When the cannons roar, comics panels fall silent: on silent representations of traumatic events in Israeli comics and graphic novels

Abstract

The present study examines silent panels in five Israeli graphic novels and comics that deal – directly or indirectly – with traumatic events, whether personal, national, or both. Much has been written about comics and trauma. Such studies have mainly been aimed at revealing the importance of comics in documenting, confronting, witnessing, remembering, and reporting trauma; or answering questions such as how fiction and nonfiction comics and graphic narratives shape the traumatic event, or why the graphic memoir is a powerful instrument for coming to terms with the traumatic experience. Yet, the intersection between silence and trauma in graphic narratives has not received sufficient attention. A quick overview of the works chosen for our analysis illustrates that silence, as a theme, may relate to (a) the genre itself; (b) the authors’ individual artistic language and self-reflexivity; and (c) the specific episode of personal or national trauma being dealt with in the work. In this paper, we wish to illuminate the diverse roles silence fulfills in comics dealing with trauma, which we hope will be useful in bolstering the value of silence as a form of expression – not only in oral and written communication, but also in multimodal texts – and thus substantiate current theories on silence as a semiotic sign. Our study is conducted in the framework of silence theories, which claim that silence is a meaningful signifier as long as it serves a purpose and is related to intention. It is also carried out within the framework of multimodal discourse theories. Specifically highlighting the idiosyncrasies of the Israeli arena, the present paper also addresses a significant body of works on the representation of trauma in comics.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The authors wish to thank the creators for their kindness in granting us the rights for publication of the included panels.

2 A tsav 8 is a military call-up order. Of course, the selected works are not the only examples of Israeli graphic narratives concerned with trauma or related topics. See, for example, Rutu Modan’s works, Exit Wounds (2007), The Property (2013), among many others.

3 See Anderson Bliss (2014), Chute (2016), Earle (2017), Pizzino (2017), and Davies and Rifkind (2020). See also Arieli-Horowitz and Golan (2010) for the Israeli context.

4 Regarding the relation between trauma and the visual sphere (broadly defined), as well as the various visualizations of traumatic events from a sociological-historical-technological and epistemological perspective, see Antze and Lambek (1996), and Baer (2002). Antze and Lambek’s (1996, xv) work raises the question of ‘how the ‘very idea of memory’ comes into play in society and culture and about the uses of ‘memory’ in collective and individual practice’. Baer (2002) addresses the power of images to trigger a discussion about unanswered questions concerning past traumatic episodes people are still struggling to comprehend. For instance, the author explores the way people remember the Shoah, and asks what is the best way to frame or to position this event which remains beyond human understanding.

5 See, for example, Kurzon (1998, 2007) and Ephratt (2014).

6 ‘Silence – lack of speech – as a zero signifier may be taken to be intentional silence when it is interpreted by a signified in the form of a proposition of the type ‘I must not speak’ or ‘I will not speak’’ (Kurzon 1998, 7). Kurzon also posits that ‘for silence to have meaning in the linguistic sense, the speaker must have an intention – hence a zero signifier has an utterable signified, a meaning that may be expressed in words’ (Kurzon 1998, 8).

7 This is in line with Saville-Troike (1985, 11) who claims that silence ‘is more context-embedded than speech’. Investigating the modalities of silence in question-answer adjacency pairs, Kurzon (1998, 25–50) shows the extent to which silence is contextual, and finds that it may be analyzed from the point of view of knowledge (silent addressees may know the answer but choose not to cooperate/ addressees who may not know the answer refuse to admit ignorance) or ability (ability not to speak/ lack of ability to speak).

8 For a documentation of this kind of response among Holocaust and war survivors, see Danieli (1982) and Grünberg and Markert (2012).

9 Steiner (1967) defends the idea of the demolition of language in light of historical atrocities, particularly the Nazi genocide of the Jews. In an essay entitled ‘K’, Steiner develops the thesis that Auschwitz lies outside speech because it lies outside reason, and that to speak of the ‘unspeakable’ (the atrocities of the Third Reich) is to bestow on language the power to bear rational truth. However, the Nazi atrocities cannot be satisfactorily communicated, not only because of the Nazi’s misuse of language or their systematic destruction of language’s function as a vessel for humane rationality, but also because their barbarity was such that it transcends any expression one could possibly use to characterise it.

10 In Hebrew, ‘quiet’ and ‘silent’ have the same signifier.

11 Hanuka makes rich use of splash panels to construct a multilayered micro-story, with dense messages that enable different readings (Adler and Kohn 2020).

12 See Adler and Kohn (2020) for a detailed analysis of Hanuka’s work in the context of silence.

13 See Adler (2011, 2013) for silence and semi silent arguments in the graphic novel.

14 These are not the only expressions of silence in comics. See, for example, Adler and Kohn (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Silvia Adler

Silvia Adler is Full Professor of linguistics in the Department of French Culture at Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of Ellipse et Régimes des Prépositions Françaises (2012 Peeters Publishers, BIG) as of numerous articles in linguistics. Her research interests lie in the area of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. In particular: ellipsis, linguistic economy, prepositions, intensity, general unspecific nouns. Her current research interest also includes strategies of meaning-making in comics. Lately, she published with Ayelet Kohn, ‘Silence in a 9-panel grid: The voice of Israeliness in Asaf Hanuka's The Realist’ (Israel Affairs, 2019) and ‘Silence: A modality of its own’ (Social Semiotics, 2021).

Ayelet Kohn

Ayelet Kohn is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication at David Yellin Academic College in Jerusalem. Her research focuses on multimodality in media texts and on communities in the internet. She has published in Visual Communication, Visual Studies, Computers in Human Behaviour, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of Israeli History, Social Semiotics, Convergence and more. Her latest book, co-authored with Rachel Weissbrod, Translating the Visual: A Multimodal Perspective, was published with Routledge, in 2019.