| MAUS |
1. What is the nature of the event?
2. How does the event encompass the story?
3. How do the perspectives of the author and reader merge?
"Two clocks dominate the landscape of Holocaust testimonies, a time clock and a space clock. They seek to sensitizeour imaginations with two currents of remembered experience. One flows uninterruptedly from source to mouth, or in more familiar historical terms, from past to present. The other meanders, coils back on itself, contains rocks and rapids, and requires strenuous effort to follow its intricate turns, turns that impede the mind's instinctive tropism toward tranquility." (Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies)
As I stated earlier, many of the themes in American literature that we covered this year were related to or direct consequences of instances of death or personal tragedy. Beloved, Ceremony, Moby Dick and Maus were driven by the death or harm of someone very near to the main character or narrator. Every author that we have read this semester deals with tragedy grounded at some level by the apparent realization of the frailty of human morality or more simply, the death of someone very close. Therefore, the intense nature of the events stem from not only traumatic experience, but do so in such a way as to invite the authors to pour personal conjecture into the novel. The authors use different techniques to explicate their opinions through the characters. At this point I would like to introduce an alternative explanation of the warrant that propels the various novels.
"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 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." Sarah Toner, "Boundaries in American Literature: Transcendable Divisions vs. Fixed Barriers"
There is an inter-cultural boundary that was an intrinsic component of the tension witnessed in all of the books. However, I believe the universal effects of death strike closer to the core of the authors messages. Death leaves things in the finite. The restrictions of our language, to express all the feelings and emotions that accompany such an event, is what fuels the tension between the author and the reader. Ultimately, the tragedy are best described as something to large to restrict them from objective discussion. The inability of the author's character to disassociate these events from the time period they occured in and the present lead to a paralleling theme of impenetrable borders.
"Deep memory tires to recall the Auschwitz self as it was then; common memory has a dual function: it restores the self to its normal pre- and post camp routines but also offers detached portraits, form the vantage point of today, of what it makes have been like then. Deep memory this suspects and depends on common memory, knowing what common memory cannot know but tries nonetheless to express." (Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies)
The interesting lesson from this section is the frequency of the tragedy of death. Each author exposes a dimension of the frailty of human mortality. Murder, extermination and the fear that haunts those who have witnessed immense examples of unnatural death are arguably irreparable. The character's persona is forever affected by this encounter with death