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Tous Charlie? Pas Tout à Fait


Yesterday morning Charlie Hebdo hit the newstands in France and sold out within minutes. The cover of this “survival issue”—the newspaper’s first since two armed gunmen slaughtered eight of its journalists, killing four others as well at its Paris offices—appeared with the title, “All is pardoned,” and featured a caricature of Muhammed wearing an “I am Charlie” sign. The image, drawn by Renald Luzier (“Luz”), a staff cartoonist who simply happened to be late to work on Thursday, was true to form in its decision to violate Islamic strictures against representing the prophet.

   (Luz at the march in Paris, 10 January 2015)

Their editorial decision to lead with this image also wasn’t particularly hard to predict. That irony, rather than burlesque, was the dominant tone captured by the cover, however, was a less typical Charliesque choice. Within the issue, nonetheless, readers did find the sort of humor they’re accustomed to: one cartoon, for example, depicted two jihadists in heaven asking about their seventy virgins, who were said to be off instead with the team from Charlie.

By chance, my wife and I happened to be passing through Paris in the days just after the attacks. I won’t try to describe what it felt like to be among the million and half marching on the Sunday after the attacks—I simply have no words for it. Erri De Luca’s French translator, Danièle Valin, describes the experience as “hydrographic”: joining a trickle of folks outside your door, then a stream soon becoming a torrent, and finally a great river. She adds that this image is no metaphor, simply the literal and physical experience of belonging.

     (The crowd in a Parisian boulevard, 10 January 2015

In the train on the way to Paris, I was reading Victor S. Navasky’s Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and their Enduring Power (Knopf, 2013). Anyone who wants real insight into the challenge that political caricature poses for advocates of free speech should do the same. Editor, then publisher and editorial director of The Nation for over a quarter-century, Navasky describes himself as a free-speech absolutist, so there’s no doubt about where he stands. Like Luz’s Muhammed, he’d likely have no problem with wearing the Je Suis Charlie sign. Yet his book—written at least in part in response to the 2005 cartoons published in the Danish Jyllands-Posten, and subsequently by other newspapers and magazine, including Charlie Hebdo—also doesn’t shy away from asking whether the power of political caricatures may at times do as much for evil as for good. After all, as he comments in his introduction, “the vicious anti-Semitic caricatures of the Nazi periodical Der Stürmer . . . helped turn a generation of Germans into Jew haters.” Navasky notes as well the afterlife of such depictions in the Arab press, and elsewhere, today. That an accomplice of the Charlie Hebdo murderers staged an assault on a kosher grocery store, killing four others, indeed evokes the Europe of over seventy years ago.

As Navasky notes, there were the twenty-four Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg, but “Julius Streicher, the founder and editor of Der Stürmer, was the only editor” (306). He cites the verdict of the International Commission, which noted that, “In its extent Streicher’s crime is probably greater and more far-reaching than that of any of the other defendants [. . .] The effect of this man’s crime, of the poison he poured into the minds of young boys and girls goes on, for he concentrated upon the youth and childhood of Germany.” Navasky also argues that caricature gains its power through its inseparable combination of ideational content and formal expression, and that it may well capitalize on our hard-wired predisposition for face recognition—that the exaggeration typical of cartoon faces may emphasize the very patterns we use to recognize faces in the first place. Navasky cites approvingly the sixteenth-century Italian artist Annibale Carracci, who wrote that “a good caricature should ‘reveal the very essence of a personality [...] more true to life than reality itself.’” The Nation’s former editor and publisher also observes that, unlike verbal satire, a drawing doesn’t easily lend itself to refutation, or even response—after all, “there is, for all practical purposes, no such thing as a cartoon to the editor.”

In Art of Controversy, the bulk of Navasky’s analysis focuses on the progressive power of political cartoons to influence public perceptions of—and in some cases even humble—the apparently magnificent and mighty. He attributes his own fascination with this topic to an unexpected uprising by his own editorial staff at The Nation against a Kissinger caricature by David Levine. Navasky later calls David Low, the artist who most enfuriated the Führer, as “the cartoonist I most wanted to talk to” and gives ample space as well to commentary on the work of Herbert Block (Herblock), “who gave Senator Joseph McCarthy a bucket of tar with a big brush, and literally gave McCarthyism its name.”

In its discussion of the work of Doug Marlette, however, Navasky’s book ventures onto the ground most fertile for thinking through, and rethinking, the recent horrors in Paris. Marlette, once a cartoonist for the Charlotte Observer, had the distinction of targeting Jesse Helms so frequently that the North Carolina senator began to collect and frame the originals, until eventually one of the caricatures incensed him to the point that he demanded an apology, threatening never to speak to anyone at the Observer again. Marlette also “outraged fundamentalist Christians by skewering TV preacher Jerry Falwell, Roman Catholics by needling the Pope, and Jews by criticizing Israel,” but it was a Newsday cartoon with the caption “What Would Mohammed Drive?” that caused the biggest backlash. This sketch showed a man in a headscarf driving a Ryder truck with an over-sized nuke poking out of it. In his defense of the drawing, Marlette wrote that it was not intended as an assault on the Islamic religion and its founder, but was instead directed at the “distortion of their religion by murderous fanatics and zealots.” Tough to argue with that.

And yet, indirectly at least, Navasky does. Although he has, and should have, more sympathy for Marlette’s civil libertarianism than for some other uses of caricature he describes, Navasky does go on to wonder if the artfulness of such cartooning may in fact be inseparable from propaganda, and if so, whether its use, even in a good cause, can be distinguished from the use made of it by the very worst—and here Navasky reminds us of Hitler’s discussion of the subject in Mein Kampf. Marlette’s readiness to resort to stereotype in making his case provokes Navasky to suggest that progressive uses and social abuses in the art of political satire are formally indistinguishable, and that the only thing that does keep them apart are the battle lines of history, along with the justness of one’s cause.

So what then, other than the side where we’ve staked our tent, ultimately makes the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo formally different from those of Der Stürmer? In essence, nothing. Even if their political content, mutando mutande, tends to be close enough to that of Marlette, their form may yet simply heat the forge of Islamophobia within a West already hot with hatred and violence. In early responses to the killings in Paris, both Teju Cole and Joe Sacco have made related points. Sacco did so in a cartoon of his own, noting that “when we [cartoonists] draw a line, we are often crossing one too, because lines on paper are a weapon, and meant to cut to the bone.” But whose bone?” he asks, “What exactly is the target?”

    (Place de la Nation, 10 January 2015)

Like Sacco, and, I believe, like most of those that marched on Sunday, I dream of a world capable of defending speech even when it offends, one that makes no apologies for brutality and murder, and yet that still believes so-called “political correctness,” though much maligned, may at times and in some cases be both political and correct. As Cole comments, “Moments of grief neither rob us of our complexity nor absolve us of the responsibility of making distinctions.” Had I not left town the day before, like most of Paris, yesterday morning I too would have gotten up early, only then to be disappointed when Charlie Hebdo sold out before I got to the newstand. I do see real heroism in their commitment to keep going, and I certainly value the République française, along with its values, which some see expressed in such journalism. But that still doesn’t make me a subscriber. 

 


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