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The Artof Survival Understanding Charlie Chaplins The Little Trampthroughthe Lensof Little Narratives
The Artof Survival Understanding Charlie Chaplins The Little Trampthroughthe Lensof Little Narratives
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All content following this page was uploaded by Binod Mishra on 01 July 2020.
To cite this article: Surya P. Verma & Binod Mishra (2020): The Art of Survival: Understanding
Charlie Chaplin’s The Little Tramp through the Lens of Little Narratives, Quarterly Review of Film
and Video, DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2020.1777051
something that would make him funny. Chaplin chose an appearance that
was ironical per se. Chaplin, though, claims to have found the dressing
style of the character, which he called The Little Tramp, funny, neverthe-
less, there seems to be a hidden and wise intention behind this contradict-
ory incarnation that made him the greatest amongst his contemporary
comedians, namely, Buster Keaton and Stan laurel. According to Stephen
M. Weissman in his book Chaplin: A Life, when interviewed by Richard
Meryman in 1966, Chaplin, identifying with what he has written in My
Autobiography, uttered following words:
I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do. I went to the dress department and on the way, I
thought, well, I’ll have them make everything in contradiction— baggy trousers, tight
coat, large head, small hat —raggedy but at the same time a gentleman. … Making an
entrance, I felt dressed; I had an attitude. It felt good, and the character came to me.2
What gives his portrayals consistency is that, whether playing rich man
or poor and regardless of his circumstances, he’s always a fish out of water.
As a vagrant, he assumes the airs of a gentleman. As an employee, he
makes mischief like a child at play or confounds his employers with his
incompetence. It all boils down to the comic principle of contrast, setting
Charlie against the world so that comic sparks fly.8
The same happened to the world of comedy. Anyone who wanted to
laugh was laughing at his own follies reflected in the Tramp. Therefore, we
can well display the chaplinesque9 lure of the human state of contradictions
only through the aforementioned gentleman analogy of The Little Tramp.
In the world of The Little Tramp finding meaning was meaningless. Only
the art of survival prevailed.
The expression, he passes when he rises for the second time, happens to
be very revealing of what he expects of the world. The Tramp had, perhaps,
expected the same what the world had to offer him. He cleans the dust
from his cap reflecting his love for the things with the least important
6 S. P. VERMA AND B. MISHRA
things. Here, we discover his first interaction with the small thing in the
movie. The importance we give to the small things in our life goes opposite
in the case of the Tramp. The most prominent statement that Chaplin
passes about life through whisper is—“This is the life.” (Chaplin, 1915,
00:00:57) This happens to be the moment when he, after entering the
world, struggles with a gardening- fork. No matter what side of the fork he
uses, it hits his companion always from the sharp side. The fork also inter-
rupts his entrance. In the end, he succeeds and expresses the most enlight-
ening sentence which happens to be reminiscent of Socrates’ statement that
he could understand only one thing about life and that was—nothing. The
enigma of life becomes too esoteric to be deciphered. The Little Tramp rep-
resents the deepest secrets of life through his interaction with small things.
Chaplin’s philosophy applied in the movie approves of Sim in disapproving
structuralism that reduces the world to an interlinked system:
“Structuralism was a universalizing theory, whereas poststructuralists spent
their time demonstrating how such theories always fail: the battle lines
were drawn.”22 Following the prevenient statement, the world of The Little
Tramp is found deprived of interwoven structures.
Even the life at sea has some order but the world in which Chaplin’s
movie related to Little Tramp are set is out of any pattern and absolutely
poststructuralist in nature. The very world mentioned above becomes the
most equivalent to our world—living a life in which we can derive no
meaning in terms of grand narratives. In opposition to modernist search
for monolithic meaning in life, we find, in the world of the Tramp, the
search for meaning happens to be of no worth. But it does not stop him
from the search for meaning. Samuel Beckett’s cry of failing again and fail-
ing better is heard at the best in Chaplin’s movies related to The Little
Tramp but at the same time we know that the best can never be reached:
It is simply because the stone of meaning has to tumble down after it has
reached a certain height—the reliability of meaning is highly temporal and
spatial. The man who has lost his purpose, having no past to be nostalgic
about and no utopia to be arrived at, his reaction in the situation matters
the most. It is the world of the characters in the “theater of revolt” 23 against
the “theater of communion” 24 as Robert Brustein has described in his book
The Theater of Revolt. The Tramp’s touch with human beings is moment-
ary and it seems to be a conscious experiment that Chaplin does to test
how much one can entertain his companions even in the time of existential
crisis. But the locus of his survival and satisfaction, that he finds in the
inanimate things, is worth learning lessons from. The Tramp comes in the
world of human beings only as a banished man. He lives a life that, he
already knows, is meaningless.
QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 7
The movie becomes suggestive of a complete life cycle. After the birth
we familiarize ourselves with the world as The Little Tramp does at the
beginning of the movie—he approaches toward the camera as he is ventur-
ing, like a child in some strange world. He banishes at the end of the
movie because he has lived his part on the earth, symbolizing death.
Following the ideas of Albert Camus which says that a life that tries to find
out the meaning in life happens to be the most worthless life. Life as a
whole cannot be meaningful only parts can be. The moment we try to con-
nect the dots what comes out is mere aporia.25 In an interview with Harry
Carr in 1925 Chaplin seems to be approving it.
Charlie, “I asked, is life worthwhile?”
At times, he answered.
For Instance?
For Instance, I lie down on my back and look up at the sky and stop thinking, in a
sort of empty bliss. Then my tummy tells me it is time to eat—and I eat. Then I lie
down again in the sand. And life is worthwhile.26
saying of “mind over matter.” 27 He eats the boiled boot with the same
degree of interests, while Big Jim cannot tolerate it, as one eats the most
delicious food. The contradiction in the reactions between two men having
their Thanksgiving dinner happens to be a realistic depiction of how the
art of survival remains the most needed property amongst human beings in
the time of crises. In another episode, The Lone Prospector, in The Gold
Rush, is found eating candle with salt ending in the absolute level of satur-
ation. Chaplin becomes most alive where there is no life at all, and con-
dones life without meaning. One must imagine The Little Tramp satisfied28
even in the most devastating living conditions. No matter what happens in
life, survival in life is the most necessary element. The necessity of survival
has been implied in The Gold Rush in the finest form. When Georgia
promises to visit The Lone Prospector on New Year’s Eve dinner, he waits
with a curiosity. She does not turn out as she has planned. Those were the
moments when he retired himself in the world of reveries and imagined
himself dining with Georgia, his love. Demanded—“Speech, Speech!” says
The Lone Prospector, “I’m so happy that I can’t speak. But I’ll dance.”
(1925, 00:55:30) He performs a dance during moments of imaginary fulfill-
ment. The event happens metaphorically again with forks and potatoes on
the table. Here the small things become the vehicle for the outlet of his
happiness. Chaplin goes at the peak in The Gold Rush when it comes
to interacting with small things it might be the reason why Silver, in the
terminus of the appreciation of the movie, goes as follows:
The Tramp is of course, a perennial and permanent outsider, the stranger in the
strangest of the lands, looking in the windows of the brightly lit party, himself as a
shadowy silhouette in the darkness. When he is invited to take part, it is the result of
accident or mistaken identity, or he is used as a tool by another person. He is a
character on the age of the film strip clinging gamely to the sprocket holes, unable to
enter the frame where life is happening, where people are having fun, where others
are taking and giving love. And this, in spite of the ironic fact that it is, after all,
his film.29
The world of the Tramp is the world where “the divorce between man
and his life, the actor and his setting” is visible and can be observed
through the naked eyes. In The Circus, The Little Tramp is blamed for the
theft, and chased by police for no reason across the maze in which he sees
his own face and becomes uncomfortable. It is because of that absurd chase
that he meets his fate to “Go ahead, and be funny” (1928, 00:20:09).
As Lucky in Beckett’s The Waiting for Godot is told by Pozzo to think and
he thinks. Similarly, Chaplin is ordered by the circus master—to be funny.
Arthur Fleck’s concern in Joker that the people in power not only control
what is right and what is wrong but decide, unfortunately, also what is
funny, and what is not. When everything happens to be definite is where
The Little Tramp becomes incompatible which happens to be self-referen-
tial to Chaplin’s life also:
The Circus has the most self-referential narrative premise of Chaplin’s silent films.
The film is an exploration of the nature of Chaplin’s own art—the art of making
people laugh. Only in Limelight Chaplin would revisit this highly personal theme. In
The Circus, Chaplin portrays the Tramp as circus performer who is funny when he
doesn’t mean to and who is unfunny when he tries to get laughs. The dichotomy
inevitably reflects Chaplin’s own deepest fears—that as a director and a performer he
would be unable to equal the comedic artistry he had realized in The Gold Rush.31
A world where freedom is granted more than it was in the times of Jean
Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger, and god is dead for
more people than he was in the space of Friedrich Nietzsche, we cannot
find any institution greater than individual by serving which we can save
ourselves from the pseudo guilt of doing nothing. The idea of nothing is
slippery in itself. Slavoj Zizek in his book Slavoj Zizek’s Jokes mentions a
joke that explains the aforementioned notion:
A group of Jews in a synagogue publicly admitting their nullity in the eyes of god—
first, a rabbi stands up and says: “O God, I know I am worthless. I am nothing!”
After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the
chest: “O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!”
After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: “O God,
I am nothing.” The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with
scorn: “What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is
nothing too!”37
QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 11
Hence, the small things, as it happens in the world of The Little Tramp,
should be given equal importance as great things. As in accordance with
Jean Baudrillard—we cannot differentiate between the reality and simula-
tion, and according to Lyotard the world of the little narratives has
replaced the world of the grand narratives, the most plausible escape of
human beings is to shatter the hierarchy between the acts of grand purpose
and the acts of The Little Tramp that appear to be purposeless.
Notes
1. Snyder, “The Tramp in the Classroom,” 746–753 þ 830.
2. Weissman, Chaplin: A Life, 218.
3. Chaplin had complete faith in spontaneous acting. He came on set, most of the times,
unprepared. He would come with the plot in his mind without any practice.
4. He was Chaplin’s elder half-brother and an actor.
5. Eubank, “The Funniest Man on the Screen,” 5.
6. Don Quixote is the protagonist of Cervantes’s novel who impersonates the
characteristics of a knight and imagines himself to be a great warrior. The novel was
brought out into two volumes in Spanish later translated into English.
7. Kamin, The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin, 198.
8. Ibid.
9. It is related to the art of Charlie Chaplin. Famous poet Hart Crane, a friend to
Chaplin wrote a poem with the same title. The term came into existence with
Crane’s poem.
10. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv.
11. Also known as meta narratives.
12. Stassi, Charlie Chaplin’s Last Dance, 5.
13. Sim, “The Modern, the Postmodern and the Post-Postmodern,” vii.
14. The term was used by Lyotard in opposition to grand narratives. It questions the
authority of Grand Narratives and also known as local narratives.
15. Sim, “The Modern, the Postmodern and the Post-Postmodern,” viii.
16. Both are characters, respectively father and son in a poetic play of W.B. Yeats The
Countess Cathleen. They are known for despising the Christian virtues in the times of
the famine.
17. It is a philosophy that follows the lifestyle of eat, drink, and be merry.
18. A character in Christopher Marlowe’s play A Tragical History of Life and Death of
Doctor Faustus who sells his soul to Devil. To escape the torture of hell he wishes to
be a drop of water in the ocean.
19. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 210.
20. Silver, “Charles Chaplin: An Appreciation,” 29.
21. Kingsley, “Beneath the Mask,” 19.
22. Sim, “The Modern, the Postmodern and the Post-Postmodern,” ix.
23. Plays in which three unities of Aristotle were not followed and no solution was served
toward the end of the play. The term is the most appropriate for the plays related to
the theater of the absurd.
24. Related to conventional plays.
25. A Greek word for an absolute esoteric situation where no straight forward stand is
visible. Plato’s earlier dialogues, for instance, are considered to be aporetic.
12 S. P. VERMA AND B. MISHRA
ORCID
Surya P. Verma http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0059-4713
Works Cited
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Movies.” In Charlie Chaplin Interviews, edited by K. J. Hayes, 67–70. Jackson, MS:
Mississippi University Press, 2005.
Best Classics. The Gold Rush [Video]. YouTube, 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=
BGLVi9XelFE&t=29s
Carr, H. “Chaplin Explains Chaplin.” In Charlie Chaplin Interviews, edited by K. J. Hayes,
84–87. Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press, 2005.
Esslin, M. The Theatre of the Absurd. (3rd ed.). New York: Vintage eBooks, A Division of
Random House, Inc. 2001.
Eubank, V. “The Funniest Man on the Screen.” In Charlie Chaplin Interviews, edited by
K. J. Hayes, 3–6. Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press, 2005.
Green Lamp Public Domain. The Tramp [Video]. YouTube, 2017. www.youtube.com/
watch?v=BGLVi9XelFE&t=29s
Hayes, K. J. “Filmography.” In Charlie Chaplin Interviews, edited by K. J. Hayes, xiii–xixl.
Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press, 2005.
Hurley, N. “The Social Philosophy of Charlie Chaplin.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review
49, no. 195 (1960): 313–320.
Kamin, D. The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin. Lanham, Maryland, USA: The Scarecrow Press,
2009.
Kingsley, G. “Beneath the Mask: Witty, Wistful, Serious is the Real Charlie Chaplin.” In
Charlie Chaplin Interviews, edited by K. J. Hayes, 17–21. Jackson, MS: Mississippi
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Lyotard, J. F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated
by G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1984.
QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 13
Appendix A
The Tramp (1915)
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Fred Goodwins, Lloyd Bacon, Paddy McGuire,
Billy Armstrong, Leo White, Ernest Van Pelt
Production: Essanay (www.charliechaplin.com/en/films/37-the-tramp)