Quiz 6 · Cartoons and Pictures as Arguments — Ancient America to the Singularity

Who made this?

1. Who made it?: The page in the photograph is the book’s own title page, drawn by its author. The book it stands for was written and drawn by one man, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, an Andean nobleman from Huamanga, in what is now Peru, born about 1535, a few years after the conquest. He learned to read and write from his half-brother, a priest, and made the whole book by hand: nearly 1,200 pages and 398 full-page drawings.
2. When, and where?: Finished about 1615, after decades of work. He had been an interpreter and a clerk for Spanish officials, and he had lost a land case that ended with a sentence of two hundred lashes and two years’ exile from his town. The book took its final shape after that.
3. Why, and for whom?: It is a letter to the king of Spain, Philip III. Its title promises a “new chronicle,” the history of the Andes before and after the conquest, and a plan for “good government,” which is an account of what officials, priests, and landholders were doing to Andean people, with proposals to stop it. The drawings are there because a picture might reach a king where six hundred pages of words would not.
4. Who has it now, and how did it get there?: The Royal Library of Denmark, in Copenhagen, catalogued as GKS 2232 4°. How it got from Peru to Denmark is not recorded; it has been there since at least the 1700s. There is no sign that the king ever read it. A German scholar, Richard Pietschmann, found it in the library in 1908. UNESCO put it on its Memory of the World register in 1999, and the library has had every page online, free, since 2001.
5. Whose voice is missing here, and where can we hear it?: His own, which is rare: one of very few books of that century about the Andes written by an Andean. Spanish and Quechua share his pages. The pictures are his argument as much as the words, and they argue by choices a reader can learn to see. In the drawing this quiz reads, he drew the Inca and the Spaniard the same size.

For your notebook: four hundred drawings for one reader, who never answered. Four hundred years later, anyone with a phone can see them. Who is a picture’s audience: the one it was made for, or the ones who finally look?

Sources: Royal Danish Library, “Guaman Poma: El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615),” digital edition, kb.dk; Rolena Adorno, Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (2nd ed., 2000); UNESCO Memory of the World Register (1999).

First, the idea

A political cartoon is a picture that makes an argument. So is a propaganda poster, a campaign image, and many of the paintings and drawings the test shows you from the past. The test asks: What is the artist’s point of view? What does this figure stand for? Who was meant to see it? Which statement would the artist agree with? You answer by reading the picture the way you read a passage: find the claim, find the evidence, find who is speaking and to whom.

Four things to read. The caption and the labels: cartoonists write on their pictures so you cannot miss the point; read every word first. The symbols: a figure that stands for something else, an eagle for a country, a snake for danger, a moneybag for greed. The exaggeration: what is drawn bigger, smaller, uglier, or grander than life. The maker and the audience: the card’s questions, who made it, when, for whom.

Size is a claim. In an argument made with pictures, the artist makes big what he wants you to take as important and small what he wants you to dismiss. Thomas Nast drew Boss Tweed as a moneybag with legs, larger than the men around him, because the claim was that Tweed was the money. When two figures are drawn the same size, that is a claim too: that they are equals. Before you ask what a picture shows, ask what it makes large.

Then the question the test likes best: what would the artist agree with? Not what is true, and not what you think; what the picture is arguing for. A cartoon against a tax is evidence of what one artist, and the paper that printed him, wanted readers to believe. It is a primary source for the argument, not for the facts the argument is about. Quiz 2’s question applies: primary for what?

Worked example — thinking out loud

In 1871, Harper’s Weekly printed a Thomas Nast cartoon: a ring of men standing in a circle, each pointing his thumb at the man beside him. The caption reads, “Who stole the people’s money? — ’Twas him.” The largest figure, at the front, is William Tweed, head of New York City’s Democratic machine. What is the cartoon’s claim?

I start with the words, because Nast put them there for me: a question and an answer. Then the shape. Each man answers the question by pointing at the next, and because they stand in a circle, the pointing goes all the way around and comes back. No one is left unaccused. That is the claim: every man in the ring is guilty, and each is hiding behind the others. Then size. Tweed is largest and nearest, so Nast wants me to start and end with him. The audience is the readers of a national magazine, most of whom had never seen Tweed’s face; Nast drew it so often that when Tweed fled to Spain in 1876, he was recognized from the cartoons.

What the cartoon does not prove: that any particular man stole any particular dollar. It is a primary source for what one artist and his magazine argued in 1871. The court records are where the dollars are.

Part A · The skill by itself

1. In 1754 Benjamin Franklin’s newspaper printed a drawing of a snake cut into eight pieces. Each piece is labeled with the initials of a British colony in America, and the caption reads, “Join, or Die.” What do the pieces of the snake stand for?

eight British warships the American colonies, separated from one another the dangers of the wilderness the eight months of the war season

2. About 1552, artists from Tlaxcala, a people who had fought beside the Spaniards against the Mexica, painted a long cloth showing the battles of the conquest. In scene after scene, Tlaxcalan warriors are drawn large, armed, and in front, beside the Spanish horsemen. The cloth was made to be shown to Spanish officials. What did the painters most want those officials to conclude?

that the Spaniards had conquered Mexico alone that Tlaxcala had been a loyal ally and deserved to be treated as one that the Mexica had been the stronger side that the war had been fought mainly at sea

3. An 1882 California cartoon draws a railroad company as a giant octopus. Its arms wrap around a farm, a courthouse, the state capitol, and a newspaper office. Which statement would the cartoonist most likely agree with?

The railroad has brought prosperity to every part of the state. Sea creatures are a danger to coastal shipping. The railroad controls too much of the state’s life. Farmers should invest in railroad stock.

Part B · The skill in the wild

A drawing from Guaman Poma’s book, photographed below, with a description to read it by. Read it the way the lesson says: caption first, then symbols, then size, then maker and audience.

Manuscript drawing: the Inca at left holds out a dish of gold toward a bearded Spaniard at right; both men stand the same height beneath the word CONQUISTA

The drawing, and the description to read it by

A full page. Across the top, in capital letters, the word CONQUISTA, “conquest,” and beneath it two names: the Inca Huayna Capac and a Spaniard, Candia. Below the title, two men stand facing each other, drawn the same height. The Inca, on the left, wears the royal fringe across his forehead and holds out a dish heaped with gold. The Spaniard, on the right, wears European dress. Beside the Inca, written in Quechua: “Cay coritacho micunqui?” — “Do you eat this gold?” Beside the Spaniard, in Spanish: “Este oro comemos” — “We eat this gold.” The caption says the two men spoke by signs.

One more thing a reader should know. The meeting did not happen. Huayna Capac died around 1525, of a disease that traveled ahead of the Europeans, and Candia first came ashore in Peru around 1528, at Tumbes, far from Cusco. Guaman Poma, writing about 1615, staged a scene.

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), Royal Danish Library, GKS 2232 4°, drawing 145. The Quechua and Spanish are his; the translations follow the Royal Library’s edition and Adorno (2000). Photograph: Royal Danish Library, GKS 2232 4°, p. [371]; public-domain reproduction.

4. What does the exchange of words claim about the Spaniards?

that they were starving when they arrived that they wanted gold the way the hungry want food, and came for it that they had never seen gold before that they spoke Quechua

5. Who was this drawing made for?

the Inca’s court readers of a newspaper in Lima the king of Spain Candia’s family

6. The Inca and the Spaniard are drawn the same size. Read as an argument, what does that claim?

that the artist could not draw distance that the two men were the same age that the two men, and their peoples, stand as equals that the Spaniard was a giant

7. The meeting it shows never took place. What is the drawing a primary source for?

what Huayna Capac said to Candia how an Andean writer understood the conquest, around 1615 the price of gold in 1528 nothing, because it is not accurate

8. Complete the sentence so that it matches the drawing and the lesson.

Guaman Poma wrote the Inca’s question in [Latin / Quechua / English] and the Spaniard’s answer in Spanish, and he made the drawing as [an eyewitness record of 1528 / an argument addressed to the king / a decoration with no point of view].

The key — and why the tempting answers tempt

1. B. The caption says it: the pieces are labeled with the colonies’ initials. Cut apart, the snake is dead; joined, it lives. A, C, and D ignore the labels. The words on a cartoon are the first evidence, not the last.

2. B. The painters made their own warriors large and forward and made the cloth for Spanish eyes. The claim is service rendered, and the unspoken second half is what Tlaxcala was owed for it. A is the claim a Spanish painter might have made; this cloth argues against it. C and D are not in the picture.

3. C. An octopus with its arms around the farm, the court, the capitol, and the press is a picture of one thing holding everything. The size is the claim. A is the opposite of the argument. B reads the symbol as the thing itself. D answers as an investor, not a reader; the question asks what the artist would agree with.

4. B. “Do you eat this gold?” treats the Spaniards’ wanting as hunger, and the answer admits it. The drawing argues that the conquest was an appetite. A takes the metaphor literally. C and D are not claimed by anything on the page; D even runs against the caption, which says they spoke by signs.

5. C. The whole book is a letter to Philip III; every drawing in it is addressed to him. A: the Inca’s court was long gone by 1615. B: there were no newspapers in Lima. D is a guess with nothing in the stimulus behind it.

6. C. European art of the time had a hundred ways to make a conquered king small; Guaman Poma used none of them. Equal height, face to face, is a claim of equal standing. A explains away a choice as a limitation; the book’s 398 drawings show he could make figures any size he liked. B confuses height with age. D is the opposite of what the page shows.

7. B. The drawing was made around 1615 by an Andean writer, so it is direct evidence of how such a writer understood the conquest and wanted the king to understand it. It is not evidence of what anyone said in 1528. A takes the staged scene as a transcript. C is not on the page. D is the flat mistake: a source that is not accurate about one thing can be the best source there is about another. Primary for what?

8. Quechua; an argument addressed to the king. The description gives the Inca’s words in Quechua and the Spaniard’s in Spanish: each man in his own tongue, which is itself a claim about whose voice counts. The whole book is a letter to Philip III. “An eyewitness record” fails on the dates. “A decoration with no point of view” is not possible for a picture with a caption like this one.

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