LITMIR.BIZ

      In the stateroom, Harpo stows away, snoozing in the luggage drawer. He finds the drawer comfortable, not cramping, as Moses enjoyed his bulrushes, or Jesus his manger’s cribbed containment—enclosures that belong to D. W. Winnicott’s category, the holding environment. Notice Harpo’s full, drooping hands, his thick fingers, his happiness at being upheld by Chico and Allan Jones (who fills Zeppo’s straight-man shoes and will star the following year with Irene Dunne in Show Boat). I remember pretending to sleep, on a boat in choppy Monterey Bay, while my Norwegian friend fished with his father. After throwing up over the rail, I feigned coma to avoid manly bait-and-tackle.

      THE FANTASY OF BEING PUT TO SLEEP BY A HANDSOME FRUITCAKE TENOR Groucho calls Harpo a “bag of Jell-O.” Allan, the handsome tenor, tucks the bag of Jell-O into bed—a covertly epiphanic moment. Imagine Allan—or any other singer too lovely to qualify for conventional manhood—putting you to bed, or hiding you in a drawer. He fulfills my Gordon MacRae fantasy; Nelson Eddy will serve in a pinch.

      My student, an Allan Jones type, appearing in a college production of The Mikado, sang “A Wand'ring Minstrel I”: though I was the professor, I became the bag of Jell-O, tucked away in the drawer, because the soapily attractive student occupied a position (a category) of songful naïveté. I could greet the naïveté as if I were a foreigner saluting someone else’s native land. The student’s high voice made me the object-in-the-drawer, the tucked-away thing. John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and Grease also inspires my wish to be the ironed, folded object. Cute male songfulness sends me into a parallel category: sleep.

      OVERORDERING EGGS In the hallway Groucho orders food from the steward. Formulaically, repeatedly, Chico, from the stateroom, adds his own request, “And two hard-boiled eggs”; piggybacking, Harpo honks his horn. In response to Harpo’s request, Groucho increases the order: “Make that three hard-boiled eggs.” Harpo expresses his greedy, automatic wish for food mechanically, via horn honks. Harpo, potentate, King Tut, laid out in state, honks from the dead: I want a hard-boiled egg. His needs don’t change. They can only be repeated, amplified. Does Harpo want an egg? Or does he simply want his sleeping presence to be noticed? Harpo’s infantile incomprehensibility sends forth an imperial demand. I don’t insist on his demand’s moral rectitude. I don’t celebrate its size. I celebrate its clear enunciation—and the paradoxical contrast between Harpo’s physical immobility (supposedly asleep) and his audible need (I want eggs). I praise not egotism but the unanswered.

      Harpo overorders eggs. I come from a family of overorderers. My mother’s mother crammed her refrigerator with food “it would be a crime not to eat.” Harpo’s reiterated demand for eggs remembers his mother Minnie’s multiple production of brothers.

      SEARCH FOR STASIS Harpo leans, still asleep, against the maid making the bed—not merely because he wants her body, but because he wants a surface, any surface. The maid—her white uniform nurse-like—tries to pry him off. She doesn’t consider him human. What’s this burden—leech or lech—on my back? Groucho interprets Harpo’s action—wrestling the maid— as groping. I interpret Harpo’s gesture as a search for stasis—a planet wanting to gird itself in the solar system’s loins. Like a corpse in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry or Rope, Harpo’s deadness encumbers and enlivens the plot. How can we deal with his stinking weight?

      TYPOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION If this image were a painting, we might call it a “deposition”— a mannerist depiction of Christ, or Harpo, brought down from the cross. I like to compare secular figures to Christ, who offers a metaphor for exemplariness itself. Leaning against a fat engineer, Harpo acts the part of Christ. Compositionally, as if in Caravaggio’s Deposition from the Cross, the diagonal object—Harpo—creates drama and swirl. Supported, he rides atop others; sleepy, he seems a dead body, the storm’s eye, the slash that cuts across the tumult and corrects it.

      Harpo’s dumb presence reminds me of the donkey in Robert Bresson’s film Au hasard Balthazar: Harpo, too, will be kicked, abandoned to die on a hillside. I have typological tendencies. (Typological criticism seeks analogues in the Old Testament for events in the New.) I take Harpo as type for something else. In a dream last night I played Harpo on a TV show, my costume a hodgepodge of available scraps. I lingered, waiting to hear my Harpo impersonation’s ripple effect on dowager consciousness: a grande dame lived in this liminal TV studio, a Mission-style mansion overlooking not one river but two . . .

      HYPNOTIZED BY MATERNAL DEATH: POINTING FINGER Emerging from the trunk, Harpo looks dazed, hypnotized by claustrophobic maternal presence, or paralyzed by maternal death. Bug eyes show him to be a boy just this instant being born and already looking dead. He pretends to consider his emergence from this trunk (Judy Garland’s “Born in a Trunk”?) a joyous nativity, but he looks like Dracula rising from a coffin in the ship’s belly. Acolyte, Harpo holds his pilgrim staff as Parsifal held the eventually salvific spear.

      Harpo, like a pointing Christ, outstretches his finger. Chico, gabbing, has turned his back. Harpo gestures, with his finger, a second time, a gesture that Chico disregards, for he has the hubris of the speaking, the vocally agile, while Harpo has the sanctified innocence of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, or any role model whose naïveté combines intensity and ignorance.

      HEAD-WIGGLE Harpo’s head-bobbing—“head-wiggle,” I’ll call it—is not my favorite of his mannerisms: he bobs his head to feign indifference. I’d prefer him to acknowledge external impingements: when his head wiggles, he lowers himself to drum-major status, an extra in the “Before the Parade Passes By” number from Hello, Dolly!—a canned rendering of holiday spirit and public ceremony. No one admires Harpo’s head-wiggle, though it provides immunity from pogrom.

      DUMBFOUNDED BY NOURISHMENT’S PHANTOM PROSPECT: HARPO AS MUSELMANN, AS DIRT Suppertime for Harpo. The Italian chef hands him a plate. Dumbfounded, mouth agape, Harpo gazes blankly at the paralyzing offer. No one has handed him a plate before. Oliver Twist, too, wanted more. Finally, more arrives. Toward pleasure’s imminence Harpo maintains a deadened stance. Pleasure is an event he can’t quite think. In line, receiving sauce, shocked Harpo recalls the figure in Auschwitz (as described by Primo Levi and other survivors) known as the Muselmann, the captive who has given up the will to live. Liberation’s bounty hasn’t broken through to Harpo, a Bedlamite who responds to plenitude’s arrival with a frozen double-take; he stares at the plate, at the man serving him, and then back at the plate. He tries to establish consequentiality, cause-effect relations: he tries to understand how the donor has a relation to the donated object.

      Harpo impersonates death-in-life: the face of the Muselmann, the vanquished. Harpo, emblem of the prankster, the giddy fool, who says “yes” to life, also embodies the “no.” Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, writes: “Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings—really, more weights than human beings—nothing does us as much good as a fool’s cap.” Harpo dangles within our reach a liberating fool’s cap—the opportunity to be permanently foolish. And yet he reminds us, when his stare goes dead, of the direness of becoming weight (stone, dirt) rather than human being.

      Paradoxically, the prospect of nourishment—of gratuitously offered food, heaped high on his plate—prompts Harpo’s free fall into Muselmann deadness.

      RUBBING Obsessive thoroughness: Harpo wipes his plate clean with a heel of bread. He rubs the bread to death; he rubs past the point of no return. Once

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