The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and their Enduring Power by Victor S. Navasky (review)

Cartoons were originally the full-scale drawings for monumental murals or tapestries. They represented idealized historical subjects, the most famous being Raphael’s Cartoons of the Lives of the Apostles, which inspired many artists (they were widely disseminated in engravings and the originals were in England). William Hogarth and James Gillray parodied these heroic images in what in the nineteenth century came to be called cartoons, one branch of which was political. From Hogarth’s “modern moral subjects” onward, they tended to retain the horizontal rectangle and burlesque serious history—Gillray’s Emma Hamilton and Admiral Nelson as a parody of Dido and Aeneas.

Victor S. Navasky’s book could more precisely be called Navasky’s Experience of the Power of Caricature. Caricature is what he means by Political Cartoons. Caricature, a fashionable eighteenth-century pursuit in England, was attached in the 1750s to politics: literally a charged (Italian caricare) likeness, prominent features singled out and exaggerated. Hogarth’s heads had been likenesses proportionate to their bodies, not different from those found in David Low’s political cartoons of the twentieth century; Gillray’s heads were getting larger, the distinguishing features more emphatic in relation to bodies, in compositions wildly baroque, but still contained within the horizontal rectangle of history (occasionally, for a parodic apotheosis, vertical).

Navasky’s subject is the caricature or power aspect of the cartoon. He draws on David Freedberg’s The Power of Images and W.J.T. Mitchell’s What do Pictures Want; he should also have read Robert C. Elliott’s The Power of Satire. His stories are of satiric images that have elicited responses in excess of the stimulus. Each section opens with “I was there,” “first I met . . .” Not personal in that Navasky was the object of the caricature—although a benevolent caricature by Edward Sorel appears on the dust jacket. As editor of Monocle and The Nation Navasky experienced one of the causes célèbres he recounts, and as a prominent figure in the world of New York journalism he witnessed others. He comes at the subject of caricature by reception theory, an “inquiry into how cartoons and caricatures get their power and their ability . . . to enrage, upset, and discombobulate otherwise rational people and drive them to disproportionate-to-the-occasion, sometimes violent, emotionally charged behavior.”

Navasky’s generalizations about power are interestingly contradictory: Almost all cartoons are “in poor taste,” often the poorest taste the “most powerful”—one thinks of Max Lieberman’s taunt that he could piss so-and-so’s portrait in the snow. An “act of violence” is an aspect of satiric caricature which Ralph Steadman illustrated when he said to Navasky that “he actually wanted to shoot Reagan before he drew him, but never after. ‘It’s a form of assassination,’ he said. ‘What you want to do is to cause that person damage.’” Back in the 1960s (in The Fictions of Satire) I argued that the master trope of satire is an “act of violence,” more specifically symbolic (appropriate) punishment—either punishment of the good by the bad or of the bad by the good. Among the traditional personae adopted by satirists was the executioner or the surgeon, and this sense of punishment or therapy plays a large part in satiric caricature.

But Navasky also believes that “it is precisely because the caricature has artistic depth and merit that the outrage is so keenly felt.” Let us examine his primary examples of response.

His first example is David Levine’s caricature showing Henry Kissinger having sex, coming to climax on top of a naked woman whose head, a globe, indicates that she is the world. The drawing was rejected by his usual venue, the NYRB, as “too strong,” and Levine offered it to Navasky at The Nation. He accepted it, but his staff reacted negatively: It was “sexist,” they told him. “Why isn’t he doing it to a Third World male?” “The Nation...