Memory

                                                Auschwitz

                                                Unspeakable

                                                Stories

The title of an award winning holocaust literature MAUS by Art Spiegelman may stand for the following four words: Memory, Auschwitz, Unspeakable, and Stories.  The book tells us the story of a Holocaust survivor through Speigelman's interview of his own father. Although the book is written, or rather drawn, in a comic fashion, the content of this comic book is far deeper than one can imagine.  Toni Morrison spoke the following in her speech given at the acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1996:
There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war.  It is larger than that. The peace I am  thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo.  The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one--activity that occurs most often in the reading/writing world we live in.  Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrant vigilance. . . . Underneath the cut of bright and dazzling cloth, pulsing beneath the jewelry, the life of the book world is pretty serious.  Its real life is about creating and producing and distributing knowledge; about making  it possible for the entitled as well as the dispossessed to experience one's own mind dancing with another's; about making sure that the environment in which this work is done is welcoming and supportive.  It is making sure that no encroachment of private wealth, government control, or cultural expediency can interfere with what gets written or published.  That no conglomerate or political wing uses its force to still inquiry or reaffirm rule.  Searching that kind of peace--the peace of the dancing mind--is our work, and, as the woman in Strasbourg said, 'There isn't anybody else.  (The Dancing Mind)

 Spiegelman's "Dance of an open mind," with which he explores the unspeakable past of his father in a unique fashion, the readers are allowed to engage themselves into the pleasurable act of "reading."  I would like to explore this new style of writing in the order of the four words that may be derived from the title itself.

I. Memory: How Human Beings construct memories ~ Cyclical or Linear ~

In one of the interviews, Spiegelman speaks of the construction of people's memory as something that is non-chronological.  When one is asked to speak about the memories of his/her high school days, one may begin by speaking about the most memorable events in his/her high school days, which will not necessarily come in a chronological order.  He/she may start by sharing about the prom night, and then the Homecoming games, and  then the tournaments that one might have participated.  Clearly, the way in which we recall the memories of the past is not always "chronological" ; different events and matters have different meanings to each of us, which makes our memories non-linear unlike a timeline in a history book.  As Vladek, Art's father, remembers and speaks of his past experiences, we see how Art struggles to get the stories from him in chronological order.

 

The way in which Vladek struggles to recall the painful memories in order might be a reflection of the two kinds of memories clashing into each other: Deep Memory and Common Memory.  In the book Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, by Lawrence Langer, Langer speaks of these two memories as the following:
Deep memories tries 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, from the vantage point of today, of what it must have been like then.  Deep memory thus suspects and depends on common memory, knowing what common memory cannot know but tries nonetheless to express. (6) 
The stories that Vladek "reremembers" at Auschwitz are something that are stored in his deep memories, and when he speaks of it, although it is still hard to recapture every moment that he is speaking in its fullness, he tries to do so; however, the difficulty of bringing the stories back to life with his common memory is a challenge for the speaker, because of the fact that Vladek himself has already outlived the struggles at Auschwitz.  Living in this society today, the survivor faces a difficulty of actually facing what he/she had done in order to survive in Auschwitz.  There is no one to condemn him/her for what one did, however, the whole event appear to the survivor as something hideous and humiliating now that one is liberated.  Thus as we see in the book, Vladek tends to go off tracks and speak of the horrible past rather in an unemotional manner. One of the survivor speaks in the Memories and Visions Section of Prologue of L'CHAIM his guilt of surviving the Holocaust as the following:
I am also concerned about my sons. I have never told them anything about my life. How will they respond? They have never asked, and that was fine with me, for I never felt worthy to have children that loved me, because I am not able to forgive myself for having survived. Survivor's guilt is so insurmountable, that it becomes a factor in coping with life; from that moment on. 

On the other hand we see a son who tries to keep his father on track so that he will speak the memories chronologically in order to fulfill his desire of keeping the memory alive.  John McGowan writes in his essay on MAUS as the following:  "One of the most frequent themes in the lives of the children of survivors is the desire to keep the memory alive."  Art's act of actually writing this "Survivor's Tale," is not only to recapture the horrible event of the Holocaust, but it is also for him to try to fulfill his desire of being able to feel the "pain" which his father felt back in the old days.  What we see as a wall between Vladek and Art is not a simple generation gap: it is a desire to "experience" the unspeakable past. At one point Art portrays himself wearing a mask of a mouse and telling Pavel after his father's death the following: "No matter what I accomplish it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz" (46). We see the one who tries to capture the memories in its fullness feels overwhelmed by the power that each of the memory enhances, which leaves a child of a survivor inferior to his father and rather helpless.  As a matter of fact, we see how Art's portrayal of himself when being interviewed gets smaller like a tiny baby mouse, and visually, we are convinced that Art feels "smaller" not only against the "memories" that his father speaks, but also against his father.  As Antonio Oliver says in his essay on MAUS, "The evil past of the Holocaust is unspeakable, unexplainable, but above all, unforgettable." 

Remember that it is easy to save 

II. Auschwitz: Oral and Written History

I have always believed that human beings are one of the best texts in life.  In The Survivor's Tale: MAUS is Art Spiegelman's attempt to write a book of a horrible event in the human history, the Holocaust, using his father's Oral history as a source.  In the essay, Of Mice and Memory, Joshua Brown calls Art Spiegelman as "a skilled oral historian." Throughout the book, not only do we see Art acting as "a skilled oral historian," but also we see how he tries to obtain the information in a more "written history" manner; that is, he tries to obtain the stories in chronological order as if he was trying to write a section on Holocaust in one of the history texts. The stories of the horrible past reach the readers going through two levels.  One is Art's conversation with his father which is the actual acquiring of the Oral history, and the second is Art's interpretation of his father's "Oral History."  In the CD-ROM version of MAUS how Art goes through several rough drafts in completing the final draft; each time the words in the bubbles change, and as a matter of fact, they  sometimes differ from the tape-recording of the interview with Vladek.  It is important that the "oral history" may "evolve" in its natural manner, because what is spoken by the "speaker," and the interpretation of it may differ with each "listener."  However, this does not mean that the history itself loses the accuracy of the events; one has to come to accept that there is a different fashion through which history has to be carried through, and "Orally," is just one example of it.  In the interview with Brown, Art comments on the difficulty of keeping the "Oral history" linear:

          This is my father's tale. I've tried to change as little as possible. But it's almost impossible not to 
          [change it] because as soon as you apply any kind of structure to material, you're in trouble--as 
          probably every historian learns from History 101 or whatever. Shaping means [that] things that 
          came out [in an interview] as shotgun facts about events that happened in 1939, facts about 
          things that happened in 1945, they all have to be organized. As a result, this tends to make my 
          father seem more organized than he was For a while I thought maybe I should do the book in a 
          more Joycean way. Then I realized that, ultimately, that was a literary fabrication just a s much 
          as using a more nineteenth century approach to telling a story, and that it would actually get 
          more in the way of getting things across than a more linear approach.

With "oral history," one has the advantage not to leave things out; one is capable of putting things in, such as the conversations between Art and Vladek we see in the book, that is off-track from the actual Holocaust accounts.  The history comes out of Vladek's mouth with life of its own, and Art interprets them to turn them into a "written and drawn" history, which is the completion of this piece of art MAUS.  Although in our society today there is a fixed notion of how history can only be legitimized when it is "written," when we go and read some of the books written on holocaust, we realize how they might be misleading one to a history without any "life" of its own except for "denial."
"In Auschwitz wurde niemand vergast." 
written by Markus Tiedemann  ("Nobody was gassed at Auschwitz.": 60  Rightist Lies and How to Counter Them"), 

III. Stories and Storytellings: Unspeakable Stories

In the Atomic Memories section of Remembering Nagasaki, there is a comment as the following on the stories he heard from her mother about the bombing of Nagasaki:
It never seemed completely real to me. I think my mother's matter or factness had something to do with that. It wasn't that I didn't think it was horrible -- I knew and felt that it was -- it just seemed very far away -- very far removed from my existence and the things I felt were real (I am speaking of the time when I was about 5-6 ). 

In her comment he said that all he got from his mother about the bombing was that "she was not harmed at all -- but lost a cousin and an uncle," which shows no emotions, but facts.  Now, can we say that his mother had no feeling of terror as she spoke about the horrible past?  When one tries to recall something so horrible in one's life, it is often the case that one tends to simplify the event so that it is bearable; or sometimes one would never speak of the "unspeakable stories" of the past.  In one of the responses to Beloved and various Holocaust sites, one of our classmates (anonymous essay #3) wrote the following:

It seems that in reference to Beloved, people "speak about the unspeakable" in the most matter-of-fact terms as possible; as if to avoid an emotional recollection of the horrible event. These "unspeakable" memories are often recollected in a fragmented form, as if they are unnaturally forcing themselves into the consciousness of the character whenever an experience allows them to do so. 

In MAUS, we clearly see how the stories of how Vladek survived the Holocaust is the most important thing in constructing the book.  Although Vladek speaks about something so painful that makes it "Unspeakable," we see how through his telling the stories, not only does Vladek begin to admit that this really happened along with the death of Anja, but also Art beginning to accept the horrible past as well as accepting himself for not being able to experience what his father had gone through.  As we see in MAUS,  it is true that by telling the "Unspeakable stories," the healing process follows, and we see the "storytelling" serving as a "healing process, more through Art's act of actually putting his father's stories into one book.

It is Art Spiegelman's way of telling the "Unspeakable stories" with a unique form that makes the book outstanding; with the several layers of paintings, the daily conversations between them, masking of the characters as animals, and finally allowing the readers to peek into even the process of Art creating the book, Art indirectly gives the history of the Holocaust.  Moreover, not only does MAUS serve as a great example of presenting the importance of the "act" of storytelling, but it is also "about" storytelling.  The whole book is reflective on Vladek's words, and those each words carries meaning as they are spoken.  Art receiving those words become connected not only to the past, but also to his father closer than ever.  By reading the book, we are able to hear the stories of the Holocaust through Vladek, but also the stories of how a son and a father becomes united through the act of "storytelling," by its very form of the book.  Doug Boin cites the following in his essay on MAUS:

The importance of oral history ( click here and check out the oral history of the survivors) is clearly seen in this relationship. In Melus, Staub argues that without talking about the past, these two would, in fact, have no relationship: 'MAUS clearly documents how the son's ambivalence towards the father in the present immensely complicates the work of reclaiming and representing the world of Vladek's past' (Staub 34). 

Unlike the diaries of his mother, Anja, that were burnt and destroyed by Vladek, the words that Vladek spoke will remain in Art's  mind and heart as well as ours. The unspeakable stories that are bled with the blood of Vladek and other countless Jews will continue to be carried through overtime.