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also evolutionary in outlook. This is especially true of the most popular of
the pragmatists, William James and John Dewey. Under their aegis the dom-
inance of evolutionary metaphors continued. For example, in discussing
knowledge, Dewey wrote that it
may be termed pragmatic. Its essential feature is to maintain continuity of know-
ing with an activity which purposively modifies the environment. It holds that
knowledge in its strict sense of something possessed consists of our intellec-
tual resources  of all the habits that render our action intelligent. Only that
which has been organized into our dispositions so as to enable us to adapt the
environment to our needs, and to adapt our aims and desires to the situation
in which we live is really knowledge.24
The above passage explicitly links intelligence and adaptability. That linkage
was a natural one in a milieu which relied as heavily as the American scene
did on metaphors derived from evolution. Thus, it seems completely reasonable
to believe that Keaton came to the theme of adaptability as the characteris-
tic feature of intelligence, and as a possible topic of his comedy, through a
process of osmosis facilitated by the broad publicity of evolutionary notions
and idioms in American society.
Adaptability in Keaton s Other Films
One way to establish that we are onto something central to Keaton in The
General is to see if it is also applicable to other key Keaton works. One famous
Keaton gag that the theme of adaptability seems to explain quite well is the
famous projection sequence in Sherlock Jr. Here, the Keaton character,
Sherlock Jr., walks into a scene being projected on a motion picture screen,
thus entering a film within the larger film. As Sherlock Jr. goes up to a door
of a house in the film within the film, the scene shifts. What is odd about
this cut, however, is that the character remains in the exact same screen posi-
tion as he previously occupied. From the shot of the character before the
door, we cut to a garden.
Themes of The General 49
Sherlock begins to sit on a bench in the garden. There is another cut, this
time to a city street. Sherlock s position and movement remain constant even
though the locales of the shots change. He falls backwards into a busy street.
Then, he stands up and begins to walk down the street. All of a sudden there
is a cut and Sherlock nearly falls off a cliff. He looks over the cliff, sticking
his neck out. There is another cut; he s in a cage, his head precariously stuck
in a lion s maw. He backs away from the lion. Cut  he s in a desert. A train
just misses him. When he sits down, the location changes to a rock surrounded
by water. He dives off the rock, but a devilishly placed cut lands him head-
first in a snow bank. Standing upright, he reaches out to lean against a tree.
In another cut, he s back in the original garden, falling on his head because
the tree he thought was next to him is gone.
The above sequence seems a virtual testimony to the theme of automatism
and maladaptation. Perhaps, the most often invoked example of poor adapt-
ability in the whole evolutionary bestiary is the dinosaur. That dimwitted
beast, though perfectly suited to tropical climates, could not survive the
rigors of the ice age. The environment changed on him when he wasn t
looking. The environment changing is also the key to the automatism/
inattention gags. There is hardly a more radical series of environmental changes
in all of Keaton than one finds in this sequence of Sherlock Jr. Via incredibly
precisioned technique, Keaton is able to draw an image of a character
maintaining a set of behaviors appropriate to one place into another place
without modifying that behavior. In some ways, this sequence in Sherlock Jr.
is the most abstract and symbolic device in all of Keaton, summarizing, as
it does, in almost allegorical fashion, Keaton s whole concern with unadapt-
ability by setting out the changes in the environment in the most hyperbolic
way imaginable. We might also add that the sequence could as well be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]