The Anatomy of Harpo Marx

The Anatomy of Harpo Marxis a luxuriant, detailed, and intimate play-by-play account of Harpo Marx's physical movements as captured on screen. Wayne Koestenbaum guides us through the thirteen Marx Brothers films, from The Cocoanutsin 1929 to Love Happyin 1950, to focus on Harpo's chief and yet heretofore unexplored attribute--his profound and contradictory corporeality. Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo's body--its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, "cute" pathos, and more. In a virtuosic performance, Koestenbaum's text moves gracefully from insightful analysis to cultural critique to autobiographical musing, and provides Harpo with a host of odd bedfellows, including Walter Benjamin and Barbra Streisand. Koestenbaum contextualizes the films in relation to the rise and defeat of Nazism: about Harpo's mock death in the film Room Service, Koestenbaum remarks, "Even in jest a dead Jewish body in 1938, a stake in his vampire heart, is not a joke. Even a fake dead Jew is real." By paying enamored attention to Harpo's silent body, its rebellions and shocks, its surprises and pauses, Koestenbaum turns Harpo into a vocal wonder.

Wayne Koestenbaum is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of thirteen books of criticism, poetry, and fiction, including a biography of Andy Warhol and the acclaimed The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.