The Political Cartoon. By Charles Press. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1981. 395 pp.

The Political Cartoon is interesting, not for its critical commentary, but for its two and a half hundred reproductions of famous and not-so-famous works spanning more than two and a half hundred years. The book is a "general" one, and people will look at the pictures because "it is enjoyable to stick pins into fools and villains or to watch others doing it"—one of the main purposes, according to Professor Press, for the political cartoon. And the author’s own light-hearted style provides entertaining reading. However, Press also aims to impart "important data for the students of politics" since the cartoonist helps link the public and its politicians; but the student of literature will find the critical analysis hurried and thin.

Chapter One, as might be expected, seeks to define "political cartoon" a task apparently equal to that of defining "humor," or "wit." Press begins by relying on cartoonist Alan Dunn who divides cartooning into comic art (to amuse), social cartoons (to make life bearable), and political cartoons (to influence governmental action). As Press points out, these distinctions rely on the "artist’s purpose rather than on his or her subject." The artist’s purpose, like authorial intention, is a slippery concept to discover and classify. Press might have succeeded better than he does had he brought to bear better critical and analytical skills. He does elaborate on Dunn’s system, explaining that the political cartoon—however humorous, entertaining, and filled with social commentary—will also be overly partisan, perhaps even acerbic, needing "to have an implicit appeal to do something political." But he is better at saying what the political cartoon is not than in saying what it is: it "does not have [to refer] . . . to specific political events of the day" although it often does. Coincidentally, most great political cartoonists—however vaguely defined seem "forcibly [to] reject the social, political, and economic system" in which they live.

Press also identifies the characteristics of "good" political cartoons primarily by negative examples of them. "Good" cartooning is not distinguished by formulas, clichés and triteness of drawing; yet good artistry is not its main requirement and can in fact obscure the idea. Likewise cartoons which have phony messages, false political morality, or empty emotion cannot rise to the height of "good" political cartoons. The imagery must be striking, forceful, or amusing, not hackneyed. Images and titles must not be too complex, elaborate, obscure, or exaggerated. Finally, and perhaps most concrete, Press says that a great cartoon must be able to make a statement which will have lasting impli-

cations—what is often called universality. Herblock is a positive example, but Press fails to analyze his strengths.

In the last two pages of this first chapter, Professor Press tells the reader "what’s available" to be studied: The British Library, New York Historical Society collections, newspaper and magazine files. He explains—albeit humorously—how difficult it is to find cooperative librarians, get good Xeroxes, and keep your mind on the task at hand when paging the original publications. He concludes, then, that "the best solution is to find cartoons in book collections" which may be arranged in a variety of ways—by artist, period, genre, subject, theme, awards, etc. Admitting that such collections are "uneven," the author nevertheless apparently relies almost exclusively on such collections of cartoons and on the works of other commentators, the bulk of them from the 1960s and l970s.

The major dissatisfaction which the student of literary humor will find with The Political Cartoon, then, is that its criticism, while witty in itself, seems inadequately grounded on either broad or detailed scholarly inquiry. The author bases his judgments on a statistical sample, selected primarily by a principle of availability: what he could readily find reproduced between book covers. The natural habitat of the political cartoon is newspapers and magazines which link the public with its politicians and seek to influence government action. Although Press doesn’t really say that he uses almost nothing but what he found in books, his footnotes betray this fact.

The second chapter "Technology and the Political Cartoon" is probably the best in the book. Here the reliance on previously published histories, including articles by Press himself, is entirely appropriate, for his task is not to unearth the developments in pictorial printing history, but rather to bring together information already available but uncollected and show how it bears specifically on a single type of art work. Technological improvements over about three and a half centuries include woodcuts, etchings, drypoint engraving, lithography, and other methods. Press shows how the printing method affected the maximum (or for that matter minimum) number of copies made available to the public, determined the quality of the reproduction, sharpened or blunted the lines and changed the background shading of the original drawing. He explains how the publisher had the work done when craftsmen transferred the drawing to the print medium, and how photoengraving, which is cheap, quick, and accurate, made possible the hosts of "local" cartoonists who could start on their hometown papers. This chapter is effective, not only because the subject matter is concrete, fascinating, and well presented, but also (judging by its notes) based on

original research by the author. He convinces the reader he knows what he is talking about.

The chapters particularly interesting to students of American humor are ten, eleven, and twelve—on American cartooning. After tracing in Chapter Eight the development of cartoon symbols like Uncle Sam, the GOP elephant, and the eagle, Press gives examples of these, discussing the use which individual artists make of such symbols in editorial cartoons in the twentieth century. Literary scholars (and art critics) are accustomed to more analysis—identifying allusions in the drawings and comparative comments about different artists’ "treatment" of the subject to clarify the meaning and enrich the understanding of the message and the wit. Press’s enthusiasm for the work of Frederick Burr Opper (fl. 1900–1905), whom he calls "the greatest humorist of American editorial cartoons" before Herblock, almost turns into analysis: "His work immediately attracts the eye. His outrageous drawings prepare you to laugh before you know what they are all about. . . . He favored the sly dig over the stinging lash. . . . His technique and caricatures are masterful." This artist whom he calls "the most neglected of the really great American political cartoonists . . . the first really urban cartoonist . . . [whose] art should be republished . . . [and who] deserves a full scale biography" receives five effusive paragraphs and four reproductions, but Press apparently assumes that his reader will know Willie, His Poppa, Nurse Hanna, Poppa Trust, and the allusions to political corruptions in the trusts of the 1890s. For a so-thoroughly neglected cartoonist, this generation could use more information.

The book’s scope is too wide; the example of Opper and the curtailed treatment of his works is one price. The last chapter, "Other Democracies and Their Cartoons," is another; it is neither the last word on the subject nor useful in placing American cartoons in perspective. The impression it leaves is that the author had randomly happened upon several miscellaneous, appealing drawings, two dozen of which he reproduced to "represent" the last hundred years. In thirty pages (including the illustrations) he covers Britain (18 pages), Canada (6 pages), France (7 newspaper-length paragraphs), and the Rest of Europe (4 paragraphs). The necessary result is superficiality of analysis—perhaps obscured for the casual reader by a lengthy bibliography of secondary sources and copious footnotes representing scant original research. Press’s casual scholarship allows him to explain at one point: "I have seen references to William Ireland collections but have neither seen one nor seen a complete citation," though he seems confident in declaring that "Ireland of the Columbus Dispatch [was] to some degree influenced by McCutcheon." Which Columbus or what sort of influence

is not known. The footnote is pointless and frustrating. The index is equally frustrating. It includes only proper names, apparently only cartoonists (for Hearst, who sponsored several of them, is not included), and it omits cartoon captions (indexing only the text). There is no list of illustrations—a small failing were the discussion strictly chronological, but Herblock’s pictures, for example, are scattered from page 20 to page 308. And the index does not list page 308 since "Herblock" appears only in the caption, not in the text on that page. And if the reader forgets the artist’s name, the index cannot help him locate the desired cartoon. The captions under each picture usually cite the artist, the title, the year, and sometimes the publication, but specific daily publication information is often omitted. In short, the "bibliographic" information is sketchy, inconsistent, and difficult to use. To locate an original publication of many of the pictures would be impossible from Press’s documentation; and nowhere does he acknowledge libraries or collections which he used (although he apparently used the Lily Collection at Indiana University).

The book is handsome and makes an interesting coffee-table piece. It is pleasant to read and filled with information, but serious scholarship it is not. I might order the book for the library or my coffee-table, but I wouldn’t run out and buy one for my study.

Discovering the Comic. By George McFadden. Princeton University Press, 1982. 252 pp.

George McFadden’s Discovering the Comic is a book that defends a particular theory of comedy: "The essence of the comic . . . is founded in a being that shows the power of continuing itself, substantially unchanged, while overcoming a force or forces that would substantially alter it" (p. 12). McFadden defends his thesis in three ways: first, by dividing the critical history of comedy in western civilization into three periods, the pre-classic, the classic, and the romantic; second, by tracing the development of romantic theorists of the comic from Schiller, Kierkegaard, Bergson, Freud, Mauron, Frye, Nietzsche to Barthes; and third, by using the central theory of the book to interpret several works, some not ordinarily considered comic. Among the works explicated in detail are two of special interest to students of American literature—Barthelme’s Snow White and Henry James’ The Pupil.

McFadden sees romantic criticism of the comic as a process; hence, he evaluates each of his predecessors carefully and in language that is ordinarily quite clear. Each critic is scrutinized according to the contribution made to this process and to the deviation from it. To McFadden, Schiller is the seminal romantic critic because he defined comedy in a way that clearly differed from Aristotle’s notion of the ridiculous. Schiller defined the genres of elegy as directed towards the past and satire as directed towards the future. Satire is of two types, the sublime, which is tragic, and the mocking, which is comic. In comedy, human freedom surpasses and never capitulates to outside forces, such as the community, tradition, fate.

Kierkegaard advanced comic theory by showing that the comic transcended the ironic; irony always moves towards an ideal, but the comic character asserts himself as the ideal. Bergson distinguished comedy from art because comedy is at the surface of things and in the service of society; art was at the explosive core of individual freedom. Five years later Freud countered, saying that comedy was art because it had a special place within this explosive core.

McFadden is clear that Freud’s major contribution to and influence upon succeeding theorists of art is his notion that art repudiates reality; that is, art acts to avoid the compulsion to suffer so that adults, the artist, and his audience can be at play like children. It is but a short step to black humor, the repudiation of reality at the cost of accepting chaos. For McFadden, black, absurd, and sick comedy aim at a "joy that revels in the destruction of a society of Philistine automata." The greater joy is in the destruction "of the noble and good rather than ugly" parts of

society.

Moving beyond the destruction of a society, McFadden sees Barthes as seeking to dissolve the means by which society is held together, that is, language. Barthes wishes to free the writer from the bourgeois use of language as a means of communicating concepts. The novel for Barthes is a product of the bourgeois and so it needs to be replaced. In forsaking the novel, Barthes also forsakes character, which he believes is devoid of power because of its over-use as a literary device. Barthes advocates minimalist techniques in art so that language can be open to the maximum number of meanings; language must be made to approximate not communication, but noise.

McFadden ends his book with extended interpretations of works by two American authors, Donald Barthelme and Henry James. In these interpretations McFadden uses Barthes’ insistence on multiple meanings of a text to save character from annihilation. If McFadden’s interpretations are as valid as the other multiple meanings, then his thesis about the comic character is saved.

The comic elements in Barthelme’s Snow White, says McFadden, are sound (alliterative passages), schemata (the ambiguous play on the number of dwarfs being seven), and meaning. After brief attention to the first two elements, McFadden elaborates on the multiple meanings of the work. The wicked witch, the poison apple, the seven dwarfs, and the prince charming from the fairy tale of the brothers Grimm are in some sense within Barthelme’s story. However, each element of the original tale has been changed almost beyond recognition, but the reasons for the changes are not clear. In other words, the changes do not produce a clear literal or allegorical meaning. To unravel or rather approach the text, the critic must devise never-ending multiple interpretations, even contradictory ones.

McFadden’s interpretation of James’ The Pupil can lead to an even more intricate view of comic art. James’ story is narrated by Pemberton, the tutor of Morgan Moreen. Pemberton sees the child as the victim of his family, the members of which are "vulgar, snobbish gypsies." Pemberton sees his task as teaching the sickly child how to play. In the end the child dies, released finally from the influence of his family. Typically the story is seen as a tragedy; at least Pemberton sees it that way, but McFadden interprets the story, with justification, as a comedy.

McFadden cites James’ own dissatisfaction with critics who fail to see in his works the "figure in the carpet." According to McFadden, Pemberton is an unreliable narrator. Morgan has played with him all the while, but Pemberton never sees himself manipulated. Morgan’s child’s sense of game is beyond the adult sophistication of Pemberton. So while

Pemberton views Morgan’s death as tragic unfulfillment, McFadden sees Morgan’s death as comic, because the character never compromised his freedom, neither to his tutor, his family, nor to his own adulthood.

McFadden does not pursue the matter of James’ sense of game, but if McFadden is correct in claiming that James wrote his story with such an interpretation in mind, why then did James keep the interpretation private? James could have, in the fashion of Aesop, written his story and afterwards told his readers and his critics its meaning. If James found it frustrating that his story was not interpreted correctly, perhaps James’ literary comedy is a riddle posed by the author to his audience. The game of literary comedy becomes two-fold: there is Morgan’s game in the story, and there is James’ game with his critics. After Barthes there is a third game in which critics offer readers multiple interpretations.

McFadden’s book is an attempt at discovering the comic. McFadden is clear and thorough and critical when he outlines the thought of the romantic thinkers to whom he is most indebted. The book explores the relationship of comedy to art, laughter, black humor, the subconscious, the physical. The book is also a compendium of useful and sometimes unusual distinctions, between popular and literary art, classicism and romanticism, the ridiculous and the paradoxical; comedy is distinguished from melodrama, farce, humor, the detestable.

McFadden limits his consideration of the comic to western civilization, from the pre-Socratics to current times. Notwithstanding McFadden’s insistence that he is defending a theory of comedy, the book is most valuable for its analysis of romantic theories of the comic. He does not consider, for example, some rather large parts of literary history, Roman comedy (including perhaps Senecan "tragedy"), medieval satire and drama, and the humanistic developments of tragicomedy and opera. The great value of McFadden’s book is that it makes important connections between the thoughts of various romantic theorists.

The book itself is of high quality, nicely bound, and carefully printed. I noted only one typographical error. In addition, the "Index of Names and Titles" is quite incomplete; many names important to the text are not listed. The bibliography frequently does not list original publication dates of historically important books, books which are also important to the author’s thesis.

(This is a blank page in the original number, ed.)

Melville’s Humor: A Critical Study. By Jane Mushabac. Hamden,

Connecticut: Anchon Books (Shoestring Press), 1981. 199 pp.

A significant part of Melville’s reputation in his own time was based on his skill as a humorist, but modern critics have tended to downplay or ignore the importance of Melville’s comic sense. In Melville’s Humor, Jane Mushabac supports Edward Rosenberry, who has argued that comedy was Melville’s "true milieu," and extends that position by claiming that humor was at the center of Melville’s vision.

Mushabac believes the reluctance to approach Melville’s comedy results from the modern critical fear of the "contagion of sentimentality." Humor, she writes, is subtly tied to sentimentality in that it "plays off’ and "moves through" sentiment to achieve its effects: "Affectionately and systematically, humor denies the reader all his fatuous best hopes until he has nothing left but the humor itself to hang on to" (p. 4).

Her book opens by delineating a European tradition of prose humor that she sees as distinctly male and rebellious, "subjective quirky monologues" which Mushabac claims provided Melville with an aesthetic and a repertoire of narrative forms. She includes Cyrano de Bergerac, Pierre Bayle, the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes, Ben Jonson, Robert Burton, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Thomas De Quincey, and Charles Lamb, arguing that these authors challenged Medieval and early Renaissance forms that presented fixed visions of certainty and authority—scholastic discourse, sermons, and chronicles. In effect, these authors focused on man’s ability to explore the universe rather than his relationship to God. They created a new male image, with narratives that encompassed "braggadocio and defeat," "grand pointless quests," and a verbal energy that "undoes itself with measured illogic, folly, and ultimate wisdom" (p. 2). In short, they "celebrated a new man . . . as well as continually undercutting his glory" (p. 2).

Many critics have focused on such doubleness in Melville’s writing, but Mushbac maintains that humor provided Melville with the only means for "hugging" the contraries of existence. This linguistic embrace shielded Melville from the "universal thump" of nothingness while denying the empty promise of the New Adam. She alters the traditional portrait of Melville as a man torn between religious belief and skepticism—an idea fostered by Hawthorne—to that of a man divided between earthly optimism in the New Adam and a skeptical disbelief in man’s perfectibility. Such a perspective necessarily results in a reevaluation of Melville’s work.

Typee, for example, becomes an initial example of Melville’s under-

cutting the patterns of thought that compose man’s illusion of rationality. In the end, this "love story between the alien and the alienated" (p. 48) makes fun of man’s pretensions to logic and order" (p. 45). Mardi is praised for Babbalanja, a Burtonesque, affectionate skeptic Mushabac sees as Ishmael’s predecessor. Moby-Dick is seen as a triumph of Melville’s "hugging," a book in which he squeezes together the opposites of love and fear, the idealized New Man and the "universal thump." For Mushabac, its center is humor although it concludes with "tragic relief" (p. 85).

Mushabac treats The Confidence-Man and Israel Potter as a diptych that represents two extremes of Melville’s comic method. The novels are "both about faith in an ideal: one book is about what kind of sensation it is to have faith, and the other about what kind it is to have none" (p. 122). Artificiality becomes man’s refuge against the absence of logic and order, so Melville’s characters engage in an existential effort to create meaning in the face of meaninglessness: "all are confidence men [in order] to assert ourselves above the blandness of existence, a certain absurdity upon which we valiantly if pathetically seek to impose a sense of ourselves" (p. 141).

Although Omoo is often praised for its humor, Mushabac dismisses it because she feels Melville was too determined to be funny and employed a Danaesque narrator who is a "normal sort of man," without a comic imbalance of humors. Less surprisingly, she faults the seriousness of Billy Budd: "Without humor, Melville veers off into unconvincing beatitudes" (p. 156).

Mushabac’s lively book is broader than its title suggests. It leads us to reconsider the background against which the American novel has developed and the function of humor in our society: "Democracy is only a place where man’s generous notions grow to abundance side by side with the absurd" (p. 160). It portrays Melville as a author using laughter to confront the human condition, to "meet halfway the continual ambiguity and difficulty of existence" (p. 161).

Mark Twain and "Life on the Mississippi." By Horst H. Kruse. Foreword by Everett Emerson. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press. 1981. xiii, 183 pp.

Life on the Mississippi unites autobiography and biography, reportage and history, yarns and manuscript fragments, borrowings from travel memoirs and reconstructions of Indian lore. Even with this eclectic array of materials, it usually stands as Mark Twain’s second-best work. Its critics, however, assert that pressure from an imminent contract deadline and the exhaustion of suitable personal materials impelled Mark Twain to pad the manuscript with literary leftovers and stolen goods.

In Mark Twain and "Life on the Mississippi" Horst H. Kruse refutes these charges. This excellent genetic study demonstrates that such attacks frequently derive from untenable assumptions regarding Mark Twain’s intentions. Rather than seeking to extend the autobiographical materials of "Old Times on the Mississippi," Mark Twain wished to make a "standard work," which would be essentially documentary in character and contain a broad range of social and historical concerns. Having germinated as early as 1866, this plan required that Mark Twain return to the Mississippi River to gather materials. After finally making the trip in April, 1882, Mark Twain employed the journey of a first person narrator traveling the river as a framework for presenting the standard work. Kruse meticulously documents the evolution of the manuscript. Exhaustively researched and eminently readable, Kruse’s book establishes sources and chronology of composition, evaluating and synthesizing a profusion of materials—manuscripts, letters, notebooks, revisions, excisions. Kruse is ever alert to Mark Twain’s many modifications. Not only was the narrative framework loose enough to contain good stories and tales from many lands, but the device of the traveling narrator also allowed Mark Twain to emerge as social critic and champion of moral and technological progress. Since major modifications in the plan for the standard work were made before the author had to worry about his deadline, Kruse convincingly argues that the undoubtedly uneven quality of Life on the Mississippi results from the "broken continuity" of the creative process. Mark Twain wrote a number of chapters out of sequence, mailing completed batches to his publisher, James R. Osgood. By November, 1881, Mark Twain was distracted by a welter of social and business affairs, while simultaneously trying to complete composition, on the one hand, and to respond effectively to Osgood’s suggested revisions, on the other.

The bulk of Kruse’s endeavor elucidates the tangled process of com-

position as Mark Twain worked in Hartford and Elmira between May, 1882, and January, 1883, and struggled to integrate disparate materials into the standard work. One of Mark Twain’s initial difficulties, for example, was to establish a narrative voice suitable for his documentary intentions. Initially Mark Twain planned to employ a youthful, naive, fictionalized persona as he interacts with traveling companions and reacts to the world —the very kind of narrator so successfully developed in The Innocents Aboard and Roughing It. By June, 1882, Mark Twain displaced the naive voice, abandoned the device of the traveling companions, and merged the perceptions of author and narrator. Mark Twain thus established an authoritative voice that shifted the focus away from the personal story of the apparently uninitiated tourist to the consciousness of pilot-turned-author, the only man alive capable of explaining the life of the river and its grandeur.

In weighing nuances of intention and achievement, Kruse provides a credible—if not compelling—reconstruction of Mark Twain’s labors to build his book. Kruse accounts for the complex presence of a number of problematic issues: Mark Twain’s struggles to incorporate the Karl Ritter materials (usually identified as "A Dying Man’s Confession") and "The Professor’s Yarn"; the apparently extraneous materials on inhumation; the incorporation of the raftsmen episode from Chapter 16 of the Huckleberry Finn manuscript; the extended attack on Sir Walter Scott, southern backwardness, and phony architecture; the use of such travel books as Charles Dickens’s American Notes and Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans; the relationship between Mark Twain, the origin of this nom de plume, and Captain Isaiah Sellers. Kruse corrects the dating of Mark Twain’s letter to William Dean Howells, which is usually cited as evidence of the author’s desperate recourse to borrowing and theft. The letter was written on 3 October 1882 rather than 30 October 1882, a correction which supports Kruse’s thesis that the use of travel books was part of Mark Twain’s enduring plan for the standard work.

Kruse’s many discoveries illuminate not only the specialized genetic concerns of Life on the Mississippi, but also this work’s position in Mark Twain’s evolving canon. The standard work encompasses both a continuation of and deviation from methods employed in The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It and A Tramp Abroad. It also offers intimations (via Mark Twain’s latent ambiguity concerning his high touting of moral and technological progress) of the bleak thematic preoccupations of his later works. Mark Twain’s reservations about nineteenth-century progress emerged almost immediately in the soon-to-be-written later chapters of Huckleberry Finn and provided a focus five years later for A

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Life on the Mississippi, then, links early and later works, constituting an amalgam of those literary forms that constitute Mark Twain’s oeuvre: travelogue, fiction, biography, history, journalism, autobiography, letters.

But Kruse’s major strength—the meticulous demonstration of the emergence of the standard work—creates an understanding form of self-restrictive analysis in one major instance. As I see it, the finished product reveals two major principles of appropriating materials: the standard work (Chapters 1–3, 22–52, 56–60) and the autobiographical concerns (Chapters 4–21, 53–56, "Old Times on the Mississippi" and Mark Twain’s visit to Hannibal, respectively). While approving the inclusion of "Old Times," Kruse criticizes the presence of the Hannibal chapters as a violation of Mark Twain’s informing plan. Kruse claims that he finally ran out of appropriate material and surrendered to sentimentality. However brilliant or moving, these chapters manifest glaring deviations. What is beyond Kruse’s stated purpose—and what is now needed—is a careful exploration of the place of the autobiographical materials within the larger framework of the standard work. One is troubled by the necessity to lament the presence of some of the book’s most powerful materials. It could be argued, for example, that the Hannibal episodes do belong and, in fact, provide an appropriate conclusion to the work. Mark Twain’s return to his boyhood home completed the journey that had initiated the cub pilot into the river’s life—a process that had helped to create the very body of experience which eventually allowed the pilot-turned-author to construct author-itatively a standard work. The relationships between past and present are major concerns of Life on the Mississippi. Mark Twain’s meditations on morality and lost youth, therefore, may seem to parallel the diminution of steamboating. Technological progress and the very passage of time, Mark Twain noted, had somewhat tamed the river: snags were yanked out like teeth; electric lights illuminated the darkest passages. The author’s lost friends and departed youth stand, therefore, as symbolic counterparts to the river’s lost mythic dimension and the death of steamboating’s golden age. It must be added, though, that such matters of interpretation transcend the circumscribed factual character of Kruse’s genetic study.

With these minor objections stated, one must celebrate Horst H. Kruse’s Mark Twain and "Life on the Mississippi" as model of scholarly method. Copious endnotes, a helpful appendix, and a carefully selected bibliography complement the on-going discourse. Professor Kruse’s book, it should also be noted, is a revised and expanded version of a work published in German in 1970. Largely through the efforts of

Everett Emerson, who contributes a foreword, Kruse was encouraged to revise and expand the English version that was among the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley. Kruse’s prodigious achievement will spawn critical reevaluation of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and provide reliable documentation for future biographical enterprises.