674
PARTISAN REVIEW
a cloud. Falling miles short of the kind of profundity he wants, he
achieves instead a clown's profundity: we are moved not by what he
says, but by his desire to speak.
If
he ends up with nothing but a worn–
out "enigma"-well, so do the real philosophers. Supposing he were to
ask us how one enigma can be better than another, could we give him
a clear answer? The gap between Calvero and the philosophers is
enormous, but in such gaps a clown has his victories: as Calvero gropes
confidently in his darkness, it occurs to one finally that this gap between
him and the philosophers is nothing compared to the gap between the
philosophers and the truth. Again, when Calvero rhapsodizes on the
"miracle of consciousness," he manages to suggest not only that we are
all responding to life inadequately, but at the same time, by his aggres–
sive "sincerity," that consciousness may be some kind of fake-and also
that the possibility of its being a fake does not matter. And when he
speaks with his most genuine emotion
a:bout
love while demonstrating
his own impenetrable isolation, and in his "secondary" role as a per–
former deflates his own sentiment with a savage little song consisting
only of a meaningless repetition of the word "love," then he is striking
at us very deeply, for at bottom we all fear we are incapable of love,
and that what we call love is only something we wish to receive from
others. That Chaplin himself is as much a "victim" in all this as we
who watch him is only the completion of the irony. A clown's function
is to be ridiculous and to make the world ridiculous with him. In this,
Calvero has his success.
It remains to be said, nevertheless, that the famous scene near the
end of the movie when Calvero performs on the stage as a comic vio–
linist, with Buster Keaton as his accompanist, represents a kind of suc–
cess far beyond the complex and unsteady ironies of the earlier parts.
In this there is no longer any problem of interpretation and choice, no
"victims" and no victories, no shifting of involvements back and forth
between the performer and his role and his audience, no society, no
egotism, no love or not-love, no ideas-only a perfect unity of the abso–
lutely ridiculous. Perhaps the Tramp's adventure with the automatic
feeding machine in
Modern Times
is as funny, but there it is still pos–
sible to say that something is being satirized and something else, there–
fore, upheld. The difficulties that confront Calvero and Keaton in
their gentle attempt to give a concert are beyond satire. The universe
stands in their way, and not because the universe is imperfect, either, but
just because it exists; God himself could not conceive a universe in
which these two could accomplish the simplest thing without mishap.
