This poor duck. He just wanted to wear his fancy musketeer clothes and fence. Alas, his God had other plans: after a few thrusts, Daffy finds himself in a white void, where, a little late, he implores: “whoever’s in charge here, the scenery! Where’s the scenery?” For his impiety, he is sent to a farm; one costume change later, this farm becomes somewhere cold, somewhere there’s an igloo. He complains and grabs his skis. Now he’s in Hawaii. He pouts and grabs his uke. Now he’s in the void. An eraser appears; Daffy disappears. From the void, he speaks: “where am I?” Beneficently redrawn, Daffy now has a big hat and a guitar, but there’s no sound; he holds up a sign: “sound please!” He strums again, but there’s still no guitar sound, only gunshots, then a horn; he smashes the guitar — a donkey brays. Daffy screams — more non-Daffy noises. A few more minutes of this, then finally, spirit broken, Daffy yells: “who are you?” A gloved hand appears, and we cut to Bugs drawing at his desk, chuckling: “ain’t I a stinker?”

Is that all, folks? That’s one question posed by this allegorically suggestive cartoon, whose central character vs. author antagonism should be eminently familiar to anyone who has ever felt like anything less than the master of their own destiny, usually no more than “the universe” conspiring against them, although, here, “the universe” is substitutable for any number of other things — God, Biology, Society, etc. — all of which seem to operate at what we could call a different “narrative level” than we do, this being the case with any author and their characters, the two firmly cleft in twain until something Gérard Genette calls “narrative metalepsis” happens, and the firm boundary between the story world, where we live, and the story-telling world, where “the universe” et al. do, collapses. But that’s not exactly what’s happening in Duck Amuck, where the omnipotent author turns out just to be Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck’s fellow toon, meaning this character vs. author antagonism is really just a character vs. character antagonism, some classic toon-on-toon violence. That things like “the universe” and “God” reveal themselves, as often as not, to be our fellow humans — typically a class of them, working against you and your classmates in all sorts of insidious ways — tends to be a fairly useful insight, in part because it unites the formerly firmly twain cleft narrative levels into only the single one, where we can do things, doing things being one of the best parts about being human, particularly when it involves ending insidious human actions and allowing for free ones, like, for example, making art. Of course, we already make art, which is interesting, says Fredric Jameson, because doing so is how we symbolically resolve the social contradictions we could otherwise only really resolve by doing things. It’s easy enough resolving contradictions in writing, because you choose all the words, consciously or not, making things happen and giving those interpretive criticism something to do as they reverse-engineer these symbolic resolutions, revealing the social contradictions that required them. Thankfully, people pleaser style, Duck Amuck does all this hard work for us, so maybe that really is all and we folks can kick back and enjoy this children’s cartoon.

After all, as Susan Sontag says, interpretation is lowkey bad? It “excavates, and as it excavates, destroys.” It’s “the revenge of the intellect upon art . . . the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.”“ It does this, in part, because “[r]eal art has the capacity to make us nervous,” so “[b]y reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.” Alternatively, Sontag recommends, we should have criticism “that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place,” criticism that values the “highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today,” “transparence,” “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” We need to “recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more,” in other words, the “function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” “In place of a hermeneutics,” Sontag concludes, “we need an erotics of art.”

Heard! Let’s whip Duck Amuck with some more allegory: Bugs the interpreter, Daffy the work of art, the former constantly redrawing the latter, forcing it into scenery and costumes that aren’t quite right, silencing it, making it speak using voices that are not its own, so on and so forth, our poor Duck Amuck being tied into various intellectual positions, when, as Daffy sagely spits at us, “buster, it may come as a complete surprise to you to find that this is an animated cartoon.” Let Duck Amuck be Duck Amuck, Duck Amuck seems to be saying — let art be art.

Hmmmmmmmm . . . should criticism serve the work of art? Does art need to be served? One thing’s for sure: we all need jobs, and with specialization, institutionalization, professionalization, and other -izations besides having divided up the intellectual labor market, we’re free to do our own thing: the critics can do the criticism, the artists the art, and the readers can get scared: “real” criticism, like “real” art, makes us nervous: that’s precisely what’s real about them: they deliver those parts of reality that have stayed real, the stuff that hurts, the stuff only we, here in the real world, can change. Who needs metalepsis when we have the basic awareness that it’s all happening here, folks?