Multimodality and the writer’s biography: exploring the prospects and pitfalls of graphic postmemory narratives

This article compares two multimodal works that engage with Holocaust memory from a postmemory perspective: Mauro Caputo’s documentary L’orologio di Monaco (2015), based on Giorgio Pressburger’s 2003 literary text, and Pietro Scarnera’s graphic novel Una stella tranquilla. Ritratto sentimentale di Primo Levi (2013). Both works exemplify how members of the affiliative postgeneration navigate the ethical and aesthetic challenges of representing a traumatic past that they did not directly experience. The article analyzes how each creator negotiates authenticity, self-reflexivity and his role as memory mediator. It demonstrates that Caputo’s film follows testimonial conventions by privileging emotional immediacy through the embodied presence of Pressburger as a witness. Conversely, Scarnera’s road story foregrounds the epistemological challenges of verifying historical traces, while simultaneously creating a metareflexive space in which the narrator critically engages with the constraints of his own postmemory position. While both works highlight the narrative agency of the postgeneration, they simultaneously expose the representational tensions inherent in affiliative postmemory – tensions that emerge from the creators’ positionalities. This dimension of postmemory studies, which concerns the motivations and self-positioning of memory creators without direct familial ties to the Holocaust, has remained largely underexplored in current scholarship.