Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York: OR Books, 2018).
OR Books brought out a new edition last year of the Marxist pop culture criticism classic by famous playwright and author Ariel Dorfman (best known for Death and the Maiden) and Belgian Marxist critic Armand Mattelart, and I knew I had to get a copy (apparently the first to appear in English since the extremely limited print run of the English translation in the '70s that survived Disney's notorious copyright lawyers).
It is, perhaps, a book more delightful in premise than in execution. And perhaps Marxist cultural critics are not a group known for their felicitous literary style. And perhaps this book -- though written by a famous author when young -- does not entirely fulfill one's hopes that it will break the mold.
And finally, perhaps Walt Disney is a bit of an obvious target (our authors say at one point that Marxists have for too long been diverted from their true enemies by attacking the particularly garish false flag of Scrooge McDuck, missing in the process that Disney's capitalist and imperialist ideology is actually being more insidiously and insinuatingly propagated by Donald and the rest. One thinks this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek.)
However tired we may be nowadays of would-be Marxist critics writing frothy-mouthed condemnations of children's cartoons, though, once upon a time this was a new and interesting idea. What's more important, Dorfman and Mattelart were persecuted horrifically for their words, being driven into permanent exile by the Pinochet government, so the usual objection to the Marxist cultural critics -- that they are out of touch élites, lobbing their little missiles from the safety of the ivory tower -- obviously does not apply here. Dorfman tells us -- in a wonderful and timely new introduction -- that he was nearly run down by a motorist at one point crying "Long Live Donald Duck!"
This early work of his thus assumes the grandeur and dignity bestowed upon all books as soon as dictators try to burn and destroy them (which the Pinochet government did). As Brecht imagines an author crying to the Nazis, upon hearing that his books had been left off a banned list, "Burn me! Haven't I always said the truth, and here you are treating me like a liar? Burn me!"
There is also at last a special resonance to this book and its historical moment, given that history is repeating itself in Latin America at the moment (both times as tragedy). If Dorfman and Mattelart were driven out of Chile by one of the world's first neoliberal dictators -- a right-wing mass-murderer to whom Milton Friedman and company were more than happy to dole out advice -- we now have another goon in the pocket of the "Chicago Boys."
Mr. Bolsonaro -- the "Brazilian Trump" (except maybe worse) whose chief occupation is scoring political points through promising to commit extrajudicial killings of so-called "criminals,"and other atrocities, apparently has a friend in Paulo Guedes -- another product of the economics department of my beloved alma mater (to our undying shame). The media seems to want to treat Bolsonaro and a Chicago Boy as an unlikely pairing -- when in fact it is following precisely the pattern laid out by previous South American dictators -- most notably the one who forced our present authors into exile.
Since, in such a world, a book that arose out of the Chilean experience in the early 1970s is plainly still relevant, I celebrate this edition of the book and would welcome many more. In that spirit, I offer the following copy edits to the English translation, to smooth the path for the next round of editors.
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p. 12. I cannot find any original source online for this quote attributed to Gilbert Seldes. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but I can't find it.
p. 23. "of a dose [sic] and lasting contact with the reader[...]" -- should be "close"
p. 40 "the punishment that Origenes inflicted upon himself[...]" The translation uses the Spanish spelling, but really in an English translation it probably ought to be rendered as Origen (the reference is to the ancient Alexandrian Christian thinker's purported auto-castration).
p. 52 "the places where are [sic] heroes venture are far [...]" -- should be "our"
p. 64 "the chief says. ["]It's real magic [...]" -- missing the initial open quotes
p. 84 "a single callous [sic] on the hand" -- should be "callus"
p. 99 "The Real [sic] drama only beings [sic] to unfold when [...]"
p. 185 Comma missing in the list of comic book titles. Also, further down the page: "less than a quarter from Italy, end [sic] a small fraction from Brazil and Denmark." -- should be "and"
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