How much does it take?

Today you are in the process of talking about a character who appears desperately to want something, starting with Dorothy Gale, who desperately wants to get out of Oz and back to Kansas, then moving along to, of all individuals, Brer Fox, who in his search for supper has focused on Brer Rabbit. This is story-telling stuff right out of the Aristotle Poetics, a character desperate for achievement of a goal driving the story forth. In a blinding flash of recognition, you are so convinced that the Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit story comes right out of Aristotle that you forget the connection between Brer Fox and Wile E. Coyote, forgetting even to mention him as your selection for the patron saint of characters. There is such a splendid balance between the character who wants a particular prize, no matter what it is, the antagonist or individual standing in the way of the character achieving goal, and the humiliation available to fall on the goal seeker lest he fail in his task. Look at the stature Brer Rabbit gains merely by surviving. Look at the seeming invincibility Road Runner has. Look at the effect failure has on Wile E. Coyote and Brer Fox; each becomes more determined, more focused and thus more likely to appear undignified. How do your non-animal characters react in such triangles? Do they become more determined and, in the process, do they lose by degree any semblance of dignity?

There is a thin line between humiliation and mere undignified performance. Too much of the latter produces a measure of the former. How then to remove in slow plausible degree from an author his or her dignity? Start by having that character reassess the nature of focus and purpose. I will get up a half hour earlier and write before I do anything else. I will get up forty-five minutes earlier, I will get up an hour earlier. Seemingly, these are small enough increments, but in aggregate, they begin to undercut any trace of dignity the character may posses. When the character begins gambling with appearances, the risk is dignity, the result inevitably humiliation.

It is useful to keep these shifting boundaries in mind as you pursue the routine of a character bent on pursuing an agenda to the point where the pursuit begins to trump the results.

M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e, Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mouse...

Mickey Mouse endings--an ending to a short story or novel in which justice triumphs with a loud tap of the gavel and the characters act as though they'd just been awarded E tickets to Disneyland; exaggerated all's-well-that-ends-well conclusions, prognoses, or payoffs.

True enough, not all stories require endings in which characters are being led to the gallows or guillotine or even seen rolling up their sleeve for a fatal injection. Many stories build to conclusions that by their very nature transmit touchy-feely emotions and are to be relished as, say, a frothy cappuccino would be relished or a bottle of Sierra Nevada pale ale. Mickey Mouse endings connote a mindless move toward propagandist tropes which pay homage to cultural decorations. Such endings relegate the protagonists of a story to the equivalent of the figures atop wedding cakes, a doughy, sugar-laced concoction colored with vegetable dye.

It is no accident that the iconic nice-guy figure from the second generation of comics in America has devolved into an adjective for types of music, books, and ad hoc events suggestive of music heard while riding in elevators or while waiting on hold for customer support from large organizations with whom we deal and have frequent issues. In a terrible celebration of wholesome excess, Mickey Mouse endings have become associated with the controlling imperatives of the company that owns him via copyright and registered trademark, a formulaic vision of the human condition, fostering a subtext of cynicism bordering on outright antipathy.

Much about endings of stories can be learned from reading the short stories of Anton Chekhov and James Joyce, adding to this accretion of wisdom the dead-pan wryness of Mark Twain, leavening the mixture with the individual writer's own special view on what it takes to make a go of life in the twenty-first or, for that matter, any century.

Yet more is to be learned from comparing the rules of behavior surrounding Mickey Mouse and his ensemble crew with the rules and regulations governing yet another figure from the animation world, Wile E. Coyote. From the former "bible," the writer can glean little more than ways to produce Mickey Mouse endings. From the latter, the writer can glean a workable recipe of humor, irony, and a GPS of the human agenda.

Wile E. Coyote: The Things He Carried

products--equipment, merchandise, devises used by characters to advance story; material goods used by writers to denote living conditions, relative affluence, degrees of decadence, boredom inherent in characters; things people want or conspicuously do not want in stories.

Nowhere in stories are products given a more substantive and metaphoric treatment than the cartoon adventures of Wile E. Coyote. In these iconic dramatic ventures, Coyote lurches forth, a faithful replication of Mark Twain's description of the species from Roughing It. Coyote's hunger prods him to consider as prey The Roadrunner; the extensive number of Coyote-Roadrunner cartoons a monument to Coyote's abject failure. The rules surrounding the Wile E. Coyote landscape are myriad and inflexible, at once rendering the terrain a cross breed between Beckett and Krazy Kat. Coyote must not catch Roadrunner. Coyote's attempts at catching Roadrunner invariably end in his humiliation. Coyote may use devices such as explosive tennis balls, giant mouse traps, do-it-yourself tornado kits, and female Roadrunner costumes, but these and all others like them must come directly from the Acme Corporation. No other organization, neither Kafkan bureaucracies nor Orwellian imperialists, is so catholic in its offered menu of product; no government or manufacturer has such a smorgasbord of devices which, taken in totality, could be seen to represent the quintessential formula for curing all ails and supplying answers for all needs. In point of fact, some of the items on the Acme Corporation's list work, they simply do not work for Wile E. Coyote. But rules are rules, meaning Coyote has no recourse; if he is to use products, they must come from Acme.

Probably based on the ubiquity and comprehensiveness of the original Sears-Roebuck mail order catalogues, the Acme Corporation's arsenal of products and their built-in exclusivity for Wile E. Coyote become a metaphor for the writer who is setting forth, beginning with a particular landscape or locale, then basic rules of engagement between the major characters, then the source of materials the characters have at their disposal.

Wile E. Coyote's credit seems to be good so far as Acme Corporation is concerned; there don't seem to be any issues about accounts receivable. There are neither long, elaborate rationales about the Coyote-Roadrunner landscape nor the rules governing it. Neither, for that matter, are there distracting questions about the landscape within Beckett plays; Beckett stories hold up while being read, then become iron filings attracted to the magnet of the mind after the reading or witnessing ends. Similarly with Coyote and Roadrunner.

The message from Beckett ("Fail again, only next time, fail better.") inheres in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons; the after-the-fact paradigm of the cartoons with respect to story also becomes apparent with a personal deconstruction of the entire, precipitous southwestern mesa-butte landscape of the cartoon series.

Tim O'Brien has written a splendid account of American servicemen in Vietnam, The Things They Carried, a novel in which products play a major role in defining character and dramatic outcome. In the cartoons, Wile E. Coyote's frequent fate is having his hair singed off, falling to bottoms of steep declivities, being squashed by falling rocks or even the occasional debris from an Acme Corporation product; sometimes Coyote sustains all these fates simultaneously. O'Brien's characters inevitably reveal a distinct, moving relationship to a product, whether the product is a letter from a loved one (or a Dear John letter), a keepsake, a weapon. Coyote and O'Brien's "grunts" are set forth in an atmosphere and landscape that could not have suited Beckett better, thus is there a transcendent plateau reached and recognized when the writer brings characters with purpose and products to a locale, imbues them with constraints, restraints, and possibly even conscience.

The Comedy of Eros

comedy--a more physical adjunct of humor, characterized by exaggeration, deliberate management of events, pratfalls; circumstances which seem to snowball before the reader's eyes, gaining a momentum which leads to combustion as in the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers film, A Night at the Opera; a set of circumstances building to a conclusive payoff. Comedy, by its very nature, seems bigger than life, consequently producing the laughter of relief that it is not us to whom the physicality is happening; humor, by its own nature, is just the right size for life, ordered out of a J. Crewe catalog, provoking in us the sad laughter of recognition. Humor is dramatic; comedy is situational and episodic; once the laugh is out, it needs to be wound up again. Comedy is like the cup in which Dunkin' Donuts coffee is served. After one use, it is thrown away. Humor is the growing awareness that we have been holding on to this old paper cup out of sentimentality.

In some of the old Restoration comedies, mistaken identities and lovers hiding under beds or in closets were staples, exaggerated by there being numerous mistakes of identity or so many hiding lovers that they could not all fit in one closet or under one bed. In humor the payoff becomes the sad awareness that one character does not recognize or remember another, that there was a need in the first place for a lover.

Comedy is the antic surprise of the pie in the face, followed by the victim's revenge of returning the favor with another pie and another; it is the anarchy at forced politeness in the convention of rules, the backyard dog digging an escape hole under the gate. Laurel and Hardy are piano movers, lugging a large piano over a narrow rope-and-vine bridge spanning a steep chasm. Midway across, they meet a gorilla coming the other way.

In fiction it becomes the revenge fantasy, acted out, its target humiliated by the forces of destiny as represented by slapstick.


Antigone--a young woman character in a play by Sophocles (442 BC), later by the French Jean Anouilh (1942),and later still by the German dramatist Berthold Brecht (1947);the sister of two brothers who fought on opposing sides in the civil war of Thebes; niece of Creon, new ruler of Thebes.

Antigone as a character bears comparison with Wile E. Coyote because of the way her embodiment of moral choice leads her to become an unrelenting force, triggering behavior in every direction throughout her family, her fiance, and friends. Antigone's opposition to a contemporary convention of respect and honor put her in danger of losing her life, indeed directly provoke an unintended death, which further provokes a sad but valuable understanding. Sophocles, actually a general who fought in the Thebean civil war, eschewed propaganda as did Anouilh, from his position in German-occupied France, and as well Brecht who, although a German, held no brief for German militarism, much less fascism. In any of these versions of the drama, the character of Antigone would do what a character should do--represent a believable individual visited with a conviction and mission that led her forth regardless of consequence. As Hamlet typifies one form of young male character driven by a goal, Antigone is archetypal in her representation of a young woman of dramatic stature.

Either of the three versions of Antigone's story could be successfully presented today; a fourth version, focusing on the recurrent issue of torture and enhanced interrogation techniques, could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them.


consequences--the results of a prior event, thought, deed, decision, or accident; the price that must be paid or the fine assessed for a previous act; the guiding principal of storytelling--things happening because of things that happened, were responded to or not responded. As a consequence of A, B came into being; this is the force that holds episodes together as story, that ties characters to tethers of relationship or commitment. Characters believe they are right, behaving as they do. As a consequence, they perform or do not perform acts, becoming the causal force in story. A narrative without causality is the literary equivalent of a body without blood; neither supports life.


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Four Thought

irony--a condition created when a character says one thing while feeling an opposing urge; a deliberate, emphatic expression made by a character in the explicit belief that the recipient will conclude the exact opposite meaning; any lurking space between what is said and what is meant.

Irony is the stage manager for most human drama; it is the genome of crossed purposes, misinterpretation, and expressions of things being taken as other than what we intended. The marvelous prank letter inflicted on Malvolio in Twelfth Night demonstrates irony in a never-to-be-forgotten manner. Through a ruse, Malvolio, the steward of the attractive young Countess Olivia, is led to believe Countess Olivia has a romantic interest in him. When Malvolio appears before Olivia, dressed as the prank letter suggested, the disconnect plays forth, with irony taking the winning hand, one on which the writer double downs when Olivia finds herself drawn to a handsome young man, Cesario, who has undertaken the job of commending to her the interest of Orsino. But of course the reader will already know the irony of Cesario not really being Cesario, but rather Viola, who wishes nothing more than the affections of Orsino. Irony truly trumps in this exemplary drama.

As its inherent condition of a person, place, or thing being opposite to our expectations makes itself known, irony causes us to understand that we are in a rigged game, a drama called Life in which we are now cast in a Road Runner cartoon, then informed by the director that we have been cast as Wile E. Coyote.

Omar Little--a front-rank character in the HBO novel-for-television, The Wire; a gritty, magnetic character who is openly gay, whose major source of income is robbery, a man who has in fact killed in defense of his beliefs, Omar Little never robs from people who are not directly involved in the drug trade, has a strict code of ethics which follows it, emerges as one of the few uncorrupted characters in the mise en scene, remains likable, admirable throughout his tenure in the sixty-episode series. When presented with moral quandaries, Little can be seen considering them as a prelude to determining his course of action. His senses of humor and irony are manifest; he is the only front-rank character who does not use profanity nor does he in any way suffer from not doing so. On occasion, Omar Little's purposeful focus is reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote, although Little is more likely to use irony instead of becoming its victim; Little and Coyote represent polarities in character force that merit study. Omar Little is a reminder that dignity is a major factor to consider in the creation of character.

Where would they rather be?--a question to ask of characters before introducing them into any scene. It is quite possible for them to want to be in the current scene, agendas and ambitions burning brightly or fearful of potential consequences. Also it is likely they would prefer to be elsewhere, doing things other than those required of them in the instant moment.

The answer to the question informs what the character thinks, says, does, keeps the character on track moment to moment. The action or overwhelming needs of a scene may mercifully prevent the writer from listing too much detail about the character, but nevertheless will influence the choice of words used in rendering the character and the pace with which the character performs.

It is important to realize that the character's preference does not operate on a right-wrong basis but rather on an opportunity-providing basis. The waiter working the dinner shift may want instead to be attending an acting class or, better still, be a character in a performance, providing the temptation for that waiter to behave at the present task of serving cheap or expensive meals to pensioners or CEOs in ways that produce a chemistry to the scene and perhaps even a consequence.

backpack--the tools, history, emotions, and baggage a character carries when setting forth into a new scene. Characters may or may not behave like tourists in a new setting, craning their necks to look at the sights or, contrarily, being blase to a fault. An actor may show up for a performance, thinking he knew his lines, but this time, in this scene, there is doubt. A housewife may return home from grocery shopping, thinking she has three hours of free time to work on a short story before her son returns from school, then notices her husband's car in the driveway. Or an ambulance. An actor leaves her afternoon AA meeting to attend a cast party at which she knows there will be several bottles of champagne.

Food for Thought

pathetic fallacy, the--a literary device or tendency of written or spoken exaggeration by which inanimate forces and objects have life-like qualities attributed to them. A term yanked into the literary sphere by the Victorian-era critic, John Ruskin, a staunch advocate of realism in writing and the visual arts, the pathetic fallacy has spread like kudzu grass, reminding Julie Andrews that the hills are alive with the sound of music, that fires dance merrily before our eyes, that brooks, babble merrily in their courses, ad of course mountains which appear moody and somber in the sunset.

Pathetic fallacy is an addition to the laundry list of commandments and injunctions addressed to writers: Thou shall not split the infinitive. Thou shall show rather than tell. Thou shall not begin sentences with "and or "but." Thou shall not use one-word paragraphs. These commandments and injunctions appear in the works of critics whose work is alive with the sound of textbooks.

What arbiters and critics fail to note is that successful writers have been getting away with pathetic fallacies and other crimes against boring writing by giving the language at hand a fresh way of looking at the human condition or of our remarkable universe. Go for it; it is like getting a last shave out of a shaving cream bomb or a last brushing from a flattened tube of toothpaste. The best approach to take with an inventive use of language is the Do No Harm Rule, which unequivocally supports tropes that clarify a condition, person, place, or thing to the point of causing the reader to say "Yes! I have felt that way myself, but was afraid of saying so for fear of being thought out of the main stream."

John Ruskin did not like the idea of liberties being taken with art, nor was he a fan of sentimentality. But there are times when a wind comes up at sundown and the aspens seem to be sighing or laughing as the wind courses through them, and if you listen closely enough, the result does have a music to it. The risk of relying overly on the pathetic fallacy is the projected sense that you or your characters are talking up the case of the human effect on Nature, saying in effect that Nature owes everything to us and that we, in turn, owe nothing to Nature. The careful storyteller will investigate the intent of the story, its setting, its characters, and the way the story is rendered to make sure that the methods of telling do not reveal more than the actual content.



Wile E. Coyote--a scruffy,scheming cartoon character who, on appearances and behavior, would go unnoticed in a Dostoevsky novel, but instead lives in the butte- and mesa-littered American Southwest. The Coyote has one essential goal: to capture and devour Roadrunner, another denizen of the hardscrabble landscape. He of course will never succeed, domed to a series of near misses, frustrations, and even humiliation. A literary descendant of Joel Chandler Harris' iconic B'rer Fox, the Coyote is a candidate for beatification and ultimate sainthood as the patron saint of characters. He has a singular, ongoing goal that occupies him every moment he is on stage. His devices and stratagems have the complexity born of mounting desperation. He is so intent on bringing The Roadrunner to ground that he frequently finds himself in mid-air, his paws cycling in wild attempts to gain some footing--but it is too late; he has only the downward fall to disaster. He is, as Mark Twain wrote of the generic coyote, "a living, breathing allegory of want. He is always hungry." The Coyote frequently obtains ludicrous materials and devices from The Acme Company, a mail-order distributor. These items plus his own hunger-driven ingenuity, comprise his tool kit.

The dramatic center of The Coyote is in his single-minded pursuit of his agenda, making him worth concentrating on while creating any front-rank character. Note, for instance, comparison points between The Coyote and Captain Ahab or, for that matter, the Jay Gatz, better known to us as The Great Gatsby, and of course, Don Quixote.

Don't Fence Me in

A favored landscape for me is the mesa-and-butte sprawl of Arizona, a place where in real life you can actually find stores that sell Wolf Brand chili, a place known variously as Keams Canyon and Second Mesa. In real life it is a hub of Hopi culture set in co-mingle with tourists, no nonsense truckers, skeptical Navajo, and the odd anthropologist. In alternate universe life, it is the landscape of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, those iconic figures of yesterday's entry who play out their dharma on a regular basis. In another alternate landscape, equally reliant on mesas, buttes, tall stacks of sedimentary rock, and a merciless summer sun, those icons of the imagination of George Herriman, the eponymous Krazy Kat, Offisa Pup, Ignatz Mouse, and an ensemble to rival The Wire.

Nice when one area can bring you three separate universes, all of them brimming with the potsherds of human behavior. Nicer still when you can close your eyes for a visit to each. Such is the nature of place in story: Place assumes the same relevance, distinct qualities, and individuality as a first-rank character, sometimes bristling with small-town eclat or intransigence, sometimes as sprawling and impersonal as a major urban center. Sometimes, by its nature, landscape is the very place where an event is least suited to take place, creating an immediate sense of cosmic uproar. Other times, landscape is inhospitable, treacherous, menacing, as cranky as a kid on a hot day who has dropped his ice cream cone.

Much as I prefer a gritty, noirish or mischievous landscape, certain of these improbable places become prima facie apt, their improbability trumping their surreal nature, a warning to me and the reader than familiar, comfortable surroundings in art and literature are music to fall asleep by. A university is endlessly improbable to me, so are court houses, hospitals, department stores, publishing houses, supermarkets. Each of these attracts ordinary persons with needs, then transforms them into some aspect of its own improbability. The house rules of Second Mesa, the Hopi way, make beautiful sense, a transformative ethos shared by the neighboring Navajo, who actually have a saying, Go in beauty. The house rules of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner are in their way the equal of our own Bill of Rights. The governing forces of the comic strip Krazy Kat are informed by a lovely, whimsical logic that convinces us in short order that life within this landscape includes the rational and the irrational, where love may not triumph but nevertheless trumps all other distractions.

Finding a landscape is as troublesome as finding the proper character imbued with the proper quirks and needs. You must, I believe, make your landscape a haven for what you seek, buried perhaps, not readily apparent, but somewhere close to the surface. Or it must be a place of anomaly or a place where what you seek has a second home, somewhere at a great distance. Ladscape has the personality and smell and texture of someone you love, some place that "feels" happy to see you whenever you return.

The Character-driven Story Writ Large

Having gone through the emotion-and-thought-linked process recently of electing the character Omar, late of The Wire, to my pantheon of favorite characters, then ratifying his nomination, I turn now to another favorite, in many ways inherent in Omar, but so completely representative of what a character should be that he deserves canonization among those of us who seek to tell stories.

I speak of Wile E. Coyote, the very mention of whom conveys in a single image his landscape and his immediate goal, the androgynous Road Runner. Said Mr. Coyote is the Darwinian result of Brer Fox, Road Runner is the morph of Brer Rabbit. Wile E. Coyote's purpose, dinner, is the driving force of the relationship. Coyote's focus is and properly should be emblematic for the writer; Coyote's thoughts are always on ways to tick, trap, capture, and cook Road Runner. Nothing else matters as much, not even awareness of one of the basic laws of gravity, which speaks to the behavior of an object in motion. Coyote, when not stealthily skulking about the mesas and arroyos of his terrain, is in motion--in motion in pursuit of Road Runner. You might say he is so in motion while in pursuit that he fails to stop at boundaries you and I would heed.

Thus do the adventures of Wile E. Coyote serve as a cautionary tale for writers, particularly in regard to observing boundaries. One of our frequent visions of Wile E. Coyote is of him mid air, having overrun the boundary of a mesa, failing in the process to note the acute angle of escarpment on which he once trod. We have all, thanks to our nature of taking risks in life and in the life of our craft, taken such risk. Now we find ourself in mid flight, with nowhere to go but down. We watch the screen antics of Coyote, doomed to another fall, awaiting the thunk of reality as he strikes the ground, once again having overreached, overrun, indulged the Becketian model of failing again, now about to further indulge the Becket admonition to fail again, only this time to fail better.

Truly, Wile E. Coyote is of Becket in his inventiveness of some newer device whereby he may undertake to trap Road Runner. It is instructive to watch a few of Coyote's misadventures on YouTube; these serve to demonstrate his unflagging desire, his frequent descent (literal and figurative) into humiliation, because that is his reward for his efforts. Our reward as writers for watching him is the relief that this time the humiliation is his and not ours, the unspoken wish that we had a goal as clear-cut as his, and the unflagging determination necessary to go forth--and fail again.

Watching enough Wile E. Coyote stories will acquaint you with another lovely story element in the form of The Acme Company, that grand organization from which Wile E. Coyote is able to chose products to aid him in his quest. It would be too easy to substitute company names such as Blackwater or Boeing or their like or even various universities, thinking in the process ha ha, bureaucracy. The fact of The Acme Company as supplier of the Wile E Coyote tool kit speaks to another important aspect of setting characters loose in a landscape--rules. As conventions do in our real life, stories must have rules. The Wile E. Coyote--Road Runner Rules become clear after watching a few episodes. Wile E. Coyote must never catch nor harm Road Runner. Wile E. Coyote is invariably humiliated but always because of things he has done.

It becomes easier to watch and understand Becket after digesting Wile E. Coyote, but it also becomes easier to watch and understand Shakespeare and Johnson and Marlowe indeed even their illustrious forebear, G. Chaucer.

How many of our characters are able to compete with the cartoon landscape of Wile E. Coyote, where even the thought of them evokes their terrain and at least one other character with whom they relate emerge with such--dare I say it?--dramatic clarity?

A County of One's own

When you think regionalism in terms of American literature, your thoughts would likely be drawn sooner or later to Yoknapatawpha, a county in northern Mississippi, and once there, to its county seat, Jefferson. Neither of these venues are to be found on Map Quest or Google maps, but they exist with throbbing presence in much of the short stories and novels of William Faulkner. They began in his mind and were transmogrified into ours to the extent that those of us who have never set foot in Mississippi nevertheless believe we know that part of the world and the complex strata of individuals living in it.

On the other hand, as many Westerners know, Coconino is the name of a county in Arizona, its county seat is Flagstaff. With the exception of San Bernardino County, California, Coconino County is the largest of the counties in mainland United States, containing among other notable features The Grand Canyon. While we're at it, there is another Coconino County, not perhaps as well know or studied as William Faulkner's county, but influential nevertheless to those whose interests and talents reside in the graphic arts and literature.

I speak of the Coconino County of a cat, a mouse, and a dog, a world of surreal and whimsical beauty and accoutrement. The cat, sometimes rendered as male, other times female, is romantically drawn to the mouse. For his part, the mouse is the sworn enemy of the cat. The dog is a sworn member of the law enforcement establishment, one of his major jobs keeping the peace, which translates to preventing the mouse from throwing bricks at the cat or, arriving on the scene too late to prevent the launching of yet another brick, hauling the mouse off to the Coconino County jail for appropriate punishment. Thus you have Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and Officer Bull Pupp.

The creator of Krazy Kat drew his last comic strip adventure shortly before his death in 1944, but for over sixty years, the legend and reach of arguably one of the great icons of pictorial story telling has attracted fans, influenced other artists, inspired some writers, and remains a cultural icon. Two other iconic contributors to the Valhalla of comic book art spoke to me with unabashed awe , enthusiasm, and admiration for George Herrimann's creation. Bob Kane, creator of Batman, confessed to an envy for the dream-like beauty of Krazy Kat; Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, said without hesitation that Krazy Kat drew him into wanting to create his own landscape, peopled with his own characters and animals.

Such is the wonderful nature of Krazy Kat, the feline, that he or she (but never it) is always ready to believe that the latest brick missile launched by Ignatz Mouse is a frank admission of requited love. In this image, Ignatz Mouse has pretended to be a picture in order to avoid detection until he has let fly with brick, catching Krazy Kat
unaware until the moment of contact, at which point, ah, true love.

It may be a stretch in time, but to show how iconic the Krazy Kat landscape of Coconino County is, we come half a century later to an equally surreal ensemble cast of characters slinking through the buttes, mesas, and cactus, none other than Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner, their agendas as clearly defined as their artistic forebears. This then becomes a panegyric to the landscape of the heart and mind, the place evolved through a combination of imagination, loneliness, desire for adventure, and the artistic need for much more than a room of one's own. They are there waiting for us, ready to pounce or throw bricks, motivated by love, purpose, and mischief.

Noh Man's Land

For some time now, I have been obsessed with the effect Wile E. Coyote has had on fiction. Tomorrow, I'm going to turn that scraggly, scruffy, obsessive fellow loose on my class in genre fiction, where I will invoke Wile E. as the epitome of front rank character, by which I mean someone at the upper level of hierarchy, someone whose story it is because, scruffy, obsessive or merely a nebbish, the sympathies of the reader are ultimately with him.

It is a leap from The Roadrunner Cartoons and the Coyote to The Iliad and Hector, but the root-for quality holds in both places: We want the Coyote to win, which my possibly mean we hope he gets The Road Runner, but more to the point, we want Wile E. Coyote not to be humiliated, because we know in advance that he will indeed be humiliated; once again he will be had. We wish Hector didn't have to die in battle because he is not only the sanest of all characters in the throes of that dumb war, incited by his dumb brother Paris, he is the most human and the most humane; he is one of the more evolved, self-realizing characters in the entire epic.

Wile E. Coyote is driven, no, obsessed, making him goal oriented to a faretheewell. He has no choice but to scheme, connive, and conspire against--beep beep--the Roadrunner. Hector pretty well suspects he will be killed in battle, his young son Andromache killed, his wife put into slavery, and yet we understand the social and ethical constraints that force him into battle so that he can die a brave death and be remembered all these years after the fact as a man who had and rejected a sane choice because the society of which he was a prominent part was in so many ways insane.

We know that there are more practical if less dramatic ways of making a living than being a pool hustler, but in The Hustler, Fast Eddie Felson wants to be the best pool hustler in America and because of what he goes through to be the best, once again we are pulled along in the slipstream of his career obsession.

Even though we may not like the person, we like the notion of someone wanting something to the exclusion of other, more rational things. There are a number of reasons why we like this notion, only one of which may be tied to our own sense of having no such goal of which to obsess ourselves.

Wile E. Coyote is not a splendid fellow. Look him up. Doing so, you will see the extent to which his creators went to set forth the rules which he and his opposing force, The Road Runner, must observe, making The Looney Tunes Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote as ritualized and mannered as a Noh play. These rules are as mannered and formal as, say, the martial art of Akido, and they produce the genius of the cartoon series by having etched in our memory the frequent sight of Wile E. Coyote so perfervid in his chase of The Road Runner that he overruns the boundary of a mesa or escarpment and finds himself launched in the air, paws flailing at the absolute airless nothingness underneath him. This is the very emotional place for a character to be, boundaries overrun, no safety net in sight, helplessly vulnerable because of his obsession.

Wile E. Coyote, the Patron Saint of characters.

Wile E. Coyote. My man.