2It seems obvious that a moderately cultivated European public would in its majority have recognized the hypopictorial source (see Figure 1), a major work in European culture, but it may be doubted whether all of the newspaper’s readers, during those highly emotional days, possessed the cultural knowledge that allows us to read the two productions in parallel and at a double level, the 2001 editorial cartoon in reference to the work dating from 1893. Those who had no idea of this underlying protocol must have found the meaning much more limited, and possibly cryptic. The analysis here concerned will adopt the point of view of a reader who knew enough to be aware of the rather complex intertextual derivation, and was thus capable of understanding it for what it was meant to be.

4The document extracted from the Daily Express is what is called an editorial cartoon. In the language of journalism the term ‘editorial’ denotes a communication from the board of editors, reflecting the opinion of the newspaper as a whole. The Anglo-Saxon practice is to leave editorials unsigned, thus making it clear that they voice the collective point of view of the publication or institution concerned. Conversely, editorial cartoons are always signed—here, Paul Thomas—; yet this does not mean they represent a personal point of view. The editorial cartoon is in fact the equivalent of an extended opinion column. It stands for, and translates into visual terms the parallel commentary to be found in the newspaper’s other texts. In the present case it is the exact counterpart of the articles framing it on this front page, all of which obviously utter the same protest. It is a text in disguise, a text condensed into one image, whose sense is supposed to be summarised in a few words: here a special metatextual caption, ‘The Scream, after Munch’; the other possibilities being a quotation passing as motto, or more frequently a short dialogue or pronouncement by the ‘characters’ in the cartoon, with a pun or a witticism based on a metaphorical formulation. An editorial cartoon could be called imaged discourse, suggesting an instantaneous demonstration or thesis. It is literally an image with an idea. It only counts as commentary and opinion. Consequently, its validity as a whole is not pictorial but textual: a nearly wordless text composed of an image accompanied by a haiku-like formulation confining the former to an imperative interpretation, tragedy being the reference here.

5Another important point to be remembered is the fact that such cartoons appear on a daily basis, which causes them to be just as constrained as any other topical news story: constrained by repetition (the formulaic side of it), by time (immediacy and lack of perspective), by the relative paucity of available information, by the institution itself and its political and ideological orientation, and perhaps most importantly, concerning the survival of the publication, by the very strong, if indirect, pressure exerted by the readers on a product which must sell.

7A comparison between the two documents shows that they work very differently on us. Seen from the point of view of the hypertextual derivation—should we say appropriation?—Thomas’s version selects the structuring forms whose visual lineaments are immediately recognized: the standing figure (only its shoulders), the staring face with enhanced eyes and mouth, the hands clamped on the ears, the road and handrail, the at once stagnant and whirling waters and heavens. It is essential, for the allusion to be immediately understood by the reader, that there should be no change at that level, and that the drawing should be explicitly found to pastiche the model by way of simplification along with intensification, all in accordance with selective techniques inherently belonging to caricature. One also remarks the foregrounded title in reversed capitals (white on grey) fitting the tabloids’ stylistic strategy of visual emphasis in case the readers might not notice.

8A second point concerns the saturation of a drawing in which all aspects are made to incarnate the lived event, thus placing the resulting composition at a semantic confluence between the hypotext and the news itself. None of the details in the cartoon can be said to be useless. The burning heavens (a sunset, said the painter) have become the national flag blown by a wind coming from the left (the positive movement in our left to right type of reading). The diagram of meandering waters subsists, but the dark bluish colouring is expanded into the smoke rising over what one surmises is Manhattan, a dark shape against which the head is made to stand out as in the painting. The more secondary presence of background pedestrians on the side of the road or bridge has been eliminated since the focus is now the missing towers. The spectator stands level with and closer to the head and the back-drop than in the picture and its overhead point of view, a more mimetic rendering thus replacing the potentially allegorical staging. The crown on the head is the key factor in the extraction of a central thesis repeated, in their own fragmentary way, by the various visual details, hence the saturation effect, each element betokening a nation in the grip of terror and chaos. The focussed orientation fosters a feeling of evidence beyond which there is nothing to say. In opposition to such explicitness, the gaps or empty places in the painting—the blurring of the face, and more particularly of its eyes—assume a disturbingly paraleiptic dimension.

10Consequently, if both documents seem to retain the same dialectical exchange between text and representation, the economy of the exchange and its bearings are inverted. Munch makes us go from image to text, and back to the image, the cartoon imposes the opposite movement. In the case of the painting the face along with the colours draw our attention before we move on to the title in search of an explanation. In the cartoon, on the contrary, we are first confronted with the emphatic title whose pivotal reversed characters impose it as the message. We pass from title to head (in a series of to and fro motions), moving next to the background signs of the catastrophe, which now seem to have become predominant. In the painting, the title supports and partly explains the image which remains our focal centre of interest: we go back to it and try to assess it in terms of the suggested interpretation. In the cartoon, the picture illustrates, expands on the title, and proves it right: the title is what draws the eye because the reader is in need of a clear interpretation, as happens in the fait divers whose central aim is to glut the curiosity it is intent on provoking. In Munch’s work, the ekphrastic exchange is at the service of a maieutics, a semiosis which after Eco could be said to be unlimited: a constructive dialectics between opening (in terms of the image) and focussing (in terms of the title); a hybrid semantic compound which distances us and thus fosters meditation. On the contrary, in the cartoon, the dialectical exchange is soon at an end since each particular element confirms the others, a perfect example of didacticism and persuasion at work. The whole apparatus is circular and illustrative of the truth according to the newspaper (a bipolar conception of the world expressive of a canonical opposition between Good and Evil): ekphrasis is debased and turned on its head. One might establish a parallel between these two contrary relations and the two types of meaning produced, first, by closed metaphors in which the two verbal components reinforce each other, and, second, by open metaphors in which these components interlock and confront their differences in a never ending chain of interpretations. One might also think that the cartoon’s triadic redundancy (image, title and adjacent articles or ‘stories’) corresponds to the didactic construction of the Renaissance emblem with its triangular system: image/motto/explanatory poem.

12With hindsight, the cartoon now seems to us to demonstrate the dangers of temporal proximity since the message it imparts is nothing but the product of the immediate affects triggered off by the crisis and the emotions they gave rise to. Its validity, if any, is that it testifies to the mood prevailing during those apocalyptic days. At the same time, this journalistic production makes us as it where reread the painting. The situation of urgency led the cartoonist to distort and simplify the material he borrowed, but at the same time, his rendering extracts, and foregrounds what had all the time been present in Munch’s work itself, which we might not have seen due to our reverential approach to art. A similar dualistic treatment and rendition of reality seems to prevail both in painting and article. We are also induced to look back with a difference on ekphrasis and its persuasive role as shown in the ruthless and rather naïve rendition of the cartoon. One might then come to realise that ekphrasis is much more than an innocent device and plays a major part in the ideological construction of meaning.

13From ‘The Scream by Munch’ to ‘The Scream after Munch’ a mutation occurs which is partly exemplified, but in reverse, in the double appellation of F. Rude’s high relief on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris: passing from ‘Le Chant du départ’ to ‘La Marseillaise’, we go from the topical and historical to the national and atemporal, from one major historical episode to its symbolic extension (collapsing the Revolution into The Republic). On the contrary, the appropriation of ‘The Scream’ and its aura by the cartoon returns the pictorial image to the topical: to understand what is actually achieved by such a translation, let us imagine for one moment the title ‘La Marseillaise’ affixed to a 1950s photograph of torture in Algeria; a disturbing but self-evident way of laying bare the ideological factor involved by the very process of naming (that is, the attribution of a title).

15This puts the complementary problem of the oscillation of a work between uniqueness (the autographic dimension of Nelson Goodman and Gérard Genette) and allographic reproduction; here a cultural chain of reproduction. Some works become eligible for a generalisation which transforms them into semantic units, formulae or expanded words, turning them into component entities entering the general discourse of culture. They thus become abstract constituents in the construction of the common sense relative to each individual moment of lived history: Rude’s high relief, the Iwo Jima photograph, Munch’s ‘Scream’ have been turned into hybrid and ossified cultural objects which can participate in novel and ever multiplying combinations.

16Another side of the question might refer us to the more general relevance of the act of naming. In the present case, the fact that the reference to Munch surfaced as it were spontaneously in the testing moment when the cartoonist set himself the task of interpreting the trauma of the day, is perhaps due to the nature of the word ‘scream’ itself, and the semantic program it holds. If one forgets for a moment its iconic illustration, one may realise the intense susceptibility to physical identification intrinsic to the notion of ‘screaming’: the somatic component comes to the fore and with it the primitive force of the affect. Hence the literally clinical dimension of the journalistic confiscation, and its validity and effectiveness in terms of passing on a message when everybody just wanted to know and think more about what had happened. In such crucial moments, the average reader—and we are all average readers when a drama of this magnitude occurs—, is easily convinced by the teleological version of time and the naïve conception of the ‘event’, elsewhere embodied in the fait divers. Such an implicit construction of meaning, and its daily concrete illustrations, thus enter our repertoire and become evidential in the interpretation of any future happening that is consequently made to seem similar. In the present case one may surmise that Munch’s painting gave added legitimacy to this spontaneous conception and philosophy of life, which it partly corroborated in its own treatment of the experiential moment, and that this will remain imprinted in the mind of the readers who saw the cartoon and really understood it for what it was, both the painting and the drawing communing in the sense of the surmised tragedy of existence. One may consequently affirm that the cartoon enlightens us as to the real nature of the painting, and its pessimistic narrowing down of life. The vision Munch’s work offers us can be thought to be just as biased as the one the cartoon exhibited under the pressure of time. We too feel like screaming in protest against what cannot but seem abnormal to a balanced mind. What both productions have in common is consequently that they tend to define life in terms of abnormality, of the exceptional, an exception brought in both cases to a climax of intensification and tension. Not an easily acceptable, and provable, version of life for those who are inclined to distance.

17The danger inherent in such dramatisation clearly appears in the present case when an event like the attack on the World Trade Centre took America and the world by surprise. The violence of the shock caused a massive discharge of affect finding expression in a spontaneous outburst of emotions. In the effusive instant of spontaneity, the American cartoons all resorted to national emblems like the eagle, Uncle Sam, the Statue of Liberty, etc.; this in a country that tends to choose symbolic images and appellations to designate any event or fact involving the nation as a whole (for instance in the naming of the shuttles or of international peace or war operations). Which prompted a sort of self-critical distancing on the part of some American journalists who naïvely wondered why this was so and why their productions in the days after the event were so repetitive. On the other hand, the productions of the English press had recourse to the national and European repertoires. Both types of reaction thus demonstrated the quasi mechanical processes at work in the reception of live events, and how little one may master the consequences of emotion based thought. This obviously is the central difference between a painting like Munch’s which was the (perhaps accidental) product of a long maturation, and editorial cartoons which the demands of the moment put under such pressure that they are the prisoners of, and imprison us in immediacy. In so far as most readers did not have time for distance and interpretation, or were not culturally capable of standing back, one might consider that such traumatic images were potentially lethal, at least in matters of thinking and of distance, in illustration of what Marie José Mondzain convincingly shows about our contemporary practice of images. One may add though, that during the few days that followed the immediate crisis, the cartoons in the English press reassumed a distanced posture earlier, and to a greater degree, than the American ones, and more so as one moved across the political spectrum, the more discriminating productions coming from the Independent and not, as one might have expected, from the Guardian.

18Many other lines of relevancy could be extracted, because, as is so graphically illustrated here, in a climactic moment of collective emotion, popular culture and practices, at their most sincere, seem to find themselves on the same ground as artistic expression; an expression which is supposed to help us cathartically overcome the unbearable confrontation with death; in the present case, death on a massive scale. This intrinsic kinship may seem surprising, but all things considered, it can also be said to be enlightening concerning the more shady obliquities of what is called great art.