Hermeneutic flashbacks: building the narrative space in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present paper attempts to read the hermeneutic play into the structural matrix of Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde through the idea of ‘spatial excess’ that the paper proposes by theoretically conflating Gadamer’s concept of ‘Fusion of Horizon’ with Groensteen’s idea of ‘hyperframe’ and ‘margin’. The paper reads the flashback episodes which it identifies as hermeneutic by disposition and which drives home the idea of historical consciousness by redefining the ideas of authorship which here qualifies not only the role of Sacco, the comics journalist but also the natives of Gorazde who narrate their own testimonies of the war. The flashback episodes in the text are embedded in black borders to categorically segregate them from the present-day narrative. These black borders apart from being a stylised trope become a potent hermeneutic schema that offers a spatial excess within which they accommodate the victims’ point of view as well as situate the readers into the textual space and thus change the epistemic practices of perceiving the past.