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The Implosive Animation of the Still CartoonAs an example of representation in action, cartoons are somewhere between advertisements and fine art. In cartoons there is no doubt that there is 'something beyond the text': the image and, beyond that, a recognisable situation. Sir Ernst Gombrich has written about cartoons, 'not so much for what they can tell us about historical events as for what they may reveal about our own minds'. Like advertisements cartoons have to communicate very rapidly to a very disparate group of people, the readers of newspapers. Cartoons are, even when their subject is grim, visual jokes, and their techniques are similar to those of verbal wit. The humble joke is in itself a vindication of representation. The essence of a joke is that a context is presented to an unprepared person who at the denouement is expected to get the point in a flash of insight. The joke is usually being told nth hand, which means that it has survived possible emasculation by a thousand Chinese whispers. A consideration of jokes suggests that far from human representations being forbidden by postmodernist reflexivity there is an excess of representation in the world. 'Or in the
night, imagining some fear, Something like bushes becoming bears is a key technique in cartooning: the fusion of a natural image with one that has human significance. A famous example, cited by Gombrich in 'The Cartoonist's Armoury' is Charles Philipon's (1806-1862) portrayal of Louis Philippe as a pear. A secondary meaning of 'poire' in French is fathead, so the cartoon is both visually insulting, in emphasising the flabby jowly features of the King and a verbal insult too. Gombrich comments: 'Thus a play on words and a visual joke were happily combined'. To extend Gombrich, even when such a literal play on words is not included, the essence of modern cartooning is to make a visual image suggest very strongly a subversive text. Take Steve Bell's cartoon in the Guardian of June 22nd, 1995, at first sight about the fate of the Brent Spar oil rig. The image is both oilrig and John Major (who is also a fusion: of his face and the famous iconic underpants). Michael Portillo is urinating on him/hosing him down, saying 'sink him now'. Michael Heseltine is tarzonning onto the landing deck, saying 'take him apart humanely'. The unspoken text is that John Major is dead in the water, a ruined hulk who has become a disposal problem. This is of course akin to the verbal technique employed by Dickens when in Dombey and Son, 'It was observed by the curious, of all her [Miss Tox's] collars, frills, tuckers, wristbands, and other gossamer articles - indeed of anything she wore which had two ends to it intended to unite - that the two ends were never on good terms, and wouldn't quite meet without a struggle'. She, of course, couldn't make ends meet. The power of images to suggest such a text is very striking. The cartoon is a telling example of what Gombrich refers to as the 'process of condensation and fusion that has always been the major aim of the cartoonist'. The power of images to evoke text, and vice versa, constantly challenges notions of the hermetic nature of language - 'nothing beyond the text'. Text and image cannot help fusing and commenting on each other. And fusion can of course take place purely within language (see the scrolling text at the bottpome of this page). Is nature also a cartoonist? Are the representations of the cartoon grounded in the physical world? Can we see a continuum between human puns and the puns of nature? In nature, we see that, although many signals involve remarkable examples of mimesis (the bee orchid etc...), many other signals are more stylized. Ethologists have experimented with various artificial stimuli to ascertain what is the minimum requirement to stimulate a given response. The male stickleback responds aggressively to another male stickleback: no, he responds to almost anything red. Gombrich comments on the 'eyes' which appear as warning signals on the backs of a hawkmoth's wings that they are not naturalistic - 'They are rather in the nature of generalised, schematic - but expressive - images. They represent, if you like, the Expressionist style of nature'. The grammar of expression is something other than an attempted fidelity to nature, like the map of the sensory perception of different parts of the part which shows that the hands, genitals, and face loom much larger in our subjective body map than the torso or legs. The cartoonist in representing his subject may resort to the equivalent of the stickleback's generic red. When Harold Wilson was Prime Minister he could be conjured merely by a pipe or a Gannex raincoat - the features of the Prime Minister did not need to appear at all. These are visual equivalents of the literary figure metonymy, the part standing for the whole. Related to this is caricature, in which the whole of the figure is reproduced but certain features are exaggerated. For example, it is curious how far a nose can be pushed without destroying the recognisability of the face. The process of caricature has its parallels in nature. In families of species, systematic distortions appear which create a new shape but which still betray the familial relationship. D'Arcy Thompson showed how nature created new species by systematic deformations of a notional grid behind the outline of the original. He acknowledged Durer's application of a similar system of grid deformations in deriving human expressions. There seems to be a continuum between the expression by means of form of living creatures and human expressiveness. The metaphors we draw on to describe human facial and behavioural traits of course derive from the natural world: feline, foxy, bear-like, and so on, and, in Philipon's caricature, pear-like. The distortions of caricaturists push to the limits the possibility of representation: taken too far we would cease to recognise the subject and the point would be lost. Stretched, condensed, fused - the images of cartoons always aim at expressiveness, and the range of expressions is limitless. Subtle political and artistic points fall naturally within their compass. The cartoon is the living proof of the kind of animism that is the best antidote to the prevalent corrosive attacks on the objective existence of external reality and the bogus New-Age remedies they have spawned. Because cartoonists often work very fast and no image or cross-reference is in principle denied them - with their before-and- after images, speed streaks, directional indicators, trajectory trails, explosion marks, exclaiming faces, fusions between the human and natural world, their graphic symbols, arrows, globes - they catch life on the wing, preserving in their black and white amber all the zest of natural and human inventiveness. Since questions of taste are irrelevant to cartooning, the range of life it can encompass is very broad. Vitality has never left the cartoon as it often has painting. In an age when, we are told, the cement of common values and interests that make civilised society possible is dissolving before our eyes the cartoon still argues that things might be different. |
