Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 61

What Cartoons Can Teach Us 57 To use the Actaon myth as a homology for learning is to specify the instance of the letter, I'etre and lettre, as a matter of having borrowed from language, having gained in language the time to speak and teach before we are turned into mute beasts. This is the time we gain by expressing the conditions of our muteness in language, conditions which Joyce established in Finnegan's Wake as, "The watched watching the watched watching." Only at the end of the sentence, Joyce tells us, are we mute-only then are we silenced by the burden of having something to say. That is to say, we are thereby duped into being by language. If we're not duped, we are in error and this fact makes a space for the word, the name, which we can, in turn, defend to the death, rightly or wrongly. Some will recognize this space for the word/name as criterion for verifiability in classical logical systems-others as the function of original sin and the fortunate fall, and still others will recognize this "space for the word/name” as cartoons. In cartoons, there are many falls and I believe we might say they are happy ones, because, in cartoon land, falling is a sign of being duped. It is common enough, after all, to see some character change right in front of our very eyes into a large sucker or a donkey just before taking a great fall. Bugs Bunny has been turned into an all-day sucker by a Gremlin. And Elmer Fudd has been turned into an all-day sucker any number of times by Bugs Bimny. What is more, when we witness the transformation of someone into an all-day sucker, we usually find written on that person the name for the object it has become. An all-day sucker, for example, has "sucker" written on its wrapper; a donkey has tied around its neck a sign with "donkey" painted on it. Language is here materialized as the separable part of a thing; it becomes something (a space) hung from the word—and that which is hung from a word is precisely the space for another word. For this reason, right before a cartoon character falls, it must determine that it has been duped. It must see itself as being able to be seen by someone in a position to see. In these terms, change is the maneuvering of the place from which we imagine that we are being seen. This maneuvering must always constitute a f ill since our metaphysical skids slip out from under us; our position in a signifying chain shifts and we can no longer stand where we did because that place is no longer there for us. 'This is not to say that the place does not exist—only that a "no trespassing" sign (our