Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 10 Number 1, April 2009
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Carroll, Noel, Comedy Incarnate – Buster Keaton, Physical Humor, and Bodily Coping, Malden MA, Blackwell, 2007, 180pp, ISBN13-978-1-4051-5525-0
Reviewed by
This book, a minor work by a major writer, is actually an edited version of the author’s doctoral thesis. It has received praise as being a brilliant, inventive and lucid examination of Buster Keaton’s slapstick silent film The General.
In the intellectual ambiance of New York during the era when the author was a graduate student, the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer produced a work entitled The Mind Is A Muscle and so the theme of bodily intelligence was in the air. Amped by the philosophy of M. Merleau-Ponty this idea became the backbone of Carroll’s approach. He analyzes the film closely from this physical humor perspective, elaborating on the themes and the style of the film and compares Keaton’s place vis–a-vis this idea to Chaplin, Lloyd and Langdon. In so doing he strips out the narrative and focuses on the way the film looks – the purely cinematic aspects of it, and only at the end does he return to discuss the narrative and explain why he separates out his consideration of it.
His main point is that the gags in the movie proceed in the beginning from ‘unmindfulness’, a kind of “fixity of attention” (31) and he produces many examples to buttress his point. He then makes a rather lengthy excursion into a comparison with Bergson, social Darwinism, William James and John Dewey, though he admits that there is no evidence that Keaton was self-consciously aware of any of the above. Herein lies the central style of explication that Carroll embraces – a kind of tendentious academic argument-counter-argument that carries through the entire book, reminding the reader that this was originally meant to be defended to a committee.
For readers who are closely interested in the hermeneutics of silent slapstick, the book will offer many minor insights. He has a talent for making the obvious seem remarkable that is prized in certain academic circles of literary criticism. However I found very little of real interest in his analysis of the structuring of the gags, the set ups of the shots, the use of what he calls long shots (wide shots) or of the style of editing. And he pays very little attention, if any, to the aspects of the film – Keaton’s melancholic humor, the brilliance of the timing and physical virtuosity of the gags; as well as the sympathy of viewpoint taken with the Confederate side in the American Civil War, that I find intriguing.
No doubt someone who is more fascinated with the intellectual-mechanics of the film and the nitty gritty of academic argument will appreciate the book more than I did.
I will quote one paragraph to give a flavor of what I mean in the presentation of his argument of a peculiar aspect of Keaton’s style (107):
On the other hand my analysis cannot be faulted because The General does not contain any of the kinds of misleading shots previously cited. For even the critic with a predilection for explanations of the most elaborate structural variety will acknowledge that not every permutation of an artist’s structural variations has to appear in every one of his works. It is enough that an analysis of the iconography successfully predicts stylistic correlates to both the success and failure imagery across Keaton’s ouvre.
So, in my reading of this book it appeared to me that Carroll, is more involved with staking a claim to a particular piece of academic turf than to providing insights into what he calls “the universalist approach of the humanist critic” (125).
For scholars of Keatonia only.