Drawing the Past: The Graphic Novel as Postmemory in Spain

To paraphrase noted philosopher Paul Ricoeur on the role of telling stories as an approach to past traumas, we must not only have body counts, but also narrative accounts (15). In Spain, narrative gives life to the memories of Civil War (1936-1939) and oppression during the Franco era (1939-1975). This historical memory is a complex web in which discourses about forgetting, remembrance, individuality, collectivity, reconciliation, vindication, justice, and commodification coexist. In 2008 Jo Labanyi noted that the memory boom that had begun in the late nineties was beginning to ebb, having reached a "saturation point" (119).¹ Nevertheless, writers and filmmakers and other artists continue to produce works that confront the past, in many cases with more self-reflexivity about the memorialistic process. In addition, historical memory has increasingly gained visibility in less traditional, less "serious" media and genres.² The presence of irreverence, however, does not signal the end of engagement; in the case of comics (traditionally considered less than the novel or even film), there has been an explosion of interest in the combined drawing/telling of suffering during the war and after.³

Comics constitute the intersection between image and word, allowing articulation and silence in the same visual space. In this article I focus on the graphic novel in particular as a site of expression for inherited memories of the Civil War and Franco era in the twenty-first century by examining two recent works: El arte de volar (2009) written by Antonio Altarriba and illustrated by Kim, and Un médico novato (2013) by Sento Llobell, known professionally as Sento.⁴ My objective here is to demonstrate how these two graphic novels take advantage of the multifaceted visual nature of the medium and explore the active space of creation in the absence of personal experience to construct narrative images of Postmemory. "Postmemory" is a concept coined and developed by Marianne Hirsch in reference to the act of recovering and representing "inherited" memories by the descendants of Holocaust victims: "Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that precede their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor recreated" ("Past Lives" 420).⁵ According to Hirsch, Postmemory is not exclusive to the pain of the Holocaust ("Surviving" 11) and it is clear that this concept is helpful in addressing the issue of memory crossing generations in Spain today.⁶ While it is true that the term Postmemory has in some cases been applied to any current text about the past in uncritical and indiscriminate ways (Martín-Cabrera 132), I demonstrate here how these two works are not merely historical but are also self-reflexive about the inherited nature of their memory.⁷ Based on the memories of two men whose lives were altered by the Civil War–Altarriba's father in El arte de volar and Sento's father-in-law, the young doctor Pablo Uriel, in El médico novato–these works act out Post-memory by playing with the question of biography/autobiography, silent and fantastic imagery, and political engagement. These graphic novels illustrate (literally and figuratively) that the past is temporally and experientially distant. They highlight and embrace the fact that those who are producing cultural works of historical memory did not live the national traumas themselves; their approach is characterized by the obligation to (re)construct and (re)present them by means of an imaginative act mediated by previous narratives and not personal experience.

In Un médico novato, paratexts underline the reconstructive task of the work. The annex at the end titled "Álbum de recuerdos" includes photos, letters, documents, etc. as traces of the past, which complement the fictive elaboration of the story. In another paratext, the book jacket, Sento notes that the work is based "en hechos reales y en documentos de la época que nuestra familia ha conservado, lo que nos ha permitido reconstruir las partes de la historia que no encontrábamos en los recuerdos...