I remember going apeshit over the misadventures of Amelia
Bedelia. When I was 6, there were very few things funnier than this crazy bitch
who, when asked to bake a date cake, literally chopped up a calendar and put it in the oven. Or when asked to
“dust the furniture”, covers every movable in the house with a thick layer of schmutz.
Amelia taught me that there weren’t only two ways to do things i.e. the right
way and the wrong way. Amelia taught me my first lesson in dialectics: that if
one did the wrong way wrongly enough,
it was better, so much better, than the quotidian “right way” ever could be.
What is the psychological make-up of a dialectical genius? Amelia
is perhaps more cunning than we give her credit for. On the surface she appears
like the most vile caricature of a Victorian colonial (she is actually in
Cameroon-a fact I never noticed as a child) and worse, a working class hausfrau
– stupid, uneducated, hasty, and glass-eyed.
But what if this was all a pose? Or even better, a strategic position designed
to subvert and undermine the petty bourgeois who exploit her gender and class?
In 1922 the Czech Anarcho-Bolshevik Jaroslav Hasek wrote The Good Soldier Svejk – a comic novel
about the misadaventures of a bumbling Bohemian soldier serving in the
Austro-Hungarian army during WWI. To surface observers Svejk is merely a comic
oaf, but discerning readers have always noted the anarchistic and dissident
undertones of his character. Much like Bedelia, Svejk carries out the orders of
his superiors with a degree of literalness crossing over insanity into straight
subversion or even mutiny – no matter how simple the order, he always manages
to overdo it by following the exact wording, instead of the spirit, of the injunction.
Thus Svejk, when commanded to deliver a message transmitted
by his foul-mouthed commander, includes the insults and swear words directed at
him as a literal part of the message. Or when asked to retrieve a black market
bottle of cognac for his commanding lieutenant “without being detected” manages
to drink the whole bottle himself to avoid detection by a nosy officer on
patrol. But, as always, when Svejk is
about to be reprimanded, the disciplinary authority catches a glimpse of his
“simple, honest face” and loses all composure. Much like Amelia Bedelia’s pies,
Svejk’s honest, salt-of-the-earth “good soldier” pose is what saves him from
rebuke. There is something inhuman, or perhaps post-human, in Svejk and in
Amelia – is he just a cunning man of the people, or just a well-intentioned
idiot? Does he represent the Brechtian adage, that “he who fights for communism
has but one of all the virtues: that he fights for communism”?
Communists have long admired the Svejkian tactic of
resistance. Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht drew directly on the selfish
proletarian anti-hero in the figures of Herr Keuner, Azdak, Lao Tze etc.
Instead of confronting injustice directly and bluntly, which only serves to
prolong the cycle of exploitation by sublating the supposed resisters into the very
structure of exploitation, the Svejkian hero resists precisely by complying. This dialectical form of
resistance ultimately proves to be the most subversive, undermining the command
and the system from the inside.
Is this what Bedelia is up to as well? How can we dare to
argue this about one of the English speaking world’s favourite children’s characters?
One must always be prepared to read beyond the assertions of the author or the
norms genre. The French literary critic and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard teaches
us in his many books of “detective criticism” that one cannot ever trust the
intention of the author with regards to his characters – literary characters
have a life of their own, and may know things their authors do not about
themselves. Bayard is thus unequivocally able to assert that Sherlock Holmes
was wrong about the Baskerville case, and that Arthur Conan Doyle himself was
duped by his own literary creation.
In this light, the happy-go-lucky stupidity of Amelia
Bedelia becomes a conscious social position. The feasibility of Amelia’s
“stupidity” becomes less and less likely the more we examine the brilliance of
her fuck-ups. Such
mistakes are all but impossible to make in the common realm of discourse. The
everyday man does not just learn disconnected words and actions – he is taught
to obey an overarching superstructure of norms and associated behaviours and
phrases that follow one another as a matter of course. He has no business
analyzing the discourse of meaning in smaller fragments – such is the work of
high culture, the war against cliché that distinguishes the fine arts. When
Amelia steps out of the world of everyday meaning and into the strange realm of
puns and literal mistakes that she continues to operate in, she is working in
the world of the poet or literary genius, not the everyday schlub.
Of course the question of Amelia as a female Svejk adds even further potential for subversion. Instead of
the liberated feminist who serves as such an easy target for the Tea Party
conservatives of the world, the Bedelia-phenomenon undermines their position
from within with a Palin-like elegance. Amelia Bedelia does what a woman in her
position “ought to do” – she complies to the letter with every assumption deems
to make about the hausfrau – a stupid bumbling idiot who cannot be trusted, but
whom we secretly expect to be efficient and cunning. Amelia obliges us further
by overidentifying with the male injunctions of identity, like Sartre and De
Beauvoir’s waiter of bad conscience:
Let us consider this waiter in
the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too
rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends
forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little
too solicitous for the order of the customer… All his behavior seems to us a
game… He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not
watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe.
There is nothing there to surprise us. The game is a kind of marking out and
investigation. The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take
inventory of it; the waiter in the cafe plays with his condition in order to
realize it.
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