El impacto de la violencia en la identidad narrativa: una aproximación desde los estudios del discurso: Caso: Persépolis de Marjane Satrapi

Abstract

In this contribution I discuss the theme of violence and its impact on identity within the graphic novel Persepolis (2000-2003). The author of this multi-modal autobiographical discourse, Marjane Satrapi, recounts her individual experience of the Iranian revolution and the establishment of the Islamic regime of the late 1970s. The corpus is composed of two sequences, which I have selected according to the epiphanies of the author—(1) the death of her friend Neda and (2) her forced migration to Europe—to demonstrate how these moments of identity transformation within the discourse are linked to different forms of violence. Each sequence is analyzed with the biographical-narrative method and with tools from both multimodal discourse analysis and identity studies. Part of the results show that the narrator uses various evaluative elements inscribed within the iconic and linguistic semiotic resources, which allow to evaluate the events and the actions of one’s own and of others. With this, it is evident that subjective-systemic violence transformed the subject in two ways: into a brave woman and into a woman uprooted from her culture and family ties. In conclusion, the subject is disturbed by contextual factors—not only historical, but political, social, and cultural—that condition her to change over time. The above is configured by the narrator in the doubly articulated story and in the different models of action that affect, mainly, her identity-ipse.