This Page Intentionally Left Blank: Charles Mingus' "The Clown"
Originally published to Reliquary Street Station. Contains discussion of clowns, literary suicide, and literary self-harm.
Charles Mingus -- "The Clown"
(Full album)
Let me tell you a story about my childhood. (Or, to quote the song I'll be discussing: "Lemme tell you about this clown.") For my ninth birthday, let's say, my parents hosted a board game themed party. They set up my favorites at the time: Risk, chess, Monopoly with index cards nearby to help houserule it. Of course, they weren't bothered at all when the natural course of the party was playing pretend in some non-board-game-centered way, running around pretending we were spies or knights or something. And yet it tore me to shreds when Tori's mom arrived and exclaimed that nobody had even touched the board games! I broke. I felt an absolutely crushing moral obligation to make use of the toys that were put out for me, to entertain those who were trying to entertain me. That guilt doesn't even square well with my values! I'm ashamed of it, really! And yet here we are. (Really this should count as an autism diagnosis, but that's another story.)
Charles Mingus' "The Clown" is a stab at that obligation to the signifiers of childhood. Briefly, it's a song about a clown that becomes depressed because the things that aesthetically symbolize childlike joy-- clapping seals, plastic bugles-- don't spark that joy. Or, more accurately, in his line of work he can spark that joy with them only when they're defiled. "All he wanted was to make those people laugh," says the song-- but one wonders whether what he really wants is a natural order where the ephemera of clowning are entertaining. The audience only responds when the seal gets sick, or when the clown stumbles over his ladder and falls flat on his face, getting a bloody nose. The clown's reactions to this are our first hint at how evasive the song is-- we never get words like "guilt" or "depression" that would let us pin down linguistically how the clown is feeling. Nevertheless, it's clear that the clown goes from well to unwell-- his mood is described in colors, once-bright yellows and greens dulling and graying. And as this happens, the music switches between cacophony and a repeated motif in a way that emulates snapping in and out of disassociation.
The clown's act quickly gains the undertones of self-flagellation, since the crowd responds uproariously to him falling on the floor and getting a bloody nose. The clown buys football pads, a tacit admission that he'll be scraping his knees intentionally during the act. This causes him both physical pain and a sickness indicating misalignment with his values. Suffice it to say, endurance art can't survive the tendency of money to penetrate the bubble of consent. The clown's act begins with a "B-flat Sears Roebuck Model 1322 A plastic bugle"; in the service of self-flagellation he gets a "yellow helmet with red stripes". Contrast those details. One implies care, artistic intent; the other is phenotype, what the audience sees. Inauthenticity and self-flagellation-as-performance are inseparable-- and the performances are getting bigger and bigger, building up to something.
The original climax of the song, I've learned from the YouTube comments, has the clown blow his brains out from within kayfabe, the audience laughing. When I first learned about this, I thought Mingus had sanded down the rough edges of the song. In the published version, a rope snaps and "down came the backdrop, right on the back of the neck / and he went flat / and something broke". This is a more open-ended take. Is the rope snapping the Monkey's Paw curling, the wish getting granted, or was it calculated? Or was it a lack of care, a statement supported thematically by the parallel between self-harm and lack of care in every other aspect of the song? In any case, is the effect indeed death, or does the echolalic repeating of "He really knew!" imply a life rebuilt around regret in some other way? This leaves more to the imagination, but at the time I thought it was unnecessary. I doubted that any possible imagined world would be as effective as just describing suicide, specifically because it's so often alluded to or euphemized in art. Don't pull your punches, I thought. Stop being evasive for the sake of it.
It's scary for art to be evasive. The retroclone Fantastic Medieval Campaigns ends with a pageful talking about the settler-colonial reactionary origins of dungeon crawlers, asking the reader not to "delude [themselves] with regards to its content or the fantasy it encodes". We might assume that this is the straightforwardly the worldview of the text, especially if we know the author Marcia is herself antifascist. But it's not quite so simple. See, the essay is printed in light gray, much less legible than the rest of the text has been. And her mini-essay has been completely overshadowed by five bold, black words: "THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK".
It would be soothing to have a simple answer. I'm just on this page, I might say, to figure out whether I'm replicating settler-colonialism with tieflings, and whether that's bad! Alas, the questions we have to grapple with are more complicated. Does the page being "intentionally blank" imply that the text is a secondary voice reviewing the text unfavorably, being silenced? A worldview the author has, but is superficially "blanking" to remain faithful to the original text? Or is it a straightforward dismissal? Perhaps the dimness of the essay lampshades that it is a concession-- perhaps she knows her audience yearns for a "safer" game whose rules forbid play-acting colonialism, rather than trusting the players to make moral decisions given the option not to. Or is it a screen into her own discomfort? It could be that the "fruitful void" of the game qua reading-of-game-text is to fill in this "blankened" page in our own words. I think, intentionally or not, Marcia took a leap of faith by using such a murky metaphor, and made uncomfortable art that demands we parse it before deciding what it says and whether we like it. I can admit I've read texts specifically to extract evidence post hoc that a book does or does not miss the mark. But FMC doesn't want that for us. Some assembly required.
"The Clown" is the same way. Instead of "THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK", the narrator enumerates the performance halls that our (probably late?) clown has been invited to, and then opaquely repeats that now "he really knew!". This laundry list tells us only what was foreshadowed-- that the clown would be rewarded for listening to the yucky colors telling him to drop heavy objects on his head. If the ending were the one with the gun, if we saw the intent, initiation, execution, and effect of the clown killing himself, the resolution would be tidy. Still sad, still affecting-- but something of a parable that's more fun to step out of than step into. We would have the liberty to judge the story by a simple summary-- "A clown changes his act into a form of self-harm, leading him to kill himself"-- and elide some processing of the details of the artwork. We might criticize the artwork from atop a high level of abstraction, critiquing an argument implied from the plot without interfacing with the song itself. But with the ending as-is, this is harder. "A clown changes his act to become self-flagellating and cruel, and ultimately a backdrop falls on him and he probably dies but the exact causation isn't clear"-- we can't express the plot as a complex sentence using only causation conjunctions anymore. We cannot see the song lyrics from a bird's eye view; we can only descend into them.
Artists often compliment art for being open to interpretation, but rarely do they truly dig into whether and why open-endedness is an unalloyed virtue. For better or for worse, open-ended art is easier to subsume into a pre-existing worldview. The ending of The Giver is ambiguous, giving the reader power, but it's also a bit of a personality test. "Does Jonas live, or is his narration unreliable?" is an interesting question, but in my experience the conversation tends to use only cursory details about Jonas. You could plug your ears and pretend the question was "Are you an optimist or pessimist about the human capacity to refuse corruption?", and you could hold your own in a discussion. With this sort of ambiguity, you lose the ability to close-read for the truth-- but you gain an interesting, timeless question that transcends the text, yet is made forever exigent by it. Judging by the reception of The Giver in the average American school district, some people think this is a vital way to interface with art; it's not my cup of tea.
"The Clown" is ambiguous to a different effect. Sure, "Does the clown die, and if so how?" is a question whose answer depends on the answerer's worldview, but it's not quite so straightforward an allegory. If you're rotating the ambiguity in your mind, it's in relation to deciphering the rest of the text-- what does "He really knew!" mean, why was the last time "bigger than Dubuque!", how true is the text's assertion that the clown "just wanted to make people laugh"? You could criticize this process as puzzleboxy, I suppose, but it's hard to imagine a sense of completeness at any point, or even much confidence.
If anything, "The Clown" is affecting because it is too much a fractal, a hydra. One head is cut, and two smaller ones grow. And if you try to cauterize the wound, to burn away the ability to regenerate, you're left wanting. The beast is too evasive.