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Hal Colebatch

Between Two Worlds

from Westerly magazine No2, June 1974

In seeing Donald Duck as a valid social and literary symbol of the dilemma presently confronting Western Man, I believe him to be the valid contemporary expression of the perennial Western tragedy of the Divided Nature. This is, of course, implicit in his very name,¹ but some deeper aspect of it is revealed in nearly all those situational contexts in which the theme may obtrude itself.

As originally conceived, Donald Duck is obviously the classical American myth-figure hewn to heroic proportions. His three nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie are so plainly the three enigmatic officers of Captain Ahab — Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, the demi-urgic figures at once voices of sanity and acceptance and codified indices of powerlessness in the face of their master's Promethian quest.

(The primacy of Donald Duck's claim to the role of contemporary symbol-hero is most clearly seen when contrasted to the altogether shallower creation of Daffy Duck, who, far less involved in the agonies of inculcated anthropocentrism, is still unashamedly able to fly with his hand-wings, and is chiefly concerned with obtaining groceries, in a cargo cult-like manner, from the eunuchiod Elmer Fudd, a spokesman, for the Western liberal conscience.)

Ahab has been mutilated by the loss of his leg. Donald Duck, however, has achieved an even more obvious and less symbolised castration of his nature: (i.e. his innate, Duck, nature, overshadowed and ultimately crushed by human cultural imperialism) The tensions built up by his internal role-conflict drive him, not only into frequent quacking frenzied rages, but also into a continuous, incessant act of self-exposure. Never without his sailor-suit jacket,² he continually refuses to wear pants, thrusting, as it were, upon a complacent social context, the reality of his avian, but also quite possible literally and physically castrated, self.³

The secondary symbol of castration is, of course, the fact that he has only three fingers on each hand (this links him with Ahab's obvious and enigmatically sinister alter-ego, Captain Hook, who has suffered a somewhat similar amputation). The fact that Donald Duck has, however, developed hands (appropriately, imperfect ones), rather than wings, points to a further aspect of the divided Self. He can no longer fly,⁴ and when fishing uses a rod and line — human inventions — since his super ego will, in the present role-conflict situation, no longer permit him to scrabble through reeds and mud with his beak. Indeed, in a recent, and highly significant publication,⁵ he is actually shown going to shoot other ducks! In this dark night of the soul, he has apparently achieved the final betrayal of his avian nature, and has become, at least outwardly, a contented consumer of the products of the U.S. Military-Industrial complex.

The failure to use his beak as a food-gathering organ⁶ has further resulted in/caused its progressive atrophy, his face having become, on the surface at least, steadily more human, as he has assimilated more of the ontological uncertainties now assailing contemporary Western Man, enmeshed, like Ahab to his whale, or Voss to his desert⁷ in the flat, stale, weary and unprofitable boredom to which Western technology has condemned him. And Donald Duck is, quite literally, a one-dimensional figure.

In this contemporary Western society, however, so desperately in need, as I believe is the trend of what Professor F. R. Leavis is trying to say, of codification and organisation of values around literary archetypes,⁸ the Duck factor in the equation of Donald Duck's being stubbornly continues to persist.⁹ Note, for example, his unending conflicts with Uncle Scrooge, the paradigm of the Western Capitalist ethic, a basically anti-life force.¹⁰ For his even deeper betrayal of his Duck nature, however. Uncle Scrooge has paid a correspondingly deeper price.¹¹ His sexual life is virtually non-existent, achieving not even the level of Donald's fundamentally unsatisfactory relationship with Daisy Duck, in whom similar role-conflicts have obviously induced total frigidity. Daisy, in common with all these essentially tragic duck-humans, has made too deep a commitment to the Contemporary Western Man's bitch-goddess of material success, symbolised by the handbag she carries. Even Gladstone Gander, to some extent a life-force, is also a guilt-ridden social parasite, plagued with inner conflict whenever his 'luck' (Manifest Destiny) is seen to desert him.

The charting of these ontological uncertainties involves a perilous voyage, perhaps, appropriately enough, not unlike Ahab's. It may be objected that there is the distinct social danger of the role-confusion being perpetuated here through a medium which merely seeks to portray it, but this seeks to beg the question, since the charting and codifying of these ontological uncertainties is (he major function to which a contemporary writer in the West can aspire.