The Anatomy of Harpo Marx. Wayne Koestenbaum
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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 twenty-eight 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. 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 Monroe’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 well-developed forearm muscle, an edible lump. (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 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.
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. 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 Renting 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 light-hearted 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. Happy man, halfway out the birth-hole, 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. Harpo wants to scissor the Angel of Death, the soul, the special effect, the fourth brother, embodied in a butterfly, whose flight reminds us that Harpo himself is flighty, not tethered.
NODS