Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 62

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subjecthood, our space) has been put up for us and on us. But, as the
cartoon materializes it, this "no trespassing" sign or this candy
wrapper of this sign is made of the same stuff as the subject to which
it is hung because, as we all know, cartoons are flat and drawn in two
dimensions. This accounts for the two types of falls in cartoons: those
we see and those we don't
Most of the time, we only see someone drop off the screen and
we presume there is some depth there because we hear the sound of
the fall. The time between the dropping off the screen and the
presence of the sound indicates how far the cartoon character has
fallen. And people tell us that seeing is believing! Well, I suppose
that is so, but only up to the point where sound intervenes as a
metonymy displaced as a metaphor for effect.
Other falls we can see . . . or, at least, we can see a subject's
long passage leading to an encounter with the ground. The impact
itself, on the other hand, appears only as a residual absence (a
crevice) or as a cloud of dust. This discontinuous movement within a
symbolic order explains why doors figure so prominently in falls. Not
only can we imagine them anywhere, but because of them we can
imagine there is an inside and an outside to anything—even a flat
cartoon. When Bugs Bunny convinces Yosemite Sam that there is an
inside to which Bugs is privy but he is not, Yosemite Sam will pound
and pound, even knock the door down to get at the inside that does not
exist as such. We will then see Yosemite Sam fall, since the door is
usually placed right next to a cliff. This fall, however, is merely an
extension of the doorway; it is the passage from the presumption of an
outside to a presumption of an inside—a temporal suspension in the
symbolic/cartoon order within which we can read the language
written on the body as if it were language. This is why, as
psychoanalysis has demonstrated, the Symbolic can be used to work
on the Real in the passage through the door, even though once you get
to the other side of the door you may not hav