Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings.

Self-consciousness is the curse of a high culture with shallow roots. That's why American popular art at its not-infrequent best is so much better than, say, your average first novel by a promising young American writer (especially one who went to graduate school). Yes, the market often squashes art down to its lowest common denominator, and you end up with gangsta rap or professional football. But every once in a while, it also creates a working environment whose narrow confines mysteriously free the artist from what W. H. Auden called "the fetters of Self," and then you end up with Fred Astaire - or Chuck Jones.

For those not in the know, Chuck Jones is the creator of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, and if that doesn't impress you, go talk to Professor Hugh Kenner, whose latest book is this monograph in the new "Portraits of American Genius" series from the University of California Press. Mr. Kenner, as readers of this journal are aware, knows a thing or two about art, and when he compares Mr. Jones to Buster Keaton, lesser folk would do well to listen up.

Chuck Jones was the most imaginative of the half-dozen men who directed cartoons for Warner Brothers between 1930, when the first Looney Tunes cartoon was released, and 1963, when Warner stopped producing animated shorts. In addition to directing the Road Runner and Pepe Le Pew series (as well as dozens of superior one-shot cartoons), Mr. Jones was mainly responsible for the definitive versions of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. It was his inspired notion to make Bugs an urbane boulevardier who went ballistic only in response to intolerable provocation and, conversely, to turn Daffy into a walking id, a twitching mass of terror, vanity, and greed who, in Mr. Jones's words, "rushes in and fears to tread at the same time."

Mr. Jones had plenty of competition throughout the Forties and Fifties, not only at his own studio but at MGM, where Tex Avery was cranking out six-minute exercises in surrealist slapstick that remain watchable to this day. But it is Mr. Jones's best cartoons, among them "Duck Amuck," "One Froggy Evening," "What's Opera, Doc?" and "Rabbit Seasoning," that have lodged most firmly in the collective consciousness of the baby-boom generation, and rightly so. Says Professor Kenner: "Should you ever face the solemn task of preserving just one six-minute instance from the unthinkable thousands of hours of animated footage that's accumulated since - oh, since 1914, you'd not go wrong in selecting |a Jones.'"

According to Mr. Kenner, the high quality of the Warner shorts owed much to the fact that they were created not by posterity-conscious "artists" but by craftsmen on tight budgets who were left alone by the front office as long as they hit their deadlines: "Like the 60,000-word novel, the six-minute cartoon derives its tautness from an economy imposed by commerce, not art. Art can work within that economy ... the Warner system, albeit by inadvertence, guaranteed a niche where miracles could happen: where |Art,' an overused word, is fitfully applicable."

Chuck Jones brought to this peculiar trade a stiff dose of what can only be described as classicism. The Road Runner cartoons, for instance, were all made according to self-imposed rules of the utmost strictness: "When the Coyote fell off [the cliff], I knew he had to go exactly 18 frames into the distance and then disappear for 14 frames before he hit." That may seem like a lot of brainwork for so unassuming a product. So it was - which is why Mr. Jones's cartoons have been playing on TV every Saturday morning for the last quarter-century. They haven't dated, and they hold up.

Dozens of books, some of them good, have been written about Chuck Jones and his contemporaries. What makes this one special is that it is the work of a first-rate critic, a man experienced in the subtle art of seeing. Here, to take one particularly choice example, is Hugh Kenner on Mr. Jones's greatest creation:

The Road Runner saga, all four-plus hours of it, relies on just one theme, seemingly inexhaustible. That is Wile E. Coyote's persistence in pursuit of what was once a potential snack and has long since mutated into an ideal conquest. The viewer of a new installment has seen all of it before and yet seen none of it before. The setting is always an idealized American Southwest, paradise of bluffs and canyons and vast spaces. Trucks or freight trains intrude sparingly, their human denizens never visible. Also mail brings wares of the Acme Company, which invariably malfunction. (But not grossly; no, subtly. The defect that sends the Coyote yet one more time off the cliff is as minute as the programming error that can cost NASA yet another satellite.)

That Mr. Kenner should have devoted such well-chosen words to Wile E. Coyote will doubtless exasperate more than a few stalwart defenders of high culture. But there is a big difference between what he has to say about Wile E. Coyote and what most academics have to say about anything at all: Mr. Kenner has no ideological axe to grind. Nowhere does he refer to cartoons as texts, or suggest that "Bully for Bugs" is every bit as good as The Wings of the Dove, or complain that "Ali Baba Bunny" privileges grey rabbits over black ducks. Instead, Hugh Kenner simply takes Chuck Jones's 204 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies at their proper value - as artful pieces of comic craftsmanship - and explains why they make him laugh.

The result is a balanced and illuminating exercise in critical appreciation which is not only the best thing ever written about Hollywood animation but one of the best things ever written about any aspect of American popular culture. This is exactly the sort of book somebody ought to write about Raymond Chandler or Johnny Mercer or Cheers: shrewd, stylish, and very much to the point. Not unlike a Chuck Jones cartoon, in other words.

Mr. Teachout, arts columnist of the New York Daily News and associate editor of The New Dance Review, is the editor of A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, to be published by Knopf in January.