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DRAWING BLOOD by Art Spiegelman STABBED in the BACK!

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DRAWING BLOOD by Art Spiegelman STABBED in the BACK! FRANCINE PROSE: A CULTURE UF CONCEALMENT HARPER'S MAGAZINE/JUNE 2006 $6.95 • ----------- . DRAWING BLOOD Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of 0 t By Art Spiegelman STABBED IN THE BACK! , The Past and Future of a Right ..Wing Myth By Kevin Baker THE LITTLE BOY A story by Mary Gaitskill Also: David Samuels and Martha Gellhorn -----------. ----------- C R T C S M DRAWING BLOOD Outrageous cartoons and the art of outrage By Art Spiegelman THIS WORLD OF CREEPERs-Afraid of themselves, and of others, afraid of the Almighty, of life and'of death. -Art Young, 1907 he tragedy of the Danish "cartoon war" picture is worth a thousand words, it often that erupted in February is that it really takes a thousand more words to analyze and T wasn't about cartoons at all. Cartoons, contextualize that picture. It isn't a question of even hateful ones, are symptoms of a disease, adding Insult to an open wound like the far- not the cause. Those Danish cartoons were right thugs of the British National Party did -in what Alfred Hitchcock called a "McGuffin," February 1;Jydistributing 500,000 leaflets of the the almost irrelevant plot device that just gets emblematic hotheaded Prophet to sow more a story rolling. The cartoon insults were used as xenophobic discord. It's a matter of demystify- an excuse to add more very real injury to an al- ing the cartoons and maybe even robbing ready badly injured world, and in this at least them of some of their venom. I believe that they succeeded. They polarized the West into open discourse ultimately serves understanding viewing Muslims as the unassimilable Other; and that repressing images gives them too for True Believers, the insults were irrefutable much power. proof of Muslim victimization, and served as As a secular Jewish cartoonist living in New recruiting posters for the Holy War. York City, I start out with four strikes against I'm not a Believer, but I do truly believe me, but I really don't want any irate Muslims that these now infamous and banal Danish declaring holy war on me. (Although I'm not at cartoons need actually to be seen to be under- all religious, I am a devout coward.) As a car- stood. If-as the currency of cliche has it-a toonist, I hope to see cartoons and comics flour- Art Spiegelman is the author of Maus, which won the Pulitzer'Prize in 1992, and, most recently, In the Shadow of No Towers, published in 2004 by Pantheon Books. ' World of Creepers; by Art Young. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [LC.DIG.ppmsca·04662] CRITICISM 43 Clockwise from left: Cartoon of Boss Tweed and his associates Philippe, 1831, by Honore Daumier. PiUarsof Society, 1926, by 1871, by Thomas Nast. ish in the twenty-first century and have long Denmark's local Muslim community into a urged librarians, scholars, curators, booksellers, Clash of Civilizations. editors, and readers to pay more attention to my Thanks to fundamentalist zealotry, the ampli- chosen medium. I'd also like to see the twenty- fication of the Internet (Peace Be Unto It), and first century flourish, and so I urge extremist intense international political agendas in collision, Muslim clerics to take cartoons somewhat less the editors of Denmark's right-wing ]Yllands- 'seriously. After all, believers in a predominantly Posten succeeded beyond their wildest night- aniconic faith-some of whom believe that mares:more than 100dead and 800 injured as mil- nothing with a soul should ever be depicted-are lions of offended Muslims protest around the really not the ideal audience for cartoons of any world; flags and buildings burned; cartoonists in kind, let alone those that, under the banner of hiding with million-dollar price tags on their free speech, were originally published to bait heads; editors fired and arrested; legislation to Cartoon by Thomas Nast (left) © CORBIS; Plate from How to Creme Carworu (top), by Frank F. Greene © Harper & Brothers; The American River Ganges (bottom), by Thomas 44 HARPER'S MAGAZINE IJUNE 2006 Nast, Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints &.Phorographs Division, [LC-USZ6-790j as vultures, 1871, by Thomas Nast. A plate from How to Create Cartoons, 1941, by Frank F. Greene. Gargantua, a cartoon depicting King Louis- George Grosz. Clerics as crocodiles, representing the Catholic school threat to public education, in The American River Ganges, the Priestsand the Children, itting firmly on the left side of the secular- fundamentalist divide and on the hyphen Sbetween words and pictures, I'd like to put in a good word for cartoons despite-or perhaps even because of-their predisposition toward in- sult. Caricature is by definition a charged or loaded image; its wit lies in the visual concision of using a few deft strokes to make its point. The compression of ideas into memorable icons gives cartoons their ability to burrow deep into the brain; we humans are wired to distinguish, for example, a "have-a-nice-day" face from an ab- stract pattern in infancy, even before recognizing our mother's smile. Cartoon language is mostly limited to deploy- ing a,handful of recognizable visual symbols and cliches. It makes use of the discredited pseudo- scientific principles of physiognomy to portray character through a fewphysical attributes and fa- cial expressions. It takes skill to use such cliches in ways that expand or subvert this impoverished put stricter limits on free speech or revive blas- vocabulary. Cartoonists like Honore Daumier, phemy laws proposed in the U.N., the E.U., and Art Young, and George Grosz were masters of beyond; boycotts of Danish goods costing over insult and were rewarded for their transgressions: € 50 million in lost revenues; and even Danish Daumier was imprisoned for ridiculing Louis- pastries in Iran rechristened (though I suspect Philippe; Art Young, the Socialist editor of The that might be the wrong word) "Rosesof Muham- Masses, was tried for treason as a result of his mad." I'm sure the Danish cartoonists involved anti- World War I cartoons; and George Groszwas would all agree that it was a mistake to enter the tried variously for slander, blasphemy, and ob- "Draw the Prophet and win a prize" talent con- scenity before fleeing Germany as the Nazis rose test, but they at least managed to demonstrate the to power. capacity of cartoons to bring urgent issues into I don't mean to suggest that the Denmark high relief. ' Twelve belong in such exalted company, though Gargantua (top right), by Honore Daumier © Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Herman Michels Collection, Vera Michels Bequest Fund, 1993.48.1; Pillars of Society (bottom right), by George Grosz © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, N.Y.C., and Estate of George Grosz/YAGA, N.Y.C. CRITICISM 45 I do believe in the right to insult even if it some- It was enough to be told that insult was in- times puts me in the position of feeling person- tended. The ]yllands-Posten could have saved ally insulted. It's just that cartoons are most aes- the $129 it paid each of its twelve cartoonists thetically pleasing when they manage to speak and simply printed a front-page headline in 64- truth to power, not when they afflict the afflict- . point type that shouted "Yo' Prophet Wears ed. (Of course, every individual or group on the Army Boots!" receiving end of a barbed cartoon feels afflicted. By February, September's local insults had In my graphic novel, Maus, I managed to offend been instrumentalized to further, various re- Jews, Poles, Germans, and even cat lovers like gional agendas, ranging from Iran's eagerness Desmond Morris, who claimed that my depic- to deflect attention from its nuclear program tion of Nazis as cats was the worst thing to hap- to pro-Taliban forces in Pakistan finding these pen to ailurophiles since the Middle Ages. As a scrawls useful in their struggles against Presi- cover artist for The New Yorker, I've upset the dent Musharraf ... and the "spontaneous" car- New York City Police Department, our mayor toon fatwa broke out across the globe. The and governor, Christians, Muslims,African Amer- framework-and even the meaning-of the icans, and more Jews.) Danish cartoons in question changed as the Still, the ]yUaruIs-Posten-a newspaper with a context went global and the besieged became history of anti-immigrant bias-seemed somewhat the besiegers. Newspapers around the world . disingenuous when it wrapped itself in the man- had to decide whether to show the drawings as tle of free speech to invite cartoonists to throw part of their reporting on the story or to sup- pies at the face of , press them-either in deference to Islamic Muhammad lastSep- sensibilities or due to 'fear of reprisals. Al- EDITORIAL CARTOONISTS ARE tember. The insti- though I was stirred by the dozens of European gating editor claimed papers that did reprint the cartoons out of soli- NOW AN ENDANGERED SPECIES, to be inspired by a darity with Denmark, it seemed that many of Danish author'scom- the papers involved instrumentalized the DYING OFF EVEN QUICKER THAN plaints that no illus- drawings in their own way, reinforcing their THE NEWSPAPERS trator would come own anti-immigrant or Islamophobic biases. forward to collabo- Most news outlets in the United States de- rate on a children's clined to show the cartoons, professing a high- book about the Prophet for fear of giving offense. minded nod toward political correctness that But the editor didn't invite illustratorsto step up to smelled of hypocrisy and fear.
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