CARTOON CURE REACHES THE UNTHINKING

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 October 1933, Page 10

CARTOON CURE

REACHES THE UNTHINKING

Humanity, grown up and “educated” but yet childish, still wants its picture Looks. “There are no pictures in it,” says the adult child, tossing aside the printed volume. And it becomes important to provide pictures for the grown-u.p children. Now, putting it in the words of Low —there is only one Low —“The unreasonable people who live by slogan and symbol are still in the majority, and they often upset the apple-cart. Their psychological needs are not to be ignored, and it is important that they should grow suitable association of ideas. Here, in the overthrow of obsolete ideas, caricature would be as useful as it is natural. This is what caricature is fo'r.” The caricaturist knows that the eye is the best route to the average brain, a better route than the ear. Of course, he has no monopoly of that knowledge. It is not new. AVhen the talking pictures were replacing the ’■ gilents, advocates of eye-attack, as against ear-attack, maintained that the additional burden of listening would be too much for the average brain of the average audience, and- that “the unreasonable people” to whom Low refers would much prefer seeing a picture-story with their alert eyes to hearing it with their lazy ears. If that estimate has been confounded by the popular success! of the talking picture, it has to be remembered that the talking picture has not abolished the effortless pleasure of the eye, but has merely reinforced it with words and sounds. If the talking pictures merely talked and were not seen, their popularity might be short. Equally, a book or a paper which is only read, and which has no pictures (or cartoons) to show, is often considered “bard reading” by “the unreasonable people who live by slogan and . symbol.” But ..give the volume a visual appeal, and the attention of grown-up children is at once secured. Mere statistics of the modern output .of camera and cartoon products in the newspaper and magazine world would be sufficient evidence of that. Now, what this ex-New Zealander Low sets out to show is that the cartoon (his branch of picture educating) has as yet only touched the fringe of its potentialities for' use. (And for abuse.)

JUST FIX HIS ROVING EYE!

It has been said that certain successful political pamphleteers in history “caught the ear” of the people. Quite a difficult thing to do, in the case of an unpictured pamphlet. But Low foresees the caricaturist “catching. the eye” in a devastating manner. He who runs may read. But it is far easier for him to see. And the eyeattack can catch him anywhere, at any time, not merely in a reading library. From that one drifts to Russia, childliko if not bland. Re-education of the Russians would seem, theoretically, to bo just the field for teaching! by picture, by cartoon. And Low States in “The Listener” that it is not theory but fact. So common is the cartoon in Russia as to create “a superficial impression that it was a cartoonists’ revolution.” Lenin cartoons, Stalin cartoons, temperance cartoons, public service cartoons ■ they run the whole range from poll- 1

tics to. social service, and from abstract virtues to racial and class hates. The latter including “monsters like Sir Austen Chamberlain and M. Pomcare.” „ But most impressive is “the free use of public ridicule as a. social corrective,” which ”is a feature of presentday Russia.” The Russians “are ceitainly cartoon-minded.” They read “the wall-newspaper” with its many cartoons. Unreasoning people living “by slogan and symbol,” and educable mainly through the eye, may be extra plentiful in Russia, but are they not common everywhere?

Even in a gaol, the prisoners may express themselves through “wallnewspapers” with cartoons. One cartoon pictures the gil l the prisoner will meet when released, or the suit of clothes he will buy. There are even “bitter cartoons about the defects of the gaol shower-bath and the shocking state of the gaol tools'.”

This phase of gaol has been done most brilliantly, in words, by Tolstoy, in “Resurrection.” _ But how many Russians read Tolstoy? Do not far more Russians see .cartoons? There you have the acid test, so far as the “slogan and symbol” population is concerned'.

In journalistic cartoons in Russia, ’ categories flayed include drunks, impulsive officials, bureaucrats, and official red-tapers, opportunists, fanatics, wranglers. These pests have no country, but are of all countries. Perhaps the most interesting of all the Russian uses of the cartoon is that by which the individual is flayed in factory or other human association. “It is -difficult,” writes Low, “for Boris, who turned up tight to work yesterday, or for Olga, who has been loafing on the jo v b lately, to resist the point of large colour cartoons fixed by order of their fellow workers above their machines, representing them respectively as a maudlin sot and a slip-shod slut.” An employer in this country who countenanced factory tactics of that kind would' see stars, but. in Russia, according to Low, officialdom publishes a series of model posters, with blanks for name and. address, suitable to be fastened on to various delinquents or to emphasise various idiosyncrasies. The Soviet thus facilitates the-- cartooning of everybody—except itself. Low writes: — “The regime, recognising the inestimable value of this medium of public opinion (except, of course, so far as itself is the object of adverse attention), encourages and assists it by issuing ready-made posters, of, say, the Camel or the Tortoise, commonly accepted symbols in Russia, of stupidity and' sloth, with convenient blank space for filling in name or names, to be publicly presented with loud jeers to deserving persons or departments. Other fosters of the like kind apply to drunkenness, carelessness, speculation, or loose morals. Their presentation is an unenviable distinction.”

••• ' VANISHED VALENTINES, ’ | It is like a harking hack to the days l of the “valentine,” when in New Zealand you could buy an apropriate cartoon (not then called such) to send to'

the man who is slow to propose, to the bibulous man, to the sporty girl, also tho naughty girl, and to hundreds of other suburban or village types. Why did the valentine d'ie? If the pen is mightier than the sword, is the brush mightier than the

pen? Among the unreasoning people, Low would answer yes. And these are the people who need to be got at—the people who don’t read Tolstoy, and who certainly do not read Keynes, Cole, and the economists.

‘AVhy must propaganda for progressive causes always be so dull?” asks Low. /‘Why do the messengers cf wisdom about finance, economics, sex, education, disarmament, and the cc-cperative conduct of mankind think it necessary to appeal only to reasonable people?” Ho quotes Stephen Leacock (an ccchcmist and a humorist, with occasional doubts about the former) as saying: “Irreverence, reverently used, is a valuable instrument in the progress' of humanity.” Low says that the unshackled paci-fist-cartoonist, eager to kill war, would never present Mars with armour and sword, but as a stupid boob so often that war would seem to be weakness, not strength. And then man would dare to be wise.