“We must leave traces”: Media and Memory in Two Graphic Novels

Abstract

Abstract At the height of the Spanish Civil War, over 450,000 Spanish citizens fled to France in an exodus known as the Retirada. Multimediality has long marked representations of this history: among its first accounts were illustrated texts by refugees held in French detention camps, and many contemporary works about this period integrate a similar interplay of words and images. This article explores two French graphic novels about the Retirada and the intergenerational transmission of its memory: Alain Munoz’s D’ailleurs (2017) and Henri Fabuel and Jean-Marie Minguez’s Exil (2013). Drawing upon Maurice Halbwachs and Paul Ricœur’s theories of memory, I argue that these texts’ multimedia and multigenre approach—involving not only the interaction between text and image, but also letters, family photographs, and different modes of storytelling—reflects a similarly dynamic interdependence between individual and collective memory. I also consider a 1939 refugee-run review, Barraca, to trace this intersection of media and memory back to the Retirada’s very first publications.