Abstract
Trauma has become a pervasive cultural model for representing individual and collective injuries and suffering. This process has produced what may be called a trauma aesthetic, a set of recognizable tropes in widespread use in trauma narratives. This chapter examines the adoption of this aesthetic in graphic narratives, focusing on the special capacities of the form. Familiar tropes, such as dissociation and the somatic trace, are presented in complex combinations of visual and textual components, often exploiting the differential appearance of text and image to introduce a dynamic of belatedness or disarticulation. This chapter analyses five works ordered according to their diminishing reliance on ‘trauma’. The trauma aesthetic is used, though not explicitly, in Catherine Meurisse’s La Légèreté (2016) about the Charlie Hebdo attack, Jean-Philip Stassen’s Déogratias (2000/2006) about the genocide in Rwanda, and Emmanuel Lepage’s Un printemps à Tchernobyl (2012) about the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. By contrast, it is absent from Mazen Kerbaj’s Beirut Won’t Cry (2007/2017) about the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and Josh Neufeld’s A.D. about Hurricane Katrina (2009). These works’ reliance on formalized and sanctioned trauma tropes not only is influenced by narrative characteristics, such as temporal distance from the event or the presence of a single narrator-protagonist but may also be motivated by the prestige conferred by trauma as recognized suffering, affecting the canonization and translatability of the graphic narratives in question.
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Notes
- 1.
While narratives of personal trauma (such as illness, accident, violence, death, abuse, etc.) also merit analysis in this context—and can in fact raise productive questions about the relative canonization and codification of public historical trauma narratives and personal trauma narratives—this is beyond the scope of this study.
- 2.
Between 1995 and 1998, Wilkomirski’s Bruchstücke (Fragments), a Holocaust memoir of his childhood, was translated into nine languages and received countless favourable reviews internationally and major book awards in the USA, England, and France. Its author toured widely, appearing before general and university audiences (Maechler 2001: 114–117). It was exposed as fictional in 1998, when its author was identified as Bruno Doesseker, but Wilkomirski/Doesseker insisted on the authenticity of his memoir. This became known as the Wilkomirski case. See Maechler (2001), Suleiman (2000), and Vice (2002).
- 3.
As of the time of writing, an English translation is forthcoming: Springtime in Chernobyl, IDW Publishing, 2019 (translator unnamed).
- 4.
The French terms in the original are: ‘maboul’; ‘complètement louf’; ‘nous sommes tous meurtris: tu es fou et moi, je suis si fatigué’; ‘bizarre’ (7, 9, 21, 57).
- 5.
Michael Chaney has identified the animal as a recurring image ‘evocative of traumatic narration’ in several works about the Rwandan genocide (2011: 95).
- 6.
- 7.
This co-authored carnet was produced, sold out, and was eventually republished by a press under the title Les fleurs de Tchernobyl: carnet de voyage en terre irradiée, not identical with Lepage’s own graphic narrative discussed here.
- 8.
- 9.
The book is unpaginated and only provides date references in the published diary. These dates are indicated here to guide readers, as far as possible, to the correct pages.
- 10.
For an extensive analysis of the temporality of the war diary and its implications for haptic visuality, see Orbán (2018: 244–250).
- 11.
Kerbaj’s affinity to the series as a product of daily routine is not limited to the serial publication of daily newspaper comic strips (e.g., collected in Cette Histoire Ce Passe [2011]). After his relocation to Berlin in 2016, his recent self-portrait series Learning Deutsch (2018) applies it to the effects of exile rather than war. Created in a single sketchbook and serially published on Instagram, the work is an excuse to experiment and play, while also processing the reshaping of the dislocated subject through the discipline of assimilating the words of a foreign language into the self day by day (https://www.instagram.com/mazenkerbaj/).
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Orbán, K. (2020). Hierarchies of Pain: Trauma Tropes Today and Tomorrow. In: Davies, D., Rifkind, C. (eds) Documenting Trauma in Comics. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8_2
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