From The Comics Journal 122, June 1988

R. Fiore on the Krazy Kat novel

Here's a man-bites-dog story for you: A novel that fails because it can't measure up to the complexity of a comic strip. It reminds me of Robert Altman's version of The Long Goodbye, in which the director projects his own lack of nerve on popular art of the past: The modern world is so horrible that it crushes the icon of the past. In Cantor's novelization, Krazy witnesses the atomic bomb test at Alamagordo and is so devastated by the experience that she retires, ending the strip. The rest of the book consists of Ignatz's attempts to con her out of it. It's a perfect example of nuclear bullshit politics. Nuclear disarmament, when stripped from its political context, is a perfect issue for the '80s: It allows you to give full vent to your self-righteousness without actually taking a political stand. One of the hallmarks of nuclear bullshit politics, prominent in this book, is that it puts the blame for nuclear weapons on the inventors rather than the people who ordered their development and use. In Krazy Kat there's a lot of talk about Robert Oppenheimer and not a word about Harry Truman. For a simple reason, I think: If it's Truman's responsibility rather than Oppenheimer's, then the public is accountable as well. Better to lay it at the feet of the misguided wizard. This superficiality carries over when Cantor's satirizes on Hollywood and televised terrorism. His first novel was about Che Guevara, so I guess he must have some kind of political sense, but Cantor reminds me of those contemporary fine artists who suddenly stumble over politics and repeat the most hackneyed, simplistic, and cliched observations as if they were a new discovery. The trouble with Krazy Kat as a novel is not, as you might expect, that Cantor condescends to his material. He's respectful to a fault. It's that he really has no understanding of it. It almost seems as though he based it on e.e. cummings' essay on the strip than the strip itself. He makes no attempt to duplicate the Herriman patois, and if you strip Krazy Kat of both its visual imagery and its language, there's very little left. Instead, it's written in a flat sterile writerese: "Once she [Krazy] had simply used to like tricks, all tricks, unsuspiciously, indiscriminately (but the Mouse's especially, of course). No more. Standing by the window, stretching lazily, she stared at the raggedy edges of the sun, as if to force it to tell her the truth-feel me at a distance and you live, it said. Inside the sun she saw a smaller more compact ball of flame, falling inward into itself-come too close to me and you die." And so on, and on, and on. Is there a school where people learn to write like this? It certainly isn't a natural way to use the language. It's one of those books that's filled with spontaneous weeping (weeping mind, never crying; weeping is prestige crying), as if to say, "If I knew how to portray emotion, this is where I'd put it." At the same time, Cantor has the nerve to complain about the lack of feeling in modern life. This is one physician who ought to heal himself. He can't handle the basic triangle at all; Offissa Bull Pup practically disappears. (So, incidentally, does the gender switching.) Krazy is pure innocence and goodness. Ignatz is a pure villain: a social climber, a manipulator, a collaborator with the badness of the modern world, and, when it suits him, a torturer. To be fair, Cantor portrays Ignatz as a kind of innocent too, cruel largely through misunderstanding what he's striving for. The best part of the book is over before the novel properly starts. It's Ignatz's version of the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts:" "It's a gift to be Clever/lt's a gift to be Smart/It's a gift to Ignore/The promptings of your Heart/And when we've attained our truly proper Size/We'll be marching up to get our Nobel Prize!" Cantor's trouble is he's a bit long on Clever himself, though there's nothing else nearly So clever in the book. Ignatz doesn't merely want to revive the strip, but to elevate it to the level of textbook literature. Throughout the book Krazy Kat is used as an example of the simple, heartfelt popular art that highbrow critics denigrate and ignore. This is wrong on several counts. As a point of character, Ignatz high-hatting just doesn't wash. In the strip he's a dedicated lowlife; the social climbing role would fit much better on Offissa Pup. Second, Cantor totally misapprehends the public and critical views of Krazy Kat. After a fairly brief vogue at the beginning of its run, the broad public pretty much turned its back on it. It was the highbrow readership that sustained it; it might have been the only comic strip kept alive primarily for its prestige value. In fact, the comic strip and the animated cartoon, like the mystery novel, have always had a bit of a privileged position among popular arts in the eyes of the intelligentsia. This continues today in the mass media attention to comic books. You would never see, say, science fiction novels getting the kind of respectful coverage from the big news magazines that comic books got recently (certainly not from Peter Prescott). It's another example of the depth of Cantor's misunderstanding of his material. In the final chapter Ignatz gets his wish, Krazy Kat is turned into realistic fiction, the characters are translated into human equivalents, and some reconciliation between innocence and experience is reached. It's not altogether convincing, but at least Cantor stays within himself. If he'd done the entire book in this manner it might have been better; certainly what he was trying to do was completely beyond him.