The Anatomy of Harpo Marx. Wayne Koestenbaum
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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.
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 hammer-stroke 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.
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. Harpo’s eyes bulge with pleasure at fitting into a category (“obedience”) while betraying it. Hand raised at military attention, he looks like John-John 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. 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: 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 pro-phylactically begins the shushing routine, finger over lips. Long ago, someone told Harpo to shut up. Afraid that Chico will say “shut up” again, Harpo shushes himself (self-mutilation, as if with a razor) in advance; and then, cheerful sprite, he forgets the self-silencing and restages the hug. Harpo’s rhythm: (1) hug, (2) shame-shushing, (3) hug, (4) shame-shushing. 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 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. 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