Those Who Knew Them: Marcel Marceau 1923-2007

It is our sad duty to present the following (tragically not silent) tribute to world-renowned mime, Marcel Marceau, by his close friend, Jacques Derigueur - author of The Disreality of 1968 (1967-69), Is This Really a Book? And if so Why? and Jerry Lewis - Clown, Meta-Clown or Semiotic Signifier?

The world has fallen into a silence from which it cannot escape. My friend, my intellectual sparring partner, Marcel Marceau, is dead - dying, as he lived his life, silently. Now he is trapped for all eternity in a box which only he can see. In this, as in all that he did, he provides a perfect metaphor for all our lives.

It was in 1946 - that time after and yet somehow before war - that I first encountered Marceau. It was then that he single-handedly (that single hand in a white glove, matching his other single hand in an equally white glove, united and separate at the same time, implicit, yet explicit) dared to save that very ancient (and paradoxically, en même temps, very modern) art of mime from the near-extinction to which the philistine attitudes of the bourgeoisie had condemned it.

And how was he to save this art? He became it! In donning the guise of "Bip" the clown, Marceau became mime and mime became Marceau. Of course there were some - there are always some - who mistook this act. Some said Bip was derived from the "masters" of silent cinema - Chaplin, Keaton, Seagal - but Marcel was ahead of his time, and of his time, and thus, in a hyperreal way, Bip was the progenitor of these pale parvenus who dared to call themselves clowns (and not merely this, with his white pancake make-up, painted eyebrows and rejection of written communication as an art form he also anticipated, perhaps created, perhaps even destroyed, the late doyenne of the British literary scene, Dame Barbara Cartland).

Like the silence before le Big Bang, Marceau's mime existed in its very own vacuum ... normally created inside an invisible glass box, a phantom prison that Bip filled with angst and a desperate need for escape, twin sensations his audience understood immediately.

Bip undertook a myriad of exciting adventures - trapped in a glass box, trapped in a glass trunk, trapped in a glass wardrobe. His oeuvre was endlessly reinvented and infinitely repeated - most successfully in his three-hour epic movie, Le Rêve du Bip dans La Vitrerie, which had audiences leaving the cinemas in floods of sympathetic tears as they closely identified with the ennui of late capitalism and found themselves filled with an immediate need for death, or at the very least a stiff drink.

Of course, comme toujours, there were pretenders to the crown: some - Benny Hill, Mr Bean - were great men, others - Jacques Tati - were mere speechless flaneurs. Where Tati posited his comic mishaps in the bourgeois world of postmen and holidays, Marcel's lack of verbiage transcended the quotidian. Bip's silence spoke volumes. Nothing more needs to be said - as I have already explained in my seminal text, Inside the Outside of the Glass Box (Vols. I-XII).

Now after 60 years of saying everything by saying nothing, Bip will say nothing - and everything - no more. Bip is dead. Marceau is dead. Vive le silence!

The As A Dodo editors add: Marcel Marceau will be buried beneath the Eiffel Tower just as soon as the stripy-jumpered pall-bearers have located the invisible handles of his invisible casket. The congregation will walk on the spot into a non-existent gale before mouthing the words of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" and dabbing at imagined tears.

The French Presidential Elections 2007-2007

The As A Dodo Editorial Staff would like to thank noted man of French letters French man of letters Jacques Derigueur for penning the following obituary for this year's French Presidential Elections, which passed away yesterday. Sadly, having read the piece, we feel unable to do so.

Ah oui. Today la belle Marianne, symbol of our great country, lies back in her bed, exhausted, satiated, as she ponders the deep mystery that has passed between her and the French Presidential elections.

Where did it all begin? Let me, like Proust, savour for a moment a tea-soaked morsel of madeleine and be invaded by the sudden pleasure of memory. I can picture the scene even now: it was but a few weeks ago that Marianne found herself in peril. While perfidious John Bull sunned himself in the light of his economic stability, poor Marianne was left to skulk in the shade, afflicted by high unemployment and sporadic rioting, with only the consolation of her appallingly high living standards, her superb health service, her generous pensions, her thriving intellectual culture, her low divorce rate, her good food, her shorter working hours but higher productivity, her still-extant automotive industry, her extensive support for the arts, her excellent education system not yet wholly devoted to utilitarian ends and her football team capable of reaching World Cup Finals.

Can we be surprised that Marianne was feeling a certain ennui? Oh yes, she had a lover, but Jacques Chirac was not the man he once was. No longer was he the smooth-talking former Mayor of Paris with a devilish look in his eye and an impressively large amount of funds in his pocket. Now he was bent by age (not to mention the prospect of some interesting times ahead in the courts to deal with that impressive trouser bulge) and no longer capable of satisfying Marianne's needs. What could she do but look elsewhere?

Soon she found herself being courted day and night by her would-be lovers. Swiftly she rejected the attentions of Jean Marie Le Pen, having tired of his far-right ways (not to mention his chat-up line "Vous avez des origines françaises? Pourquoi pas une descendance français?"⁽¹⁾) during their last dalliance in 2002. Next she refused the protestations of desire from stolid centrist farmer François Bayrou ... largely due to his being so boring that she continually fell asleep while he stolidly made love to her.

And so the people of France waited with bated breath as Marianne was forced to make her choice between her two remaining suitors: the dashing Nicolas Sarkozy, eager to open Marianne's eyes to the dark and sensual pleasures to be found in fiscal fetters and a firm hand, and the striking Ségolène Royal, keen to spend her way to Marianne's heart. In the end there could be only one choice, with Marianne unable to bear the thought of her new love not being able to get half-way through a treaty-signing without all the assembled French men attempting to pinch her bottom, she had no alternative but to turn away from Ms Royal and settle down to make love, tout fou, tout passionné with M. Sarkozy and his mighty water cannon.

And so, my English friends, the deed is done and L'Élection Presidentielle Françaises 2007 have passed away. Marianne has her new lover and only one question yet to decide: who will be doing the screwing and who is about to get screwed?

The As A Dodo Editors add: The French Presidential Elections 2007 passed away on 6 May. They will be buried, along with Jacques Chirac's political career, just as soon as the funeral cortège can make it through the traffic jam at the Arc de Triomphe and the attendees end their strike calling for increased crematorium regulation and a minimum three bottles of 1982 Chateau Lafite per mourner.

⁽¹⁾ "Do you have any French in you? Would you like some?"

Terrorism 1793-2007

We are grateful to a Mr J Reid of the Home Office (of whose passing Mr Reid has already informed us) for alerting the As A Dodo editorial board to the end of Terrorism, which he assures us cannot possibly survive the birth of the Home Office's offspring, The Ministry of Love The Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism.

Terrorism was born in 1793 in France, the younger brother of the famously attractive triplets Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité who at the time were the toast of the land thanks to their stirring performance during the ongoing French Revolution. Though it was later to set out on its own, Terrorism's early years were spent in close proximity to the state, ousting its elder sisters from the national bosom in the hope that false arrests, conviction on the flimsiest of evidence and a surveillance society could be nurtured in their place. Arm in arm with Citizen Robespierre and Madame Guillotine it wandered up and down France, stirring fear in the hearts of all it met and a desire to hide among all it didn't (a role today played by itinerant Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and Chuggers). It was not long, however, before Terrorism (unlike the aforementioned Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and Chuggers) tired of such behaviour.

It was at this time that Terrorism turned to philosophy, just as so many young people in France still do to this day. Thanks to the work of Immanuel Kant, Terrorism came to mean a pessimistic view of the destiny of mankind, in which guise it was swiftly seized upon by anarchists such as Bakhunin as a means of bringing down the state and providing Joseph Conrad with plots, as well as being seized on by the inhabitants of assorted colonial outposts as a means of ridding themselves of their various Imperial oppressors (and in the case of TE Lawrence, a really good excuse for mucking around on camels in a keffiyeh).

Soon Terrorism came to mean the use of the threat of violence to put people in a permanent state of fear, and was distinguishable from the behaviour of parents after catching their offspring playing with matches, really scary teachers discovering that one somehow hasn't quite managed to complete that extra tricky piece of homework they set and Governments eager to pass a few more laws by the fact that the people carrying it out usually had an indifference to the sanctity of human life combined with a different accent and/or political philosophy and/or religion to whoever was calling them "terrorists".

From the latter part of the 20th Century, Terrorism came to be a significant force in global politics, filling millions across the globe with fear, causing the death of thousands upon thousands and inflicting numerous episodes of 24 upon the world. Where once people merely had the prospect of nuclear annihilation to keep them awake at night, now they had the possibility of being shot, gassed tortured or blown up (either by the terorrists or by Jack Bauer) as they went about their daily business to keep them from the arms of Morpheus. Few, apart from some very disturbed people with uniform fetishes and/or a worrying belief that this year's most vital accessory was a semtex bandolier, could be happy about such a situation. Yet not even this was enough for Terrorism which, it turned out, had long regretted its decision to turn away from the ways of its youth and whose attention-seeking and destructive behaviour had merely been an attempt to return to the bosom of the state, where it could go back once more to practices such as placing the populace in a permanent state of fear, imprisoning the citizenry without trial, indulging in constant surveillance of the public at large and abrogating the liberty of the people.

Happily, we are told that Terrorism's time is now over. We are assured by John Reid, the father of The Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, that his new offspring's "faster, brighter and more agile response" to Terrorism gives us the brightest prospect of putting an end to this dreadful scourge... and if that fails it can simply put Terrorism out of business by doing much of its work for it.

Terrorism will be buried in an undisclosed location by men in balaclavas. It is survived by freedom fighters, jihadis, rebel/freedom/liberation movements, militants, fedayeen, guerillas, paramilitaries, mujahadeen, participants in armed struggle and assorted other nutters in quasi-military dress who think the best way of resolving a dispute is to bomb the hell out of something (as opposed to those of the same opinion without balaclavas, who are often in government).

The Slow Train 1825-2007

The Slow Train – the backbone of Britain’s “integrated transport system” for nearly two hundred years – has reached its terminus following the news that a French TGV (Train à Grand Vitesse – one of those French phrases which cannot be exactly translated into English but means something like "non-British train" or "untortoiselike means of locomotion that will not break down five miles out of Paddington") has broken the world speed record after travelling at 356mph between Paris and Strasbourg.

The Slow Train was born in 1825 – the offspring of Richard Trevithick’s steam locomotive (which was so slow it was practically stationary) and the desire to transport goods and passengers between points A and B faster than a team of sloths on Diazepam. George Stephenson’s optimistically-named Rocket travelled between Stockton and Darlington at speeds of up to 29mph, although when encumbered with passengers and goods it could only manage a measly 12mph… if moving downhill and with a following wind.

For nearly two centuries, the Slow Train became a feature of everyday British life, much-loved by comedians… and much-hated by anyone who had to make a connection at Crewe by midday, travel between Cardiff and Swansea in under three weeks or failed to appreciate the delights of having their nose pressed into a stranger’s armpit whilst the train stopped inexplicably between stations for longer than even Tantalus had to endure.

With the privatisation of British Rail in the mid-1990s, the Slow Train reached its finest hour (which occurred at least forty-five minutes later than the time printed on the timetable), as first the Conservatives and then Labour ensured that passengers would never again have to experience the horror of travelling faster than a nun on a bicycle or suffer the shock of arriving at their destination on time.

With the news that the French TGV had broken the world speed record for a train on rails¹ – moving along the line faster than Keith Richards snorting his father’s ashes – the last Slow Train in Britain (last Tuesday’s 17:42 from Guildford to Woking, expected to arrive a week on Thursday) pulled into a siding and died of shame.

The Slow Train will be buried at the John Major Church of the Privatised Railway. This Service has been delayed and mourners are advised to use other forms of transport to reach their final destination.

The Slow Train is survived by The Stationary Train, The Train Withdrawn From Service and The Train Now Standing At Platform Nine Isn’t a Train – It’s a Virgin Express.

¹Despite attempts to prevent the record by three men speaking only schoolboy French, and wearing stripey jumpers, berets, false moustaches and strings of onions, who were later arrested for impersonating French train drivers and named as Jeremy le Clarkfils, James Mais-Oui et Ricard Hammond-Legume.