588
PARTISAN REVIEW
occasionally take on a certain purity and freshness that would almost
surely be smothered higher up on the cultural scale. The quality of a
Marx Brothers movie, for example, comes from an uncompromising
nihilism that is part.icularly characteristic of the submerged and dis–
possessed; the Marx Brothers are
Lumpen,
they spit on culture, and
they are popular among middle-class intellectuals because they express
a blind and destructive disgust with society that the responsible man is
compelled to suppress in himself.
In
Krazy Kat,
a very sweet-tempered fantasy, the gap between
mass culture and respectable culture manifests itself not in an open
rejection of society, but, more indirectly, in a complete disregard of the
standards of respectable art. Working for an audience completely out
of touch with the concerns of the serious-minded, George Herriman
had the advantage that Lewis Carroll got by writing for children: so
long as the internal patterns of his work-the personal and physical
relationships of the characters-remained simple, he was fairly sure to
please. Where no art is important,
Krazy Kat
is as real and important
a work of art as any other-it is only supposed to divert its reader for
two minutes at a time. (While the intellectuals had to "discover"
Krazy
Kat,
the comic-strip audience just read it.)
Thus Herriman's fantasy can be free and relaxed, it can go its
own way. What came into his head went down on the paper. His lan–
guage is built up of scraps of sound and meaning, all the echoes that
his mind contained-Krazy talks an arbitrary dialect that has some
connection with the speech of New York but is attributable in its finished
form neither to foreignness nor to illiteracy but solely to the mind of
its creator: "Et less my l'il korn butch yills a krop-now I will have
korn bread, korn mill mutch, korn poems, korn plestas, korn kopias";
Offissa Pup tends to be highftown: "I mean none other than Ignatz
Mouse-who makes evil the day by tossing bricks at that dear Kat."
While the characters stand still, a potted tree behind them becomes a
distant plateau and then a house and then a tree again. The continual
flux is never mentioned and has no meaning; it is just that Herriman
felt no obligation either to keep the background still or to explain its
mobility. This absolute fantasy sometimes becomes mechanical, but it is
never heavy and it frequently achieves the fresh quality of pure play,
freed from the necessity to be dignified or "significant" and not obviously
concerned even with entertaining its audience.
This is the plot: Krazy, inoffensive creature of uncertain sex, loves
Ignatz Mouse. Ignatz despises Krazy-for his inoffensiveness, for his
impenetrable silliness, and for his unshakeable affection-and Ignatz
(therefore?) devotes all his intelligence and energy to the single end
of hitting Krazy on the head with bricks. He buys bricks from a brick–
maker especially for this purpose; he conceals the bricks in innocent–
looking packages or disguises them in innocent-looking shapes, he makes
