Pictorial images as narratives: Rhetorical activation in Campaign 88 political cartoons

This study closely examines the features of political cartoons, testing whether cartoons exhibit the form and function of narratives, an assumption that has been advanced but not demonstrated in previous research. By focusing on cartoons about a specific event, the 1988 Presidential campaign, two questions are raised. How may cartoons be considered as narratives? What stories do they tell about the 1988 Presidential campaign? These two questions are intertwined. Seeing political cartoons as narratives is initially problematic, because narratives possess a temporal aspect. Conventionally, political cartoons are not presented in sequential patterns. This study argues that cartoons are capable of movement and effect a sequencing, particularly when they employ visual metaphors. Because metaphors involve a step-by-step cognitive transformation of something or someone from an initial state to a second state, they create sequence and activate audience response through the use of culturally shared referents. Drawing upon a collection of 2752 cartoons, this study examines them for displays of the basic elements of narrative: character, setting, narrator, and plot. Political cartoons are found to exhibit these elements collectively, in various configurations. Cartoons operate rhetorically by creating persuasive definitions, constructions that function as terministic screens, defining campaign events and personalities. These cartoons create terministic screens in three basic ways: (1) by making characterizations, (2) by casting characters into situations, and (3) by narrating or verbally describing situations. Visual metaphors, motifs, and references to campaign actualities are the inventional tools of the cartoonist, and contribute to the elements of narrative. Political cartoons are found to reflect the elements of narrative--character, setting, narrator, and plot--and to offer historicizing narratives about the 1988 Presidential campaign. The significance of seeing political cartoons as narratives is to be found in their realization as collective experience and in their moralizing function. Although the usual function of a cartoon is subversive, this discrediting function is reflected against its opposite, the expression of an ideal. As satire, as comic correctives, and as narratives, cartoons implicitly-propose ideal modes of conduct by providing commentaries on the absence of the ideal