Reconstruire l’archive testimoniale : autour de Maus et de MetaMaus d’Art Spiegelman

Abstract

This article means to examine the way in which the presence of archives in the comics form becomes the locus of the transmission of traumatic memory, through a study of Art Spiegelman’s acclaimed graphic novel, Maus, in which the artist strives to reconstruct his father’s oral testimony of the Holocaust and dramatizes his own post-traumatic experience of history. This study also focuses on the materiality of the process of archiving and reconstructing memory, at work in MetaMaus, an intermedial creation published in 2011, in which the artist revisits, twenty-five years after the publication of Maus, his own artistic project. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theorization of the archive in Archive Fever, this article therefore questions Spiegelman’s unending reconstruction of his archival material in the light of the crisis of representation in the context of postmemory.