Remembrance of Things in Past: History and Memory in the Graphic NovelWaltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story

This article attempts to read Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s graphic war manifesto Waltz with Bashir (2008) as an example of postmodern historiography on the 1982 invasion of Beirut through the lens of a soldier’s (read Folman’s) traumatic memory. Through its universal critique of war, the text probes the problematic ways in which memory and traumatic lived realities interact to create narratives that subvert populist/national discourses. Folman’s amnesiac memory, which refuses to uphold a linear progression of the past, brings before the reader/viewer dual textual registers of identity formation (through Folman’s coming to terms with his repressed memories as a soldier in Lebanon) within the attempted counter-narrative against totalitarian histories. The article looks at how Folman’s amnesiac memory becomes a tool through which an ‘individual’ subjective history is birthed—thus giving rise to a reverse bildungsroman—within the contours of a counter-narrative on the national history of Israel’s war in Lebanon. Finally, in positing history as a project against totalitarianism, the article attempts to question what constitutes historicity: Is it the facticity of past events that determines their actual value? If so, what does it bode for a post-truth, polysemiotic world?