mechanical ducks & beyond

[TERRY CAESAR]

     I first heard of Jacques de Vaucanson and his mechanical duck in Hugh
kenner's wonderfully suggestive work of literary criticism, The Counterfeiters
(1968). Counterfeiting is not satire, exactly, but not not, either. The prin-
ciple upon which counterfeiting exists, sez Kenner, is that "man is knowable
only in his behavior." On this basis, he connects de Vaucanson with such
worthies as Swift, Buster Keaton, and Beckett. 

     Looking over the book with great pleasure after so many years, I see that
M&D can be included among Kenner's examples in ways I hadn't anticipated. At
the end, he writes as follows: "The focus of counterfeiting is always on ori-
gins, and behind such poetry there seems not only to be no craft but no poet: as
though the language had gathered itself into form, as flames do or clouds." The
author of M&D is going to fool no one in this respect, or certainly no one on
this list. Yet what is the eighteen-century style nonetheless but an elaborate
gesture at counterfeiting--for which the duck is a displaced trope--that we are
expected to be amused and delight in as if for its own sake? Among other things,
M&D is the work of, well, a quack.

                                   Terry