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Comedic Modernism* Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00289/1754014/octo_a_00289.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 MALCOLM TURVEY Modern artists have long been fascinated with the circus, pantomime, and other comic entertainments, and since the late nineteenth century, many mod- ernists have made use of the figure of the clown in advancing their avant-garde agendas.1 This strain within modernism—what I call comedic modernism—is bookended, perhaps, by Gustave Flaubert’s final, unfinished novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, which he began writing in the mid-1860s, and Samuel Beckett’s Film, starring Buster Keaton, made exactly a century later.2 I should hasten to add that, as the latter example makes clear, by comedic modernism I do not mean humorous modernism, but rather the employment of the slapstick comedian as a subject and/or model in modernist theory and practice.3 In this essay, I attempt to account for the pervasive appeal of the clown to modernists by exam- ining the European avant-garde’s appropriation of film comics in the interwar period. Numerous scholars have of course explored the attraction of specific avant-gardists to particular film comedians, such as the Soviets’ zeal for Charlie * This essay is a revised version of a talk titled “Fernand Léger, René Clair, and Comedic Modernism” that I delivered at the fifth annual Anne d’Harnoncourt Symposium, “Reconsidering Paris in the 1920s: Fernand Léger in an Expanded Context,” in November 2013. I thank Anna Vallye and Christine Poggi for inviting me to the symposium, and for their helpful comments on my talk. 1. For an overview of the image of the entertainer, including the clown, in modern art, see Naomi Ritter, Art as Spectacle: Images of the Entertainer Since Romanticism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989). 2. On modernism and comedy in Flaubert and Beckett, see Hugh Kenner, Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962). 3. Recently, William Solomon has coined the term “slapstick modernism” to refer to what he describes as “the coalescence in cultural practice of the artistic experimentation associated with high modernism and the socially disruptive lunacy linked to the comic film genre” (Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016], p. 2). Solomon’s account is full of insights into the convergence between modernism and slapstick comedy. However, I continue to prefer the term “comedic modernism” because, as I argue in this essay, modernists were influenced by a variety of conventions from the genre of comedian comedy, not just slapstick. Furthermore, Solomon argues that modernism and slapstick “for the most part had remained separate throughout the 1920s . and then came together in explosive fashion in the United States in the post–World War II era” (ibid.), when in fact this convergence occurred long before the 1920s. OCTOBER 160, Spring 2017, pp. 5–29. © 2017 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 6 OCTOBER Chaplin.4 It is, however, not often recognized that the affinity for slapstick film on the part of the interwar European avant-garde was one instance of a much broader phenomenon, and here I trace the major forms of assimilation of the slapstick-film comedian by modernists that transcended any particular comic or avant-garde group. Like so much else in modernism, the roots of this affinity lie in Romanticism. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00289/1754014/octo_a_00289.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 The confusion of identities and use of masks that are leitmotifs of commedia dell’arte as it was translated into pantomime in the early nineteenth century appealed to French Romantics uncertain of the role of artists in the new, postrevolutionary social order.5 Drawn to the grotesque, they were captivated by the comic’s liberating animality and subversion of hierarchy. They also identified with what they perceived to be his alien- ation from society, propagating the archetype of the “sad clown,” even while they viewed him as a satirical double of the mythical bourgeois they detested.6 Of the many comic types to be found in popular entertainment of the era, the French Romantics celebrated in particular the mute version of Pierrot created by Jean- Gaspard Deburau in pantomime-féeries at the Funambules Theater beginning in the 1820s. The incoherence of the féerie’s oneiric plot, with its abrupt transformations and supernatural characters, satisfied their desire for enchantment, and they saw in the libidinous, cruel, and cunning behavior of Deburau’s egotistical Pierrot a heroic ver- sion of the revitalizing child-man they idealized.7 In the second half of the nineteenth century, as the pantomime and circus became more popular and modernism started to take root, writers and visual artists frequently drew on the figure of the clown. Flaubert, who might have seen Deburau perform in Paris when studying law in the early 1840s, collaborated in 1854 with his friend Louis Bouilhet on a pantomime, Pierrot au serial, in which the eponymous hero retains many of the traits of Deburau’s Pierrot.8 In Bouvard et Pécuchet, left uncomplet- ed upon his death in 1880, Flaubert used two clown-like characters to satirize the extreme stupidity (la bêtise) he feared was engulfing modern civilization. In cultivating fumisme, an attitude of irreverent skepticism toward all values, the Hydropathes, Incohérents, and other avant-garde groups that congregated in cabarets such as the Chat Noir in Montmartre from the 1880s onward parodied serious art and mocked social norms using sexual humor. For Incohérent Adolphe Willette, who illustrated the Chat Noir journal, Pierrot was the quintessential fumiste, and Willette used the 4. See, most recently, Owen Hatherley, The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the International Communist Avant-Garde (London: Pluto Press, 2016). 5. Louisa E. Jones, Sad Clowns and Pale Pierrots: Literature and the Popular Comic Arts in 19th- Century France (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1984), pp. 12–14. 6. Ibid., pp. 23–24. 7. Robert F. Storey, Pierrots on the Stage of Desire: Nineteenth-Century French Literary Artists and the Comic Pantomime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 18–23. As Storey puts it, “Like the circus (another enthusiasm of [Romantic writers such as] Gautier, Banville, Baudelaire), the pantomime- féerie offered frankly infantile fantasy to the habitués of the Funambules” (ibid., p. 25). 8. Ibid., p. 159–60. Comedic Modernism 7 clown’s image in a series of illustrations beginning with “Pierrot fumiste” in 1882.9 Slapstick and licentious humor also featured prominently in the puppet shows and shadow plays staged at the Chat Noir, such as Louis Morin’s Pierrot pornographe (1894), which in turn set the scene (along with the Symbolists’ passion for mimes and shadow plays) for Alfred Jarry’s infamous Ubu Roi, first performed in Paris in 1896. The char- acter of Ubu, with his primitive, murderous appetite for power, his scatological lan- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00289/1754014/octo_a_00289.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 guage, and his buffoonish incompetence, was indebted to the slapstick tradition as fil- tered through guignol. Indeed, Jarry preferred using marionettes to stage the play. In introducing the live-action version, he reportedly discussed its debt to the puppet the- ater as well as its use of masks,10 and in 1901 it was performed as a puppet show at Les Quat’z’Arts, another avant-garde cabaret in Montmartre. Jarry was a hero for younger avant-gardists, including Picasso, who lived in Montmartre in the early 1900s. In selecting saltimbanques, Harlequins, and fools as subjects, especially in his Rose period, Picasso was also following in the footsteps of Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other Impressionists and post- Impressionists who had painted these and related figures in depicting the popular culture of their time.11 Picasso frequented the Cirque Medrano in Paris, and he reportedly derived great pleasure from clowns and their slapstick antics.12 Yet, his portraits of circus entertainers perpetuated the archetype of the “sad clown” by repre- senting them as melancholic and exhausted. According to Theodore Reff, Picasso viewed these performers as alter egos, as highly skilled artists who, like himself, were estranged from society because of their nonconformity and creativity; he even went so far as to give several of his Harlequins his own features.13 Picasso was also a devotee, like the Futurist F. T. Marinetti, of the music hall where films were projected.14 As Richard Abel has shown, it was in the late 1900s that the French avant-garde, many of whom were Picasso’s friends, began embracing the cinema.15 But it wasn’t until World War I that they became captivated by slapstick film, largely as a result of Charlie Chaplin’s international success from 1915 onward.16 Comedic modernism 9. Phillip Dennis Cate, “The Spirit of Montmartre,” in The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-Garde, 1875–1905, ed. Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw (New Brunswick, NJ: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum/Rutgers, 1996), p. 37. 10. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 206. 11. See Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), chapters three and four; and The Great Parade. 12. See the firsthand account in Fernande Olivier, Picasso and His Friends, trans. J. Miller (New York: Appleton-Century, 1965), p. 127. 13. Theodore Reff, “Harlequins, Saltimbanques, Clowns, and Fools,” Artforum 10, no. 2 (October 1971), p.