Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics

Three: On the Border with The Pilgrim: Zigzags across a Chapl(a)in's Signature

THREE On the Border with The Pilgrim: Zigzags acrossa Chapl(a)in's Signature Louis Kaplan Pilgrim, n. A traveler that is taken seriously. AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil's Dictionary IntroducingChapl(a)in In the annals of silent film comedy, there is neither a more beloved nor a more invested signature than Charlie Chaplin's. It is literally legendary in that the signature carries its legend along with it. The mythos of Charlie Chaplin has established a fixed context of description and as­ sociation over the past decades in the mere mention of the proper name or its illumination upon the silver screen. It connotes an entire cast of outcast roles— the little tramp, the pantomimic clown, the nomadic vagabond—with each and every inscription. In reviewing The Pilgrim (1923), the critic Robert E. Sherwood dis­ cusses how Charlie Chaplin's art of disguise in this film adds other vari­ ations to this repertoire of roles to function as a thinly veiled autobio­ graphical reflection: "Thus, when Chaplin impersonated a convict who disguised himself in clerical garb, he approximated autobiography" (1971 [1923], 107). For Sherwood, the double impersonations of convict and cleric serve to cancel each other out and leave Chaplin straddling ap­ proximately in the middle with a rather dubious doubter's identity. "He has retained the identity of Charlie Chaplin; he has remained an agnos­ tic, in the most inclusive sense of the word" (107). Although I have no argument with the end result of Sherwood's appraisal, his analysis over­ looks the orthographic operator that structures this shift in significa­ 97 98 Louis Kaplan tion as applied to The Pilgrim. Slightly altering Sherwood's terms, this essay is an attempt at Chaplin's "bio­auto­graphy," or one that organizes a reading of The Pilgrim through a play of its signatures and focuses on the comic slippage induced on account of its wavering signature bor­ der. This essay focuses on the manner in which the surname of the star­ ring signature scripts the narrative structure of The Pilgrim and plays upon a series of identity borders (e.g., cultural and geoterritorial) in the process. But to undertake this analysis, the viewer must overhear the last name and introduce a homophonic overtone into it. Like the filmic genre in which Chaplin is animated, this letter will be silent. It will be seen, but never heard. With the addition of the initial letter of the alphabet, the clown's proper name is led into religious service. As luck and as language would have it, his signature is haunted by a holy writ. There is the man of the cloth in the guise of the tramp in rags. There is a black frock and a white collar lurking in the black­and­white prisoner's stripes. In this borderlining manner, Chaplin faces off with chaplain.1 This speculation upon a silent letter and its comic effects is not so far­fetched. For one commentator, the setting up of a slight or silent difference that plays along and with a border is at the metaphysical ba­ sis of Chaplin's conception of comedy in general. Chaplinesque humor depends upon such disparities in conjunctions. It involves "a slight dif­ ference in the action, or between two actions, which brings out an infi­ nite distance between two situations, and which serves only to bring out that distance" (Deleuze, 1986,169). Starting from this assumption, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze reviews how the narrative action and the comedy of The Great Dictator (1940) are played out between the physical convergence of the Jewish barber and the Tomanian dicta­ tor and the infinite distance between victim and executioner. In The Idle Class (1920), where the double­dealing Chaplin plays both Charlie (the impoverished tramp) and Mr. Charles (the rich alcoholic), there is again disparity in the conjunction that qualifies both of these charac­ ters for membership in the idle class. In The Pilgrim (1923), a slight dif­ ference in a signature, or between two signatures, brings out an infinite distance between two situations and serves only to bring out that dis­ tance. Between Chaplin and chaplain, or—to go out even further on an On the Border with The Pilgrim 99 allegorical limb fraught with Christian underpinnings—between a thief and a savior, this is the wandering path of ThePilgrim. There is a repeated gesture in The Pilgrimwherein this initially silent letter writes...