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Copyright 1996 Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.

The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996) 57-61

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Chaplin Times Two

Theodor W. Adorno

Translated by John MacKay

Translator's Introduction

In his writings on contemporary culture, Theodor W. Adorno was inclined to treat laughter with suspicion, inparticular the kind of laughter generated by popular film comedies and other products of the "cultureindustry." What received its comic comeuppance in such films, he claimed, was anything opposed to orunassimilable by the status quo; such mirth produced a false sense of liberation masking blind conformityto a cruel social order. In the Dialectic of Enlightenmenthe glumly observed:

In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it intoits worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which, accordingto Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life,

self-assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasionarises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, alldedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone else. Theirharmony is a caricature of solidarity. What is fiendish about this false laughter is that it is acompelling parody of the best, which is conciliatory. Delight is austere: res severa verum

gaudium.1

Nonetheless, like his associates Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, Adorno was a great admirer ofthe screen's most celebrated comedian: Charlie Chaplin. For all three men this admiration was informed bya sensitivity to the political overtones of Chaplin's work; Benjamin remarked that Chaplin had directed

himself "toward both the most international and the most revolution ary affect of the masses--laughter,"2

while Kracauer noted "a touch of utopia about [Chaplin's] challenges to space, time, and gravitation."3 Thetwo brief essays which follow are Adorno's responses both to the tough poignancy of Chaplin's art and toChaplin the man, whom he got to know during his Californian exile (1941-49). His comments, whichculminate in a remarkable personal anecdote, hint at an alternative conception of laughter, of a criticallaughter soberly aware of its own affinities to domination.

The first essay appeared under the title "Kierkegaard prophesies Chaplin" in the Frankfurter Zeitung, May22, 1930; the second as "Chaplin in Malibu" in Neue[End Page 57]Rundschau, Vol. 3, 75th year, 1964;they first appeared together under the present title in the volume Ohne Leitbild(Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 1969), 89-93.--jkm

I

Prophesied by Kierkegaard

In Repetition, one of his earlier pseudonymous writings, Kierkegaard gives a detailed treatment of farce,true to a conviction which often leads him to seek, in the refuse of art, that which eludes the pretensions of

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art's great self- contained works. He speaks there of the old Friedrichstdter Theater in Berlin and

describes a comedian named Beckmann4 whose image evokes, with the mild fidelity of a daguerreotype,that of the Chaplin who was to come. The passage reads:

He is not only able to walk, but he is also able to come walking. To come walking is somethingvery distinctive, and by means of this genius he also improvises the whole scenic setting. Heis able not only to portray an itinerant craftsman; he is also able to come walking like one andin such a way that one experiences everything, surveys the smiling hamlet from the dustyhighway, hears its quiet noise, sees the footpath that goes down by the village pond when oneturns off there by the blacksmith's-- where one sees [Beckmann] walking along with his littlebundle on his back, his stick in his hand, untroubled and undaunted. He can come walking

onto the stage followed by street urchins whom one does not see.5

The one who comes walking is Chaplin, who brushes against the world like a slow meteor even where heseems to be at rest; the imaginary landscape that he brings along is the meteor's aura, which gathers herein the quiet noise of the village into transparent peace, while he strolls on with the cane and hat that sobecome him. The invisible tail of street urchins is the comet's tail through which the earth cuts almostunawares. But when one recalls the scene in The Gold Rushwhere Chaplin, like a ghostly photograph in alively film, comes walking into the gold mining town and disappears crawling into a cabin, it is as if hisfigure, suddenly recognized by Kierkegaard, populated the cityscape of 1840 like staffage; from thisbackground the star only now has finally emerged.

II

In Malibu

The fact that profundity is irritated by profound topics, that it would rather, according to Benjamin's phrase,

latch onto that which is devoid of intention,6

would be reckoned a good thing if only profundity, soself-satisfied and untrammeled by an object, would not then wear itself out. For the most part, [End Page58] profundity uses unhackneyed topics as a pretext for vagueness and banality, exploiting the apparentinability to resist of that which from itself sets forth no meanings and which possibly, to the extent of its

immediacy, itself tends toward banality or stupidity just like the empty ideas on which it is sharpened by theclever mind. The link between mind and clown is as understandable as it is unfortunate. The children'sdarling is spared no demonology; one owes it to him to certify once again the laughter he arouses beforedecorating him with the trumpery of great categories, which hang more loosely and less amusingly on himthan his traditional costume. At least he should be allowed a long and thorough grace period.

Psychoanalysis tries to relate the clown-figure to the reaction formations of earliest childhood, before any

crystallization of a stable self.7

As always the situation is the same: more information about the clown is tobe found among children who, as mysteriously as they do with animals, communicate with his image andwith the meaning of his activity, which in fact negates meaning. Only one capable in the language commonto the clown and to children, a language distanced from sense, would understand the clown himself, in

whom fleeing Nature bids a shocked adieu, like the old man in the illustration "Winter ade":8

Nature, so

pitilessly suppressed by the process of becoming an adult, is, like that language, irrecoverable by adults.

Its loss demands silence, and especially in the face of Chaplin. For his precedence over other clowns,among whose number he proudly counts himself--as far as I know, their club is the only one to which hebelongs-- encourages interpretations which inflict more injury the higher they elevate him. In this way theymove away from the conundrum whose solution is the only interpretive task worthy of Chaplin.

I do not wish to offend in this way. Only because I knew him many years ago would I stress, without anyphilosophical pretensions, two or three observations which might contribute to a descriptive account of hisimage [zur ecriture seines Bildes]. It is known how different Chaplin looks in private from the vagabond onthe screen. However, this difference pertains not only to his soign elegance, which as clown he in turnparodies, but to expression. This has nothing to do with sympathy towards a begging, abandoned and

unshreddable victim. Rather, his powerful, explosive and quick-witted agility recalls a predator ready topounce. Only through this bestial quality would earliest childhood have brought itself safely into wide-awakelife. There is something about the empirical Chaplin that suggests not that he is a victim but rather,menacingly, that he would seek victims, pounce on them, tear them apart. One can well imagine thatChaplin's cryptic dimension, or precisely that which makes this most perfect clown more than his genus, is

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connected with the fact that he as it were projects upon the environment his own violence and dominatinginstinct [sein[End Page 59]Gewaltsames und Beherrschendes], and through this projection of his own culpability produces that innocence which endows him with more power than all power possesses. Avegetarian Bengal tiger: comforting, because his goodness, which the children cheer, is itself in a compactwith the very evil that in vain seeks to destroy him--in vain, for he had already destroyed that evil in his ownimage.

Presence of mind and omnipresence of mimetic ability also characterize the empirical Chaplin. It is wellknown that he does not confine his mimetic arts strictly to the films which, since his youth, he produces only

over great intervals of time and in an intensely and openly self-critical spirit. He acts incessantly, just likeKafka's trapeze artist, who sleeps in the baggage rack so as not to ease off training even for a moment.Any time spent with him is an uninterrupted performance. One scarcely dares speak to him, not from aweof his fame--no one could set himself less apart, no one could be less pretentious than he--but rather fromfear of disturbing the spell of the performance. It is as though he, using mimetic behavior, causedpurposeful, grown-up life to recede, and indeed the principle of reason itself, thereby placating it. But thisendows his incarnate existence with an imaginary element beyond the official artforms. If Chaplin theprivate citizen lacks the features of the famous clown (as though these features were under a taboo), he

has all the more of the juggler about him. The Rastelli of mime,9 he plays with the countless balls of hispure possibility, and fixes its restless circling into a fabric that has little more in common with the causalworld than Cloudcuckooland has with the gravitation of Newtonian physics. Incessant and spontaneouschange: in Chaplin, this is the utopia of an existence that would be free of the burden of being-one's-self.

His lady killer was schizophrenic.

Perhaps I may justify my speaking about him by recounting a certain privilege which I was granted, entirelywithout having earned it. He once imitated me, and surely I am one of the few intellectuals to whom thishappened and to be able to account for it when it happened. Together with many others we were invited toa villa in Malibu, on the coast outside of Los Angeles. While Chaplin stood next to me, one of the guestswas taking his leave early. Unlike Chaplin, I extended my hand to him a bit absent-mindedly, and, almostinstantly, started violently back. The man was one of the lead actors from The Best Years of Our Lives, afilm famous shortly after the war; he lost a hand during the war, and in its place bore practicable claws

made of iron.10 When I shook his right hand and felt it return the pressure, I was extremely startled, butsensed immediately that I could not reveal my shock to the injured man at any price. In a split second Itransformed my frightened expression into an obliging grimace that must have been far ghastlier. The actor

had hardly moved away when Chaplin was already playing the scene back. All the laughter he brings aboutis so near to cruelty; solely in such proximity to cruelty does it find its [End Page 60] legitimation and itselement of the salvational. Let my remembrance of this event and my thanks be my congratulations to him

on his 75th birthday.11

Theodor W. Adorno(1903-1969), a major 20th century philosopher of culture and society, was a leadingmember of the Frankfurt School and author of Philosophy of Modern Music,Minima Moralia,NegativeDialectics,Aesthetic Theoryand (with Max Horkheimer) Dialectic of Enlightenment, among other works.

Notes

1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York:Continuum, 1972), 141.

2. "Rckblick auf Chaplin" in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften III, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurtam Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 159. Trans. JKM.

3. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film(New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 88.

4. "Friedrich Beckmann (1803-1866), famous German comic actor, from 1824 the leading actor of theKnigstdter Theater for many years." (Note from Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition,ed. and trans. HowardV. Hong and EdnaH. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 367.)

5. Repetition, 163-4.

6. Cf. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977),183-185: "If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flowout of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is

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unconditionally in his power. That is to say it is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning orsignificance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist. . .. It may not accord withthe authority of nature; but the voluptuousness with which significance rules, like a stern sultan in theharem of objects, is without equal in giving expression to nature. It is indeed characteristic of the sadist thathe humiliates his object and then--or thereby--satisfies it. And that is what the allegorist does in this agedrunk with acts of cruelty both lived and imagined. ... For the only pleasure the melancholic permits himself,and it is a powerful one, is allegory."

7. Cf. Freud's discussion of the comic as the result of a "comparison between the ego of the grown-up and

the ego of the child" in "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious" in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud,trans. and ed. Dr.A.A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1966), 795.

8. "Winter ade" ("Adieu, Winter") is the title of a children's song by Hoffman von Fallersleben (1798-1874), a19th-century liberal and populist poet and philologist perhaps best known as the author of the old Germannational anthem, "Deutsch land, Deutsch land ber alles." "Winter ade" is an ironic song of "sad farewell"("Adieu, Winter!/ Parting brings sorrow./ But your departure is such/ That now my heart laughs").

9. Enrico Rastelli (1896-1931), Italian juggler.

10. The actor described here was Harold Russell (b.1914 in Nova Scotia), who in fact lost both his handsas a soldier during World War II. Acclaimed for his performance as one of the three returning veterans in

William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives(1946), Russell became the only actor ever to win two Oscarsfor the same role: one for Best Supporting Actor, the other a special Oscar given "for bringing hope andcourage to his fellow veterans." Russell made history again in 1992, as he became the first Oscar recipientto sell one of his awards, which he did in order to raise money to help cover his wife's medical expenses.

11. The translator would like to thank the following people for their assistance: Charles Musser, JoannaSpiro, Michael Kerbel, Lance Duerfahrd, Dan Friedman, Patrick Noon, Richard Field, Carol Hightower,Alexander Ulanov, Christa and Jeffrey Sammons.

.

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