The perverse machine of oblivion: comics and postwar memory in 90’s Spain

Abstract

This paper analyses the Spanish graphic novel El Artefacto Perverso (The Perverse Machine, 1996) by Felipe Hernández Cava and Federico del Barrio. This study shows how, by employing comics resources at their best, this work constructs a complex and compelling reflection on memory, especially that of the losers of the Spanish civil war (1936–39). The subject of memory is at the core of El Artefacto Perverso. Characters speak about it; plots concur in it. The main one, the level of ‘reality’, is set in post-war Madrid. There, those who lost the civil war try to forget their past, struggling for surviving in a silence that the guerrilla strives to break. Around this one, other stories emerge and dialogue with each other. One narrates the memories of a Spanish republican refugee in France. Another shows an agonizing republican agent that speaks about the erasure of all the losers of the war from the pages of history. Finally, there is the comic book written by the main character, where an all-Spanish-hero, Pedro Guzmán, saves the world from a perverse machine that causes oblivion. The contact with the main plot, charges this ingenuous story line with critical significance. Style also speaks about memory: Fading memories of refugee camp and feverish narrations have, each one, a correlated graphic representation. Pedro Guzmán’s adventures bring to mind the post-war by employing conventions of Spanish comics of the forties. All of this has implications about contemporary Spain. There, El Artefacto Perverso confronts the official discourse of the democracy regime, where war and post war periods have been consciously neglected. Since Maus, we are sure that comics can vehicle reflections on memory in ways different from those of literature or films; El Artefacto Perverso, far from any formula, shows how that exploration is not over.