Forging intragenerational and common memories: Revisiting Paracuellos’s graphic violence in times of confinement

Abstract

In our times of confinement, cultural production has become as important as it is precarious. Reading habits were revamped during the most stringent moments of the early lockdown. Some would consume new products, some would revisit their favourite classics. In this article, I analyse Carlos Giménez’s pioneering graphic work, a(n) (auto)biographical series of comics surrounding children’s experiences in Francoist orphanages, or ‘Homes’ (Hogares de Auxilio). I argue that Paracuellos operates as an isotopic and confining device at formal, thematic, intragenerational and affecting levels. It displays an aesthetic of confinement and brings together a set of core themes that generate a continuum of isotopic semantics, catalysing the work’s capacity to affect and be affected. Graphic violence is as its core and serves as the main constant, be that presently exercised or absently loomed, in a context of pathos, loss and scarcity. This article further explores how the comics series pulls back the veil on the folds of early Francoism as well as the later transition to democracy, a period of ‘lockdown’ for cultural memory in general, and for the experienced confinement in the Francoist ‘Homes’ in particular. The piece suggests that in retrieving this collection of common memories of recurrent episodes of violence experienced individually, Giménez’s work ultimately nuances the monolithic concept of collective memory within cultural production.