In the prologue to his study of moral life in the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag titled Facing the Extreme, Franco-Bulgarian theorist Tzvetan Todorov examines the ‘moral acts’ of Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski’s stories about life in Auschwitz. He juxtaposes the ‘real’ experiences of the ‘real’ Borowski at Auschwitz with those of the author’s central character, also named Tadeusz, given that Borowski’s pitiless accounts of life in Auschwitz are told in the first person. Todorov draws his readers’ attention to a clear distinction existing between author and protagonist (we learn that the ‘real’ Borowski behaved quite differently from his narrative self, his commitment to the well-being of others exceeding the realms of mere devotion), since as a theorist he is primarily interested in the implications of Borowski’s narrative choices. By writing himself in the totality of human degradation and corruption that encircled the hierarchical structure of the camp(s), Borowski, according to Todorov, wrote about the horrors of Auschwitz the only way he saw fit/possible: assuming full responsibility “for the worst humiliation that the camp inflicted on its inmates.” Todorov recognizes this narrative choice on the part of the author as an attempt to expose the world for what it is, a battlefield where humanity engages in survival tactics. In other words, Borowski’s recollected and refigured memories fashion a narrative illustration of the principles behind Social Darwinism, which may account for the absence of ‘little acts of heroism’ on the pages of his collection.
What does this historically and socially detached observation encompass? Do Todorov’s assumptions about Borowski’s choice of an engaging narrative strategy truly reflect on the author’s views about the (re)presentation of morality in an artistic project concerned with life in a totalitarian system?
Tadeusz, the central character of Borowski’s photo-texts, continuously negotiates a pitiful and cynical existence as he reaches for a body in the suffocating darkness of the ramp trains, another man’s trinkets, the residue of a turnip soup container. He declares that “the whole world is really like the concentration camp…the world is ruled by neither justice nor reality…the world is ruled by power”, and we get the feeling that here Borowski is not speaking only from his own ‘hands-on’ experience. Which brings me to another set of difficult questions regarding (re)presentation of the Nazi genocide; how do we talk about testimonial narratives, like Tadeusz Borowski’s photo-texts or Primo Levi’s non-fictional prose, if we, ourselves, have not lived through the experiences they recollect?
Furthermore, how does a writer, an artist (re)present the painful reality of Holocaust pre- and post-mortem survived life if he or she has heard it ‘second-hand’? And, how do we then comment on these historically and spatially detached (re)presentations of survivors’ testimonies?
Do we read the artfully recollected accounts verbatim, assuming that they ‘stand in’ for the missing links of Nazi era history, or do we treat them as we would treat other works of novelistic fiction loosely based on auto/biographical material?
Enter Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus. Unlike Borowski, Spiegelman is not a Holocaust survivor; he did not go through the ‘bestiality’ of camp survival tactics. It was his parents, Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, who lived through the camps, the ghettos, the involuntary incarceration. However, his was an existence made possible because his parents did survive the Jewish Holocaust; he was born as a result of their ‘emergence’. In a sense, he is a second-generation survivor; he gets to live with the realization that his birth is tied to his parents’ pain and suffering during the war years. He cannot undo that pain, it is not possible and maybe not even desirable to do so, but what he can do is try and give it a voice, a face, a pulse. Yet the result of his artistic attempt, the graphic memoir Maus, seems to complicate the issue of (re)presentation even further.
Whereas Borowski decided to portray his chief protagonist as a ‘passive observant’, an accomplice to the annihilation of human life in the camps, and by doing so as a writer subverted the ‘truthfulness’ of his own camp behavior, Spiegelman employs the offerings of visual ‘allegory’ as he weaves in the many threads to his story; namely, he draws the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats, the Polish as pigs, the French as frogs, the Americans as dogs, etc., while picture-telling his father’s and his mother’s story before, during and after the Second World War. It is a useful technique, for the most part, since Maus is a graphic memoir, so the thought process of the reader is sped up while the images and accompanying words are being received. Consequently, we get to see Spiegelman’s characters at the same time we read about them and try to envision them. But not all of his characters are simple animal creatures. For example, while reading through the second part of the Maus epic, particularly in the second chapter titled “Auschwitz (Time Flies)”, we notice that Art is no longer a mouse, i.e., he is a human being hiding behind a mouse mask. The same is true for the other characters appearing early in the chapter; his psychiatrist Pavel, for instance, or the handful of intruding members of the press and ruthless businessmen.
The question beckons then, who is the ‘real’ Art? Is there a ‘real’ Art? Why such a blurring of self when the issue at hand is a graphically rendered (re)presentation of one survivor’s experience?
In her work on Holocaust fiction, Voicing the Void, Sara R. Horowitz reflects on this ‘truthful’ subversive technique behind Art Spiegelman’s artistic work in Maus. Horowitz likens Spiegelman’s graphic choices with those of filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whose testimonial opus Shoah bears witness to the reality of the Jewish Holocaust not by reproducing this reality (Lanzmann does not rely on archival footage to re-present the Nazi regime) but by letting the complex narrative of his subjects unfold almost ‘naturally’, spontaneously, without the cumbersome use of a staged exposition and/or an off-camera commentary. And yet, both Spiegelman and Lanzmann, according to Horowitz, impose their ‘artistic selves’ on their projects so that they, their respective projects, stand to question the possibility of exhibiting ‘truthful’ (re)presentation through artfully recollected bits of history:
Spiegelman’s and Lanzmann’s respective projects challenge the boundaries between art and history. Where these boundaries blur, they imply that one can think better or at least differently about the events of history. The point is not so much to learn the facts directly from the mouths of survivors as it is to break down the cognitive and emotional barriers that keep the past safely in the past for listeners, readers, and viewers.
Hence, The Shoah comes to life in Spiegelman’s graphic (re)presentation through the relationship Art Spiegelman the son has with Vladek and Anja Spiegelman the parents and Richieu, the brother he never truly had. While grappling with his father’s, Vladek’s, recollected memories, looking for a way to talk about his mother’s absence from their lives and at the same time trying to find out ‘what really happened’ to his parents during the War, Spiegelman arranges his work of (re)presentation so that both protagonists and readers actively engage with the enduring acts of re-membering, re-assessing, re-experiencing. Then, to what extent (if any), is his father’s story, Vladek’s story of surviving the Holocaust, and its (re)presentation in the memoir ‘the story’ of Maus, thus making the memoir a (popular) culture-savvy biographic account of Art Spiegelman’s father’s life-story?
Paul John Eakin, a notable guru on autobiographic (re)presentations, examines this issue of ‘whose story is being told’ in Art Spiegelman’s memoir in a larger work of literary criticism titled How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Eakin reads Maus as a complex collaborative autobiography, since the medium of Spiegelman’s narrative choice for the memoir (namely, that of graphic art) complicates the re-telling of the ‘doubled’ autobiographic acts by exposing in plain sight the step-by-step nature of the collaborative process between the ‘informant’ (Spiegelman’s father, Vladek) and the ‘oral historiographer’ (Art Spiegelman himself). The way Spiegelman has chosen to ‘give the public’ his father’s story, going back and forth between the story of his own relationship to his father and the story of his father’s and his mother’s Holocaust survival, according to Eakin, furthers the entanglement of the presentation of the ‘doubled’ autobiographic acts. Eakin calls Art’s story “the story of the story.” And it is “the story of the story” (that is, Art Spiegleman’s work of narrative recovery) that draws the structure of Spiegelman’s memoir. Therefore, Eakin argues that since there is an emphasis being placed by Spiegelman the author on the “performance [aspect] of the [father-son] collaboration”, the two main narrative threads in the memoir, that of the son and that of the father, “are not offered to us on an equal footing.” In that respect, Eakin sees Maus as Art Spiegelman’s autobiography rather than the memoir of his father’s experiences during the war years.
However, as soon as he makes this claim, in his own analysis of Maus, Eakin, ever the craftsman’s critic, is aware of the oversimplifying undertones to this unilateral reading of the memoir. The nature of the power relations between Art and Vladek is one far from simple and easy. Art’s identity as his father’s biographer but also as his father’s son is challenged almost throughout the piece, perhaps most strikingly in those segments where he is no longer a mouse, but a man pretending to be one. In these instances (most vividly portrayed in the second chapter of the second volume of the memoir), we see Art Spiegelman the artist, sitting over his drawing board, which is ‘conveniently’ suspended over a heap of bodies that we come to recognize as (re)presentations of Holocaust victims, exasperating over the implications of his new-found fame status. He wrestles with various reporters and shady entrepreneurs who want him to assist them in furthering the comodification of his father’s story. Unable to deal with this pressure, he consults with his psychiatrist Pavel, a man with a mouse mask, who does not seem to help him entirely alleviate the built-up guilty conscience for exploiting his father’s memories, but at this point in the narrative, we get the feeling that Art Spiegelman does not desire complete absolution for his ‘sins’. Quite the opposite, his growing awareness that the collaboration was somehow lethal to his father’s crumbling health, that he indeed may have played a decisive role in his father’s passing away, contributes to the memoir’s self-explorative undercurrent. Moreover, the fact that Art Spiegelman the artist feels like a con-artist, a cheap scoundrel exploiting the weak for personal gain and profit, compels us to look at Maus as a probing self-recovery story of Art Spiegelman, the son of Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, Holocaust survivors.
Nonetheless, at this juncture in my many readings of Maus, I cannot say that I have come to a bullet-proof understanding of the memoir and all of its (re)presentational implications. The more I return to it, the more overwhelming its form and context seem to be. If indeed Maus is first and foremost the story of artist Art Spiegelman’s self-recovery, then to what degree do we consider Vladek’s story, that is to say, Spiegelman’s (re)presentation of Vladek’s story, to be a truthful account of a survivor’s tale, similar to perhaps that of Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz? But again, what do we mean when we call someone or something ‘truthful’, how are our memories shaped, what do we ‘leave out’ and what do we ‘put in’ as a result of our exposure to the media’s coverage of historical events? The Holocaust occurred at a time in human history when our technological advances had not yet reached the level of today’s ‘perfection’; there are still photographs depicting the Allies’ liberation of the camps, there are also minutes of film documenting these rescues by the British forces, for example, but our understanding of the camps’ horrors is mostly shaped by the narratives of survivors, published in autobiographic or novelistic format, as documentary prose or even poetic inscriptions. The language of the Holocaust has also been based on an absence rather then a presence. More than half a century after the reality of the Nazi genocide, the Holocaust historian Berel Lang informs us that no adequate decision has been reached regarding the issue of ‘linguistic inscription’ for the people who were incarcerated through the Nazi concentration camp system, and almost terminated as a result of its devastating tactics:
When the camps were liberated, beginning in late 1944 and then in 1945, the headlines of the New York Times spoke about the “slaves” discovered in them who were still alive. But the first [Nazi] pair of these terms – Stücke [pieces] and Figuren [fragments] – are indictments of the speakers who use them. And the second and third of those mentioned are, more simply, false: prisoner implies a penal system of some sort, with procedures of judgment and punishment, at the very least of a prison intended to contain or keep the prisoner, and slaves implies that it was the labor these people provided that was a condition of their existence.
The inaptitude of our post-Holocaust language to address the plain facts of Holocaust life suggests that the events surrounding the Jewish Holocaust are somehow out-of-the-ordinary, never before witnessed by the diligent eyes of human history, thus proving to be out of language’s reach. Accordingly, when ‘talking about’, ‘writing of’, ‘re-membering’ this incongruous event, people, artists, survivors are compelled to seek the help of recollected patches of self-memory; these luminal clusters of present-day past re-memberances, where absence and presence take turns, where the historical self undergoes a painfully unavoidable self-invention, offer a way to begin to understand the post-Holocaust life while beginning to comprehend the fragmented semblance of the survivors’ narratives. On that note,
Maus is a graphic memoir which seems to follow in this tradition of fragmented testimonials; however, the ability of the text to move us, to inform us, to make us aware does not solely rely on its incorporation of a ‘survivor’s tale’ but on Art Spiegelman’s distinct way to picture-tell us how this tale became an unalienable part of his own life.
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