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Forging Intragenerational and Common Memories: Revisiting Paracuellos’

Graphic Violence in Times of Confinement

Article in Studies in Comics · December 2020

DOI: 10.1386/stic_00027_1

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 stic 11 (2) pp. 245–257 Intellect Limited 2020

Studies in Comics
Volume 11 Number 2
© 2020 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00027_1
Received 8 August 2020; Accepted 5 November 2020

XOSÉ PEREIRA BOÁN

SUNY Oswego

Forging intragenerational and

common memories: Revisiting
Paracuellos’s graphic violence
in times of confinement
Keywords Abstract
Paracuellos In our times of confinement, cultural production has become as important as it is precarious. Reading
Iberian comics habits were revamped during the most stringent moments of the early lockdown. Some would consume
cultural memory new products, some would revisit their favourite classics. In this article, I analyse Carlos Giménez’s
Francoist dictatorship pioneering graphic work, a(n) (auto)biographical series of comics surrounding children’s experiences in
Spanish transition Francoist orphanages, or ‘Homes’ (Hogares de Auxilio). I argue that Paracuellos operates as an isotopic
confinement and confining device at formal, thematic, intragenerational and affecting levels. It displays an aesthetic
graphic violence of confinement and brings together a set of core themes that generate a continuum of isotopic semantics,
isotopy catalysing the work’s capacity to affect and be affected. Graphic violence is as its core and serves as the

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Xosé Pereira Boán

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic will be the most globally remembered event since the Second World War.
In a time of mass (dis)information, memories of how we have commonly and individually experi-
enced confinement, fear, scarcity, loss, denial, response, systemic alternative truths and/or violence,
at some point, will abound. For many, economic disparities have been laid bare, particularly for
those on the front lines of operation of an unequal, but ultimately outdated, economic scheme. The
COVID-19 era has uncovered the need to revisit, rethink and completely redesign this system under a
sidelined climate emergency: from a reliance on underpaid essential workers to failing and inequi-
table educational and health systems; from the unfettered nature of mass tourism to our modes of
cultural production and consumption.
In times of confinement, culture has become more important than ever for those in the somehow
privileged ‘trenches’ of this absurd (but logical) perfect storm. Humans around the world increased
reading consumption in lockdown (Flood 2020). For some, this may be a new phenomenon, having
lacked either inclination, habit, need, mental capacity or time prior to 2020. Many bought eBooks
(Pressman 2020); some affectionate, privileged and/or professional readers may have looked back to
their personal libraries and revisited old favourites. I would dare to guess that some of those oeuvres
were ‘classics’ in the eyes of their readers. I chose to revisit a graphic narrative of confinement and
violence, the first volume of Carlos Giménez’s Paracuellos. As I revisited my chosen graphic ‘clas-
sic’, I could not help noting uncanny similarities with our current times of physical, emotional and
systemic confinement. In this piece, I argue that Paracuellos operates as an isotopic and confining
device at formal, thematic, intragenerational and affecting levels, while ultimately forming a set of
common memories.
The Paracuellos series was created between 1977 and 2017. The first two volumes were unsuc-
cessfully released between 1977 and 1980, published by Amaika in Spain, following its success
in France as an early cult work. Nonetheless, Giménez’s production España, Una, Grande, Libre
(1976–77) appeared in El Papus and other satirical magazines during the same period. In contrast to
Paracuellos, this work received a warm welcome south of the Pyrenees in the context of the prevailing
economy of collective forgetting; the pact of silence otherwise known as the Spanish transition to

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 Forging intragenerational and common memories

1. ‘In May 1937 Auxilio democracy. During that period, magazine editors imprinted a bolder inclination towards satire and
Social was established
as a National Delegation
‘funny stories about tits’ rather than those ‘about sad children in the “Homes” of postwar Spain’, as
of the Francoist State Giménez recalls (Deuben 2016). Giménez resumed the Paracuellos series in 1997, twenty years after
within the bureaucratic the first edition, finally publishing all six initial volumes as Todo Paracuellos in 2007. Afterwards, the
framework of FET-JONS:
Falange Española [...] seventh and eighth volumes came to light in 2016 and 2017, respectively, forming an oeuvre span-
had an explicit welfare ning forty years. Besides the increasing scholarly attention on comics, influential media outlets have
brief, modeled on (and already pointed out that Spanish comics are in the midst of a Golden Age (Constenla 2017), in which
named after) the Nazi
organization Winterhilfe the most recurrent thematic axis has been memory. The early Paracuellos series have been widely
(Winter Aid)’ (Cenarro acknowledged as a pioneering referent for the later revival of the Spanish graphic tradition around
2008: 43).
cultural memory in the twenty-first century.
2. ‘recuerda la disposición
de las camas en los
dormitorios, de los ‘Homes’ of confinement
pupitres en clase, de
los cuerpos de los Paracuellos is situated in the falangist Hogares de Auxilio Social, homes/orphanages which proliferated
niños […] los principios in the post-war period, ‘conceived as an instrument of social control and how it was experienced
de encadenamiento by the most vulnerable group: the children of the defeated in the civil war’ (Cenarro 2008: 42).1
uniformador
[…] su carácter Giménez, himself embodied as a character, does not occupy a distinct space with respect to the other
concentracionario’ kids’ stories. He blurs himself into the array of individuals and anecdotes. The narrative structure
(author’s translation).
presents a juxtaposition of recurring themes and characters. These episodic vignettes are displayed in
a compact manner, a formal fashion that ‘reminds of the disposition of the beds in the dorms, of the
desks in the classrooms, of the bodies of the kids […] the principles of a shackling uniformity […] its
concentrationary character’ (Altarriba 2001: 342).2 The oppression takes a material form in the work’s
composition in its use of the gutter, which reduces the space and confines the experiences homo-
geneously, individualized and shared within the Hogares; in form and semantics, be that the graphic
depth through clear backgrounds that centre on communicating action and affect, be that recurrent
isotopy as meaning production.
Algirdas Julien Greimas postulates isotopy as such:

a redundant set of semantic categories which make possible the consistent interpretation
[literally, ‘uniform reading’] of a story, as it results from the reading of the successive segments
of the text and the resolution of their ambiguities in view of the quest for a coherent global
understanding.
(2007)

Giménez’s characters follow an isotopic constant through different layers of both stylistic and
thematic constants. The central child characters establish the recognizable aesthetic of the oeuvre,

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Xosé Pereira Boán

the semantics of the form. The continuum of those children’s horrified gaze and the perspectives 3. The intertwining of
monster spawns and
bring together the most defining attributes of Paracuellos, a signifying form. It highlights, as a thriller, Francoist society are
the temporary deferral of violence: a continuous violence in both spectral (as a suspended threat) prolific in Peninsular
and material (factual) fashions. The children’s eyes appear big and round like their faces, out of films such as The Spirit
of the Beehive (1973),
orbit, with small and vapid pupils that look up from low-angle shots, in a constant state of alert Raise Ravens (1975),
with regards to that vertical threat that lurks over their heads, which sooner or later will inevitably Butterfly’s Tongue (1999),
materialize upon their bodies (Figure 1). The eyes of the Falangists, priests, nuns and caretakers Black Bread (2010) and
The Last Circus (2010)
at the Hogares, on the other hand, are smaller, oval and sharper, with their gaze always up, suspi- among others.
cious, anticipating a looming discipline, offering low-angle shots that confirm the direction by which
power is exercised towards the children. The Falangists, priests and nuns’ faces are also especially
detailed, highlighting their defects (wrinkles, veins, crooked noses…). This rendering is also seen,
for example, in the depictions of ageing and tired mothers. However, these women gaze through
large eyes with irises and pupils emanating a warmer light, while projecting endless sorrow. A third
type is formed by outsiders, as in the case of Ms. Merche (‘El beso’) or in ‘Tito’ – Giménez’s brother,
who is portrayed in a more naturalistic fashion in contrast to the communicative aesthetic of pathos
Giménez employs for the confined children (Figure 2). Other characterizations contribute to the
configuration of that microcosm, but as it does in Francoist Spain, the inside/outside dichotomy
seems to always prevail.
The microcosm of the Hogares operates like its own dictatorship, which traces a macrosocial and
metonymic portrait of this post-war period awash with violence and humiliation. In the same vein,
Anne Magnussen (2012: 33) observes that rather than with a ‘coherent’ narrative, when reading one
history behind another, the reader-viewer remains ‘with the impression of a place, the orphanage’.
These liminal islands of common experiences, ‘these schools, these hogares are the logical monster
spawn of a monstrous society’ (Giménez 2014: 22). The chapter that opens the series (Figures 3 and
4) operates like a statement of purpose to demonstrate Giménez’s assertion; which I similarly refer
to as Frankenspain: the cultural representation of that factory of monsters created by the Francoist
machinery and whose own genesis was usually conceived in violence itself, constituting a recurring
theme in Peninsular cultural production.3 Alongside prevailing violence, trash as a source of nutri-
tion, the child-minion as a hench-child, the looming repressive figure that does not fully enter the
shot, the inciting of gratuitous violence, the cynical humiliation with which fights are broken up, and
the National-Catholic symbols encapsulate the series in this first episode. This pattern will return
through different characters and chapters, in different personal (hi)stories that Giménez proceeds to
collect over time, and eventually reproduce graphically as (hi)stories of violence, confinement, loss,
scarcity and ever-lurking threats.
Gratuitous violence reigns and is exercised not only via physical abuse and humiliation, but also
through practices of scarcity and physiological punishment. During ‘The Visit’, Giménez displays
the double standard between autarky and reality, in both Francoist society and the ‘aid-homes’.

248  Studies in Comics
 Forging intragenerational and common memories

Figure 1: Paracuellos: Children of the Figure 2: Todo Paracuellos, 2012 (courtesy of Carlos
Defeated in Franco’s Fascist Spain, Giménez ©).
2016: 19 (courtesy of Carlos Giménez ©).

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Xosé Pereira Boán

Figure 3: Paracuellos: Children of the Defeated in Franco’s Fascist Spain, 2016: 16 (courtesy of Carlos
Giménez ©).

250  Studies in Comics
 Forging intragenerational and common memories

The national delegate portrayed as a bourgeois woman arrives at the ‘homes’ for an inspection. In
the spirit of the Francoist ‘white bread’ slogan as propaganda of the link between abundance and
the regime, her brief intervention ends with physiological punishment-by-excess (of milk – ‘white
water’) within a short-circuited system – between autarky and scarcity (Figure 3). This shortage-
excess model springs up again in the simulacrum of ‘The Night of the Magi’, in the form of giving
(presents) only to take them (immediately) away, as a sort of micro-violence towards the children
that contributes to their constant sense of loss.
Overall, the physical, physiological and psychological abuse form the thematic axis, an isotopic
recurrence, which generates meaning through and beyond repetition. Giménez offers testimonial
stories regarding the systematic abuse to which the children in the ‘Hogar’ had been submitted
under the guise of falangist charity. In Paracuellos, the hogares de auxilio are homes of confinement,
violence, humiliation and deprivation; their Christianity a crooked prolongation of military exercises
and gratuitous punishment, relying on vertical state power structures – the backbone of fascism,
with children at the bottom. Hunger, systemic and systematic violence, humiliation, the folds of the
early Francoism and the Falangist moral are inscribed within the microcosm of class, which tends
to converge the losers and the poverty-stricken. The ‘Homes’ confine the new poor of the post-war.
These are the unfortunates suffering acute poverty, often also burdened by the stigma attached to be
the offspring of Republican parents.
Paracuellos generates an atmosphere of pathos and fear, articulated by the constant presence of a
sort of gratuitous, rather than solely repressive violence, which looms as a perpetual suspended threat.
This invisible persistent horror engenders a morbid poignancy that impregnates its continuity in the
graphic reading experience of violence through the panels of Paracuellos. In other words, the closure
that McCloud postulates (1999: 107) relies on pathos and a violent continuum; not only in terms of
the execution of violence, but also regarding its spectrality as the aforementioned continuously loom-
ing threat. This effect is delivered through close-ups, embodied by the gazes, through short shots that
sometimes foreshadow violence or focus in, graphically, on the victim mid-punishment, reinforcing
the ability to affect and be affected. When not instigated among peers, as in the opening chapter,
violence is often projected from one body to the others, experienced individually and, intragenera-
tionally, as a group (Figure 5), forming a set of common memories of abuse and graphic violence
and, ultimately, having Paracuellos become a site of (common) memories – individually and internally
experienced by a certain generation (within certain demographics) in Spain after 1939.

Oral history and common memories of abuse

Paul Ricoeur defined generational transition as a process in which wound and suture occur at the
same time, intertwine (2006: 514). However, this process can take place beyond simple vertical

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Xosé Pereira Boán

Figure 4: Paracuellos: Children of the Defeated in Franco’s Fascist Spain, 2016: 19 (courtesy of Carlos
Giménez ©).

252  Studies in Comics
 Forging intragenerational and common memories

Figure 5: Todo Paracuellos 2014: 113 (courtesy of Carlos Giménez ©).

transfers and feedback between generations – as a track baton in dispute, but ultimately passed
along. Both the wound and the healing process can also take the circular shape of a horizontal,
intragenerational community. As a gathering around a bonfire, participants throw their own baton
into the flames, which rather than suturing, invite the cauterizing of the open wound. Although the
remaining scar, be that made by thread or fire, may stay indelible, the haunting spectre formed by
an aggregate of silences might finally be vanished by those oral (hi)stories, a collection of common
4. See De la Fuente Soler
memories.
(2011: 274) and Merino Carlos Giménez’s Paracuellos is often shown as a pioneering example of collective memory.4
and Tullis (2012: 213). However, I would like to point out the productive critiques by Avishai Margalit (2002) and Wulf
Kansteiner (2002) regarding Maurice Halbwachs’ conception of collective memory (1989). Both
authors contribute terminological nuances. Margalit distinguishes shared memory from common
memory. The first would be closer to the idea of collective memory in its function of integrating
and calibrating ‘the different perspectives of those who remember an episode’ (2002: 51) into one.

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Xosé Pereira Boán

However, Paracuellos, despite the integrated and calibrated immanence that underlies any cultural 5. ‘todas las anécdotas
están extraídas, repito,
work in its entirety, approaches what Margalit understands as common memory, since it ‘aggre- de hechos reales. Todo
gates the memories of all those people who remember a certain episode which each of them expe- lo que he contado
rienced individually’ (2002: 51). Giménez recalls individual memories – testimonies – in the mode sucedió en realidad […]
Esta documentación se
that Kansteiner distinguishes collective memory from what he designates ‘collected memories’ (2002: compone de fotografías,
186) and configures an aggregate final in which everyone is as much a part as a sum. cartas, textos diversos,
Giménez has retrieved and collected more than curated those memories in the case of Paracuellos: recortes de periódicos
[…] pero sobre todo,
‘all the anecdotes are collected, I repeat, from real events. Everything I have told happened in reality de grabaciones’
[…]. This documentation is composed of photographs, letters, a range of texts, newspaper clippings (Translation is mine).
[…] but above all, from recordings’ (2016: 19)5. Giménez, thus, delivers an obliterated set of oral (hi)
stories through a multiplicity of voices he transfers to the graphic medium. The representational
syntax is linked to the classical understanding of memory, ‘which is defined by the two activities
of collection and recollection, of storing and retrieval’ (Rossington and Whitehead; Richards 2008:
20). For this myriad of experienced, retrieved and collected anecdotes, Giménez makes use of oral
history as a mode of textual production that does not seek to calibrate the composition towards
the production as a whole (the one-shot formula), according to Margalit’s shared memory and
Kunsteiner’s collective memory nuances. He inserts these oral testimonials in the graphic medium,
the batons that each one of them has experimented individually and contributes to the open bonfire
of common (Margalit) / collected (Kunsteiner) memories. If we consider the text boxes themselves as
the diegetic narration – a reading voice-over, and speech balloons as mimetic narration – to be read
in a ‘speech voice’, then Giménez relegates or completely erases the diegetic voice. He (con)cedes
the (diegetic) word and empowers the mimetic device to hand over the plethora of intragenerational
anecdotes within the post-war Hogares. Ultimately, Giménez accomplishes in his work what Cenarro
argues surrounding the historiographical approach to those Francoist ‘homes’: ‘Oral history allows a
“bottom up” approach to the topic of Francoist welfare, providing knowledge about everyday life in
Auxilio Social children’s homes’ (2008: 41). Giménez explains the process in the introduction of Todo
Paracuellos:

The most customary procedure of collecting facts, anecdotes and histories has consisted of
meeting in three or four around a recording device, with a few beers […] everyone sharing a
bit, myself included, the histories we are collecting as they come to mind.
(2014: 20)

The characters experience a pattern of violence – both individually and collectively – which gener-
ates a commonality. In each anecdote, one or two kids enter a scene, to later give way to another
character, which without the need to be tied beyond the aforementioned common experience of the
violence, humiliation and the deprivation, contributes to the intragenerational microcosm, to this

254  Studies in Comics
 Forging intragenerational and common memories

compound of subjectivities that were systematically abused by the Falangist paladins during their
prevalence in early autarkic Francoism (1939–53). These collected episodes constitute, primarily, their
own history that cannot arise in the midst of the transition, in the midst of the silence of the forgot-
ten group among both public and official marginalization.
The oral archive and the graphic narratives coalesce in the rescue of a generation ignored by
official history until the resurgence of Paracuellos two decades later and, especially, with the publish-
ing of the consolidated Todo Paracuellos at the peak of Spanish cultural memory boom in 2007 –
thirty years after the initial release of the first volume. Giménez remakes the memories of others
of his generation as his own, and vice versa, in this palimpsest of anecdotes that are retrieved and
compiled, driven by the violence inscribed on them by the regime. The regime of violence becomes
graphically imprinted on the reader by means of its own continuity, pivoting between presence and
absence, scarcity and loss, inhabiting the inside of the ‘homes’, as a dominant spectre, as a device
that confines characters, vehiculated through individual memories of common experiences of multi-
modal violence, becoming a vicariously shared collective memory with the reader-viewer. This is
ultimately an intragenerational account that passes a wound without suture as an intergenerational
memory of the Spanish dictatorial times. That intertwining of wound and suture was broken by the
intergenerational gap provoked by the transition to democracy, in which ‘disregarding the sin rather
than [just] forgetting it’ (Margalit 2002: 197) prevailed. During the Spanish transition, public powers
and actors were both fond of and/or compromised or obliged to disregard those episodes in favour
of a viral pact of silence, imposed by the threatening spectre of a violent and repressive past, which
quietly integrated a regime of violence within democracy without accountability.

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www.intellectbooks.com  255
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Suggested citation
Pereira Boán, Xosé (2020), ‘Forging intragenerational and common memories: Revisiting Paracuellos’s
graphic violence in times of confinement’, Studies in Comics, 11:2, pp. 245–57, https://doi.
org/10.1386/stic_00027_1

Contributor details
Xosé Pereira Boán is an assistant professor at SUNY Oswego in contemporary Iberian studies and
Latin American cinemas.
Contact: Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, 244 Poucher Hall, SUNY Oswego,
Oswego, NY, 13126, USA.

256  Studies in Comics
 Forging intragenerational and common memories

E-mail: xosepereira.boan@oswego.edu

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8578-3312

Xosé Pereira Boán has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

www.intellectbooks.com  257
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