Hierarchies of Pain

Trauma has become a pervasive cultural model for representing individual and collective injuries and suffering. This process has produced what may be called a trauma aesthetic, a set of recognizable tropes in widespread use in trauma narratives. This chapter examines the adoption of this aesthetic in graphic narratives, focusing on the special capacities of the form. Familiar tropes, such as dissociation and the somatic trace, are presented in complex combinations of visual and textual components, often exploiting the differential appearance of text and image to introduce a dynamic of belatedness or disarticulation. This chapter analyses five works ordered according to their diminishing reliance on ‘trauma’. The trauma aesthetic is used, though not explicitly, in Catherine Meurisse’s La Légèreté (2016) about the Charlie Hebdo attack, Jean-Philip Stassen’s Déogratias (2000/2006) about the genocide in Rwanda, and Emmanuel Lepage’s Un printemps à Tchernobyl (2012) about the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. By contrast, it is absent from Mazen Kerbaj’s Beirut Won’t Cry (2007/2017) about the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and Josh Neufeld’s A.D. about Hurricane Katrina (2009). These works’ reliance on formalized and sanctioned trauma tropes not only is influenced by narrative characteristics, such as temporal distance from the event or the presence of a single narrator-protagonist but may also be motivated by the prestige conferred by trauma as recognized suffering, affecting the canonization and translatability of the graphic narratives in question