In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

63 Robert Warshow “Woofed with Dreams” Partisan Review, vol. 13, November–December 1946. Reprinted by permission. On the underside of our society, there are those who have no real stake at all in respectable culture. These are the open enemies of culture, despising indiscriminately a painting by Picasso and a painting by Maxfield Parrish, a novel by Kafka and a novel by A. J. Cronin, a poem by Yeats and a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox— these are readers of pulp magazines and comic books, potential book-burners, unhappy patrons of astrologers and communicants of lunatic sects, the hopelessly alienated and outclassed who can enjoy perhaps not even Andy Hardy but only Bela Lugosi, not even the Reader’s Digest but only True Detective. But their distance from the center gives them in the mass a degree of independence that the rest of us can approach only individually and by discipline. In the extremity of their alienation, they are ready to be assured and irresponsible; they are ready to say: Shoot the bankers, or Kill the Jews, or Let the Nazis come. They no longer care if the ship goes down, they go their own way. That is why an editorial in the Daily News is so much more interesting—and often so much nearer the truth—than an editorial in PM. PM has too many things to consider; only the Daily News can remain entirely reasonable and disinterested when it suggests that the human race is on the way to extinction. When this Lumpen culture displays itself in mass art forms, it can 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 particularly characteristic of the submerged and dispossessed; 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 seriousminded , 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 language 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 I’ll 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 highflown : “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 unshakable affection—and Ignatz (therefore?) devotes all his intelligence and energy to the single end of hitting Krazy on the head with...

Share