Visualize the past

This essay inaugurates both the collection “ Graphein » published by Le Manuscrit and concludes a seminar cycle on the visual writing of the history of comics. By entering the workshops of comic strip artists who take up history, attentive to the gesture, Adrien Genoudet does not simply offer here a reflection on history and its representation, but on the very writing of history. Questioning the “ cultural history concept » by questioning the notion of the past, he places his reflection within the framework of a renewed cultural history (Pascal Ory signed the preface to the work).

During the second half of XX^e century, the historical community questioned history and memory as two different relationships to the past. Historians and their speeches then took a unique place in the public space, some of them being summoned as experts to judges, politicians or even cultural leaders. As Gil Bartholeyns points out, these two notions do not in themselves exhaust the relationships maintained with the past: it is a question of proposing “ the conceptual separation between “history” and “past” to think about a second degree relationship to the past “.

Adrien Genoudet, following him, notes that “ there is only plural and amalgamated history and if history no longer has any real meaning, we must now explore the cultural practices of history » (p. 39). What story is it about when authors choose to “ draw history » ? To draw is to show what is no longer, from mediated traces which are transmitted and committed over time, to bring to light a past which, because it is graphic, is necessarily visual. In the tradition of Michel Foucault, the author proposes to study the visual genealogy of these images of the past. To better understand them, he chooses dialogue with cartoonists and favors comic strip authors who, through their works, reconstruct the past.

Gestation of the gesture, treatise of the trait

In the first part, Adrien Genoudet endeavors to detect, in the practice of designers, the “ part inspired by the drawing “. He chooses to situate himself “ at the level of the origin, at the level of this “human Vesuvius” of which Zweig speaks, of these hands which tremble and which trace » (p. 21). Firstly, he returns to the forms of learning to draw established over the centuries in the West. He underlines the place of masters, the almost necessary habit of practicing one’s stroke from models, in order to “ copy to learn and get inspired to be original » (p. 61). Learning as appropriation ? Thus, when a designer comes to make his gesture, it is with a “ criterion of art » already loaded.

From another perspective, Adrien Genoudet focuses on a method of teaching history through drawing. Its author, Charles Denizard, invites schoolchildren to familiarize themselves with the story by accompanying a text with shapes to draw, in order to allow students to “visualize the era they are studying» (p. 71). Each student is invited to color them with their own imagination, which results in a unique depiction of history, both close to and distinct from that of their classmate. From this angle, underlines the author, the writing of history is “largely dominated by the past as a visual performance» (p. 73).

The analysis then focuses on the “photo-graphic gesture“. Captured by naturalist painters or by cartoonists, photography is often used to represent a reality. The author focuses more specifically on comic strips, one of whose specificities is to integrate drawing into a graphic sequence. The designer is forgeda mental or inspired visual catalog» (p. 89) to succeed, over the pages, in establishing the story, the evocation, the testimony that he wishes to transmit. Comic book artists often choose to draw inspiration from photography: carrying out documentation work, they imbibe a visual already there to build a backdrop to their story. Drawing on the work of several designers, Adrien Genoudet sheds light on different appropriative processes implemented by the designers.

These uses and appropriations of the photographic image question the researcher for what they have to say “on the cultural practice of history as a science of truth, of the true, even of the probable» (p. 77). Photography seems to be a guarantee of historical truth and to condition the visuality of history. The Great War, like other episodes of the XX^e century, is thought through a set of visual forms whose genealogy, which extends to today, once again underlines the importance of visuality of history in its writing and understanding. That’s the whole point of the book.

Learn from cartoonists

The second part of the essay focuses on two comic book authors, David Vandermeulen, Belgian author, and Séra, Franco-Cambodian author. The workshop of these designers becomes the researcher’s laboratory. From the experimentation of one derive the questions of the other. Adrien Genoudet examines the gesture of these creators in the light of their inspirations, tools and techniques, their sensitivity, to try to detect the performance of the images. Images which are born here in the desire to get as close as possible to a past that they wish to embody through line, in order to show it.

David Vandermeulen, in his series which began with Fritz Haber, and Séra, in two of his works on the Cambodian genocide, demonstrate different ways of showing the past and using the past to achieve a creation. Both reveal the contours of a “recomposed past“. The researcher then attempts to resolve the tension between the singularity of the author and the visual genealogy of his drawing, by analyzing the creative processes he implemented.

The long work of composing the image carried out by David Vandermeulen makes us think about the texture of images of the past. Composed from multiple visual fragments, the author appropriates images from different temporalities and restores them in a subtle game of concordance of times. Through this long work of patina and updating, he re-presents, he gives birth to “a visuality of the Belle Époque tinged with fin-de-siecle and the Great War“. The verisimilitude sought by the designer is just as much “disturbing and engaging» (p. 133): she questions the writing of history and sketches “new questions regarding the cultural notion of the past“.

For her part, Séra’s work is the result of commitment. Starting from a traumatic period and his own contemporaneity, he attempts to put images on a past, of which only few visual traces remain. Unlike David Vandermeulen, some of the sources he uses are shown, “inserted also as images and therefore as components of the past» (p. 142). He wants to create a work of visual history, precisely where history is gaping. In another way, he shows the faces of people who have now disappeared, whose presence he recomposes by appropriating forms that remain.

These deaths observe the reader and thereby challenge him; the author calls him to witness. The past is thus updated in the latent injunction to look and not forget. Through her work, Séra produces “a memorial space» (p. 153).

Continue the investigation

In this work, pride of place has been given to the gesture of the designer, to this charged line which, placed on paper, forms and releases the images of the past. The last part offers a return to the practice of the historian, to his gesture of writing, to his risk of imposture. To write history is to commit; to engage with what has been, to retrace what was with what makes us today.

If Drawing History seems to respond to the idea of ​​“write history», it is possible, perhaps even necessary, to envisage a visual writing of history. This book is betting on it. Viewer, researcher, author: writing a visual history means perceiving past time as visual, confronting the past as a composed image and analyzing “how the visuality of past eras imposes itself on our memories and what is their performance in our contemporary society» (p. 174).

The debate is open. It is to be hoped that future essays in this collection will dig deeper, for example by questioning the form of the comic strip in which the drawing is not produced by the screenwriter. Or again: are there black holes in the representation of history, pasts without images??