Cartoons and History

I am in agreement with Professor Staley’s modest assertions that historians need to acknowledge the limitations of written prose while also exploring the multidimensionality of computer-based visualizations of the past. In my view, the scholarly debate that stems from new approaches and methodologies can only serve to advance the thought and production of history. In this light, various aspects of Staley’s book elicited a number of questions in my mind. The questions I had were primarily related to Staley’s analysis of historians’ use of prose. On page 19, Staley suggests that historians assume words to be the highest level of thought due to an uncritical acceptance of Greek tradition. Accordingly, I wondered: What is Staley’s perception of why history is written? Why did Herodotus and Thucydides write history? What purpose did history serve for Herodotus and Thucydides and how is that different from what historians do today? Interestingly, on page 178, Scott McCloud asks a very similar question about the creation of art: “Does this artist want to say something about life through his art or does he want to say something about art itself?” So, if we understand historians to be practitioners of an art, and if we also understand, as Staley notes, “there is no Platonic medium that exactly and perfectly represents thought,” then in terms of searching for truth and expressing meaning, the value offered by mathematic precision seems at least as limiting as the syntactical confines of cause and effect relationships. In their pursuit of meaning, Staley makes plain that both writers and mathematicians use abstractions. But again McCloud notes: “When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential meaning, an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.” On page 30, McCloud calls this “amplification through simplification.” I am not certain how much of the past is truly recoverable. So perhaps amplification through simplification has as much methodological applicability for cartoonists as historians. I find that prospect more than a little unsettling!