The Anatomy of Harpo Marx. Wayne Koestenbaum
Читать онлайн книгу.
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.
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? Unable to comfort this fellow loner with words, he provides 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. 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. 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 returning, 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. 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 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