Au nom de la mère. Reconfigurations du modèle spiegelmanien du témoignage dans deux récits graphiques sur la guerre civile espagnole

Abstract

This paper examines two French graphic novels which reconstruct the Transpyrenean memory of the Spanish civil war: Le Convoi by D. Lapière and E. Torrents (2013), Dolorès by B. Loth (2016). Both works reshape the narrative model of war testimony created by A. Spiegelman in Maus, where the memory of a traumatic past is transmitted between generations within the family circle (postmemory), combining both personal life story and collective History. Focusing on the narratological device of the voice, three major changes are highlighted: the non-actorialization of the author-narrator (unmaking of the autobiographical identity), the feminization of the recipient of the testimony (not a son but a daughter who listens on behalf of a silent mother), and the extension of the family circle beyond a particular family through condensation or displacement. The paper discusses these points studying the stories as well as the paratexts and argues that the specific combination of the three major changes in each graphic novel produces different ways of disjunction between the subjective and the political dimensions of trauma, in other words, between the intimate and the collective sides of History.

Keywords:

• Exile
• family
• gender
• memory
• trauma
• voice

Notes

1 This article is based upon work from COST Action CA19119 “Investigation on Comics and Graphic Novels in the Iberian Cultural Area” https://iconmics.hypotheses.org/, supported by COST www.cost.eu.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cristina Álvares

Cristina Álvares is associate professor of French Literature at the University of Minho. Her research interests include comics and graphic narratives. She has published articles on comics in Cincinatti Romance Revue (2017), Revue Romane (2020), Synergies Espagne (2020), Neuroptica (2021) and European Comic Art (2021). She is currently co-editing a Portuguese journal issue on gender in Ibero-American graphic narratives.