The year 1922 has been celebrated for the appearance of [Eliot's] The Waste Land and [Joyce's] Ulysses. It was also the year The Reader's Digest began publication. Buster Keaton's "Cops" (1922), I would maintain, is a great work of art, belonging with Eliot's poem and Joyce's novel rather than with the trivial works with which it has been associated because its discourse has depended on gags. (p. 269)

Keaton's gags are more philosophical than slapstick in that they test the nature of reality. In "Cops," objects prove to have a side so hidden as to allow indeterminacy to reign in our perception of the received world….

If things have a hidden side, people also are capable of conscious and unconscious duplicities; they too are "indeterminate." (p. 271)

For Keaton's hero in "Cops," the resistance of phenomena to certainty, the duplicity of people and things, and the failure of epistemological systems to establish...