Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Keaton’s Yoke ALEX PRIOU Love, looking at me meltingly under dark-lidded eyes, by all manner of charms throws me into the limitless fishing-net of the Cupridian [Aphrodite]. And I tremble as he approaches, just as an aged, yoke-carrying horse that has carried off victory unwillingly walks into contest with swift chariots. (Ibycus, frag. 287)1 The resurgence of love in his old age prompts a fearful reflection in the aged Ibycus. Love sets a trap he must escape, but cannot for all its infinitude, just as an athlete’s prior victories never sate his love of competition. Ibycus discovers the paradox of his situation, that the satisfaction sought is immeasurably greater than what a finite victory could ever provide. The competition of rival lovers for the beautiful beloved appears to Ibycus to be an immediate contrivance for an ineluctably distant object. Ibycus thus learns that love is human finitude’s attempt to answer the question that it itself raises. And yet, despite his fear, Ibycus’ reflection seems more comic than tragic, for his bestial image of love’s effects subverts all pretense to participation in the divinity of Aphrodite. The thought that the ultimate object of love’s longing is spurious may engender fear, but fear, in giving us an acute sense of our mortal limits, has the potential to take us outside ourselves and so prepare us for laughter. For reasons this tattered remnant of Ibycus’ poem doesn’t give us, the apparent tragedy of love—of the simultaneous necessity of pursuing the beloved and impossibility of complete satisfaction—appears resolved by our very awareness of it.2 Thankfully, Ibycus’ vision of love as both tragic and comic has a striking corollary in the films of Buster Keaton, who arion 26.3 winter 2019 mirrors the tension between yoked racehorse and reflective poet in the determined striving of his protagonists and the reflective depth of his directing. As both actor and director, Keaton is both striving body and disembodied thought, both trapped in finitude and reflecting thereupon. Ibycus and Keaton may bear love’s yoke, but they know the yoke’s on them. Keaton’s films thus promise some glimpse into the possibility of a comic redemption to the tragedy of lover and beloved, so much so that it seems one can connect these tatters of papyrus using celluloid film. Can the finite, particular beloved ever satisfy the lover, who strives to escape the limits of finitude? Or must we resign ourselves to our own transience? Keaton explores these questions by crafting comedies around characters who so strive. These characters—strikingly similar in their circumstances and ambitions, yet with slight but essential differences in disposition—offer Keaton a way to look for who bears easiest the weight of love’s yoke. I’ve chosen four films—Cops, College, The Playhouse, and The General—that, when ordered thus, bring us gradually from unavoidable tragedy to the unwitting self-redemption that comes when we laugh at ourselves. Discussing each in turn, I hope to offer some glimpse into what Ibycus may have had in mind when he playfully cast man’s most distinctive and serious striving as a yoked horse. CO P S (1922) the burden of love’s yoke is nowhere clearer in Keaton’s films than in Cops, as the film’s ominous epigraph warns: “Love laughs at locksmiths.” Keaton the director elegantly and humorously frames Keaton’s character as among love’s prisoners. The first shot features him behind bars, gripping them from within what appears to be a jail cell, as he and his love interest carry on a discussion with forlorn looks on their faces. Because the camera is on her side of the bars, we are invited to imagine ourselves free from Keaton’s predicament. She bids him farewell, and as she walks away Keaton the 116 keaton’s yoke director cuts to the other side of the bars and at a greater distance from the action. We discover that he isn’t in jail, but standing outside the gates to a great mansion. Keaton’s love interest turns around and speaks again, now stern rather than solemn. An intertitle finally...