrative attention that his lank forefinger followed up every line as he read, and made clammy tracks along the page (or so I fully believed) like a snail.” My slow reading of Harpo, like Uriah’s studious applications, leaves a sticky residue. Buried in Harpo’s and Uriah’s hand gestures is an anti-Semitic image of craven hunger and quibbling finickiness. Hands rub together to generate heat, to combat persecution, and to avoid penury. Shyster-Brother Laying on of Hands  Groucho: “Something crooked going on around my pants . . .” Harpo, playing around with Groucho’s pockets, performs a shyster laying-on-of-hands. Shyster has an uncertain etymology—perhaps connected to German Scheisser (worthless person), or Scheisse (excrement). Shamed identities boil down to excrement. Next to shyster, in the dictionary, I find Shylock, the Jewish merchant of Venice, and “shy.” Knowing that I am shit, I become shy and learn to scheme. Harpo Invaginates Groucho: The Fold  Harpo, needing purchase on his brother’s oblivious shyster-body, scissors a hole in Groucho’s pocket, while Groucho and Chico shake hands. Thus the three brothers simultaneously touch each other—three-way of fake agreement, covert invasion.  Ω  Scissoring, I enter your body. I invaginate you, Bro. I punch holes in your solidity. Invagination, no crime, demonstrates wiliness, intrepidity, aesthetic ingenuity. Stéphane Mallarmé, though male, maximized invagination—a sensibility that Gilles Deleuze refers to, in The Fold, as a creased fan: “Ultimately the fold pertains to the sensitive side of the fan, to sensitiv-

Go West   |    143

ity itself, stirring up the dust through which it is visible, and exposing its own inanity.” Fold sentences to expose a thought’s underside. Pile up the folds, and you end up with a book—though maybe not the “total Book” Mallarmé sought, as Deleuze observes: “It is well known that the total book is as much Leibniz’s dream as it is Mallarmé’s, even though they never stop working in fragments.” How many times can I fold Harpo’s book-like body? Why not imagine that Harpo, too, is dreaming of a total Book?

Anatomy Lessons: Pointy Psychoanalytic Elbows  The Marx Brothers give anatomy lessons: opportunities slowly to look at men’s bodies, to marvel at how the parts fit together. I see a burn mark on Harpo’s left arm. I see slumped shoulders. Body parts speak, in passive, uncomplaining tones: no apology, no hypothesis. Harpo’s body parts dare us to give them a hard time. An Indian arrow pierces Harpo’s butt: he flashes the injury.  µ  Harpo contains an obscene undercurrent; he is a mooning underdog, penetrated and abject. You may think me a lascivious and small-minded promulgator of dirty agendas, but I consider myself a dutiful interpreter, alert to invaginations. Harpo’s elbows remind me of the pointy elbows of a psychoanalyst (Jewish) who once slugged me at an art opening.

II Harpo’s Connection to Chopin’s Études: Crabbiness as Heritage  Harpists depend on filigree—melody buried in digressive notes. Playing Chopin’s “Aeolian Harp” étude, I pretend my hands are an aristocratic Jewish Pole’s (Arthur Rubinstein’s). I work on becoming Harpo by practicing arpeggiation. I tickle the enemy, engage in rote compliance, splay my fingers, occupy the stage-mom POV. Toward crabbiness, a worldview, I feel patriotic: my ancestors were crabby, like Groucho. Harpo might be secretly cantankerous, but he acts cheerful, avoiding historical prognosis. I dread the moment when Harpo-immersion will end and I will be exiled from his presence. Yet I’m already exiled. He exiles—and shames—the viewer by not speaking: in this hypothesis, I

144   |    Later Astonishments

follow psychologist Silvan Tomkins, who observed, “If I wish to hear your voice but you will not speak to me, I can feel shame.”

Idiotic Enjoyment  Harpo doesn’t function as allegory: he behaves as extraneous irregularity. Harpo trips, kicks, prompts, spills, adjoins, abuts—he is not the stable thing-in-itself but the wrong element. That’s what Slavoj  izek means, I think, when he borrows the term “quilting point” from Z Lacan to describe the moment at which “a perfectly ‘natural’ and ‘familiar’ situation is denatured”—when we “add to it a small supplementary feature, a detail that ‘does not belong,’ that sticks out, is ‘out of place.’ ” Harpo, uncanny, sticks out from history, MGM, family, the 1930s. Sticking out, he creates inexplicable excess, which Žižek (via Lacan?) calls “idiotic enjoyment.” Try to embrace idiocy without moralizing it, without insisting that Harpo represents anything in particular—whether anarchy or desire. Stein Envy: Sudden Switch between Unhappiness and Happiness  Note Harpo’s dead-mouthed gaze of empty longing at the regular joe’s stein.  Ω  Harpo suffers stein envy. He wants—or pretends to want—the other man’s stein. Harpo’s blubber lip overplays longing, and thus makes fun of those who yearn. With puppy-love gaze, Harpo intercepts the sliding stein. He switches from unhappiness to happiness with the suddenness of Longinus’s skyey lightning-bolt—the classical, Sappho-derived definition of the sublime. Harpo leaps from sadness to joy, without foreshadowing. Cubist, he omits intermediate steps and opts for montage, a blunt juxtaposition. In the editing room of the emotions, he effects a saber cut between sorrow and elation, and throws away the middle footage. Laugh at the Stud Who Laughs at You  Harpo acts out a textbook of mannerisms that undo masculine aggressions. Women can be nasty, too, but Harpo’s foe is The Man—Gentile, cowboy, cop. Even Groucho plays the part of The Man who needs to be foiled and fouled. When The Man laughs, Harpo mimics laughter. To disarm the stud

Go West   |    145

laughing at you, imitate him and then insert a backhanded usurpation.  µ  Harpo’s “Queer Nation” copy machine—his capacity for insurrectionary imitation—never shuts down. Note: when he silently laughs, you can see his nonfunctioning uvula. His conscientious-objector larynx, like Bartleby, refuses.

Cabaletta  I dreamt, last night, of a satisfying Verdi cabaletta, rushing headlong toward revenge and self-aggrandizement. Cabalettas stimulate because they suddenly pop out from a calm context. Harpo, like a singer, switches, without transition, from cavatina (sweet song) to cabaletta (angry denunciation). Cabaletta: raising an angry fist, he grabs Chico’s plaid shirt.  µ  Harpo expresses sudden vendetta. His large hat comically exaggerates a maleness we fear is merely a stumpy financier’s. Then he retracts his fist and smiles. He cancels the cabaletta’s simulated fratricide. Limp Wave  Harpo’s limp, undirected waves are missives without addressee. He waves to anything in the vicinity, or to no one.  µ  He lacks shame about effeminacy; he willingly makes himself a public spectacle, as if foolishness—a limp wrist—were activism. Democratically, he disseminates affection. He doesn’t care if tall Westerners think him a freak. The butt of his joke is the West, supposedly his destination. The Squat Father’s Maternal Sign: Immoderation  Harpo touches the hand of Mr. Beecher, a standard-issue cowboy with a mustache: the actor, Walter Woolf King (who later appeared on the TV shows Marcus Welby, M.D., The Beverly Hillbillies, and I Dream of Jeannie), looks like Burt Reynolds in Deliverance, the male-male rape film. Harpo could play either role in The Miracle Worker—Annie Sullivan, Helen Keller. His head-shake reminds me of the

146   |    Later Astonishments

Gutfelds, my father’s mother’s family: Berlin Jews, of uncertain echelon. As a child I ate German cookies (stale gingerbread with off-white frosting) manufactured by Leibniz, the same name as the monad-inventing philosopher. If you regret your squat body, hold it upright, with astronaut stoicism. Harpo, explorer, sends his short body toward a proper West he may never reach. Sauntering, Harpo takes Chico’s arm, like Judy Garland and Fred Astaire at the climax of Easter Parade—and then jumps into Beecher’s arms.  Ω  It takes athletic forethought to leap and land securely, a held pinup. Harpo exhibits the dangerous overenthusiasm of the baby/ pervert unable to moderate excitement or aim it wisely. Beecher won’t welcome Harpo’s body. That’s why Harpo leaps—to experience the thrill of wrong destinations.

Why Harpo Looks Away  Harpo whistles, blows out a candle, and writes. Then, ashamed of text, he looks away.  Ω  Why does Harpo look away? He values detours. He looks away from men-who-speak. He looks away from his own uncontainable rage and self-destruction, emotions that psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold, in Soul Murder, calls anal rage—a sensation that Elfriede Jelinek, in such novels as The Piano Teacher, elevates into social critique. Harpo looks away from brother and Beecher but not from himself. Twisting, he avoids contact with the West, with habitual business. Why Harpo looks away is my religion; his athwart gaze asks an impossible question. Harpo looks away from stinting custom. Meanwhile, Chico—decoy and babysitter—keeps the mustached Gentile occupied. Do Harpo’s hands clutch his own waistband to keep the pants up or to reassure his fingers that reality exists? Chico scolds him for “talking too much—from now on you keep your hands shut.” The pattern: Harpo transgresses, and then Chico reprimands. This inevitable sequence—action, shame—delivers an abstract rhythm.

Go West   |    147

Wrong Hug  In a stagecoach, a female passenger stands to straighten her bustle. Subordinate, Harpo hugs her waist, as if she were furniture and he were fourteen.  µ  I remember hugging my mother in the hallway, near a door that led to the Other Part of the House— the East Berlin half (kitchen, rumpus room), divided from the West Berlin of the bedrooms. I was nearly her height. To avoid sentimentality, I amplified the hug into a claustral squeeze. In the cramped carriage, Harpo hugs the woman not to enjoy her body but to disorient her. Ever-plunging, he clings, like Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock. Contentless Bliss-Out Next to Western Man   µ  Blissed-out by playing with the woman’s bustle, Harpo leans toward indifferent Beecher. To muster manly corroboration, act like a girl. Mock the cold straightness of pinstriped operators who ignore your baby-faced charm. Harpo’s kerchief—reminiscent of my Apache scarves, purchased at JC Penney’s, seventh grade—has no overt gay motive. Harpo sticks tongue between teeth and squints—face folding, like a rosebud’s or fingerprint’s converging whorls, with an aggressive pressure that Shengold, in Soul Murder, might have called anal. Tongue between teeth, Harpo reforms—or cuts—his misbehaving, silent mouth, and closes eyes to block out Beecher’s crudeness. Harpo will play the dumb, silly baby to fit into the emotionally cramped Weltanschauung of the carnation-wearing Western man, not Jewish. The Freeze    µ  Up close to the con man’s face, Harpo stares, dumbfounded. His key tactic is the freeze. The freeze occurs (I’m no scientist) right before orgasm, or before any moment of exaltation and self-shattering. Harpo, buffeted by categories (man, woman; mature, immature; stupid, smart; Jewish, Gentile; appropriate,

148   |    Later Astonishments

inappropriate), freezes to arrest dialectical violence. His freeze exceeds its occasion. Emergency shutdown: Harpo’s system goes into shock, and the engine locks. Freeze signifies unbearable excitement. Freeze attempts reciprocity: Harpo freezes to align himself with a dumb Western man. To create a film still, I freeze the moving image. “Autohypnosis,” Shengold calls the tendency to freeze. Freezing, I pay attention to only one thing. I permit monomania. I dissect, postponing the spasm of synthesis. Amorous Petrarch wrote: I burn, I freeze.

Baby’s Bottom: Jutting Lip  The Western man needs a Marx signature. Illiterate Harpo rubber-stamps the paper. “On the bottom,” Beecher says, meaning the paper’s bottom. The bustle-wearing woman holds a baby; Harpo aims his rubber stamp at the infant’s bottom. Harpo confuses two meanings of bottom. Bottoms don’t embarrass him; he doesn’t shirk the responsibility of bearing witness to civilization’s anal undercurrents. Harpo’s lower lip registers a protest against ordinary discourse.  Ω  His jutting lip confirms my simplistic belief in revolution, even though I know that rebellion reproduces power and doesn’t merely overthrow it. Listening, he expresses indignation at straight talk: instrumental speech, as polite, functional people (or crooks) spin it, is Greek to Harpo, who distrusts status-quo ongoingness. He prefers the whimsically cloacal. Sometimes, lacking strength to squeeze my idiom into a conversation, I give up trying to be understood. Stocky Unambivalence  Beecher offers fifteen hundred dollars. Great deal! Harpo whistles (two fingers in mouth), stands, and shakes Chico’s hand.  Ω  Note Harpo’s uncensored muscularity: the arrowy, unfeigned hand, loyal to Chico, responds quickly. Stint not in its praise. Suddenly I’m worshiping straightness wherever I can find it. Harpo’s handshake, its shortstop abruptness and unambivalence, recalls the spark plug cheerful-

Go West   |    149

ness of a Mickey Rooney or a barrel-chested Miami retiree, good at baseball but better at adjudicating. I’ve never before admired stocky, umpire-glad men, but now I yearn for them, and construct prose boxes in their honor.

Usurpation of Baby Bottle  Harpo grabs the baby’s bottle and swigs it: opportunistic thirst. Outraged, Chico says “stop it”: shaming gestures crimp the fool, eager to upstage.  µ  Treating stolen milk as liquor, Harpo achieves a strange, dented machismo with his femme garb, his out-ofwhack kerchief, his baggy Western shirt, his Mom-wig. Plump muscular hands, harp-ready, advertise virtuosity in repose. Chico and the anonymous woman express censoriousness, but amoral Groucho tolerates bottle-usurpation. Groucho’s fake hirsuteness—blackface mustache—seems a Sadean entitlement, licensing Harpo’s descent into evil, if we call bottle-theft evil. The Blind Beggar  Each of Harpo’s gestures could be captioned. In The Prelude, William Wordsworth describes an emblematic blind beggar with a sign around his neck. Seeing the beggar, who wears “a written paper” explaining his identity, Wordsworth experiences shock: “Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round / As with the might of waters.” My mind turns round, caught by Harpo’s spectacle, a riveted chain of routines, each gesture separable, ready to be name-tagged. Around the neck of Harpo’s father, the tag said “tailor.” Scissors, the tailor’s tool, isolate gestures from natural flow. I pervert Harpo’s routines by scissoring them up. Fabric-Hound: Push the Man into the Carpetbag  The lady’s bustle, with a mind of its own, adheres to Harpo, mindless mindfulness’s best friend. “Give me back my bustle,” says the indignant woman: the inappropriate item of clothing always ends up affixed to Harpo, who may prefer fabric to people. I imagine him delighted by bedspreads, blankets, keys, belt loops, candy-cane wrappers, watch-faces, tumblers, coasters. (Am I bragging about his autistic behavior?) Let’s laud Harpo for acknowledging ridged, sticky, warped, grooved, seductive surfaces. “Where’s my hat?” says Beecher, plunging his upper body in the Marxian

150   |    Later Astonishments

carpetbag.  Ω  Harpo’s unembarrassed hands push Beecher’s buttocks. Harpo likes to see men fall. Shove the straight man into the wandering Jew’s bottomless, commodity-eating gut. Harpo incorporates, or destroys, the body that ignored him. The angry farmer in Busch’s Max und Moritz stuffs twin pranksters in a grain sack, brings it to the mill, and pours the sack’s contents into the hopper, which grinds the bad boys into bits, eaten by ducks. A mill, I mince a mischief-maker.

III People Are Impediments: Finger Independence  Does silence put the lid on Harpo’s overstimulation? Pushing Groucho at the saloon door, Harpo wants to dispense with people—impediments—but exiles them with “cute” mannerisms to avoid offending. Hands flop at his sides, wrists limber as a boxer’s, pianist’s, or jazz dancer’s—the equipment of a short musical Jewish Arthur, whether Arthur Rubinstein, Artie Shaw, or Arthur Marx, an unphobic Los Angeleno wearing loose duds and driving a convertible. Observing Harpo’s hands in motion, I notice finger independence. Young pianists play Hanon exercises to develop finger separation, like siblings who strive to avoid symbiosis. The fourth finger, a problem, depends on the fifth. Harpo, like a thumb, a stupid separatist, goes off in his own squat direction. Sometimes, however, he behaves like the wedding-ring finger, leaning into the pinkie. Mock Machismo: Lost Singers  Gun-toting Harpo wears a holster: he ribs masculinity but maintains a supply for himself. He dents a category without destroying it. A woman sings a torch number—her voice so low, she seems a man. If Harpo spoke, would he have a low or high voice? His silence prevents us from knowing. This female singer, using the man-voice that Harpo’s muteness threw onto her, is June MacCloy, who died in 2005, and who appeared in The Gay Girls, directed by humiliated Fatty Arbuckle. I could spend a lifetime listing forgotten singers.

Go West   |    151

Spectralism  On Chico’s urging, Harpo steals the IOU from the cash register. Harpo smiles, pleased to coincide with a task, but then he tosses the money away: he prefers the IOU. Harpo doesn’t subscribe to narrowminded economics (gold standard, capitalism): he considers bills and coins to be mere play objects. He tampers with economics by giddily handling money, frolicking in its sea-spray. His fiscal philosophy puts into practice the fractured (fractal?) iridescence that distinguishes timbrally splintered compositions like Debussy’s La Mer, Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy, and Boulez’s Sur Incises; Harpo enjoys money’s spectralist shimmer of overtones but doesn’t respect its value—a system, like tonality, that he has transcended. Tongue-between-Teeth: Proprioceptive Anxiety  The tip of Harpo’s tongue— pushing against his upper teeth and then protruding—expresses joy through anatomical code. His joy undergoes two stages: (1) he feels the delight; (2) he embodies it in physical gesture. Sometimes gesture precedes delight. Harpo makes a sandwich of his tongue—to put the brakes on overstimulation? To protect against convulsions? Think of the stick placed between an epileptic’s or shock-treatment patient’s teeth. Blindly needing physical adhesion as guidance, Harpo touches the back of Chico’s jacket.  µ  Locomotion requires intermittent palpation, proprioceptive hiccups; navigation unites the brothers. Harpo couldn’t traverse space without assistance. Let’s imagine that Chico’s short jackets are corduroy, thus giving Harpo’s fingers room for rumination—resistance, fold, rise, bump. At his haptic best, Harpo seeks orientation through touch, not sight or hearing. He leaves civilization and returns to a state of dependence on tactile sensation. Similarly, in Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, the wild child, locked away from German culture, finds his befouled dungeon’s hay comforting. As a kid, I fingered a car seatbelt’s mismanaged threads, which mitigated the fabric’s horrifying shininess and neutralized my cantankerousness. Harpo forces a liquor glass to a lush’s mouth: this stranger becomes an

152   |    Later Astonishments

inanimate object. The cartoon ability to treat others as not-human gives Harpo access to inner floods of grandeur: I become a superman when I humiliate the hobo.

Virtuosity in a Void: Harpo’s Hyperkinesis  Pathetic onlooker, Harpo sits beside Chico and watches him play piano. Harpo’s fingers spread daffily wide in pianistic imitation.  Ω  The unplaying hand achieves inaudible bravura, virtuosity in a void. With this splayed, overdemonstrative display of digital width, Harpo imitates Chico but also tries to upstage him. Harpo looks at his own fingers: everyone else looks at Chico. I like to show off my pianist-fingers at rest. (My father has thick fingers.) In trigonometry class I rested my hand on the red textbook to prove that I was superior to math, that I had other, aesthetic pursuits. Spread fingers bragged about talents tucked away from visibility. Harpo responds to Chico’s audacious passagework with a double-take— like a gently electroshocked Nijinsky. Discombobulated by octaves, Harpo jumps up and down and grabs the girl seated behind him. He listens with masochistic hyperkinesis. We don’t see his entire face—only its side. Sharing his point of view, we watch Chico play piano, as if we were his younger brother or his stage Mom. Harpo is now merely a minatory cheekbone, an observing set of spit curls, a shoulder of supervisory awe. Pathos of Fruit  On his sleeve, Harpo polishes a piece of fruit, which Chico confiscates. At the number’s end, Harpo applauds; he taps hands on knees and sways, mouth open, ready to receive fruit. Pathos: Harpo considers this meager allotment (one piece of fruit) joyful. Three girls in my childhood offered me fruit. Mary Ann offered coconut; Cher, pears; Audrey, grapes. Three times I refused. Harpo would never turn down good fruit. Verification: Harpo as Epistemological Warrior  Observe the rhythm of enunciation: Groucho says a line, and then Harpo looks to his left (as if at the comment’s consequence or referent). He gazes for proof, to glue

Go West   |    153

together sentence and meaning, statement and recipient. Verification isn’t a subject he takes lightly. Psychoanalysis calls it “reality testing.” On behalf of immigrants, exiles, and social climbers, Harpo defamiliarizes and comically oververifies reality. His jutting lower lip means business.  µ  Harpo, king of the Jews, vigilante, stands up for Western civilization and the Marx name. Is he a ghetto upriser or a willing executioner? He offers a motley antidote to panic. Groucho passively watches Harpo, fake man, march forward, concentrating on a task. Harpo will demand that reality prove itself each time anew. With every footstep, he reinitiates the philosophical project: presuppositions need to defend their honor. Fruit must reclaim the right to call itself fruit. Harpo, epistemological warrior, fights to make strange the grounds for saying that we know what we know. Harpo is much shorter than the saloon owner. Not measuring up, a valuable commodity, signifies comic potency. Smallness is a huge subject Harpo knows his way around.

Tickle the Enemy: The Master Letter  Harpo twirls his pistol—a valet’s brush—and dusts off the enemy’s jacket. Hard Western cock turns into servant’s livery tool. Smile while tickling the enemy. Tickling never leads to orgasm. Tickling qualifies as torture. Harpo has figured out a behavior that allows close contact with antagonistic male bodies. Pretending to be a lackey, Harpo gives the Big Guy the brush-off. I abase myself before you as a secret method of achieving an otherwise inaccessible elevation. Harpo paves the way for Jerry Lewis. Tickling the enemy: when I was twelve, an older kid threatened to beat me up. After our near-tussle, I decided to type him an intricate, self-abasing letter: I hoped to win him over with syntax and typing—more so by my secretarial skills than by my words.

IV Sacramental Nod: Maniac Eyes  Harpo nods, though only we, viewers, can see it. The reflex nod, attesting in a void, doesn’t expect a result. Incidental,

154   |    Later Astonishments

brief, the nod has sacramental status. Existence instructs Harpo: Acknowledge the world, through tiny gestures, like a king blessing his subjects. Confirm your relation to matter by nodding. Harpo’s button eyes, fixed on nothing in particular, resemble a maniac’s, a Moonie’s. (Or do they seem ultra-sane?) Ungreedy eyes contain syntax and compensate for speechlessness. Harpo’s eyes, brimstone-bright, like Klaus Kinski’s, could be an egomaniacal prophet’s, or the cornflower-blue eyes of the inamorata who cajoled me into buying Leibniz cookies for our folie à deux tea-party.

Suddenness: Backside Vision  Shengold, in Soul Murder, refers to the “and suddenly” phenomenon: an oversensitivity “to sudden changes in others (with a corresponding tendency to quick alterations in the patient’s own mood and behavior).” Harpo switches mood and gesture lickety-split. Sudden, too, are my quick splices, scissoring Harpo’s seamlessness into prismatic bits of business. I’ll claim suddenness as a theme, not merely as a style. Harpo, overattuned to environment, cautious about other people’s mood changes, uses abruptness as armor. His violent switches teach us to be overattentive, and to become connoisseurs of suddenness. In a shot of Harpo climbing up to a window, butt crack is visible through jacket-flap opening. The reappearing motif of Harpo’s buttocks “gooses” us, gives us vistas of suddenness. Didn’t MGM notice? Harpo’s butt escapes the censor and escapes cognition altogether. And thus it is my duty as the world’s anal char to collect these instances and to point out the ubiquity of backside vision. Eyeballs against Nature  As in Chaplin’s autumnal film Limelight, co-starring Claire Bloom, Harpo prepares to say farewell to his role, his dollhouse. A manner as fixed as Harpo’s must eventually be abandoned. Harpo, looking down and away from the heroine Eve (actress Diana Lewis, who married “Thin Man” William Powell, went by the name “Mousie” Powell, and resembles a milquetoast Claudette Colbert), appears to be keeping a secret. Why not give up the burdensome, humiliating act? He rehearses death by

Go West   |    155

staring into nothing. His eyes flamboyantly—against nature—swivel away from their centers.  µ  Experiment, in front of a mirror—see how far you can swerve your eyes. Does it hurt?

Homophobic Policing between Brothers: Smacked Wrist  Harpo wants to hammer the safe but accidentally hammers his hand instead. To express pain, he puts hand between legs, blows on it, and offers limp, wounded knuckles to Groucho, who hammers them again.  µ  Brothers homophobically police each other: we laugh at Groucho’s humiliation of Harpo, and at Harpo’s happy solicitation of shame. I admire the fleshy looseness of Harpo’s wrist, the easy danseur fullness of the hand’s lope downward, all sash and rose-goblet. The figures are dramatically organized, as in “pregnant moment” Renaissance or post-Renaissance paintings (David, Ingres, Caravaggio, Rubens, Titian, Leonardo, Raphael, Tintoretto): Harpo, as Virgin Mary, receives the annunciation of Groucho’s hammer. Crouching, Chico impersonates the witnessing peon, the apostle or saint who happens to be in the barn at the same time as the miracle. Harpo offers his hand for cure and care—or to be kissed, noblesse oblige. Harpo’s Hole  While June MacCloy, low-voiced torch singer, flirts with Chico, Harpo holds a huge horseshoe magnet to remove her brooch. Notice Harpo’s third-wheel status: remote from lovemaking, but profiting from remoteness.  µ  Harpo magnetizes jewelry to mock sexual magnetism. Though he can’t seduce June, his props draw a response. Antiromantic, he pretends not to want human contact, only to want jewels, money, objects. His comically big magnet, an elliptical orifice, tells Chico: I, too, have a hole. Choose me! (Actually, it looks like a toilet seat.) Phalluses Are Hollow: Glee of a Doomed Scheme  Harpo lights a stick of dynamite under the safe and jumps up and down, fingers in ears. Glee

156   |    Later Astonishments

of a doomed scheme: despite his frozen mask, wide-open Mom-mouth, and closed eyes, the stick won’t explode.  Ω  Phalluses—as symbols of power—are hollow. Though he hopes to blow up the house, in fact he is more attached to embodying the mask of arrested excitement, a static pose, on explosion’s brink. His back is turned to the classically lovemaking lampstatuary. I appreciate Harpo’s gleeful ignorance of his scheme’s imminent failure. He isolates glee from its supposed catalyst. I worship glee-in-a-void. Let’s get excited about explosions that will never happen.

Attestation  Harpo crawls up to a non-Marx man and whistles annunciation, a tune consisting of six notes: low pitch, high pitch; low, high; low, high. This whistle insists that he rightly perceives evidence, that he stands in a one-to-one relation with the phenomenal world. This posture I call attestation. I see you; I whistle to acknowledge your presence. Your conspicuousness I consider candy, a treat suddenly obtained and naively greeted by whistles. Harpo, playing harmonica on a horse, leads the gang and, like Sancho Panza, exhibits dumb loyalty to a lost cause.  Ω  Alone in the frame, Harpo renounces companionship and embraces code. Delectation, bliss-in-a-void, has no direction. The bulbous horn and harmonica (low on the instrumental hierarchy) are his two devices of self-attestation. Joke apparatuses allow Harpo to say, I’m here. That statement, though laughable, takes work. Twin Sucking: Nod  The Marx Brothers arrive at an Indian encampment. (Native Americans, in this racist scene, provide window dressing for Harpo; they point out his primitivism.) He blows one horn protruding cuckoldstyle from an Indian chief’s headdress, and Chico blows the other. Brothers suck twin teats.  Ω  Breastfeeding, oral sex, and music-making arrive in one bundle, showing off diverse Marxian arts of consolation and defacement.

Go West   |    157

Above his waist, Harpo’s big thick belt, holding open his trench coat, leaves his crotch area bunchy and visible, not the center of attention (consciously) for most viewers, though I notice its bulky adultness. Right hand, a lax Stokowski’s, limply gestures: flaccid wrist seems orchestrally commanding. Toward the chief, Harpo shakes his head “no” and extends the nod to the nearby squaw. I have spent a long time on Harpo’s nod, but I must say one more thing about it: his nod sadly acknowledges surrounding phenomena, as if these objects—flower, squaw, tree, brother, bush—would wither and die if Harpo didn’t water them with a nod.

Formalist Analysis: Harpo at the Apex of the Triangle    µ  Harpo’s head occupies the small end of the V—the triangle’s apex. A movie projector creates a similar V, a funnel, when it aims its river of light at the screen. Perception demands this V of the vanishing point. Tuning also requires it: Harpo made the Native American’s loom a harp by joining the ends of two warp beams. He constructed a triangle and nominated himself as endpoint. Groucho, Chico, and Harpo are a brotherly triangle, a fact that demands a formalist analysis of the number three, or at least a kabbalah-conscious analysis, or at least a nod in its direction, Harpo-style, to acknowledge the number three’s numinousness. As a kid, I repeatedly drew the V—triangle of light—that the movie projector emits. Light was easy to stylize. Predictable spillage: luminous cone bisects compliant theater. Projectionist was a career I could imagine.

V The Invention of Velcro  The Marx Brothers try to catch a train. Harpo trails behind the film’s romantic hero (a tall actor named John Carroll, whose final film was Ride a Pink Car) and touches his back and vest: Harpo wants

158   |    Later Astonishments

to hold on to the departing body. Playing tag, Harpo grips the universe and avoids ontological fall. Axiom: Harpo practices arts of Velcro. He denies human separation. Burr-like, he sticks to others. Historical tidbit: Velcro was invented in 1941 by George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer. The word Velcro comes from two French words: velours (velvet), crochet (hook). De Mestral invented Velcro after walking his dogs in the Swiss Alps.

Drive versus Desire  Harpo faces outward, toward the horizon, toward havoc, as if he could see his actions hypostasized and firmed up in the distance, turned into Mont Blanc. The train won’t stop, and Harpo enjoys its perpetual plummeting forward. Can we claim that Harpo enacts drive, not desire? I can’t remember if Freud or Lacan separate drive and desire—a distinction I’d like to declare, in order to give Harpo his own, non-intentionoriented duchy. Drive precedes desire, if we need to impose chronology on the time-defying unconscious. Smart Jews, Dumb Jews  Groucho is the smart Jew. Chico and Harpo are dumb Jews. And yet, adeptness at playing dumb is smart. Is my overthoroughness dumb? Perhaps overzealousness makes me a smart Jew, organizer, tidbit-gatherer, like my mother’s father, who published a compendium of erotic anecdotes about writers, and died before finishing a treatise on Jews in American literature. Smart Jews are survivors, smart enough to go west. Dumb Jews stay put in Europe. Harpo diligently gazes back and forth, always on the lookout for dangers and theft-possibilities: mental acuity arises from emergencies. Shoulders hunched, Harpo tries to explain himself, in perplexed gesticulations, like rabbinical quibblers in Richard Strauss’s Salome. Harpo’s Body as Trampled Bridge: Magnet Behavior  Harpo’s body straddles two disengaged cars of a train. His feet remain on the rear car—his hands grasp the fore. The carriages have separation anxiety, as does Harpo, who acts on their behalf—he sacrifices his body (I must resort to Christological comparisons) on behalf of the Train-Father.  Ω  The compulsion

Go West   |    159

to Velcro together separate items is not merely Harpo’s need: reality itself requires Velcro, and reality conscripts Harpo into behaving stickily. Groucho shouts, “Hang on, Rusty,” a moment of cozy interpellation, like being tucked into a Père-Lachaise crematorium drawer—honorary ashes within the named urn. Being called “Rusty” is Harpo’s reward for inserting his body between separated vehicles. Torture intensifies. Groucho steps on Harpo’s butt, a useful bridge, a Panama Canal, linking trains that carry human cargo.  µ  Debasement consolidates Harpo’s ego: the more trampled, the more Harpo. Close-up: a villain steps on Harpo’s head, covered by a hat.  µ  Is Harpo a masochist? His head has a path-stone’s invulnerability. Eyes shut, he grips the forward-moving car. Taken out of comic context, this image depicts exemplary spiritual suffering. (In Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, the donkey, like the idiot boy or Jesus, is the butt of everybody’s cruelty and callousness.) Harpo turns pain into a way of making progress and achieving happiness. I am Harpo because a villain steps on my head and because a brother steps on my butt; neither trespass causes pain. In fact, these violations advertise my prowess as patient slug. To be an attendant—to be one who waits—is a vocation. “They also serve who only stand and wait” is the final line from the Milton sonnet about day-labor I recited at my maternal grandfather’s funeral, the poem he repeatedly tried to recite (from memory) the last time I saw him. The body must behave as a bridge, transmitting knowledge from generation to generation. I transmit lore, not love; I transmit interpretive idiosyncrasy. Special effects intrude, and the separating cars hyperextend Harpo’s legs, which seem to s-t-r-e-t-c-h, like Silly Putty or Gumby.  µ  A martyr-mediator must dispense with physical comfort. Harpo’s body—as bridge between his

160   |    Later Astonishments

parents, between his brothers, between MGM and America, between Jews and Gentiles—can endure torture because he will neuter his nerves rather than allow the two empires to be sundered. Martyred, the short Jew gains a few inches. I never had a growth spurt; no doctor stretched me. Recurrent childhood fever-nightmare: my task was to bring together two magnets—one in California, the other in Red China. The fool must diplomatically unite warring poles, while his stretched legs endure last-ditch détente. Orgasm is magnet behavior: exquisite stretching. The postorgasmic body no longer needs to behave like Harpo-uniting-mutually-repelled-magnets. Germanic, hyphenation bundles together grimy monads.

Incest Dream  Dream: my father, in a surprise appearance, whisked me away to a Metropolitan Opera matinee. I had one or two tickets. I didn’t understand the difference between one and two; numbers are philosophical problems. We entered a dark storage room, where our bodies pressed together: reciprocal hardness. The incest taboo didn’t cow me. The Marx Brothers seem sexually embroiled even when they ignore each other. Magically, Harpo jumps back into the train car: reversing diaspora, he acts out a jack-in-the-box relation to decontamination purges. No nation can exile him. Unaware of Futility: Categorical Liberation  Harpo waves good-bye to the romantic hero and heroine, who are too far away to see his gesture, which he performs for the pleasure of private enactment. Unaware of the category “futile,” he communicates pathos (poor Harpo, not understanding his own uselessness) and a utopian disregard for fact. Harpo mistakes kerosene for water. He uses this category error to declare his own optimistic vision, which asserts equality between items, and dissolves dejection: a possibly traumatic state of not being seen turns into a radical power to rename objects. Backside Vulnerability  Train motion throws Harpo off-balance; again we see Harpo’s butt through waistcoat opening.  Ω  Harpo’s backside vulnerability is not my imagination. Shamelessly, he reveals embodiment’s verso. I place high, in any list of human attainments, the ability to reverse and

Go West   |    161

regress. I may be wrong to link Harpo’s rear end to his need for brother: but the two particles (assexposure, need-for-brother) appear frequently together, and adjacent objects magically acquire correspondences. (Is Harpo a logical place to seek evidence of the fanny’s hefty, consoling nature?)

Extermination Relay  The Marxes, preserving themselves by destroying every passenger’s suitcase, replay pogrom. Brothers throw bags to each other, a relay race, to stoke the fire and keep the engine running. Harpo stuffs suitcases into the blaze. Baggage hits him on the head and almost pushes him into the inferno, but with an astonished rictus—glad mouth, clapping hands—he saves himself from combustion. Ovens can’t terrify him. His own luggage, too, will be burned, but he doesn’t care. Cavalier about landedness and possession, he is a victim of Groucho’s moral callousness, but Harpo has victims, too—those to whom he won’t speak, those whose luggage he burns. Three-Fingered Whistle  Harpo saves his three-fingered whistle for extreme occasions: it offers louder volume, deeper penetration.  µ  A holler, it summons, without flattery. Three middle fingers enter his mouth; thumb and pinkie splay. (Thus he teethes on three brothers.) Whistling expresses direction: over there, up here. The whistle wishes into existence a noun, an actuality, though the whistle itself, poor pronoun, can only point in the direction of the desired substantive, the clump. Three rude fingers, in his mouth, summon an answer from the nonreciprocating countryside, the flimsy mise-en-scène that MGM, cheapskates, forced on him, refusing him the big budget he deserved, refusing him the opulence of Grand Hotel or Gone with the Wind, rewarding his talents with chintzy sets and price-slashed co-stars. He whistles with the decisiveness of an Olympic swimmer slicing water. Whistling, pointing, Harpo forthrightly insists that each object exists in a halo of surety, surrounded by no shadow emotions, no rival siblings. Messenger eyes narrow in concentration, servant of the colossus he points toward.

162   |    Later Astonishments

Angel of Destruction  Harpo—as Shiva-the-Destroyer—axes down a house and throws every smidgen in the fire. Comedy ruins the universe so that afterward we can see it reconstructed, saved from our furious unpiecing. Is it rage, or is it playfulness, when Harpo sharpens his blade on the train’s subterranean wheel? (Harpo belongs in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. He belongs in many German plots. Worker bee, he contacts Loge, Wagnerian god of fire.) Is it rage, or is it heroism, when Harpo chops down the train compartment’s walls—when, paradoxically, he destroys the entire train in order to maintain its motion? Harpo imagines himself to be magically indispensable. He dreams up a family or social structure that hails him as actual and beloved, that encloses him within an emotionally three-dimensional (not psychotically flattened) identity. But what if Harpo is not indispensable? What if he is garbage? Demonstrative in a Void    Ω  Here is another strange butt-shot of Harpo making extermination and motion happen by destroying, turning to timber, the entire train. Bending over, obeying orders, he thrusts butt in air; pants crease at the cleavage. No big deal? I include this picture for you, as a recognition of your presence, your demand for evidence. Rage  Harpo’s silence contains rage against self and against unresponsive others. Raging, he destroys language. Writing, too, produces rage—against writing. Any subject—not merely Harpo—will produce this paradox, this fold: in words I rage against my dependence on words and thus experience the freeze, an ecstatic paralysis. I can’t protest against rage, or imagine a utopian space where rageless writing could occur. When syntax turns on its motor, rage arises. Walter Benjamin, trying to escape Nazi-occupied France and go west, killed himself in 1940, the year that Harpo made Go West. Death protects both of them from the despoiling rage in any sentence that moves, like a cyclone, in circles.

Go West   |    163

Lonely Wacky’s Incremental Lines of Flight

The Big Store (1941)

One of the accusations directed at me maintained that I composed only for my private satisfaction. —arnold schoenberg, “How One Becomes Lonely”

I Matrilineage: Schoenberg, Shortness  Harpo’s mother’s maiden name was Minnie Schoenberg. “Mere” coincidence? Harpo and the composer Arnold Schoenberg, in Hollywood, were friends; I sense an underground affinity between Harpo’s entertaining performances and Schoenberg’s lonely craft. When Harpo asked the composer why he always carried around a violin case, he opened it to reveal “four Ping-pong paddles and a collection of Ping-pong balls.” Arnold liked games; his twelve-tone system, a ritualistic (kabbalistic?) method, achieved order and beauty through careful arrangements. Harpo’s work, too, relied on games and on the coordination of separate parts; both men paid attention to a composition’s increments or monads. And both Harpo and Schoenberg were short—Arnold was under five foot four, and Harpo was in the neighborhood of five foot four or five foot five. Composer Allen Shawn, in his book Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey, describes height’s impact on character: “If one is short relative to one’s peers one is more likely to have been beaten up and generally trodden upon as a child, which can inspire certain personality traits”—including a

164

“philosophical attitude” and “an ingrained hatred of bullies and tyrants.” Harpo has the personality of a short Schoenberg; Marx Brothers’ films are studies in short consciousness.

Wacky’s Upper Arm  In The Big Store, Harpo’s name is Wacky, which suggests whacking off, oddity, nonseriousness: in The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes clear that lightness and playing-the-fool are philosophical necessities. Wacky, in close-up, reaches with girlishly exposed upper arm into a quacking hen’s cage.  Ω  Harpo resembles Arthur Rubinstein or Wanda Landowska, serious Jews husbanding lost arts (eggs, keyboards). I connect Harpo’s fey puissance to Chopin’s piano concerti, where soloist dominates orchestra through filigree rather than volume. An upper arm, not muscular—a European Jew’s?—might be bullied. Harpo’s aesthetic gifts were accompanied by a propensity to be harassed. Why Harpo Nods  Sometimes, Harpo nods in order to point, not to concur. The nod expresses fake accommodationism: I agree that the world deserves to call itself world and that I am its humble servant. Harpo nods prematurely, before someone else finishes speaking. Wanting to rhyme, Harpo nods in a schizoid plurality of directions. The nod, slippery, pretends to establish reciprocal relations with the world while actually severing connections. Gladly he corroborates opposite stances: no, yes. Bidirectionality avoids pogroms and extermination-logic by offering preemptive agreeability. Shaving the Brother  How do brothers cope with hair loss? After graciously helping Groucho put on a fur coat, Harpo disrespectfully brushes it with a whiskbroom. He enjoys using wrong tools, as if bringing milk to the meat table. Removing feathers from Groucho’s wrap, Harpo creates a bald patch.  Ω  Servile Harpo snips away Samson’s camouflage. Seeing the feather-pile, Groucho says, “I could have sworn I’d shaved this

The Big Store   |    165

morning.” Harpo has depilated his speaking brother’s backside. Thus, an underling’s broom exposes ambition’s bald, shamed foundation.

This Gesture Is Always the Same  To the suspicious guard, Harpo gives a backward air-karate-chop: Don’t cross me, buster. This gesture is always the same, and it happens in full flower, not in seed or bud.  µ  The karate-chop arrives packaged and inviolate. No one taught him the gesture; he honed it in a private atelier. Aside: I’m not Althusserian. Harpo’s gestures can’t be reduced to ideology. Perhaps Harpo is part of the superstructure, but he rescues something valuable and tender from its clutches. Harpo’s movements permit a series of recognitions, of happy homecomings. Each motion reminds me that I have already encountered it and am free to greet it again. Monads: Harpo’s Grave  Philosopher G. W. Leibniz used the word monad to describe the universe’s basic unit, its atom. (The opening proposition of his Monadology: “The monad, of which we will be speaking here, is nothing but a simple substance, which enters into composites; simple, meaning without parts.”) I use the word monad, in the context of Harpo-appreciation, to express the loneliness of the single, unaffiliated being. Harpo, as monad, is alone. (Monad sounds uncomfortably like gonad.) In his soporific, frozen state, Harpo-as-monad is not yet a multichambered soul. Harpo was cremated at “Hollywood Forever,” and, according to a website, his ashes were scattered “into the sand trap at the 7th hole of the Rancho Mirage golf course.” This information disappoints me. I must figure out a melancholy interpretation of his final resting place. Would Harpo object to my investigations? Maybe I’m betraying him through faulty logic, prurient embroidery, and autobiographical digressions. If he were alive this morning, he’d be 119 years old. Peripeteias of the Everyday  Groucho, recognizing Harpo, says, “That’s my driver.” Chico begs to differ: “Driver? He’s-a my brother. Wacky!” Arms extended in a preparatory hug, Harpo runs toward Chico, but then turns

166   |    Later Astonishments

around to receive a back-rub. Two kittens, refugees from a lost litter, know each other’s kinks.  Ω  Harpo acts out commonplace peripeteias of cuddliness and gimme-shelter. Peri­ peteia is the ancient Greek word for a tragedy’s reversal of fortune, a turning point preceded by anagnorisis (discovery). First, enacting anagnorisis, Harpo and Chico rediscover each other: Wacky! My long lost brother! Second, they undergo reversal: Harpo turns his back to Chico. Harpo’s circumstances never change, but his body flip-flops: peripeteias of the everyday.

Lag: Miss Deadpan  Harpo stares at a store official, and keeps staring, even after the topic has shifted. Arrested, he lags behind, paying nonsynchronized attention; delay is a neutral event, without content. Harpo, stuck in the previous moment, hasn’t moved on to the next increment of plot: we could consider him retarded, or we could consider his lag a syncopation, a pleasurable—and abstract—rift. (A monad of lost time?) Virginia O’Brien, a novelty singer, sings “Rock-a-bye-baby” without moving her face. Her novelty is emotional nullity: she has no facial expression, no relation to baby or audience.  Ω  Emotionlessness is funny. So is infanticide. Miss O’Brien has a nonsynchronization problem, like Harpo’s; she lags. Her nicknames included Miss Deadpan, Frozen Face, Miss Ice Glacier. The origin of her impassive singing style: “paralyzed by stage fright” at her debut, she couldn’t move her face. Harpo and Virginia use fear-of-performance to create a comic style. Stillness and muteness enshrine vaudeville embarrassments. Harpo’s Preference: I Go for Brothers  Harpo, a frowning snake-charmer in swami gear, attempts yoga. His phalli (snake, flute) are detachable and eager to “get a rise.”  Ω  Up goes the

The Big Store   |    167

snake, commanded by Harpo’s panpipe. Groucho, babysitter, assists Harpo’s bug-cheeked efforts at stimulating the fake snake and thereby blesses the phallus that Harpo comically overmanages. Obligatory virility stresses him out. Groucho reminds me of a straight guy I fondled on three occasions in restaurant bathrooms. Our phalli, although alert, seemed de trop. Harpo, despite the diapered backwardness of his bunchy pants, seems clean, while Groucho, with fake mustache, bears the soiled imprint: he is an ungroomed, mangy guy that Miss Deadpan might kick. Maybe I desire Groucho, even if he disgusts me. He reminds me of a balding, beanpole professor who considered me flaky, yet who uncharacteristically treated me, one afternoon, to ice cream, which I licked while discussing implausible research topics. Hierarchies reversed (peripeteia of the everyday) because I’d humiliated the dogmatic professor by accepting his gift of a cone.

II Pietà Posture and Other Muteness Episodes  A sinister woman appears at the record counter; Marxes sidle up to her. Harpo, with reversed pants, insinuates himself especially near. Short Harpo has a gift for interposing himself, third wheel, romantically irrelevant.  µ  While Groucho patters, Harpo stares, a homing pigeon. I recognize his POV—a short fool’s, beside an imperious, tall woman in polka dots. In high school I befriended a tall bassoonist whom I hubristically placed on a victory-garden list of girls I might theoretically conquer. Also: at a dim-lit party I watched my best friend, a saxophonist who looked like James Taylor, French-kiss a popular girl with amontillado-brown hair. Paralyzed, I struck a Pietà posture. The dead Christ I worshiped was the couple making out: I bowed down to the structure that rendered me null. A worshipful stance can deform the body; Pietà duties strained Mary’s spine. When members of my family listen, we crane our necks and freeze our mouths; we imitate attentiveness with a Lunt/Fontanne bravura act. We are virtuosi of passive-aggression, like Liv Ullmann going mute in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona: silence allows Liv to express spite, to bite the universe. For ten minutes I went mute in bed

168   |    Later Astonishments

with a temporary girlfriend: my peevish silence emulated a Cézanne landscape, portions of canvas left unpainted. That was the autumn of elective dissociation: alone, I’d slide into autohypnotic trance after Jungian jerk-off sessions based on archetypes.

Centrifuge Face: Being Snubbed as Prelude to Canonization  The polka-dotted shopper calls the Marx Brothers “silly creatures.” Harpo’s mouth opens a slit’s width, as if to offer tribute. When she says, disdainfully, “Not really,” Harpo imitates scorn, his face passing through an imaginary centrifuge: his mouth and eyes mimic the disfigurement this stranger tries to perform on his spirit. My college roommate, straight, expressed a skepticism (I don’t take Wayne seriously) that I tried to reinterpret as homoerotic interest, as if not taking me seriously meant that he was taking me gaily, placing me in a special category of loser who needed tender interpretation. Perhaps I could be petted, zoo-managed, burped: perhaps I could be rebuked but then cosseted. A snubbed body may wish to experience this sequence: (1) to be ignored, (2) to be idealized as the neglected one. Photography as Memorialization (Atget) and Retaliation (Brownie Instamatic)  “Out of my way, stupid,” the polka-dotted woman says to Harpo, who follows with hands-in-pocket Chaplinesque waddle. (I don’t give Harpo’s comedic precursors enough credit.) At the counter she demands a matching hat. Daydreams and women’s hats stun Harpo, elbow against counter.  Ω  Harpo, a mannequin, stands stranded and hypnotized in the female phantasmagoria of severed heads. Fixed, relationless gaze typecasts him as a classic “perv,” like the Sal Mineo character in Who Killed Teddy Bear? Or think of Harpo as my abstracted landsman Walter Benjamin, hanging out in arcades: imagine Harpo transplanted into a Eugène Atget photo, a Parisian store window filled with mannequins and hats, the dismembered trophies of commodity fetishism and of a vanishing city that needs to be documented. (Why not imagine that Harpo’s The Big Store pays magical homage to Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, which anatomized Paris’s nineteenth-century prefigurations of the shopping mall?)

The Big Store   |    169

The labor of memorialization stuns Harpo: hypnotized by an off-camera phantasm, he wears the gaze of fixative, of epoxy, a taxidermy stillness, the anesthesia of unknowing, his wrist limp with debonair relaxation. Spoils of yesterday’s wars clutter the storeroom of the unconscious. Like the female heads surrounding him, he wears a hat: in tribute, he has become a bust, a hat-model. Working, not resting, he leans forward, neck craned, body tense, waiting to surprise. In a three-way mirror, the snobby shopper sees that Harpo has scissored away the back of her skirt. The ashamed butt—epitomizing the stupefied, the divided—is Harpo’s specialty. Reiterated flashback: I photographed a sixth-grade classmate’s underwear when she climbed a ladder. Earlier, we’d fought on the playground; I spat and kicked—leprous strategies of a feral Kaspar Hauser, hiding a Brownie Instamatic.

Well-Mannered Bean-Snapper  Harpo crouches on a bunk bed’s lower bunk. Why is his tokhes aimed at the Italian man?  µ  Waiting for a spanking? I admire the clarity—folded origami—of Harpo’s body, its duck-and-cover awareness of world war. “Hey Wacky,” Chico calls. Harpo touches his own hat (for security?) and runs to his brother. Harpo is always ready to accept the crib-sensation of being hailed. My baby brother learned to walk in a crib with harp-string bars: watching him stand, I noted our new parity. Crib-sensation: I snap string beans in my grandmother’s kitchen. I know how to trim unsightly edges, how to boil beans, how to deplete their color. We are well-mannered toward vegetables. Tautological Gesture as the Neutral  Harpo, behaving as Chico’s sales assistant, makes a “let’s go” gesture. A Greek chorus, he interprets the actions of others, yet his movements, aimed at us, are tautological; they belong to Roland Barthes’s category of “the neutral,” a Zen-derived condition of satori, blankness, and noncommitment. Harpo’s extraneous gestures reinforce, through mimicry, a message that we already understood through words. Gestures create a “poof” of emptiness, an eventful uneventfulness: we take time to note and celebrate a thing not quite present.

170   |    Later Astonishments

Harpo Turns Human Gesture into a Serial Procedure  An Italian family of shoppers yells, and Harpo lopes up, pretending to be faithful and deformed. Jew mocks Italian. Freakish, Harpo raises his right shoulder in a nerdy stasis, warding off disaster.  Ω  Harpo dips into the ungainly, the unnecessarily sinuous. The gesticulating Italian object of Harpo’s mockery never sees him. Tagalong, barnacle, Harpo turns human gesture into a serial procedure. I consider him an abstract actor, virtuously shedding a patina of disenchantment and alienation over family gestures. He empties out the meaning of what he imitates. Or, by aerating categories, he allows us to be less anxious about the meaning, less stuck in “Italian,” in “fat,” in “father.” “What happened to my six kids?” says the Italian father, and Groucho responds, “What are their draft numbers?” Playing along with the gag, Harpo gives a military salute. He reinforces other people’s fugitive meanings, or any straggling phrase caught in his flypaper head. Sleep Activism  Because standing up is hard work, Harpo finds new ways of loafing. He steals chances for stillness, as if against the capitalist assembly line. Harpo and Chico sleep together on one bed. Batching is the antiquated term for bachelors shacking up. Still wearing shoes, Harpo snoozes on the fly. Sleeping is his ideal state. Hands under head certify exile in the land of Nod. Groucho wakes up Chico to give him news but doesn’t bother rousing Harpo, whose sleepiness has a political point (no more sleep deprivation!), and who puts his two cents toward an activism of abstention. Arrested-Development Lovebirds  Harpo and Chico sit together, legs touching, on the piano bench. Compare these brothers to Dorothy and William Wordsworth, arrested-development lovebirds, siblings, espousing a new romantic politics of the stay-at-home and the incestuous. Like Dorothy, Harpo endured a long separation from a brother, and now, reunited, enjoys “babes-in-the-woods” enchanted-cottage immunity. (My first shrink dismissively said that my not-quite-sexual intimacy with a beloved girl was

The Big Store   |    171

just “babes-in-the-woods” delusion.) Orphans in the storm: Harpo gazes with unironic love at Chico.  µ  Harpo, protective, understands Chico’s limitations and consents to wear idiocy’s hair shirt. His openhearted, nonbony gaze shames me. (I equate my face’s angularity with a failure to love.) A shopping woman—spectator—suffers truncation: the cinematographer omits her upper forehead.

Self-Abasement as Agreeability  Chico’s index finger reaches rightward to harpoon a high note. Harpo, getting the joke, exaggerates complicity.  µ  Harpo’s point: I will ruin my body to fit into your nonsensical scheme. Chico only takes the schtick so far. Harpo pushes it further. At dignity’s expense, he amplifies one monad of behavior and subsists on incommunicable reveries. Language’s dirty secret: it doesn’t communicate. Harpo’s manic enthusiasm, not self-aggrandizing, intends to canonize Chico, although, like any amorous, lyric utterance, Harpo’s jubilation exceeds its aim. Chico Shames Harpo  Chico’s shaming glance subdues Harpo’s ebullience. Here’s the rhythm: (1) Harpo enthuses over Chico, but goes too far; (2) with a glance, Chico shames him; (3) Harpo quiets down; (4) Harpo forgets the insult and regains a giddiness meant to butter Chico’s bread. To Chico’s suave smile, Harpo responds with shy, shut eyes.  µ  Leaning against his brother’s shoulder, Harpo begs not to be ejected from prelapsarian perversity. When Chico bumps him off, the ditching hurts Harpo’s nose, which he clutches. The women laugh. Rejecting the sissy is an easy joke. Harpo’s vulnerable smile lays down a doormat for shaming smacks. Seductive pianist, Chico smiles at the women, across Harpo, who takes

172   |    Later Astonishments

the love gaze personally, as if it were directed at him. The women—a gaggle of shoppers, commodity fetishists, arcade browsers, in thrall to the big store—justify Chico and Harpo’s “batch” act. To undo its vaudevillian hamminess, the women need to be present; they turn ham into plot. Yet Harpo doesn’t stare at the women; he stares, as usual, at the void. Hailing emptiness, he enjoins the void to behave like a good mirror, a good Minnie. Harpo gives the void the same glance—rapt, unconflicted—he’d given Chico: void equals Chico, in Harpo’s balance-book.

Feeling Up the Brother in Front of the Shopping Ladies  When Chico takes over at the keyboard, Harpo, detoured, plays his brother’s body.  Ω  Harpo turns him into an instrument: as if blind, Harpo feels up the brother (forbidden act). Look at the parade of willing, nameless women. One of them, fifth from the left, might be wearing a Star of David. The women, beaming in a row, look uniform, a drugged chorus, face after face, as if on a frieze, an Elgin Marbles horizontality, signifying “women watching boys batch it up.” I see unhappiness (or I see synagogue) in their hats, their proper attire. A minyan, these modest women sanction the piano’s desecration. Although they lack volition, names, and careers, they communicate the chunkiness of purses, buckles, and square-toed pumps. The piano bench confines Harpo and Chico in a wordless frame: no conversation or plot twist will leave Harpo stranded, functionless. Smashing the Frame  Harpo aims an “aw, raspberries!” (Little Rascals) gesture directly at the camera.  Ω  We’re briefly rewarded—by his dismissal, by his complicity with us, by his nondiegetic look of amused conspiracy, whereby he smashes the frame and exits the story. Harpo destroys plot, though he pretends merely to shrug it off. His “aw, raspberries!” hands pretend not to violate. Renouncing wakeful tasks, he gives up his character, “Wacky,” and becomes, once again, merely Harpo.

The Big Store   |    173

Wackiness: Harpo’s Codpiece  Chico says: “Wacky, I got a good idea.” Thank you for calling me Wacky again. When you say Wacky, you imply that wackiness isn’t evil. When you raise my flaw to the status of proper name, you reinterpret my errors as sources of salvation. Wackiness entitles me to be addressed by you, to be seized into the fellowship of those who deserve names. A protuberance—kerchief?—marks Harpo’s middle.  µ  Necktie, clumped into a corsage, functions as codpiece and reiterates questionable maleness. His codpiece reroutes phallus into frivolity, fillip, curl. Here Harpo claims “guy” status; hands in pockets do their best to normalize puffy pants. Curls spill from hat like grapes, tempting the viewer to pluck and bite, as in Caravaggio’s bacchic Boy with a Basket of Fruit. The Homeland of Overthoroughness  The comic actor may end up scapegoated, unloved. Harpo never underwent Fatty Arbuckle’s fate. And yet, at the seams of any clown’s likability lurks the prospect of a Fatty-like demise, a rape trial, destroyed career. The appreciated substance—fatness, muteness—can suddenly become disaster’s fulcrum. Am I too thorough? Overthoroughness is my homeland, my foreste vergini, the landscape that Aida tries to hard-sell, luring her lover to escape. (Who, in Verdi’s score, is more of a sucker, the slave Aida or the half-martial, half-marshmallow Radames?) Aida has no sane reason to be nostalgic for the land of overthoroughness. That’s where she was soul-murdered, among the sycamores, practicing solfège with her dad, the narcissistic Amonasro. Aida wants a sleeping pill, not another duet. Arthur Rubinstein’s Shadow: The Ignored Sixteenth Note, Lengthened  Harpo never presses too hard on his gestures. Not pressing too hard is the buried message of his glancing physical resemblance to Arthur Rubinstein, ambassador of the natural Apollonian sound of the hand dropping (death-drive?) into the keys, as if into Lotos-eater repose. When Rubinstein plays the second (“feminine”) theme in the opening movement of Chopin’s F minor concerto, he idiosyncratically lengthens the dotted sixteenth notes so that they sound stately rather than nervous. Without overdoing it, Rubinstein

174   |    Later Astonishments

expands notes that could easily be rushed. Harpo, too, extends an identity— the silent one—that might otherwise be ignored. Dilating Harpo’s screen time, I amplify a figure whom unbelievers might consider small.

III Defense of Incrementality  The blow-by-blow approach may not work, but I allow myself, as Investigator, to be incremental, to proceed image by image. Defending the incremental, Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus: “The smallest interval is always diabolical.” Elsewhere, they call this incremental poetics a “generalized chromaticism.” Harpo creates a new chromatic system of nods, eye-blinks, and finger-pointings, gestures that belong not only in the soporific and martyred tradition (Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar) but in the infernal tradition, near Antonin Artaud’s poem “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” a verdict Harpo glides beyond on figure skates. Artaud’s short essay on the Marx Brothers appeared in tandem with his “Theater of Cruelty” manifesto; he credits them with embodying anarchy and (my favorite word) exaltation. Head-Wiggle: Self as Threesome  Harpo, with rococo poseur’s waistcoat and wig, approaches the harp, bows down to its bulk, and plays a kiddie piece (Mozart’s C major piano sonata). His head wiggles musically—combo of mental-ward spasm and an espressivo soul’s gyrations. On Harpo’s face, as on Falconetti’s in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, we can watch moods flicker—atmospheric precipitation I pick apart instead of synthesize. The camera pulls back to show Harpo as a wedge between two reflected images of himself.  Ω  We see three Harpos. Two are reflections; one is real. Harpo confronts neverending descent into narcissism, a waterfall of similitudes, every harp identical: slough-ofdespond or ecstatic apex? Struggling to find “self” in a competitive trio, Harpo usually plays the child; the other two brothers behave as parents. Instead of this psychoanalytic vocabulary, I could borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s terms—

The Big Store   |    175

“lines of flight,” or “deterritorialization.” Does Harpo fly away from family, away from the “arborescent” modes that D & G disparage? (They prefer the “rhizomatic.”) But if we pin down Harpo to the phrase “line of flight,” then he slips back into arborescence.

Pointing Finger  “Hey Wacky,” shouts Chico, offscreen. Harpo turns around, lassoed by interpellation’s punishing lariat.  µ  Briefly we see his pointing hand beside diminutive icons. Harpo cannot define or explain; he can only point. Pointing means “I’m Christ, or headed there, or near him, apostle-like.” This poignant, weird shot isolates Harpo’s “Doubting Thomas” finger, an abstraction apart from his body’s larger purposes: the finger alerts us to the importance of incremental, isolable, contextless details. What Do Glass Balls Mean?  Notice the decorative glass balls suspended, like beads, on vertical poles, behind the harp.  µ  What do those glass balls say about Harpo, replication, similitude, and desire? Glass gives us a lesson in how to read his singularity and solitude; decor annotates him. Theorem: inanimate surfaces, whether textured or shiny, in the vicinity of stars, point out soulful dimensions of abstractions like plural, singular, alone, molten, shining, broken. Glass balls demonstrate that Harpo is temporarily intact, but also that he holds court over the empty, the transparent, the unresolvable, the stacked-up, and the lit. Fraternal Incest  Lights go out while Groucho poses beside actress Virginia Grey (whose first film was Uncle Tom’s Cabin and whose final film was Airport). Lights come on: Virginia has disappeared, and Harpo replaces her in Groucho’s love scene.  µ  Masquerading as his

176   |    Later Astonishments

brother’s momentary girlfriend, Harpo puts two hands in a back pocket posing as a front, and his wrist bends, violating the rule against limpness. The forbidden is a crack in the sidewalk he willfully steps on. Like a coprolaliac shouting obscenities, Harpo airs taboo impulses, including fraternal incest.

Fratophagia  Crooks pursue the Marx Brothers, who try to flee the big store (a.k.a. Nazi-occupied Europe). Into the elevator Harpo flies. Here is the line of flight I’ve been searching for: Harpo, reborn, like a bodysurfer, skier, or gymnast, flies into the Jonah-whale’s mouth, the elevator’s descending box, and falls into fraternal arms.  Ω  Harpo, nearly unconscious, held by both brothers, has achieved his dream. I dare you to define the dildo-like protrusion in his jacket. Straddling Groucho’s leg, Harpo rides it like a sawhorse. Free-for-all: three brothers consume each other, a scapegoating party, a round-robin of fratophagia. Harpo, disseminating shock’s booby prize, considers confusion a turn-on. Running, Harpo holds an incriminating photograph—evidence he tenaciously grips without understanding. Hands want to keep holding what they already hold. How do we classify this tendency? Persistence, or regressiveness, or incremental consciousness: if you proceed only one step at a time through a labyrinth, you will never grasp the totality, but you will befriend the texture of the maze’s walls. Harpo’s White Skates: Syringe  Photo between lips, Harpo ties his roller skates. Another dream of girlish flight comes true: he wears the white boots of a fancy dancer, a Hermes, a Ziegfeld wonder-worker. Chico and Groucho have dark skates; only Harpo’s are white. Forgive me for insisting that white skates are sissy. I assume that Harpo would want dark skates.  Ω  Photo in mouth repeats the old story of his dumbfoundment; and yet

The Big Store   |    177

he maintains a lip-hold over the mechanically reproduced, pubescent crux. To escape the crook, Harpo jumps onto milk-glass lamps, hangs from them as if in Tarzan’s jungle, and leaps between their luminous vines. The lamps are the shape of his car-horn, his syringe, a word etymologically linked to syrinx, which means “a set of panpipes.” Through syringe and syrinx I align Harpo with any possessed singer, séance artist, or Goliath-slayer.

Failure to Perform Schizoanalysis: Harpo’s Butt Is Fragile  I’m not behaving in Deleuze-Guattari-approved fashion. Instead of schizoanalyzing, I’m enthroning childhood memory. I wouldn’t mind performing a schizoanalysis of Harpo, or paying more attention to his flows than to his character. And yet I rely on the embarrassing “I.” D & G say that “you can keep on saying ‘I,’ just for kicks, and already be in another regime in which personal pronouns function only as fictions.” Pretend that I use “I” just for kicks. Harpo slides into the down chute, the anus of the department store. The big store has many anuses. (D & G would say “field of anuses.”) We see Harpo carried through the store’s bowels and then ejected from the “up chute,” and when he emerges, a “Fragile” sign is stuck to his butt. One hand holds the photo; the other grasps his left buttock.  µ  Harpo’s butt is fragile. But he can’t see or read the sign. Only we can. We can adjudicate that backward crack, that small division line, on which rests the word fragile, or its sign, catching Harpo, stuck in the mail room. The mail room is a logical destination for a man who likes to destroy letters and eat communications, and who, as a fratophage, macerates any code he stumbles across. Fragile are the up-chute and the down-chute of Harpo’s shame-tunnel, his kicked rear, his backstory, what he can’t acknowledge or understand. How brothers treat each other (Cain, Abel) are themes the Marxes bring home: brothers protect, ignore, abuse, silence, eat, hug, and humiliate each other. Brothers compete; brothers notice each other’s sexualities. Harpo’s silence articulates these undercover themes. Am I stammering? Incremental poetics involves never finishing a point, never knowing my destination, rushing through culture’s big store on sissy white roller skates without a

178   |    Later Astonishments

stunt double, and enjoying “generalized chromaticism”: every moment is an occasion to wave, point, bump, or stop, under the auspices of failing to speak properly. Why make such a big deal out of the “proper”?

The Point of the Penis  It seems urgent to mention a pointy penis I illicitly touched. It belonged to an Irish fellow, a baseball fan with Byzantine eyes. His penis came to a proper point; the organ, wide in the middle, tapered at the tip. The Marx Brothers manage plural penises; confusion ensues when the phallus is not one but two, three, or four. In Harpo’s world, the penis is no longer a lone marker; it has become a multiple-choice item. Sudden auditory hallucination: I hear Donna Summer sing, “Last dance, last chance.” The fear that a detail doesn’t belong in this book inspires me to insist that everything belongs. What’s the point of “book” if it can’t include scraps? Isn’t inclusiveness the point of the big store, a warehouse of points, some insufficiently pointed? Multiple Libidinal Rewards  Prime mover, Wacky rides the conveyor belt: another birth scene—skating into existence. Face down, he jets out the canal, then magically slides (wish fulfillment) onto unicycle-riding Groucho’s shoulders. Harpo’s crotch touches his brother’s skull.  Ω  I experience these details as libidinal rewards, though disavowed by comedy’s will-o’-the-wisp tone. Chico wraps arms around Harpo and brings him into the electrical supply room, filled with lightbulbs, a surplus of replicable ideas, the assembly-line womb of Minnie Marx, star factory. Who owns Harpo? Perhaps his son, Bill Marx. I will not seek him out, lest he say: keep your fantasies away from my father’s image. Duck-Mouth in a Void  In the supply room, the brothers have trapped the store manager, Grover (played by Douglass Dumbrille, whose final role was in an episode of TV’s Batman). Harpo, rubbing hands together, anticipates lucre. No one pays attention to his code: signage in a void. (When Harpo’s semaphore misses its mark and detonates in a void, he announces to us

The Big Store   |    179

the meaning of “void.”) And no one pays attention to his duck-mouth, when, as peacemaker, he stops heartthrob Tony Martin (a Jew who married Cyd Charisse) from following Grover: stopping Tony is just another chance to hug Tony, to give Tony the duck-mouth, to lay on Tony a shoplifter’s adhesive hands.  µ  Harpo’s meaty, sticky fingers clutch the male merchandise, but his duck-mouth, insufficient, can’t climb the Himalayas of encounter.

The Meaning of “Bi”: The Movable Scapegoat  Harpo prevents Tony from hitting Grover. With one fist Harpo holds off Tony, and with the other fist smacks Grover. I don’t want Harpo to be a bully, yet I admire his ability to perform two actions at once. He looks at hunky Tony while slugging creepy Grover. Tony reminds me of Jimmy Sims, my friend in third grade; Harpo next to Tony (wily shrimp next to solid guy) reminds me of standing near tall boys who transiently befriend me, include me in their rock bands, but then renege. Axiom: comedian and hunk are adjacent categories. Comedy is (why not use Deleuze and Guattari’s term?) a line of flight away from (or a deterritorialization of) “hunk.”  µ  The comic uses “bi” dexterity to please the hunk. Harpo is “bi,” or street-smart: even if blindfolded, he can steer two swindles at once. I recognize Harpo’s ambidextrous readiness to serve a larger man who will temporarily adopt him. Harpo doesn’t touch Tony or the bully whose jaw he moments ago thwacked. In the photo’s paradisiacal time, Harpo touches nobody. May I tell you more about my tall, stocky, popular friend Jimmy Sims? Toward the monosyllabic name Sims I felt Oliver Twist’s tenderness for Nancy Sykes. Through Sims, I could understand my own smallness as seen from outside, and I could therefore turn smallness into concept. Jimmy Sims lived in a slightly larger house than mine. All houses in our development obeyed the same master plan, but tiny differences mattered: dog shit on one garage floor turned that tract house (otherwise identical

180   |    Later Astonishments

to its neighbor) into an ideogram of squalor. Through physical adjacency, Harpo rescues Tony Martin from the gladiator-pit of the generic. Harpo transforms Tony—hunk, hero—into idolized whipping-boy and scapegoat simply by choosing him as audience for mock pugilism. Thus, in comedy’s freeze-tag, the royal crown of victimization—“you’re It!”—passes from hand to hand.

Toward a Schizoanalysis of Harpo  I take back what I said earlier about schizoanalysis. I suggested that I wasn’t capable of schizoanalyzing Harpo, yet, look, I’m investigating Harpo’s big store, his “BwO,” his body without organs or with too many organs, with pockets and points enough for everyone. My childhood’s big stores were JC Penney, Macy’s, I. Magnin, and the Emporium. In Penney’s, my friends and I—three boys, an anarchist cell— befriended the “store protection,” an undercover detective whom we called Chickie. She had a shag haircut like Jane Fonda’s in Klute. Chickie tried to nab us for troublemaking, but we were experimentalists, bodies without organs, and she eventually laughed at our lines of flight through men’s and women’s wear. One 1970s afternoon, I unscrewed a female mannequin’s hand and stuffed it into a male mannequin’s pocket. Chickie saw me deterritorialize the dummies, but she didn’t call down the law. Toward these effigies, who fell under Chickie’s jurisdiction, I behaved, like Harpo, incrementally: with no one’s say-so, I repatriated the polystyrene hand.

The Big Store   |    181

The Bubble-Blowing Demarcator Tickles Totality

A Night in Casablanca (1946)

People often have too much of a tendency to reterritorialize on the child, the mad, noise. If this is done, one fuzzifies instead of making the fuzzy aggregate consist. . . . That is why it infuriated Paul Klee when people would talk about the “childishness” of his drawings. —deleuze and guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

I Don’t “Fuzzify” Harpo  Yesterday at lunch with intellectuals I said that I don’t believe in God but that I’m not an atheist: maybe one day I’ll drop acid and hallucinate Him. I hold on to “God” (synonym for extreme consciousness) as an ace I might later play. Meanwhile, I’ll use Harpo as a Thou. But I’ll try not to make him a fuzzy child. That would be an act of reterritorialization. It’s easy to divvy up critical theory’s terms into valorized and denigrated items. To avoid fuzzifying Harpo, I won’t make him the prince of subversion and misrule. Biographemes  Harpo’s oldest brother, who died in infancy, was named Manfred, like the incestuous hero of Lord Byron’s “closet” drama, Manfred. Mere coincidence. Mere ghost. Harpo’s maternal grandparents, according to The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia, “traveled as magician and harpist.” Furthermore, “it is said that Harpo’s gentle manner was inherited from his father.” To do: explore coincidental links between gentle and Gentile.

182

Work as Occasion for Tickling  Harpo (his character’s name is Rusty) works as valet for a Nazi, played by Sig Ruman (originally Siegfried Rumann, who, as noted earlier, fought in the German army during World War I). I will lean on the Nazi theme; Harpo leans on it, too. Harpo was a comic genius before the Third Reich came along, but the Third Reich gave Harpo’s anarchy extra pointedness. Here, Harpo creates a shoe-polishing device that doubles as a self-tickler.  Ω  Harpo’s torture chamber, like an autistic’s hugging machine, offers the consolation of cuddly limits. Is he trapped or ecstatic? Vampishly he gyrates to a tango beat. Discovering secret dividends within labor and horror, Harpo inserts “pleasure” into the statement “I’m slaving for you.” From servitude, he extorts caresses. Harpo can turn a Nazi into a loofah. To do: find occasions for mechanical pleasure by demoting the enemy into a machine. Explore the affinity between friction and thinking. Stylization Undergirds Foolishness  The Nazi calls Harpo a Schwein, a “silent idiot,” and hits him with the walking stick. In Harpo’s mouth I see outrage. Subtle fact of body language: raised elbows allow hands to hang down passively.  Ω  To be an idiot requires forethought, gymnastic precision: stiffness and lightness, combined. The Nazi hits Harpo, who doesn’t budge, though he bunches his fingers in secret preparation for the next trick. Bunched fingers hide resentment, woundedness, family history, war, ghetto, and the inability to assimilate; bunched fingers throw a hex onto the abuser. Harpo wears high-waisted pants. So did the men in my father’s old-world family—short men in shock over the Zoot Suit or other nefarious developments that distorted the measure of how much fabric a male body needed. “Blowing It”  The Nazi calls Harpo “ape.” Harpo holds a vacuum cleaner; its snaky hose, beyond phallic, gives a taste of Eden. He blows into one

A Night in Casablanca   |    183

end of the vacuum tube (a wind instrument), the other end poised at the Nazi’s hairpiece.  µ  Blowing, a sexual act, disturbs the Aryan coiffure. I’m always blowing it, and so I take personally this strange image of Harpo using a vacuum as wig-remover, humiliation-engenderer. (Groucho’s last name in this film is “Korn­blow.”) Harpo’s wig never blows away, but a paranoid structure gives Harpo license to blow away the evil chap’s toupee.

Brothers Bump Butts  Harpo, wearing a fez, honks and points at Chico: annunciation, deixis. Harpo runs toward him; outstretched arms imply family, old country, unstinting forgiveness, no critical faculties. Brothers perform a tribal or freemason’s salute of reunion, slapping hands, rubbing butts.  µ  They slam cans together, while a passing sailor’s rear end greets the camera. Butt-bumping may not involve sexual desire. Brothers bump for clarity’s sake—to mirror each other, and to prove that nonbrothers are treif. Upon reunion, Harpo and Chico express inauthentic excess of glee. Signal is separate from feeling: with formalist tweezers, I divide behavior from the emotion it seems to represent. Extruding a sign, we experience an almost anal enthusiasm. There should be a word to describe the pleasure of articulation, of code without content. Glaze, Bulge  Chico: “Hey, Rusty, you hear that? They got new management for the hotel.” Harpo nods quickly, yes, and then his eyes glaze. Here’s the order: (1) nervous nod of affirmation; (2) eyes freeze, awaiting the next command. That’s his natural gift—bulging (exophthalmic?) eyes.  µ  His gaze implies the metaphysical introspection of a wildernesswanderer, staring back at decimated family. Eyes don’t acknowledge Chico or circumstance.

184   |    Later Astonishments

Thirty-days-in-the-desert separations between encounters justify extreme contortions of glee upon reuniting. Harpo never seems aloof from his body, except in glazed-eye moments of preoccupation-with-voids, guilty remorse. What sin did Harpo commit, that his eyes should bulge in horror?

(Jewish?) Overprotectiveness: BUtterfield 8 Contrapposto  Harpo wears body-protecting gear: a baseball pitcher’s or fencer’s costume. Insectoid armor overprotects Harpo’s body and creates a new torso. (In the 1960s, my best friend’s mother, who had a Florence Henderson aura, said: “Wayne’s mother overprotects him.” Is overprotection Jewish? Stereotype motivates this aside.) Gregor Samsa, unprotected, exterminable, falls into bug identity to overprotect himself, to reconceive body as cage. A Night in Casablanca concerns World War II’s aftermath: imagine that Harpo, with his Kafkaesque carapace, is a Holocaust survivor surfacing in North Africa.  Ω  His predicament is not funny. Harpo’s stance—hand resting vulnerably on door jamb—reminds me of Liz in BUtterfield 8, the contrapposto of a compromised renegade in a leaning posture of surrender, waiting for the villain (patriarchy?) to overtake her: Liz, Academy Award winner at a bedroom’s edge, struck the same pose in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Call it the threshold position of the oversexed. I was overprotected, Liz was oversexed: two different ways of being over. Anxious Erections  Butt to butt, antagonists stand. Harpo’s sword sticks straight out. Is he frightened or aroused?  Ω  Some erections stem from anxiety, not desire. We recognize the forty-five-degree angle that Harpo’s jokesword describes: it is the angle of the preposterous assertion. In response to the enemy’s outstretched sword, Harpo hits it, then holds up crossed fingers: Can’t touch me. Facing Nazi aggression, Harpo trusts a private childish code that no one will take seriously. And yet Harpo insists on importing it into a cruel context.

A Night in Casablanca   |    185

He drags toys and superstitions into the light of adult congress, where he will be mocked. Thus without translation I import baby-semaphore into writing.

Clock Face  A clock face appears onscreen, and suddenly I remember my childhood house’s dining-room clock, a George Nelson original without numerals—just four colored quadrants. Talking about Harpo is like trying to have a conversation with a clock face. (Deleuze and Guattari, acknowledging that the human face is also inhuman, call it “bunker-face,” an occasion for holes.) In our tract house, the clock face reigned. It hummed, while the thermostat whooshed, susurrated, and clicked. Creating “Game”: Too-Muchness  Harpo creates “game”—pure presentness—wherever he goes. Each encounter is a joust with rules he will never communicate. On his knees, Harpo, supposedly subjugated, rolls dice and snaps fingers.  µ  Announcing numbers, Harpo crouches on the floor in private revel. He assumes that the enemy will appreciate coded display. Harpo’s ecstasy optimistically ignores the other’s cruelty. Decisive in a void, he folds triumph into humiliation. Raised knee proves exorbitant animation, tension, excitement—the “too-muchness” that Shengold mentions in Soul Murder. I’m not an enemy of “too-muchness”—at least when Harpo practices it. He might be held captive by enthusiasm, but its discomfiting excess he spills outward for our benefit. Sudden Boredom  The Nazi’s helper backs Harpo into the corner. Swordplay becomes so rote, so clockwork, that Harpo relaxes, leaning against the planter. He yawns and looks away; bored, he eats an apple while fencing. Teamwork enervates Harpo, whose ennui is dandyish.  µ  Male-male swordplay leads to clock face. The harder the cock, the less sensitive it grows, and the more inhuman. Harpo’s not homo. Two guys going at it with

186   |    Later Astonishments

their rods is yawnsville, yet his mouth opens, ready to receive a customer. Harpo makes virtuosity invisible. He snoozes while playing the étude. He shrugs off what other people consider momentous labor.

Poetics of the Dissolve  The scene ends: the Nazi’s sidekick sinks in exhaustion. Dissolve to foxy Lisette, in sexy outfit, entering a room. (Lisette is played by Lois Collier, who also appeared in the camp chestnuts Cobra Woman, Jungle Woman, and Jungle Queen.) Notice what happens during the dissolve, when one image overlaps another.  Ω  Lisette enters; Harpo yawns. Lisette’s image “tops” Harpo’s; the two, for a moment, meld. Poetics of the dissolve: let’s hoard these almost invisible overlays and use them to invent an ulterior film, where Harpo can stop being Harpo. Juxtaposed: (1) Harpo eats an apple, as the Nazi swordsman bows, humiliated, at his feet; and (2) Lisette, alluring as a budget Ida Lupino, enters a room. Her cigarette holder coincides with his sword. Our game: interpret this evanescent juxtaposition. We crouch on the floor, our fingers crossed in crazy code.

II Why I Use the Word Haptic Instead of Tactile: Is Harpo Smooth Space?  Harpo’s physical maneuvers are haptic. Instead of language, he uses fingers. Deleuze and Guattari defend the word haptic: “ ‘Haptic’ is a better word than ‘tactile’ since it does not establish an opposition between two sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this nonoptical function.” Harpo’s eyes, bugging out, perform a haptic maneuver. Toward Harpo, I am guilty of behaving haptically. Diving into minutiae, I commit the crime of “close vision”—which Deleuze and Guattari, my Sacco and Vanzetti, my underworld heroes, commend: “Cézanne spoke of the need to no longer see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself without landmarks in smooth space.” I don’t see Harpo. I’m too close for accurate vision. Harpo has become my smooth space, my mesa. The danger of smooth space is that I fuzzify it—I treat it as salvific. D & G warn

A Night in Casablanca   |    187

against sentimentalizing the smooth: “Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. . . . Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.” I promise (fingers crossed) that this is the last time I’ll mention Deleuze and Guattari.

Bubbles  Harpo blows a bubble for Lisette, who seems puzzled by his remoteness from easy-to-name masculinity. Men usually fall for her; Harpo doesn’t. Miffed, she stalks off a few paces. He imitates her gait, très flamboyante. She inspects him disdainfully through a lorgnette. He counters by doing same. But then he transubstantiates the lorgnette to a bubble-blower, and his mouth goes to work.  µ  With crooked pinkie, fey Harpo appreciates his own bubbles—inane effluvium. Note his cigarette holder’s multiple extensions, one penis piled on top of another, an accretive Eiffel Tower. Harpo fills up space with more, more, more. He crowds space with the same. Bubbles have no content. Harpo has no content. He simply takes up space; he occupies without dominating. One would never call Harpo imperialist, though he advances, annexes. He does so in sly, bubble-making fashion, with slippery legerdemain. He barks at the bubbles and tries to bite them. He wants to eat the inedible. But he treats hunger as a comic fact rather than as a source of melancholy. (No more verdicts!) Harpo as Fascism’s Antidote  Harpo puts his arm around Chico, as if they’ve been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Like Pablo Casals, Harpo poses a cuddly antidote to fascism; his cuddliness puts the gun to fascism’s fat head. The etymological origin of fascism is fasces: bundles of rods, tied into an axe. The Marx Brothers stick together, but their bundling has more to do with Israelite tribes than with fasces. Hand Washing: Pointing  Harpo rubs his hands together in earnest or guilty anticipation of money. Lady Macbeth, hand washer, rehearses a bygone scene: her gesture repeats the past. Uriah Heep, handwringer, looks toward the future. Harpo positions himself toward neither past nor future— his hand-rubbing is a present-tense pleasure, an oscillation, a spinning-

188   |    Later Astonishments

in-place. When Harpo claims his ’umble place in the cosmos by rubbing hands together, this haptic gesture seats him at the center of whirlwinds and annihilations. He becomes not the hand pointing at the sunset, but the sunset itself. Earlier, I said that Harpo recapitulated Doubting Thomas, fingering Christ’s wounds. I was partly wrong. John the Baptist, in certain paintings, notably one by Leonardo da Vinci, himself points.  Ω  Pointing is a religious and artistic act, a severe gesture aimed at nothingness. (Toward what in heaven or hell is John the Baptist pointing? He seems enshrouded in a darkness from which only the shoulder, and not the finger, pushes forward.) I can point something out without it ever appearing: when I point, I draw attention, and luminousness, toward my pointing finger. (We respect its futility.) Harpo’s mimicry points sometimes toward specific words, for which his gestures are sign-language equivalents, but often he points toward nothing.

Kissing Cash  Chico gives Harpo their pile of earnings, a messy bundle, which Harpo kisses.  Ω  He smooches with cash. (Or blows his nose on it.) Idolatrous, he mistakes symbol for essence, and spills affection onto the insentient. Why, as a child, did I kiss my pillowcase and stuffed animals? I wanted to tell the room—empty space—that I had moral integrity, and that I was a caring, assiduous proprietor. I am the person who loves cash, so I will kiss it. I need to make myself legible—to you, to God, to the laws of language—as someone who loves cash. I don’t really love it. I have been told—by you, Chico—to gather it, and so I am kissing the mission accomplished. Harpo kisses bills to unite with them. He stains money with his signature, the residue (ink, snot, spit) of enthusiasm, always overly literal. Harpo, kissing cash, goes overboard with the gesture; repetition depletes authenticity, proves an affiliation (I love cash), performs stereotypical Jewishness (I love the letter of the law), and displays industry. Odd, to celebrate laziness through conspicuous work.

A Night in Casablanca   |    189

Charades #1: Semes  The charades scene’s quick pace teaches a lesson: never desist. Always tumble forward. Cooperating, speedy brothers asexually replay incest’s too-muchness. Each hurdle in charades, when surmounted, elicits a physical gesture of congratulation. Harpo plays disciplinarian, dispensing rewards or spankings. He gives Chico a language lesson, but their warped dialect won’t win entrance to a country club. Charades excuse affectionate corroboration between brothers. Harpo repeatedly pats Chico’s back: now Harpo is the smart one, with a discomposing method of communication, breaking words into parts and searching for analogies and puns. N.B.: Harpo enacts a haptic relation to language. He feels its seams and demarcates syllables. With nervous muscularity, he communicates to Chico not the overall meaning but the innuendoes of individual semes. I like the word seme—Greek for “sign”—because it has a relation to semen, because it seems less mechanical than syllable, and because it points to an atomic level within language, beneath the molecular; I want to disentangle words, unbundle them, allow them to regress toward a monadic condition. Seme suggests Harpo’s physical need to enact the wordmaking process. Harpo, like his father, who was a tailor, and apparently not a very good tailor (because, according to the Marx Brothers Encyclopedia, Chico was always stealing his scissors), pursues the family business of semes/seams, of ripping apart and reassembling fabric. The charades scene rapidly moves between semes, and separates them with a thick bar of prohibition. Chico endures the disciplinarian action of Harpo’s seme-separating strategies. Example: Harpo splits the word Pekinese (dog) into peek and knees. He peeks through his hands and then touches his knee. Back and forth between “peek” and “knees” Harpo oscillates, until Chico unites the monosyllables. Charades #2: Pointing Finger  Harpo lifts his pants leg, flirtatiously looks upward, airsketches an hourglass figure, and mimics putting on makeup. “A lady!” says Chico. Correct! Harpo emphatically points at him and whistles.  µ  Harpo’s pointing finger—a mapreader’s—is large. Luminous? No. But almost

190   |    Later Astonishments

accusatory: it indicates Chico’s sudden accuracy. Harpo puts one hand in his own mouth (self-directed); the other hand points outward. Harpo, unlike John the Baptist, is in no danger of losing his head. The finger denounces while giving a corroborating slap-on-the-back: I point out your rightness, masculinity, and synchronization.

Charades #3: Smothering the Brother  Harpo tries to communicate, in pieces, the word Beatrice. For the syllable Bea-, he buzzes, then imitates a flying bee and a dive-bombing airplane. Chico guesses: “a B-29.” Harpo whistles, and covers Chico’s mouth after the syllable B to prevent the sounding of 29—a masterful effort at cutting, at separating syllables. I’ll silence my brother. (And, while I’m at it, asphyxiate him.) Over Chico’s mouth, Harpo slaps and then retracts a smothering hand.  Ω  On again, off again: repeated motions excite. Harpo aggressively makes Chico experience the indignity of speechlessness. When you can’t speak, you must touch the other, even if the gesture seems inappropriate, excessive, or “needy.” Buddy behavior conceals Harpo’s wish to mute Chico. And yet their goal is communication: in paroxysms of mutual decoding, they rub sign-deciphering capacities together. Demarcation #1  Harpo’s love of cutting apart words has parodic affinities with literary modernism. Critic Hugh Kenner observed that Ezra Pound maximized demarcation by treating each word and syllable as a unit, separate from its neighbors. Demarcation—restoring each word to its sonic individuality, its dignity as luminous module—is a modernist practice; Harpo plays a similar, silent game by elevating the word into a position of heroic solitude, each seme alone and silent on its peak. My favorite Pound line elegizes men dead in World War I: “Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid.” Seven demarcated syllables. Six strong stresses. Chico and Harpo, together, playing their own version of quick-eyes-gone-under-earth’s-lid, try to reanimate (mouth-tomouth) the mute body of language. And always, behind Chico and Harpo’s charades, I imagine missing brothers—Groucho, brittle; Zeppo, ousted; Gummo, who never wanted to be part of the gang; and the dead infant Manfred.

A Night in Casablanca   |    191

Harpo smacks a word into halves. He could be spanking his brother, or rapping a judicial gavel.  µ  King Solomon threatens to divide the child. The word is sundered, but nothing can separate Harpo and Chico. Note Harpo’s aggressively decisive mouth, intensifying the slap. Finally, Chico hits the jackpot: “Beatrice!” Harpo whistles, shakes Chico’s hand, pats his back, wraps an arm around him, and off they walk, having labored—wastefully?—to assemble from scratch the name of Dante’s beloved. Putting a simple word together is a romantic quest.

Star Facelessness  Stardom—becoming legible as name, face, routine— requires a backdrop of nothingness. First comes namelessness. Against obscurity, the star grows visible. “Harpo” couldn’t exist without a dismal, absent, or inscrutable origin. Did every star have an unhappy childhood? No. But every star emerges from a faceless prehistory. No one recognized Harpo until he became “Harpo.”

III Is Harpo Drugs?  This book is an experiment in star immersion. Can any star produce in the viewer’s internal system the warping and woofing effects (striated space, smooth space) of drugs or the Internet or the intertext (as imagined in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Library of Babel”)—a sensation of dizzying interthreadedness and careening implication? Is my language antisocial? Should I normalize it? May I take Harpo as the author of affront, of the nonstreamlined? Can Harpo replace human contact? Is Harpo health or psychosis? (Don’t bifurcate!) This book is also an experiment in star somatization. What happens when you take a star into your body? You develop problems. From the other side of the camera, Jean-Luc Godard (as quoted in Alexander Kluge’s Cinema Stories) offers insight into the difficulties that movies pose to the body: “When I begin a film, I often develop dermatological problems and I could imagine that this happens because the surface of the film is delicate, one still speaks of film material

192   |    Later Astonishments

technically as la pellicule (skin).” Image-hoarder, word-chewer, I somatize Harpo as button, pellet, pill, monad, increment, beat, and bite.

Biting the Interdicted  In the hallway, “honk” goes Harpo’s horn, arbitrarily—a sound in the middle of nowhere. Hungry, Harpo bites—or sucks?—Chico’s thumb.  Ω  Note Harpo’s oral need. Fellatio? He wants to gum the interdicted. But then he scowls and spits out dross. Chico’s thumb didn’t taste good. The desired idol, Harpo, the object that I violate society’s commandments in order to consume (I bite him by ignoring the codes of sane discourse), also sickens me; I need to disgorge him. Low-Key Togetherness  “You crazy,” says Chico, “but you hungry.” Harpo wiggles his head in agreement. Chico oversees Harpo’s appetites, and yet Harpo—dog or infant—likes being curtailed. The Marx Brothers enjoy steady-state togetherness—clubby, kvetchy familiarity. In the late 1960s, my mother’s mother said “shit” when she spilled canned fruit cocktail on a hotel-room carpet. Does spilled fruit cocktail qualify as low-key togetherness? No. But I recognize moments of waiting for fruit cocktail to be served, moments of pretending to enjoy fruit cocktail even if the murky syrup tastes doubtful. Excoriation as Glory  “There’s a human guinea pig,” says Chico, pointing to Harpo. Groucho: “He’s a pig, but he doesn’t look human.” Harpo—illogically happy, standing next to breadsticks and candles—beams in a void.  Ω  We see Harpo from the point of view (POV: I love the anagram) of Chico’s pointing, and from the POV of Groucho’s disdain. We see Harpo from the POV of his excoriater. A beloved, seen from a despising POV, acquires a double-whammy strangeness. Hands thrust in reversed-pants pockets, Harpo reinterprets excoriation as glory. Harpo occupies the positions of “cute” and “detested” at the same in-

A Night in Casablanca   |    193

stant. “Cute” overrides “detested,” but rottenness vibrates beneath adorability. He rides the threshold, “beloved” on the cusp of “hated”—the scapegoat’s Totentanz, waltz at the edge of the pit.

You Notice My Miraculousness  Harpo puts his finger in a lit wick, steals the flame and separates it from the candle, which he chews, wide eyes acknowledging tastiness.  µ  Don’t tell me those are “normal” eyes. Supernatural, they belong in the “God” file, or in De Sica’s Miracle in Milan. Harpo is not astonished by flame or pain: bug-eyed, he is astonished by his own transformation into the allegorical. He indulges in the coy rhetoric of the double-take, but he also occupies a pinnacle of shock and arrest. I nominate this image as a fetish to take into the war zone as magical armor against holocaust. Phallus-Lengthening  Duck-mouthing, Harpo uncorks a champagne bottle with his knuckles: lo and behold, the cork turns pickle-length. For leverage, he leans against Groucho’s crotch. Cocks come in many sizes. Arousal lengthens the organ, but more important than the enlarged cock is the compared cock, suffering or enjoying its incremental modicum of difference. Magically stretching the cork, Harpo plays a chromatic glissando, traversing intervals of cock-next-to-cock difference. Brothers size each other up: amazed, Groucho and Chico behold Harpo’s stretched cork. Harpo and Chico Eating Each Other  Perversion escalates. Harpo and Chico together eat two ends of the same bread stick. Groucho cranes forward, violating his own spinal uprightness in order to peer at their kink. Then follows the climax of mutual consumption: Harpo and Chico make out. No way to avoid this interpretation. I specialize in pointing out perversities that others won’t acknowledge.  µ  To the viewer, Groucho directs a wit-

194   |    Later Astonishments

ticism: “Wouldn’t it be great if they ate each other?” Is fratophagia the right word to describe brothers gobbling each other up? Why my lust for words ending in -phagy? “Eating myself” sounds disgusting, but “autophagy” sounds like a spiritual career.

Harpo as Trash Receptacle: Self-Invagination  Garbage magnet, Harpo sweeps a dropped cigarette into his right shoe: toe-flap opens to form a dust trap. Human ashtray, he accepts debris without complaint or revulsion.  Ω  Trash receptacle, I invent folds in my body to hold other people’s remains. Invagination doesn’t hurt. I use the word invagination because I want to find unheralded hiding-places inside bodies whose skin seems closed, nonporous. I want to imagine lines of flight not only out of the body but into it. I want to pretend, at risk of scarification and self-loss, that the body can host “foreign” substances and experiences. By “the body” I mean if not the male body then the body that thinks it already has enough vaginas and will be surprised to discover new ones—imaginary puckers, tucks, and pockets. Some men wouldn’t like to be informed: “Hey, buddy, guess what? You’re invaginated! Get used to it!” Invagination, as concept, amplifies Harpo’s strange eagerness to find new sacs in himself for accepting useful trash. His ability to be multiply invaginated presupposes a cantering toward ruin, a wish to become fallen, a readiness to repress disgust and to relinquish skin’s barricade. The title character of Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten has an appetite for servitude. Jakob plays underdog to enjoy a mental expansion and inward somersaulting that resembles autophagia: he eats away at himself for the gymnastic pleasure of occupying eccentric points of view. Walser expresses the bliss of going lower and lower, of self-smashing: “When I imagine the clink of a gold coin, I go practically frantic. I have food to eat: so what. I would like to be rich and smash my head in.” Servitude, in Walser’s eyes, requires voluntary invagination—indenting, folding, anointing oneself with abjection’s aristocratic myrrh.

A Night in Casablanca   |    195

Rebirth from Elevator’s Womb  When the elevator gets stuck, Harpo climbs up the emergency escape hatch to seek help. Groucho gives him a stool and assists, like a dancer upholding his prima ballerina assoluta.  µ  Elevator failure gives Harpo the chance to step on Groucho and to perform a birth scene. Servility pays secret dividends. Let’s get born together. I, first-in-line fetus, will investigate the outside world’s temperature before we emerge. Smacking Himself: Gookie’s Vector Ambiguous  Serious symphonic music— heroic exploration, like Wagner’s Ring—accompanies Harpo’s exit from the elevator into a dark attic. Shocked, he opens his mouth. Reaction shot to vista of Nazi loot: Rhine gold. He opens a treasure chest, almost pockets a tiara, then slaps his hand to abort the theft. I smack myself on the verge of committing a crime. Pretending to be his own mother, he learns morality. Harpo approaches a harp and acknowledges its aptness by gently waving. Startled, he spots an unframed painting of a man with a Gookie. As self-inoculation, Harpo imitates his own trademark.  µ  The Gookie, like selfsmacking, provides a little punishment to grease the ego’s wheels and to counteract the otherwise inadmissibly corny harp-solo. The Gookie is directionless. Where will its hate-vector land? No longer on its original victim, Mr. Gehrke. Now it falls into the Rhine gold’s void; it falls into the echo space of Harpo’s inclination to stage mirror scenes and to repeat gestures that were, long ago, his identity’s foundation, and that only we, as Harpo’s emissaries, are alive to read. Harpo’s Emotional Excess  At the gambling table, chips pile up, improbably, on square #5: Harpo virtually froths at the mouth—perpetuum mobile of smiling, nodding, Uriah Heep–hand-wringing. Groucho spins the roulette wheel. Harpo, myopic or dying for physical contact, leans into the wheel to watch, up close, the grass grow. The stack of chips rises like a little Babel,

196   |    Later Astonishments

a sand castle, an accretion kingdom, an ode to compulsiveness and repetition. Harpo can’t keep polite distance from desired objects: he clutches Chico’s jacket. We look directly into Harpo’s gaping mouth and see his inactive larynx sing silent hosannas.  Ω  This shot, evangelical, argues for miracles and peripeteias. It could be part of Potemkin, or any film that makes a big statement about human greed and devastation, about uninhibited keening. Harpo abandons himself to rapture but also simulates abandon: he experiences an emotion and then demonstrates it to others. Linguistic impoverishment produces affective excess. Healed leper, he aims jubilation frontally at us. Prayerful Harpo—dead center of the composition—becomes nothing but open mouth, clasped hands, and shut eyes.

Unauthorized Kisses  In a second jubilant outpouring, Harpo slaps a mouth-to-mouth kiss on an old gent, while a woman watches.  Ω  This sturdy, suspicious woman reminds me of Angelica Huston— Hollywood daughter—and of a Jewish poet I once disappointed. Chico doesn’t see the kiss. Only the woman sees it. Note Harpo’s muscular forearm drawing him into a closer “buss.” Harpo hasn’t learned the ban against men kissing men. Shock: Harpo kisses Chico, who homophobically says “no kissing me!” and pushes away the slavering mouth. Wanting to Be Seen Wanting Unconsciousness  Expulsion sends Harpo reeling toward the pile of chips.  Ω  In this image, my favorite, Harpo takes emotion to extremes. Performing ablutions, he smothers his face with chips— symbolic siblings to coins, trinkets, buttons, bubbles, words, manna. Skipping the intermediate steps between winning money and

A Night in Casablanca   |    197

spending it, he attempts instant transubstantiation, like trying to fuck a pinup. Baptism-bound, he believes, like Elizabeth Bishop, “in total immersion.” Center of the image, he leans forward, 3-D, coming toward us. He relinquishes face and identity for the pleasure of cresting into abandonment’s mystical embrace. He wants unconsciousness. He wants to be seen wanting unconsciousness. (Note this division between feeling and wanting to be seen feeling.) In third grade, I bragged to a devout Mormon girl about my collection of Playboy magazines, stolen from tract-house garages on Cub Scout paper drives. Later, lying, I told her that I’d thrown the smut away. In a jubilant note, embroidered with exclamation marks, asterisks, and balloons, she praised my triumph over Satan. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about hoarding Playboys, and I still can’t keep it shut about wanting to be seen wanting unconsciousness.

IV Proprioceptive Insecurity  Proprioception helps us avoid bumping into other people. Harpo dramatizes this awkward gamble of figuring out nearness and farness. To assist locomotion, he touches Chico’s back.  µ  As if blind, Harpo navigates by handling people with chummy politeness, like Verdi’s Falstaff and Ford, in courtly fashion allowing the other to pass first: “Please pass,” “Passate!” (Thus cuckolded men sweet-talk rivals.) Harpo experiences spatial anxiety, a need to be rescued from free fall. Dependent, he adheres to objects with a loyal, prayerful materialism, a belief that matter matters, that flesh and trees, dogs and brothers, sidekicks and chairs are solid and deserve to be greeted. Clasping Groucho from the rear, Harpo achieves untoward contact by aligning his faltering body with solidities.  µ  Hands, reaching out, assess dimensions, experiment with space, and preserve its mystery.

198   |    Later Astonishments

Interminableness: Omitting the Middleman of “Use”  The Marx Brothers, imposing interminableness on situations that should be consolingly terminal, secretly unpack a suitcase that the Nazi is trying to pack. Harpo lies on his back, under an expandable table, and separates its leaves; through this crack of division, clothes rain upon him. He tosses them back to the Nazi, who pointlessly throws them again on the table. Another round-robin of property-annulment.  Ω  Harpo occupies the recumbent position of a baby for whom the world is the toy-object dangling downward into the crib. Lazing, Harpo reinterprets labor as restfulness. Finally, Harpo and Groucho toss the Nazi’s clothes out the window—efficient technique of garbage disposal, omitting the middleman of “use,” excreting food before digesting it. In a three-part action, he removes the middle part; Harpo insists on skipping the second step, not merely to obtain economic joy from streamlined efficiency but to reap the abstract thrill of omission. Harpo was the second son. (So am I.) Junking the second step, Harpo discards himself: streamlinings have a suicidal undertone. A large family may need simplifying, its middle member canceled. Shame-Finger  Harpo throttles a Nazi and pushes him out the airplane window: rare, for Harpo to commit manual violence without the mediation of props. Lisette, affectionate, plucks his cheeks. Like a bashful schoolboy, he wags a scolding finger. Naughty, naughty. Girls have cooties. Harpo won’t directly encounter romance. Joking, he points at it with the shame-finger, its “tsk, tsk” infantilizing him but also establishing skeptical distance from sexual interaction. The shame-finger performs a demarcation, as if a frame had fallen over an unstructured view and forced it to become a landscape. No Transition between Moods  Stupefied, Harpo stumbles to the steering wheel and somnambulistically gropes its levers. The plane spins. In joy’s seat, Harpo plays mad scientist, his maneuvers scattershot, tongue-between-teeth. After accidentally pulling the airplane’s brake, he succumbs to fear. A split second later, he catapults to unmixed joy: enjoying flight’s orgiastic preposterousness, he rises in his seat and rabidly leans forward, ready

A Night in Casablanca   |    199

to kiss, chomp, or bark.  µ  Hilarity erases anguish. Although I celebrate the stark contrast between opposite moods, should we mistrust a person who can kill memories with laughing gas? Note Harpo’s inability, whether imbecilic or innocent, to absorb negative experiences, to form predictive patterns based on unhappy events. No prognostications darken Harpo’s unmodulated attitude.

Crabby People Seem Wise  Enjoying playtime, Harpo lolls on the steering wheel. Groucho and Chico revive the Nazi pilot, but Harpo clubs him again with the scepter. The Nazi staggers backward, nearly unconscious. “The master race,” Groucho quips, instructing us to remember the context of Holocaust in which this film, like other Marx Brothers vehicles, finds its point. Harpo raises clasped hands—victor!—above his head. Groucho puts his arm around Harpo, who has won the sourpuss’s approval. We slave to please crabby men. My mother’s stern father looked like Groucho—similar nose, mustache, pate, spectacles, overconfidence, misrecognition of others. Rhetorical, he out-argued and wheedled. Groucho lectures. So did my grandfather. So do I. Harpo never lectures. Joy’s Escalation  Harpo’s excitement escalates, even if his brothers are bleeding.  µ  I take Harpo’s limitless mania as an appealing model for aesthetic experience, for a gluttonous desire to make and receive art. Harpo pops up from his chair with kiddie-birthdayparty body language. Round knobs on airplane control-sticks remind me of obsessive dots— cells, nipples, “Op” protoplasm—in Yayoi Kusama’s artworks. In patterns and repetition, as in Harpo’s permissively open mouth, I seek absolution, trance, exaltation, and ether—properties that underlie abstract art and Harpo’s jubilation.

200   |    Later Astonishments

Squeezing: Hair  Outside the police station, Harpo wrings the Nazi’s neck and climbs on him. Violence eases into doggy cavorting. One body on top of another isn’t enough. Harpo needs to be the third body, to add an extra, impossible layer.  Ω  Harpo hops on the buddy huddle. Squeezing, adhering, he achieves happy unconsciousness. Through lunatic overpiling, through escalation, a comic body can dream of escaping jail, politics, World War II, Holocaust, obsolescence. (Fact, though final, is always open to interpretation.) Hair obeys a law of contagious adhesion. Through theft and stickiness, the balding brothers gain hair. Harpo pulls off the Nazi’s wig (and wears it as beard); Groucho nabs the goatee; Chico steals the Hitler mustache. Harpo flashes a wide-open Mom-mouth and touches the Nazi’s sleeve: I laugh at your humiliation, baldie. Harpo’s Crush on Chico  Harpo’s hand grips Chico’s bicep with atavistic adherence, or grandmotherly gravity. Crossing the street, my mother’s mother held my arm: she exerted the companionable firmness of steering and steerage. Blood relations, we stick together. We will not be kind to each other, but we will cling. Clutch the family member’s arm, and thus arrive—Saran-wrapped, name-tagged— into humankind.  Ω  Harpo embraces Chico. The comedy ends with two couples: Groucho and Lisette, and Chico and Harpo. Harpo loves Chico not because Chico is talented, but simply because he is Chico. Harpo exaggerates the affection (or points to its social inappropriateness) by demonstrating it physically, and thus leaving himself vulnerable to homophobic insult. Leaning on Chico, Harpo turns him into totality. In my father’s Thin Paper Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, published in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1945, totality is next to totalitarianism, but I needn’t assert an absolute relation between the words. Philosophers have much to say about totality. Go seek out their concepts. Harpo is as close to totality as I’ll ever come.

A Night in Casablanca   |    201

Bulge, Glaze, Pause, Shock; or, The Bushy-Haired Ragpicker’s Burnt Offering

Love Happy (1949)

But has the counterpart of this entranced removal ever been investigated—the shock with which we come across a gesture or a word the way we suddenly find in our house a forgotten glove or reticule? —walter benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle”

I The Pillow Book of Harpo Marx  You are now holding the pillow book of Harpo Marx. The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, from eleventh-century Japan, was composed in notebooks that the empress had given her lady-inwaiting. Of these notebooks, said Sei Shōnagon, “Let me make them into a pillow.” She filled them “with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, often including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid.” On the whole she concentrated on trivia, on the inanimate, on people-asobjects, on objects-as-people. On the whole she ignored her audience because she had no audience. On the whole she conflated writing and sleep. On the whole she believed that writing was mute. The pillow book wasn’t a transitional object; she never made the transition. The object ceased to be a way station and became her destination. In Sei Sho–nagon’s wooden pillow, she inserted stuffing. Harpo is stuffed with material he will never articulate. Stuffed, he suffers ineffability, a more

202

elegant condition than unspeakability—a code word, in Oscar Wilde’s time, for homosexuality. The unspeakable and the ineffable have different connotations. The unspeakable hides below speech. The ineffable soars beyond speech.

Kissing the Tin  Love Happy, “based on a story by Harpo Marx,” is his final film. Auteur, he dominates; Groucho and Chico are sidekicks. The film sentimentally emphasizes Harpo’s clown-pathos, his identity as debris. To express kinship with the kippered and the inanimate, Harpo ritually kisses a sardine tin.  Ω  He can’t decode the tin’s Maltese Cross—not quite a swastika. Kissing the tin is like kissing kin. He would rather kiss a tin than a person. I kiss this picture of Harpo kissing the tin. I follow his lead in worshiping the deadened. My father kissed my forehead. Not erotic is Harpo’s relation to the tin, its insignia horrific, if understood. “Hah-po” as Gesture of Forgiveness  “Hello, Hah-po,” says Chico. Everyone pronounces his name “Hah-po.” And that soft r, erased, promises kindness—or hard-knocks obliviousness—to Harpo’s bruised nature. In the Brooklyn accents of my mother’s parents, I heard indifference but also forgiveness: the Flatbush absence of the r forgave my negligibility. Voice Box  Dissolve: sardine tin turns into loudspeaker.  Ω  Observe the voice box—horn, honker, blank, puncture, tittie, cup, tease. If you scrutinize or open it, you might discover emptiness. Peering into desire’s mechanics could lead to dissolution. Some psychoanalytic writers might call this voice box, externalized on the wall, a “part-object.” I’ll call it a piece of Harpo, sent outward for our visual inspection. If voices are as alien, protruding, awond featureless as this loudspeaker, perhaps we’d be better off mute.

Love Happy   |    203

Demarcation #2  I enjoy imposing demarcations on Harpo’s undifferentiated “niceness”: a pleasure, to snip exegetical scissors and push my amplification button. Should I abolish indecent embellishments? Pleasurable intensification causes an after-dose of terror. Being seen as disgustingly overanalytical is at least a form of recognition. Harpo’s even-tempered uniformity (always affectionate, delighted, self-pleased) excites my compensatory wish to impose demarcations upon him. Hugh Kenner uses the word demarcation, in The Pound Era, to describe the poet’s love of “consonantal boundaries,” the “sharp discrimination of word from word.” Kenner observes: “A rare but recurrent temperament owns such zest for demarcation as a life-pattern.” Pound demarcated syllables; Freud demarcated concepts. Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” ends: “In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.” Demarcate or die. Synchronicity: José Lezama Lima’s Mother  Across the Gulf of Mexico from Key West lies Cuba, home of poet José Lezama Lima (1910–76), implicitly queer, explicitly baroque, whose mother—mere coincidence—was born the same year as Harpo, and died the same year as Harpo. José dedicated his crowning volume of poetry to her: “para mi madre Rosa Lima de Lezama (1888–1964), toda mi poesía.” His poem “Mother” points to a harp: “the lightness of what the rain weighs / or the harp’s venetian blinds.” Window slats demarcate light and dark, street and home. “Full of desire is the man who flees from his mother,” writes Lima in the poem “Summons of the Desirer,” published in 1945, four years before Harpo’s Love Happy. Forgive links between unlike figures. The Swatting Mother  In a skit, Bunny Dolan (played by Marion Hutton, who once sang with the Desi Arnaz orchestra, and was the sister of Betty Hutton, who replaced Judy Garland in Annie Get Your Gun) slaps around three longhaired dolls, emblems of the three Marx Brothers.  µ  Glamorous, hairbrush-wielding Bunny looms over inanimate victims—brothers transformed to stuffed, raggedy nothings. The Marxes undergo gender switch and ontological downgrade, from man to doll.

204   |    Later Astonishments

“Who stole that jam?” sings Bunny. Jam—a queasy, jismy, vaginal substance—belongs in mother’s larder. Jam maven berates and swats a seated ragdoll trio: “Mama’s goin’ to kick some teeth in if you don’t confess.” Will she punish bushy-haired Harpo with her hairbrush? We call this hairbrush proleptic: it predicts Joan Crawford’s implement in Mommie Dearest. Harpo, incapable of confessing, backs away from the swatting mother.  Ω  Muteness has Gulag consequences: silence, no longer cute and self-protective, might lead to kicked-in teeth. Perhaps Harpo finds threats erotic. No: stunned, he recoils from Bunny, singing dominatrix. He quivers to her punitive beat. As bribe, Harpo offers a faked striped lollipop, which she slaps to the floor. Cowering, with mea culpa eyes, he gazes at the accuser, who sings, “You stole that jam!”  Ω  Harpo, seen by the law, becomes an evicted nonperson, rat, scum. And yet, with coy backward glance, he resembles a pinup, Jane Russell in The Outlaw, or a thriller victim, Psycho’s Janet Leigh, undergoing the countdown toward death, a slashing that coincides with the instant of being seen.

Haptic Guidance  Fleeing the theater, Harpo touches its wall: orientation, sedation. Can he tell the difference between wall and person? Those who love demarcation don’t necessarily love humankind. Think of the haptic pleasure the ragdoll gives the child-finger. The doll’s inanimateness is a small price to pay for the pleasure of its fabric’s grain and burl, sending the fingertip a call to existence: you exist, the slubby cloth tells the guidance-seeking digit. Concepts offer a similar consolation. I include under “concepts” the rules of musical tonality, Harpo’s arpeggios, D major or minor giving haptic confirmation to the bewildered, night-encircled hand. I play a Chopin étude because its tonal tunnels, its arpeggios in demarcated keys, give my fingers the delight of categorization—at least when I arrive accurately at the notes, and articulate them with the rehabilitating “click” of proper placement.

Love Happy   |    205

Christine Jorgensen  Madame Egelichi, the film’s sinister vamp, played by Hungarian-born Ilona Massey (later blessed with her own TV series, The Ilona Massey Show), calls Harpo “the bushy-haired shoplifter” and then tries to hypnotize him. (Bushy-haired: an insult I take personally.) Madame Egelichi looks like Christine Jorgensen, pioneering transsexual, male-tofemale, who took after Marlene Dietrich, and who was the subject of the biopic The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970), verboten drive-in fare. Jorgensen was semantically linked to Jergens lotion in my parents’ bathroom.  µ  Pretend that a man, disguised as a woman, is seducing Harpo. With her Eastern European accent, she is the nightmare Nazi inversion of Marilyn Monroe, who appears later in the film. (In Love Happy, all the women, whether good or evil, are blondes. Blonde Harpo joins their mutant club.) Madame Egelichi, her hyperfemininity artificial and outmoded, looks like the mother of my friend Bob (our friendship’s peak was fifth grade, when he showed me his precociously long penis): Bob’s mother, an Avon lady, curt and cold, had Germanic white-blonde hair and a large sedan. The Gift of Bulge  The officer calls Harpo “bushy-haired”—an ethnic stain, the disorganized hair of the bush-people, antithetical to Jorgensen’s surgical white-blondeness. Harpo’s downward gaze assesses Madame’s breasts. Maybe he feels nothing. Maybe he’s just interpreting. He interprets to stay alive, not to be sportive or cute. He wears an expression he might not feel: he wants to second his environment, as if it couldn’t exist without the aid of his assertive bulge-lip and bulge-eyes. Harpo has the gift of bulge. He distorts his face to match the Jorgensen conquistador’s breasts. Anamorphosis #1  Madame stuns him with a “whammy”—sci-fi anamorphosis of her face and figure. Anamorphosis means “a distorted projection or drawing that appears normal when viewed from a particular point or with a suitable mirror or lens.” Anamorphosis is a pet concept of Jacques Lacan, who uses it to demarcate subjectivity’s intrinsic distortions: Madame’s stretched face, attempting to hypnotize Harpo, suggests the warpings produced by perspective, desire, and self-consciousness. Madame’s

206   |    Later Astonishments

whammy does a number on Harpo’s susceptible, bushy-haired soul; he experiences the annihilations that accompany garden-variety desire. To her special-effects anamorphosis, Harpo responds with a surprise washed clean of guile or concept.

Why Harpo Quit School  In his autobiography, he blames the Irish bullies. They picked on him for three reasons. I quote Harpo: “I was small for my age. I had a high, squeaky voice. And I was the only Jewish boy in the room.” When the teacher “left the room,” the bullies threw Harpo out the window. These ejections were frequent. Each time, he returned to class and lied to the teacher, Miss Flatto. He didn’t want to squeal on the bullies, so he claimed that he’d cut class to use the bathroom. Finally, one day, the bullies threw him out the window, and Harpo never returned to school. His formal education ended. A silent career replays ejection from Gentile book-learning. Glaze  Harpo backs away from the Nazi-tinged female predator. (Call her Miss Flatto.) His eyes are glazed. When I say “glazed,” I allude to the glamor of glazed donuts, especially glazed French twists, and to the soul’s protective disguise of blankness and unreceptivity: a shininess on Being’s surface, a sugar-paste thickness that prevents invasion. Harpo emits glaze to defend against this attractive woman—and to dematerialize the terms attractive and woman. Harpo emits italics by glazing himself. The Christine Jorgensen enchantress doesn’t engineer his shock. He produces it himself. And yet he casts doubt on her gorgeousness; with double-take glaze, he suggests the speciousness of sexual attraction.  Ω  Bossy heterosexuality is a threat that Harpo italicizes—renders “glazed” and noticeable-as-fake—by going blank. Against the wall he stands, a bushy-haired mess, stunned by the anamorphosis of Christine Jorgensen, her patent falseness, her Nazi plenitude. Tickling Fest  Bodyguards violently search Harpo, who considers it a tickling fest: thus he deliberately misinterprets male aggression.  Ω  He coop-

Love Happy   |    207

erates, to make it easier for thugs (Sal Mineo’s big brothers?) to frisk him and to clutch his underarm, while he waves at the Aryan siren.

Harpo as Ragpicker  Bodyguards remove gleanings from Harpo’s pockets, which, like a department store, contain multitudes: music box, ham, female-mannequin leg, welcome mat, umbrella, barber pole, shaving mug, inflated lifesaver, ice block, sled, and dog. Harpo excels at playing dead. Village-in-little, survivalist, he has no sense of private property, of what is valuable and what is trash; ragpicker, he subscribes to the “you never know when you might need it” philosophy. The itinerant ragpicker is one link in the history of montage, bricolage, and other surrealist modes of juxtaposition that depend on demarcation. You must demarcate the goods before you can rearrange and splice them together. You must scissor up the world into bits before you can compose Potemkin-worthy sequences. André Breton, in Nadja, scours the streets for clues that might elucidate his nostalgia for the present moment. Harpo is both Nadja (madwoman) and Breton (poet) simultaneously. Harpo is his own lost object; his pockets contain all the treasures the boulevards offer the browser. “Ragpicker” describes consciousness, its crevices full of junk that never finds a use. I should pity the ragpicker-castaway; but Harpo in his packrat guise, a wily and industrious preserver (Vishnu), fights against destructibility, as, long ago, I collected cardboard cores of paper-towel rolls because I liked their hollowness. Zombie Stiffness  A moment ago, I found Madame’s exposed flesh alluring, but the allure didn’t fully enter my consciousness; it stayed frozen and removed, like a room of masterpieces with a glowering guard stationed at the door. “I like you very much,” she says, and in profile he leans unnaturally (special effects) toward her.  µ  Harpo’s body surrenders, erect, to the task of pointing, like a dog whose muzzle guides Master toward bounty.

208   |    Later Astonishments

The Limpness Act  Harpo’s hand, hanging limply, a pendulum, regularly thumps her. She judo-flips him. Abandoned ragdoll, he lies immobilized on the floor. (The toy no one wants is a pathetic sight.) Bodyguards slap him, and he returns the favor. Violence turns into festivity, sportiveness, tickled arousal, without climax. Fainting, like a Victorian with the vapors, he enjoys limpness, and gladly lets go of masculinity. Flaccidity’s a gas.  Ω  Harpo falls away from the Nazi woman onto the Sal Mineo fraternity of bodyguards, who don’t want him but who must accept his offer: it’s their job to behave as sticky trampolines, retaining the bouncing object, the manboy, his face like Busch’s Max and Moritz, German brats who maintain cuteness despite evil natures and schoolmaster-destroying urges. Harpo’s visage becomes young again, devolving into plumpness, shedding the horror of adult definition. Syntax: Serpent  Syntax tickles us with the movement between parts of speech as they come together, higgledy-piggledy, to form a chain-link sentence—like a toy I once owned, Cecil, a stuffed snake, modeled after a TV star. Bill Marx writes, in the afterword to his father Harpo’s autobiography: “His all-time favorite television star was Cecil, The Seasick Sea Serpent, a hand puppet on ‘Time for Beany.’ If any one of us dared break into the den while Dad was watching Beany and Cecil, we got grounded.” I don’t remember Cecil’s seasickness. I only remember his fake fur. When I stopped caring about Cecil, I exiled him to a cabinet with shiny doors, a shellac I saw with a post-Cecil gaze. Anamorphosis #2  As torture, Harpo is put into the washing machine, where he looks fishily out the aquarium porthole, anamorphosis distorting his face.  Ω  This flat window, an abstract oval, recalls the “tittie” loudspeaker, seen earlier. We view the washing machine’s elliptical window from the side, rather than straight on; cinematic protocol forbids Harpo from

Love Happy   |    209

looking directly at us. We glimpse his predicament through two flat planes: movie screen, washing-machine porthole.

Harpo’s Kaspar: Georg Trakl  A bodyguard fires a gun through an apple balanced on Harpo’s head; Harpo plays William Tell, or Isaac, nearly sacrificed by Abraham. (The German words for sacrifice and victim are the same: “der Opfer.”) Harpo, like Dostoevsky, is brought to his execution—and therefore experiences the idiot-epileptic’s exalted interregnum before the fit: “in his epileptic condition there was a certain stage almost immediately before the fit itself . . . when, amidst the sadness, the mental darkness, the pressure, his brain suddenly seemed to burst into flame at moments, and with an extraordinary jolt all his vital forces seemed to be tensed together.” Through paralyzed suspension, the idiot—or Harpo—attains last-minute vitality. This moment of tingling before the epileptic fit commences is known as an “aura,” Walter Benjamin’s word for an artwork’s uncanny vibration.  µ  Harpo looks like Bruno S., schizophrenic star of Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser: Herzog described Bruno as one of the most “mutilated” individuals he’d ever encountered, yet Kaspar enjoyed the fringe benefit of epitomizing the romantic poet, a naïf untainted by culture. Harpo, crowned by an apple, regresses to Adamic basics. After wildly eating the apple, Harpo seizes the bodyguard’s pistol and holds it to his own head.  µ  Cannibalistic or suicidal Harpo tries out for a role in Potemkin, primer in revolutionary aesthetics. Thrown into the bedroom, he eats like a madman. I’m glad that such a scene exists, Harpo as wolfman, hungry beast, psychotic, anticivilized, the Jew who must be destroyed. He undergoes post-Holocaust therapy: he restages hunger, cannibalism, destruction of the neighbor, within the Germanic register of Kaspar Hauser. Poet Georg Trakl, who killed himself (cocaine overdose) in 1910 at age twenty-seven, wrote “Kaspar Hauser Song,” Kaspar Hauser Lied, about the wild child from whose mouth the “dark lament” emerged: I want to be a

210   |    Later Astonishments

rider. Harpo onscreen could not have uttered the simple declaration Ich will ein Reiter werden, the one sentence that Kaspar’s captor taught him; the one sentence that tied Kaspar to human speech; an inherited sentence, learned by rote.

Detachable Phallus: Why I Poach from Psychoanalysis  Consider this equation: Harpo = phallus. I speak from experience: the penis is the most reliable thing in my life. And yet, erection brings out the organ’s brittle detachability. When Harpo departs, when I stop closely watching him, I use syntax to reattach the wanderer. Lacan claims: “Certain moments of silence in the transference represent the most vivid apprehension of the presence of the other as such.” Don’t consider Harpo’s silence a negation of other people. The other’s palpability weighs on Harpo’s heart. I derive interpretive moxie from psychoanalysis, an investigative mode that carries assumptions about nested boxes, linguistic contortions, topsyturvy duration, interminable delving, entangled antitheses, memory’s unreliability, and uncertainty’s numinousness. I’m not putting Harpo on the couch. I lack the credential. And I lack the couch. And I lack the “I.” That’s one thing Harpo and I have in common: a sense that something is missing.

II Anal Mirror Scene  Harpo, whistling, removes a huge mirror from his coat pocket and inspects his reflection. He uses a pick to comb his hair and diminish its curl. We receive a POV shot of Harpo in the mirror: a black frame, like the washing machine’s porthole, encircles him. I want him haloed; I want to sever Harpo from social context by demarcating him with a black line. We see Harpo seeing himself with gamin eyes. Charm, and a swish necktie, sequester him from ordinary masculine ways of exerting influence. When the mirror flips around, he sees the back of his head. I call this image an anal mirror scene because the “I” looks at itself with eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head.  Ω  The anal eye

Love Happy   |    211

beholds itself. Suddenly, Harpo’s muteness means visionlessness. This image, a dead center of Harpo’s corpus, is an eyeless-in-Gaza moment, linked to Marilyn Monroe’s butt, later in the film. “Eyeless in Gaza” describes the shorn he-man in blind Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Harpo’s muteness is, by displacement or analogy, blindness. I keep my eyes peeled for examples of blocked sight in Harpo’s films; Georges Bataille, writing about the solar anus, the pineal eye, the rear eye, inspires us to look for sight in unaccustomed places.

Harpo’s Paralysis  Vera-Ellen cries, head on table. (This anorexic actress, of German stock, starred in White Christmas; her daughter died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.) Harpo nods in recognition: there you are, visible world. He touches her arm, tentatively, to test sentience. She says “Oh, Harpo!” and leans, crying, on his forearm. Gravely discovering the fallen world, he clasps his own belt: fabric, not humankind, supports him.  µ  In Harpo’s stumped condition do I see my father or do I see myself seeing my father, an early moment of idealizing (through the reverse motion of pity) a man who cannot cope with his condition? Beholding a stuck man, I revere his paralysis, his eyeless-in-Gaza spinning. Husbands spin in space because they can’t deal with crying wives. Sons watch silent fathers spin in space. Sons romanticize fatherly silence. Sons consider it “deep.” Dots: Solace of Pointillism  In 1977 I discovered depersonalization in the first paragraph of a Joyce Carol Oates story, “An American Adventure”: “Waking, I am overcome with a sense of dread. My wife is sleeping beside me but her face will not stay permanent—it dissolves back into its elements, into dots. I look away from her; I am not equal to this marriage. I am not equal to the person I am supposed to be.” I, too, have dissolved into dots, to glean the solace of pointillism and disintegration. I aestheticize dots: Yayoi Kusama’s dot paintings, their gorgeous psychosis. Dotconsciousness received its finest articulation in Emily Dickinson’s phrase, “Soundless as Dots, / On a Disc of Snow.” The alliteration of dots and disc

212   |    Later Astonishments

is itself a pointillist pleasure, an instance of dotting, turning the world into countable demarcations.

Harpo Removes His Eyes  Sitting on the park bench, Vera-Ellen says, “It must be wonderful to be like you, Harpo.” Pleased by praise, he rocks back and forth, autistic. “You live alone. You don’t need other people. You don’t depend on them. You never get hurt.” Eyes closed, she can’t see him. Harpo spins in the space created by VeraEllen misrecognizing his hurtlessness: to be misnamed, misidentified—you never get hurt— occasions Harpo’s free fall into a stunned state.  Ω  Voiceless, and soon sightless, Harpo means serious business about castration. If you lose vision and dwell in a civilization touched by Oedipus and Samson, then you can’t avoid castration’s shadow. Harpo plays an eye trick: to cheer up Vera-Ellen, he pretends to unscrew his eyeballs. I’m polishing my detachable eyes to prove that I never get hurt. Later I’ll look through the peephole and watch Vera-Ellen gagged and attacked. Harpo blows on his phantom eyes, juggles them, and puts them back in. Oops. Wrong eye, wrong socket. Flinching, he removes and exchanges the orbs, then rolls his eyes to demonstrate regained sight.  Ω  I’ll destroy my vision and ruin myself in order to distract you from crying. Here, Harpo strikes a flattering pose, swerve-eyed, like Anna Moffo. He undergoes a chain of removals: voice, sight. Throughout the surgery, Harpo smiles, a religious martyr, more cheerful than Job. Deprive me of every organ; I’ll still have faith. Supposedly we think it’s funny that Harpo can pretend to remove his eyes, that he can mutilate himself, that he lives in the park, that he can’t talk, that his clothes don’t fit. What’s the alternative? Thinking him sad? Funniness is the moat we cross to reach the castle of the sad. Funniness is the bitters that makes his plight drinkable. In Vera-Ellen I see my grammar-school friend Mary Ann, a curly-haired girl who offered me coconut shavings; to her bullying brother I imagined

Love Happy   |    213

typing a long letter of apology and self-aggrandizement, impressing him with my secretarial skills and mature sentence structure. Like Shirley Temple, Mary Ann had dimples, curls, and musicality—a halo. Her halo was a ballet barre I bumped into—like the funniness moat that Harpo crosses to reach momentary security.

Mysticism  Is Harpo a mystic? Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin’s friend, followed William James’s lead in noting silence’s connection to mysticism: in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Scholem refers to the “indefinable, incommunicable character of mystical experience.” Maybe Harpo doesn’t speak because he is brimful of a transport he has given up hope of communicating. Silence stems from mystical bliss. Godhead as trauma—collision with inexplicable fullness—sends him reeling into a vocation of silence. Harpo’s Antimoralist Pleasure Shack  Harpo unlocks his secret shed’s door: bordello beads hang from its entrance. At last we see his home. Jack Smith could have lived here. Smith, radical gay artist, made the film Flaming Creatures (1963), which inspired an early essay of Susan Sontag’s. Apply to Harpo what Sontag said about Smith’s work: “Flaming Creatures is that rare modern work of art: it is about joy and innocence.” And: “What I am urging is that there is not only moral space, by whose laws Flaming Creatures would indeed come off badly; there is also aesthetic space, the space of pleasure. Here Smith’s film moves and has its being.” What Harpo’s antimoralist atelier contains: no-parking sign, chandelier, quilt, flying cherub, pharmaceutical bottles. This magician’s den—like Joseph Cornell’s garage, Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, and Henry Darger’s lair—belongs to a genealogy of hideaways, of sensibility workshops distant from conventional taste. In his shack, Harpo presses the valve of a water tank connected to a tuba or flugelhorn. The faucet combines arts of hydration, urination, and musicmaking, and demonstrates Harpo’s queer plumbing—crafty, shtetl-honed extraction practices, always indirect. Liquid  Time to act the part of Orpheus, etherizing the beasts. Vera-Ellen weeps; with one hand, Harpo plucks happy birthday on the harp. He can undergo virtuosic or bathetic contortions, but they won’t win Vera-Ellen’s

214   |    Later Astonishments

love. At least he has a big (but wrong) thing between his legs: a harp. When Harpo’s mother, Minnie, gave him his first harp (the instrument was Mom’s idea!), she wrote, in the accompanying telegram, “don’t get it wet ”—as if alluding to the urinary undertow of the harp’s liquid arpeggiation. Harpo described the harp’s container as “monstrous,” and the harp itself as “the biggest musical instrument I had ever seen.” The word big needn’t bring phallus in its wake.

Why Harpo Stopped Speaking  I haven’t yet told you why Harpo stopped speaking. (In private life, Arthur Marx spoke, but never in his incarnation as “Harpo.”) Early in his vaudeville career, a reviewer in Champaign, Illinois, praised the “amusing” Harpo, but said, “Unfortunately the effect is spoiled when he speaks.” His mother, Minnie, “said nothing” when Harpo told her about the bad review. “She looked at me with sorrow and sympathy,” Harpo writes. “But she didn’t say, ‘Forget it—what does he know?’ She said nothing.” The nothing the mother says inaugurates the nothing that Harpo will henceforth say. His silence is not merely a response to the critic who insulted his voice. His silence takes its cue from his mother, who said nothing to contradict the reviewer. Minnie replaces Harpo’s voice box with the harp, which could overpower Groucho: “Groucho I could now drown out,” says Harpo. And yet the harp’s softness requires a silent audience: he writes, “A harpist has to have total silence when he plays a serious piece, or he won’t be heard at all.” On his audience, Harpo imposes a contagious silence mythically linked to Philomela, the tongueless, raped girl turned into a nightingale. Menorah Fingers: Expectation  Harpo distends fingers, a lit candle tucked into each nail: hand metamorphoses into menorah.  Ω  His hand, a festival of lights, introduces shiksa VeraEllen to Jewish park-bench ways. Hobo status matches Jewishness, his compulsion to go Holocaust, to burn himself: harp-playing turns fingers into illumined candles. Blind Milton begged his muse: “What in me is dark / Illumine.” Turn what is ineffable in me into speech.

Love Happy   |    215

Before Harpo brings out diamonds, I see them waiting on his pocket’s edge. (He seems to be dawdling, but secretly he is preparing his next gag.) Sheepish or stoic, he stares at Vera-Ellen’s face and awaits reaction. His expectancy has Jewish overtones: it is the posture of a people waiting for their time, a people with a propensity to put consummation or arrival in the future. (Christianity, too, considers resurrection a postponed event.)

Failed Encounter  Harpo turns away and starts playing the harp, while Vera-Ellen, crying, walks off.  µ  Abandoned, he immerses himself in self-etherizing musical trance. (By choosing one interest or obsession, we abandon others.) With his old-ladyish, flattened wig, he resembles my father’s aunt, Alice Gutfeld, wearing, in the last years of her life, a cheap wig, a synthetic alibi on a shiny scalp. We see Harpo—Byronic hero—from below.  µ  In a dramatic shot, worthy of Scarlett O’Hara or Heathcliff, harp and Harpo appear against the stormy night sky: I’ll never go hungry again, I could go on singing, I’ll cry tomorrow. He plays “Way Down upon the Swanee River.” (Hence, Tara. Hence, homesickness.) As at every solo’s climax, Harpo’s hands execute a fast tremolo—the signature of overstimulation, of diving into music as the antidote to failed encounter. Marilyn Monroe as Harpo’s Double  Marilyn Monroe makes a cameo appearance in Love Happy: she looks like Harpo’s bosomy doppelgänger. Both are fools, both are blondes, both have reason to hide from the world and to retreat into their own physicality. Both have reason to pretend to turn away from mind. Both overflow, whether in hilarity and harp, or in giggles, bosom, curvaceousness-as-cause. Marilyn is the cause of motion, cause of the excitement of others: she needs to move tenderly and gracefully so that her mere presence doesn’t disturb the hemispheres. Harpo needs to shut his mouth so that his egocentricity doesn’t topple the United States.

216   |    Later Astonishments

Horseshoe Marks on Harpo’s Butt  Harpo knocks on Room #2 and bends down to eavesdrop through the keyhole. Harpo’s tush has horseshoe marks: Vera-Ellen, rejecting him, symbolically stepped on his rear. Next, a POV shot shows us what Harpo sees through the keyhole—three thugs, who gag Vera-Ellen.  Ω  (Being gagged is Harpo’s fate.) Then the camera returns to his horseshoe-marked rear, in tighter close-up.  Ω  On Harpo’s butt, Chico and Groucho are inscribed as two horseshoes—the letter U (or “You”), duplicated. If it arouses Harpo to see Vera gagged, the glute shot is excitement’s safety-valve. My claim: Harpo’s butt is the seat of his misery and power. Harpo’s butt is the trampled, kicked surface. Harpo’s butt represents his asinine silence. Harpo’s butt is symbolically the gagged woman he sees through the keyhole. Do you follow? (1) Harpo sees Vera-Ellen gagged; (2) we see Harpo’s horseshoe-marked butt. Ergo, the two spectacles acquire twinship. Certain points, difficult to explain, make me want to give up speaking. Speaking excites me. It might also have excited Harpo—too much. Excess sends the subject reeling away from pleasure, toward its opposite. Harpo’s last film has the obligation of coming to terms with his silence. “Hoppo” is how he pronounced “Harpo,” according to his autobiography. “Hoppo” is nearly a palindrome; “popo” is never far behind.

III Absorption: Whistles  I can’t explain why Harpo makes me happy: “yet I do not explain what exactly makes me so happy today,” writes Frank O’Hara in “Pistachio Trio at Château Noir.” Yesterday, the fact that O’Hara’s long poem “Biotherm” ended with the word “absorbed” helped me happily imagine a receptive art that could absorb any fragment, any droplet of event we offered it. Whistling, Harpo grabs Chico’s waistcoat to arrest him. Plurality of

Love Happy   |    217

whistles portrays intensification for intensification’s sake. Whistle asserts self’s presence. Earlier I used the word egocentric; I regret it. Psychologist Peter Fonagy and his collaborators, in Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self, suggest that infants are originally oriented outward, not inward: we begin our pathetic journey with capacities trained to read the world. Other-centricity precedes egocentricity.

Perform, Halt, Perform  Chico asks, “What’s on your mind?” Harpo thrusts his hand forward—halt!—and makes a figure eight. “It’s a dame.” Harpo signals halt, unambivalent as a red traffic light, and slowly repeats the female curvaceousness symbol. “It’s no dame. It’s a nice girl.” Harpo whistles and raises his hand: halt. Their charades game obeys a rhythm: perform, halt, perform. Mammy: Handshake of Comprehension  Harpo imitates Al Jolson’s “Mammy.”  µ  Harpo revisits the origin of talking pictures, a sound /  silence fissure, a maternal seam, where a Jew doing blackness sings “Mammy” to catapult silent films into talkies. “Mammy?” says Chico. Harpo aggressively mutes Chico’s mouth to reshape the syllable ma, and then imitates a key probing a lock. Ma. Key. When Chico guesses “Maggie,” Harpo seals linguistic legibility’s business deal with a handshake, the carrot held out for the horse.  µ  Brothers perform the comprehension shake: climax, reward, acclaim, dividend, death benefit. Singing “we’re gonna go through it together,” Liza and Judy at the London Palladium performed family closeness, a joined-at-the-hip stickiness, two survivors slavishly attuned to a cheering audience. Harpo’s and Chico’s charades act reveals vaudeville origins and steers clear of cinematic devices. This scene, flatly aimed at a stage viewer, hustles us, without ambivalence, into their act’s web.

218   |    Later Astonishments

Hitting, Pointing  When Chico guesses the word itchy, Harpo unambivalently hits him. Hit means you’ve hit the jackpot, you’re smart, I hail you.  Ω  Harpo points a decisive, accusing finger punitively close to Chico’s mouth. I seem to point at you, but I’m pointing at what you’ve just said. I’m pointing at our accord. Minimalist, Harpo uses only four techniques to signify a correct (or incorrect!) guess: hitting, handshaking, pointing, and whistling. When Chico guesses wrong, Harpo hits him: Stop that dumb train of thought. Let’s detour. The smack recalls Gertrude Stein’s notion of “beginning again”—the art of rebooting consciousness and abandoning outdated modes by performing the hit of diversion, a line break, a new paragraph. Tiny Increment  Harpo mimics hammering a nail on Chico’s chest. Measuring, Harpo indicates an increment (three inches?) with his fingers. “Little itsy nail. Tack!”  Ω  Eschewing phallic grandiosity, they take pleasure in smallness; closeups themselves are species of the tiny. Here we closely nestle with Harpo and Chico in a domain where nonmonumentality carries no stigma; Harpo and Chico narrow their focus onto the less-than-finger-sized, the increment between harp strings. Harpo’s and Chico’s pose resembles a photo of my boyfriend and me in 1983. I parted my lips to plump them up: I wanted to resemble Jason Gould, spawn of egocentricity and vibrato. In my dream last night I offered Streisand a kabbalistic interpretation of her pre-fame life, while we sat at a rinky-dink table near a waterfall. The small increment formed by Harpo’s fingers recalls what I’ve gleaned of the Kabbalah from reading Gershom Scholem: minuscule correspondences across mute centuries. Mother/Murder  Harpo morphs Chico’s nitwit mouth to turn the word mother into murder.  Ω  Murder the mother? Mother is murder? Mother murdered my speech? I murder mother by fondling you? I make mud out of mother by mocking your speech or funneling it in a nasty direction?

Love Happy   |    219

Harpo shows us a different way of giving birth to a word, child-birthing the brother’s mouth, invaginating the face, controlling its communicativeness, treating language as mud for pies.

Trying to Talk to a Man  “Egelichi going to murder Maggie”: correct! Harpo turns around and falls exhausted into Chico’s arms: strenuous sign-language leads to bedtime, spooning. Every sentence demands labored dismemberment and reconstitution via syllable-by-syllable homonyms and pantomime. Communication’s impossibility reminds me of Adrienne Rich’s poem “Trying to Talk to a Man.” In my dream last night, Rich had buckteeth—new dental information I couldn’t assimilate. Stubble  Another dream last night: I rubbed against some off-limits man, perhaps my father, brother, student, or someone dead. Repeated rubbing turned my groin into a house, church, or bus station: I became a building because I’d illicitly rubbed against a taboo man (Harpo?): the sin of repeated, incremental observation and sampling. Now I remember: I was rubbing against one of my publishers! in a bathhouse! or a men’s club, an aquarium, a terrarium. He apologized as he felt up my crotch, in the darkness, with Oulipian persistence. The room’s darkness matched his out-ofcontrol stubble, a field of hairs-gone-to-seed, a havoc of misattributions, a fecal intensity of inscriptions—triplicate hieroglyphs. His stubble was failure, not success. Some masculinity, when piled on top of itself, becomes disgusting and weak, rather than strength redoubled. Some masculinity, when intensified, becomes bag-of-bones. Walter Benjamin’s stubble might have gone graveyard, when Marxism rubbed against it, when Marxism rubbed it raw. Little Boy Size Issues  Harpo hoists himself onto the theater’s roof. Lights— a General Electric neon sign—flash on and off. Harpo is pals with electricity, shocks, outages. In close-up, he embraces a chubby advertising icon, like the Pillsbury Doughboy or Bob’s Big Boy mannequin—Big Boy, home of bouffant waitresses, towering milkshakes, and fake-buttery buns. Harpo

220   |    Later Astonishments

puts his hand over the plastic boy’s mouth, and yawns, fatigued from screen work and from his mechanical persona.  Ω  Consoled by artificiality, Harpo heads back to boyhood, even if the boy is a frozen, dead, Madison Avenue image. Harpo cedes the yawn to his synthetic friend, whose largeness makes Harpo seem cozily minimized, as if by Wham-O’s Shrink Machine, a toy that shrank plastic objects into useless miniatures.

Shock  Harpo meets a Mobiloil Mobilgas sign, and hops on its neon colt. Lights flash. Wagnerian background music lends Harpo a heldentenor heft that has been waiting in the wings since A Night at the Opera. Harpo is in shock, which institutes revolutionary consciousness: one acquires revolutionary consciousness because one has been shocked, or else the arrival of revolutionary consciousness feels like shock. Shock brings on what Walter Benjamin calls the “now of recognizability”: this “now,” like cinema’s lightflash, arrests thinking and kicks off its free fall. “To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts”: thought ends where Harpo begins. Revolution doesn’t preoccupy Harpo, who merely pursues the arrested state of shocked consciousness. Perhaps I ally his shocked demeanor with Benjamin’s formulations because the word shock describes my process of stumbling to articulate Harpo. I have not said my last word on shock. Harpo as Brünnhilde  Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” begins; Harpo, clutching stolen diamonds (Rhine gold), climbs onto the sign. Jamming himself into advertisement, he ignores proportion and size. Harpo makes his operatic comeback as Brünnhilde or one of her sisters.  Ω  Like the Marx Brothers, the Valkyries are a family act—with a weakened, idealized, one-eyed father, Wotan. The sign has six horses, but only one is lit at a time—motion broken down into separate Muybridge parts. Riding all six horses, Harpo subsumes his brothers. Three shocked thugs watch Harpo

Love Happy   |    221

magically hop between two signs, Mobilgas and Mobiloil, on his neon horse of muteness, which affords the merry-go-round thrill of bumpiness, visibility, Wagnerian accompaniment, and US fuel-power.

Silence as Smoke  Harpo, as if inebriated, exhales blinding steam—mace?—into the thug’s face. We hear Harpo’s aggressive exhalation.  µ  Harpo’s silence, a lethal smokescreen, overpowers the capo. Muteness hides fantasies of omnipotence: when Harpo opens his mouth, out comes a nonlinguistic foam, toxic to he-men. For the first time, a Marx Brothers’ film offers a visual analog for Harpo’s silence—a smoke that points to the Holocaust. Annunciation paintings depict the Holy Spirit’s arrival as an actual emanation, a cloudy triangle. Then, Harpo plays himself like a levered instrument, a slot-machine solo sending steam out the ears. Self-absorbed, safe from relationality’s storm, he enjoys the waste dump of his solitude. We see a close-up of hilarity’s escalation.  µ  Harpo accomplishes three-dimensional egress: smoke comes out his orifices. Possessing the holy spirits of the three brothers, Harpo expels them. He incarnates Jew-asmonster, a fire-breathing dragon with a rabbinical, smoke-triangle beard. Fade out, fade in. Harpo’s smoke has coalesced into one small ball, spotlit. A cloud covers him: he impersonates Moses and the burning bush, but no godly voice comes out of Harpo’s nimbus. He bumps against an object he can’t see: blinded by transubstantiation, he nearly falls down a trash chute—like Alice in Wonderland into the hole, or Max and Moritz into the grain pulverizer. Harpo feels the plunge’s magnetism; feet push against chute for leverage. Overcoming locusts, he falls on his butt. Pressure Games  Boys play pressure games: Harpo lies on top of Chico and squeezes him like a Cuban sandwich or a Croque Monsieur. Pressure is code word for pleasurable obliterations I seek—thought-canceling hand

222   |    Later Astonishments

on my forehead. Diamonds—real and fake—lie beside brothers, enjoying parallelism, sleeping on top of each other.  Ω  My brother and I shared a bunk bed: from below, I kicked the underbelly of his mattress until its tatting disintegrated and hung down in Miss Havisham spider-threads.

Frozen Pause before the Fit  Neon light flickers on and off: its periodic flashing reminds me of the strobe that catalyzes epilepsy in the movie The Andromeda Strain, and of the paralyzed period between bouts of an air-raid drill. The siren’s pitch lowers to a growl; after silence, the dirge recommences. In the interregnum before its return, shock’s nearness suspends us in honeyed dissonance, delaying the fit, as the Tristan chord glamorously postpones the cadence. Exaltation, according to Dostoevsky, precedes the idiot’s collapse: we want to remain in this tunnel of near-arrival, numinous as Harpo’s playful destruction of categories. Dreamt I slept with a writing teacher in her country house, Cape Cod or Mexico. Her breasts seemed inflated and artificial. She lay, with Lollobrigida insouciance, near a velvet pillow: the sight of velvet provoked a frozen interregnum sensation connected to air-raid sirens. Keep Castration in the Family  Groucho shakes Harpo’s hand: “Good work, my man.” Harpo smiles at the belated recognition, after thirteen films, and opens his coat to flash the axe, tucked into his pants.  Ω  Keep castration in the family. Keep castration in the present tense. Groucho marvels at the final revelation, a blade resembling a toucan’s beak, like the chattering bird in Harpo’s pleasure-shack. Harpo flashes the axe of speech’s unnecessariness. He knows that flashing is a joke. He knows that the penis—when forced, when amplified—is a joke. He knows that the Marx Brothers are finished. Watching the Brothers’ Erotic Adventure  Madame fake-flirts with Groucho, while Harpo passively observes. Watching my best friend make out with a girl in seventh grade, I sat on the floor of a darkened party room and

Love Happy   |    223

froze. Sibling rivalry induces inner Iceland. Three Marx Brothers are too many. If someone else exists, then I die: narcissistic premise. Writing a book destroys the self that sets words in motion. If I seem to be plumping up my “I,” through autobiographical interruptions, in fact I am destroying my voice, a burnt offering.

Burnt Offering  “Good-bye, old man, it was nice knowing you,” Groucho says, and extends a hand. Harpo reciprocates with a leg.  µ  Witness the final leg offering. A holocaust is a burnt offering. Harpo’s leg is not burnt, but it is an offering. Harpo regives the leg; the leg never stops its generosity, its sacrificial intent. This leg, the thing not wanted, lacks soul. Across the site of the offering, the brothers greet each other, recognizing the switch trick’s fading power. Harpo offers this last gag, a quotation, as a sly sign of elegiac retrospect. Harpo tosses the stolen diamonds in the air like a private plaything— this toy makes them interested in me. Groucho and Madame depart, while Harpo—fool, outcast from marriage’s fortress—exits, faceless, turned away from the camera. Power fades. Or maybe it never existed in the first place. Last night I dreamt that Debbie Reynolds confessed to me, “I can’t sing, despite my Singin’ in the Rain fame.” Harpo / Marilyn  In the final credits, at the top of the cast list: Harpo . . . . . .  Harpo Marx. At the bottom: Grunion’s client . . . . . . Marilyn Monroe. Their position as bookends—top, bottom—suggests a “logic / Of strange position,” as John Ashbery put it in “Le Livre est sur la table.” Marilyn Monroe is the toy—the shock—that illuminates Hollywood’s tomorrow and helps us face the Marxless future. Without Harpo, what do we have? Nothing. And so Love Happy, this final offering, gives us Marilyn as token of another pneumaticism, another way of being empty and blown-up, another way of being silent.

224   |    Later Astonishments

The Idiot Tumbles Back to the Beginning of Time

III

This page intentionally left blank

The Undeliverable Ice of Pinky’s Mom-Mouth

Horse Feathers (1932)

I who cannot live among humans I with the German language this cloud around me —ingeborg bachmann, “Exile” (trans. Peter Filkins)

I Syntax  Destroying chronology, now I slide backward, from 1949 to 1932—from the end of Harpo’s film career to nearly its inception. My aim is retrograde—remedial, unrealistic, chthonic. In the bathroom, when I was a teenager, I smacked my little brother with a towel. Wet towels hurt. What’s the point of a book if it can’t undo a random act of cruelty? With an exegetical towel’s smack, I enjoy breaking films up, interrupting seamlessness, creating modules of Harpo-resuscitation, chambers in a growing mausoleum, like the Winchester Mystery House, my hometown’s major tourist attraction: mad widow Winchester imagines that she’ll never die as long as she hears a hammer constructing another detour, another dead end. Devotion to useless totality: in sixth grade, my research paper “The Movies” swelled to sixty pages. With Germanic syntax, an angry speaker (Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Ingeborg Bachmann) hammers home the monologue, a language so cloud-encumbered it seems pitched to babies, idiots, and the dead.

227

Word Games  Feathers? Fathers? “Of course, playing games with names in this way is a bad habit of children,” writes Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Fathers are abject, Jewish ones especially. Freud remembers his father telling him that a “Christian” knocked his cap onto the ground and shouted, “Jew, get off the pavement!” The father’s response? “I stepped into the road and picked up my cap.” Sigmund is disappointed that his unheroic father failed to confront the anti-Semite. Paternal Jewishness leads to lowness, in a cascade of equivalences. I slip down that chain, and thus, a cascader, I grow low. Syllogism and illogic, forms of low reasoning, permit me to tipple metonymy, the cheap Thunderbird of argument-via-contiguity. Horse Feathers = horse shit. The Marx Brothers go public with dung. Horse and hoarse are homonyms. Is Harpo hoarse? Is that why he can’t speak? He impersonates the hoarse father, forced to undergo the shame of wrecked speech. Aren’t fathers always damaged? Isn’t that how we pick them out from the crowd on the pier? Pinky  Harpo, a dog catcher named Pinky, rescues unspeaking beasts. (Pooches are his peer group.) On his cap, the name “dog-catcher,” like the sign beneath the blind beggar in Wordsworth’s Prelude, declares category. A beggar asks Harpo for coffee. Harpo—Great-Depression angel, Pinko—retrieves from his pocket a steaming cup of joe. Pinky or Pinko is a wrong, liminal identity: Pinky will be, in 1949, an Elia Kazan film about a light-skinned black woman—a verbal coincidence that proves (if desire requires proof ) Harpo’s prescience. He sheds light in whichever direction we point his flashlight-body. Breaking Words into Parts  Harpo breaks words into parts: he signals “swordfish”—password to enter the speakeasy—by plunging a sword into a fish’s mouth. Dumb-show substitution excites him: he looks at us to make sure that we’ve cottoned on to his apt communication. Conscript without a cause, Harpo marches—swordfish (or, wordfish), like a rifle, propped on his shoulder—into the speakeasy. (He doesn’t speak easy.) Military gait responds to an unheard anthem. His coat, a prop storehouse, is tattered into feathers, like a woman’s scarf, or anything ripped and irredeemable.

228   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

Shower of Coins  In the speakeasy, a gambler plays a slot machine. Harpo— space hog—intrudes, peers into its penny-arcade peepshow window, hugs the machine, and brings it to climax with a coat button: out spews a coin shower. With open mouth, he accepts the unearned, spermy geyser.  Ω  He likes to communicate glee, not merely to experience it; he tilts his head back to see if the fellow gambler, too, is ecstatic. After the jetting stops, Harpo hands him a coin—scant compensation, and yet it signifies Pinko altruism. Then Harpo gives the familiar “aw, raspberries” wave, a repeatable mannerism imprisoned, like a lisp, inside stylization. His shirt’s Las Vegas vibrancy strikes a forbidden, eye-catching note of uselessness. Isolation with Pet Plaything  Cut to Harpo, holding flowers, and whistling, with orchestral accompaniment, the amorous ditty that Zeppo sang, in the previous scene, to the pretty widow, Thelma Todd (who died in 1935 from carbon monoxide poisoning in her parked car—probably murder, possibly suicide). The close-up on Harpo obscures whether he is serenading the bouquet itself or the person on whom he will bestow this mangy bundle. Showing off sophistication, despite tatterdemalion garb, he conducts a phantom orchestra. Has he been mauled? His curbside workshop is a cozy berth. The low-lying camera meets him on his level—crouched on the sidewalk—and doesn’t subordinate him to larger flows. Preferring objects to people, he enjoys being sequestered with brothersubstitutes.  Ω  I like images of Harpo alone, exposing himself to pet playthings and watching them reveal inanimate cores. I like images of abased Harpo finding comfort by isolating a toy he will address first as his companion and only then offer to someone else. Misrecognition of Categories: Eating Horse Food  The camera pulls back to reveal his serenade’s addressee, a horse, who munches the bouquet. Harpo starts eating flowers, too, and then gobbles oats from the horse’s feed bag.

Horse Feathers   |    229

Harpo eats horse food for many good reasons. He wants to shock us. He loves his horse. He imitates nearby behavior. He degrades himself to earn affection. He ignores nourishment hierarchies. He has problems regulating intake. He is poor. He wants to satirize Jew/Gentile dietary differences. He practices a religious ritual but has forgotten what it commemorates. Creamy residue on Harpo’s lips, after he eats, resembles epileptic froth, slobber he won’t wipe off.

Pointing #1  Smiling, he points to himself—index finger touching chest— while he eats.  µ  He verifies his chest’s presence. The pointing finger substitutes for the other’s gaze: no world blesses him by saying, “Harpo, you’re behaving like a horse, you’re a virtuoso of bestial mimesis,” so his own finger must embody confirmation. He points to say I’m me. Identity needs nervous reiteration: I repeat I’m me because perhaps I’m not me. I must hypothesize that someone watches the self-pointing charade. Yesterday I happily said to myself, “I’m a penis.” Harpo might agree: I’m a wordless subject of sensation. Being a penis means being receptive to the world. This book shouldn’t turn into a song of praise for “the” penis. Harpo unzips a pea-pod. Inside is a banana. Assumptions encircle it. After taking a bite, he rezips the pod. He exhibits a protective, babying attitude toward the half-consumed banana, a toy, a member of the I’m me battalion. He nods to reassure himself: I’m not disrupting existence’s parade. He gestures with the banana-purse toward the horse, welcomed into Harpo’s eating club. I tabulate gestures—tiny moments (nods, pointings) that show Harpo always working to three-dimensionalize a flat world; to witness himself; to invent a responsive companion who forgives punishable acts. Harpo behaves as if there didn’t yet exist a cinematic grammar—reaction shots, editing—to socialize the solitary, beastly star. Ripping Up Text  Harpo’s dog catcher truck creates a traffic jam; honking cars multiply his trademark horn-bleat. The policeman says, “What do you think this is, a picnic?” Ever polite, Harpo nods, tips his hat, and flashes a

230   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

banana—to flaunt his picnic, his intactness, his zippered gadget. The policeman tries to ticket Harpo, who fouls the process: Harpo produces his own ticket book, scribbles him a warrant, and rips up the cop’s pad.  Ω  No policeman can conquer Harpo, who flips off the Law. And if no one believes in the Law (Žižek might call it “the big Other”), will it die? Harpo, by ripping the warrant and confusing his own false ticket with the cop’s genuine summons, destroys the written word and legal contracts. Muteness gives Harpo permission to dismember everyone else’s language, to turn their letters into horse feathers. His relation to the ticket reproduces the destruction of the Temple, the Torah, the Letter. By tearing up legal text, Harpo joshes his tribe of quibblers. My fragments belong to the regime of the rip.

Accretion, Multiplication  The cop threatens him with a billy club, which Harpo grasps manually, as if to shake a friendly hand. On the billy club, Harpo begins to play the pile-up-the-hands trick; the Law cooperates. No one can resist this trick, difficult to describe: speedy events evade transcription.  Ω  (1) Harpo grasps a stick. (2) The cop grasps it, but higher up. (3) Harpo relocates his own hands, even higher: suddenly this puny totem pole becomes the testing ground for every ambition. Handson-a-stick is an accretion game; interchangeable hands play Babel. Harpo makes a joke of similarities, of being doomed to stack equivalences. He disarms authority by setting up games that hail the other as playmate. Two orgiastic men make four hands look like eight. Multiplication: “Do you see that badge?” says the cop, flashing it. Harpo opens his own jacket, a panoply of badges pinned inside. Facing the policeman’s singular credential, Harpo combats it with a nonsensical plural: many badges, many dogs, many tricks, many survival schemes, many species. With a butterfly net, the wrong tool for the task, he chases a dog. Harpo hops, skips, limps, lopes—it wouldn’t behoove him to run straightforwardly toward a goal. Why not introduce duplicity into every ambulation?

Horse Feathers   |    231

Communication Is Exhausting  After capturing the cop, Harpo pulls down a window-shade placard—Police Dog For Sale—and points at it. He can’t speak, but he can point, like a teacher, to words. Is he pleased by the sign’s meaning or merely by its materiality? Harpo is proud to wear words on his truck, like the vocational label, “dogcatcher,” on his hat brim. He yawns, fatigued from cop capturing.  µ  The scene ends with a yawn. Showbiz is exhausting. So is explication. Harpo yawns after reading four words. Police. Dog. For. Sale. Reading lessons makes him sleepy. I want to use the yawn to bridge the gap between Harpo and Freud, but I’m too tired. Book Burning  Perusing a book, Harpo laughs and points to it, as if he wished to indict literacy itself as a funny spectacle. At this nightmare bar-mitzvah, Harpo holds a Torah he can’t decipher.  µ  In an essay I read decades ago and now can’t find, Ralph Waldo Emerson encourages us to learn to be ignorant. Emulating Harpo, we develop dumbness—another word for awe. As a child, I tried to read difficult books from my father’s shelves. Emily Dickinson said that her father read “lonely & rigorous books.” Books are lonely if a reader’s fantasies haven’t fertilized them. Harpo tosses the book—and then a whole pile—in the fireplace, as if anticipating Nazi book-burning, or commenting on anti-intellectualism, anti-Jewry, anti-refinement. Why is a Jew joyfully burning books?  µ  The camera, looking up at Harpo, monumentalizes his shoveling labor. He could be an underling in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or else a serf, a work-camp prisoner. He may not hate books, but he has discovered a pleasing task to repeat aimlessly. Perhaps he intends to destroy his tribe. Harpo, book burner, dives into flow, into automated, soothing action; deadened, he wants to perpetuate his own antilinguistic insensibility. Thrilled to escalate,

232   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

he takes one act (a burnt book) and multiplies it into a conflagration. Harpo was deprived of an education; his revenge, foreshadowing 1968, is to burn down the university.

Harpo Signs His Name  Groucho says, “I want you to sign this agreement.” Harpo asks for a pen by crooking his finger toward himself—a gesture that becomes useless and pathetic because Groucho ignores it. Harpo stares directly at his brothers, who don’t reciprocate the gaze, and so Harpo’s eyes dart forward, nervously, toward the viewer.  Ω  Will we help Harpo defeat his brothers? He may hope to secure our approval, but no viewer answers his gaze’s entreaty; in vaudeville, Harpo had a live audience, a consolation that cinema forecloses. Harpo signs a piece of paper with a big X, covering the entire sheet, and then smiles contentedly at us: I am filled with nothingness because I have exercised my sole function. Only one task at a time occurs to Harpo; he executes it and then, emptied, awaits reprogramming. I have satisfied your impossible demand, and my bereft face lacks a new object to mimic. Holding on to His Hat: Seal  “This isn’t legal,” says Groucho. “Where’s the seal?” Harpo holds his hat down while preparing to exit—a nervous gesture of keeping himself in place. Before any migration or separation, Harpo must arrest his hat, lest it blow away. Someone (his mother?) must have taught him to be prudent. A caretaker’s warnings survive in his gesture, but now, no one congratulates him for compliantly gripping his hat. The omniscient figure is dead; prudence’s perpetuation, like a kosher diet, preserves the vanished judge who originally commanded. Holding on to a hat is an excessive precaution, a compulsion: protecting an object, Harpo acknowledges its detachability. If the hat—why not buckle down and call it a yarmulke?—disappears, he will expose his arrogance to God. Harpo hauls onscreen a live seal, a sacrifice. He satisfies an impossible demand by providing the wrong object, though it bears the right name: Groucho asked for a notary public’s seal, not a slippery mammal—a member of Harpo’s zoological Mafia.

Horse Feathers   |    233

Classroom Insubordination: Nebuchadnezzar, Tumbling  Chico and Harpo, announced as “two dunces,” enter the classroom. Harpo’s trousers droop, nearing indecent exposure. Bearing a watermelon as tribute, he gives it to the fat professor and then looks to see the dupe’s response.  µ  I may be an idiot, but I have stolen recognition— eye contact, more precious than sperm or tears— from your stern, professorial body. “I’m sure my students will bear me out,” says the bearded professor (played by Edward J. LeSaint, who also appeared in Reefer Madness and Judy Garland’s Pigskin Parade). Chico and Harpo “bear him out,” forcibly evicting him, Harpo’s face a retributive near-Gookie. His appalled jack-o’-lantern mask implies, This human cargo disgusts me. Harpo’s horn emits emphatic, abstract asterisks. Returning to the classroom, Harpo wears the professor’s beard, and thus resembles a statue of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon—or a stinky guy who once sucked me off. I wanted to be incorporated by the hairy king who destroyed Jerusalem, or by anyone fatherly. “Father” was a far-fetched hypothesis, connected to Jewishness but also severed from it. Nebuchadnez­ zar educated my penis and judged it sizable; comic scimitar, it interrupted the Temple’s destruction. Walking on Groucho’s desk, Harpo kicks over the watermelon and tumbles onto the floor. We glimpse his somersaulting backside.  µ  Harpo’s suspenders are a cross, a structure of restraint and crucifixion: we see Harpo’s secret binding, his flexible willingness to tumble and reverse. I have not sufficiently defended my rearward inclination. Taking his seat, he initiates a tumble-hug; he uses Chico as Lucky Pierre, and reaches across him to caress the girl, the extra. Whom does Harpo want to embrace—Chico or the girl? Both. Harpo’s mode is tumble. Tumble dry. Tumbleweed. Smearing identities and genders together, he accelerates over his brother’s pavement-body. This integrationist tumbling, not erotic, is simply his body’s somersaulting capacity, its impetuous wish to roll, like

234   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

a cheese wheel spinning downhill in a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. Harpo is a tumbler. Also, a tummler—a jack-of-all-trades Borscht-belt comic who lubricates the audience. Harpo, tumbling, mocks desire’s subject-verb-object syntax. He has no object, merely momentum, and yet he is hardly a tank occupying Prague. At the blackboard, Harpo conceals the human-body diagram by lowering over it a chart of a horse—his version of cheesecake. Notice his Jewish-father-beard, a learner’s apparatus.  Ω  Harpo wants to unseat the human and to upset Groucho’s lesson plan. Forgetting the taboo against bestiality, Harpo proposes horse as nonsensical amorous object, and he mistakes a general diagram for a specific creature.

Burning the Candle at Both Ends  Smiling, tongue-between-teeth, Harpo holds the twice-flaming emblem of hedonistic excess popularized in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig” (1920): “My candle burns at both ends.” Millay was bisexual: her candle flaunts erotic doubleness, a flexibility that Harpo proudly flashes.  Ω  The candle, a phallus with two lit ends, a mustache-shaped ignis fatuus, amplifies desire’s unsolvable puzzle. Do I desire a horse, or Chico, or the girl seated behind me, whose femaleness I repudiate and reinforce with my weird candle trick? Do I desire impersonation or obedience? Do I desire Groucho’s authority or his demise? Do I desire mischief or family unity? Do I desire my own outfit? Do I desire my offscreen hideaway? Do I desire a beard, sexual maturity? Do I desire speed, tumbling, nondifferentiation? This twice-lit candle, a step toward a menorah, is Harpo’s kabbalistic claim to magical authority. It is the “stumping” (mind-baffling, koan-like) nature of Harpo’s idiocy. He is the solution to some ancient enigma, but the answer does us no good because we have lost touch with the original question. The twice-lit candle is Harpo’s impractical intensity; his refusal to conserve energy; his philosophy of burn, burn, burn, of tumble, steal, and absorb; his vocation as sponger, bum, appropriationist, shyster (give me two for the price of one).

Horse Feathers   |    235

White Phagocytes  Harpo’s humiliation in the classroom is a grievous fact. (I’ll repeat: bullied, he left second grade, never to return.) Note, behind him, the nameless woman, a bit player. Harpo may be weeping because of his likeness to this abject extra. In the clown’s vicinity we find fragmented tokens of his distress.  µ  I choose—through excerpting and dilation—to idealize and extend his tears, which represent the boon of intensified consciousness. Groucho, posing as professor, induces Harpo’s shame. Harpo has a pet-like, preposterous belief in his brother’s omnipotence. Groucho asks, “Who did it?” and Harpo answers by standing. The need to confess overtakes him: I’m the sinner. As Groucho recites, from a textbook, a scientific fact about “white phagocytes,” Harpo and Chico shoot peas through a straw at him: another phallic revolt, another shoot-to-destroy or shoot-to-annoy mission.  µ  The word phagocyte (“any leucocyte active in ingesting and destroying waste and harmful material, bacteria, etc., in the blood or tissues of the body”) inspires the peashooting, the peeing. Harpo and Chico do it together: mild-mannered homoeroticism, two men facing their target, not each other. Then they shoot peas at Groucho’s posterior. “My rear end has been cut off,” says Groucho. Dismemberment seems a lark. It’s fun to destroy the teacher.

II Absorption #1: Dream  Art historian Michael Fried uses the term absorption to describe figures, in eighteenth-century French painting, who focus, unaware of the beholder, on tasks. A blind man, absorbed in his blindness. A reader, absorbed in her book. A watcher at a deathbed. A melancholiac. A philosopher, absorbed in contemplation. A weeper. A saint, absorbed in prayer. A listener, absorbed in a sermon. An infant, absorbed in sleep. A blower, absorbed in his soap bubble. In Chardin’s work, for example, writes Fried, “absorption emerges as good in and of itself, without regard to its

236   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

occasion.” The viewer concentrates on the painting, just as the blower concentrates on the soap bubble. Attentiveness itself matters more than the object attended to. Harpo loses himself in the practice of being Harpo, and I lose myself in contemplating Harpo. Dream: I tried to explain the meaning of Heidegger’s Da-sein to my students. I said, “God didn’t create man. Man was there, and he felt invented; he needed to describe his sensation of being-called-into-existence.” A skeptical student, who planned to commit suicide tomorrow, scowled.

Transcendent Upward Gaze  Secretly entering Thelma Todd’s room, Harpo kisses her neck, sticks a foppish lily in her departing lover’s collar, and, exulting in aromatic evanescence, sniffs the bloom. A moment ago, Harpo had kissed Thelma; now, absorbed, he inhales the lily.  Ω  Fickle, he’ll follow anything floral. His upward gaze seeks transcendence: a clown has nowhere to go but up. Double recompense: seek godhead while humiliating a hero. Harpo waves good-bye to the widow, too, after her lover (played by David Landau, who died on my birthday, and who appeared with Mae West in She Done Him Wrong) says, “Good-bye, dear.” Harpo camps the gesture of good-bye, to taunt her: Girlie, I’m leaving with your lover. Limp-wristed nancy man, Harpo follows the lily’s magnetic pull—not because he wants to exit but because he wants to interrupt our expectations of what he should want. Unwanted Block of Ice  Harpo reenters with a block of ice. Why is he delivering it? To cool down the aroused widow? Hostile ice will interrupt Hollywood lovemaking, a pageantry excluding him. Harpo’s deadpan face itself is ice, as he moves somnambulistically toward executing the task. Messenger, he enacts annunciation—but he brings ice instead of immaculate conception.  Ω  Immediately after giving Thelma the ice block, his hands mechanically revert to his sides, and he issues a zero-degree gaze. A

Horse Feathers   |    237

golem, Harpo is nonetheless her blonde, curlyhaired twin. She refuses the gift: “I don’t want your ice.” As Harpo runs to the window, his face communicates mental stoppage.  µ  Backward glance—paranoid reflex—involves no interiority. Like a Chardin figure, Harpo doesn’t know that we are watching him; unawareness attests to moral caliber. (Good people don’t strive for “effect.”) A holy fool, he focuses on his task—to escape detection, to obey the woman, to destroy the parcel of heavy unconsciousness. Harpo acts like a conjure man who moonlights on the Ford assembly line. Out the window he throws the ice, which loudly crashes and splinters— the shattered crystal of “spectralist” music, of Messiaen, Boulez, and other timbral adventurers. Harpo, iceman running out of the room, glances at Thelma, flouted authority, to confirm capitulation. Like Wallace Stevens’s snowman, Harpo represents unconsciousness, obliviousness—the morally deadened art-object. Harpo-as-iceman delivers a message he doesn’t understand, a message that stops thought and feeling, a message that no one wants. The first paragraph of Joyce Carol Oates’s story “In the Region of Ice” describes an absorption similar to Harpo’s: the nun, a teacher, has “a face waxen with thought.” Harpo’s face is waxen with stopped thought. Harpo has learned his lesson. He enters again, with ice, but this time he doesn’t bother giving it to Thelma: he throws it out the window. Harpo, a baby mastering cause and effect, resolves contradiction with an uncanny compromise: throw the ice out the window. The woman doesn’t want ice, but Harpo won’t revise his mission or ignore the commandment. As in a Kafka parable, or a schizogenic double bind, if two imperatives contradict each other (bring ice, obey the woman’s desires), then he must obey both orders by inventing a third term (throw ice out the window). Harpo climbs over his brothers, who embrace Thelma on the couch. Errand boy, oblivious to foreplay, he treads on their dirt-bodies.  µ  Absorbed, he executes his meaningless task and runs away. He is the Flying Dutchman, doomed to lonely wandering, to occupy-

238   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

ing the nocturnal transversal, away from couch-contained lovers. The ice block glows like radium in his hands. Are his clothes disordered because he is mentally ill, because he is Rousseau’s natural man, because he is shameless, or because he lives in Hollywood? Head-wiggle suggests obedience, obsessiveness, and inner vacancy. What does it mean to be absorbed in a delivery that no one wants? What does it mean to deliver an undesired block of information, to hold freight that finds no audience and will be tossed out the window? Hit man, he obeys orders. I understand his lonegunman isolation, his ice-delivering incommunicativeness. This book is my block of ice.

Hop  Harpo graduates from iceman to Lothario. On the ground, he blows a kiss to Thelma, in her window-coign. Newly lovey-dovey, she reciprocates. He hops gleefully up and down. A still image can’t capture the gravitydefying hop. He hops with legs wide apart, straddling an invisible horse. The hop is a rodeo gesture no one will applaud. No one will say you hop beautifully. He hops to applaud himself. Hop—a bunny motion, not human—expresses unpopular, manic self-satisfaction. Why do I isolate the hop? Because I want to figure out how Harpo executes a virtuosity of the adorable. Adorability is a set of stylized codes, of difficult, patterned actions. I respect freakish virtuosity’s power over an audience, and I want to point out the bravura of Harpo’s dumbness, shattered into increments. Harpo is my Hammerklavier. I’m trying to make his adorability Germanic, transmissible, as if I were explaining Da-sein, a lesson the pea-shooting students don’t want to learn. Pointing #2  Arriving at the harp, he blows Thelma a kiss and points up to her. Because we can’t see her, Harpo seems abstractly devoted to the high and the invisible, to adulation. (Harp playing is a strange way to seduce a girl.) After blowing her a kiss, he sends it on its path—addresses it, like a post card— with the zip code of the pointing finger, which prevents his actions from seeming lonely. The finger proves that Harpo can focus. Absorbed, he faces his destination: the singular finger turns a liquid self into an arrow. The finger is not aggressive, although parents instruct children, “Don’t point.” The pointing finger doesn’t demand—it merely indicates. The finger is at once tentative and bold: I create the world by pointing. His pervert pants hang low.

Horse Feathers   |    239

Absorption #2: The Button  Playing harp for no one, ignoring the beholder, he never looks up at Thelma. Diderot would be pleased. According to Fried: “And it was above all else the apparent extinction of that awareness, by virtue of a figure’s absolute engrossment or absorption in an action, activity, or state of mind, that [Diderot] demanded of works of pictorial art.” Engrossed, Harpo plays the song that Zeppo sang earlier. Harpo thus follows in the hetero footsteps of his handsome younger brother. Harpo’s prowess at plucking strings implies that he is a good lover. Is he actually playing, or is he finger-synching? Harpo’s rolled-up sleeves reveal muscular, hirsute forearms. He seems most masculine when playing harp. His whimsical shirt’s football-like parallelograms can’t compete with his wig or his concentrated expression. To make Harpo glamorous, the camera glimpses him through the vertical prison of harp strings. We gaze up at him; he looms, like a monument or a father, and we lie at his feet. His shirt’s top button glows, silver, reflecting the klieg light. The glowing button is the only jeweled aspect of his costume.  µ  The button, irrelevant to human patter, satisfies my taste for shimmer, for differentiations that rise from matte surfaces. The button—I shouldn’t make too much of it—is a reward, a retainer; it holds his billowing, eroding costume together. The button emerges from indistinctness. A moment ago, it didn’t glow. Then, suddenly, light catches it, and it attracts the eye, as if that unspeaking button distilled Harpo’s dilemma. We can stop thinking about the problem of being Harpo. We can begin to think, instead, about the button. Surrounded by trees, he has entered Shakespearean comedy’s green world. Harpo’s harp playing and curly hair belong to the pastoral mode. So does his drecky, antimasculine shirt. He harps his way into a wacky version of pastoral; he reinterprets “Jew” as “natural.” Harpo’s facial expression doesn’t alter. It resists the impossible demand, express yourself. His harp playing, a block of ice, is a delivered message that has no content, only a temperature. At the solo’s climax, his fingers intensify their rapid thrumming. His mother gave him the harp: head bowed,

240   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

unsmiling, he attains a peak of absorption, as if he were trying to crawl back into the harp, or into its donor.

The Face of the Nineteenth Century  After the solo, before his eyes brighten, Harpo gives us the face of the nineteenth century.  Ω  Here is the moment of threshold, of shocked arrest, before Harpo leaves the region of ice. This passport photo certifies Harpo’s citizenship in The Past. The face of the nineteenth century, pre-Hollywood, doesn’t understand that it must become excited for the camera’s sake. His wooden, unbudging expression resembles the boxy faces of my father’s mother’s Berlin family, the Gutfelds. Harpo’s eyes and mouth don’t hustle; they hold back the clock. I think of Harpo’s harp solos while watching a solo porn video of a guy named Dave. The director leaves Dave alone in the room with the camera and tells him to take his time. Dave, who looks Levantine, alternates between raptly fingering his own nipples and glancing guardedly at the camera for cues about how to behave.

III 179 East 93rd Street  Last night, in misting rain, on East 94th Street between Lexington and Third, I saw a harp in a picture window—one block north of 179 East 93rd Street, the house where Harpo grew up. To kill time, I ducked into a kosher café. I felt a sudden desire to explore a Jewish man’s chest. Compulsively I needed to touch a burdened Stein or Goldstein or Goldsmith or Finkelstein or Ornstein or Roth or Rothenberg. Harpo Distorts Chico’s Instructions  Harpo and Chico walk up the steps of house number 39, the football players’ dwelling. Excessively zealous, nodding, Harpo agrees that this house is indeed number 39. He specializes in idiotic reinforcement of what we already know. “Where the pick?” says Chico. Harpo points to a pig. To point is to adore. I adore this image of Harpo pointing to a pig, so I will point to it. Harpo

Horse Feathers   |    241

points to the pig because he loves it.  µ  He expresses the pleasure, momentary, of coinciding with Chico’s catechism. “Don’t you know what a hog is?” And Harpo opens his arms to hug Chico. Harpo misconstrues “hog” for “hug”—a linguistic mistake that gives him an excuse to kick into homosocial gear. His goofy smile signals willingness to go gay—not because he feels queer emotion (who knows what Harpo feels?) but because he loves to cross behavioral borders and to distort whatever word Chico offers.

Contorted Fingers: Pumping the Jock  Short Harpo believes in his own plumped-out omnipotence. His hat advertises fake mastery: its front says kidnapper, and its rear, dog-catcher. Harpo considers himself an infallible kingpin in both businesses. Does Chico measure up? Looking back at him, Harpo seeks assurance that Chico is competent, able to confront the tall athlete.  µ  Harpo’s fingers anxiously bundle together. Middle finger juts out; the others cluster in a ball, a defensive rebus, a spasm of self-containment. Observe the loneliness of he who contorts his hand into a near-fist. Fist in German is Faust. See Harpo’s Faustian energies, compacted: where did Harpo get the idea for jammed fingers, the concentration of a kid trying to shit or to contain explosive emotion? His fists are small suicide plots—or bomb shelters. Secretive fingers dream of revenge. Doesn’t the Chanukah legend include Trojan Horse strategies of delayed retribution? Harpo’s hat falls off while he pulls the jock’s hand. Frustrated, Harpo pulls, face gearing up for a Gookie. Then, his body relaxes, tethered to the football player.  µ  The jock, a Maypole, supports Harpo’s weight. “You think you’re going to take us for a ride,” says the stud, and Harpo nods, because, indeed, he is

242   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

riding—pumping—the jock’s arm. And then, gripping the other athlete’s wrist, Harpo curls a come-hither finger, as if it were easy to topple Jericho.

Stupor in Corners: Framed Hyperventilation  One of the jocks throws Harpo onto the couch. He smiles, happy to be tossed by hunks, whose uncooperativeness is a trampoline. Joy paralyzes Harpo, half-limp wrist leaning with foppish languor on couch edge.  Ω  He loves this corner of the couch; he does his best thinking—his best drooling—his best stupor—in this ditch. (Open a file on corners. Consider Harpo’s connection to corners, and Dickinson’s poem, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun— / In Corners . . .” Soulfulness, afraid it will offend, hides in corners.) Harpo transforms persecution into pleasure via the golden gate of stupefaction. Hyperventilating, Harpo freakishly huffs and puffs. His middle finger sticks out: “giving the finger.” He winds himself up, a spinning top, self-moved.  Ω  Hydraulic performance won’t influence football players. Trying to be macho, he makes himself monstrous. Chico says get tough with one of them. Then get tough with the other. Then get tough with both of them. But Harpo’s toughness has limits. Cross-eyed Harpo is flanked by the two blank backsides of dark-haired, broad-shouldered athletes. To be framed represents apotheosis, containment: they’re the wrong men (they’re not his brothers), but they bookend his Mr. Hyde contortions. (Harpo’s semi-Gookies prefigure Spencer Tracy’s debauched face in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1941.) Harpo misleads the bullies through hyperventilation, then suddenly slaps them.  Ω  In the chasm between two generic men without star identities, Harpo preens, goofy-mouthed, tongue-between-teeth, patterned-shirted, darting-eyed. With retinal virtuosity, the chiasmus gaze connects stereoscopic enemies.

Horse Feathers   |    243

Catatonia: Reversals of Energy  Slugged, Harpo lands on the floor and wiggles his misaligned jaw back and forth to assess damage. Note, in close-up, the stunned face, frozen eyes, open mouth.  µ  Willing to be dumb, to give up humanness, to repeat early abasements, he strikes a pose that points to Titticut Follies, Frederick Wiseman’s documentary exposé of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane: if Horse Feathers weren’t a comedy, we would worry about this cretin, a case of catatonia and soul-death. Harpo, disoriented, finds the wherewithal to bop the football player on the head with a mallet. Sudden reversal of energy: a moment ago he was exhausted, but then, belligerence returns, and a mallet magically appears. Harpo experiences unpredictable spikings of hyperstrength. The Emptied  Escaped upstairs, Harpo, dumbfounded, satisfied, hangs his head and points to bullies through the closed door: we’ve successfully routed them. Gone is the catatonia of a moment ago. But then his eyes forfeit optimism; sightless, they face nowhere.  µ  Right hand points downward; left hand opens, palming his abdomen for security. His hat’s sign says kidnapper, but Harpo is the kidnapped victim. Nabbed eyes, shocked, omit emotion; he has elected himself as the empty. His finger points at that instant of anointment, that new identity. I, Harpo, the emptied. Instead of “emptied,” Paul Celan uses the word annihilated (vernichtet) in the poem that concludes his book Breathturn (Atemwende), a volume enacting silence, brokenness, the impossibility of providing transparent testimony. To what do Harpo’s widened eyes attempt to testify? As I’ve noted, Auschwitz’s most eviscerated captives were sometimes called Muselmänner—the no longer human. (Primo Levi calls them “the drowned.”) Harpo’s deadened gaze and the Muselmann’s destroyed consciousness are hardly comparable—but allow me to notice that Harpo points forward and backward to horror.

244   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

Peeking into the Anterior: Getting Undressed  Harpo’s first action, in a new circumstance of peril, is again to pin up his calendar: as reflex, he creates home in a persecuted void. Again, he peeks below the pinup—as if untucking her underwear—to see if there is a further secret.  Ω  Trying to get behind Time’s mystery, he doesn’t understand that the calendar merely represents (rather than embodies) chronology. He wants more. He wants the underneath, the early. I call it the anterior, as if the “aunt” were earlier than the mother: the aunt-erior, an anodyne erotic space behind the mother. Harpo’s shredded pants are falling off. We see him from the back: exposed drawers, abject. A thug strips Chico: “Take off your pants.” Seated, with binoculars, Harpo watches Chico’s shame. Is Harpo nearsighted? A Peeping Tom? A man who likes to magnify? Binoculars: as a kid I ordered X-ray glasses from a comic-book ad. I tried to see through a freckled bully’s clothes, but my X-ray spectacles failed: they doubled reality. Every object— rock, shrub, clothes-pinned laundry—came encrusted with a companion image. The bully and I saw My Fair Lady in 1964. He wasn’t yet a bully; he waited until the following year. Maybe My Fair Lady was the last straw. When Chico’s pants come off, Harpo turns the calendar around. Harpo believes that the pinup woman can see Chico, that stripped people have reciprocal viewing privileges. Harpo raises his hands over the calendar, as if blessing it. Thugs instruct Harpo, “Take off your coat.” Off go most of his clothes. In boxers and tanktop, like a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty, he coyly places one hand over his crotch, and the other over his heart.  Ω  Droopy-drawered, sexually flexible Harpo plays the girl. What amnesty does this interpretation provide? Harpo in Tears  The thugs lock the brothers in the room, homophobically jeer (“I’ll send my sister in to keep you company”), and depart for the football game. Abandoned by playmates, Harpo starts bawling, head

Horse Feathers   |    245

lowered, undershirt torn. Can you see his tears glisten?  µ  Tears, catching the light, might not be feigned. Usually Harpo rebounds from sorrow, via punning or subterfuge, into joy, but not this time: he looks briefly beyond the frame, and then turns back to his humiliated corner. Fade out on Harpo crying.

IV Thematic Dream  Last night I dreamt that I gave an A-minus to a Jewish girl, a student with red frizzy hair. She complained: she wanted a straight A. I told her, “Your essays were good, but you said nothing in class, and you befriended troublemakers.” I consoled her with the gift of an old cologne bottle, still filled with French scent. (Pour un Homme?) Themes include disobedient Jew, silent Jew, transgendered Jew, Dreyfus case, uneven student, complainer, punishment, tribunal, revenge, revolt, reward, relic, gift, perpetuity, smell. Harpo’s Vaccination Mark  On the football field, Harpo wields trashcan-lid as shield: he seems a guest from Ben Hur or some other sword-and-sandal picture. The brothers sit on a low wall and play cards, Harpo in scarf and underwear, like a tennis dress. Have Game, Will Travel: the Marxes smuggle Borscht-belt rites—canasta, Mah-Jongg—into football.  µ  Attractive muscular definition, where Harpo’s vaccination scar meets deltoid, contradicts his girlish outfit. The vaccination mark is the sign of “my” mother, “the” mother—my voice’s originator, looming beside our tracthouse hallway’s Berlin Wall. Groucho scolds the goof-offs. Harpo, finger to mouth, shushes him: don’t bother us, we’re playing cards. Harpo raptly focuses on the puny, uncountenanced task. Dressed in a wedding outfit (Midsummer Night’s Dream), he ignores the football field, ignores Groucho’s speech, says “shush” to every

246   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

interruption: consciousness itself is an interruption to a mind as soporific and temperate as Harpo’s.

Being Enfolded by a Guy: Stretched Shirt, Pregnant  A football player asks, “Where’s your number?” Harpo pouts: I pray that I belong. The strapping fellow puts his arms around Harpo to help remove the sweatshirt.  Ω  Normal American strongman assists freakish Pinky. Thus I fantasize that a guy enfolds my small, curly helplessness without squelching it. The football player pulls off Harpo’s sweatshirt, in search of the number below, but the shirt keeps stretching, like taffy, its long snake proving Harpo imperviously protean: you can’t destroy someone whose shirt is infinite. His torso becomes inhuman, zoo-worthy. The shirt has a gummy fluency and extensibility, like German syntax. The jock-helpmeet pulls the shirt, and Harpo seems to have no head, no neck, only a Schlange, an elephant trunk. Trousers ride up to show leg. His cuteness, triangulated, implies your presence, and mine, too, for there needs to be the Investigator, who points out cuteness, and then there needs to be this other, you, reader, who follows my pointing finger. Harpo imitates pregnancy: ball tucked underneath jersey. As the umpire removes the ball, Harpo smiles, reinterpreting reprimand—tussle, tackle— as a chance to be tickled. (We see his naked, downy belly.) Head wiggles as he swaggers, drum-major-arms scissoring. Job well done. I’ve posed as a pregnant woman, and I’m therefore “me” again. Biting the Football Player’s Finger  Harpo catches the ball and takes a detour to steal a hot dog; while running, he spreads mustard on the meat. Football players pile on Harpo. One opponent lies stricken, near Harpo, who has lost his hot dog. He puts the prone jock’s finger between two bread fragments, spreads mustard, and bites. The victim shouts, “Ow!”  Ω  Harpo,

Horse Feathers   |    247

cannibal, conscripts a finger into posing as hot dog. Harpo bites the forbidden—nipple, glans, anything—to get a rise out of the enemy, to produce a noise through another body’s “Ow!” Harpo’s wig hangs down to his eyes. Formerly I had curls profuse as Harpo’s, but mine were disorganized, not equidistant. Every inch of Harpo’s head has curl, a Nebuchadnezzar amplitude, and yet his overstuffed pockets look like loaded diapers.

Verifying the World’s Presence  Harpo folds opposites together: (1) immersion in activity; (2) a cautious glance to ascertain that the beholder remains steady. Example: while preparing a trick—rigging the football into a yoyo—he looks up to verify our presence and to ensure that the world hasn’t crumbled.  µ  I recognize that face from baby pictures: the “me” person sits on gravel and looks upward at the camera-wielding stranger. The stranger is mother or father, to whom I give a suspicious glance of appraisal: my nineteenth-century face doesn’t yet know how to compose itself. The expression later will be classified as “cute” and therefore rescued, but at its first emergence, it is uncivilized, preverbal, bestial, with a Tiergarten coldness and impartiality. Hugging the Ball  Absorbed, Harpo hugs the ball, his secret weapon, his fake baby.  µ  Bomb or baby: he sees no difference. Both are objects to enfold. We call this a fetal position, but it is also a Pietà, a curlicue, an autophagia, an inward tunneling, like the leaf pattern on a Corinthian capital. Harpo’s posture has a serpenteating-its-tail circularity; intestinal, he coils, like Scheherazade. Mom-Mouth amid the Huddle: Sideways Gait  I note Harpo’s Mom-mouth, gaping amid the huddle, after the athletes disperse on their masculine task of finding the ball. They don’t know that Harpo still holds the weapon, a homunculus he hugs with self-enfolded glee.  Ω  If I say “Mom-mouth amid male hubbub,” will this shorthand speak to you, or, instead, earn me a seat in hell? Any Mom’s mouth, or my mom’s? Is it fair, is it English,

248   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

to call Harpo’s expression “Mom-mouth amid the huddle”? Is the phrase “Mom-mouth amid the huddle” a form of muteness? A refusal of clear speech? He jumps up and down with glee, cackling—Rumpelstiltskin, Hunchback of Notre Dame, child-eating ogre. Harpo canters (cantors!) side to side rather than straightforwardly runs—as if encumbered with a holy secret, a burden of damaged interiority. In seventh grade, when I played the role of Benny the Eel in my friend’s Super 8 parody of an antidrug flick, I hunched my shoulders. So does Pinky: he performs huddle in solitude, his body a desert tent. The Pinky complex: my body is an alienated ark, a cockroach cage for unacceptable mind.

Pinky’s Touchdown  Harpo runs with the ball. Chico cheers: “Atta boy, Pinky!” Harpo dances a jig before reaching the finish line. No urgency about climax: he embroiders en route. Pinky crosses the finish line’s Jordan with Mommouth of unmodulated awe.  Ω  Jubilation, not aimed at someone else, is a mute inward exclamation, the sound of the abyss. Harpo experiences himself as dynamite: he might be a victim of his own TNT. Zeppo congratulates Harpo and actually calls him “Pinky”: “That’s great, Pinky, you made a touchdown.” A straitlaced, handsome brother, saying “Pinky,” momentarily participates in code, in tribal baby-talk. A list of studs who never congratulated me on touchdowns would be long. Stumbling and self-mockery are good ways to steal male affection. So are multiplication-of-balls and stupefaction. For Harpo, every experience is a fresh start. He is always, phenomenologically, a virgin: each moment offers him a new chance to rewrite natural law. At last, with contortionist enjoyment, Harpo kicks Groucho’s rear end. Topping Groucho is a subtext, triumphal, of many Harpo gestures. Think of Hegel, if you wish; or don’t think of Hegel. Think of masters and slaves, tops and bottoms.

Horse Feathers   |    249

Unrecognized Joy  Like a monkey, a kid on the toilet, or a goose laying a golden egg, Harpo sits on the football (past the touchdown line) and eats a banana.  µ  While athletes mill about, Harpo gestates. Men accept him back into the game: Harpo, enjoying a mascot’s infantile privileges, throws banana peels behind him as he merrily skips, like a girl playing hopscotch. Opponents trip, with assembly-line efficiency. We see, in close-up, Harpo’s Mom-mouth of gaping awe as he sends football studs falling with strewn banana peels.  µ  His self-congratulatory jubilation says, “I’m a miracle worker, sufficient, adequate, equal to expectation,” a joy never to be turned into words, never responded to, only reasserted, as self-applause, in every film. The neck-vein protrudes—a face stretched to its limits. Harpo catches the ball. A dog runs by; Harpo, distracted, chases it with his butterfly net. The Mom-mouth of awe, a stressful O, doesn’t shift when he segues into dogcatching. One face fulfills two tasks. Multiplication of Balls  Into the Ben-Hur garbage cart jumps Harpo: whistling, hand in mouth, he chases the dog (although his brothers shout You’re running the wrong way) and drives the chariot past the touchdown line. Harpo, an ever-wakeful Argus who doesn’t take for granted his Being, must earn it through awe, prank, and hyperventilation. Harpo hops out of the cart (in fast-motion: sped up to make him seem an efficient machine), and Harpo, a literalist, offering the Law exactly what it asks for, but not one whit more, and without conviction, puts the ball over the touchdown line, and then puts down another, and another, and another: he ignores the fact that football demands only one ball. Harpo slides past foreplay formalities and hits the G-spot repeatedly, foolishly. Dumb reiteration: ball + ball + ball. The brothers toss him balls, one by one. Harpo seems illicitly manic, accelerated by drugs or willpower, as if the Jews had a secret formula that conquered the world through chicanery and cabal. Isn’t ball + ball + ball a

250   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

variety of usury? Ball + ball + ball represents the supposed uselessness of same-sex love, the accretion of balls, their traffic jam. Levitating, Harpo hops and skips and claps between each ball-deposit.   Ω  A jig interrupts the assembly-line satisfaction of winning. The skip, like the nod, whistle, or pointing finger, is nominally directed at others, but is mostly an announcement-to-self, FYI message sent to his own brain. FYI: I’m happy.

Multiplication of Grooms  In the final scene, Chico, Harpo, and Groucho— all three at once!—marry Thelma Todd. Harpo jumps on Groucho and Chico, and they topple together: another buddy huddle. Harpo wears a tux: decently dressed, he enjoys a triumphant heterosexual ending, albeit polygamist. Harpo, jumping on Chico and Groucho, as if playing piggyback or horsy, wants brotherly antics, not a bride. On top, he rises above the familial stack of pancakes. By piling up observations and exclamations (ball + ball + ball), I coin + clone + increase Harpo. My little brother, in his infancy, had a clean, utopian smell, like A-andD ointment, butter, blankness, and Maypo. Now, because of a mysterious ailment, he has trouble speaking; he stops in the middle of a sentence, to catch his breath, and he pauses, for a spell, before continuing.

Horse Feathers   |    251

The Kippering, Bopping, Shushing, Bear-Hugging, Beard-Pulling Bustle

Monkey Business (1931)

What is so wretched about me, that I can only be used for writing? —elfriede jelinek, Greed

I Arty Choke  Dream: Harpo starred in a Yiddish film, a talkie. He spoke! His voice was soft and gravelly. Also dreamt I steamed an artichoke. Moral: I choke on art. Have you met Arthur Choke, a quiet klutz his friends call Arty? Kippered Herring  Food is my subject. I eat Harpo. He stands in a barrel, labeled “Kippered Herring,” and uses its top as a primping mirror.  µ  (Hollywood openly portrayed effeminacy before the decency code clamped down.) The barrel’s top reflects nothing; Harpo recognizes himself in voids. Kippered Herring: my mother’s father, who looked like Groucho, and whose verbal one-upmanship resembled selfflagellation (excessive verbal precision is masochistic), ate herring, and

252

only herring, on the boat to Europe for his honeymoon. Nothing else was kosher. I recall my father’s taste for tinned sardines. We come to you from the land of herring; we stink of kippered processes. A kipper (slang) is a fellow, a chap. To kipper, according to my 1945 Thin Paper Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, is “to cure by cleaning, salting, and, often, treating with pepper, spice, etc., and then drying or smoking.” I am kippering Harpo. Near kipper, on this dictionary’s page, is Klingsor, the castrated magician who stole the sacred spear in Wagner’s Parsifal. A talisman to take into the war zone: Harpo rises from his sleep of kippered herring. The other brothers are still immured in their barrels. Alone, Harpo faces the camera directly, no mediation.  Ω  Eyes supernaturally wide, like saucers (the Tinder Box fairy tale), Harpo holds his horn, a comforting possession, an inky bubble, his printed shirt freaky. The boxes behind him say Fragile Fragile Fragile: is their brotherly tie fragile, is their foothold in America fragile, is Harpo’s soul fragile? His tethered connection to us, via saucer eyes, is not fragile. These eyes preach no moral. I am a connoisseur of eyes. I canvas them for signs of shine: which eyes shine more, which eyes are larger, which eyes shall I take with me into the war zone?

Three Biographemes  Roland Barthes uses the word biographeme to describe a life’s molecules of fact and conjecture—like the abstract geometric polyps of a Chuck Close portrait seen up close. Here are three. (1) According to a co-star (Margaret Irving), Harpo was “more of a mother’s boy than any of them. Not that he was her favorite.” (2) Chico, their mother’s favorite, had piano lessons. Harpo didn’t. The family couldn’t afford lessons for two. (3) Their father was an “inept” tailor, says Groucho. “He was the only tailor I ever heard of who refused to use a tape measure.” Mother’s boy. Son of inept tailor. No piano lessons. Cruising the Men’s Room  Harpo, standing in front of the men’s bathroom, waits for a function. Is he cruising? Loitering? Note his sideways glance, akimbo posture, and half-unfastened suspenders; louche, he might be

Monkey Business   |    253

wearing makeup.  µ  Expressionless eyes watch a stranger enter the lavatory and get ejected. Philosophically disinterested, Harpo has no intention, no wish to harm or to usurp—no wish, whatsoever. The expelled stranger looks at the restroom’s sign and then at Harpo, who steps forward to reveal that, by leaning, he had concealed the first two letters of women, and turned it into men. Give Harpo credit for botching gender and extending open-ended invitations.

Puppet Show: Anal Retaliation  Attempts to explicate the puppet scene place me in the scapegoated position of the overreader, too concerned with details, like Freud analyzing a dream and seeing Oedipus everywhere. I see humiliation everywhere. Elucidator, scapegoater, Harpo points to puppets.  µ  Note his forthright arm’s unambivalent confidence: the other is not me. He barges into the theater’s proscenium and pretends to be a puppet. When a fellow puppet thumps him, Harpo’s laughing Mom-mouth declares: I enjoy being scapegoated. The officer (played by Tom Kennedy, who later appeared in Marilyn Monroe’s Some Like It Hot) goes backstage and pin-pricks Harpo’s gyrating rear end.  µ  What other Hollywood star has such a singled-out derrière? Now the theater’s proscenium frames Harpo’s butt, star attraction, spanked with a jumbo-sized paddle.  µ  In response, Harpo parts the rear curtains and blows into a children’s party toy, a “blow-out.”  Ω  Eyeballs protrude, and his mouth releases a coiling, playful snake. (It looks like his tailor-father’s missing tapemeasure.) Cut to children, laughing, clap-

254   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

ping: more girls than boys. The audience loves Harpo so much that they will eat him alive, like Sebastian cannibalized in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer. Each of these precocious kids, these puppet-show watchers, has a stage mother or stage father. Each has a performance psychosis. Each has a problem: I appeared in Monkey Business. Each may now be dead. The officer wrings Harpo’s neck: master throttles curly-headed Jew. Stay tuned for Kristallnacht. In revenge, Harpo kicks the meanie’s tush. Kicking butt is Harpo’s goal. Exciting, to aim a shod foot at the soft, intolerable rump. In seventh grade I paid a shrimpy Italian kid—the only other boy-classmate as short as I—to kick the butt of Bob, who’d once showed me his jumbo-sized penis. The hut where he showed me his goods wasn’t Heidegger’s hut—it was Bob’s hut, in his San Jose backyard. Another ship officer—played by Ben Taggart (who appeared, uncredited, in Al Jolson’s Mammy)—grabs Harpo’s leg, a prosthesis. Harpo helps pull the fake leg by hugging the officer and turning police action into rhythmic game.  Ω  Harpo’s orgy mentality—tropism toward huddled, stacked-up bodies—brings out the sexually pleasurable, periodic aspect of punishment. He hugs men bent on ruining him, and turns persecution into row-row-rowyour-boat homoerotic chum-folly. Willingly enduring fake castration, Harpo puts his noisemaker in the puppet-alligator’s jaws (I dare you to bite off my rod) and escapes audibility’s labor.  Ω  Mechanically closing, the puppet produces the trademark honk that proclaims “I’m Harpo.”

Pure Appearing  Harpo falls off a kiddy-car and grins winsomely at the camera, at us. The smile exceeds narrative, and indicates the star’s happiness at

Monkey Business   |    255

onscreen Being. He looks like Dr. Caligari, or Dracula’s fly-eating peon Renfield.  µ  Harpo’s excessive smile disrupts continuity. Shenanigans stop, and Harpo-presence flashes forth. The smile is an occasion for shine, for pure appearing, an emergence possible only because we (audience) are there, though invisible, to suture him into place. (And yet his eyeballs, slightly to the side, don’t quite meet us.) I want to live in that crack where narrative breaks down, where I can eat the extradiegetic meat of mere shine.

Cutting the Mustache  A customer enters a barbershop manned by Chico and Harpo. Harpo snaps scissors: nonverbal noise. Tender, attentive, he snips off the guy’s mustache. Harpo-as-castrator lacks malice. He trims the mustache to look like Hitler’s, and then, stepping back to inspect, rests his forearm on the customer’s shoulder.  µ  Harpo’s hand achieves recumbency, a happy, meaty limpness whose incommunicability intensifies joy. I’ve pleased Chico and arrested the universe. Selfsatisfaction produces mildly crossed eyes. Nowhere outside me to look: one eyeball seeks the other. My arm rests on this sleeping guinea pig’s shoulder. I look down, away from the viewer, from Chico, and from the victim, whose mustache I’ve Hitlered. Like his father the inept tailor, Harpo falsely believes himself competent at a trade—a lousy barber, imitating deluded masculine sufficiency. When Chico calls the haircut “a work of art,” Harpo’s terrified eyes protrude, staring into solar catastrophe. He folds trauma into a parody of satisfaction and complacency. Dream: a woman called me complacent. In my hotel bed, she screwed a dark-haired man, whose Jewishness was undeniable, though domesticated by lawyerliness. I backed off, so she could monopolize. Two men collaborate on giving a haircut to a somnolent guy: the situation recalls Warhol’s film Haircut (No. 1), though Harpo’s innocent glee short-circuits homoeroticism and reroutes it toward aggressive play. Hypothesis: play doesn’t always line up with erotics.

256   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

II Groucho’s Incidental Eroticism  The incidental has its own eroticism—the allure of the shunned. Groucho reminds me of Sacha Baron Cohen and other straight or bisexual Jewish men on whom I have permanent, self-depleting crushes, their egotism a Jacob’s ladder I ascend. Groucho purses his lips to kiss a man.  Ω  Do I resemble Groucho? Maybe I’m more Groucho than Harpo. Dreamt last night I gave a hand job to a literary powerhouse, while we sat, discussing finances, at a fancy Upper East Side restaurant. His dick: knobby. Mesmerized by Rhythmic Frog  Harpo interrupts children playing in a pond. I admire his nattiness. (Forget the shredded trouser-hems.) Fishing, he dips his stick into the pond; three kids laugh and point. Lips pursed in mock outrage, he shoos them away. A frog jumps into his hat; Harpo puts the hat on and smiles goofily. As the frog chirrups, the hat elongates, a bellows, a periodic swelling that alarms. Observe the deadened gaze of a man who would swallow Jonestown KoolAid.  Ω  An alien presence invaded me; I pissed my pants on the vaudeville stage, and I’ve made a career of repeating the situation—performance— that frightened me into shameful voiding. Harpo smiles, eyes rolled up toward the hidden frog. His honker, at chest height, like the statue’s breast, waits to be squeezed. The frog’s periodic utterance, its dot-dash binary sexual presence, its status as nestled companion, beguiles. Anything exterior, anything alien, can be turned into a comforting internal object, secured within the folds of a pocket, a hat, a tiny diasporic tent. Stupefied by Humanness: Palpating His Blubber Lip  At a card table (like the Algonquin Round Table, which sometimes hosted the real Harpo Marx),

Monkey Business   |    257

our holy fool sits down, fascinated by two chess players—men in suits— who ignore him. Harpo is stupefied by humanness, by run-of-the-mill male behavior, its lack of nuance and neurasthenia. My family, too, is freaked out by the unflappability of “normal” people. We can’t modulate our fast, rude intrusiveness and reciprocity-mongering to match their well-adjusted (WASP?) equanimity. I’m in the family business of commenting on what goes without saying. Pensive, one of the players leans back in his chair. Harpo also leans back, cross-legged, and palpates his lower lip’s blubber.  µ  Harpo keeps attuned to the other’s lack of attunement. By exaggerating, toying with his lip, Harpo renders the stranger’s denseness a spectacle that viewers can understand. When the straight man leans forward again, so does Harpo, learning to behave like a patriarch, arms crossed with guy-arrogance. One chess player holds a cigarette. Without looking at him, Harpo borrows it and inhales. The victim, fingers poised in air, seems not to know that his cigarette is missing. Without looking at him, Harpo returns the cigarette. The stooge’s fingers open to receive it, but he acknowledges neither the theft nor the restitution. Playing replacement games, Harpo has a Bookmobile or lending-library approach to phalli. He freezes time and manipulates the bodies of unknowing strangers, who function as sex-doll statuary. I become an Übermensch, because you, taking normality as your compass and corset, ignore my hypernuanced ways. Harpo doesn’t belong in the card game. He inserts himself without the other players ever realizing he is present. Harpo achieves invisibility: invisibility isn’t thrust upon him. He invents this elevation. No one will praise him for it. No one will say, Congratulations on being invisible!

III Neutralizing the Enemy  At a crook, Harpo waves a dismissive hand—futile gesture, committed for catharsis, not for consequence. With a honker, Harpo conks the crook, who mistakes him for a policeman, and raises surrendering hands. Pleased, Harpo plays flirtatious patty-cake.  Ω  Harpo

258   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

neutralizes the enemy by forcing him to be girlish. In kindergarten I knew a mean, popular girl who wore nail polish and refused to recognize me; her German surname included the sounds “high” and “baa.” She played a patty-cake game I feared: it used a foreign code, employing cruelties of language substitution, incomprehensible nuances of girl sophistication. She didn’t live on my block: she was therefore an early site of forced transplantation, the labor of trying to earn recognition from those who would never accord it, and who would coat their disdain with niceties of nail polish. A second gangster asks Harpo and Chico, “Who are you guys?” Harpo mimics “Shush,” looks directly at the lout for a silent beat’s duration, and then breaks the trance by honking and grinning, though his smile quickly vanishes. Hyperresponsiveness to other people’s moods marks Harpo not as oblivious clown but as attuned bellwether: serving what cause?

Freeze, Cuddle: Squeezing an Orange  And then arrives the moment I await.  Ω  Harpo’s eyeballs stop oscillating, stop scoping out enemies and brothers, and, instead, stare blankly ahead into isolation and futurity. When his eyes freeze, when he ventures into solitude-amid-company, I nab him for myself. Is he fantasizing about a jackpot? He shimmies to mark the gag’s success, and to celebrate ephemeral reciprocity with the villain. With Huck Finn boyishness, thumbs jauntily tug suspenders, connected to a functionless belt. “Show him how tough we are,” says Chico; Harpo rolls up his sleeve and slugs Chico in the face. The concussion of fist and face, a loud smacking sound, counts as one of Harpo’s noises. Grinning neutralizes his slug’s aggressiveness. Harpo is round-faced, I’m angular-faced: I fell into angularity after an early paradise of roundfacedness. Coached by Chico on how to fight, Harpo claims the right to approach

Monkey Business   |    259

him affectionately.  µ  Harpo uses his brother’s body as cuddle-mat. Admittedly, this moment of physical closeness is tiny; its smallness makes it unauthorized, shameful, vulnerable to your rebuttal. At the moment his fist hits Chico, Harpo scowls—a semi-Gookie, apotropaic, meant to frighten, like a paper dragon. Chico accuses him of punching “like a lily,” and backs Harpo into the corner. Though his eyes widen with shock at Chico’s critique, Harpo’s over-the-shoulder glance is coy, like Anna Moffo’s in publicity photos—the swerve-eyes of being seen. Mimicking ferocity, Harpo works his face into a froth, nearly a Gookie, lips parted, teeth clenched, half-moon eyebrows raised, cheeks swelled. Post-slug, Harpo’s face retains its Gorgon mask. Face doesn’t keep the same time as fists or heart. Momentary lag shows his ability to remain faithful to former feelings.  µ  Aggressively, he squeezes an orange; his face is the orange. He forgoes vanity and achieves batty authenticity. Chest and shoulders heave; innards compress. Then the frog in Harpo’s hat croaks, and the hat respires, up and down. Harpo’s face relaxes; he smiles, and eyes roll north. Eye motion, a signal for our sake, proves awareness of amphibian presence. Harpo generously acknowledges our need to read his mind. I see the frog, my secret friend. I must communicate to you that I see it. I have inward companions, internal objects. I am not empty. Call the frog-in-myhat a memory. Call it Torah, learning, secret history, inheritance, plunder. Chico puts finger to lips to shush Harpo, who does the same. Accord is his accommodationist goal. But when Chico offers a handshake, Harpo extends the appalling horn, announcing libidinal or metonymic flexibility: not affixed to any one word (“hand”), he is happy for the signifier to slide. Rejected, Harpo rebounds, a yo-yo. Arousal always rebegins, and so does his identity as Chico’s sidekick.

260   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

Girl-Chasing: Beard-Pulling  A woman walks past Harpo; his gaze, magnetized, follows her. Whether by means of glue or desire, “girl” drags Harpo’s gaze along, harpoons it. Infantile, distractible, he looks around skittishly, head loose as a spin-toy. Does he have add, or no self? Every morsel of information excites him. Fascinated by the ambient, his wandering eye hunts, but for what? Harpo grabs a bearded gent’s hand in conspiratorial laughter: I’m on your side, fellow joker.  Ω  With patronizing, fake-aristocratic amusement, head to the side, Harpo puts his own being at an angle to itself, and clucks over the wrong goods. Femme merriment precedes assault: Harpo springs the leg trick—mating behavior—on this gent, thereby signing or marking another body, as a baby crawls on a grown-up. Leg trick expresses ambulatory wishes to hijack, trespass, or spill. By pulling the gent’s beard while force-feeding him the leg, Harpo double-dip-humiliates a guy who looks like Freud: I pull your beard and compel you to uphold my thigh. Remember Freud’s humiliated father, hat knocked to the ground by an antiSemite. Jewish men’s hats may be hot spots of shame. Harpo chases a lady around the ship’s stair; seeing another lady, he pursues her instead. Fickle, childish concupiscence can’t menace. No decent girl considers him boyfriend material. Abstraction  In the corridor, Harpo whistles, fascinated by a wall’s shadowy fretwork.  Ω  Abstract patterns cast by staircase newels and bannisters momentarily enthrall him: without human companions, he finds spider-designs and nameless starry shapes riveting. Toward their nonfigural heaven, he leans. Frog in Throat  When Harpo falls flat on his stomach, his hat tumbles off, and the frog hops out. Whistling, he chases the escapee and enters a barbershop, where a hoarse customer explains, “I’ve got a frog in my throat.” (I can’t identify every bit player, but I’ll mention that this hoarse customer

Monkey Business   |    261

is Bobby Barber, who appeared, uncredited, as a busboy in Judy Garland’s Presenting Lily Mars.) Harpo stands between barber and client.  µ  Harpo’s blank, shocked gaze depicts the initiation of arousal, or the moment before. Young-seeming, as if he were redoing puberty, he is sandwiched between two regular guys engaged in business, which Harpo, go-between, has interrupted, inserting himself as the triangle’s titillated apex. Harpo, searching for a “frog,” and confusing the word’s two meanings, tries to extract the hoarse man’s vocal obstruction. Quack laryngologist, Harpo aims to wrench back his own voice by turning the stranger upside down. Hearing the frog, Harpo looks in the other direction while retaining hold of the scapegoat’s head and mouth.  µ  Harpo, muting the other, retains smothering contact. His free hand heavily grips the hoarse guy’s forehead. As Harpo turns away, he still holds on to the stranger’s shoulder: I’ll leave a manly hand on you for one final moment. Harpo’s orienting hand extends a buddy’s protectiveness. When Harpo finds his lost frog, he scolds the prodigal and then pats his own heart: the trouble you’ve caused me! I’m your martyred Jewish mother. He flashes calf; torn pants radiate countercultural chic. Messy wig combines the adorable and the atrocious. In college, I had Harpo hair, a Jewfro: it was my shame’s Grand Central Station. Through it, commuters traipsed. Puberty skipped our household. It never wrote its Passover X upon our door. We launched into our futures without its bloody mark. (Isn’t the word puberty disgusting?) Harpo and puberty keep missing each other.

Suddenness  In the port, an opera singer poses for a picture. As the photographer squeezes the trigger, a horn bleats, and out from the camera’s concealing cloak emerges Harpo, smiling: he takes pleasure in observing discombobulation. (Homeless, Harpo squats as camera but scrams when an authority discovers his nap’s locale.) From Harpo’s suspenders hangs

262   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

his honker, sticking straight out. Flasher, he points to it. As he runs away, the erect horn bobs and shakes. He shocks by materializing suddenly (I’m enamored of suddenness): you expect a camera, but instead, Harpo appears. The bulb is an unforewarned and pointing presence, a forty-five-degreeangle noisemaker, an announcer that, rod-like, aims its effect at a stranger. You didn’t expect a penis: that’s why phalli are pleasing pointers. Excess— shock value—is built into them. Harpo, a surprise pointer, indicates “look over there.” He enjoys being a busybody, a nuisance, a blitzkrieg materialization. Walter Benjamin described the sudden appearance of similarity as a flashing up (the German word, one of my favorites, is Aufblitzen). Are erections blameworthy?

Phallus inside Showgirl Feather: Harpo as Lana Turner  The ship official holds out his arm to restrain Harpo, who uses it as pull-up bar. Transforming prohibition into calisthenics tool, he discovers new neighborhoods of prank. When asked, “Where’s your passport,” Harpo initiates buddy huddle: arms encircle Zeppo and Groucho. Every contingency is a catalyst for cuddling. Not uptight, Harpo tumbles onto bodies. Emotionless, he knocks Groucho over with a feather. Harpo masters puns, literalizations. His mechanical pleasure releases tension rather than expresses desire. Inside the tickle-feather he finds a big rod and admires it with glazed eyes.  Ω  Resembling Groucho’s cigar, the hard rod points upward at the oftremarked forty-five-degree angle. Its cloaking feather suggests burlesque. (Inside the showgirl’s feathery costume, if she is a drag queen, lies an unexpected stick.) Forgetful, Harpo drops the billy club. Its thud, as it hits the deck, is a Harpo noise. His irises, zombie pinwheels, spin. Harpo reaches into a man’s jacket pocket to grab a passport. “I’ve got him,” says the stranger. Harpo, denying captivity, smiles—sun-bronzed, affluent, starry, like Lana Turner, tanned exemplar of blankness-as-royalty, in the early days of her romance with Johnny Stompanato.  Ω  Lana-like, Harpo beams at Groucho. I’m cuter than Groucho, Harpo has reason to

Monkey Business   |    263

think, but he gladly cedes superiority to the gawky brother. Then the stranger says “Ah!”— dismissing Harpo as nuisance. On this ship, one bit player, uncredited, is Sam Marx, Harpo’s father, who spoke, according to The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia, not much English; his preferred language was Plattdeutsch.

IV Suspender-Play: Head Motion of Self-Hailing  Harpo plays with loose suspenders, to remain occupied while other people ignore him. He specializes in nervous self-ministering motions—like a kid masturbating to keep himself company? One foot hangs into the suspender’s pulley: he enjoys its gummy, rubbery resistance. He looks back and forth between Groucho/Chico (on his right) and Zeppo (on his left). A mediation machine, Harpo checks to see if both sides (lunacy and sanity) function. Crossfire glances make him seem socialized, part-ofthe-gang, although others shun him. I hail myself, since my brothers refuse. When Zeppo, holding a forged Maurice Chevalier passport, sings “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me,” Harpo smiles, generously beholding handsome prowess: my brother the matinee idol. Harpo, grandmotherly, retreats into muteness and lets the kid shine. Toward Zeppo, he waves a conciliatory hand—“there, there, lie quiet, child,” Aunt Em–style, toward Dorothy, delusional in her Kansas bed. Lunatic Paper-Scattering: Anarchic Escalation  Arriving in America, the brothers wait in line to show passports. Harpo takes cuts in front of a young girl. Groucho crawls under the table, and Harpo rides on Groucho’s back: a sexual, dominating use of brother-as-transportation. (I’m surprised that the blabbermouth lets himself be used.) Harpo takes the rubber stamp and starts repeatedly, nonsensically stamping. Action delights him: stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. Again and again the stamp makes contact. Steinian, concussive, assertive, it resounds. I’ve never seen Harpo happier.

264   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

He stands upright at fake attention, chest penguin-puffed: he pretends to line up for fascist roll-call. And here comes the lunatic climax: changing tactics, with a possessed smile he steps on the rubber stamp, and both hands toss papers in the air. A customs officer grabs his waist: Harpo achieves the goal of being hugged, smothered, contained. Squeeze me from behind.  Ω  Authority’s bear hug only intensifies Harpo’s anarchic disregard of paper organization, a country’s stacks of documents authorizing entrance. And then, still hugged, Harpo elatedly pumps the pens, in their holders, left and right, like canoe oars: two penises, two nipples, ingenuity, doubleness. I’m milking a cow, but where is the milk? His discharging action is jubilantly immaterial. Harpo pounds fists on the table and looks over his shoulder to see the officer seeing him: Admire my hyperactive upsurge. I escalate anarchy for your sake. Accept this strange love-gift. Harpo’s shirt peeks open: belly-flash. Close-up on Harpo’s passport: it, too, is Maurice Chevalier’s. Harpo, lip-synching the chanteur, faces us.  Ω  Establishing eye contact, he presents an impossibility: Harpo singing. Eyes swerve to the officer. Harpo’s fingers, curled into cute near-fists, convey contentment—a tucked-in mimic who feels tended by his impersonation’s aptness. He spreads arms wide. If a nightingale could sing like you, he’d sing much better than . . . Singing is an “if”: voice is contingent. To signify schmaltz, Harpo clutches his heart. The officer bear-hugs Harpo again; Harpo grabs the stamp, and stamps every paper in sight—no order to his mania. He removes the official’s hat, and repeatedly rubberstamps authority’s bald pate, meanwhile smiling at the stiffs: watch me humiliate your colleague.  Ω  Without passport, Harpo falls back on prankishness, a trait that Nietzsche appreciated. Normal people’s ordinariness drags Harpo’s mood down. He needs

Monkey Business   |    265

to “up” them, to overstimulate them, to spread his lunacy around, to make it a new norm. Harpo wreaks havoc not to express hostility but to establish mania as external verity, so that he can see “mania” outside himself, not merely as internal (discomfiting) speed. Intensity is itself an aesthetic value—or is it dangerous, this unmodulated excitement neither climaxing nor tapering off?

We Are the Middle Distance Harpo Stares Into  Harpo tries to crash a fancy masked ball. On the mansion’s doorstep, he looks back and forth between surly butler and blankness: we are the middle distance Harpo stares into. His eyes are spin art. Were you alive when spin art reached its peak? Spin art, neither beautiful nor fun, was a requirement, a fad in which I participated: a team player, I entered the carnival booth and made a spiraling contribution to world culture. “Stay away from this door,” says a bouncer: Harpo, disgusted, imitates the dictate. As if spanking air, Harpo gestures, but no one sees the insurrectionary mimicry. Only we do. Hostile prohibitions don’t infect him: imitating, he disgorges moody toxins. Harpo as Daughter: Lifted, Escorted  The patriarch introduces his daughter: “I want you to meet the sweetest little thing in the whole wide world.” Answering the call, Harpo emerges from a wreath—like a party girl popping out of a cake—and sinuously interposes himself between aghast father and daughter. He’ll serve as daughter—wrong daughter—just for the pleasure of being at the wrong place at the right time. Happy again to be sandwiched, a Lucky Pierre whose pants enjoy a downward drift, Harpo holds a Carmencita rose between his teeth. Slow-witted Daddy hasn’t yet swallowed the surprise of Harpo’s presence.  µ  Harpo-as-damsel elbows an invisible ledge, his eyes putto-like, stylized, upward-tending; cute Harpo assumes a pedophilic-beauty posture, like an artist’s model in a New York Bowery fairy demimonde, or a Taormina underage urchin posing nude for Baron von Gloeden. As two bouncers eject him, Harpo experiences the pleasure of being

266   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

lifted—the goal of urchin behavior. Two men—an ideal enclosure—support Harpo, who honks repeatedly, maybe seven times, while exiting: I’ve won. I’ve done a Harpo. I’ve made my mark. I’ve exercised authority. I’m repeatedly me. Harpo has a binary sound system. It’s either turned on or off. And the “on” switch—honk honk—must do the work of expressing joy and triumph, as well as protest and complaint. “Honk honk” means “I’ve triumphed!” but also “I’m hungry.” While honking, Harpo glances momentarily at one of the bouncers, a habitual checkup glance: am I being held properly, are you still there, escorting me? Harpo is not self-absorbed. He is absorbed, however, in his emissions: honk honk honk. Absorbed in habitual actions. Absorbed in extracting reactions from the dumb folk surrounding him. The film stills I’m seizing aren’t conclusive. But at least they conform to a rhythm—click, snap, spin, bounce.

V Family Equations: Groucho as Pure Penis  Facing Groucho, I meet my dead maternal grandfather: grouch, tirade-master, mustache-man, gent from the East, dapper Mikado lover, Latinate lecturer, Jew-conscious Jew, with pointy head, stubble, insistence, stubble-as-insistence. Groucho is the presence of the horrid inside my own body when I look in the mirror. Groucho seems pure penis, a penis with book-learning, a penis that walks and talks. Blame the penciled-in mustache. If Groucho is cocky, then Harpo is _____? Curly. Cute. The noncock. The soft-edged and compressible. The Bustle: Aesthetics of Exhaustion  At the party, Harpo hides inside a dowager’s bustle. She walks away, but her bustle, independent, stays put. (The part revolts against the whole.) Harpo-asbustle is the freakish family pet, like Cousin Itt or Thing from The Addams Family. Harpo peeks out from the reattached bustle, right behind the woman’s rear end.  Ω  A peering dwarf, half-wit, Harpo visibly endures his own demotion to ottoman: subordination is a platform for mischievous voyeurism.

Monkey Business   |    267

The woman exits, leaving Harpo alone inside the bustle. Now, Harpo-asbustle is on the rampage: a dancing woman, not the bustle’s original possessor, turns around to find this ambulatory caboose attached to her. Harpo, a horny Velcro appendage, affixes himself to random dames. Exhausted on a couch, Harpo wears the bustle like a lap blanket. (Here I must give a quick plug for the aesthetics of exhaustion.) A wallflower harlequin, postbacchanal, he rests amid the lees. Mouth agape, legs spread, he counsels: Never fear being seen as dimwitted. Embrace ease and stupor.

Companionate Marvel  A maiden wears an outer-space headdress. Its wing, like a Yagi-Uda antenna, bumps against Harpo’s head. Spin-art-eyed, he stands beside the sprite. (She reminds me of actress Kym Karath, who guest-starred as the “Princess” on TV’s Lost in Space.) Harpo touches the fellow freak.  µ  Observe his careful act of solicitation. Now he looks away—to retreat from alien presence’s excess. He jumps onto her protruding skirt, as if it were a fauteuil, then flees. He thought she was magical, but then she turned into Chutes and Ladders, or a costume with problems. Coloratura Horror: I Consent for You to Overtake Me Now  As if imitating Dracula, a scary Jew, a bogeyman, he peers through harp strings at us and at a female harpist (aren’t most harpists female?) who accompanies a pretentious operatic singer, Dumont-like, performing “O sole mio” lugubriously, with mushy diction. After the rival harpist runs away shrieking in fright, the oblivious diva continues singing: she doesn’t realize that Harpo, now seated at the harp, has usurped the accompanist’s role. Frustrated at the song’s interminableness, he bites his own shoe.  µ  He eats himself because environment provides no echo. Then he scratches his sole. Harpo, like a monkey, satisfies accumulated itches—whether an exiled hobo’s prickly heat, or the hankering to play harp. Grimace metamorphoses into eye-twinkle. Moral: no emotional expres-

268   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

sion lasts long. He wiggles his nose—a new area of his body to itch, to manipulate. The more divisible a body, the cuter. He is guilty of nasal rudeness—involving us in his phlegm. Is he blowing his nose? By tweaking it, manually, in rhythm, he produces two pitches, percussive, Papageno-like. Jutting bottom lip proves him a serious artist, Rodin’s Thinker, man-ona-toilet, man-on-the-dump. Heavy seriousness is one of Harpo’s best roles. When the lady’s singing becomes florid, Harpo’s mouth expands with horror. Coloratura confuses him, although his face’s plasticity, its susceptibility to incremental, chromatic change, resembles coloratura. The soprano’s display sends him into a William Tell act, turning harp strings into bowand-arrow, to remove the offending vocal object. Fingers poke in ears, as if trying to evict noxious sounds—a woman’s voice—trapped inside his head: his own high-pitched voice. Harpo’s voice took time to deepen: his performances repeat the shame of being a boy who speaks with a girl’s voice.  Ω  Retreat into Kaspar Hauser psychosis erases the other. Harpo drapes a jacket over his head to create a photographer’s or surgeon’s tent, and to operate on the strings without hearing or seeing. After the singer finishes, Harpo hogs the ovation—harpist-hands lifted like a triumphant boxer’s. When Chico scolds him, Harpo freezes, astonished by perpetually recurring culpability: to this spasm of eclipse he responds with a glazed stare. Chico requests a different song, and Harpo thrusts at him a pointing arm.  Ω  I enjoy the muscular exuberance of Harpo’s deixis. What command does the pointing hand perform? J’accuse? Je t’aime? Harpo, playing the song that Chico requested, is a happy-faced Adam who has finally pleased his demanding God. When playing, looking ahead, at us, at Hollywood, at his brothers, at the orchestra now accompanying him without irony, Harpo nods, a simple, rhythmic, binary cut, a yes, expressing willingness to harmonize with whatever unspecified agent is out there listening. Harpo gives the nod of cease-fire, of uncondi-

Monkey Business   |    269

tional rhyme. Harpo’s nod is like an OK that he grants the executioner (you may slaughter me now), or like an OK that a soloist grants a conductor to say that the first movement’s torture may now begin (I am ready to make my disastrous entrance). Like Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, Harpo nods “yes” to the oncoming fit: I consent for you to overtake me now. When Harpo, absorbed and serious, plays harp, he ignores the spectator. No more hello to us. No more nod to the executioner. No more smile. No more expressiveness. If Harpo’s antics are his problem, then the solution is harp-playing’s habeas corpus. When applauded, Harpo’s gratitude seems genuine, not a gaze of riveted mimicry, not a plastered-on grin.  µ  We are hailed by his eyes: we come into existence by applauding him. I seem to be his mother, watching him; the “I,” the viewer, becomes Harpo’s mother, the one who made Harpo happen, the one who authorized these bright and impossibly goodnatured eyes, eyes willing to be called fool, eyes accustomed to reinterpreting humiliation as an honor. I belong to a special club, the foolish-eyed. His mother (in this case, I) accepts that he is a man but also begs to differ: Harpo is a man? His eyes counteract, through ardent width and gleam, the other’s nonreciprocation. My intuition: the mother, not the father, watches Harpo. We, seeing this film, occupy the mother’s POV. Rolling up his eyes, he acknowledges the prodigal frog, hat-ensconced. Harpo’s oscillating orbs pay tribute to amphibian croaks and contractions.

Bopping the Enemy  In the final barnyard fight sequence, Harpo pitchforks a gangster’s glutes. Harpo and the Investigator are butt-centered. The gangster, looking at Harpo, backs down the ladder; Harpo, insolent, returns the gaze. Crime is a good excuse for eye contact. The pitchforked thug retaliates by dismantling Harpo’s weapon—cracking off the tines, then breaking the stick into pieces. Harpo copes with catastrophe by throwing a Gookie. He elongates his lips, horizontally: I endure my castration with equanimity. The gangster tries to pull off Harpo’s jacket. Reversing, Harpo bends

270   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

down: we see his behind. Coattails part, permitting a brief glimpse. I don’t find it arousing, but, because I am methodical and exacting, I must point it out. Gangsters enter. Harpo and Chico, huddled behind the barn door, shush each other: frottage, two men in a corner doing joint business, faces crammed together, fingers to lips. With a crowbar, Harpo hits a gangster’s neck—but not the noggin. (I want Harpo to be ethical.) Escalation: he bops the skull itself with an effortless blow, like mechanically depressing a piano key. Chico awards Harpo a second mallet, which he uses to knock a thug unconscious, and then to brain Chico. Harpo has the same expression on his face when he bops gangster and bops brother: Harpo has learned a new trick—bopping—and he enjoys exercising this skill anywhere, amorally. Bopping involves no emotion, just the tactile pleasure of a simple task accomplished, just dumb satisfaction at the mallet’s effectiveness. He is pleased to see causality occur, to see A lead to B, whether B is a good or an evil consequence. Mere sequentiality satisfies his itch. Harpo emerges from a haystack with a cow, a bell around its neck: he has chosen a musical mate. But the camera quickly leaves him—sweeps away from his animal love, toward the normative romance, Zeppo and his girlfriend, Mary (actress Ruth Hall, who died in 2003, and was only twenty years old when she appeared in Monkey Business). A medium shot places Harpo in the background; he glances left and right, ignored. Harpo is getting lost. Harpo is slipping away from sight. Harpo is not in a tux. Comedy abandons the melancholy Jaques, who says, in As You Like It, “rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.” Sinking, Harpo tries to stumble out of the haystack swamp. Without comic business, he loses jazzed-up hyperconfidence. Zeppo ends up with a girl; Harpo ends up with a cow. Harpo is an animal. Harpo desires an animal. Harpo desires anything. Harpo desires anything with a bell around its neck. Harpo desires languageless beasts. Harpo, a pet, is happiest with other pets. The cow won’t “call” Harpo on his muteness. A cow is Gertrude Stein’s code word for orgasm, among other unspeakable emissions. Harpo kisses the cow repeatedly. One kiss isn’t enough. Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss. Shocked kisses. Incredulous kisses.

Monkey Business   |    271

At last he has a companion. But that’s not how the film ends. It ends with Harpo retaliating, throwing hay. It ends with Harpo’s aggression. Harpo, apparently, was one-sixteenth of an inch shorter than Chico. To someone, this knowledge—this tiny difference—mattered. Imagine a consciousness plagued by such increments, and by the jealousies that flower from such precise, such overly precise, measurements.

272   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

The Pretzel Glimmer-Eye of Stuffy’s Stuttering Surge

A Day at the Races (1937)

Klein believed that the child, from the very beginnings of life, is consumed with anxiety and racked by destructive drives that put him in danger of being disintegrated. —julia kristeva, Melanie Klein

I Jewish Weirdo Dream  Dream: I met Barbra Streisand at her home. Blonde, preoccupied, she confused me with another acolyte, a hack writing a book called Barbra in Motion. Harpo and Barbra are two Jewish weirdos who made it big. I’m amnesiac about what I’ve already included in this book, and what I haven’t. Have I already told you about the time I saw Jason Gould walking up Eighth Avenue? Did I use the phrase “spawn of vibrato and egocentricity” to describe him? Or did I cut that phrase, because I worried that “egocentricity” was an unkind way to describe Barbra? And did I mention my jealousy of Jason, or of men who’ve slept with him? Allan Jones’s Neck  A Day at the Races, Zeppo-less, carries a wound: absence of the handsome brother. The back of Allan Jones’s neck, in his first lovemaking scene with prim Maureen O’Sullivan (Mia Farrow’s mother), will suffice as erotic treasure: again he reminds me of a college senior who

273

sang “A Wand’ring Minstrel I” while strumming a mandolin, and whose smooth shave hid a hirsuteness I could only imagine. Groucho, in his first scene, wears a skimpy shirt, revealing most of his upper arms, not overly muscular, hence idealizable; hence, I can see them from the mother’s (Minnie’s) point of view; hence, they belong in the subset of masculinity I might entitle “Allan Jones’s neck,” a zone of closely shaved tenor vulnerability.

Stuffy, Butt, Stutter  Harpo plays “Stuffy,” a jockey. The boss—Douglass Dumbrille, who later had a small role in Marlon Brando’s Julius Caesar— elevates Harpo by kicking his butt: upward hop.  µ  We see the abased posterior but can’t perceive its sensations. Then Harpo runs away, with side-to-side gait, toward a hay pile: clumsy, he stutters and delays. (Walter Benjamin: “space begins to stutter . . .”) “Stuffy, where are you?” says the aggressor. Repetition of “Stuffy” teaches us Harpo’s new nickname. Hearing a non-Marx say “Stuffy” gives it a reified fullness. The name Stuffy might describe the condition—a subjectivity stuffed full of unsayables—that brought Harpo to muteness. Stuffy, whose polka-dotted shirt disobeys masculine codes, kicks the boss’s butt. Aggressive leg emerges from hay’s concealment. Moral: Harpo never misses a chance to exact comic, butt-centered revenge. Harpo’s face opens wide with awe for anyone who will serve as nonenemy, as kin. Clown-lurching toward Allan, Harpo merely pats him, as if quieting a mischievous protuberance. To Allan’s palaver, Harpo responds with knee-jerk nod, eyes riveted. The nod demands: remain where I place you. Outside the barn, Chico shouts “Get your ice cream!” Startled, Harpo switches: one action suddenly halts (his emotional commitment to any gesture is total but temporary), and he rushes out to greet Chico, who cries in recognition, “Stuffy!” Harpo’s open-armed, shark-fin trajectory aims to cut the brother as much as to embrace him. Harpo wants ice cream more than rendezvous. Will ice cream prevent him from being consumed by anxiety or racked by destructive drives? Kristeva, on Klein: “The future subject is

274   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

founded upon a dynamic of abjection whose optimal quality is fascination.” I am fascinated by Harpo, as he is fascinated by ice cream and other melting objects.

Swiveling  Chico brags about winning money. Harpo, whistling in admiration, touches his own belly for haptic self-consolation. Listening, Harpo looks sulky, blank, his bottom lip puffed out, as if he were Susan Hayward preparing for the gas chamber in I Want to Live! or a juvenile delinquent tutored by long-suffering Annie Sullivan.  Ω  See Harpo’s depressive fog—embodied in blank eyes and protruding lip. Interrogated, Harpo lights a match—a code Chico understands. He translates: “You’re fired.” Stuffy nods, victim lips puffed out, eyes swiveling away evasively, like a shady governor unable to face his wife’s or his nation’s music. Chico’s toosmall corduroy coat sublimates a wandering tribe’s stuntedness. Chico calls Harpo “honest”; to disprove the praise, Harpo dives back into the ice-cream cart, and his eyes brighten with a gleam that says I’m caught and therefore cute, a gleam that Allan’s presence facilitates. Harpo finds triangulation relaxing.  Ω  Abandonment is just a gemütlich chance to wander away from bossy schemers. He amuses himself with a foot game: heel against toe, advancing, repeating, creating a square. Moral: measure your condition’s limits by drawing lines between imaginary points. Same, Same, Different  The sheriff (played by Robert Middlemass, who appeared in the forgotten 1932 film Shave It with Music) makes a blustering demand, which Harpo imitates, to mock querulous normalcy’s lack of selfcritique. Change of plan: Harpo touches the sheriff’s back. Suddenly the simpleton uses the Law for proprioceptive assistance. Slapping his own belly, Harpo apes a chortling fatso, sated on ill-gotten provisions—like my early role models Max and Moritz, two German tykes who foil schoolteachers and prove themselves Mephistopheles in short-stack-pancake guise.

A Day at the Races   |    275

Playboy financier, Harpo takes pride in midriff thickness, and he surrenders to premature self-congratulation: prematurity is an attainable paradise. Harpo reaches deep into the sheriff’s pocket and sinks into it. You can’t pick a man’s front pocket without bumping into the basket. Comedy’s tripartite rhythm—same, same, different—is a musical form. The second, dumb iteration (same, same) lures me into thinking the world incapable of discontinuity. And then—suddenly—different arrives, goosing me. Reaching into the sheriff’s pocket, Harpo falls limply upon him. Harpo’s lethargic body becomes a dead weight that the Law must support. The third time, Harpo comes up with the stooge’s socks: coins, ice cream, and hosiery are interchangeable booty. In the next scene, Chico sells books to Groucho, who doesn’t need them. Piling useless texts into Groucho’s snookered arms, Chico dramatizes words-as-encumbrance, nonsense that Harpo escapes through silence. Replacing books with ice cream, the brothers choose sugar-satedness over library stupor—the dead weight of Torah and learning, the meal-sack of interpretation, a burden we lug, vending unwanted nuances, from town to town.

II The Ego in Bits  Matricide undergirds thinking, according to Kristeva’s Melanie Klein: “In truth, matricide, which Klein was the first to have the courage to consider, is, along with envy and gratitude, at the origin of our capacity to think.” Let’s hypothesize that Harpo’s silence expresses identification with the mother. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Harpo’s muteness tries to annihilate her. Klein often noticed her patients attacking objects—tearing playthings into bits. Her phrase: “the ego is in bits.” More Klein, courtesy of Kristeva: “loving an object and devouring it are very closely connected.” I lovingly devour Harpo by dividing him into swollen, swallowable morsels. Overstatement is a tendency that flowers on ground sown with torn-apart bits. Surge, Wave  Peering in a window, Chico points: “You see that sourpuss?” To avoid drift and error, Harpo urgently nods. Can’t spill this precious nod, this surge, streaming onto Chico. I note Harpo’s round face—too much face, a burdensome excess?

276   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

“He’s no good,” says Chico, of Whitmore (played by Leonard Ceeley, who reminds me of five-o’clock-shadowed Richard Nixon, and who was an understudy for a role in Julie Andrews’s 1954 Broadway debut, The Boy Friend). Harpo quickly shakes his head “no”: unambivalent, he splits the world into good and bad. “They’re trying to get the sanitarium away from Miss Julie,” says Chico, and Harpo lunges over the windowsill to express fruitless devotion. Chico restrains Harpo: “no, you gonna watch him.” Nodding, chastised, Harpo honks comprehension. Abstract, the honk advertises alacrity, surge, burst: punctuation, not substance. Leaving, he waves to an unseen person. Harpo bids farewell not to someone in the story, but to the story itself, and to us. This inexplicable wave is a Bedlam gesture: hello, fellow asylum-dwellers. A persecutory structure underlies this book. My subject attacks me, wrests me away from atopical homeostasis. Paranoid state: being taken over by a topic. Surmounted by Harpo, I surge onto myself. Kristeva interprets Klein: a “ ‘narcissistic structure’ is based on this surging of the object onto itself.” Without speech, Harpo must surge onto himself, the only destination for passionate attachment.

Rape, Riding, Retarded: Clap, Point, Clap  “I’ve got a patient for you,” Chico tells Groucho. Guess who enters, flute-playing, kicking, undulating, like an exotic dancer. Groucho takes Harpo’s pulse and says, “Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.” File this quip in the dossier entitled Harpo’s inhuman body, remote from normal flows. Whenever Groucho speaks, Harpo stares at him, as if lip-reading, and then quickly swivels to check Chico’s reaction. The mustached brother tries to insert the thermometer in Harpo’s mouth: fraternal rape? Harpo’s lips, resisting penetration, clench, but then he relaxes and chews the instrument. External objects have one fate: to become internal. The Other is a lollipop. Harpo hops onto Groucho’s back and rides him like a pony.  Ω  This scene of male violation recalls Myra playing doctor with sexy Rusty in Myra Breckinridge, or Marcello Mastroianni riding a peasant party-girl in La Dolce Vita: orgy as the decline and fall of literate civilization.

A Day at the Races   |    277

Groucho examines stunned Harpo’s head.  µ  Axiom: when Harpo gets a close-up, I’m happy. Two brothers gang up on him, as when three boys in high school “witnessed” to me, holding my hands and entreating me to accept Christ—homo seduction under gospel guise. The parahypnotic trance breaks when Groucho says “1 percent mentality.” Harpo sits back, pleased to be called retarded. But when Groucho calls him “the crummy moronic type,” Harpo’s face exhibits sudden sobriety. Mood lability doesn’t preclude mood stability. His secret is look toward and then away: face Groucho (for confirmation, love, diagnosis), and then, without registering disappointment, turn away with a Balthazar-like calm. Harpo blows a bubble (chewing gum, Chardin), aimed not at us but at the void, or at any sounding board. Eyes widen, matching the bubble; its growth amazes him. Then, as he inhales, his eyes dart fearfully between captors. Strategy: stay immobile after perpetrating a wicked deed. There are only three positions for Harpo’s eyes: right, left, forward. Toward one brother, toward the other brother, toward the No One. His blank stare has spiritual dimensions but also criticizes religion’s insufficiencies. Chico and Groucho put their hands on his throat to preserve the fully blown balloon’s dimensions.  µ  Sealing off Harpo’s head, they express fratricidal willingness to decapitate. Harpo bends down, flaunting his curly pate. He wants to cauterize the balloon’s umbilicus, but also to become the Inanimate. Harpo, unsupervised, moves a hypodermic up and down, taking a formal or physical pleasure in its flexibility, its phallic extendibility. The rod, built into the body, is every boy’s favorite toy. Harpo pumps anesthetic into Groucho’s ankle: the master/slave dialectic flip-flops. Etherizing the brother is Harpo’s hobby. When Groucho falls, Harpo claps and points. I exist because I know my tempo; I know how to insert between myself and the angry world this camouflage of clap, point, clap.

278   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

III Striped Jersey, Duck-Mouth: Cute Communication  Chico says, “Ask Stuffy,” and Allan Jones asks Stuffy, who nods in affirmation. Strange, to call on a mute as witness. Harpo wears a horizontalstriped jockey-jersey, like the shirt I’m wearing now. He seems proletarian Lenny—virile yet childish—in Of Mice and Men. Harpo pats his own stomach and points to the horse. Mockindignant lips puff out.  Ω  I touch my jutting belly to declare an unsanctioned love affair with myself. Harpo, the horse’s babysitter, wears a cap backward, like gay men in the act up generation, and clasps Allan’s hand. Harpo’s fearlessness about male-male touch I won’t call subversive, but I’ll call it systematic: it floods the films. When the sheriff arrives, Harpo mimes displeasure, but then smiles, nods, and points—taking pleasure in mere recognition. Continuity— sheriff remains sheriff—satisfies Harpo. Afterward, his face metamorphoses, reinstates duck-shock. He turns good lips into beaks, useless for speech. Harpo knows the comfy paralysis of living within duck-man (or duck-boy) premises, and staring out, past the chute-mouth fence, at normal men. The sheriff believes he is leading the horse, but Harpo now wears its bridle. Harpo, as horse, tries on the role of bottom just for laughs. Then, he waves a silly, flapping good-bye. A Harpo mannerism: wave to someone who doesn’t care. Place the unwilling bystander in the hailed position. I haven’t said enough about Harpo’s physical quietude: at home in the knit jersey, at home on the horse, at home in the stable, at home standing beside the horse, at home waving, at home wherever he finds himself, because he never needs to expatriate or advance. Never abandon the brothers. No mother in sight, no father, no teacher. Only brothers. I know my place: beside Harpo, watching him. No ambiguity. No guilt. Only the security of twinship, of accompaniment. My younger brother has trouble speaking, but most of my humanitarian gestures go toward Harpo Marx.

A Day at the Races   |    279

Water Ballet  Harpo and Chico watch a water ballet. An observer, not an initiator, Harpo wears a tux, unfastened. Comically distant from gender rules, he expresses shock at women, and places hands on hips, as if he were a soigné “catch” in formal duds, though he is merely a hobo in tie and tails, like Judy Garland’s “Born in a Trunk” costume: nightclub artiste as social outcast. Disoriented, Harpo kicks and flaps, a circus freak, and then leans back and places the “Ssshh” finger against his lips. Hands lift to placate Chico, turned away; Harpo consoles a world not paying attention to the consolation. The Disintegrating Piano  To escape the sheriff, Harpo sits down, dumbfaced, at the piano: last chance to flee the ghetto.  µ  Vilna eyes convey surprise that literal-minded fools consider him a criminal. He stares so intently that he stops seeing, eyes stunned, victimized, like a pinup’s, a piece of trade’s, a zoo exhibit’s—the gaze of paralyzed fascination. He plays a romantic concerto. First sign of error: an octave goes bad. He cocks his ear toward the piano, to interrogate the fault’s source. Consternation, a wrinkle between eyebrows, clouds his face: baby is not up to snuff today. Tetchiness accrues when “self” butts into “world.” Again, he confronts a broken note. He rolls up his sleeves. Time to be a virile conqueror. He grapples, like a plumber, with the foul low note. The piano begins to fall apart. He attacks repeatedly the same romantic opening chords, their simplistic and agonistic cri de coeur: he spoofs Sturm und Drang soliloquy. Now the keys, animated, fly upward. Harpo gazes, astonished at their independent flight, and finds himself in a clangorous composition anticipating John Cage: the self-dismembering piano’s revenge. Against artillery, Harpo protects his head: save me from the sniper keyboard’s vengeance. Octaves metamorphose into brutalist thwacks, a lumberjack’s or revolutionary’s, against the enemy instrument. He climbs into the disintegrating piano’s chaos and retrieves a harp—mysticism—out of domination’s debris. Mystical Transaction with Harp  Harpo’s hands instruct orchestral players to stay in their places, and he confronts, with sleeves manfully rolled up,

280   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

this improvised harp, a residue survivor-lyre. From below, we see him play, face flushed from apocalypse, wide eyes like strafing searchlights, commiserating with the void: his empathy is a fire-hose jet, with nothing to receive its blast. The camera looks at Harpo through the harp-string scrim. His instrument is now elegant, no longer the skeleton that emerged from the smashed-up piano’s innards. His environs grow swanker by the minute. After a glissando, his eyes swivel, as if he’d just committed a cheeky impropriety. A film still can’t capture Harpo’s oscillating, side-to-side head-wiggle of jubilation at his own audacity. In close-up, his hands navigate diagonals of white strings against black background.  Ω  This close-up dives into abstraction, where his silence and my words secretly aim—a total composition, a blur, an overintensity of presence, without companions or sadness. We hear the vanished orchestra: Harpo is alone with his sound system, his pleased (autistic?) reactions-to-self. The harp’s mystical transaction allows him to transcend buffoonery and become wonderstruck by the instrument’s capacity for rainbow. He finds Lotos-eater remoteness from bickering and commerce; action slows down, and seriousness awakens.

Recognition Interlude  Without the ability to speak, a person can’t achieve recognition. I’m paraphrasing Paul Ricoeur. Harpo’s theme: have I been recognized? Harpo also strives toward the pinnacle of self-recognition, unattainable without speech. Ricoeur: “The characters in Homer and, even more so, the tragic heroes all speak continually of their action. And they name themselves when they make themselves known; they call upon themselves when they disavow their actions.” Harpo can’t call on himself, except by pointing, duck-mouthing. He can’t speak of his actions. And so he lacks an I. Harpo’s Being is null. Yet it is also full. How can we reconcile these two positions? In a dream last night I picked up the phone. A nineteenth-century woman on the other end said “Wayne?” I hung up. I didn’t want to be recognized.

A Day at the Races   |    281

Behaviors Seek Antidote  Harpo overhears floozie Flo (actress Esther Muir, briefly married to Busby Berkeley) and crook Whitmore (the guy who looks like Nixon) concoct a plot against Groucho. And now Harpo must communicate this conspiracy, through charades, to Chico. “What’s the matter with him?” asks Chico. Harpo puts finger above lip, signifying mustache/Groucho. Chico replies, “Hacken-a-bush.” Harpo touches him, a brief chest-pat, implying: the subject of the sentence has been established, and we’re climbing uphill toward the predicate. Harpo makes a womanly-figure semaphore: Chico misinterprets it as “apple dumplings,” and Harpo scowls, whistles, and smacks Chico to reboot the enterprise of sentence-assembly. Back to the labor of constructing a simple clause. Harpo repeats the sinuous hand gesture, each time making the figure eight’s bottom larger, to signify hourglass hips. After Harpo lifts his pajama leg and looks coquettishly upward, Chico understands: “woman.” Harpo needs to impersonate a woman to say the word woman, but a journalist describing war needn’t physically enact war. Chico shouts, “It’s a woman!”: success leads to the manly handshake of surcease. Harpo, whistling, points to his own forehead and to Chico’s: brain-parity. Harpo spends longer pointing to his own forehead, as if claiming superior smarts, despite tattered clothes. He recognizes his own mind: Cogito. Harpo pats Chico’s shoulder, and starts the sentence all over again. “Dr. Hackenbush. There’s a woman. She knock on the door.” And then Harpo emphatically whistles (we’re beginning a difficult word now), backs away, scampers, puts a hand behind his ear, suggestively thrusts his hips, tears a regulatory notice off a tree, and kicks the contents out of the picture frame, leaving just the frame. Through its viewfinder, he looks at Chico, but also nearly at us. Harpo seeks the frame of cinema, brotherliness, sentence, scene, identity. Chico: “Oh, she’s going to frame him!” Communication is a killer; Chico’s denseness and linguistic mishaps don’t help. After the charade, Harpo collapses backward in his brother’s arms.  µ  For years, they have practiced this climactic breakdown, this end to manic signage. Point: behaviors seek antidote. Consider this writing a flustered

282   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

behavior that begs for cancellation. The activity of behaving like a thief of meanings, a bender of sense, is not its own reward, but seeks a stasis on the other side of mania.

Heave-ho Thumb: Cuteness of Tautology  Interrupting Groucho’s and Flo’s love scene, Harpo tumbles onto her lap. She calls him a “little pest” and dumps him. He gives duck-mouth and heave-ho thumb: scram, Flo! Harpo falls back on the same gesture, the hitchhiker thumb (get the girl out of here), its reiteration “cute.” He exhibits the cuteness of tautology, of overloading. Repeatedly, he gives the hitchhiker thumb. I’m addicted to it. Harpo climbs over Chico, as I climbed over my older brother when we played turtle: I was baby turtle, he was mother turtle, until he revolted, and demanded that we switch roles. More than necessary, Harpo touches Chico, a warm surface, a perfect compromise between thing and person. Again, Harpo gives the heave-ho thumb.  Ω  (Short fool looms over seated hussy.) Is the thumb efficacious? She replies: “Scram. Blow.” Harpo smiles; taking the message literally, he blows her compact’s face powder, like flour, and Flo’s face disappears in a white cloud. Harpo blows. Harpo makes a cloud. Harpo effaces. Harpo hides in a white puff. Harpo uses wind power to undifferentiate. Harpo obeys orders. Harpo dwells playfully within a dirty word’s crevices. Harpo tampers with makeup. Harpo disturbs the toilette of a woman named Flo/Flow. Then, like a clumsy horse, he trots out of the room. Inspecting Womanly Details: Dog-Propulsion  Harpo, wearing Sherlock Holmes gear (magnifying glass, tartan hat and cape, pipe), enters tottering, with side-to-side gait. He loses and regains a shoe: costume intricacies are preoccupying. Then he trains the magnifying glass on Flo.  Ω  He does not attempt direct sexual relation—she is a curiosity, an impediment, to be examined and removed. Performing joke scopophilia, he functions as

A Day at the Races   |    283

detail-hound—watchdog, entrusted with keeping Groucho’s premises Flofree and with asserting a clubhouse mentality. With magnifying glass, we overdose on minced increments. Groucho throws steak to the dog; Harpo holds its leash. Dog, running toward steak, drags Harpo on his butt along the floor. He succumbs to dogpropulsion, as did I, when slugged in the back by a fat boy, Gary, in sixth grade. Already pubescent, he had impetigo around his lips and a wallet in his back pocket. He treated girls to french fries at the mall. Twenty years ago, I wrote a poem about his largesse: “The Erotic Charge of French Fries on the Plate of a Fat Boy.”

Spilling Fluids: Hypnotized by His Own Prankishness  Harpo and Chico arrive as wallpaper hangers in Groucho’s room. Gainful employment is a gas. Instead of a hat, a paste-filled pail sits on Harpo’s head. Paste, or brain matter, is spilling. His horn emits an arbitrary, untethered honk. Chico tells him to work on one side; they’ll meet in the middle. Selfsufficient Harpo reaches into the honeypot above his head and stirs, as if enacting the song “Honeysuckle Rose.” Again, note the hat. Consider Jewish men and their hats, which formalize the relation of head to sky.  µ  Harpo wastes naught: is his process masturbatory or ecological? He plasters exuberantly, manically—throwing paste all over the wall. Slathering antics accelerate. Smiling, he wallpapers Chico’s side: Harpo trespasses, one Torah-like roll encroaching on the other, not lining up, not matching. Imprecision, balletic, throws Harpo’s body, a botcher’s, here and there. The pleasure he takes in gestures themselves, in plastering-as-play, exceeds the purpose. Harpo’s paste is cum-like; he twists sexuality by holding paste in a bowl on his head rather than in a secret bodily pocket. Harpo conscripts any fluid into his game: spread the liquid widely, without aim. (Long ago, standing beside my father, I learned how to aim.) Harpo’s smile admits no awareness of aim: he pointlessly reaches brush and paste into Chico’s territory, as if playing with feces. What matters is not Harpo’s action but his smile as he commits the act. Hypnotized by prankishness, he smiles to solemnize existence, not to communicate joy.

284   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

Harpo wallpapers with no pretense at competence; with audible percussiveness, he randomly hits the wall. Chico and Harpo turn their patooties toward us: the brothers convoke a butt-centered bacchanal, “work” as interference, a crescendo game, overstimulation, too many people, function forgotten, intention abandoned, the room a manic vortex of storm-forces, Harpo’s desires externalized in thwack and spill. Harpo’s final prank, in this scene, is to spank Flo with his brush, affixing a wallpaper swath to her butt. He dispenses shame onto the departing woman and eliminates his own nastiness. Finally, chiasmatic arms X-ing at the elbow, he shakes hands with both brothers.  Ω  Pretzel contortions: pervy handshake turns simple masculine closure (good job, boys!) into Kama Sutra complexity (we in Hollywood make love strangely with arms crossed on vacation from synagogue). The pail-hat is Nefertiti’s headdress, royal sign of the enslaver. Harpo looks back and forth between brothers united by routine. The self-foiling handshake suits Harpo, way station between siblings. Harpo is a double helix—the structure of DNA, codiscovered by scientist James Watson. The physician who delivered me was another Dr. Watson: he authorized ether and supervised my body until I turned eighteen. Harpo, double helix, is a top, spinning in private orbit, but sent into motion by his need to bolster Chico’s bona fides and to protect Groucho from showgirl machinations. Harpo aims to restore lost brotherhood—a conservation project. Most scenes end with his satisfaction: Harpo’s psychic economy leaks perpetual excess.

IV Dream Recognition  Dreamt I sucked my father’s cock: I promise. Harpo can’t promise. Ricoeur, in The Course of Recognition, clarifies promising’s dependence on speech: “the ability to promise presupposes the ability to speak, to act on the world, to recount and form the idea of the narrative unity of a life, and finally to impute to oneself the origin of one’s acts.” Harpo can’t narrate or impute. And yet his presence promises that he will remain mute. Silence is a kept vow. (Re: Ricoeur: I hate depending on another man’s text.)

A Day at the Races   |    285

Being Flayed: I Choose the Briefcase  Stuffy cuts the mattress open with a knife to procure stuffing—hay—for the horse. Harpo “makes hay”: horse sexuality. Slashing the mattress is his first violent act. Harpo wants to flay. Does he feel flayed by persecutory internal objects? Harpo grabs the liberated hay and hugs it to his chest: attachment to hay exceeds attachment to humanity. Hay, his baby, is made sacred by the beloved horse’s need. Stuffing is Stuffy’s internal material. Does interiority remain sewn into his body, or does it spill? I refuse to relinquish my hay, these words. When Groucho tries to leave, Harpo seizes his coattails and gives duckmouth: I disapprove of this meshugas. The instant that Groucho decides to stay, Harpo makes no gradual transition to gladness: he grabs Groucho’s briefcase, as if Harpo preferred briefcase to brother. Medical Exam: Undermining, Wiping  Harpo, dressed as nurse, flicks hands in water but doesn’t dry them. Looking at Dr. Steinberg (our old friend Sig Ruman, formerly Siegfried Albon Rumann, German World War I vet), Harpo stands a few feet away, dumbfounded, and his mute stolid presence (I won’t be helpful) undermines the doctor’s authority. (I hear my father saying, in the distant past, “You kids are undermining me.”) Chico introduced himself as Dr. Steinberg. Groucho introduces Harpo as “another Dr. Steinberg.” Harpo bows wrongly, backward. Hands on hips, he sends his pelvis forward and chest backward.  µ  Inverted bow and groin-thrust insolently misconstrue polite codes. He bows again and again, happy to repeat a tic. Notice the Jewishness of bowing and nodding. Notice the Jewishness of repetition: ritual, memory, observance. So many Dr. Steinbergs! Harpo and Chico resemble white-robed rabbis. Harpo puts on a stethoscope and lowers his mask. Sig says, “Take her pulse!” to Groucho; and Harpo, duck-mouthing, nods. “Take her pulse,” says Groucho. Harpo takes her purse instead. Harpo stunts words by detaching them from normal usage. Error coincides with wish: to steal a woman’s purse (vagina); to remake a command-to-aid (“take her pulse”) into a chance-to-rob (“take her purse”). Harpo confuses two meanings of

286   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

take: to assess, and to appropriate. I enjoy the solemnity of Harpo’s silent vow-rich movement of arm, one economical gesture toward the purse, wrongly named: he unambivalently executes the misinterpreted command. Three brothers wash hands in three basins, and then dry themselves on the backs of each other’s surgical uniforms: a parody of toilet training, learning to wipe. They execute a round-robin incestuous gang-bang aesthetic by shamelessly delving into each other’s drawers and crannies. brakes relined says Chico’s shirt. But these brothers lack brakes. After they wash hands again, horse-like Harpo drinks from the basin. Harpo’s gift: smile in the presence of his own foulness. For convenience, he dries his hands on Sig’s coattails. Harpo appreciates the near, the rear, the available, the free, the stolen, the expedient, the usurped, the private. When a pretty nurse arrives, Harpo hugs her. As a result, he earns her dress, which adheres to his body. Groucho grabs him from the rear: Lucky Pierre moments are candy to Harpo. He takes the light pole—a lamp to illuminate surgery—and points it at Groucho, for the pleasure of manipulating a pole and sending light in no particular direction. Harpo works the pole as an oar: he wrests a lamp away from its purpose, treats it as percussion instrument, time-beater. Harpo abstracts lamp into joystick, a vertical instrument for senseless, anarchic navigation-toward-nowhere, in response to Groucho’s shipboard lingo: “Man the stations!” For “Harpo” to emerge, he must destroy everything that is not “Harpo.” Speech may not be his biggest sacrifice. Harpo puts a towel on Margaret Dumont’s chest and prepares to shave her. He wants to fiddle with the mother’s body, to make her a man, to dissolve sexual fixities. Harpo turns Margaret’s chair into an amusement park ride; with manipulated lever, he shifts her legs up and down, for the fun of repeatedly moving an object and submitting a heavy body to rhythmic experiments. Sig says, “X-ray.” Chico deforms the word into “Extra!” Read all about it! Harpo runs to get the prop. Newspapers under his arm, he pats hand over mouth, on-off, imitating a stereotyped Indian “hi-ya-ya-ya,” as if hawking dailies. Quickly he tires of the charade, though a moment ago he found it absorbing. His MO: receive a command, misconstrue it, execute the misinterpretation, and then let it mutate into a new ploy.

A Day at the Races   |    287

V Recognition Dream  Because we are born, we become, in words Ricoeur quotes in The Course of Recognition, “ ‘that inestimable object of transmission.’ ” (The phrase is Pierre Legendre’s.) Harpo is an inestimable object of transmission. During haircuts as a kid, I’d press my forearm against the barber’s body. Ricoeur: “My birth made me a priceless object, something outside ordinary commerce.” Harpo, an inestimable object of transmission sent by Minnie and Sam (“Frenchie”) Marx into the world, was their coded package, inexplicable, not exchangeable. What did he transmit? What do any of us transmit? When Harpo made A Day at the Races, he was exactly the age I now am: beyond the mezzo del cammin. Flapping Hand, Glimmer-Eye, Finger-Pointing: Harpo, Blackened  In a barn, Harpo waves a flapping (autistic?) hand directly in Maureen O’Sullivan’s face. She ignores the greeting. Pretty girl ignores asocial hand that advances into forbidden territory but never touches her. Harpo looks away from crying Maureen, toward the camera, or the void.  µ  Brief flash of glimmer-eye expresses shock at Maureen’s uncontainable need. He lacks means to express his predicament, though he confronts it. Eye-shine reaches out not toward a solution to crisis but toward an articulation of it. This image proves Harpo’s confinement within a quandary. “Laugh, Stuffy,” says Chico. It takes a moment for Harpo to comprehend or execute the command. Stony-faced befuddlement is an interstice before knowledge dawns: moments of blankness, when Harpo merely stares, are islands on whose contentlessness I land, as my finger alights—and lingers unjustifiably—on a dissonant note in Albéniz’s “Triana.” (Harpo’s goal— mine, too—is to find zones of security amid confusion and flight; to insist on stasis, even within diasporic urgency—hurry up, pack your bags, vanish.) Then Harpo reassumes the laughter rictus: a pose, not an inner urgency. Query Harpo’s geisha-artfulness of masquerade: does a stretched-open mouth hurt? Orphic, Harpo turns around and looks back at Maureen. Avoiding a

288   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

verdict on sadness, he wants the chance to look at it again and again, to remain in its inexplicable presence. I admire his contentless gaze and its ambiguous aim: he seeks not to retrieve anything in particular but simply to look backward, to grant each moment its allotment of stare. (He is leaving school forever.) Allan serenades Maureen; framed as their audience, Harpo peers, smiling, pipe in hand. Eavesdropping, leaning against the barn door, pushing it toward the camera, Harpo moves closer to the lovers: curious about smooching grown-ups, he remains convinced that he will never couple. We, in the dark theater, are Stuffy-like, separate from songful romance; we must accept other forms of tactile consolation. As Allan’s serenade ends, Harpo pipes approval, pointing his flute at the lovers—as one-upmanship (I, too, can make music) but also as applause. In phallic emulation, he pipes directly at Allan and Maureen—to imitate them, to cheer them up, to intrude his solo mode (one man, one pipe) into their double frolic. He moves his reed close to their faces. No one wants or caresses his useless instrument, which he toots in their faces more to aggravate than to earn serious regard. He steps back and pipes a rapid ditty, then stops, looks directly (tauntingly, scientifically: have I won your regard?) at Maureen, and points to her with an experimenter’s finger: Harpo the psychologist tries to figure out if his pipe will cheer up the suffering maiden. He is less eager to earn her love than to ascertain empirically whether a fool’s melody hits her nerve center. Finger and pipe strike tinder-quick engagements with external phenomena. Outside the barn, he advances toward a group of African American dancers. Curious children grip his coattails. Harpo makes snaky handand-finger-movements while pied-pipering. He might have learned this behavior—an Egypto-Harlem finger ballet?—from Cab Calloway, or from queens on sarcophagi and temple walls. (For once, rather than tagging along, Harpo leads a crowd.) Head-wiggling, wrist-bending, and eye-rolling are femme. And yet the kids decide he’s Gabriel. Ecce homo. Harpo nods, accepting the promotion to godly ringleader. Harpo’s finger-slitherings might resemble blackface, though they are also nonce, an unclassifiable gestural repertoire of singularities and flutterings. A Day at the Races can’t forget race. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein’s

A Day at the Races   |    289

question in Four Saints in Three Acts: how many races are there in it? Are Jews white? Is Harpo trying to expatriate into blackness? Is he slumming or soaring? A woman rolling dough sings “Hallelujah” in a house. Her song’s seriousness makes Harpo hesitate. Eyes barred by window-lid, he peers inside and impishly pipes a song, changing the crowd’s mood. He acquires the authority of the provocateur, the sacred guest.  µ  Here we have a close-up of the interloper, the saint, seen by the black folk as a freak but also an angel. Harpo relishes this new, concrete function: no longer a mime, he is now wondrous instigator, star attraction. Harpo’s bright eyes, a Jew’s, match the shocked, anonymous eyes of the black man behind him: together these men form a spectrum of inarticulateness. Harpo is now recognized by a more deeply unrecognized community. Harpo’s hand, a flute-charmed snake, gyrates around the pendent wrist. His arching undulations experiment with new versions of limpness, further reaches of torsion and extension and wrongness. Limp-wristed Harpo is Gabriel at the piping head of an African American congregation, gathered to marvel at this Jewish monster-visitant, whose will to power and whose mandate to lead seem as much a consequence of his hand gyrations as of his piping music. His hand is the whitest thing in the composition. Black faces, black bodies, nighttime, dark earth, Harpo’s dark outfit—everything is shades of gray, except his hand’s white beacon, held out as if it weren’t part of his body. His smile acknowledges the hand’s otherness; he dissociates himself from it but also marvels at its gem-like singularity. Harpo finds a new, hip house, with a sexier, jazzier singer. No more spirituals. We couldn’t witness these scenes of “black music” (featuring the Crinoline Choir) unless Harpo were watching—and thereby framing—the spectacle. He mimics jubilation at the jazzy singer. He jiggles with uncontainable joy at her hipness. Little kids surround him at the front of the pack; he shakes hands in air like a gospel singer. Kid choristers in a San Jose Children’s Light Opera production of Li’l Abner in the late 1960s introduced me to this gesture (I was in the audience): this obviously inauthentic gesture of hands waving above heads during choral climax horrified me. Where did

290   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

bratty chorines learn to shimmy their hands like wind-fluttered pennants? I don’t object to inauthenticity: I don’t object to Harpo’s mouth wide open, the stimulation of another’s presence flooding him, the derivativeness of his own gestures stunning him, this derivativeness an essential part of Hollywood or Broadway acting. Harpo acts black. Harpo acts like a preacher man. Harpo gyrates his hands. Harpo tries on the Jazz Age to see if it fits. Harpo jumps back into the fray and conducts. Talent scout, he brings forward a hot jazz singer, Ivie Anderson (who performed with Duke Ellington, and eventually ran a restaurant called Ivie’s Chicken Shack). To her song, “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm,” Harpo contributes a minstrel’s lamenting hand-shiver, thereby undercutting her act, though a moment ago he’d led her into the limelight. Once the dancing begins (according to the The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia, one of the dancers may be Dorothy Dandridge), Harpo, overrun by couples, looks panicked; he disappears. All blacks onscreen now, no whites, no Harpo, just dancers (Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, founded by Herbert “Whitey” White), a swing populace that Harpo has brought to Hollywood visibility. He elevated them to the threshold of the perceptible, but they perform antics that even Harpo wouldn’t dare. With a pitchfork, Harpo leads the pack.  Ω  A little kid steps forward and looks directly at Harpo. For an African American child in 1937, is Harpo a role model or a nightmare? This wordless child, gazing at Harpo, becomes his twin-in-shame. The sheriff and his men arrive; using a wheelbarrow’s wheel-grease, the three Marxes blacken their faces. Harpo makes himself half-black; he didn’t realize he was supposed to blacken his entire face.

Words Harpo Slashes  Harpo, hopping onto the horse, earns Allan’s offscreen plaudit: “Nice work, Stuffy!” Accreditation falls from the darkness and the unbeheld onto Harpo, who flees, on his horse, from our sight. The straight man, serenader, briefly attests to Harpo’s competence. Hi-Hat throws Harpo through the billboard advertising the upcoming Steeplechase. Harpo’s body slashes the sign. He destroys the word sparkling: the sign now says sparkl_g . Harpo’s body rode through the n.

A Day at the Races   |    291

Harpo’s body slashed the word coming and turned it into com__ng. These are the words that Harpo’s body destroyed.

VI The Unheard: The Endless  Paul Ricoeur writes: “To speak—in effect, to say something—presupposes an expectation of being heard.” Harpo has no such expectation. He finds other, wily ways of being apprehended. Or is being heard not his aim? Ricoeur: “When, we asked, can an individual take for granted having been recognized? Does not the request for recognition run the risk of being endless?” Can Harpo ever put to rest his quest for recognition? And can I ever put Harpo to rest? Emmanuel Levinas, according to Ricoeur, proposed that it is “in the ethical mode of interpellation that the ego is called to responsibility by the other’s voice”: but what if the other has no voice? What if Harpo is the other, and he has no voice, and I am therefore not called? The Last Scene: Stuffy’s Triumph  Harpo and Bros., on a trampoline-tent roof with arresting stripes, look through binoculars. As Harpo slides down the trampoline, his mouth is wide open with alarm: awe not at what he beholds but at the surprise of his own arrival into visibility. Three brothers peer into one pair of binoculars: Harpo tries to crawl into Groucho’s flesh.  µ  Harpo burrows into a body not anatomically built to contain him; Harpo must find a new pathway inside, through pressure and adamancy (these forcing sentences). Shoving himself into the brother, Harpo seeks entanglement: not sexual, but in sex’s trampoline vicinity, when a boy wants to squeeze, inflate, and animate another boy. Seeing the horse’s arrival, Harpo gives the wide-open mouth of unspecified excitement: Chico says, “Go to it, Stuffy!” He may recognize the artificiality of calling his brother “Stuffy,” yet Stuffy gladly receives the name, as when you call a dog “Stuffy” and it begins to answer to “Stuffy” and actually becomes “Stuffy”; but what happens when it dies and you buy a new dog

292   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

and name it “Stuffy”? Do you realize the name’s falseness? Do you regret betraying the first Stuffy? To let Chico know that Hi-Hat is gone, Harpo swipes a hat from a male extra and throws it out of sight. Double payoff: I express hostility, and I communicate with my brother. Hats orient Harpo: he divests others of hats, he always wears a hat, and he loves Hi-Hat. Harpo, reaching for the stranger’s hat, inadvertently shows butt: jacket-tails divide. Religious theft: the stolen hat isn’t a yarmulke, but it looks back to a primal, dismal scene whose aftershocks never end—the anti-Semite knocking off Freud’s father’s hat. Harpo rigs a bugle to produce—when blown by an unsuspecting bugler—a bubble. From a tree’s crook, Harpo watches, wide-eyed, surprised, though he invented the trick. Notice the virtue of a V, a groin, a coign, a place for hiding the face and for enclosing (and holding aloft) my own speechlessness and fascination.  Ω  See Harpo, surprised by the fruits of audacity: Harpo, framed by tree-crook: Harpo, mimicking the bubble’s “pop”: Harpo, silently approaching sound: Harpo, alone in spectatorship (no brother nearby): Harpo, crowned with a close-up: Harpo, hands clasped, inviolable: Harpo, aware that the idyll will end. To create commotion, he turns on a wind machine, which sends spectator hats flying. Harpo uncovers a crowd’s pates: stadium-wide castration, a whirlwind of hats, group striptease, identity loss, Holocaust, a mass of people systematically deprived of protection. Chico says, “Stuffy! Did you find the ambulance?” Radiating multiplicity, Harpo manically shakes his head no no no, a repetition engine, shoulders hunched: no way to please Chico, to answer him, to anticipate his demands. I see a Band-Aid on Harpo’s right hand: the secret wound. The Band-Aid’s presence marks the body—Harpo’s—as real. I tried to photograph the Band-Aid, but it was too tiny and fleeting. FYI: I have a paranoid notion this morning that other people are attacking me though they are merely communicating with me: a mistake I frequently make, interpreting the attempts of others to get in touch with me as attacks, because when in another’s attempt to greet me I see no recognition of who I actually perceive myself to be, then I feel the greeting to be an attack, an attempt

A Day at the Races   |    293

to seize my body, an attempt to eat me alive, and hence my silence, my unresponsiveness to others who try to contact me, my persistent refusal to communicate. Don’t you see, my refusal to respond to you is Harpo-like, a shutdown to save the enterprise of accurate communication? In honor of communication’s sacredness I refuse to communicate with you, however paranoid my refusal might be. Chico’s trousers seem barely fastened—secured by clothes-pin, diaperpin, or paperclip. I’ve spent no time on Chico’s butt. Cinematographers, too, stint it. In close-up, Harpo, wide-mouthed, sees the sheriff. Harpo’s shocked face mimics the enemy’s astonishment, and also attempts to frighten through vicious mirroring. But first, Harpo looks at us: we receive his intention to appall.  µ  My aim in this book? To be serious. To pay attention. These principles, in memoriam, I attribute to Susan Sontag: seriousness, attentiveness, intensity. On the horse, Harpo exchanges top hat for jockey cap; his body language becomes a racer’s, concentrated on forwardness and futurity. Hands pump up and down, joyfully anticipating release: no more containment. He enters the race: the bottom’s triumph, retrograde motion, usurpation. The fool, taking over the plot, waves a loosewristed hand to the crowd. In close-up, Harpo—as if being called, pointed to, named—looks at the camera, his mouth a baby’s O, blowing bubbles, marveling at his own capacity to be astonished.  µ  Witness the fascinated mouth and gaze, Harpo fascinating us, showing himself fascinated, fastened into Stuffy-identity: I’m me, I’m on the horse, I can’t help my predicament or posture. Embodiment is an ineluctability and a miracle, an “inestimable object of transmission”: also inestimable is Harpo’s basket, revealed in jockey pantaloons, with intricate buttons at the crotch. In this flattering picture, Harpo’s waist is more cinched than anywhere in his oeuvre. Harpo, the beyond-price, the matchless, responds to the crowd’s notice by whipping the horse’s bottom.

294   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

Chico, on the sidelines, cheers, “Stuffy!” Harpo nods, waves, and smiles.  Ω  He seems actually to be riding the horse, no stunt-double, Harpo momentarily the hero, the object of Chico’s gaze. Harpo’s waving hand remains limp and foolish, conveying babyish joy at being the center of attention and fascination, and (as Frank O’Hara put it in “Autobiographia Literaria”) expressing surprise at being the “center of all beauty! / writing these poems! / Imagine!” Intercut shot depicts Allan and Maureen reacting with joy: Allan’s goody-goody handsome face, all teeth, directs half its smile at Hi-Hat. The other half goes to Harpo, who will accept this portion as adequate, and will wordlessly interpret the moiety as the totality. When you ride a horse, if you are Stuffy, you raise your rear end and experience the saddle’s thwack. And, if you are Stuffy, you quickly nod, with a reiterative vibrato, as if saying yes yes yes. I comply I comply I comply. The other jockey gallops up and whips Harpo, who reacts with indignant chute-mouth, and then—close-up—puts hand to ear and looks toward the stadium. He wants Groucho to microphone the boss’s voice, which will shock the horse into motion. With open mouth (fascinated baby blowing a bubble), Harpo declares: I need reciprocity and sound.  Ω  He shields the ear to create a mollusk chamber. Eyes expectantly torque upward: a face so straightforward in its greeting of the other, even if the other is absent, that I must freeze the image, to prove that Harpo guilelessly solicits your response. Our two jockeys tumble into a muddy pool. Hands reaching outward in exclamation and dismay, Harpo leans sideways, unmoored, no expression of pain: we need highly attuned sympathies to understand the difference between Harpo’s face of exaltation and his face of distress. As I write these words, I fear that I’m blowing it—through overelaboration, overquestioning, underattentiveness, or a lack of conceptual frameworks, a problem I’ve tried to remedy through assiduous study, although my

A Day at the Races   |    295

mental lacunae, gaping as Harpo’s mouth, keep ambushing me. The rival jockey’s horse wins. Mud-spattered Harpo in close-up—hat low on his face, lower lip pouting—expresses sadness and incomprehension.  µ  In Harpo’s moment of befouled shame, mud masculinizes him. He seems macho when drecked-up. Piqued duck-mouth saves his dignity, secures his identity, throws shame outward, tries to foul the other and to escape the fate of being fouled. And yet he’s caked with merde. He has the traumatized expression of Jackie Kennedy on Air Force One as LBJ is sworn into the presidency. Harpo scrapes mud off Hi-Hat and reveals its true identity (the hidden Number 7). This same mud, Harpo tosses in the rival jockey’s face. Harpo finally becomes the agent of fouling, the mechanism that besmirches the anti-Semite. Harpo beams upward at you, whoever you are. Though smeared with mud, he can still exalt and point. Scraping dung off his sleeve, he reveals Hi-Hat’s number. Mufti be gone. Harpo whistles, befouled fingers in mouth, hand pointing at horse.  µ  I whistle to get your attention; I point to what I wish your gaze to acknowledge, approve, and conjure. I whistle from within disgrace: I whistle against my befouled state, to interrupt and pierce the murk. His upward gaze has no clear addressee: open to contingency, he trusts that he won’t accidentally find himself gazing at the devil. Harpo hugs Hi-Hat, not in a clean or commensurate way, not with a contained sense of the animal’s limits: instead, Harpo hugs the horse with totality in mind. Repeatedly Harpo attempts to invaginate, to discover pockets and entryways within closed bodies: he tries to surround the horse, to dive into its body, to turn Hi-Hat into an environing enclosure. “Stuffy!” shouts Chico, and Harpo opens arms wide—  µ  —as Chico rushes toward him: unrestrained reunion. “You were wonderful,” says Groucho. Both brothers embrace Harpo. Hat askew, he stands centered between them. Harpo vinci-

296   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

tor, faces forward, while the other two stand obliquely.  Ω  Harpo has earned frontality. He gives us his Beverly Sills face: grand and simple, just-folks and heroic. A native-born god. A local product. Mud-spatters recall earlier blackface: Harpo thrives when blackened. Jockey shirt is a convict’s, striped, the covered-cloth buttons enviably Beau Brummell. Back and forth between Groucho and Chico, Harpo’s gaze swivels, synoptic—sewing the brothers together. Chico and Groucho bend down, and Harpo steps on their backs to climb onto the horse.  Ω  Showing rear, Harpo subordinates stronger brothers. If I rise, you must fall: Hegelian physiodynamics, without violence. Harpo amalgamates Chico’s and Groucho’s bodies into one utilitarian platform. Now the African American crowd streams into the scene; Harpo’s use of brotherly backs as stepladder symbolically opens the segregated arena. Blacks, Jews, and horses fill the gladiator pit. Everyone walks; only Harpo, the leader, rides. Maureen and Allan stride on either side of triumphant Hi-Hat. Harpo leans over and touches first Allan’s shoulder, and then Maureen’s hand: to touch is to include, because he can’t speak to thank them. Symbolic gestures of gratitude, of recognition: Harpo must express to the universe (overkill to call Maureen and Allan the universe?) that he recognizes it. And he lays a flat, affectionate hand on Hi-Hat’s head. Harpo, victor on the wreathed horse, rides higher than everyone else. Allan sings, with a schmaltzy, emotive voice, directly across Hi-Hat’s face to Maureen; he seems to love the horse as much as he loves the girl. Harpo, by leaning down toward Allan, makes himself nearly invisible. Allan will never again aim words of address or excited expostulation (“Nice work, Stuffy!”) at Harpo. Leaning, for Harpo, is instinctive, and he might be angry at me if he knew that I am trying to attribute to him this degree of poignance, of pathos, of energetic desire to be included: but it is my duty as writer to exaggerate the affections and intensities of silent others, as if my own emotions were insufficient without the echo of these compatriots, who can’t consent

A Day at the Races   |    297

but can only stand by while I watch them and speak for them. Harpo leans down moony-faced at the hero, not because Harpo loves Allan but because Harpo loves momentum. Allan acts, moves, and sings, and therefore is the agent of change and propulsion Harpo must lean toward, hungry for what he himself can’t produce. In the final seconds of the film, Harpo raises both arms; the camera moves toward him, but a fade-out cancels sight.  µ  The film doesn’t end with a close-up but with the crawl toward a close-up. We see two mute faces—Hi-Hat’s and Harpo’s. The camera aspires to shut everyone else out of the picture; the camera will finally give Harpo his portion of centrality. The last image includes everyone, but Harpo is on top, riding toward his ambiguous conclusion, looking at no one, possessing no one, alone with the totality he has worked to create with pointing and honking and whistling and duck-mouthing, the totality he leans toward and yearns to become, the totality that makes him momentarily king.

The Unseen Chestnut  My last name is a mystery. Though German, it escapes definition. It might mean chestnut tree, generic tree, tasty tree, costly tree. It might mean several things at once. It might mean nothing. Next to my Harpo drafts and notes, on a shelf above my desk, I keep a chestnut—genuine, round, and brown.  µ  Ten years ago, a Gertrude Stein scholar—a stranger—gave me this shiny souvenir as an offering of friendship; she found it among the pebbles and memorial objects piled on Stein’s grave in Père-Lachaise. I rarely notice the chestnut. It belongs to that family of phenomena we call the unseen. Although the chestnut is silent, it is capable of sound. Lift it, and then lightly drop it on the floor; when dropped, the chestnut makes a hollow clack. If I were to squeeze the chestnut, I might crush it. The chestnut smells like a hollow wooden door in my gray-blue childhood house, or like a tiny abacus my older brother once owned. When I pick up the chestnut and look more closely at its ir-

298   |    The Idiot Tumbles Back

regular shape, I realize that it is not circular. It is lumpy, ridged, and dimpled. It looks like four buttocks put together, or a petrified brain. I pity this solitary chestnut, the babysitter of my Harpo drafts—a graveyard of trial flights. The chestnut has no function, though I am entrusting it with the responsibility of bringing me toward farewell. I have lived with Harpo for a long time, but now I must drop him. I am trying to drop him lightly, so that he doesn’t shatter when he hits the earth.

A Day at the Races   |    299

Designer and compositor: Nicole Hayward Text: 9.7/14.5 Scala  Display: Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.