George Herriman

Topical reflux

Even with our eyes upcast from the ground, we’ll probably have to acknowledge, sooner or later, that we are periodically overwhelmed from low within by something brute. The evidence is in the record. Twentieth-century Anglo-American literary history, for instance, yields up a whole alluvium of anecdotes about F. R. Leavis and Delmore Schwartz. Leavis, of Cambridge, was a critic who happened not to be able to write, read, or think; Schwartz, of Harvard, was a poet whose works are vanished now except for a single short story. But no one ever recovered from a seminar with Leavis or a conversation with Schwartz, and during their lifetimes those wordy men exerted a mute musclepower.

The nature of that relationship between us subordinates and those dominants has proved to be historically reversible. The century-old short story you’re about to read was forgotten long ago, and of course (you’re about to say) deservedly. Dating from the epoch of modernist literature, it never became literature itself. On the page before you it’s only old journalism: a few paragraphs on browned old paper, written in words whose developing language system moved out from under them and left them behind. But this year, see if this story doesn’t affect you in a way that seems new: new again for the first time in a century and therefore actually new. The developing language system has given you new powers and simultaneously deprived you of old ones.

During his shortened life (1878-1937), this story’s author, Don Marquis, expressed himself in genre after genre through persona after persona, but what lives on now in words is only the persona you see in fine print here: Archy the cockroach poet.

And Archy himself was later to undergo the defining final stage of his metamorphosis at the hands of a graphic artist who (unlike Marquis) had a line in modernist textuality. That was George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat.

Nevertheless: because the image that you’ve just seen probably moves you, the short story that you probably haven’t really read moved you too, whether or not you knew at the moment that the transport was under way. You can test that assertion by keying it to a single probative fact:

Like the protagonist of “The Mulatto,” George Herriman was a black man who passed as white.

I wrote and bolded that sentence on May 26, 2025. If it had been written on May 26, 2024, it wouldn’t be readable now in the circa-2025 way you have just read it. Its relation to the verisimilar would be deeper-rooted. The change occurred during the interval between 2024 and 2025, when history’s personal force came rushing in an inaugural January flood between you and 2024’s older, loamier way of reading. Upwelling from undetected whiteness, it washed away some of the words you used to read with. As it came, it didn’t just dumb language down; it rooted it up and dumbed it away.

You can see for yourself how blank the page beyond Marquis and Herriman looks now. Until the white subsides, it may be all there is going to be.

Twinning and special

In 1925 the two big volumes of Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy were published nineteen years after the occurrence of the one little non-fiction on which they were based: a small-town murder, followed by the murderer’s apprehension, trial, and execution. Bit by bit during the nineteen years, Dreiser laboriously traced the historiographic relationship between himself and those data. For the 1948 World Publishing Company edition of his final transcript, H. L. Mencken explained:


“It really happened”: italicizing Dreiser’s words as if they were foreign, Mencken distanced them from his own. He seemed to assume that he himself wrote under the control of a literary norm, whereas Dreiser’s discipline was something like an autobiographical sociology.

But the source of the language that immersed Dreiser wasn’t entirely under Menckenian genre control. Look below, for instance, at this twinned pair of stories from the Detroit Free Press for Sunday, July 15, 1906. Together they were printed on the front page.


There below the fold they appear side by side: first an early text of the upstate New York drama of Chester Gillette; then, with no space whatever between, the text of a drama closer to Detroit. The Detroit text and only the Detroit text is tagged “(Special).” It also comes to us marked with a time term, “Eight years ago,” which points to the little did she know genre of dramatic irony. A mere six years after Chester’s boat capsized, the Titanic went down.

On a page, such a pairing of texts becomes one more text. Think of the infinitesimal between the liftoff of Ignatz’s brick (Zip) and its touchdown on Krazy’s head (Pow). Think of Ignatz and Krazy’s George Herriman as a geometer writing an equation that reveals that curve through time as one more thing: uniting the mouse, the brick, and the cat, their integrating idea.

Think of Herriman’s no longer read older contemporary Theodore Dreiser as almost another such artist, but this one the one who wrote thousands of slow words about a trajectory through time without being able to name it. Little did he know: its name was the infinitesimal Zip.

Book with brick

The image you see is without consciousness. Whatever interpretive inference you made of it was not original to the image. You drew your conclusion in your mind, where the words are. The inference was the perception-effect of a silent surface, and to think that it was a reading in words of a wordlesssly depicted life would be sentimental.  On its surface, an image of a cat is not a cat but an image. Its surface is only a dead layer of ink or pixels.

But ink can depict. If it happens to depict words, those can establish an off-image connection between what is seen in the image and what is thought imagelessly with words. Off-image, you can imagine a cat clawing open a book whose title includes a word: Krazy. Then you can read the book and learn the word.

George Herriman, Krazy’s creator, was a black man passing as white. With its never-changing but ever-morphing language and its never-changed theme of love met with a thrown brick, his daily comic strip must have borne a connection with the secret life of his mind.  Herriman gave the secret a black disguise and a blurred name: kat. Thereafter, day after day, pulsed by clock and calendar, George Herriman would sit before his drawing board and throw an image of a brick toward kat’s head. Day by day, it seemed that kat’s love-words were about to echo from the brick’s arriving surface. But the echo never came and the brick would always bounce off kat’s skull. The calendar page would turn; daily between 1913 and 1944, kat would speak love and then his silent brick would fall. But the next day, undyingly, as if its trajectory were a route of spring hope, the fall would be redrawn.