R.C. Harvey on the Krazy Kat novel by Jay Cantor

Krazy Kat in Prose Not Pix

After three or four Superman flicks, we've grown accustomed to movies based on comic strip characters. In fact, you might even say we've become a little jaded by all the big-budget Hollywood attention. So it's high time for something a little different. And now we have it.

A novel inspired by a comic strip. A serious novel. Not one of your Whitman rehashes in prose of a comic strip plot that's already run in the newspaper somewhere, but a serious work of prose fiction that takes a comic strip as the springboard to the telling of another story using the same characters and the same ambiance.

Dunno if there's a precedent for this variety of media crossover (a polite way of referring to the perversion of one artform by another), but unprecedented or not, we've got it -- a novel called Krazy Kat by Jay Cantor. Yup -- a serious work of prose fiction, and it's brought out by a serious (even dignified) publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, under the Borzoi Book imprint for $16.95.

If you're a dedicated fan of George Herriman's classic kat and mouse game, you probably won't like this book. Cantor takes Herriman's characters away from the lyric rites of their endless courtship ritual away from the basis of their enduring appeal• and plunks them into late 20th century America, complete with neuroses and political/social consciousness.

That's right: he's "up-dated" Herriman's creation. (Horrible expression, "up-dated." Reminds me of up-chucking.)

If you're not fanatic about Herriman, Cantor's passion to modernize Herriman by destroying the innocence of his characters will not strike you as blasphemous. In fact, you will doubtless find his treatment ingenious and amusing in an elaborately contrived sort of way. Cute, that is but not profound.

Cantor approaches Herriman's characters as if they are vaudeville performers (a wholly valid conception, by the way) whose "act" was a comic strip. Krazy quit the act upon witnessing the explosion of the first atomic bomb: presumably, recognition of such destructive power so carelessly deployed robbed her of the innocence so essential to the success of their act.

After the episode at Alamogordo, the ritual of the strip didn't work for Krazy any more. The bricks Ignatz threw at her no longer seemed to be tokens of his love: suddenly, they hurt.

But Ignatz isn't ready to retire. He misses the fame that he enjoyed as an entertainer, and since he can't get a billing without Krazy, he plots to get her back.

In the first of the novel's five sections, Cantor outlines this predicament, and Ignatz tries to trick Krazy into returning to the strip (returning to the stage) by impersonating Robert Oppenheimer writing letters to Krazy to convince her she's mistaken about the bomb. But eventually, Ignatz tips his hand, and Krazy sees through his trick.

In the next section, Ignatz psychoanalyzes Krazy. She's "flat" (a two-dimensional character) he announces, and she should be "round." The difficulty stems from the "basic split" in our character, Ignatz explains, the division between "our animal nature -- our Sex-Hunger -- and our need for civilization, for Table Manners...

"Everything we do expresses our desire and our need to punish ourselves -- to squelch our desires and have some manners. So all we do or think or see has two faces. If you look at it one way, it means sex-hunger. If you look at it another, it means punishment of sex-hunger. Everything becomes round."

In other words, everything becomes round when we recognize and reconcile the divisions in our personality.

But Krazy isn't convinced.

Before Ignatz can find another tack to take, a movie producer appears on the scene, and everyone in Herriman's surreal Coconino County is stampeded into seeking salvation by being in a movie. At the last minute, though, the producer discovers that none of the denizens of Herriman's landscape own the rights to themselves: they belong to Hearst, so they can't act independently.

In search of redress, Ignatz and Krazy and the rest of the strip's characters form a radical organization to terrorize the establishment. But when they discover Hearst is dead, they lose their revolutionary fervor, and their movement collapses.

In the last section of the book -- the longest -- Ignatz and Krazy take human form: Ignatz becomes a therapist who seduces his patient, who is Krazy (of course: why else would she be seeing a therapist?) in the form of a woman called Kate Higgs Bosun. He abandons his practice and he and Kate (sometimes called, affectionately, "Kat") become nightclub entertainers. She sings and he accompanies her on the piano.

Krazy and Ignatz are performers once again. The novel's animating dilemma resolved, it ends.

Perhaps the strangest thing in this patchwork of eccentricities is the page numbering. Only the odd-numbered pages carry page numbers. And that is emblematic of the novel's most evident successes: only the odd stuff really counts, and there's a healthy dose of oddities here, including a host of tiny but telling insights.

For instance, when Krazy and Ignatz are leading their radical movement, the entire band of terrorists is besieged in their hideout by the police. The police action is being covered by a local TV news crew, and the outlaws amuse themselves by watching the whole operation on their television set. As they watch, the deadly seriousness of their dilemma evaporates: products of the TV age, they are convinced that they can't really die in the ensuing battle because they are now characters in a TV show.

This section of the book is full of scathing comment on the state of modern TV-dominated society. "The media gods thought bad was good -- good television anyway."

"Media access sped like a drug through the Mouse's blood. Getting on TV, Ignatz said, was the new avant-garde mass art form! Performance art!"

Terrorism as avant-garde performance art.

And there are other glib bon mots: "The world is a suicidal thought in the mind of God...." And when Krazy becomes Kat the torch singer, she murmurs once that "it's better to sing the songs than to suffer them."

Cantor slips often into lyricism. Ignatz can hurt Krazy with the smallest action. Once he laughs at her "and it was like an icicle in her heart. The icicle became a snowflake, just as it always did with that Mouse's meanest gestures. She thought, He loves me. She tried to say it. She couldn't. The snowflake melted and left nothing in her heart but a puddle of confusion."

Cantor's linguistic inventiveness is delightful. Describing the movie producer, he writes: "He had a wide mouth, bald dome, and a broad nose that occupied the middle of his face by droit de seigneur."

Throughout, Cantor sprinkles Joycean puns. "Mr. Eeek That's a Maoist" is Ignatz Mouse. "Awful Sir Ball Pop" is Offissa Bull Pup (also, on another occasion, "O.F. Sassy Phup").

Elsewhere, we have a punning commentary on capitalism - "keepitallism." And "personal" becomes "personhell."

The ingenuity of such locutions is amusing, and they also evoke the spirit of the comic strip, which was redolent with Herriman's word play. Cantor's linguistic homage to his inspiration is therefore both delightful and appropriate.

But over all, Cantor strays too far from the elfin ambiance of Herriman's krazy world. Ultimately, in paying homage to the cartoonist whose creation he clearly loves, the novelist destroys that creation by making into something it never was.

The appeal of the comic strip arose chiefly from the sublime innocence of its star. And in his book, Cantor has erased that innocence.

To resolve the novel's central thematic conflict, Cantor converts Krazy to Kate, and he gives her a sex life. And with that, the mythology of the Garden of Eden is replayed. Consciousness of sexuality destroys innocence, and with the loss of innocence, our heroes and heroines are banished from Paradise.

In this atomic age, the innocence that pervaded Herriman's Coconino County is no longer possible. That, at least, seems to be the message of the book.

The message, however, is blurred by a host of other concerns that Cantor indulges herein. The book bristles with satirical criticism of movies, TV, pop psychology, ranting radicalism, and the very meaning of life itself. But it isn't the variety of targets that obscures Cantor's purpose: it's his failure to resolve the meaning of his metaphors.

Krazy's ambiguous sex is introduced as a minor motif. Is the Kat male or female? Is the brick that Ignatz sails to Krazy's bean a symbol of love or hate? Does she want it or fear it? Is the atomic bomb a giant brick? Or is the brick (as we discover in the movie-making portion of the novel) simply a grapefruit in the face? (Only Jimmy Cagney fans will get that one, I suppose.)

Is roundness better than flatness? To be round is to have a soul; but to be flat is to be innocent (pure?).

With metaphors like these, Cantor introduces a wealth of targets. But having lofted his symbolic balloons, he lets them drift off without really puncturing any of them.

Although Cantor finally decides that Krazy is female, the love affair that he constructs between Kate and Ignatz at the end of the novel is cloaked with the kind of polymorphous perversity that Freud championed as the infantile vision of sexuality, in which gender matters not a whit. In Freudian terms, this kind of "perversity" is simply libidinous innocence. So, with this ploy, Cantor gestures at preserving Krazy's innocence.

But it's a clumsy maneuver. The polymorphous perversity that we all carry around in our subconscious memory is too deeply buried there to be readily accessible to conscious apprehension, and so we do not respond sympathetically at first to Kate and Ignatz in heat. Ultimately, we may rejoice in their happiness together (despite Kate's leaving a husband we've never met and can't therefore know if his fate is deserved or not), but at first we are likely to be shocked by the experimental lust that initiates their affair.

The problem with this outcome is that love is bound up with sex in Cantor's resolution. And sex is ultimately antithetical to Herriman's asexual vision and therefore violates it.

In attempting to up-date Herriman, Cantor seeks to preserve the spirit of Herriman's art by replacing innocence with something else. A noble try nobly inspired, but there is no substitute for innocence. Cantor knows that. He's intimate enough with Herriman's masterpiece to realize the futility of looking for a substitute for innocence. And he signals his recognition of this fact at the very beginning of the novel. Ignatz is raging at Krazy about her refusal to "vary the plot" of their act. But she simply couldn't vary it:

The plot was she herself! Her art had been what she was -- how could she have been otherwise? done otherwise? But in his rage Ignatz forgot the essence of her heart -- the very axis of their work. For only the Mouse, of all of them, could dream that anyone could even imagine changing his nature.

Cantor tries to change her anyhow. But he isn't entirely serious in his attempt. At the end of the book, he describes the shifting features of the desert landscape in the strip -- a Herriman trademark -- and he concludes about the phenomenon that "it must have been the light playing tricks." With this coda, he labels his novel, too.

But even if the novel is little more than word play and a light show (and such endeavors are entirely worthy in themselves), it nonetheless has an organizing principle. And Krazy is the linchpin of that principle.

Early in the book, Ignatz (posing as Oppenheimer) lays out the thematic equation. Referring to the "contradiction" between mankind's animal and angelic natures, he says:

Krazy, you alone have resolved that very division into an image of life. The cat has always represented the animal in man, the sexual, the woman. But you Krazy Kat, a cat that talks! you accept the pain of our divided condition (redoubled) and you transform it into graceful love.

Krazy Kat knows who she is: she's no one's slave -- and no one's master. The gracefulness of Fred and Ginger are all contained in your person. You are Self and Other dancing together. Dignity without pomposity. Pride without revenge. Civilization without the discontents. That entertainment!

But the intricate symbolism falls apart when Cantor fails to realize his metaphors dramatically - that is, in the actions of characters. Unable to make his metaphors dance to his thematic tune, he resorts to a professorial solution: he explains them all.

The exposition comes at the end, of course, like the solution to a drawingroom mystery. He insinuates it into the action of the novel by passing it off as a critic's review of the nightclub act Kate and Ignatz do.

Kate sings (sometimes songs that Ignatz has written, and Cantor includes a couple of these in an appendix -- just to demonstrate the art that the critics rave about; a nice touch) and Ignatz accompanies her on the piano, and they engage in loving banter between songs.

"Kat and Ignatz show us that you can participate in your lover's success," the reviewer writes. "And the electricity between these two is palpable; we can be certain that these two are lovers..."

Then Cantor tries to reconcile sexuality and innocence in the reviewer's commentary: "Listening to Kat and Ignatz one begins to feel that sex may be a lesser form of connection than playing music together. And Kat's rendering of Cole Porter's somewhat masochistic love songs -- "so your baby can be your slave" -- reminds one that these longings, too, can have their place in love-becomes-art, that they can be raised and transformed, so that love need not be same-same obsession but, instead, a field of playfulness."

He substitutes polymorphous perversity for sex: "Kat is the incarnation of the mystery of sex for our decade," the reviewer goes on. "Androgynous, open, seemingly guileless in her sexuality, nothing overwhelming predatory about it, except as that, too, might be the occasion for playfulness."

In this context, gender is irrelevant: "Who is a man and who is a woman -- when each of us takes up or turns those roles -- is not, finally, a matter of organs."

Finally, in the "confessional aspect to the very surface of their work" (in their on-stage banter), the reviewer seems to resolve the flatness/roundness issue: "Kat and Ignatz -- by their rigorous gossiping about themselves, which puts everything on the flat surface of the stage -- let us feel how we make one area the unconscious, the background; we create perspectives, create roundness -- that beautiful fiction -- collaborate in creating people with shadows on the stage."

After six pages of this sort of explanation, Cantor is at last able to assert the theme of his novel -- again, as a simple bald statement, the conclusion of the lecturer's diatribe: "Together, Ignatz and Kat give us a figure of reconciliation."

Cute. Not high art maybe -- not expert use of the medium, not profound or earth-shattering in revelatory meaning. But not bad, not bad at all.

Considered simply as homage to Herriman's creation, Cantor's novel is a glimmering gem of accomplishment -- small but brightly shining. It's a mischievous recreation that sings with allusions and profundities in a minor key. Cantor's facile prose and ingenuous metaphors are like the desert light playing tricks on the reader. And in its playfulness, the novel invokes Herriman and makes a fitting tribute in one medium to masterwork in another.