The Informing Word: Verbal Strategies in Visual Satire

The Informing Word:utsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Verbal Strategies in Visual Satire*MLKJIHGFEDCBA K A T H R Y N H U N T E R Just as the act of reading is not entirely verbal, our perception of art is not wholly a visual experience. Every work of art requires of its audience some knowledge of the context and conventions. As E. H. Gombrich has taught us, the naked eye—could there be such a thing—is not enough: to see even an apparently “culture-free,” “natural” painting like a still life or a landscape is to be guided by perceptual and representational conventions.1 The impor­ tance of these conventions is so great that Morse Peckham has argued that the value of all art lies in its capacity to disturb us by its unexpected varia­ tion, its departure from the conventions we know.2 Because representational conventions exist, most art theorists grant the resemblance of art to language, but whether the relation between them is analogue or metaphor or identity is a matter of dispute.3 An interesting description is given by the semioticist C. W. Morris: painting and music, though they signify iconically and thus operate as languages themselves, are “ ‘post-linguistic’ in that they are dependent upon language for their appear­ ance.”4 Satiric art shares the language-like qualities of all art, but it is verbal in a further sense. By its nature satire must do more than speak itself. It must go beyond the iconic sign to refer to the world outside; it must designate its *1 should like to express my gratitude to the American Philosophical Society for a summer grant in support of the research that led to this essay. 271 272 / vutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA KATHRYN HUNTERutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA extra-artistic context; it must mean. Such allusions are almost always verb al­ ized conceptions, and therefore, a satiric work must either use words them­ selves or word substitutes: the verbal constructions of emblem and symbolic allegory or the referential signs of caricature. To understand visual satire, the viewer needs to perceive it verbally. It is especially true that the naked eye is not enough in looking at a satiric print. We must recognize allusion, see metaphor, apprehend clues to the context; and this experience is primarily a verbal one. Looking at satire requires an educated eye, one that is aware of satiric modes and the issues of the day. And to see the work truly, that eye probably must be slightly jaundiced in the same political or philosophical way as the artist’s. It is not that satirical prints are not visual, it is that they are essentially verbal. If you have ever tried to explain an editorial cartoon to a five-year-old, you have faced this essential verbalness: “That donkey riding a bicycle backwards is Lester Maddox, who once rode a bicycle backwards, and who for four years was a backwards governor, and he looks like a donkey because he is a Democrat for one thing, and . . . .”5 Though this verbalness characterizes visual satire in every age, eighteenthcentury English prints provide a particularly good illustration of visual satire’s dependence on language. In this as in so many other ways the age was one of variety and change, and it offers us a sampling of almost all the strategies of visual satire in other times and places. Some of these are represented in emblematic prints and political allegories like Hogarth’s The South Sea Scheme (Fig. 1), a work which would not have seemed strange to a sixteenthor a seventeenth-century viewer; after the mid century there is also caricature, which was to become the mainstay of nineteenth- and twentieth-century graphic satire. We, can even find in the eighteenth century some generalized satire of social types, although except for brief vogues like the one of maca­ roni prints and the foretaste that Rowlandson provides, type satire does not predominate, as it does in medieval admonitory prints and in nineteenthcentury social comedy drawings. Even where we suspect a satire of manners or social types—as in Hogarth’s pompous doctors in the fifth plate of A Harlot's Progress—when we look closer, and, above all, when...