The Cornerboy
Please come and visit. The most interesting thing about my village is The Cornerboy. He is celebrated even at a regional level, although he has never set foot in any other village, close by or far away. No matter when you will come, you will see him. You must come soon. The Cornerboy is getting old and he is not eternal. Only one thing I must tell you is no photographs, video or audio recording is allowed. Please respect this. There are large fines for any breaches, which are always observed.
Every day The Cornerboy wears a different costume. Many of these relate or refer to historical or legendary figures, or to figures from politics or the showbusiness world, or very often to figures from Art History. Greek, Roman, African, Chinese, Renaissance, Modernist and Postmodernist themes all show up from time to time. However, many times the costumes are completely original devices and difficult to contextualise. Sometimes The Cornerboy will choose to be absurd and provocative. For example, last Tuesday he wore nothing but goggles and a tie. But don’t worry, most days his body is not in itself on display and, when it is, there are always signs erected on the approach to warn away children and the elderly and others who might be offended. You do not have cause to worry about anything in my village, which you must come and visit. His body in any case is not as offensive as most and has been described in the literature as suitably sculptural.
Very often large crowds come during high season to get a glimpse of The Cornerboy, who I will add was recently named in a list of the world’s top 500 tourist attractions. When there are very large crowds, each person or group of persons is issued with an electronic ticket, which expires after ten minutes. After fifteen minutes, if they have not left the zone of observation, the ticket, which is tagged at the ankle, emits a small shock. Every five minutes the shock increases in strength. My advice to you is, if you are nervous of crowds and especially if you are nervous of shocks, to come at low season, or in high season come very early on Sunday morning.
Most of my village’s money goes on buying costumes for The Cornerboy. Everyone contributes what they can. We have six large warehouses full of clothes, props and make-up. We have had to make alternative arrangements for the livestock, most of which we have in any case sold to stock the enormous wardrobe of The Cornerboy. But this is not a problem because now we all make money one way or another from the people who come and visit The Cornerboy — from souvenirs and food and hospitality and many other services.
The morning (September 3rd, thirty-two years ago) when The Cornerboy arrived at the north-eastern corner of the cross — some call it a star — at the heart of our village, to which he has returned every day without fail ever since, was the dawn of the modern in our village. We are not any longer desperate peasants whom one bad winter can annihilate. We are in business regular-style now, with stable credit lines. We can make plans for years in advance and be reasonably sure of achieving them. What remains completely and gloriously unpredictable is what The Cornerboy will be wearing when he shows up today. That is known only to him, up until he orders his costume, which is normally about an hour before the display.
Some costumes are very elaborate and others quite simple. For example, if The Cornerboy wishes to dress up as some kind of emperor or aristocrat or supermodel there is a lot of work in tailoring, make-up, sourcing materials and designs and so on. But if he wants to dress up as a slave or a prostitute all we have to do is hand him a tea towel, a length of chain and a dishrag.
It is true, and I admit this with shame and in the spirit of truthful atonement, that on the very first morning all those years ago, when The Cornerboy turned up dressed as a colourful hen, in a hen-suit he had obviously stolen from the marketing department of our local chicken factory, which up until then had been our main source of employment, income and pride, that some locals, eager to defend the pristine reputation of our village throughout the region and beyond, began to throw mud, stones and hard-boiled eggs at The Cornerboy. With luck, a visiting regional officer, here to inspect the progress on our then long ongoing and extremely controversial sewerage scheme, intervened. The regional officer, now a national principal officer, is a visionary man and has been instrumental in our village, our region and our nation’s salvation in so many ways. He ordered that The Cornerboy be respected and furthermore treated as an asset, that he be allowed carry through his wonderful experiment without molestation from the atavists. Within a week, on the word of the regional officer, who had on his own initiative begun to speak to the regional press about The Cornerboy, cars and trucks and even buses began to come off the bypass and enter the town for a glimpse of The Cornerboy. Attitudes were soon transformed.
Many scientists and semioticians have come to study the costumes and, in particular, the sequences in which they are worn. They are trying to discover if the costumes form some kind of language which they can translate in order to discover the message or messages The Cornerboy may be trying to express. But no such logic has so far been discovered. The Cornerboy may not in fact be trying to say anything. He may not wish to speak to us at all. The costumes are not ciphers, or letters, or runes in a “costume language.” They are obviously not mating calls. But you will, I am sure, have your own theories about what The Cornerboy intends. You must come and visit.
The Cornerboy mostly stands upright with arms by his side, or else he slouches with pocketed hands. He sometimes introduces a performative element which enhances the display. He is fun-loving and mischievous and likes to work with contrast, producing strange, hybrid effects, playing with cultural clichés and expectations. For example, if he is dressed like a wolf he may baa like a sheep. He may shove a syringe in his right eyeball when dressed up as a nun. He is also musical and can play a bewildering variety of instruments, tunes and musical styles. One of his most famous displays, uniting many of these elements, has become known as The Dirty Harpist. The Cornerboy turned up, five years ago, midsummer, Sunday, with hair and beard extension, smeared from head to foot in a mixture of animal excrements, including his own, with harp in tow, and proceeded to play dozens of tunes from the regional repertoire, many of them very obscure, and all of them given his own singular interpretation. Recordings of “The Dirty Harpist” are available exclusively from our village musical store, along with dozens of other recordings representing the “musical costumes” as they have become known to us. You must produce proof that you have gone to see The Cornerboy before you are allowed entry to the musical store.
I would like to emphasize that The Cornerboy is only occasionally sensational in this sense. Sperm, blood, vomit, shit, pus and urine rarely play a large part and, again, there will always be signs and warnings in place in order to avoid any possible upset.
You will perhaps read the rumour that the original Cornerboy, putatively a political troublemaker in open dispute with the Village Elders, was killed off long ago and replaced by an interchangeable battalion of Cornerboys appointed by the Village Elders. The Village Elders are accused of deciding the sequence and format of costumes by committee and up to a decade in advance.
This is not true.
If you met my village officers you would soon realise they know very little about costumes.
A more baroque rumour accuses The Cornerboy of being a plot carried out by national government in league with international business concerns in order to test consumer sentiment regarding new styles and fashion accessories. Conspiracy theorists have gone so far as to suggest that The Cornerboy is a hologrammatic projection of an alien power known variously as “The Spectacle” and “The Mesmerists” and that everyone who goes to see The Cornerboy is nanotechnologically implanted with alien control devices.
Another tale states that The Cornerboy does not exist and is in fact a mass hallucination created by mysterious powers of suggestion, which powers, by the by, ancient folklore ascribes to the people of my village and its environs. There are also many religious and pseudo-religious theories about The Cornerboy. All are completely unsubstantiated nonsense of course. However, the rumours generated by The Cornerboy are of great interest as a cultural phenomenon in themselves and have been collected into three separate volumes, which are available for purchase exclusively in our village and only after you have gone to see The Cornerboy.
You must come and visit.
Of course The Cornerboy is not eternal and he will die. This is a problem for which there is no simple solution. I am one who supports memorialising The Cornerboy, as opposed to substituting him with a new Cornerboy or Cornerboys. I believe that people will not pay to see an impression of The Cornerboy. I also believe that if we in our village introduce the idea of the Ersatz Cornerboy then other villages will follow suit and what we will end up with is an economic collapse in my village, complete devastation. I am confident that our faction will win out in the end.
The problem is how to memorialise such variegated and complex phenomena. How to find a form to represent in static posterity a dynamic that has taken so many forms, many of them basically irreconcilable and all of them irreducible to one another. We are really dealing with a counter-form, or an attempt to escape from form and this involves a basic antipathy to mediation, summary, reproduction, and, in a word, to memory itself.
There are two warring sub-factions within the memorialist faction. One supports the construction of an enormous Cornermuseum on the site of the old chicken factory and surrounding farmland. The museum would somehow be made up of nothing but corners and points from which to view corners. There would be one corner for every single day of The Cornerboy’s long run and each corner would contain an exact statuesque replica of an individual Cornerboy display. Now I know for a fact this will never come about, simply by applying some logic to the situation. The running total of Cornerboy displays now stands at 11,659, and may reach 13, 14, or even 15 thousand by the time he passes away.
The time it would take to exactly reproduce all these would be measured in years at least. Also, the money, not only to construct, but to maintain, staff and service such a museum would be beyond our national budget, not to mind local or regional. We would be paying through the nose for something we now not only get for free, but make vast profits from. The Cornermuseum is a cretinous folly dreamed up by economic illiterates. It will never see the light of day.
I am proposing a solution far more radical, original, inventive, attractive and financially beneficial to the members of our village community and our region as a whole, as well as one we can get off the ground as soon as The Cornerboy dies, with virtually no investment our end. It is this:
We offer members of the public a chance to become The Cornerboy for a day — or an hour or even fifteen minutes.
We can work out a price structure and we can offer the potential Cornerboys the use of our vast Cornerboy stock from which to mix and match their own costume, or of course they can come up with one on their own. We can award weekly, monthly and annual sponsored prizes for Best Cornerboy. There is nothing but inflow to our ledgers and accounts and the village will be in an ongoing state of carnival and carnival is money. If we do this we will have turned The Cornerboy into a perpetual money machine and we will be able to live off The Cornerboy until Kingdom Come.
Do come and visit us and have a good old gander at our Cornerboy, truly one of the most amazing sights you will ever see. I must tell you however that if you do decide to come I will feel sorry for you as I feel sorry for all of our visitors; that they can only visit our wonderful village and not live here as I do and always have done, and always will, for the rest of my years, whatever there is to come in them.