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PARTISAN REVIEW
casting himself solely as the victim, a role that history had already
carved out for the Jews. Once the tramp could fight back; in the early
films he even had a great deal of the rogue in him. Now, even more
than in
Modern Times,
he has been overtaken by history, overwhelmed
by forces that rendered his defenses irrelevant . This is the last film in
which the tramp appears, and it ends on an uplifting note which is
actually a confession of failure: an impassioned speech - not by the
tramp, the tramp is gone- but by the actor directly to his audience.
Impersonation has run its course; the reign of language has begun.
What is suppressed in the mind remains covertly present,
always threatening to reappear or showing itself in what does ap–
pear. This is the essence of Freud's theory of wit as a defensive pro–
cess in his book
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,
where the
raw material is the self-deprecating Jewish anecdotes he loved to col–
lect. But Freud perversely ignores the social sources of these defen–
sive strategies and confines himself to the psychic process alone.
Chaplin's autobiography is full of evidence of his lucky inability to
put the troubled conditions of his early years behind him. No sooner
did he escape the poverty of the East End than he began to make
emotional visits to his boyhood haunts, propelled in equal measure
by feelings of nostalgia and revulsion. In one sense, all of his work is
a series of nostalgic visits to the marginal existence he had left
behind yet integrated into his art through the character of the tramp.
As a child living from hand to mouth, from odd job to odd job,
by the age of twelve, says his biographer Roger Manvell, "he has
passed through virtually every strong experience that was to il–
luminate his art ." This comes to mind later when Manvell catalogues
the infinite variety of roles the tramp would play in Chaplin's earliest
films . He was "a comic chameleon who could become anything the
situation demanded - not only a waiter, an ex-convict or petty crook,
a prop man in a vaudeville theater, a janitor, a cook, a baker's, a
piano-mover's or a paperhanger's assistant, but also an errant hus–
band, a city slicker, a film actor, and a fake boxer."
Thomas Burke, a writer who shared his background and knew
the dark side of London, met Chaplin during his famous return visit
in 1921 at the height of his celebrity. Burke shrewdly observed that,
He is first and last an actor, possessed by this , that or the other.
He lives only in a role , and without it he is lost. As he cannot
find the inner Chaplin , there is nothing for him, at grievous
moments, to retire into ; he is compelled to merge himself, or be
