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Memory in Camouflage: Alberto Breccia and Guillermo Saccomanno's "William Wilson" as Catalyst for Memory

Theory, Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a minor medium such as comics—specifically, Alberto Breccia's version of Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson"—used its counter-censorial potential to activate memory in a context stifled by harsh repression. Through the development of several reading hypotheses, the author demonstrates how Breccia's drawings allow for a decoding that runs counter to the signification imposed by the Argentina junta of 1976-83. By recontextualizing the transfer to comics and by detaching the images from Poe's source text, the analysis diverges from traditional adaptation studies, which privilege words (the "original") over images (the adaptation itself). Instead, the analysis foregrounds the specificity of the Latin American cultural framework as one of camouflage, in which encryption and decoding are central and potentially empowering. This utopian thrust is located in the comic's appeal to memory, which runs directly counter to a censorial logic intent on erasing and forgetting.