Charlie Chaplin & the Little Tramp - Assignment Example

Charlie Chaplin & the Little Tramp After the defeat οf the old bull fighter, who is lying wounded on an operating table, Zurito, the picador, is about to cut off the old fellow's pigtail, the mark οf his profession. But when the wounded man starts up, despite his pain, and says, "You couldn't do a thing like that," Zurito says, "I was joking." Zurito becomes aware that, after all, the old bull fighter is, in a way, undefeated, and deserves to die with his coleta on. (Hemingway xxi) After generalizing on the centrality οf Manuel Garcia's character to Hemingway's fiction, Warren observes, with Garcia in mind, that the location "οf the poetic, the pathetic, or the tragic in the unpromising person is not unique with Hemingway" (xxi); and he compares Hemingway to Wordsworth. Susan Beegel has recently offered the intriguing speculation that the character οf Manuel Garcia was based partially on the nineteenth-century matador Manuel Garcia "El Espartero." (Beegel 12-23) Hemingway's article in the Toronto Star Weekly (October 17, 1923) continues to suggest, however, that the character in question was inspired largely by Manuel Garcia Lopez, called "Maera," and his chaotic bullfight at Pamplona in July 1923. Hemingway was a relatively inexperienced spectator when he wrote the article for the Toronto Star Weekly. In fact, he had never seen a bullfight until earlier that spring, and the title οf the article, "World Series οf Bullfighting a Mad, Whirling Carnival," (White 99-108) characterizes his rather unsubtle response to what he saw. By contrast, in the so-called "miniature" that he wrote about the fictionalized "death" οf Maera-shortly after seeing the fight-Hemingway's tone is, despite the subject matter, coldly, if not grotesquely, ironic. Although he had completed a draft οf the miniature by late July, he apparently revised it in response to Ezra Pound's comments, because he wrote Pound that he had "redone the death οf Maera altogether different.... The new death is good." (Baker 91) Although Hemingway is not, apparently, trying for comic effect with this "larger" -- "smaller" --"faster" -- "film" imagery, he is clearly detaching the reader from the emotional impact οf Maera's death by introducing the irony οf a "Keystone Cops" or Chaplinesque (Benson 35) ending. Indeed, the potential comedy οf Maera's cinematic "death" was not lost on Scott Fitzgerald, who parodied the miniature in a letter to Hemingway in the fall οf 1926, a year after the miniature appeared as "Chapter XIV" οf In Our Time: "The King οf Bulgaria began to whirl round and round.... Soon he was whirling faster and faster. Then he was dead." By the time Fitzgerald wrote him, however, Hemingway had long since moved from comparing Maera's death (in the miniature) to a sped-up film, to comparing Manuel Garcia's bullfight (in "The Undefeated") to a pratfall ballet which echoed not just Maera's bullfight at Pamplona in 1923 but the antics οf Chaplin's comic tramp, "little Charlie." Comic bullfights featuring clowns dressed like Chaplin's little tramp were very popular in Spain and France in the Twenties and Thirties. (Campbell 42) And perhaps Hemingway was influenced solely by having seen a bullfight involving "Charlie Chaplins," as he calls them in "The Undefeated." But there is a good possibility that he was inspired to employ the tramp as an analogue in "The Undefeated" by a conversation he had with Fitzgerald's close friend Edmund Wilson, who had written what he called "a great super-ballet οf New York for the Swedish Ballet--a pantomime explained by movie captions and with a section οf movie film in the middle, for which Ornstein is composing the music and in which we hope to get Chaplin to act." (Wilson 117) Hemingway had first met Wilson in New York, in January 1924 (see Selected Letters, 103, Notes) and apparently learned about the projected ballet at this time. On October 18, 1924, a month before he completed "The Undefeated" (see Selected Letters, 133), originally entitled "The Bullfighters," (Johnston 90) Hemingway ended a letter to Wilson by asking, "did you ever get Chaplin for your ballet?" (Selected Letters, 128). As it happened, Wilson did not get Chaplin for his ballet--later published as Cronkite's Clocks. (Wilson 158) But for Hemingway, the little tramp was in the public domain, and he apparently changed the title οf his story from "The Bullfighters" to "The Undefeated" after reflecting on his Chaplinesque theme. Moreover, Hemingway had actually compared bullfighting to ballet a few months before meeting Wilson. In his article "Bull Fighting Is Not a Sport--It Is a Tragedy," for the Star Weekly (Oct. 20, 1923), he had, for example, used ballet imagery in describing the young matador (Chicuelo) performing a veronica: "The kid stood his ground, simply swung back on his heels and floated his cape like a ballet dancer's skirt into the bull's face as he passed." And Hemingway makes the same comparison in describing the last οf Manuel Garcia's veronicas--before things start to go wrong--in "The Undefeated": "he held the cape against his hip and pivoted, so the cape swung out like a ballet dancer's skirt and wound the bull around himself like a belt...." (Hemingway 27) As Fitzgerald's parody οf the miniature about Maera suggests, Hemingway's objectification οf the dying matador's perceptions has the incongruity οf comedy. Yet, however incongruous Maera's fictionalized "death" may seem, it is not altogether out οf harmony with his actions as Hemingway described them in the Toronto Star Weekly. Maera's bad luck in killing the bull gave him little opportunity to demonstrate "grace under pressure," the phrase that Hemingway used in defining courage for Fitzgerald in a letter in April οf 1926 (Selected Letters 200). Instead οf a graceful dance with death, Maera's actions became progressively more grotesque: he hit bone; the sword "shot out οf his hand"; he went up "in the air" on the horns οf the bull; he staggered to his feet; he lost his sword "again and again" as he tried with a sprained wrist to kill the bull; and the bull nearly "got him twenty times." "What the hell is this? A Chaplin comedy?" (Hemingway 236) Hemingway asks in Green Hills οf Africa (1935) after falling "flat" on his face in the dark. The little tramp--with his white face and toothbrush moustache, his bowler hat and jaunty cane--was the most popular film character in the world when Hemingway was writing "The Undefeated." Chaplin had created the tramp persona, with which he would be so closely identified, for Kid Auto Races at Venice (1913). But it was The Tramp (1915) which popularized "little Charlie" and gave him the image οf the tough and eternal optimist. When the movie opens, Charlie is walking down a dusty road. Then a large automobile passes, and he is knocked down. But he simply gets up, brushes himself off, and continues down the road, in Gerald Mast's words, "dirtied but undaunted." (Mast 73) At the end οf the movie, we are brought full circle to a similar moment, when Charlie loses Edna Purviance to a rich and handsome boyfriend and, Mast observes, "takes to the road again--alone. We see his sad lonely figure, shuffling slowly down the road away from the camera. Suddenly he stops, begins to pick up his heels in a snappy, march-time tempo, and then continues jauntily down the road--diminished but not defeated". Or--to use Hemingway's word--"undefeated." As "The Undefeated" opens, the aging matador Manuel Garcia has just left the hospital after recovering from a bad wound in the only fight he has had this year. But he refuses to give up bullfighting, and Retana, the bullfight promoter, knowing he can get Manuel cheap, offers him a "nocturnal"--an evening fight--instead οf the more prestigious afternoon fight. Retana tells him he can work with a young matador named Hernandez and kill two bulls that "the veterinaries won't pass in the daytime" (5). This unpromising event is to take place after the "Charlie Chaplins," the comic bullfight performed under the "hard light οf the arc-lights" (19) by two men dressed "like tramps"--that is, like "little Charlie" in The Tramp. Works Cited Hemingway, Ernest., A Farewell to Arms, Intro., Robert Penn Warren (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons: Modern Standard Authors [1949]), p. xxi. White, William., "World Series οf Bullfighting a Mad, Whirling Carnival," Toronto Star Weekly, Oct. 27, 1923, p. 33, rpt. as "Pamplona in July" in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967), pp. 99-108. Baker, Carlos., Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981), p. 91. Hereafter cited as Selected Letters in the text. Benson, Cf. Jackson J., Hemingway: The Writer's Art οf Self-Defense. Minneapolis: Univ. οf Minnesota Press, 1969), where he notes Robert Cohn's "Chaplin-esque" actions in The Sun Also Rises (p. 35). Campbell, Roy., Taurine Provence (London: Harmsworth, 1932), p. 42. Wilson, Edmund, Letters on Literature and Polities, 1912-1972, ed. Elena Wilson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 117. Johnston, Kenneth G., The Tip οf the Iceberg: Hemingway and the Short Story (Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1987), p. 90. Wilson, Edmund, The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries οf the Period, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 158. Hemingway, Ernest, "The Undefeated," in Men Without Women (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927), p. 27. Hemingway, Ernest, Green Hills οf Africa (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935), p. 236. Mast, Gerald, The Comic Mind Comedy and the Movies, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. οf Chicago Press, 1979), p. 73. Beegel, Susan., "The Death οf El Espartero," pp. 12-23. Read More