The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg (review)

In The Comic Worlds, Iain Topliss charts the development of significant aspects of American middle-class life from 1925 to 1975 through the work of four prominent New Yorker cartoonists. In the process, he elevates The New Yorker cartoon to a noteworthy form of critical commentary. Each respective chapter on Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg demonstrates how these artists' work reflects well the shifting values of the periods on which they comment. In order to accomplish this task, Topliss engages aesthetic, cultural, and Freudian criticism. His descriptions of the cartoons and his aesthetic and cultural readings are excellent. But his Freudian theory, while provocative, seems a bit disconnected from his other critical approaches, even though, in his introduction, he grounds his primary argument in it. According to Topliss, The New Yorker cartoons offer "insights into the unconscious and unacknowledged drama of middle-class consciousness" (14-15). Arno's dandies, Steig's working-class families, Addams gothic ghouls, and Steinberg's masses, share one thing in common: they identify new social experiences that are already registered "disturbingly within the individual psyche" of the middle-class American (6). By laughing at these cartoons, readers recognize experiences common to their class, which to this point, have been felt or intuited anxiously rather than grasped through language. The argument is compelling. But Topliss does not defend it thoroughly throughout his book. The strength of The Comic Worlds lies in its ability to demystify the embedded cultural rather than psycho-social meaning of the cartoons it analyzes, despite Topliss' claims to the contrary (6).

There are moments when Topliss' theoretical approaches converge nicely. As he traces Arno's aesthetic shift from a "dandified elegance" to an "openly masculine character" (61), for example, he establishes a convincing psychoanalytic link between the artist's cartoons and a growing sense of impotence among upper-middle-class men during the twenties and thirties. But Topliss' theoretical positions often leave gaps in his argument. Toward the book's end, for instance, Topliss theorizes laughter. When we laugh, we free ourselves, however momentarily, from the bondage of signification, the creation of meaning through language that makes possible comprehension and elements of the unconscious like desire. He positions this theory against a reading of advertising in order to demonstrate how The New Yorker's cartoons spring us from the grip of the magazine's seductive advertisements. If, as Topliss maintains, advertisements "activate desire" and "chain us to the chimera of consumption," then cartoons "through the ecstasy of laughter, pick the lock" (253). Thoughtful as it is, the argument stops short of confronting complexities that impact the book's entire project. If laughter offers temporary relief from advertising's complex web of signifiers, doesn't it also allow us to transcend the content of the cartoon that made us laugh in the first place? How, then, do we negotiate the tension between a reading that explores the cultural significance of cartoons and a theory that claims that the meaning of those cartoons is suspended through laughter? We may be "outside language" when we laugh (251). But when we read we prefer to be entrenched in well-constructed meaning.