Stanley 1 MA VCS Thesis Proposal Title: But We, To Whom The World Is Author: Bradshaw Stanley Abstract. In this thesis I view the animated children’s show Adventure Time as a 21st century “surrogate,” in the sense developed by performance theorist Joseph Roach, for Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By viewing “surrogation,” reconstruction, and even re-enactment as occurring between two artworks rather than two artists, I outline a theory of desubstantialized “body-to-body transmission” that does not rely on “real” or substantial bodies for its support. I conclude by arguing that embodiment can be understood as a formal problem rather than one defined by organic function or phenomenological sensoria. Research Areas. Embodiment, Affect Theory, Formalism, Animation Theory, Performance Studies, American Studies, Childhood Studies, Queer Theory, Film Studies, New Media, Visual Studies, Critical Theory Agenda. Popularly acclaimed as “the trippiest show on television” (Rolling Stone), “groundbreaking…[and] ever more experimental” (AV Club), “sneakily sophisticated” (New York Times), and “dark, gripping and almost nightmarish” (Indiewire), Adventure Time may sound more like an HBO series than a Cartoon Network animated children’s program. Because such accolades are typically reserved for adult (not to mention live- action, "underground" or foreign) productions, it is unsurprising that Adventure Time has been used to satirize conservative cultural anxieties, as in a ChristWire article that, perhaps picking up on the show’s “trippiness” and eagerness to experiment, asks whether it is “a gateway drug to LSD, homosexuality, and the rave lifestyle.” Such satire indicates a bleed between the formal qualities of a work and the embodied responses its viewers, in this case young children, may have: being exposed to trippy and experimental work, the thinking goes, may incline one to seek out trips and experimentation in other contexts. Stanley 2 Indeed, this is a bleed that the Cartoon Network brightly capitalizes on in its commercial breaks, where children are routinely shown buoyantly re-performing clips from the channel’s line-up. In this thesis, I will be following the neon-colored trail of those bleeds, the mimetic and non-mimetic circuits that link the non-/dis-embodied and immaterial to the embodied and material responses and performances that they enable; I will be asking how incorporeal performers, such as cartoon characters, transmit their unique behavioral, affective, and narrative orders to the regime of corporeality; and I will be examining how we, "to whom the world is our native country," as Dante wrote, establish and perform modes of sovereignty in a non-native world—a world where the four principle elements may not be fire, water, earth, and air, but fire, ice, slime, and candy. Put at its most polemical, my thesis raises the following question: What if embodiment could be understood as a formal problem concerning line and color rather than organic function or phenomenological sensoria? Although to begin unpacking this question I turn to Adventure Time and the burgeoning field of animation studies, which claims line and color as its formal provenance, it is important to note that my thesis is not a media history or study of children’s animated programming. Consequently, I will not be pronouncing on long- standing debates between film and animation, nor will I be focusing on the circum- Pacific production routes that most Cartoon Network productions participate in, nor still will I be examining the sizable fan culture that has grown up around Adventure Time and other animated works. Such considerations, although important for a fuller view of the issues I will raise, are beyond the scope of this thesis and fall to other scholars. Stanley 3 What I primarily will be addressing, then, are the formal elements of Adventure Time: its visual themes, narrative structures, rhetorical figures, and affective labors. Since I will not be looking at the immediate production context of the show, or what Donald Crafton has termed the “performance of animation,” I suggest instead another, perhaps unsuual context: the story that Ernest Hemingway described as the fountainhead of American literature, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By placing these works together, I propose to focus on what Crafton calls the “performance in animation,” or the ways in which animation, by complicating our ideas of liveness and embodiment, can be said to perform (Crafton 15). In this case, that performance is a question of color and line—a question that the author Mark Twain, in the age of the color line, surely had in mind as he wrote Huck Finn, although the bleed to embodied performances was far darker. If Adventure Time has merely been satirized as a gateway drug for children to moral failure, Huckleberry Finn was outright banned upon its release at libraries throughout the United States for being “trashy and vicious” (Springfield Republican), “flippant [and] worthless” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “not altogether desirable” for “parents who want a good future of promise for their young folks” (San Francisco Evening Bulletin). It is worth remembering, however, that Twain described the novel not as a book for boys, but as a book for men who remember being boys. Likewise, when Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward says that he makes the show according to “what I would have liked when I was a kid,” he refers not to what he did like but to what he would have liked, participating in the subjunctive mood that characterizes performance. In short, Adventure Time and Huckleberry Finn are primarily designed to restore parts to Stanley 4 our (boyish) selves that are past. More than both works simply being stories for men who remember being boys, however, Adventure Time and Huck Finn also play across the mythic chronotope of “adventure-time,” which Mikhail Bahktin describes as “an extratemporal hiatus between two moments of biographical time,” in which events can be reconfigured and rearranged without damaging the narrative arc (Bahktin 90). (In performance, this “adventure-time” is perhaps better known as rehearsal.) Both Adventure Time and Huck Finn crucially and oddly structure their diegetic universes around a temporal tripping: whereas Huck Finn achieves this by omission, since it was written after the policies of Reconstruction had been enacted but takes place in a time that is either before or to the side of the US Civil War, thereby “tripping” the past and present, Adventure Time signals its “tripping” of past and present through the anachronistic insertion of Abraham Lincoln into its animated, post-apocalyptic world. Adventure Time's pilot, a 7-minute short originally produced for NickToons in 2007, introduces Pen, a 12-year old, human boy whose name suggests that of his creator, who is accompanied by his magical, shape-shifting, “28-year old” dog, Jake. As the two try to cheer up a sobbing Lady Rainicorn (a flying half-unicorn, half-rainbow creature who does not speak English), they stumble into the frozen biome of the nefarious Ice King, where they must fight to save Princess Bubblegum. When the Ice King momentarily gains the upper-hand in battle, Pen's body is frozen and his mind is "transported back in time and to Mars" where Abraham Lincoln tells a disoriented Pen to believe in himself. This temporal marker positions the show in an American mythos—and especially its mythos of mis-/dis-remembered wars and national, international, and even interplanetary material conquest. Stanley 5 This is particularized several years later when the Cartoon Network picks up Adventure Time as a full series. There, Pen is re-introduced as an orphan named Finn the Human, a kind of distorted orthographic inversion of Huckleberry Finn, and Jake returns as Jake the Dog, now also playing the role of Finn’s “older brother.” As we know from Sianne Ngai’s essay, “On Animatedness,” the cartoon animal is often a stand-in for the raced other: Finn is to Jake as Huck is to Jim. This should remind us, if reminding need be, that what counts as human, for us as well as for Huck Finn in his own time and place, is always an open question. By focusing on how Adventure Time re-performs, re-imagines, re-enacts, and even re-constructs (with all that term's historical weight) Huck Finn along formal dimensions, my thesis hopes to hold open the gaps of Adventure Time’s playful (re- )performances in order to glimpse and map some of the contours of that (re-)performing body that is irreducible to the human body, that body of forms, that body that is form, a body that, like a cartoon figure, is "not human" and "not not human,” thereby revealing the performative (rather than phenomenological) dimensions of human embodiment. Methodology. Because I envision this thesis as a work of performative scholarship, I want to include a final remark on how I will be putting this material together. Performative scholarship, as Della Pollock has argued, is a mode of criticism that dispenses with the ontological interrogative “What is…?” Thus, my thesis generally declines the conventional art historical labor of evaluation and judgment; instead, I am keen to approach Adventure Time by working to understand its internal logic and the expression of that logic as it is revealed through form. As the performance artist Matthew Goulish says, the labor of understanding is one that happens from “any direction whatever,” and it Stanley 6 is precisely from “any direction whatever” that I approach Adventure Time. Parafictional narratives and memories of paratheatrical events from my own childhood snake their way through the meta-critical commentary and close viewings that comprise the thesis. I deploy these “personal” details as sites for readers to re-perform the text before them, and I exploit the pleasures and difficulties of lacing disparate verbal registers together in order to enhance the performative dimensions of the work.