Well, it’s awfully considerate of you to think of me here, and I’m most
obliged to you for making it clear that I’m not here. That said, there might not
be an immediately obvious connection between the art of the political cartoon
and the opening lines of the final track on Pink Floyd’s second album, A
Saucerful of Secrets, which I’ve just quoted to you. Still, let’s see if we can
run with it. That last track was the only song on the album written by Syd
Barrett, the founding genius of Pink Floyd who, shortly after he wrote it had a
massive mental breakdown, a bit like poor old Gillray. Unlike Gillray, it was
too much acid which led to Syd’s irreversible collapse into schizophrenia, but
that’s beside the point at the moment. Let’s stick with the schizophrenia bit,
and remember, for a moment, the title of Syd’s first solo album, "The Madcap
Laughs". Like every other cartoonist, the question I’m most frequently asked
is "where do you get your ideas from?" I used to answer, sarcastically, that I
got them from ingesting vast pharmocopia of hallucinogenic drugs, but I had
to stop saying this because too many people believed me. So much for irony.
Nonetheless, I still occasionally encounter profoundly stupid people who
clearly possess no mind worthy of expansion who look at my work and say
"Hey, you’re so weird you must be on acid!"
Well, again, no, but still bearing Syd Barrett in mind it places us rather neatly
in the dark, shadowland occupied by the newspaper cartoonist. We are, we
know, the court jesters, the holy fools of newspapers, the madcaps capering
around saying the unsayable but allowed to say it because we are
institutionally mad. A mark of that madness, of the role of "Ye Madde
Designer", to quote the title of David Low’s 1935 book on cartoon and
caricature, is that what we do is so very different from everything else that
newspapers do.
In point of fact, although all newspaper editor clearly recognise a cartoon and
the role it plays in the topography of newspaper design, the way a cartoon acts
as an oasis - of insanity, you might say, or greater sanity - in the arid deserts of
text, many don’t actually understand what cartoons are at all. The most
frequent mistakes editors make are that a cartoon is basically an illustration
and should have no words, and that a cartoonist is the merest of mechanicals
who has to be guided and controlled with a firm editorial hand to stop the poor
halfwit soiling himself in public all over the leader page. In fact, a cartoon
should have exactly the number of words it requires, be that none, two or three
in a title, 250 in the case of some Low cartoons, 1000 or more in the case of
some Gillray prints, in those vast wobbling zeppelins of text, or more than
anyone could reasonably read in a lifetime, in my case on one of my more
prolix days. The confusion on the poor editor’s part arises rom the fact that
most writers can’t quite cope with a group of people who can draw and write,
as every decent cartoonist must be able to do. That’s why some editors seek to
control their cartoonist far more rigidly than they’d ever seek to control, or
even guide, their textual columnists.
But it goes with the territory. For while a cartoon by, say, Steve Bell or Peter
Brookes or Nick Garland addresses a particular issue more precisely, more
pertinently, more accurately and more speedily, for the reader, than the
columns by Hugo Young or Lord Rees-Mogg or Boris Johnson upon which
they squat like gargoyles, what those cartoonists do is not quite decent. While,
in the hierarchy of newspapers, it’s sherry glasses full of gravitas for the
textual columnists up at the Big House, I always tend to get the feeling that the
cartoonists will be lucky to get a glass of mackeson and a pork pie down in the
servants hall. In a way that’s as it should be. I think cartoonists should be
semi-detached and not quite decent. But it’s worth while speculating on why
editors should come to the same conclusion, albeit from a different starting
point.
I’d suggest it’s because what we do is, quite simply, so savage that it borders
on the incomprehensible. But by savage I don’t cruel or scatalogical, but
primitive and elemental. And not just because it’s primitive voodoo, seeking
to inflict harm at a distance with a sharp instrument. The political cartoon, as
it’s developed (even though it hasn’t, in fact, developed much since Gillray
defined our basic schtick 200 years ago) encapsulates within itself two of the
more primitive aspects of human behaviour: humour and art. Let’s just look at
art first. While one way of looking at humankind’s use of art - or artifice - is
as a way of controlling the world, of catalysing the observed universe through
the filter of a human sensibility, the particular kind of art which cartoonists
produce - of taking recognisable individuals and then transforming them into
something recognisable but clearly and deliberately different, and thus
transformed, making their twisted representations act out demeaning or
abusive narratives of the artist’s devising - belongs, if you think about it, more
in the realm of shamanism and sympathetic magic than journalism. By rights
editors should reach for the garlic and make the sign of the evil eye when
dealing with cartoonists, but instead too many of them find it easier to bung us
on a table behind the coffee machine, pretend we’re semi-literate monkeys to
be told precisely what to do or, if they’re feeling generous and we’re lucky,
permitted to be licenced madmen free to say and draw what we want. The
chimerical nature of our product, with its collision or, perhaps more correctly,
dialectic between text and image points to its inherent schizophrenia, which
brings us back to Syd. Although, of course, he is mad, while most of us, by
and large, are not.
Politicians - the usual victims of the dark magic - tend to get the point better,
but usually enter into a self-deluding symbiosis with us, their tormentors.
They pretend they don’t mind, in the face of which we do our best to pretend
that we still matter. However mad that may be - the cliche of cliches is how
the cartoonist operates his sympathetic magic to destroy the politicians, and
they respond by buying the original and saluting the cartoonist for the simple
act of noticing them at all - it’s probably best, all round, that things are
maintained on this basis in order that we might all keep our sanity.
However, to return to those lines from "Jugland Blues" - it’s awfully
considerate of your to think of me here, and I most obliged to you for making
it clear that I’m not here. I’ve taken this as my text today, if you like, so I can
amplify specifically on what’s taking place here today. It allows me a way into
discussing the dynamic between cartoonists and the Academy, to report back,
so to speak, from the petrie dish.
Of course it’s terribly flattering to find oneself in the position of being
observed and analysed from the ivory towers of Academe. I sometimes
wonder where it gets anyone, however. To take a case in point, about a month
and a half ago I was invited to a plenary talk (and that particular adjective is
just for starters) at Birmingham University on a comic book I did a few years
ago in which I transformed T.S.Eliot’s "The Waste Land" into a
Chandleresque film noir. Now this bloody book, which took me 18 months to
produce, and which nearly drove me mad in the process, although not, at the
time, selling well, has had a curious academic half life. Thus the plenary talk
at Birmingham. Alas, no one has yet succeeded in coralling enough wild
horses to drag me, by train, to Birmingham on a Sunday evening in late
March, but I was sent a synopsis of the talk, which concluded thusly: "The
present paper interrogates Rowson’s parody for what it reveals both about the
process of narrativization and about the traffic between elite and popular
genres in the modernist period and since. The talk ... will reflect not only on
the readerly (re)construction but also on the poetics of the graphic novel, the
epistemology of detection and the heuristic uses of parody."
Some years earlier a young woman at the University of Genoa, clearly
labouring under the influence of Professor Eco, wrote her PhD thesis on my
version of "The Waste Land". She wrote to me often, as I suppose PhD
students do when their subject is still alive and in a position to write the thesis
for them. That said, one question kept recurring. Could I please tell her rom
which work of criticism did I get the idea for turning T.S.Eliot’s poem into a
detective thriller? In fact, I got the idea sitting on the lavatory when I suddenly
connected - this is what cartoonists do, connecting nothing with everything -
the scene in Howard Hawks’ film of "The Big Sleep" when the DA’s office is
dredging a car out of the Bay containing the corpse of Philip Marlowe’s
client’s chauffeur with Part 4 of The Waste Land, "Death by Water", so
"Phlebus the Phoenician, a fortnight dead" became, in my mind’s eye, a
meticulously copied drawing of the scene from the movie with the tag lines "It
was Phlebus the Phoenician - He’s been dead a fortnight." Just to take this
further for a moment, I was particular attracted to this scene because of the
circumstances of its filming. Apparently Humphrey Bogart asked Hawks what
the relevance of the dead chauffeur was to the rest of plot. Hawks, unsure,
asked the scriptwriters who, equally in the dark, phoned Chandler to ask him.
He replied that he’d forgotten. I liked that, I liked the author being too bloody
slippery or forgetful to be of any help at all. Anyway, I told the young Italian
woman, several times but each time honestly, that the way I got the idea for
the book was that I’d made it up. This, however, wouldn’t do. She simply
couldn’t accept an answer which denied her the 27 pages of bibliographical
notes and cross-references that, I must assume, make it work for the examiners
of PhD theses.
Despite my uncooperativeness, her thesis duly appeared. I have a copy. It’s in
Italian and I don’t understand a word of it. Still, she got her doctorate, so good
luck to her. It don’t, for the record, understand half the words of the synopsis
from Birmingham either, and I’m not trying to be deliberately obscurantist
here, despite a tendency among certain cartoonists to play up the faux-naif
simple soul role. Perhaps, in the two decades since I gained a very bad degree
in English Literature from Cambridge the language of academic discource has
become even more arcane and exclusive. Perhaps I wasn’t listening properly
in the first place because I was too busy drawing stupid pictures for two-bit
student rags. Or perhaps, whether it be in Italian or the secret English of the
Academy, I’m not meant to understand.
After all, these denizens of their various academies view my work - here a
particular book which, as one of its parents has kept English Departments
from their knitting for the better part of a century, appeared to be crying out
for critical exegesis - as cultural artefact, as something to be poked and
analysed and discussed and, presumably, understood. My intentions, however,
in turning Eliot’s creaking Modernist juggernaut into a pulp detective thriller
rendered, moreover, as something as tacky as a fucking comic book was to
take the piss.
The Eliot estate and its attack lawyers got the point, and descended on me like
a ton of red rocks. But in the Academy perhaps it’s not necessary to know the
author’s intentions, even when he tells you. For the good doctors in
Birmingham, my overstrained piss-taking is far less important, in terms of
learned discourse, than, I quote "de-narrativization in the process of
composition provoking re-narrativization in the process of reception",
obviously.
In mitigation I should plead on my exegesists’ behalf that they were dealing
with a book, albeit a comic book which, in the good old, pre-post-Modern
days wouldn’t have merited a second glance. It gets worse when you get me
on the day job. Last week I gave a lecture in the History of Art Faculty at
Warwick University, in their series of lectures on Image and Text. I played it,
as I normally do, for laughs, although making it kosher by talking about
Hogarth and Gillray and Low and Vicky, how and why they drew what they
did. Only then did I start showing them my own work, in a knockabout
rollercoaster gig, with lots of swearing, blood, violence, cheap gags and the
other trappings of my particular oeuvre. I’m pleased to say that they laughed.
But to my horror they were also, right until the end, still taking notes. True, it
was only afterwards that I was told that the lecture was part of the syllabus,
but what on earth were they writing down that could possibly be of any use?
My contention that the Princess Diana Memorial Garden should be planted
with landmines to stop dogs shitting on the flowerbeds? The tone of green I’d
used to paint a pool of Jo Moore puke? My jovial and truly vile cartoon about
Rupert Murdoch’s prostate cancer ("You see that poor tumour over there?
He’s got Murdoch!" "It’s worse than that, the Murdoch’s malignant!"). I
honestly don’t know. Moreover, I don’t know whether I was teaching, or
being used as a teaching aid. Well, good luck to them, but likewise God help
them.
That said, of course, what people choose to do with what I’ve done, after I’ve
done it, is really none of my business. Once it’s in the public domain I have no control over
whether it’s stuck on someone’s fridge, used to line a budgie cage, screwed up
in disgust and rage or becomes the subject, in 20,000 words, of the results of
careful "reading". All I know is that some, but by no means all, of the readers
of the paper or magazine my cartoon has appeared in will look at it for, at best,
13 seconds and then move on. They may smile, they may frown, they may
remember it, they may forget it.
Excuse me. I’m being both ungracious and ungrateful here. For a cheap hack
like me it’s both a privilege and a pleasure to be invited up onto high table,
even if it’s only so you’ll see how discreetly I dispose of my cherry stones. As
a cartoonist, obviously I’ll spit them in your eye. That’s what we do, that’s our
function, as court-jesters, as holy fools, as piss-takers. So forgive me while I
piss on your curtains, but what do you expect?