Le Masque: Why Count Olaf Isnât What You Think He Is
Firstly, let me say that I understand why a lot of people are reading Count Olaf as a Jewish-coded villainâI really do. It makes sense that a greedy bad guy with a prominent, pointy noise is going to raise some red flags in our community, and in any other instance, I would probably agree with the accusation. However, A Series of Unfortunate Events is a special case, in that itâs drawing on a very specific, yet slightly more obscure, trope with which most people arenât likely to be intimately familiar. I only picked up on it myself because I took four intensive semesters of both the History of Theatre and Theatrical Text and Theory in college from a pair of professors who happened to also be the Head of Dramaturgy and the Theatre Literary Director of the American Repertory Theatre, and they drilled these concepts into my teenage brain at the exact time that I discovered the works of Lemony Snicket.Â
Okay, so letâs start out by stating the obvious:Â
A Series of Unfortunate Events is absolutely packed with literary and cultural references. Nearly everything in the series is an homage or allusion to something else, whether itâs a snake named after Virginia Woolf or the true crime saga of Claus and Sunny Von BĂŒlow (Inverse has a pretty solid list of all the references from the first four books, if youâre interested).Â
Of course, the Baudelaire children get their surname from French poet Charles Baudelaire, whereas Count Olaf gets his name from a character in a story by Baudelaireâs contemporary, ThĂ©ophile Gautier.Â
Now, itâs important to note that Baudelaire and Gautier also wrote criticism in addition to penning their own works. Beyond poetry, Baudelaire was a renowned art critic, and Gautier wrote both artistic and theatrical criticism. So it should come as no surprise that both authors were also massive fanboys of other artists, most importantly, a guy called Antoine Watteau, who was an early-18th Century French painter. Watteau was famous for his paintings of stock characters from Commedia dellâarte (a 16th Century form of theatre from Italy characterized by masked types, some of which, like the harlequin, still hold meaning today):
Itâs possible you have seen these images before; or perhaps not, but regardless, Baudelaire and Gautier could not get enough of this stuff. As noted in the Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist and the Culture of His Time by Mary D. Sheriff:
A group of romantic writers including Arsene Houssaye, ThĂ©ophile Gautier, Gerard de Nerval, and ThĂ©odore de Banville used Watteau and other rococo artistsâ paintings as the source of inspiration for poems and prose created only for their beauty. Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt continued this tradition of art for artâs sake through the 1860s. Within this tradition Watteau occupied a cultlike status, and a whole iconography grew around the artistâs life, the subjects he painted, and the lost world of aristocratic refinement his works evoked. Watteau was not only revived, but also mythologized as a melancholy genius.Â
In other words, Baudelaire and Gautier were dropping Watteau and Commedia dellâarte references all over the place as an homage to fucking aesthetic. In Baudelaireâs poem Les Phares, Watteau gets the following nod:
Watteau, carnival where the loves of many famous hearts
Flutter capriciously like butterflies with gaudy wings;
Cool, airy settings where the candelabrasâ light
Touches with madness the couples whirling in the dance
His piece A Heroic Death is a subversion of the stock fool character in Commedia dellâarte. As Ainslie Armstrong McLees writes in Baudelaireâs Argot Plastique: Poetic Caricature and Modernism:Â
Baudelaire, embracing a popular art formâcaricatureâas a model for poetry, drew upon the traditions from which it arose, modifying them and molding them for his use.Â
Meanwhile, you have Gautier decrying the lack of respect for Commedia dellâarte in his theatrical criticism. To quote Helen Elizabeth Patchâs book The Dramatic Criticism of ThĂ©ophile Gautier:
When thoroughly disgusted by the plays offered in the literary theaters of Paris, Gautier turns his backupon them and seeks refuge in the scorned pantomimes. Because of its illusion, pantomime is in Gautierâs eyes a serious art-form, too much neglected by his serious and prosaic contemporaries. He has already recognized as art the Italian comedy-masks as they appeared in the Commedia dell'arteâŠ.The old mask-characters, says Gautier, form just the medium necessary to pass from reality to the realm of illusion. They lend the perspective essential to the portrayal of serious themes without the evocation of daily problems and cares.
Then he goes off and writes a novel called Captain Fracasse about a destitute Baron who joins a travelling Commedia theatre troupe, because hey, why not.Â
Okay, so now that we have established the connection between Baudelaire, Gautier, and Commmedia dellâarte, lets examine a little bit more about the latter.
As mentioned, itâs a form of theatre based on stock characters and recognizable tropesâsomething which is actually really prevalent in A Series of Unfortunate Events. In Kendra Magnussonâs article Lemony Snicketâs A Series of Unfortunate Events: Daniel Handler and Marketing the Author, itâs noted thatÂ
As one adult/scholar argued [about A Series of Unfortunate Events], even âthe critical reader is hardly able to distinguish one book from another.â Reviewing the promotional material and the books themselves, Bruce Butt deduces that the series âveers precariously close to the exploitation of a young readerâs willingness to hear the same gag again and again (and again).â Further, he âdoubt[s] that this is a device that we should applaud,â as it is âan easy way to satisfy undemanding readersâ. This characterization of young readers as unchallenging, exploitable consumers probably overestimates their vulnerability, while underestimating SoUEâs cross-over appeal. Countless readers, young and old, experience pleasure in the repetition of a familiar gag, and have done so for centuries. For example, the narrative conventions of commedia dellâarteâa theatrical genre dating back to sixteenth-century Italyâbuild entirely upon the repetition of familiar gags by the same stock characters. Not only did the genre sustain its popularity for centuries, but it is also now generally considered a high art form. Potentially tedious repetition, even when directed at a young audience, can also serve important narrativistic functions.
Basically, A Series of Unfortunate Events knowingly (and often mockingly)Â employs the the Commedia dellâarte model as a narrative.Â
Now, when it comes to characters in Commedia dellâarte, there are three main branches: The Iinnamorati (lovers), the Zanni (clowns/servants), and the Vecchi (the villains). The primary Vecchi are Pantalone (a powerful and wealthy man who is also incredibly greedy), Il Dottore (a pompous windbag who thinks heâs more intelligent than he is and is jealous of Pantalone), and Il Capitano (a bombastic braggert who intimidates everyone and wears overly elaborate clothes).Â
If you take the greed, the pompousness, the jealousy, the bragging, and the elaborate costuming and roll them into one, you essentially get Count Olaf, and this translates into his looks as well as his characterization. Â
This is what Pantalone looks looks like:Â
It seems very evident to me that Count Olaf is actually fashioned to look like Pantalone and not a Jewish stereotype.Â
Now, I know what youâre thinking: âWell, if Pantalone is a miserly character with a hooked nose, whoâs to say heâs not an antisemitic caricature himself?âÂ
Good question! Well, we know Pantalone isnât meant to be a Jew because in Commedia dellâarte, itâs not the Italians, but the Levantini who are the Jewish caricatures (can also sometimes be Arabs or Armenians). The Levantini are always foreign outsiders, whereas Pantalone is an old money Venetian. Also, if you read Robert Melziâs work, youâll find that Jews are very clearly labelled (and oft mocked) in Italian dramas of the period, and that their Jewishness or foreignness is always a point to be mentioned, meaning that subtle coding wasnât needed or used at the time. In other words, itâs basically the âI canât have committed the crime because I was out committing another crimeâ defense.Â
So, there we have it. My argument for why Count Olaf is does not have anything to do with Jewishness apart from the fact that he was created by a Jewish author. Instead, heâs a reference to Baudelair and Gautierâs references to Watteauâs references to Commedia dellâarte. A reference to a reference to a reference to a reference. Because thatâs Lemony Snicket for you.
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