ABSTRACT
In 1918 Charlie Chaplin released Shoulder Arms, a short film that makes a large claim. Shoulder Arms suggests that its writer/director/producer/superstar deserves to reside in the stratospheric heights where his literary contemporaries were locating themselves through linguistic and narratorial experiment. Though the film comprises a comedic look at life in the World War I trenches, it is neither the imperative of its title, nor the underlying high seriousness of its subject matter, nor the fact that at its New York premier at the Broadway Theater it was paired with a Verdi aria that claims to elevate Chaplin to the authorial ferment. Rather, it is the film’s announcement of a new kind of filmmaker-an idealized figure of the author as both source and endpoint of all meaning-which makes Shoulder Arms a text that formally echoes the machinations of literary modernism. Chaplin invents himself as a figure who might match not only Foucault’s description of the author who appears “so transcendent…that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely” (221) but also those modernists-Joyce, Stein, and company-whose idiosyncratic representational techniques imagine a similar, irreproducible, godlike creator.
