Memory and History in Maus and Austerlitz: Recovering from Trauma through Remembering, Forgetting, and Sensemaking - Essay Example

? Memory and History in Maus and Austerlitz: Recovering from Trauma through Remembering, Forgetting, and Sensemaking 8 January Testimonials and autobiographies are some of the common ways of recording and sharing personal and collective histories. This essay believes that these forms have been entrenched into new ways of narratives, including the comics or commix and novel forms. They are called hybrids, where fact and fiction combine, and which compel some scholars to question their authenticity. Cowan (2010) echoed the concerns of scholars that historical prose, such as Austerlitz, will be accepted as factual, when for him, Sebald reconstructs the past through his own limited interpretations of it. Costello (2006) agreed with the idea that memories are unusual sources histories. She asserted that Spiegelman’s Maus cannot be historical in traditional terms. Despite these apprehensions of the factual essence of these hybrid historical works, this essay believes that these works present memories that help record, transmit, and make sense of history. Memory becomes a process of remembering, forgetting, and understanding the Holocaust history, both for survivors and their second-generation children, and this process is vital in directly and vicariously recovering from its longstanding trauma. Memory is used to support, not replace, history by documenting and sharing it through the minds of its survivors, understanding both its weaknesses and strengths. Memory transmits and records the past through survivors. Art Spiegelman learns what the Holocaust has been through his father’s memory of it. His medium, which he prefers to call as “commix,” uses the power of mixed image and text to be more faithful to what the human mind records as memories. Young (1998) cited Spiegelman, who quoted Swiss educational scholar and writer Rodolphe Topffer (1799-1846): “The drawings without their text would have only a vague meaning; the text without the drawings would have no meaning at all. The combination makes up a kind of novel-all the more unique in that it is no more like a novel than it is like anything else” (‘C,’ 61, cited in Young, 1998: 672). Art tries to help his father and himself to remember the Holocaust because remembering is a critical aspect of ensuring its validity as their history. Vladek Spiegelman constructs the past as he narrates it, while his son records them through his animal characters. Vladek’s memories and his son’s artistic rendering produce a triangulation of meaning of the Holocaust and its impacts on them as a family and as individuals (Young, 1998: 672). Young (1998) believed that this form of “a mental language may not be reproducible, but it is part of any narrative just the same” (672). As an old man, Vladek’s memories may be seen as flawed, but their reality to his life cannot be reduced. His stories are personal accounts of the Holocaust as it directly affected him and his family, his people and his faith. While Art cannot commit to history as it is, the way historians can or say they must, he admits that he does this because he cannot write about the horrors of the Holocaust as it is. His humour and sarcasm in Maus enables him to write about it as a writer and as a second-generation survivor. Commix becomes a lighter, but not less valid, way of narrating the Holocaust. Austerlitz offers a different way of remembering and recording the past. Cowan (2010) suggested reading it with caution, but he commended the rhetorical value of the text in describing Holocaust as a narrative. He provided the example of journalistic report of Henri Lemoine's brief, ten-sentence account, which summarized seven pages of news: “...Sebald created an artfully composed and logically paced statement,” and this “avoids any suggestion of sentimentality or melodrama, and whose very understated conversational tone intensifies its rhetorical impact” (72). Sebald uses narrative prose to document Holocaust history, but he does it in a tone that seeks for objectivity, an objectivity that his character, Austerlitz, wanted, so that he could attain a better understanding of his identity sans its potentially emotionally devastating effects. Furthermore, Austerlitz determines his true history through the photographs and memories of the past. In doing so, his collection of multimedia becomes essential to recording and sharing history too. He bequeathes to the narrator his house and accumulated photographs and said: “I could stay there whenever I liked, he said, and study the black and white photographs which, one day, would be all that was left of his life” (Sebald, 2001: 408). His present is an extension of the past, and what the survivors left to him is something that he can share with others too. Aside from showing him what is left, the pictures of the past give memories of history that cannot be changed. His past is shrouded in mystery and history, and only the pictures allow him to know something of it, no matter if they are vestiges of the past and his making sense of it: Histories, for instance, like those of the straw mattresses which lay, shadow-like, on the stacked plank beds and which had become thinner and shorter because the chaff in them disintegrated over the years, shrunken – and now, in writing this, I do remember that such an idea occurred to me at the time – as if they were the mortal frames of those who once lay there in that darkness. (Sebald, 2001: 30–1). He does not want to forget his history in darkness. He wants to know, to remember, and to participate in the historical pain of his family again, even if it means rendering public what is so torturous to the self. The sharing of the past is personal and public. He knows and accepts that his life intertwines with the Holocaust and its gruesome consequences. Memories are not fully accurate representations of history, but they are critical to forming history as a “remembrance” of histories through vivid and fragmented narratives. Vladek has ways of including seemingly inane bits of facts or stories of his life, which Art and readers have no way of verifying, but they are elements of his memories, which influence his way of seeing and un-seeing the Holocaust. For instance, Vladek does not begin his story with Anja but with an earlier girlfriend Lucia. On the one hand, it seems that Vladek is digressing and this frustrates Art. On the other hand, his memory of Lucia launches his memory of Anjan. The mesh of memories indicates that they are important cmemories, not only individually, but as a whole. Moreover, Maus and Austerlitz demonstrate that pictures are tangible and meaningful evidence of the past, in as much as they record what is, although how people interpret and remember their connections of the photos are integral to the shaping of the Holocaust’s collective narratives. Fragmented memories in Maus intersect Art’s and Vladek’s personal and collective memories. Art remembers being wounded as a child because of his friends. Vladek tells him that he will know who is real friends are when they are locked in one place for a week without food. These memories bind meaning to history based on how people remember and share them. Osborne (2007) cited Richard Crownshaw who aimed to understand how the images in Austerlitz can be used as “affective conduits for the transmission of trauma,” when this material evidence occurs as “a spectral residue seen only on the point of oblivion” (232, 222 cited in Osborne, 2007: 518). They are residues because by virtue of being taken by someone, this someone is the one who gives meaning to them. Subjectivity affects the sensemaking of history through hypermedia products. The numerous voices in these works attempt to find histories in history. In addition, photos and images indicate that time builds and erases boundaries to history. Austerlitz remarked on the nothingness of time, which makes memory hard to measure, thereby difficult to understand and to recollect: “[time] is by far the most artificial of all our inventions” and that “being bound to the planet turning on its own axis [is] no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees” (Sebald, 2001: 141 – 42). Memory cannot be history itself because it comes from various voices and materials. Their sources are rich and they enrich history as pieces of histories. Kouvaros (2005) emphasised that memories are problematic instances of the past, although they represent individual and collective ways of remembering it: “various photographs scattered through Sebald’s writings are both a means of communicating with the dead and crucial to the way he writes the dilemma of memory other than as a process of conscious remembrance” (174). The remembrance provides history the colour and texture of human frailty and spirit. Other Holocaust survivors and children prefer to forget their Holocaust memories, not because they want to demean its memory, but because of the pain it brings. Art wants to use his time to build his memory and the Holocaust history. His motive is personal because of his need to understand his father, but at the same time, his commix enables him to shed light on the essential histories of the Holocaust from important people in his life. The memories in Maus and Austerlitz are conscious efforts to record both history and trauma that time can similarly build and erase. Memories enable Holocaust survivors to understand what it means and to ironically get away from its meaninglessness through purging deep memory. Maus offers survivor testimony to help survivors comprehend how the Holocaust shaped their lives and identities, which enables them and the public in recording common and deep memory. Friedlander defined and differentiated common and deep memory. Common memory “tends to restore or establish coherence, closure and possibly a redemptive stance,” while deep memory stays “essentially inarticulable and unrepresentable, that which continues to exist as unresolved trauma just beyond the reach of meaning” (cited in Young, 1998: 666-667). These memories cannot be combined seamlessly, Friedlander noted, and “any attempt at building a coherent self founders on the intractable return of the repressed and recurring deep memory”( Young, 1998: 667). What is unstated continue to shape what is stated. Friedlander calls for a way of recording deep and common memory, so that they cannot be irreducible to one another, as Young (1998) described it (667), and the latter believed that Maus attained this goal through the commix form. Art finds out the meaninglessness of the Holocaust through its inhumanity. He cannot help hurting his father in the process, however, because it reveals his deep memory. One time, Vladek calls Art as Richieu, Art’s older brother who died in the Holocaust. This slip of the tongue suggests a longing, a yearning to tell stories to a son who is long dead. Deep memory uncovers unspeakable pains, and memory etches feelings into history that tends to be devoid of it. Recovering deep memory happens in Austerlitz too. Kouvaros (2005) argued that images remember people, instead of people remembering through the former. Austerlitz sees a picture of himself in the costume of the Rose Queen’s page boy. He cannot remember playing this role: I did recognize the unusual hairline running at a slant over the forehead, but otherwise all memory was extinguished in me by an overwhelming sense of the long years that had passed. I have studied the photograph many times since, the bare, level field where I am standing, although I cannot think where it was; the blurred, dark area above the horizon, the boy’s curly hair, spectrally light around the outline of his head, the cape over his arm which appears to be held at an angle or, as I once thought, said Austerlitz, might have been broken or in a splint, the six large mother-of-pearl buttons, the extravagant hat with the heron’s feather in it, even the folds of the stockings. I examined every detail under a magnifying glass without once finding the slightest clue. (Sebald, 2001: 259-260). While he forgets what happened, the picture remembers it for him. Eventually, these pictures enable him to attain pieces of history, which reconstructed his personal and family history too. Memories in images remember what happened, reminding people of what was and what is. Apart from remembering for the sake of history and recording/purging personal pains, the memory of survivors shapes the history of the Holocaust for second-generation kin through their vicarious relationships to the former. Post-memory impacts the integration of narratives into the overall history of the Holocaust. In Maus, Young (1998) argued that the received memory of the past does not aim to produce post-memory that replaces memory. He agreed with Hirsch (1992-1993) who said: [Post-memory] takes us beyond memory or displaces it in any way, but it is ‘distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Post-memory should reflect back on memory, revealing it as equally constructed, equally mediated by the processes of narration and imagination... Post-memory is anything but absent or evacuated: It is as full and as empty as memory itself (8-9). The vicarious nature of post-memory depicts the Holocaust history as a memory of received histories. Alice Kaplan (1989) asked: “What happens to the memory of history when it ceases to be testimony?” (160 cited in Young, 1998: 670). Maus does not attempt to record an accurate account of the Holocaust. It is a son’s way of making sense of his relationship with his father, whom the Holocaust shaped and destroyed to some extent. Spiegelman asserted his vicarious relationship to the past: “Maus is not what happened in the past, but rather what the son understands of the father's story... [It is] an autobiographical history of my relationship with my father, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, cast with cartoon animals” (cited in Young, 1998: 670). Their histories merge and help them reconstruct a horrific aspect of their racial identities. Like Maus, Austerlitz is a story, where the son seeks to reconcile with his family’s memories, but this time, history gives him shreds of memories too. Austerlitz can only attempt to unravel the “marks of pain” of his parents and other victims of the Holocaust (Sebald, 2001: 16). The pictures will never be enough to capture the pains of his family and countless others, recorded or otherwise, who suffered because of anti-Semitism. He knows, nonetheless, that his distance from the Holocaust allows him to both painfully remember the past as an existence of something and as a memory of what is to become. Austerlitz reminds readers that memory helps construct history and the latter’s relation to the future. Austerlitz sees pictures of Breendonk infrastructures outside the Belgian city of Antwerp. The buildings did not help defend the city. Austerlitz feels that the pictures of the past say something about the ruins of the future. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins. (Sebald, 2001: 177). This statement suggests that the past has ruined the future. In other words, the past ruined him, his present, because he has been forcefully detached from his family and roots. These photos are his clutches to the past, the past that cannot be retrieved, and sadly, it cannot be changed too. Its ruins produced his certain ruin as well. Memory helps survivors to heal their trauma, even to the point of possibly changing history in the process. Memory helps survivors and their second-generation children to uncover and remember the trauma. Sebald’s Austerlitz cannot entirely get the facts he needed to establish his family’s past. Restuccia (2005) argued that Sebald use the melancholia of pictures to “confront modern history” as “trauma” (304). She noted the aspect of understanding their trauma through the Holocaust trauma: Even as Sebald avoids using the term ‘Holocaust,’ stresses the tact and tentativeness of his oblique treatment of it, and generally focuses on displaced lives that only gesture toward the horror, he deploys a melancholic photographic mode of writing meant to distinguish him from those Germans who repress their history. (Restuccia, 2005: 304). The pictures make him look, and by looking, he seeks to understand the trauma and his role in it. Maus does not attempt to provide closure or to forget the Holocaust trauma. Costello (2006) used the term “performative memorialisation” as a form of remembering in Maus. She described this process of memorialising the past: Performative memorialization is a layered memorial activity that performs in every Holocaust genre to create a temporally fluid, Bakhtinian dialogic between the author and the subject (memory) and the event and the audience (history)-combating tendencies toward collective amnesia or foreclosure (Costello, 2006: 51). She believed that writing the commix is transformative for Art. He learns the horrors of the Holocaust by listening and by writing. Memory becomes more complex through various conversations- son and father and son within himself. Memory becomes and changes history in the process of its performativity. Another scholar asserts that memory is about remembering “what is” that others might want to suppress. Berlatsky (2003) asserted that political revisionists wanted to see the Holocaust as unfounded, something that Jewish testimonies made up for their personal interests. He commended Spiegelman for dispelling these ideas in a popular form: “Spiegelman here displays both an allegiance to history as factual, as a political necessity to refute the David Dukes of the world, and an acknowledgment that his book is not and cannot be completely nonfiction” (127). Fiction is not ahistorical and apolitical per se. Berlatsky (2003) believed that Spiegelman spoke of the unspeakable for those who could no longer speak about them, and for the written works to remind people that the Holocaust happened and should never happen again. Berlatsky (2003) noted that Spiegelman “created a hybrid category that relies on identity, history, and memory and also visually exposes them as essentialist notions” (127). Memory is history too, especially the memory of the survivors and their children. Apart from validating history, memory is used to forget the trauma of the past. Cowan (2010) asserted that the repressed memories that Austerlitz aimed to discover helped the lead character to heal from and through his past. Austerlitz visited libraries, consulted people and photos, and in the end, he created a “new history” (Cowan, 2010: 66). This history does not make him bury the past, but it eases his pain. Another way of recovering from trauma is folding the past to the present (Restuccia, 2005: 310). Austerlitz extends the past through his description of Lucas van Valckenborch’s sixteenth-century painting through comparing it with folk ice skating on the Schelde River. Austerlitz sees the skaters as though they were in the painting. ‘Looking at the river now,’ he tells the Sebaldian narrator, thinking of that painting and its tiny figures... I feel as if the moment depicted by Lucas van Valckenborch had never come to an end, as if the canary-yellow lady had only just fallen over or swooned, as if the black velvet hood had only this moment dropped away from her head, as if the little accident, which no doubt goes unnoticed by most viewers, were always happening over and over again, and nothing and no one could ever remedy it. (Sebald, 2001: 16). He cannot evade the haunting feeling of the past. It echoes into the present, perhaps even into the future. But by remembering, it is possible that the knowledge gives comfort that without forgetting, the pain somehow subsides. In Maus, Vladek cannot overlook the misery of losing so many family and friends in the Holocaust, so he destroys Anja’s diaries. His son calls him a murderer for this. What Art forgets is that memory remains even after the diaries are burnt. In his mind, Vladek always remembers. Second-generation survivors also want to forget and remember the past. Kohli (2012) quoted Erin McGothlin, who asserted that “postmemorial work performs a crucially double role by recording the personal and historical trauma caused by the Holocaust, and by facilitating the rehabilitation of the second generation to its unlived past” (3). The multilayered aspect of storytelling, receiving, and recording argue that remembering is also forgetting the trauma through these various layers of narratives. The key is remembrance that does not undermine the Holocaust. Remembrance is a sign of respect, a way of healing because it respects the knowledge of reality and its remnants. This essay quotes Young’s (1998) assertions that apply to both Maus and Austerlitz: “...for an essentially reciprocal relationship between the truth of what happened and the truth of how it is remembered” is elementary to making sense of history (698). He continued: “The facts of the Holocaust here include the facts surrounding its eventual transmission to him. Together, what happened and how it is remembered constitute a received history of events” (Young, 1998: 698). The relationship between memory and history in these works are far from being plain and being simple. Memories in these works serve to support, strain and challenge history. They provide a complex depiction of history as histories, where people’s memories and those who receive them are textured fragments of collective histories. Furthermore, these memories construct and reconstruct the past in connection to personal needs and aspirations. At the centre is the trauma of the Holocaust- it can be remembered, but its pains should be forgotten for those who continuously reel from it. Memory continues and shapes history in a dynamic process- changing, living, dying and living again, as they are resurrected in the words and images of Maus and Austerlitz. Bibliography Berlatsky, E. (2003) ‘Memory as Forgetting - The Problem of the Postmodern in Kundera's The 'Book of Laughter and Forgetting' and Spiegelman's ‘Maus,’ Cultural Critique, vol. 55, pp. 101-151. Costello, L.A. (2006) ‘History and Memory in a Dialogic of 'Performative Memorialization' in Art Spiegelman's ‘Maus: A Survivor's Tale,’’ The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 2, pp.22-42. Cowan, J.L. (2010) ‘W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz and the Great Library: History, Fiction, Memory. Part I,’ Monatshefte, vol. 102, no. 1, pp.51-81. Hirsch, M. (1992-1993) ‘Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory,’ Discourse, vol. 15, pp. 3-29. Kohli, P. (2012) ‘The Memory and Legacy of Trauma in Art Spiegelman's ‘Maus,’ Prandium - The Journal of Historical Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp.1-22. Kouvaros, G. (2005) ‘Images That Remember Us: Photography and Memory in Austerlitz,’ Textual Practice, vol. 19, no.1, pp. 173-193. Osborne, D. (2007) ‘Blind Spots: Viewing Trauma in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz,’ Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 43, no.4, pp. 517-533. Restuccia, F.L. (2005) ‘Sebald's Punctum Awakening to Holocaust Trauma in Austerlitz,’ European Journal of English Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 301-322. Sebald, W.G. (2001) Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Penguin. Spiegelman, A. (1986) Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Mid-1930s to Winter 1944). New York: Pantheon Books. ---. (1991). Maus II:A Survivor's Tale: And Here M y Troubles Began (From Mauschwitz to the Catskills and Beyond). New York: Pantheon Books. Young, J.E. (1998) ‘The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman's ‘Maus’ and the Afterimages of History,’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 666-699. Read More