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ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
In an essay about the state of British cartooning, the artist Ralph Steadman
(1997) complained that the cartoon is now generally regarded as little more
than a readily digested pictorial version of the written word, intended for
those who do not wish to read, who cannot read, or who just will not
understand (p. 23). In fact, many academic scholars currently working in
this field seem to share the view of the cartoon as a relatively simple and
readily digested medium. In her study of cartoon representations of
Saddam Hussein, for instance, Conners (1998) confidently asserts that
cartoons can often be understood across cultures, ages, and levels of
intelligence (p. 97). This, she believes, is due to the common use in cartoons
of metaphors and symbols which simplify ideas and thus enable readers to
interpret the images quickly and easily (p. 100). While agreeing with
Conners on the prevalence of symbols and metaphors in cartoons, I believe
that, far from making the interpretation of cartoons easier, this reliance on
non-literal thought processes actually contributes to their complexity.
SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC):
http://vcj.sagepub.com Copyright The Author(s), 2009.
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Vol 8(2): 181205 DOI 10.1177/1470357209102113
182
V I S U A L L I T E R A C Y, M U L T I L I T E R A C I E S
183
The political cartoon constitutes a very specific genre, with its own history,
distinctive styles, conventions and communicative purposes. It is an
illustration, usually in a single panel, published on the editorial or comments
pages of a newspaper. Most commonly, cartoons address a current political
issue or event, a social trend, or a famous personality, in a way that takes a
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185
Figure 1 mac (Stan McMurty), Daily Mail, 15 July 2008. Daily Mail. Reproduced with
permission of Stan McMurty and the Daily Mail.
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Figure 2 Nicholas Garland, The Daily Telegraph, 15 July 2008. The Daily Telegraph.
Reproduced with permission of Nicholas Garland and The Daily Telegraph.
cartoons was likely still to be very present in the minds of most people living
in Britain at the time.
The participants in the study were all academics from a relatively
homogeneous, highly educated middle-class background, whom I chose
deliberately because I thought they would be likely to share an interest in
political affairs. Of the four men and four women interviewed, ranging in age
from 29 to 64 years, five were British, one was of Spanish, one of Catalan and
one of Italian origin. I expected the interviewees different cultural
backgrounds and levels of experience of and engagement with British society
and culture to have some bearing upon the interpretation process.
All eight participants described themselves as being interested in
current affairs and as quite or very regular newspaper readers. Three respondents regularly read The Guardian, one occasionally reads The Independent
and another The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. The other three
respondents read a whole range of newspapers, including some foreign ones.
All but two of the respondents said that they (almost) always looked at the
cartoons when they were reading the paper, and all of them acknowledged
that they sometimes found them quite hard to understand, particularly if
they had not been following the news or if, in the case of one of the nonBritish respondents, the cartoon related to UK politics. Although only one of
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Figure 3 Dave Brown, The Independent, 15 July 2004. Dave Brown. Reproduced with
permission.
the respondents, D, had seen any of the cartoons used in this study before the
interview (specifically Figure 3), all the participants were thus reasonably
well acquainted with the genre and the conventions and styles associated
with it. This was confirmed during the interviews, when several respondents
explicitly referred to what they thought cartoons are normally about.
Respondents were interviewed individually for between 30 and 45
minutes each. In order to preserve their anonymity, responses were coded
with a letter from A to H. The interviews took place two to six weeks after the
publication date of the cartoons. One by one, the cartoons were shown to
the interviewee, starting with Figure 2, which was first displayed without the
context of the page it appeared on, since I wanted to discover whether it
made any sense to viewers outside its context. With the other cartoons
(Figures 1 and 3), I used the whole page (or double spread in the case of the
tabloid Daily Mail). In each case, the interviewee was first asked to describe
what he or she could see in the cartoon, without trying to analyse it.
Occasionally, I would ask additional questions in order to elicit more details,
such as: Where do you think this scene might be taking place? How would
you describe the mood/feelings of the depicted characters? Only after the
interviewees had described their own responses to the cartoon would I ask
them to say what they thought the cartoonist wanted to communicate. I
encouraged them to read any of the headlines or articles that they would
normally read in conjunction with the cartoon before attempting an
interpretation. In a final step, I asked respondents to describe their overall
El Refaie: Multiliteracies: how readers interpret political cartoons
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During the interviews, I always asked the respondents to describe what they
could see before attempting an overall interpretation of the cartoons. This
made it easier to distinguish between some of the competences involved in
the interpretation process. These multiliteracies are explored by focusing on
the following five questions: How do readers: (a) establish the real-world
referents of a cartoon; (b) impose a narrative on the cartoon image; (c)
interpret the facial expressions of the depicted participants; (d) understand
textimage relations; and (e) establish metaphorical connections between the
fictional scene of the cartoon and a political argument?
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Extract 2
My problem is I cant identify the cat as any particular person.
Normally, in political cartoons, you can actually identify the figure,
even if its in a sort of mythological or animal form, as a person. Im
not identifying that cat visually with anybody. So Im left asking what
exactly who exactly its meant to represent. (C)
Only one respondent (G) was prepared to identify the cat as possibly
representing Tony Blair on the basis of a physical resemblance: the eyes and
its very thin, very marked features. Caricatures tend to represent the more
permanent traits of physiognomy and of particular facial tics; apparently, it is
often the mouth, the eyes and the eyebrows that function as the most
important signals of identity (Moyle, 2000: 13). As Walker (1978) points out:
cartoonists quickly develop and fix a visual image of particular politicians,
and cartoonists tend to mine each others ideas (p. 8).7 However, some
cartoonists develop a very individual shorthand style when drawing famous
politicians and it is therefore hardly surprising that people who are not
familiar with a particular artists work will struggle to recognize some
caricatures. The respondents all indicated that they were unfamiliar with the
way Nicholas Garland normally caricatures the then Prime Minister.
By contrast, the caricature of Tony Blair in Figure 3 was recognized
immediately by seven out of eight respondents, who mentioned the typical
rather forced smile (D) and the pronounced grin and ears (B). Dave Brown
explained that he enjoyed the fact that Tony Blair is still instantly
recognizable, even though he is almost completely covered in whitewash. In
the case of Lord Butler, the artist conceded that Butler isnt the most
recognizable person for caricaturing, so the idea of him as Tonys butler was
an ideal way to lead people in. This figure was described by all the
respondents as a sort of butler or manservant, and five identified him as Lord
Butler, either immediately or else after spotting the name in the accompanying article. But Brown was clearly right in assuming that Lord Butlers
face is not so widely recognizable: only respondent B referred to a particular
physical feature (his shiny nose) when identifying Butler.
Figure 3 offers another good example of the way in which the recognition of some visual elements depends on familiarity with the symbolism
used by a particular artist. As Dave Brown explained: the smoking Y-fronts
lying in front of the bath were a sort of visual rendition of the expression
liar, liar, pants on fire and represented a running gag that had started at the
time of the Iraq war and that referred to the fact that Blair had lied over
weapons of mass destruction. The dossier was intended to put out the fire,
so in this cartoon the pants are smoking in a pool of whitewash. Brown
conceded that this particular verbo-visual joke would only work for viewers
who were familiar with his work.
As it turned out, none of the informants had been following Browns
running gag, and none of them were able to even recognize the scorched
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Y-fronts, let alone interpret them in any meaningful way. G thought this item
represented the dress of a soldier, with smoke rising from it after a recent
battle. The four British respondents, who were all familiar with Steve Bells
cartoons in The Guardian, referred to his use of Y-fronts to represent John
Major, but they were unsure as to what the connection between the two
might be. They were also unable to decide whether the pants were meant to
be scorched, or soiled.
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this vector seemed to suggest an action so strongly that they described the
butler figure as walking (C) or running (H) away from the bath, even
though, as Dave Brown pointed out, the butler is not actually depicted as
moving at all; in fact, he is standing still with his back to the bath. Everybody
agreed that the butler had done something to the figure in the bath, although
the exact interpretation of this action and its consequences were dependent
on how participants interpreted the facial expressions of the two figures and
the inscription on the can.
very angry (H), really enraged . . . gnashing his teeth (F). One respondents
reading of the facial expressions seemed to interfere with his overall
interpretation of the cartoon:
Extract 3
Im not entirely sure why hes [Lord Butler] looking so smug, when I
would have thought that it would be Tony Blair who would have the
grin all over his face. If Tony Blair is supposed to be grinning, I dont
recognize it. So it seems to suggest that Blair isnt entirely happy with
being whitewashed in this way by Lord Butler. (B)
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Extract 4
Blair doesnt look terribly happy, and standing by him is what seems
to be a sort of butler figure and he is holding a tin of a [laughs] Nice
n neutral full gloss and then Id obviously start interpreting it. I
would presume that Blair is trying to whitewash himself, so that
perhaps what hes got running down him is actually whitewash and
not water. (A)
This passage illustrates how respondents gradually pieced together all the
verbal and visual evidence in order to create a coherent narrative. One of
the non-native English speakers, for instance, did not get the reference to
whitewashing, and instead came up with the association of the White
House. Although she was still able to come up with some meaning for
the cartoon, she was clearly aware of the fact that she was missing
something:
Extract 5
The White House! So its putting him [Blair] in the White House, or
painting him as if he was the White House, for the relationship . . . He
took us to the war for the false grounds, as it says here, just joining the
White House. Probably this one is completely wrong. (F)
The third and final function of verbal text in Figure 3 is to add further
humorous details. All the native English speakers agreed that the hint of
raspberry was an allusion to blowing a raspberry, thus implying that the
cover-up might not be as complete as intended. For D, this expression
simultaneously recalled the various shades of paint one might find in a DIY
shop, which to her conveyed the image of rather small-minded Englishness.
The description of the paint as Nice n Neutral was interpreted by B as
obviously satirical, implying that Lord Butler was anything but neutral.
These subtleties of linguistic and cultural meaning were apparently not
available to the non-native English speakers participating in the study.
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For another interviewee, the butler figure evoked the idea that Tony Blair
really rather likes to be thought of as a member of the elite and of having a
manservant who attends to him and looks after him (A). Respondent B used
the fact that the butler is dressed far too formally for an ordinary manservant
to conclude that the cartoonist was presenting Lord Butler as a toff, a
member of the establishment. Just pretending to be a butler.
The cartoon thus encouraged viewers to go beyond the simple
concept of whitewashing and to use visual details such as facial expression
and dress to generate a whole set of interesting questions: Who exactly was
responsible for the act of whitewashing? Was the whitewash really a
complete success? What are Tony Blair and Lord Butler like as human beings
and what is their relationship to one another?
Even if the cartoon was interpreted in a way that completely diverged
from the cartoonists intended meaning, it still generated intriguing
metaphorical entailments. Respondent H did not see the two figures as
specific personalities; instead he saw the figure in the bath and the butler as
representing, respectively, the government of an invading country and the
people of the invaded countries. For him, the white substance in the tin
represented the invasion of a foreign country, and the information on the
tin the unreliable information provided by the intelligence services. He
interpreted this as indicating the need to read the small print before
deciding on military intervention, in order to know whether there are any
damaging side-effects.
The responses to Figure 3 show that visual metaphors are often more
specific than words, capturing nuances of meaning that would be hard and
sometimes perhaps even litigious if conveyed through language.
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CONCLUSION
The results of this small pilot study appear to challenge the widespread view
that cartoons are simple and easy to read. My findings suggest that even for
highly educated readers who are relatively well informed about political
events the reading of individual newspaper cartoons poses quite a challenge
and requires a whole range of literacies, including a broad knowledge of
current events, an excellent grasp of idioms and other linguistic phenomena,
a vast repertoire of cultural symbols, a familiarity with cartoon conventions,
and a capacity for lateral thinking. According to some educators, these
features make the political cartoon, used judiciously, a particularly good
vehicle through which to develop an ability to identify bias and formulate
opinions (Kleeman, 2006: 62) and an outstanding device for honing
analytical skills (Dougherty, 2002: 264).
Even the apparently simple process of identifying visual elements and
parsing them according to the ways they refer to the world (Elkins, 2003:
137) is far from straightforward. In this study, the respondents were all well
aware of the main issues surrounding the Butler report and most of the
divergent responses thus cannot be explained as the result of a simple
knowledge deficit. Instead, many of the distinctive interpretations were due
to respondents unique socio-cultural background, as the example of the war
graves in Figure 1, which evoked different responses from the British and
non-British participants, clearly demonstrates.
As Nicholas Garland pointed out, the language of cartooning is not
always self-evident and can be misunderstood by readers who are not used to
this genre. For instance, a familiarity with the convention of sequence and
motion lines was clearly decisive for the understanding of the falling cat in
Figure 2. Similarly, in order for viewers to understand that the caption to
Figure 1 represented the spoken words of the figure in the foreground, they
had to recognize that the quotation marks and open mouth indicated a direct
speech act. The identification of some of the visual elements, such as the Yfronts in Figure 3 or the particular way in which Tony Blair is caricatured by
Garland in Figure 2, were apparently dependent upon a familiarity with the
work of a particular artist. In this respect, an awareness of the visual practices
associated with the cartoon genre and with individual British artists may
allow viewers to move from tacit looking to a more skilled understanding
in Schirato and Webbs sense (2004: 2, 3).
In the cartoon genre, text and images are often so closely related as to
be virtually inseparable. Sometimes words simply anchor visual meaning,
but in many cases they add further information or create a sense of incongruity and irony that could not be conveyed through the image alone. As the
example of the inscription on the tin of paint in Figure 3 shows, many of
these additional meanings may not be available or at least not particularly
salient to non-native speakers.
199
I would like to thank Nicholas Garland, Dave Brown and Steve MacMurty for
permitting the use of their cartoons in this article and for kindly agreeing to
be interviewed by telephone (June and July 2005).
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NOTES
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7.
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10.
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