Six Heroes
why then does harlequin dress in fabrics that are mixed, speckled, mottled, striped…? From having imitated everyone and his masters, he has taken on their forms and colors. The thickness, in depth, of his clothes and the superficial mosaic of his cloak give some idea of the immense corporal memory. Conversely, Pierrot’s white lets its light transparency be seen. When he undresses, Harlequin remembers, by recreating them, the gestures (of persons, in the sense of masks or disguises) stored by the corporal schema. Always still dressed, never naked, he can’t get to the bottom of his memory, down to the total and first oblivion. But when Archimedes surged naked from the bath in which he discovered the force that makes us float, he inverts Harlequin, overdressed, the way invention is opposed to memory.
The slavery which set him traveling through the entire body social and taught him, a serf, to counsel princes; the successive sales and his various masters, which set him wandering here and there, wherever shipwrecks might carry him, to know the world and human beings; his earthy and wise language, which made him understood by all, as though he spoke in several tongues; but above all his body’s misshapen, potent, simian, hunchbacked and theatrical ugliness; in sum, the adventures of his life made Aesop the perfect paradigm for his own Fables and for ours, because this man, said to be the primal father of the fabulous, belongs to it rather, as model, vignette, illustration or, better still, the basic soil, as though the Fables related in detail the currency of his body. The Life of Aesop, that’s the title of the founding apologue every fabulist must write; as if this canonical man’s body and language imitated the bodies and language of animals, plants, mountains, kings and cobblers. The fables’ corpus relates Aesop’s body in detail.
How is Aesop’s body able to project itself so easily into every species? Victor Hugo gave one of his main characters, who resembled the fabulist, a nickname which summarizes my words, Quasimodo, a name that means “as if”: like animals, like other men and things, by taking their place, by substituting oneself for them, by acting like them, by portraying them and simulating them. Deformed, the bell ringer’s body appears monstrous because it can take on a thousand forms. These mimetic gymnastics explain fables, stories and theater, totems and fetishes, but dive, deeper still, into the acquisition of knowledge. They no doubt even transcend cultural barriers, like a common corpus. No doubt universal, at least fundamental, in every way transcendental, this body shows the sum of our bodies and also the well that archaic knowledge comes out of, brought up from the bottom of the ages by fables. As ugly, in sum, as Aesop and Quasimodo, lastly we have Socrates, a scholar without writing, reciting fables before dying and whose wisdom Plato deciphers on the teaching body.