Charlie Chaplin & the Little Tramp Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Charlie Chaplin & the Little Tramp - Essay ExampleSusan Beegel has recently offered the intriguing speculation that the character f Manuel Garcia was based partially on the nineteenth-century matador Manuel Garcia El Espartero. (Beegel 12-23) Hemingways article in the Toronto Star Weekly (October 17, 1923) continues to suggest, however, that the character in question was inspired largely by Manuel Garcia Lopez, called Maera, and his chaotic corrida at Pamplona in July 1923. Hemingway was a comparatively inexperienced spectator when he wrote the article for the Toronto Star Weekly. In fact, he had never seen a bullfight until earlier that spring, and the title f the article, World Series f Bullfighting a Mad, Whirling Carnival, (White 99-108) characterizes his rather unsubtle reply to what he saw. By contrast, in the so-called miniature that he wrote about the fictionalized expiry f Maera-shortly after seeing the fight-Hemingways tone is, despite the subject matter, coldly, if not grotesquely, ironic.Although he had completed a draft f the miniature by late July, he apparently revised it in response to Ezra Pounds comments, because he wrote Pound that he had redone the death f Maera altogether different.... The new death is good. (Baker 91)Although Hemingway is not, ... Indeed, the potential japery f Maeras cinematic death was not lost on Scott Fitzgerald, who parodied the miniature in a garner to Hemingway in the fall f 1926, a year after the miniature appeared as Chapter XIV f In Our Time The King f Bulgaria began to whirl round and round.... Soon he was whirling hurried and faster. Then he was dead. By the time Fitzgerald wrote him, however, Hemingway had long since moved from comparability Maeras death (in the miniature) to a sped-up film, to comparing Manuel Garcias bullfight (in The Undefeated) to a pratfall concert dance which echoed not just Maeras bullfight at Pamplona in 1923 exclusively the antics f Chaplins comic nates, little Charlie. Comic bullfights featuring clowns dressed like Chaplins little tramp were very normal in Spain and France in the Twenties and Thirties. (Campbell 42) And perhaps Hemingway was influenced solely by having seen a bullfight involving Charlie Chaplins, as he calls them in The Undefeated. But there is a good possibility that he was inspired to employ the tramp as an analogue in The Undefeated by a conversation he had with Fitzgeralds close patron Edmund Wilson, who had written what he called a great super-ballet f New York for the Swedish Ballet--a pantomime explained by characterization captions and with a section f movie film in the middle, for which Ornstein is composing the music and in which we commit to get Chaplin to act. (Wilson 117) Hemingway had first met Wilson in New York, in January 1924 (see Selected Letters, 103, Notes) and apparently learned about the projected ballet at this time. On October 18, 1924, a month before he completed The Undefeated (see Selected Letters, 133), originally empower The Bullfighters,