Time Unbound: Images of Postmemory and the Superpresent in Jewish Graphic Novels

• In Event: Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels

Abstract

This paper examines a phenomenon found in Jewish graphic novels to portray traumatic moments when a character and the reader become disconnected from conventional experiences in life, trapped in a moment where past violence and traumas invade present realities; a phenomenon dually called postmemory and the superpresent. These terms, coined by scholars analyzing Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel MAUS-—or Spiegelman himself—-have been used to understand inheritors of memories from the Holocaust, Korean War, Indian Partition, and other historically traumatic events. Scholarship has not yet considered how specifically postmemory and the superpresent are generally used in the graphic novel medium by Jewish graphic novelists to make sense of violent and traumatic Jewish pasts. This study examines instances of postmemory and the superpresent in several contemporary Jewish graphic novels that explore the Holocaust, Israel, and Tanakh. An attempt will be made to show how the Jewish graphic novel, by strategically creating a sequence of images is capable of exploring not only moments of trauma in which past and present collide, but is able to simulate a characters’ disorientation and disconnection with the world by transitioning from moments of the superpresent to the conventional, everyday world. In so doing, the depiction of violence in Jewish graphic novels extends beyond a simple testimony; the mantra “never forget” does not easily apply to events that could never physically be. Instead, artistic creativity portrays emotions as if they were as observable as the events themselves and just as meaningful in understanding an array of Jewish presents.

Author

• Talia Hurwich, NYU