Contents
(Please note that this essay may be read in any order. It is purposely nonlinear, and does not adhere to any bounds or chronology but is meant instead to transcend time and distance, like the novels and themes on which this study is based.)
Literature embodies the culture from which it originates, from which its author was shaped. More specifically, certain boundaries and dividing lines exist in all cultures; while some traditions are based on an expansive notion and ideas of transcending boundaries, others are rooted in living according to boundaries, and adapting to fit into them. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko and MAUS by Art Spiegelman are both American pieces of literature, each shaped by products of different cultures--accordingly, notions of boundaries are addressed in contrasting ways in the two books, and this becomes evident by the methods with which the two stories are told, how culture is reflected in their plots, and each novel's inter-generational theme.
Silko's Native American background has molded the way she communicates, in particular the way she authors her novels. The Laguna Pueblo tradition of which she is a part is built around an oral history of telling stories. Oral communication is served almost completely by memory, and memory itself is nonlinear, nonchronological, and hence cyclic by nature. Because it is cyclic it is infinite--nothing that is told as a story has a beginning or an end --it merely experiences transitions. Congruous with this, Silko's style of writing Ceremony is cyclic, adhering to no formal boundaries except the ones imposed by the physical nature of the book itself. Likewise, Ceremony's content follows a theme of "boundaries versus transitions," which the novel's entire plot alludes to. The most polar boundaries that Silko talks about are those between the Native American and the American culture. This contrast is one of the central tensions in the book. Additionally Silko includes a transgenerational contingent to the novel: the atomic bomb at Nagasaki is pertinent to both Silko's comtemporary American audience of the 1960's-70's and the Peublo culture.
Art Speigelman's MAUS is a narrative about the Holocaust told by his father, Vladek Speigelman--Art compiled MAUS after numerous conversations with his father about his experience witnessing Auschwitz. This book is similar to Ceremony in that it addresses "boundary issues" of all kinds. First, it confronts the struggle of putting an an oral account of a virtually unimaginable event onto the two-dimensional pages of a book. Culturally, Maus deals with Hitler's key notion in starting the Holocaust: purifying a race in order to put clear, definite boundaries between different groups of people. Finally, MUAS incorperates into its narrative enough dialogue between Art and Vladek for the reader to detect a transgenerational gap dividing them from sharing any true understanding of Vladek's experience. Their relationship thrives on this struggle for understanding; on the tension between Art's desire to find a way to summarize and simplify the Holocaust and Vladek's knowlegde that such an event can't ever be done justice by simplification. In both novels, the narratives are propelled by this type of pull between transcending boundaries and obeying them--while one side of the equation usually prevails, the constant push of the two extremes against one another gives both books an energy that fuels them straight through to their endings. Although, appropriately for Silko, her last page is not in fact any type of ending, but instead she adheres to her notion of transitons, seeing it as transcending the book's physical boundary and moving towards a new phase in the cycle:
"Sunrise,
accept this offering,
Sunrise."
(Silko, p.262)
Ways of Telling: Meeting Barriers
Ceremony is interspersed with stories between the text, as if they were being read orally from the pages. Silko explains in An Interview that in Laguna Pueblo cutlture "each adult works with every child, children belong to everybody and the way of teaching is to tell stories. All information, scientific, technological, historical, religious, is put into narrative form. We remembered it easier that way." Although the stories from her culture are often very literal, they still have "in their deepest level a content that can give the individual a possibility to understand"(An Interview with LMS, Part I). The disparity between the types of text that rub against each other creates its own form of energy fueling the book. The stories with no beginning or end contrast with the novel, which is phsycially required to have a start and finish. What makes any written novel unique as opposed to an oral story is that it is completed before the reader has ever opened the book. An oral story on the other hand is momentary, only existing as it is spoken, existing among whoever is present at the exact moment at which it is told. No method of recording or recalling can recreate a story in the precise way it was communicated previously. While oral traditons and narratives are modified bit by bit every time they are said, this quality also gives them a different kind of value than any printed word has.
MAUS is pulled in two directions as well, though Art Spiegelman handles the pull in an innovative way: He draws the story in cartoons.
For Spiegelman, opting to draw cartoons of the Holocaust, not involving humans at all, was a way to try to indirectly encompass the massiveness of the event. Through oversimplification, Spiegelman entices his readers to realize the very expansiveness of the Holocaust, the uncommunicable horror of Auschwitz. The understated character of his drawings, especially the lack of identity among his mice, compels us to be more aware of the act of attempting to undertand the Holocaust. Use of spare black-and-white sketches of mice(Jews) and cats(Nazis) also forced Spiegelman to boil down his father's stories, reconstructing them only within the bounds of the page's ten-square-inch framework. He chose to keep his working drafts the exact same size as the page the reader sees, according to an interview with him on the MAUS CD Rom. This was done instead of drawing them larger and then condensing them, so that he oculd be more in-tuned to the required mental shrinking of images and words. This was also so that he could be sure he remained on the same level with his readers, making Maus easier to comprehend. According to Josh Brown's essay, Of Mice and Memories, "because the balloons would be about twelve inches high for every two-inch picture," Speigelman had to make decisions as to which parts of his father's extensive accounts to put within the border of the paper. This is why "comics are an art of indication", not an art of overdetermination. A second major difficulty Spiegelman had in creating his book was in attempting to linearize, or make chronological, his father's testimony. In a self-conscious manner, it is apparent through Art's and Vladek's casual discourse the tensions between memory and a linear narrative. Here is a graphic example of this from Maus.
In a cultural sense, both Maus and Ceremony include evidence of one race of people, or ethnic group, imposing their boundaries or regulations on another, usually less powerful, group. Again, resistance between the cultures powers the narratives of each novel. In the context of Ceremony, the white people, who live in a society ruled by boundaries as dividing lines between ownership and status, impose land restrictions on Native American society, which only beleives in boundaries if they are natural and made by the earth, such as mountains or rivers. Pueblo culture sees human-made boundaries as an artificial means of imposing a finite character on things--they prefer instead to view things as infinite, hence beleiving in transitions across any existing boundaries. In the desert of the Southwestern United States where Ceremony takes place, the land is spare and barren, considered worthless to Americans. Nevertheless, Americans have built fences all over this land, marking ownership and divisions. Part of the struggle between cultures in Ceremony is between the worth and worthlessness of boundaries. While living on fenced-in, low-quality peices of land, Native Americans actually combat this by trying to look past such imposing barriers and re-establish their cultural identity. Looking down from the peaceful mountain top, Old Betonie tries to convince Tayo to ignore the American-made "headlights and taillights strung along Highway 66"(Silko,p.128). Betonie argues with him that the white people "only fool themselves when they think [the land] is thiers"(Silko,p.128). He goes on to allude metaphorically to the expansive nature of things through the Native Americans' point of view that "nothing is that simple"(Silko, p.128),and is actually part of a larger, complex web of understanding involving the entire natural earth. Thick cultural irony frustrates the tensions here: Native Americans were forced onto this land because the Americans closed in on them and literally encirled them with extensions of tangled barbed wire fences that physically separated one race/culture from another. Additionally, not only are the Native Americans surrounded by the danger of the physical boundaries on the revervation, but they are boxed in also by nuclear bombing test sites--uraniun streaks the earth's rocks, so permanent damage to her had been done by "the destroyers" (Silko,p.246).
In Maus, the cultural ideologies that actually initiated the Holocaust fit the boudaries theme: In particular, Hitler's goal of purifying the Aryan race, establishing a definite line of division or a boundary between those who were among the "master race," and those who were not. He sited that all non-Aryans, essentially all Jews, should be eradicated because they were contaminating the human race--he felt that they need not be included in any boundaries, certainly not grouped with other humans, since they were vermin. Hitler equated Jews to sewer rats, which is in part what gave Art Speigelman the idea for how to portray his characters in telling Maus in the first place.
One of the problems that comes along with a generation experiencing a devastating event together is the gap of misunderstanding sparked by this event, that usually follows between "the experiencers" and the subsequent generation. This is evident with both the Atomic Bomb at Nagasaki and the Holocaust. The generational divide that is formed is an additional way in which much of our society is shaped by boundaries--this has become an appropriately popular phenomenon to play on in many current works of literature--Ceremony and Muas are no exceptions.
Silko's novel in itself actually tries to put a brigde between this intergenerational apce by appealing to two generations at once. Silko's novel transcends generations through its theme of the atomic bomb at Nagasaki. Most of her literary audience when Ceremony was published in 1978 had experienced the atomic bomb. They probebly were less familiar with its connection to Native American culture, however. This book ties the two together, using the bomb experience as a method of breaking down the barrier between both cultures and generations.
A major part of Maus is consumed by tense dialogue between Vladek and Art: either Art is prodding Vladek to tell his stories in chronological order, or Vladek is badgering Art about his laziness and wastefulness. There is a clear gap in their relationsip, and Spiegelman wants his readers to notice this and relate to it as a frustration experienced by most people in his generation. In addition, Vladek's and Arts' relationship is a personification of the tensions between viewing the Holocaust through an expansive lense and a reductive one. The Holocaust survivors and their contemporaries are equally frustrated by any attempt at communicating the event they lived through via simplified or indicative means. They hold that no boundaries must be utilized in trying to explain it. Hence the resistance Vladek feels when Art is trying to mold him into telling his story in a certain order, or direct him in the way he recounts things. This sentiment is reciprocated when Art tries to imagine the Holocaust from a modern point of view. His solution in retelling it seems to have been to hover nearer to understating the events then overstating them, giving a visually sparer account out of mere respect for something that Speigelman realized cannot possibly be recreated or articulated accurately. The tension portrayed between Art and Vladek is a very real one, and personifying it is probably Art's way of trying to connect with other children of Holocaust survivors.
Shaped by culture, one author writes his book in accordance with boundaries, because that is the only way he can resolve in understanding and communicating so expansive an event. The other author writes her account in the (for her) blissful absence of boundaries, and she has been formed by her own culture to do so. Hence, Silko's and Spiegelman's writing styles and themes are concurrrently indicative of their respective backgrounds. In Ceremony, the conclusion comes with the atomic bomb--where all cultures converge at the hands of the bomb as an omnipotent "destroyer". At this point, all boundaries disappear for a moment, until the apocalypse that inevitably follows. But for that short moment the people combine their powers towards staying alive, ignoring their respective boundaries. The tragedy of the Atomic Bomb and that of the Holocaust are both representative of a struggle created in America that seems to persist through time, that reaches across cultures, generations, and literature. This fact shows the potential triviality of all human-made boundaries, which may be realized with another apocalyptic event like the Bomb or the Holocaust. But is this ultimate tragedy, our destruction, the only result of convergence of peoples and dissolving boundaries? Ceremony points its readers in this direction at the climax of the novel which takes place at Trinity Site in White Sands, where the first atomic bomb ever exploded, and here, one possile answer is laid out for us. Standing at this point, Tayo realized he had "arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid...From that time on, humans were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers had planned for all of them"(Silko, p.246).