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The Art of Survival: Understanding Charlie Chaplin's The Little Tramp

through the Lens of Little Narratives

Article in Quarterly Review of Film and Video · June 2020

DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2020.1777051

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 Quarterly Review of Film and Video

ISSN: 1050-9208 (Print) 1543-5326 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gqrf20

The Art of Survival: Understanding Charlie

Chaplin’s The Little Tramp through the Lens of
Little Narratives

Surya P. Verma & Binod Mishra

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

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QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO
https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2020.1777051

The Art of Survival: Understanding Charlie Chaplin’s

The Little Tramp through the Lens of Little Narratives
Surya P. Verma and Binod Mishra

Chaplin and The Little Tramp

Charles Spencer Chaplin has made his appearance in a good number of his
movies as a screen persona called The Little Tramp. It was in 1914 that
The Little Tramp was seen on screen for the first time in the movie The
Kid Auto Races in Venice. The Tramp that acted first on the stage was not
the same who made its first glimpse on the screen in the eyes of the world.
It was perhaps a coincidence that supported Chaplin’s vision of the world
with no order. The very first movie in which he acted in the costume of
The Little Tramp was Mabel’s Strange Predicament. The Kid Auto Races in
Venice was premiered on 7 February 1914, two days prior to the release of
Mabel’s Strange Predicament. John Snyder is right in supporting the view
of the Tramp being recognizable to everybody at some point in life.
Snyder, in The Tramp in the Classroom, writes, “We all, in one way or
another, can identify with the Tramp. The Chaplin character has been
compared to the Joyce’s Leopold Bloom by Marshall McLuhan, to Falstaff
and Micawber by Robert Warshow and to Hamlet by James Agee.”1

The Advent of The Little Tramp

There is hardly any tale of life that can be narrated without a certain
degree of amalgamation of tears in it. For Charles Spencer Chaplin, life
happens to be funny only in long shots but in close-ups, it has always
been highly unfunny—full of the theme of imprisonment, hunger, and
aggression. This is the reason when asked by Mack Sennett, a Canadian-
American film actor, director, and producer, he decided to dress in
Surya Prakash Verma is a well-read scholar of English literature. Having earned his English honours from the
Department of English, Central University of Jharkhand, India, he completed his M.A. in English literature from
Banaras Hindu University, India. His areas of interest include Silent era of movies, Modern drama, Translation
studies, and Gandhian literature. He has participated and presented papers in several seminars, and published
his article entitled “Gags that teach us to decode life” in the Open page of The Hindu. Currently, he is pursuing
his PhD at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Roorkee, India.
Binod Mishra is an associate professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social sciences, IIT
Roorkee, India. He has published and presented research papers widely. He has edited many books. He has pre-
pared and participated in E-Content Development of Language Learning Programs inducted by Ministry of
Higher Education, Govt. of India. He is vice president of The Indian Journal of English Studies, Association for
English Studies of India.
ß 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 S. P. VERMA AND B. MISHRA

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

The Little Tramp screen-persona supported Chaplin’s philosophy of

“spontaneous actions hitting the truth nine times out of ten” 3 as well as the
idea of representing the comedy of actual life. Chaplin did not believe the
tragedy being high art—the only form of art able to portray the reality of
human life. In his childhood, he wanted to be a tragedian who could bring
people into tears. At the time his elder brother Sydney4 always mocked him
and considered Charlie only a comedian what, eventually, Chaplin became.
Chaplin’s anagnorisis for the misconception that only a tragedian could
bring tears into the eyes of people happened quite early and he, in an inter-
view in 1915 with Victor Eubank, accepted the fact “In human heart, for
some reason or other, there is love of truth. You must give them truth in
comedy.”5 Perhaps there prevailed a part of truth in the mocking of
Sydney for he might have known it for long enough that the truth, even
the deepest one, could be shown in comedy. To bring tears into the eyes of
people tragedy was no longer required. What Chaplin started doing after
this realization was quite contrary. Since tears demanded only truth and
truth can be depicted in comedy, comedy became Chaplin’s high art and
The Little Tramp his mouthpiece.
With the creation of the character in which we find a funny man embedded
within a gentleman, Chaplin ventured against the established norms where a
gentleman could only be a serious person with all the manners. The gentleman
of Chaplin reminiscences The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La
Mancha.6 A gentleman’s identity becomes synonymous to the means of
Chaplin “of contriving comedy plot was simple. It was the process of getting
people in and out of trouble.”7 The identity was always at stake with a complete
paradoxical state, at the same time the appearance always commensurates the
ways of a gentleman without the slightest amount of irony involved in it. The
intent for a gentleman like appearance of The Little Tramp can be best under-
stood in The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin of Dan Kamin:
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 3

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 Little Tramp in the World of Little Narratives

The Little Tramp expresses its reliability for the “incredulity toward meta-
narratives”10 that were unquestionable in all conditions. The milieu of our
Little Tramp does not appear to be a space where we give importance to
any institution only for the sake of Grand narratives.11 The setting of
Chaplin’s movies really made people “see things that don’t exist.”12 This
particular milieu is always set out to question the dominance of objective
notions of finding meanings. In the world of The Little Tramp, even the
situation where to laugh becomes questionable. We can laugh at the ges-
tures of the little gentleman. But at the same time when we realize that
these gestures were the only possible wise response to the life he is living
in, and his world stands equal to our world, there comes a feeling of guilt
upon us as if we have laughed at not something funny but at something
that was worth crying a thousand times over. The necessity to learn from
The Little Tramp in the present times marks the death of any claim like
that of Alan Kirby makes. Stuart Sim quotes from Kirby’s The Death of
Postmodernism and Beyond “postmodernism is dead … and buried.”13
Here Stuart Sim stands in stark opposition to Kirby’s remark. Sim disre-
gards the anatomy of extracting saturation only by serving any institution
that is greater than us. He does not seem to be defying Chaplin’s analogy
of deriving indemnification from active interaction with small things. Every
time we watch a movie related to the Tramp, we come by energy to fight
against all our troubles. Since the Tramp always remains active regardless
of his harsh surroundings, we also, with a postmodern purpose, get inspir-
ation to fare forward—not to achieve any grand goal, but to walk on a
path with courage. Jean Francois Lyotard’s concept of little narratives14
seems to be the most applicable at the point: with a contradiction to the
destinations of metanarratives, little narrative seeks to achieve only short
4 S. P. VERMA AND B. MISHRA

terms objectives—interested in making dots and barely worried about con-

necting them. All moves of the Tramp teach us an ever-active reaction
against all our situations. Even if the meaning is lost in the postmodern
world; the hunt for its search continues in the forms of ways of survival.
To seek for meaning is to survive. While “The postmodern is still with us
in the twenty-first century, a positive aspect of our culture that deserves
our support” and “We set out therefore to define and defend the postmod-
ernism,”15 we need to follow The Little Tramp more than ever. When The
Little Tramp interacts with the small things, he becomes a carrier of little
narratives. As little narratives long for no destination, the Tramp’s journey
becomes his destination. Charles Silver in his book Charles Chaplin: An
Appreciation depicts how we are incapable of achieving any goal. It
reminds me of one of my post-graduation days at Banaras Hindu
University. Since it was the time of examinations, very few attended the
classes. But one day none, except me, turned out to the class in which we
were taught The Countess Cathleen written by William Butler Yeats. My
teacher had been criticizing the characters of Sheamus and Teig16 open
handedly throughout all his previous classes on the ground of them being
followers of bohemian17 lifestyle. That day when he gave me the opportun-
ity to ask questions, I refuted his ideas on the basis of the question of sur-
vival only then he revealed what otherwise would remain encrypted: he was
explaining everything in the context of the nineteenth-century Christian
notion of morality. He was serving the purpose of a greater institution
ignoring the verity of hunger being strong enough to overpower the slip-
pery concept of morality. These two characters were following the art of
survival in the darkest time. We should embrace the postmodern condition
open-handedly and seek for our survival even in the times when to be alive
becomes almost impossible. It is not always that human beings find them-
selves superior to other creatures but there are times when they do feel like
Faustus18 of Christopher Marlowe, not even being able to identify himself
with animals—“O soul, be chang’d into small water-drops, And fall into
the ocean, ne’er be found!”19 Silver seems to be carrying similar notion
when he writes the following lines about the vulnerability of human beings:
We are in many ways the weakest and vulnerable of many species, and The Circus
contains repeated insinuations of inferiority of humans to their animal captives,
Human dignity (mostly Charlie’s) is subjected to a variety of assaults at the hands, or
rather hooves and paws, of an ornery mule, a rebellious horse, a sleepy lion, a yappy
dog, wiggly worms, assorted ducks, pigs and rabbits, and of course the monkeys.20

A circus happens to be a space where animals and people interact for a

similar purpose—to entertain the audience. It is in the time of this inter-
action that we arrive at the moment of realization that The Little Tramp is
not able to identify himself with the monkeys. The Little Tramp of Charlie
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 5

Chaplin here reminds us of Eugene O’Neill’s (1888–1953), later to be his

father-in-law, character of Yank in The Hairy Ape (1922) where the Yank
retires into the company of animals only to be defeated by an ape. In The
Circus Chaplin portrays the helplessness of human beings. Throughout the
movie, human beings remain in chaos while the animals sleep—in the case
of the lion, and run—in the case of the mule, with full freedom. The set-
tings of the movies related to The Little Tramp that I have taken for my
argument comprise such setbacks of human beings. When we come to
know that the problem is not in the freedom to make choices but it is with
the choice itself. Every choice we go with turns out to be inferring equally
unfavorable consequences in regard to being able to serve the objectives of
grand narratives. It is only through a continuous struggle with whatever
choice we make that we can survive. Therefore, the response of The Little
Tramp, resultant of his interaction with small things, happens to be an
interesting enigma that, if cannot be decoded, is worth-discussing.

Chaplin’s Interaction with the Small Things

The Little Tramp appears to be well adept in following the notion of little
narratives for the sake of survival. In the very beginning scene of The
Tramp, Chaplin, in the incarnation of Little Tramp, is found approaching
toward the camera, or to the crowd from an unknown land in which he is
going to vanish at the end of the movie. He encounters a car, the very first
big thing, coming toward him with impossible speed, and it hampers his
space—the freedom to walk. The car hits him from the backside and as he
tries to get up, it hits him again coming from the other side. He gets two
hits in a couple of moments as if the wheels were designed only to warn
him against what the world has to offer him. He falls down, gets up, and
falls down again. The scene also relates to the real-life of Charlie Chaplin
who was famous for mocking the car company’s concept of promotion. In
order to increase the sell, the company agent would request Chaplin to
buy the cars whenever they would launch a new one. Chaplin despised the
conviction of car ownership.
No, I don’t own a car. I rent one when I need it. When I was over at the Keystone, I
bought a car. The first day I ran it it went on a gasoline jag. First it playfully
climbed a telephone pole, then it bit me when I tried to fix the speedometer, and
lastly, when I got out and tried to pry the darn thing loose from a house it had run
into, it jammed me up against a wall and would not let me go.21

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

In the postmodern world since there is no meaning but only deconstruc-

tion of meanings. Therefore, it would be an injustice to find out the mean-
ing in falling and rising—and these are literal falls and rises in the life of
someone who represents the best response to this kind of life—sometimes
it is entertainment and at others, it results in pain and tears.
The Tramp makes a bill for what Mr. Stout had eaten in the opening
scene of The Rink. Being an incarnation of a man belonging to an era of
fragmented memory, he doesn’t remember what he had served to Stout.
But again, he trusts things more than human beings and writes—spaghetti,
coffee, and other foods by touching whatever shares of the food had
dropped on the body of Mr. Stout. (1916, 00:01:48) In another scene of the
movie, he sharpens a knife before cutting a piece of meat and tests the
sharpness of the knife by cutting one of his hair just after uprooting it
from his head. The philosophy of Chaplin that is to trust in the small and
inanimate things more than human beings is not to show scorn for human
beings but it happens to be an alternative of living life when all the rela-
tionships are failing and the language that is spoken becomes problem-
atic—no signified happens to be the last and unquestionable but every
signified refers to some other signified.
Likewise, in The Gold Rush, The Lone Prospector, the exclusive name of
The Little Tramp, portrays one more such example when he cooks one of
his boots as the thanksgiving dinner. The prospector and Big Jim, in the
quest of the Alaskan gold rush, are lost in some blizzard-stricken land, and
starve unless The Little Tramp comes with the idea which follows the
8 S. P. VERMA AND B. MISHRA

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

Silver, in the afore-quoted passage, suggests that Chaplin was putting

himself, repeatedly, in the catastrophic end while responding always in the
wisest possible way because he wanted to offer with the solution to the suf-
fering humanity against this dimension of life. The setting has a connota-
tion of absurdity and happens to be representative of the surroundings in
plays related to the theater of the absurd as Martin Esslin describes it in
The Theater of the Absurd.
A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But
in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger.
His is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland
as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man
and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity.30
 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 9

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

It is not because of following his intellect and logic—that we think plays a

great role in shaping our life but the coincidences play a prominent role in
the situational success of The Little Tramp. The Lone Prospector becomes a
grand success but it eventuates only because he pursues his instinct and sur-
renders to fate. Therefore, there is no place for Laputian32 logic in chaplin-
esque space. The moment The Little Tramp discovers that he is going to be a
hustle in the lives of others, he announces his departure and this is what he
does in both the movies—The Tramp and The Circus. While his sudden
announcements to leave the crowd happens to be manifestation of possibilities
in the life—not to live a life with all establishments but with the courage to
leave it for other possibilities, his feeling satisfaction that comes out of—eating
shoes in The Gold Rush, removing dust from his derby hat in The Tramp and
testing the sharpness of a knife by cutting one of his hair after uprooting it
from his head hair in The Rink, teaches human beings to be hopeful, despite
the lack of happiness and meaning in our life, by retiring ourselves in the
works that have no meanings. Nell Hurley in his article The Social Philosophy
of Charlie Chaplin portrays Chaplin’s philosophy as follows:
A child of poverty with a Hebraic sense of mission, Chaplin has not only pushed
cinematic art to exalted heights but he has given witness to the utopistic hope of a
social order in which the individual will not surrender his dignity in the face of
wealth, social status, mechanization, totalitarianism or an enervating form of
democracy. The ‘Little Tramp’ has been for those condemned to a life of quiet
desperation a ‘pillar of fire’ in the darkness of industrial society.33
10 S. P. VERMA AND B. MISHRA

Chaplin’s Choice Amongst Existentialism, Nihilism, and Absurdism

An existentialist always tries to derive something meaningful—an act that
could add meaning to their existence, regarding the responsibility of freedom
s/he has been given. Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand in case of an
existentialist—freedom to make choice and then a process to derive meaning
in the choice made. Chaplin never preached in favor of the philosophy of exist-
entialism, he understood the limitation of human efforts and contribution of
coincidence in any effort resulting in meaningful action. Not to mention this
situational meaning would be lost if trying to fit it in some long project. The
action in the world of The Little Tramp is meant to keep people busy. The free-
dom to make choices is not a privileged situation to derive meaning in an
absurdist’s world. The Spanish film El Hoyo Trimagasi tells his cellmate En el
hoyo, cada uno es muy libre de decider lo que quiera34 (Trimagasi 00:20:43). But
he knows that going upside was impossible. The theme of perpetual imprison-
ment is almost the same in the case of The Little Tramp’s milieu. Unlike a
nihilist who would have chosen to despise after the revelation of the truth of
choice-making, Chaplin’s philosophy follows an absurdist temperament which
allows us to perform our actions unconcerned about the meaning and con-
demns: “a cosmos where humans were held responsible for their actions or the
result of their actions. All such notions,” says Chaplin “are absurd, antiquated,
and unfair to humanity.”35 The Little Tramp impersonates Chaplin’s credo of:
What is the purpose of existence? I don’t know. I accept it as it is. After all, what is
value of putting such queries to one’s self? It’s enough that we’re here, that all that
has gone before has led up to ourselves. What does it matter what comes tomorrow?
So far as we’re concerned, we’re the crown of the ages. Each one can consider
oneself the perfect fruit toward which evolution has been working. We’re in this
world to live—that’s enough.36

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

26. Carr, “Chaplin Explains Chaplin,” 87.

27. Our way of thinking affects the existence of things for us.
28. Derived from Sisyphean condition in The Myth of Sisyphus wherein ‘One must
imagine Sisyphus happy.’
29. Silver, “Charles Chaplin: An Appreciation,” 25.
30. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 18.
31. Vance, “The Circus: A Chaplin Masterpiece,” 195.
32. Related to the people of Laputa, a fictional place in The Gulliver’s Travels of Jonathan
swift, where people were obsessed with the theoretical knowledge and logic while
incompatible with their practical life.
33. Hurley, “The Social Philosophy of Charlie Chaplin,” 320.
34. Trimagasi explains to Goreng the nature of freedom in the hole—In the hole,
everyone is free to decide what they want(translation).
35. Berthon, “Absolutely, Mr. Chaplin!” 69.
36. Vreeland, “Charlie Chaplin, Philosopher, Has Serious Side,” 55.
37.  zek, Zizek’s Jokes, 52.
Zi

ORCID
Surya P. Verma http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0059-4713

Works Cited
Berthon, T. “Absolutely, Mr. Chaplin! Positively, Mr. Freud!: Psychoanalysis Comes to the
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
University Press, 2005.
Lyotard, J. F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated
by G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1984.
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Marlowe, C. Doctor Faustus (2nd ed., edited by M. Keefer). Peterborough, Ontario,

Canada. 2007.
Movie zone. The Circus [Video]. YouTube, 2016. www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Mg8y6NyE1oE&t=2239s
SEPL Vintage. The Rink [Video]. YouTube, 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eelQxCpLa4
Silver, C. “Charles Chaplin: An Appreciation.” The Museum of Modern Art, 1989. https://
www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2136_300062892.pdf
Sim, S. “The Modern, the Postmodern and the Post-Postmodern.” In The Routledge
Companion to Postmodernism, 3rd ed., edited by S. Sim, vii–xiv. New York: Routledge,
2011.
Snyder, J. “The Tramp in the Classroom.” The English Journal 62, no. 5 (1973):
746–753 þ 830. www.jstor.org/stable/814287. doi:10.2307/814287
Stassi, F. Charlie Chaplin’s Last Dance. Translated by S. Twilley. London: Portobello Books;
Google Books, 2014. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=3zgoAwAAQBAJ&hl=en&
pg=GBS.PT2.
Urrutia, G, dir. El Hoyo [The Platform] [Film]. Netflix, 2020. https://www.netflix.com/
watch/81128579?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2C33168ce3bb97a2f227062287d3ef8e
b03403c75d%3A792b11bc25fa8ac8d4d7e2996736db401b61c041%2C%2C
Vance, J. “The Circus: A Chaplin Masterpiece.” Film History 8, no. 2 (1996): 186–208.
Vreeland, F. “Charlie Chaplin, Philosopher, Has Serious Side.” In Charlie Chaplin
Interviews, edited by K. J. Hayes, 51–63. Jackson, MS: Mississippi University Press, 2005.
Weissman, S. M. D. Chaplin: A Life. New York, NY: Arcade Publishing, 2011.
 zek, S. Zizek’s Jokes. Edited by A. Mortensen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. https://
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libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=EE7C59D5F29B06DF463BB84BA0ABE9C9.

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)

The Rink (1916)

Mutual
Director/Producer: Chaplin
Cinematography: Roland Totheroh
Scenarist: Chaplin
Cast: Chaplin (Waiter and Skating Enthusiast), Edna Purviance (Society Girl), James T.
Kelley (Her Father) (Hayes, Filmography xxxiv)

The Gold Rush (1925)

United Artists
Director/Producer: Chaplin
Cinematography: Roland Totheroh
Scenarist: Chaplin
Cast: Chaplin (Lone Prospector), Georgia Hale (Georgia), Mack Swain (Big Jim McKay),
Tom Murray (Black Larson) (—Filmography xxxviii)
 14 S. P. VERMA AND B. MISHRA

The Circus (1928)

United Artists
Director/Producer: Chaplin
Cinematography: Roland Totheroh
Scenarist: Chaplin
Editor: Chaplin
Cast: Chaplin (Tramp), Merna Kennedy (Equestrienne), Alan Garcia (Circus Proprieter),
Harry Crocker (Rex, the High Wire Walker), Henry Bergman (The Old Clown)
(Filmography xxxviii)

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