11/07/06: Re: the unanswered riddle

I started looking up the answer to this and came across an article that was published in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies Issue: Volume 7, Number 3 / October 01, 2002, pp. 345 - 363

Life Is Beautiful: four riddles, three answers, by Steve Siporin

It's quite interesting, he analysis the other riddles in the movie as well, but I'll write what he addresses concerning the unanswered riddle here:

Lessing arranges for Guido to wait tables at a dinner for visiting Nazi officials. We understand that this will provide Lessing and Guido with a chance to meet and exchange words,and that this will be Guido’s opportunity,through Lessing, to save his family.Here is the film’s fourth and final riddle,followed by the scene in which it appears,embedded in the dialogue: [4] Grasso,grasso,brutto,brutto, Tutto giallo in verità, Se mi chiedi dove sono, Ti rispondo qua qua qua! Camminando faccio poppò, Chi son io,dimmelo un po’. [Fat,fat,ugly,ugly, All yellow in truth, If you ask me where I am, I tell you ‘quack,quack,quack!’ While walking I defecate, Who I am,tell me a little.24 (No answer given)] Il capitano,ancora volutamente,rovescia il suo bicchiere pieno su un lungo tavolo appoggiato alla parete. Alza la mano vistosamente verso il cameriere italiano. CAPITANO(forte): Ah! Guido corre con un tovagliolo e asciuga il tavolo mentre il capitano si mette di profilo a lui,faccia al muro,pensosamente. CAPITANO(piano): Allora Guido,fai attenzione ... Il capitano si guarda ancora intorno,per l’ultima volta.Poi ... CAPITANO(piano ma infervorato): Grasso,grasso,brutto,brutto, Tutto giallo in verità, Se mi chiedi dove sono, Ti rispondo qua qua qua! Guido lo ascolta con attenzione.Smette per un attimo di pulire il tavolo, come paralizzato. CAPITANO(sussurra) ... Camminando faccio poppò, Chi son io,dimmelo un po’. Guido è incredulo. CAPITANO: L’anatroccolo,no? E fissa Guido facendo di sì col capo. Ma ha un gesto di stizza. CAPITANO: È l’anatroccolo! E invece non è! Sono quattro mesi che non dormo la notte. Me l’ha spedito un mio amico veterinario,di Vienna. Non posso spedire a lui il mio finchè non risolvo questo! Brutto brutto ... è il brutto anatroccolo! Ma lui mi ha detto che non è l’anatroccolo! Che cos’è? Ho pensato l’ornitorinca,ma non fa qua qua qua! ... (Benigni and Cerami 1998a: 171–2) [The captain, on purpose, knocks over his full glass on a long table placed along the wall. He showily raises his hand in the direction of the Italian waiter. CAPTAIN(loudly): Ah! Guido runs with a towel and dries the table while the captain sets himself in profile toward him,facing the wall,lost in thought. CAPTAIN(quietly): Now,Guido,pay attention ... The captain looks around himself again,for the last time.Then ... CAPTAIN(quiet,but impassioned): Fat,fat,ugly,ugly, All yellow in truth, If you ask me where I am, I tell you ‘quack,quack,quack!’ Guido listens to him attentively.He stops cleaning the table for a moment as if he’s paralyzed. CAPTAIN(whispering): While walking I defecate, Who I am,tell me a little. Guido is flabbergasted. CAPTAIN:The duckling,right? And he stares at Guido,who is nodding ‘yes’with his head.But the captain makes a gesture of annoyance. CAPTAIN:It’s the duckling! But it’s not! I haven’t been able to sleep at night for four months.A veterinarian friend from Vienna sent it to me.I can’t sendhim mine until I solve this one.Ugly ugly ...it’s the ugly duckling! But he’s told me that it’s not the duckling! What is it? I thought of the platypus,but it doesn’t say quack quack quack! ...] Guido’s bug-eyed response,like our own,is a reaction to Lessing’s shocking inhumanity.Lessing demonstrates his passion – but for what? For solving a trivial riddle while willfully ignoring industrialized murder? He is a monster, and Guido’s face conveys his reaction to an unimagined moral blindness in the midst of the horror of brutality.How can Lessing plead ‘Help me,Guido.For heaven’s sake,help me!’about a riddle,in this world? How can he lose sleep over a riddle but not over the people whom he sends to their deaths daily? He had seemed different from the other Nazis (Guido called him his ‘most cultured’customer), but he is really no different or,possibly,worse. In one moment Guido sees his hopes shattered and realizes that he,Guido,never was a human being to Lessing even though Lessing called him a ‘genius’.Guido was only an instrument,useful for solving riddles.Yet his final expression as he looks at Lessing agonizing over the unsolved riddle is not one of self-pity but of utter astonishment and pity for what Lessingis. Odds are that we,viewing Life Is Beautiful,are too shocked by the emotional impact of this scene to seek the actual solution to the unanswered riddle – the only unanswered riddle of the four in the film. We may also shy away from trying to solve the riddle because we don’t want to be like Lessing and concern ourselves with trivia in the midst of horror. Isn’t one point of the scene,after all,that solving riddles is only a game and not to be taken seriously? In fact,I think the riddle isworth considering,and there’s nothing to be lost in thinking about it.Like the other three riddles,it has intrinsic,as well as posi- tional,meaning. I was unable to locate this riddle in riddle collections and riddle literature.I also asked folklorists,riddle experts,and Italian Jews and Catholics,but no one recognized it.The possibility remains that the riddle is traditional but difficult to collect because of its possibly racist,anti-Semitic imagery.25 One Jewish-American colleague of mine,Professor Len Rosenband,saw an anti-Semitic stereotype in the riddle and guessed that the solution could be‘the Jew’.‘Fat,fat,ugly,ugly’fits the cartoon caricatures of Jews that appeared in the anti-Semitic press of the 1930s in Germany and Italy – evidence itself of an underlying stereotype that could have been the basis of a riddle and other kinds of anti-Semitic folklore.Yellow might refer to the yellow of the star Jews were forced to wear in several European countries – the same yellow star we see Guido wearing in the death camp. That Benigni may have had this in mind seems possible. Earlier in the film, Fascist vandals paint Guido’s uncle’s horse green with the words ‘attention Jewish horse’ on the horse’s flanks. Guido, shocked,denies this portent and says,‘What can they do? At most they’ll strip me,paint me all yellow[my italics],and write,“attention Jewish waiter”.’26 Looking again at the riddle,the conventionalized sound (in Italian) made by a duck, quaquaqua(translated in the subtitles as ‘cheep, cheep,cheep’,but by me as ‘quack,quack,quack’),could also be a pun on a common Italian word for ‘here’,quà.Thus,to the question ‘Where am I?’the answer is ‘Here,here,here!’ The Jew is here,all around,in the death camp – the answer to the riddle.Is this another reason why Guido’s eyes bulge out? Because the answer is so obvious? All around. And yet Lessing can’t see it? (‘The bigger it is,the less one sees.’) The line ‘camminando faccio poppò’ – ‘while walking I defecate’ – might suggest either being ‘scared shitless’by the Nazis in the camps or the stereotype of the ‘dirty Jew’, especially ingrained in German folklore, and explored so articulately by folklorist Alan Dundes in his essay,‘Why is the Jew “dirty?”: a psychoanalytic study of anti-Semitic folklore’(1997). I’m not certain that this solution to the riddle,while illuminating,is entirely convincing;other possibilities,at any rate,should be considered,too.Lessing says that duckling and platypus,two possible solutions,have been ruled out. (Though the mere mention of the platypus is appropriate to ‘the Jew’solution since it might be understood to parallel and symbolize the Jew,who,like the platypus, seems,in the Nazi view of race,to confound biological categories that should be kept distinct.27) What if,as folklorist Elliot Oring suggested,there may be no answer?28Or could the riddle be what Alessandro Falassi,after Dan Ben-Amos (1976),calls an ‘anti-riddle’,a riddle with the ‘impossibility of ...“objectively” satisfactory answers’(Falassi 1980:93)? In other words,could ‘duckling’actually be the answer – but the riddler is using his power to exclude even the correct answer? That would make the riddle an appropriate metaphor for the fiendish- ness of the Holocaust. In either case (Oring or Falassi), one of the two basic rules of riddling (that there is at least one solution and that a correct solution be acknowledged) has been broken.Metaphorically,the rules of civilization are gone – there is no acceptable answer, even if one exists. Maybe this is the ultimate demoralization of the human spirit. Death and suffering are arbitrary – and one is not allowed to make sense of them,even if one can.The riddle, like the Holocaust, is intentionally unintelligible. The problem is designed to preclude solution if possible and reject it if offered.29 Another approach to this riddle would be to consider whether the context carries ‘neck riddle’associations.The ‘neck riddle’is a riddle one must solve or pose to save one’s neck.Well-known literary examples occur in the biblical story of Samson and the riddle contest in J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1966). It is, in fact, appropriate to this genre that the quick-witted Guido is in effect a condemned man and that he is asked the riddle by his enemy,who holds him captive.It’s also interesting that although the riddle isn’t overtly posed as a neck riddle,Guido fails to solve it and shortly afterward he is executed...

Anyway, I'd read the entire article if you get a chance. It's quite interesting.

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