El tarot como discurso de contestación en la caricaturista venezolana Rayma

Abstract

The attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris by two armed religious fanatics on January 07, 2015 that left eleven people dead and several others injured ”“most of them cartoonists and journalists”“ reminds us that nothing is “more devastating than humor”. Using as theoretical frame a combined approach from critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995, 2001, van Dijk 2000, 2011), the study of multimodal discourse (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, 2006), and from linguistic theories of humor (Attardo 1994, Ruiz Gurillo 2012), I analyze 27 political cartoons entitled “Rayma en Tarot …” [Rayma in Tarot..] published between May 2nd and 30th 2014 in El Universal, a major Venezuelan newspaper. These pieces appeared in a moment of intense protests by university students and the equally intense repression of those protests by President Nicolás Maduro’s government. The inherently connotative genre of the caricature reaches new dimensions when its author assumes the identity of the necromancer and her discourse the divinatory function of tarot. To this end, the author uses characters taken from this age-old art and adapts them to her vignettes; as such, their interpretation will require a special hermeneutic that resides in the revelatory relationship reader-country. The results of this analysis will shed light on the characteristics and function of contestation in editorial humor.