Oldal 88 [88]
OCR
86 Alexander Kozintsev British anti-Nazi invective is best exemplified by some of David Lows cartoons, one of which, also sarcastic, is shown in Figure 32. ‘The essence of invective remains the same regardless of the artistic means, as illustrated by an unusual example of Soviet anti-Nazi propaganda—an oil painting by Kukryniksy showing the last days of the Third Reich leaders (Fig. 33). As long as pure invective is involved, the difference in impact between artistic means is one of quantity, not of quality: unlike a cartoon or a poster, a painting does not belong to the mass media. Another difference, also trivial, is that a painting is somewhat less related to verbal discourse: it can have only a title but no caption (some cartoons, however, have neither captions nor titles). A far more important distinction, which I will discuss later, is that an oil painting is usually serious whereas a cartoon is satiric: it includes humorous elements in both form and/or content. Humour The principal logical difference between humour, on the one hand, and invective, lie, irony, and sarcasm, on the other, is that humour encroaches not on the modus but on the reference and dictum, automatically rendering the modus irrelevant (Kozintsev 2010: 147). The problem is not objective but subjective: it lies not in the amount of fantasy and distortion but in our attitude to the message. However grotesquely the targets of invective and their behaviour may be rendered by the artists, we accept or reject the message in earnest; we agree or disagree with it (see Figs 30-33). By virtue of the “willing suspension of disbelief” we refer such a message to one of the possible worlds—the metaphoric world of hyper-reality, which may affect us even more strongly than reality itself. We refuse to take the humorous message in earnest not because its referents are represented less realistically (in fact, the opposite may seem to be the case), but because the reference is fictitious and so is the entire message. Acceptance or rejection of a humorous message is not the same as the acceptance or rejection of an invective message. In the case of invective, we deal with a bona fide accusation even though its modus (for instance, the truth parameter) may be non-bona fide, as with the lie, irony, and sarcasm. The stronger and the more cruel the enemy is, the worse. In the case of humour, we deal with a pseudo accusation, whose principal aim is to amuse. The weaker the enemy is and the more stupidly they behave, the better. In essence, humorous accusation is largely playful and thus not an accusation at all. The meta-message of humour, which is absent in pure invective, cancels the message by saying, “This is play” (Bateson 1972: 181-198). The world to which such a quasi-message refers is an impossible world despite the outward realism with which it may be rendered. Even when humorous characters resemble actual people, they are but clowns, whose behaviour should not be taken seriously. Therefore we accept or reject the humorous quasi-message not at its own level, as in invective, but at the meta-level. The notion of modus including the truth parameter, belief or disbelief, agreement or disagreement is irrelevant in humour. We
