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| George Herriman |
Krazy Kat was a daily strip by American cartoonist George
Herriman (1880-1944) that appeared from 1913 to 1944 –and also in weekly full-page
format since 1916- in a varying number of American newspapers. Very little is known
about Herriman’s early years apart from the fact that he was born in New Orleans,
and his family moved to California when he was still very young. Around the turn
of the century, he travelled to New York to become a cartoonist and since 1910 he
worked regularly for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal. That year he started drawing a strip called
The Dingbat Family, where the eponymous characters had an unnamed domestic black
cat which would evolve into Krazy Kat and emancipate into a strip of its own in
1913. For over thirty years, Herriman told, once and again, several times a week,
the story of Krazy, a black male cat, madly in love with Ignatz, a white male mouse,
who, on the contrary, hates the feline protagonist and knows no greater pleasure
in the world than hitting him with a brick, an aggression which the cat indefectibly
interprets as a gesture of affection. As for the third main character of the series,
Offissa Pupp, he is a canine police officer who adores Krazy and constantly tries
to imprison the mouse. Poet E. E. Cummings best summed up this minimal drama as
follows: “Dog hates mouse and worships ‘cat,’ mouse despises ‘cat’ and hates dog,
‘cat’ hates no one and loves mouse” (1946).
As stated
in the title above, Krazy Kat constitutes an intersection of surrealistic sensibilities
with non-normative sexualities insofar as the cat-mouse-dog love triangle which
is the basic premise of the strip turns upside down the natural (stereotyped) order
of things –dog hates cat; cat fears dog and hates mouse; mouse fears cat- and transgresses
the traditional boundaries of erotic attraction – heterosexual, same-race, same-species–.
It is my purpose in this paper to elaborate on the historical and textual ties between
Herriman’s strip and Surrealism, as well as explore the raison d'etre of its core
network of normativity-breaking affections and dislikes.
2. KRAZY KAT AND SURREALISM: EXTRA-TEXTUAL CONNECTIONS
Amongst the few scholarly
works that have traced with some rigour the actual ties both historical and intellectual
between Krazy Kat and Surrealism, special attention should be paid to those by Rosemont
(1979) and Inge (1990). The latter outlined the connections between Krazy Kat and
Dadaism, the movement that was the immediate precursor of Surrealism, noting that,
“Herriman was at work well before the Armory Show of 1913 and the subsequent art
movements, he anticipated a good many of the ideas and attitudes which would characterize
their art” (1990). After Herriman’s death, an article firmly stated that
the cartoonist had been “Hailed as one of the first surrealists”.[1]
Actually, André Breton’s seminal First Manifesto acknowledged the surreal impulse
in precursors as diverse as Shakespeare, Dante or Poe, but Herriman was not amongst
those illustrious forefathers of Surrealism (Breton, [1924] 2006: 434). Nevertheless,
there is some recorded evidence that Krazy Kat may have exerted an influence on
him and other young French poets in the early 1920s. A decade later, some Americans
tried to reclaim the inspirational effect American popular culture had had on the
origination of the avant-garde movement. Thus, in 1932, Matthew Josephson wrote:
“[Americans] have long been producing super-realist [i.e., Surrealist] art in the
raw state. The European artists of the French capital have inspired themselves with
our movies, our jazz comedians, our folk customs, have refined all this material
and sent it back to us” (1932). As he elaborated later in his memoir, Josephson
himself had played an instrumental role in that process of cultural pollination,
since in 1921 he had met Dadaist writers Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault and Breton
in Paris. Soupault sustained, “literature alone did not suffice the new generation”
(qtd. in Abel, 1976), and these soon-to-be founders of Surrealism were very
interested in popular culture: films, dime novels, advertising… Josephson helped
them by “furnishing them with a goodly store of recent ‘Americana’ in the form of
Krazy Kat cartoon serials by George Herriman [...] These were exhibited to my French
friends [Soupault, Aragon, Breton] as ‘pure American Dada humor’” (Josephson, 1962).
Other historical
evidence of Krazy Kat’s possible influence on Surrealism includes the reported devotion
to the strip by Eduardo Paolozzi, who donated the Krazy Kat Archive to the Victoria
and Albert Museum in the 1980s (Grieve, 2001). Amongst the accolades of Herriman’s
work from Surrealism and other avant-garde movement were visual artists like Ad
Reinhardt – “a lifelong admirer of Krazy Kat” (Howe, 1974)–, as well as Pablo
Picasso and Willem De Kooning (McDonnell et al., 1986). A decade and a half
after Herriman’s death, Jack Kerouac called Krazy Kat “an immediate progenitor of
the Beat Generation” (1959), which was in some sense an inheritor of Dadaism
and Surrealism, born of a similar reaction to the impact of a world war. Also, in
1990, the New York City Museum of Modern Art's exhibition High and Low: Modern Art
and Popular Culture juxtaposed original Krazy Kat panels of 1919 with oil paintings
by Joan Miró (Zurier, 1991). According to Eggener, “Paintings such as Miró's
Carnival of Harlequin […] were praised for their ‘perky, goofy’ imagery, their fantastic
humor and jaunty wit. Miró’s figures were compared to Krazy Kat comic strips […]
and Mickey Mouse cartoons” (1993).
3. GEORGE HERRIMAN: THE CARTOONIST AS AN ARTIST
According to all biographical
sources, Herriman was a very shy person whose view of himself as an artist was “modest
to the point of self-effacement.” (Blackbeard, 2003) As for what he may have
thought of the favourable reception of his work by members of the artistic avant-garde,
there is no evidence that he was conscious of it at all (Inge, 1990). Most probably,
he ignored it but even that we cannot assure, since not even the most exhaustive
biography of Herriman (McDonnell et al., 1986) brings out any clues about his artistic
or literary interests.[2]
Regarding what Herriman thought about his own work, all we can find is an absolute
lack of affectation and apparently little understanding of the critical praise he
received.
Probably,
the foremost apostle of Krazy Kat’s virtues was American cultural critic Gilbert
Seldes, who wrote enthusiastically about it and personally introduced several illustrious
acquaintances of his to the strip.[3]
Seldes called Krazy Kat “the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of
art produced in America today […] Mr. Herriman, working in a despised medium, without
an atom of pretentiousness, is day after day producing something essentially fine”
(1924). Seldes went on to lament that the previous statement, along with others
in his book, would be condemned as heresies, in accordance with the prevailing high-vs.-low-culture
paradigm. And Herriman was no exception to that norm, since neither did he think
of himself as a fine artist nor did he feel he could relate on equal terms with
members of the intelligentsia like Seldes, no matter how much they admired his work.[4]
Nevertheless, Herriman’s unassuming stance should not be misinterpreted as disrespect
or carelessness in his career: the constant struggle for innovation that shows in
his work is the unequivocal result of the dedication he poured into the medium of
comics, even if it was deemed as vulgar and unworthy of scholarly attention. Consequently,
it is not in the sparse biographical material on Herriman that we should look for
an insight into the sources of a sensibility akin to Surrealism but in the Krazy
Kat daily strips and weekend full pages themselves, which he produced for over three
decades.
It has
been noted that within the broad field of mass media, newspaper comics “are extraordinarily
susceptible to individual creative impulse”, and even though “not all comics are
produced by a single creative intelligence […] most of the greatest strips have
been the expression of a single creative vision” (Harvey, 1994). Such is the
case of Krazy Kat, because, while Herriman’s private life may have been obscured
by his own introversion, as an artist he had a strong and distinctive personality
which showed in his work. Additionally, it should be noted that Herriman benefited
from pretty unique working conditions for a practitioner of a medium where the success
and the chance of survival of a product depended on how many readers it could attract,
since comic strips had been conceived to boost the sales of newspapers. Therefore,
a cartoonist had to strive for the favour of readers, even if that meant sacrificing
personal interests or adhering to a formula of proved mass appeal, to the detriment
of more experimental approaches. However, Krazy Kat was protected from such pressures
for, if Herriman was the father of the strip, it also had a most powerful godfather
in the person of none other than W. R. Hearst. The legendary press mogul enjoyed
the little cat-and-mouse pantomime so much[5]
that he gave Herriman a lifetime contract and carte blanche to do whatever he wanted
(Blackbeard, 1989). As noted by several comic strips historians, colleagues and
intellectuals revered Herriman’s talent, but “their high opinion of Krazy Kat did
not translate into circulation. Krazy Kat appeared in very few newspapers relatively
speaking” (Harvey, 1994), so “Hearst had to personally back Herriman […] despite
calls from Hearst editors to cut the strip” (Schwartz, 2003). Thus, Krazy Kat
has even been described as “an unpopular failure that survived largely due to the
whim of one popular fan, William Randolph Hearst” (Zurier, 1991). To be fair,
the strip enjoyed considerable popularity during its early years up to the 1920s,
the decade that witnessed the so-called “death of nonsense,” a shift from the whimsical
humour so dear to Herriman toward the situation comedy that would prevail during
the 1930s and 1940s (Schwartz, 2003). Though Herriman often satirized “popular
culture […] the latest fads in music, clothing, mass media, or popular belief” (Inge,
1990), hardly any allusions to political and social issues ever entered the
universe of Krazy Kat in an explicit way. As pure fantasy gave way to a more reality-based
kind of humour, other cartoonists started developing their strips in close correlation
with the pulse of current events in order to satisfy their readers’ taste for social
commentary and lampoon. However, thanks to Hearst’s protection, the real world rarely
affected the development of Krazy Kat, which remained “a self-contained aesthetic
universe largely impervious to history” (Orvell, 1992).
In short,
Herriman produced his strip under a regime of patronage which may have been more
or less common in the domain of the fine arts, but was almost unheard of amongst
practitioners of mass media culture. This situation allowed Krazy Kat to evolve
responding above all to its author’s creative impulses, much to the delight of his
patron: “Increasingly, Herriman became a court jester to an audience of one” (Schwartz,
2003). As the years passed, Krazy Kat progressively monopolized its author’s
efforts to the point of completely absorbing him after the death of one of his daughters
in 1939. During this last phase of his career, isolated from the external world,
Herriman unconsciously embodied the romantic idea of the artist who lives only to
produce art for art’s sake, even if it was within a popular branch of the visual
arts like comics.
4. KRAZY KAT’S SURREAL WORLD
The uncanny presided
over Krazy Kat from the beginning of the strip. One of its most celebrated surreal
aspects is the way Herriman designed sceneries that somehow resembled Giorgio de
Chirico’s metaphysical landscapes, which so strongly influenced Surrealist painters.
Still, Herriman’s inspiration came from his direct experience in the vast plains
of the American Southwest deserts to which he made a yearly pilgrimage. It must
not be disregarded as a mere coincidence that, when Herriman was given a more spacious
weekend full page to play with in 1916, he decided to move the action of his strip
from New York to his own imaginative version of the Arizona territories he loved
so much. If the unreachable line of the horizon and the natural stone formations
of the real-life Monument Valley already bore an undeniable likeness to the never-ending
alien landscapes of Dalí’s and Tanguy’s paintings, Herriman recast it as a veritable
collage of disparate elements. The Coconino County where the Krazy Kat strip takes
place is a juxtaposition of the desert and the big city,[6]
as well as the modern American culture and the Hispanic and indigenous ones. Especially,
Navajo designs and motifs had an important presence in Herriman’s panels, mirroring
a fascination for these North American natives which the anti-colonialist Surrealists
came to share:
It was towards the peoples of Arizona and New Mexico […]
that the Surrealist gaze in North America was first directed […]. A romantic interest
in the lives of North American “Indians” had been nurtured by the movement long
before its American sojourn. Apollinaire, in 1903, made the first reference to American
“Indians” in one of his earliest articles (Tythacott, 2003).
I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with
conventional language […] I don’t want words that other people have invented. All
the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and
vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own […] It will serve
to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around.
I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat miaows […] ([1916]
2006)
Nevertheless,
Herriman was not an inventor of words à la Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, nor did
he intend to reach a nihilistic situation in which there could be no possible communication
with the reader. Instead, he realised that language was not something stable, but
it could be bended and stretched, so he became a manipulator of words, writing them
as they sounded, breaking them or fusing them, and, of course, throwing in the mix
as many Ks as possible.[7]
And not only is Krazy Kat the character whose name is doubly defamiliarised by the
initial K, but, as noted above, his speech is so strange that it becomes a challenge
to his relationship with the other characters in the strip.
Herriman’s
manipulation of written language exemplified Breton’s doctrine of poetry as free
and unlimited play even before the French poet had enunciated it. And the cartoonist
applied a similar playfulness to the visual components of the comics’ language,
continuously stretching the limits of the medium, though “he didn’t transcend comics,
rather he took the special language of comics and gave it a personal lilt as no
artist did before” (Heer, 2007). Of course, his taste for experimentation shows
in the inventive layouts he designed for the weekly full pages, but it is also evident
in the most basic mechanism of the sequential language of comics: the transition
between panels. In a blatant rejection of every rule of raccord, Herriman abruptly
changed the backgrounds from one panel to another, without any apparent relevance
to the narrative and most often without the characters ever referring to the non-sequitur
shifting of their spatial settings. The result is a world in continuous metamorphosis
which, added to the already mentioned surreal treatment of the landscapes, led to
an effect of disorientation of the viewer not unlike Max Ernst’s collage novels.
Just as Alfred Jarry’s revolutionary staging of his play Ubu Roi had the backgrounds
change even within the same scene, Herriman dispensed with the plausibility of Krazy
Kat, in accordance with what Sartre would later describe as one of “the three essential
refusals in the contemporary theatre”: the refusal of all realism (1966). And,
in the plane of content, compliance with the other two “essential refusals” formulated
by the Existentialist philosopher –the refusal of psychology and the refusal of
plot– allowed Herriman to indulge in his taste for formal experimentation. Like
Jarry, Herriman renounced to naturalist psychologies and elaborate plots, in favour
of symbolic characters and a minimal farce he revisited once and again. The simplicity
and the repetition of the content gave him the freedom to improvise and toy with
the form of the expression: he would always tell the same story, but in an infinite
number of variations.
5. KRAZY KAT’S PLOT: THE OMNIPOTENCE OF DESIRE
Breton distilled what
he considered to be the pure essence of Surrealism in the following statement: “the
omnipotence of desire […] has remained, since the beginning, surrealism's sole act
of faith” ([1934] 1974). Instinctively, by that time Herriman had already
been exploring the overwhelming power of desires and obsessions as the basic theme
of Krazy Kat for over twenty years, and would continue to do so till the end of
both the strip and his own life. The development of the theme had been almost casual,
seemingly unplanned, starting with a mouse throwing a piece of brick at a cat’s
head in the 26 July, 1910 instalment of the Dingbat Family series. In this manner
the rodent began a campaign of attacks against the feline which would constitute
a subplot somehow mimicking the conflicts between the human main characters of the
strip. By the time they were finally given a daily strip of their own, on 28 October,
1913, the basic dynamics of the relationship between the two animals had already
been solidly established: more than anything else on the world, Ignatz, the mouse,
wants to hit Krazy Kat’s head with one of his bricks; and, correspondingly, Krazy
craves for the collision of the projectile on his cranium. This violent slapstick
was a direct appropriation in comic strip form of the two-man act so common in the
American vaudeville theatre, with the original twist of the victim longing for the
aggressions. Two daily instalments published with an interval of only a few months
clearly confirm that the impact of the brick causes Krazy pleasure instead of pain
even though, at heart, the Kat knows the mouse actually attempts to harm him. The
first of these (11 October, 1918) shows Krazy gradually approaching orgasm as Ignatz’s
aim fails once (“Ah, Ignatz is nigh”), twice (“Ah-h”), thrice (“Ah-h-h”) and finally
hits his target (“AH-H-H, li’l sharp shoota [sic]”). Some months later (4 February,
1919) Krazy directly asks Ignatz whether he loves him, to which the mouse answers
with a rotund negation while throwing a well-aimed brick at the cat’s head; in the
last panel, alone and contused, Krazy complains about his luck: “Ah, if only he
was as dimunstrative [sic] in loving me as he is in not loving me, what a heppy,
heppy ket [sic] I’d be”.
In the
former quote, the allusion to the theory that humans are born polymorphously perverse
leads from Breton’s vindication of Sade’s Surrealism to what may have been his greatest
source of inspiration in the foundation of Surrealism: Freud’s doctrines (Hopkins,
2004). It has been suggested that Breton’s claim of a Sadean heritage responded
to “the psychoanalytically oriented attempt to develop a theory of sadism as part
of the epistemological foundations of surrealist aesthetics” (Weiss, 1989).
In the case of Krazy Kat, the Freud-Surrealism connection throws an amount of light
on the nature of the violent relationship between the cat and the mouse. According
to art historian Hal Foster, a defining characteristic of Surrealism is the “tension
between binding and shattering tendencies, the play between sadistic and masochistic
impulses” (1991). In this regard, Freud considered sadism and masochism were
opposed, but complementary, forms of sexual fantasies and behaviours that stemmed
from an association of sexual and aggressive instincts. Both of them consisted of
a search for sexual arousal or gratification through either the infliction or the
suffering of physical or mental pain, as the active and passive sides of perversion
rooted in the anal period of the child development. In keeping with his belief in
the superiority of men over women, Freud considered sadism as a result of the exaggeration
of the normal aggressive component of the more active masculine sexuality, whereas
he related masochistic tendencies to the weaker superegos and penis envy of females.
This attribution of genders to the roles in sadomasochistic practices is consistent
with the dynamic of the two main characters of Krazy Kat. Ignatz, the torturing
side of the couple, is masculine and his portrayal includes such traditional features
as his married state and his paternity of a triplet of little rodents. On the other
hand, the femininity of Krazy is much more controversial, since Herriman enjoyed
playing with the ambiguous sex of the protagonist.[8]
The third
component of the classic Krazy Kat love triangle was not part of the strip from
the beginning. The canine police officer Offissa Pupp started appearing sporadically
as just another secondary character amongst the many picturesque ones that populated
Coconino County. At first, Pupp’s function, in accordance with his job, was exclusively
that of acting as the guardian of moral order in the region. In consequence, it
is no surprise that the nature of the threesome relationship has been interpreted
in terms of the classic tripartite model of personality introduced by Freud: “A
common Freudian reading of Herriman’s Kop-Kat-Mouse triangle assigns Offissa Pupp
the role of superego, Krazy the ego, and Ignatz the id” (Blackmore, 1997). As
the dog acquires his status as the third protagonist of the strip, he also develops
more passionate, and diametrically opposed, feelings toward the other two central
characters: Pupp becomes the silent admirer of Krazy, whom he tries to protect from
attacks by Ignatz, whom he, conversely, detests. Gradually, the canine officer develops
a behaviour which reflects Ignatz’s cruelty to Krazy: Pupp takes pleasure in imprisoning
the mouse and also progresses toward an adoration of the jail, symmetrical to Ignatz’s
own worshipping of the brick. This way, the classical plot becomes an even more
satisfactory allegory for Freud’s notion of the human mind locked in a cycle of
incessant conflict between the interests of three different agents. And, just as
the never-ending struggle between id, ego and superego results from the tension
between the realisation of primary desires at any cost and the repression of those
same desires, in Krazy Kat it is Ignatz’s brick that comes to symbolise the object
of pleasure to seek or proscribe: “The brick becomes a symbol of communication and
miscommunication; the love triangle lets Herriman play with every possible angle
at which desire and authority meet” (Wolk, 2007). In different ways, the brick
can satisfy the diverse instincts of the three characters in a convoluted circle
of gratification and repression: being perhaps the most directly linked to the id,
for Ignatz the brick is just the missile with which he can satisfy his primary wish
to punish the Kat; nonetheless, Krazy’s imagination transforms the brick in a brutal
–albeit acceptable within the confines of the vaudeville conventions– means of receiving
erotic pleasure from the mouse; as for Offissa Pupp, he is constantly trying to
confiscate the brick –which he often labels an instrument of sin– before Ignatz
has a chance to use it against his adored felid. Some authors have gone so far as
to suggest the brick is the fourth protagonist of the strip, and have produced some
evidence for their claim:
The consistent placement of all characters’ names in quotation
marks within dialogue is a signature feature of Herriman's style […] by designating
“brick” the same way he designates “Krazy”, “Ignatz”, and the others, Herriman emphasizes
the brick's agency in the storylines (Crocker, 1994).
What is
for sure is that the brick transcends its function as a mere prop and takes on a
crucial role in the repetitive plot in virtue of the extraordinary value the Kat,
the mouse and the dog assign to it in their interminable game of desire and frustration.
This brings the brick close to another of Freud’s preoccupations, namely fetishism,
which he defined as “those cases in which the normal sexual object is replaced by
another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal
sexual aim (Freud [1905] 1953). Also, the brick has to do with the fetish understood
in the Marxian sense of the commodity fetish, since it is the basis for the most
frequent portrayal of economic transactions within the Krazy Kat strip, those between
Ignatz and his purveyor of bricks. In this aspect, the mouse’s behaviour is akin
to that of a drug addict, constantly seeking money to get his missiles and, unsurprisingly,
it is Krazy himself who often gives him the sum to buy them and thus fulfil the
appetites of both. Once again, the brick, understood as a fetish, links Herriman’s
strip to Surrealism, for, as Dawn Ades explains, fetishism interested Breton not
so much “because of his sexual obsession per se, but as someone who is convinced
by his imagination […] The fetishist offered a supreme example of the reconciliation
of imagination and reality” (1995).
6. HERRIMAN’S OUTING
According to Richard
Dyer, “Queer theory is especially interested in manifestations of male-male sexual
attraction where you wouldn’t expect to find it, where it’s been diverted or repressed
or else obliquely expressed or unknowingly sublimated” (2001). Doubtlessly, a
mainstream comic strip from a major American press syndicate that ran uninterruptedly
during the first half of the twentieth century is one of those unexpected places
to find not only same-sex attraction but also other forms of nonnormative sexualities,
such as sadomasochism and fetishism, as exposed above.
It is difficult
to determine to what extent Herriman was consciously aware of the gender-bending
and transgression of heteronormativity he was embedding in the naïve pantomimes
of Krazy Kat. The fact is that he was allowed to do so thanks to the support of
Hearst, who most probably regarded all that as nonsensical eccentricity. Whatever
was at the root of Herriman’s discourse, he wrapped it all in a surreal landscape
in constant metamorphosis, inhabited by oddball creatures of animalistic appearance
that speak strange dialects, in the same manner as the dreamwork which, according
to Freud, constitutes the manifest content of dreams. (Freud & Oppenheim, [1911]
1962) Even the humorous tone and comical intention of Krazy Kat reinforce its
connection with dreams, since Freud considered these were closely related to jokes
because they were all due to the same mental processes. ([1916] 1979: 273-274) It
seems, then, adequate to conjecture about the latent meaning concealed within the
little mental comedy around the comings and goings of Krazy, Ignatz and Pupp.
In fact,
the queer ingredient of Krazy Kat did not go unnoticed to everyone at the time of
its first publication, since there is some evidence to support the possibility that
the strip acquired a special significance within the clandestine gay communities
of that time. Concretely, Heer has pointed out the existence of a club called Krazy
Kat in Washington, D.C.:
The clientele included college kids, flappers and gays.
A diary by a gay man kept in 1920 refers to the Krazy Kat club as a “Bohemian joint
in an old stable up near Thomas Circle […] Is it possible that Krazy’s shifting
gender identity made him/her an icon for gays? […] The building that housed the
Krazy Kat club remained a gay hangout for decades to come (2008).
Either
consciously or not, in some sense, in Krazy Kat Herriman codified a discourse about
his own kind of “queerness”, as his posthumous outing revealed almost three decades
after his death. However, instead of the proverbial closet, it would be more proper
to say that the cartoonist was brought out of a cabin, for the social identity he
had kept mostly secret throughout his life did not have anything to do with his
sexual orientation but with his racial origins. In 1971, Arthur Asa Berger discovered
that Herriman had been described as coloured by the New Orleans Board of Health
in his birth certificate and his parents had been listed as mulatto in the 1880
census. According to Harvey, Herriman “was probably one of the ‘colored’ Creoles
who lived in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century –descendants of “free
persons of color” who had intermarried with people of French, Spanish, and West
Indian stock” (1994). Whatever the precise blend of races that made up his
ethnic identity, Herriman chose to pass as white and took great care to conceal
any features that may have given his true ancestry away, so much so that he wore
a Stetson hat all the time most likely in order to hide his black curled hair. Apparently,
Herriman’s “passing” was so successful that he was listed as Caucasian in his death
certificate and his own granddaughter did not learn the truth about the racial origins
of her family until Berger’s discovery: “That was a family secret […] I was certainly
never told about it” (Heer & Tisserand, 2008). In this sense, the cartoonist’s
attitude hardly qualified for the kind of revolutionary stance Breton seemed to
be invoking when he wrote that, “the emancipation of people of colours can only
be the work of those people themselves, with all the implications inherent in that”
(qtd. in Stansell, 2003).
While he
eluded it in real life, through Krazy Kat Herriman translated his own identity conflict
into an allegory where racial and ethnical barriers were replaced by sexual and
gender boundaries which the main characters crossed back and forth once and again9.
From this point of view, the kat-mouse-dog love triangle that constitutes the basic
plot of Krazy Kat has been described as “a comically thwarted fantasy of miscegenation”
(Heer, 2005) where racial identity conflicts are disguised as erotic relations.
Jack Babuscio defines “the gay sensibility as a consciousness that is different
from the mainstream; a heightened awareness of certain human complications of feeling
that spring from the fact of social oppression” (1977). Accordingly, Babuscio
adds that the gay sensibility is not actually exclusive to gays, but it is also
developed by “members of minority groups which have been treated, in essential respects,
as marginal to society” (idem). Regarding race, the equivalent of the heteronormativity
of sexual orientation was whiteness. As noted by D. R. Roedinger, “To refer to people
of color as nonwhites almost perfectly exemplifies the tendency to place whites
at the normative center of everything and to marginalize everyone else” (2003).
Thus, it has been a frequent reaction amongst those who did not actually identify
themselves with the norm, either sexual or racial to avoid marginalisation by pretending
they did conform to that norm. Known as “passing,” both in its sexual and racial
modalities, this kind of behaviour is “often productive of a gay sensibility” (Babuscio,
1977). Consequently, it is plausible that Herriman instilled Krazy Kat with
the special perception of the world he had developed as a result of his lifelong
impersonation of a white man.
In contrast
with the cartoonist, who struggled to assimilate to the white majority, his creation,
Krazy, embraces his homoerotic attraction toward Ignatz without inhibitions, which
is in consonance with Freud’s theory of the artist as “a man who turns away from
reality […] and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life
of phantasy” ([1911] 1962). It should not go unnoticed, however, that Herriman
chose to represent the relationship between the black cat and the white mouse as
one in which the former willingly submits himself to the aggressive disdain of the
latter. Maybe, after all, Herriman was justifying his own “passing” in real life
because, otherwise, the white American society would have treated him just as badly
as Ignatz treated Krazy. But, at the same
time, the cartoonist seemed to express genuine admiration and affection for Krazy,
who openly expressed his true self, no matter the punishment. As for the way Herriman
felt about his passing as a white man, probably his last known reflection about
it was the Krazy Kat strip from 21 May, 1944, in which he equates it to the behaviour
of a lowly weasel that gets itself bleached in a beauty parlour in order to “pass”
as a precious ermine.
The question
of Herriman’s racial identity brings about yet another connection between Krazy
Kat and Surrealism. As Amanda Stansell points out, “The Surrealists’ presentation
of racial difference as socially constructed, yet unfixed, anticipates the work
of ‘whiteness’ critics” (2003). Similarly, when interpreted as a metaphor for
the impersonation of different racial identities, the gender-shifting Krazy also
questions established notions of race and purity of blood, though Herriman’s critique,
conscious or not, was hardly obvious to his contemporary readers. Even so, some
of them were able to recognise the racial subtext underlying the sexual metaphor
of this strip, for, just as there was a Krazy Kat club in Washington, D.C. which
congregated gay citizens, there was also a namesake club in Chicago which served
as a meeting place for African American teenagers (Heer, 2008). And, despite his
timidity, Herriman himself planted the seeds of his posthumous transformation into
an early symbol of the African diaspora in the United States: once, when asked about
the conception of his strip, the cartoonist answered that “Krazy Kat was not conceived,
not born, it jes’ grew’” (qtd. in McDonnell et al., 1986). His words echoed
the famous answer given by Topsy, the slave girl in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when asked
who her parents were and when she was born: “I s’pect I just grow’d. Don’t think
nobody never made me” (Stowe, [1852] 1986). Decades later, shortly after Herriman’s
nonwhiteness had been uncovered, African American author Ishmael Reed dedicated
to him his novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), in which a “mighty influence, Jes Grew, infects
all that it touches” ([1972] 1996), with orgiastic effects. Furthermore, in
2000, poet Harryet Mullen commented with regard to Herriman’s influence on her work
that “Herriman was a melting pot American […] The issue of lost kinship, of lineage
and the denial of relationship in ‘passing’ is evident in Herriman’s story” (Frost
& Mullen, 2000). Thus, not only has the revelation of Herriman’s hidden
identity served as the platform for a reading of Krazy Kat in a racial key, embedded
in homoerotic tensions and elements akin to surrealism, but has also turned both
the cartoonist and his creation into symbols for the cultural liberation of African
Americans.
*****
EDIÇÃO COMEMORATIVA | CENTENÁRIO
DO SURREALISMO 1919-2019
Artistas convidados: Frank Miller,
George Herriman, Grant Morrison, Katsuhiro Otomo, Max
Andersson, Moebius, Neil Gaiman, Paul Kirchner, Robert
Crumb, Tsuge Yoshiharu
Agulha Revista de Cultura
20 ANOS O MUNDO CONOSCO
Número 140 | Agosto de 2019
editor geral | FLORIANO MARTINS | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
editor assistente | MÁRCIO SIMÕES | mxsimoes@hotmail.com
logo & design | FLORIANO MARTINS
revisão de textos & difusão | FLORIANO
MARTINS | MÁRCIO SIMÕES
ARC Edições © 2019
[1] “Death of Herriman,” Art News, 1-14 May 1944, p. 7.
[2] An exception is the fact that he liked comedy films, especially those
by Charles Chaplin, as, aside from his cartoons and comic strips, one of the few
known public texts by Herriman was an appreciative review of Chaplin’s The Gold
Rush (1925) for one of the most popular film magazines of the time (Herriman, [1925]
2002: 9). It was a fondness
shared by Surrealists (Abel, 1976: 90).
[3] “Seldes’s circle included the renowned literary figures F. Scott Fitzgerald,
e. e. cummings, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and H. L. Mencken, all of whom were
introduced to Krazy Kat by Seldes” (McDonnell et al., 1986: 67).
[4] As best illustrated by a passage from his infrequent correspondence with
Seldes: “It’s sure nice, folks like me —getting letters from folks like you” (qtd.
in McDonnell et al., 1986: 67).
[5] Reportedly, Hearst himself had encouraged Herriman to develop the comings
and goings of the cat and the mouse that appeared in the marginal spaces of The
Dingbat Family panels into a strip of their own (Schwartz, 2003: 8).
[6] According to E. G. Anderson, it is “a mixture of two actual adjoining
and complementary places, Kayenta [Northeast Arizona] and Monument Valley [Northeast
Arizona and South Utah] […] Herriman urbanizes these places [and] reinvents them
as surreal, abstract, jerry-built figurative sites […] migrated from New York to
the southwest without leaving behind its urban genealogy […] continually merges
the skies and seas of Manhattan and Arizona” (1999: 151).
[7] Herriman’s fondness for this letter may be part of a more general fad
(Pound, 1925).
[8] So much so, that he was often asked about it by his readers, as in the
case of a young Frank Capra who only got from the cartoonist the following answer:
“[…] I realized Krazy was something like a sprite, an elf. They have no sex. So
the Kat can’t be a he or a she. The Kat’s a sprite – a pixie – free to butt into
anything” (qtd. in Capra, 1971: 40).
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