In academia, as in cartooning, Gonick operates along the fringes. Five years ago, he gave a presentation at Berkeley's Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, where he would later serve as a journalist in residence, and confessed: "I have one foot in mathematics and one foot in science journalism, and unfortunately ... it also seems to mean that I have one foot out of mathematics and one foot out of science journalism." His books have met with varied response. Scientists generally admire his cartoon guides, in part because Gonick solves a problem many of them face daily: snoring freshmen. But historians haven't settled on an opinion. Some shrug and call Gonick's conclusions "pat"; some smile at the effort but dismiss it as another sendup; and some praise it, as Yale professor Jonathan Spence did in the New York Times Book Review, calling the histories "a curious hybrid, at once flippant and scholarly, witty and politically correct, zany and traditionalist. Mr. Gonick's approach to the past is personal, free-wheeling and immensely ambitious."
One recent afternoon, Gonick summarizes his approach to history in a long soliloquy.
Paolo Vescia
Larry Gonick looks nothing like the narrator
of his cartoon histories. "I wanted somebody
professorial," he says. "But inside, he's a lot
like me."
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"Let's not call it chaos theory," he begins. "Let's just say nonlinear dynamics." Nearby, someone is at the studio's paper cutter, interrupting with an occasional THWACK!
"Nonlinear systems are systems with any kind of physical system that has feedback loops, where an output in the system can come back and affect the system. Well, obviously, human society is such a system. Our brains are such a system."
THWACK!
"There's this great chemist, a Russian-Belgian chemist" -- THWACK! -- "who died a few weeks ago, named Ilya Prigogine, who figured a lot of this stuff out. A Nobel Prize winner. The idea is this: Dynamical systems in general have a certain quality as follows -- much of the time, they flow along with tremendous momentum, and small perturbations have small consequences. Small causes have small effects." THWACK! "But it happens periodically that systems become chaotic and they enter states in which small perturbations can have large effects. Human history is no different. So this has some implication, for example, on the impact of the individual on history." THWACK!
"Tolstoy thought the individual just rides the waves of history. But when you think of history as a wave, you're thinking of it in terms of" -- THWACK! -- "these periods when there's a lot of momentum and the thing is definitely going in a certain direction. But you also enter periods when it's not going in any definite direction. Things are very mixed up and nobody knows what's going on. [You] can't necessarily say whether you're in such a period -- but they exist, and when they do, small actions can have big effects.
"You imagine the system is a single point moving through a very high-dimensional space. So from seven-billion-dimensional space, you've got a point following a path through that space." THWACK! "That's the evolution of the system. And it comes to a point, and no matter how close you get to that point, you can't tell whether that thing is gonna go this way or that way, right?" THWACK! "The tiniest, the tiniest, little ball -- no matter how tiny a little ball you draw around that point, there will be points in there that cause the thing to go this way, and there will be other points in there that cause it to go that way. They're all mixed up. So at that point, the future of the thing is indeterminate." THWACK! "Tiny effects, you know?
"So, for instance, if you think about that in terms of the individual's impact on history ... a single person who's on the knife's edge of deciding one way or another could determine the entire course of history." THWACK! "Or he decides and a safe falls on his head, right?" THWACK!
Gonick pauses. He has sunk deep into his chair, a pillow at his back. It's a peculiar picture: a cartoonist with an advanced degree in math, discussing history by way of non-equilibrium chemistry, high physics, War and Peace, and cartoon slapstick. The world according to Gonick. All it needs, it seems, is Mother Goose.
"'For want of a nail,'" he concludes. "Right?"
