Lecture for an Empty Room
Love, Coconico Style: notes on the poetics of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913-1944)
Circa 2008, I crafted the beginnings of an essay I’d titled “Love, Coconico Style: notes on the poetics of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913-1944),” attempting to connect some of the vibrancy of his collaged syntax and multiple languages and slang to the poetry of Paul Celan and Lisa Robertson. I’d picked up a couple of volumes reprinted by Fantagraphic Books in their collected series, and was fascinated by the fragmented blends of language so often too quick to catch in a daily or weekly strip. Clearly there was a lot going on. I wanted to pick up the entire series of Fantagraphic reprints before moving much deeper into the subject, but my persistent lack of finances distracted the possibilities of that particular thread (and my attentions eventually drifted elsewhere). Here is a reworked selection of those notes.
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L’il Cupid’s dark, deep, dum, or blind, – his great love six me out.
Krazy Kat, June 28th, 1925
George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, or Krazy + Ignatz, was the daily record of an ongoing adventure that lasted thirty-one years in the fictional Coconico County, Arizona-style. A shifting landscape, a myriad of linguistic play. The androgynous happy cat, the angry mouse who throws bricks at our hero’s head, and the police dog whose main purpose is a daily combination of thwart and punish as each situation in the cycle required. How complicated is this? A daily note, repeating. An endless, simple cycle. Writing out of a love of language, and a pure love, with twists. An admirer of the daily feature, poet E.E. Cummings composed “A Foreword to Krazy” for a 1946 edition of reprints, writing:
Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp are opposite sides of the same coin. Is Offissa Pupp kind? Only in so far as Ignatz Mouse is cruel. If you’re a twofisted, spineless progressive (a mighty fashionable stance nowadays) Offissa Pupp, who forcefully asserts the will of socalled society, becomes a cosmic angel; while Ignatz Mouse, who forcefully defies society’s socalled will by asserting his authentic own, becomes a demon of anarchy and a fiend of chaos. But if – whisper it – you’re a 100% hidebound reactionary, the foot’s in the other shoe. Ignatz Mouse then stands forth as a hero, pluckily struggling to keep the flag of free will flying; while Offissa Pupp assumes the monstrous mien of a Goliath, satanically bullying a tiny but indomitable David. Well, let’s flip the coin – so: and lo! Offissa Pupp comes up. That makes Ignatz Mouse “tails.” Now we have a hero whose heart has gone to his head and a villain whose head has gone to his heart.
So there it is. Put the brick to his head. Or hers. A love triangle involving this repeating action with another brick, each one new, not (seemingly) repeated. There was Kolin Kelly, a dog, and his endless production of brick-building, manufacturing hand-crafted blocks for this particular mouse. Was Ignatz his best customer, or was this more of a side business? As The Simpsons pointed out, the cartoon animal hierarchy: mouse, cat, dog—Itchy, Scratchy, Poochie (Walt Disney, to his credit, turned this, so to speak, on its mouse-ear). Offissa Pupp and Kolin Kelly, two sides of third-handed coin. Thirty-one short years; is it coincidence that Herriman died the same year Vancouver’s bpNichol was born? Does one perception lead immediately and directly to another? bp was a fan of comic books himself, as well, and even produced, according to jwcurry, the first “underground comics” in Canada via “Milt the Morph.” Perhaps all the poets of that particular era had their own corresponding comic strip: George Bowering, who infamously titled a book of his prose poems after a quote from Walt Kelly’s Pogo (1948-1975): “I must remember this excellent witticism for when I write my autobiology.” In Autobiology (1972), Bowering responded to that particular quote as a jumping-off point through a sequence of first-person lyric prose blocks, almost a variation on what Fred Wah later termed “biotext.” It was not the brick that Bowering threw, but a language propulsion that sought to comprehend and articulate his own history, memory and childhood amid the lyric. Poets appreciate the play, after all, and Cummings clearly felt his own kindship, via linguistic and layered collage of sound and meaning, to Herriman’s own unique blend of languages, slang and jumble.
Poor “seep,” he thinks its love, when this fella Kewpid sokks him with a “bone arra” – […] But wot does he know about, ‘Ignatz’ and a ‘brick”?
Krazy Kat, September 20th, 1925
This twist, of Herriman’s language, blending and contorting words into new shapes, offering multiple languages simultaneously into a blend that appeared, at points, nonsensical, but was entirely deliberate, offering a collage effect comparable to the blend-words of Paul Celan; a poet’s ear and a linguist’s mind. What do we know? The pure physics of Ignatz and a brick, one to the hand, and purely thrown. Is simply-thrown the only purpose here? What does, if anything, Ignatz see beyond the daily brick, the attempt at striking Krazy’s noggin? The chase, the constant thrill; each morning’s dawn that reset the score back to zero; Ignatz, with mouse-wife and little mice-children at home. Is this a love, illicit or latent? We all know why poor Charlie Brown works so hard to kick the football, understand why Lucy pulls it back at each final moment. Charles Schultz’ classic strip populated with character tropes and types: a fairly straightforward psychological map. But with simple, naïve, sweet, daydreaming Krazy Kat, what motivates Ignatz Mouse? Is it as simple as jealousy, as simple to refuse an admission of love? Is it the landscape itself that propels?
Worse than Cupid, a brick to the head. He loves me, he loves me not, pelting bricks and the cat not seeing stars but swirling hearts. “L’il aingil,” s/he called him. Invented words and a shifting landscape in a twisted, twirling vernacular. We need a new language. I have exhausted this. Does a brick to one’s own head constitute self-love or self-abuse? Ignatz, the brick. Or, as Monica Youn focuses on Herriman’s “rodent of criminal tendencies” in her highly imaginative Ignatz (2010), articulating a variant on Wile E. Coyote, from her short lyric, “ERSATZ IGNATZ”:
Here is the door he will paint on the rock.
Here is the glass floor of the cliff.
Ignorant of each other’s motives, of Offissa Pupp, in love with Kat, repeatedly putting Ignatz in jail for each individual assault, rarely reprimanded as a repeat and serial offender. How is it they can live each other’s language but not know each other’s thinking, each other’s motivations? Is it a violence that we do to language or a special kind of love, a love that leaves its own mark? As Strother Martin’s warden said to Paul Newman’s Lucas “Cool Hand” Jackson in Cool Hand Luke (1967), “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Does the tension between then fall through language, love or their perpetual unknowing each other? The appearances of Don Kiyoti, perpetual troublemaker, titling at Coconico windmills. And Kat seeing Officer Pup and Ignatz as playing a perpetual, foolish game that Kat doesn’t seem to understand. Or, as Lisa Robertson wrote in her EXclogue (1993):
When I was lounging in the Grove I saw a Vision: it was like a flickering screen reporting a very pleasant history of love, thick-set with trees and starred with flowers and diverse fountains, all belonging to the sweet or to the dangerous affairs of love. I interpreted the image then drew up these two books as my oblation.
Dim, romantic and androgynous, Krazy Kat, who uses language best of all, the perspicacity of those who know the least and accomplish most. What? Waits for love to call and call it does. L’il aingil. Ignatz, the brick. Or is this Ignatz the brick-addict, self-destructively acting out against their own impulse, comparable to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes? To slow down his thoughts. “The Needle, Watson.” Is this a rejection of perceived queerness, the androgynous Krazy who responds from the heart, and Ignatz, who rejects out of fear and responds with violence?
Purchased now or found on the ground. If one might ask: where do all these thrown bricks wind up? Where do they land? Is there a brick mesa somewhere along that horizon? Does Offissa Pupp seize each one as evidence? The number of strips with Ignatz cradling or seeking a newly-hot brick, or his frustration at being unable to purchase another. Is a used brick so useless? Once thrown and sent through the air, might a cold brick equate to a cold heart?
Daily, everything resets, a progression of zeros. The strip adapts and develops even as it claims this endless cycle of beginnings, and a dismissal of continuity. What adventures might our characters get up to this week? And here, the trope of the sitcom, the daily or weekly strip: progressing all the way back, every episode, to its original moment. Is this Groundhog Day (1993) or Alberta poet Robert Kroetsch’s perpetual delay? One might think of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: no matter where the story might end up, it always resets. They perpetually begin.
It all happens with the simplest of set-ups: the mouse hates the cat, the cat feels the attentions, real or imagined, of love returned, and the dog aches to thwart each day’s new assault. This is how premises begin. There is that quote from The Goon Show’s Spike Milligan on comedy: if you start a sketch with five guys in carrot suits and a further character enters the sketch dressed normally, the sketch has to explain why that one character isn’t wearing a carrot suit. Was it even Milligan who said this?