{"id":160635,"date":"2022-07-20T10:47:09","date_gmt":"2022-07-20T14:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=160635"},"modified":"2022-07-25T11:15:25","modified_gmt":"2022-07-25T15:15:25","slug":"e-e-cummings-and-krazy-kat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/07\/20\/e-e-cummings-and-krazy-kat\/","title":{"rendered":"E. E. Cummings and Krazy Kat"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"<\/a>

Krazy Kat<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by George Herriman.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1910,\u00a0a mouse named\u00a0Ignatz\u00a0first beaned Krazy Kat with a brick. The plot of this comic strip, centered on a \u201cheppy go lucky kat,\u201d is simple. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse. Officer Pup loves Krazy Kat. Ignatz Mouse hits Krazy over the head with a brick; Officer Pup pursues and usually arrests\u00a0Ignatz Mouse; Krazy, to whom the brick seems to be a sign of love, is ecstatic. A small heart pops up above his head.\u00a0The cartoonist, George Herriman,\u00a0twisted and tangled the three-lover triad and cat-mouse-dog triad and spent thirty-one years retying the same surreal knot. You know what will happen in any strip of Krazy Kat<\/em>\u2014the same sequence reoccurs eternally\u2014but somehow there is still room for unexpected delight.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

E. E. Cummings was one of the Kat<\/em>\u2019s biggest fans. In 1922, he wrote from Paris to request clippings from friends in America. (\u201cThank you moreover for a Kat<\/em> of indescribable beauty!\u201d he wrote to an obliging friend.) In his 1946 introduction to the first edition of the collected strips, Cummings wrote that the brick unleashed joy within the\u00a0\u201cultraprogressive game\u201d of the real world, with its preestablished rules, of which it flouted the most sacred: \u201cTHOU SHALT NOT PLAY.\u201d\u00a0(Winnicott defines\u00a0play<\/em> as \u201cthe continuous evidence of creativity, which means aliveness.\u201d) Herriman gives pleasure without the instant gratification of a punch line, undercutting the expected gag trajectory. The brick hurtling across the page doesn\u2019t end the joke; games end,\u00a0but play is infinite. There is no winner, and if there is, it is Krazy, who, for private reasons, interprets the brick as love.<\/p>\n

The strips were published daily in Hearst newspapers between 1913 and 1944, but Herriman never repeated himself. Or at least, the strip didn\u2019t look the same. The improbable landscape of Coconino County, Arizona, where the strip is set, seems almost to move on the page. Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes<\/em> and a Herriman megafan, wrote, \u201cMountains are striped. Mesas are spotted \u2026 The horizon is a low wall the characters climb over \u2026 The moon is a melon wedge, suspended upside down.\u201d Herriman juggled all the elements the form allowed: language (hyperbolic Creole, Spanish, Yiddish); comedy (existential, vaudevillian, burlesque); and gender\u2014the Kat is neither he nor she, but rather, as Herriman put it, \u201ca pixie,\u201d whose pronouns switch within a strip and occasionally within a sentence, making the possible configurations and miscommunications of the comic infinite. Somehow, in this static form, nothing is inanimate. Only a killjoy would try to extract too much meaning from Krazy Kat<\/em>, but it\u2019s not surprising that Herriman created art that depended on fluid identities. Twenty-seven years after Herriman died, the sociologist Arthur Asa Berger published the birth certificate on which Herriman was registered as \u201ccol,\u201d for \u201ccolored.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>Herriman was born in New Orleans in 1880 to a mixed-race family that moved to Los Angeles ten years later and from then on passed as white. Herriman had plenty of reasons to keep it up, including his job at the\u00a0Los Angeles Examiner<\/em>, a publication that regularly outed people for their race, and the fact that he lived with his white wife in a neighborhood with racist housing covenants. Telling different stories at different times,\u00a0Herriman\u00a0explained his light brown skin as the result of years spent living under the Greek sun to some people and claimed various ancestries\u2014often French\u2014to others. (As Krazy tells Ignatz, \u201cLenguage is that we may mis-unda-stend each udda.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The Kat<\/em> had a cult following among the modernists. For Joyce, Fitzgerald, Stein, and Picasso, all of whose work fed on playful energies similar to those unleashed in the strip, he had a double appeal, in being commercially nonviable and carrying the reek of authenticity in seeming to belong to mass culture. By the thirties, strips like Blondie<\/em> were appearing daily in roughly a thousand newspapers; Krazy<\/em> appeared in only thirty-five. The Kat<\/em> was one of those niche-but-not-really phenomena, a darling of critics and artists alike, even after it stopped appearing in newspapers. Since then: Umberto Eco called Herriman\u2019s work \u201craw poetry\u201d; Kerouac claimed the Kat<\/em> as \u201cthe immediate progenitor\u201d of the beats; Stan Lee (Spider-Man<\/em>) went with \u201cgenius\u201d; Herriman was revered by Charles Schulz and Theodor Geisel alike. But Krazy Kat<\/em> was never popular. The strip began as a sideline for Herriman, who had been making a name for himself as a cartoonist since 1902. It ran in \u201cthe waste space,\u201d literally underfoot the characters of his more conventional 1910 comic strip The Dingbat Family<\/em>, published in William Randolph Hearst\u2019s\u00a0New York Evening Journal.<\/em> Hearst gave Herriman a rare lifetime contract and, with his backing, by 1913 the liminal kreatures had their own strip. Most people disliked not being able to understand it. Soon advertisers worried that formerly loyal readers would skip the strips and miss the ads. Editors were infuriated by devices like Herriman\u2019s \u201cintermission\u201d panel, which disrupted the narrative by stalling the action. There was also just the sheer strangeness of some of his characters, such as Mock Duck:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Panel from Krazy Kat<\/em> by George Herriman. Digitized by Jo\u00ebl Franusic.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

For Cummings, who, with his flagrant anti-intellectual stance, privileged what he called \u201cAliveness\u201d above all else, Charlie Chaplin was the only artist to rival Herriman. But technology disrupted both Chaplin\u2019s and Herriman\u2019s idiosyncratic work. At the introduction of sound in film in 1927, Chaplin said that the \u201cspontaneity of the gags had been lost,\u201d but what he\u00a0really lost was his control of time. Sound erases distance; there was no longer a delay in which the incongruity between seeing and comprehending could bloom. In his essay \u201cWhat People Laugh At\u201d (1918), Chaplin noted \u201cthe liking of the average person for contrast and surprise in his entertainment.\u201d Both Herriman and Chaplin orchestrated meticulously timed, silent dialogues between images and words. Slapstick<\/em>\u2014a word that originally referred to two pieces of wood joined together, used by pantomime clowns to make loud noises\u2014is, in their work, a deliberately clumsy cleaving of the relationship between words and images. If people could explain themselves, there would be no time to revel in ludicrous situations, as when in\u00a0The Kid<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>Chaplin, caressing the hand of a policeman\u2019s wife, is accidentally caressed by her husband.<\/p>\n

T. S. Eliot commented that Chaplin had escaped \u201cin his own way from the realism of the cinema and invented a rhythm.\u201d This rhythm in Chaplin\u2019s work is a personal tempo. Chaplin has perfect control of his own time; his bodily movement controls the rate at which the story unfolds. Rhythm<\/em> is an acoustic metaphor for a visual form with its own internal logic, and it is evident too in Krazy Kat<\/em>, where it creates an elastic, almost spatial experience\u00a0of time rather than a narrative one. Chaplin and Herriman\u2019s work presents discrete moments that appear as part of the same present, although they are not serial narrative; they create strange, self-contained temporalities.<\/p>\n

Many criticized Chaplin for resisting the lure of sound, but in a 1940 letter, Cummings wrote, \u201cI like Charlie Chaplin as is and my lightning raw\u201d\u2014no accompanying thrum of thunder. Cummings understood that sound could kill play; he once said, \u201cNot all of my poems are to be read aloud.\u201d The 1922 ballet Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime<\/em>, based on Herriman\u2019s strip, was a flop for the same reason: it robbed the reader of the internal, private experience of making connections between frames. (Likewise, a series of attempts to animate Krazy<\/em> was a disaster.) It\u2019s funny when Krazy misreads signs we can see, because there\u2019s an ironic distance; both meanings are there at once. With sound, Herriman\u2019s wit was reduced to a series of quips and the crash of a brick hitting a cat.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

Panel from Krazy Kat<\/em> by George Herriman. Digitized by Jo\u00ebl Franusic.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

I first encountered the Kat<\/em> in my early twenties, trying to wean myself off Cummings\u2019s love poetry by reading his letters. Heartbroken and too raw for new experiences, I took comfort in the strange repetition of each strip. In 2020, in between lockdowns, I started prowling the internet again for the Kat<\/em>. The strips felt very of the moment; I couldn\u2019t escape my awareness of how quickly time was passing and how few things it took to fill it up. I was bored, but in the acutely happy moments, eating with friends, or when my friend\u2019s baby held a phone to her ear and then to her doll\u2019s ear\u2014a baby on a phone holding a baby on a phone\u2014I didn\u2019t want anything to change. No news was good news. Repetition seemed like a space in which creativity could thrive.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason the strip didn\u2019t catch on more widely is that it isn\u2019t easy to read quickly. Because of the changing layout, scattered phonemes, and rotation of themes in Herriman\u2019s strips, you can\u2019t read them left to right or in a hurry. Spatially, the strip defies the linear progression of a\u00a0gag, both in the way we read\u2014sometimes the brick hurls against us, whizzing from right to left\u2014and in the uneven panels, which defy chronology. In one of my favorite strips, Krazy reads Krazy Kat<\/em>. Naturally, he is astounded. He says, \u201cBut ignatz dahlink!! Here I am here, and here you is here too.\u201d\u00a0Ignatz, ever superior, replies, in a nonchalant pose: \u201cOf course.\u201d The panel is delineated and thickly framed, emphasizing Ignatz\u2019s comfort within the cartoon world; by contrast, in the next frame Krazy jumps up and down on the paper (\u201cbut, if I are here, and you is here, how come I are in the paper, and you als\u2014ansa me that\u201d). Ignatz\u2019s pose is then rotated so that he lies on his side, in exactly the same construction of lines, and replies, \u201cBecause, fol, how could it be aught were it not thus\u2014you answer that.\u201d Here, like Krazy, we are perplexed. We cannot answer. Ignatz raises an eyebrow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Krazy Kat<\/em> by George Herriman.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

Cummings also sought to control time by manipulating space in his poems. For this reason, he disliked technology, particularly the Linotype, which he saw as intruding on his freedom. In one plaintive letter to his aunt Jane, he writes about the urgent need to \u201cretranslate 71 poems out of typewriter language into linotype-ese,\u201d which \u201cinflicts a pre-established whole\u2014the type \u2018line\u2019 on every smallest part; so that words, letters, punctuation marks & (most important of all) spaces between these various elements.\u201d The Linotype\u2019s enforcement of the linear destroyed\u00a0the potential space within the typewritten poems for chance collisions and a hidden choreography of readerly eye movements. In 1920, after reading a book asserting that the eye remains in constant motion, Cummings scrawled excitedly: \u201cTHE EYE MUST NEVER STOP.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ironically, the digitization of Herriman\u2019s strips has improved the experience of reading them. We read differently on screens; we\u2019re used to tabs, pop-ups, watching movies, toggling around. As I discovered during lockdown,\u00a0having hijacked the huge monitor my boyfriend\u2019s company sent him, these digital versions of Herriman\u2019s strips preserve their strange logic; technology doesn\u2019t interfere with the artist\u2019s control of time but lets us read vertically and horizontally at once. Gazing at them on the screen made me realize why Cummings felt such a kinship with Herriman, whom he called a \u201cpoet-painter,\u201d a title he otherwise reserved for himself. Try looking at one of Cummings\u2019s poems, the ones not meant to be read aloud\u2014one imitating striptease, or a drunk still drinking, or the twirl of a snowflake, or even a grasshopper on the page\u2014and then looking at the screen. See how it hops.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Amber Medland’s debut novel<\/em> Wild Pets<\/a>\u00a0was published by Faber last year.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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