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.