Guilt and Representations of the Holocaust in Art Spiegelmans Maus - Essay Example

of Guilt and Representations of the Holocaust in Art Spiegelman’s Maus In a conversation with his wife, the character Art Spiegelman speaks of the guilt that he felt as someone who had not suffered as members of the previous generation. In many ways, both parts of his work Maus seek to come to terms with the guilt that survivors and their children have to experience. The conversation happens without the character being aware of such possibilities, pointing to the experiential and everyday aspect of the guilt that survivors had to face. In other terms, the empirical element of the experience is what the character, but not the author, portrays. This is of great importance to the understanding of the holocaust. Most survivors are scarred forever by their experience of the holocaust, even though they may not be aware of it. Guilt, for different reasons, is a significant manifestation of this. Maus speaks of the need to piece together histories. Fragments of such a history may have been lost irretrievable, but the remaining shards of the mirror remain. Maus is an attempt to do just this and in way that seek to portray a round picture of the survivors and their next generation. It is the story not just of Vladek Spiegelman but also his son, Art. The importance of this inter-generational aspect of the story lies in its assertion that the event of the holocaust is not one that can be forgotten easily. The guilt too, is something that is shared, even though in different degrees. The desire to forget the holocaust is evident in the questions that are asked of Spiegelman in Maus 2: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. Many younger Germans have had it up to HERE with holocaust stories. These things happened before they were even born. Why should they feel guilty? (42) The question of guilt is thus, of paramount significance for not just the survivors but also the perpetrators of the guilt. It begins to acquire political significance, the basis on which countries construct their self-image. The all-encompassing nature of the guilt then becomes a measure of the control that the concentration camps exercised. Michel Foucault argues in his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, that such feelings of guilt are engendered by structural factors. Such feelings help structures of power to maintain their authority without having to face any expenditure. Guilt is thus, a, economical method of controlling populations. For instance, in Maus 2: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, there is an instance where Vladek’s father moves to the wrong side of a stadium where Jews were assembled in order to help his daughter Fela. He says, “My Daughter! How can she manage ALONE- With four children to take care of?” (91) The Nazis do not have to spend any energy to take him to Auschwitz; feelings of guilt carry him to them. Guilt thus maneuvered, is able to help those who are in power at any given point in time. It is in reaction to such feelings of guilt that survivors may feel that Vladek often speaks, he often talks without a moral foundation, calling into question any such bases for human action. He cites his experience of Auschwitz as the reason for this. Right at the beginning of the first part, he says in regards to friendship. Friends? Your Friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week… then you could see what it is, FRIENDS! (5 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History) The urge to justify one’s past actions can be seen in such statements. Vladek is however, unable to make a real critique of the past, owing to the trauma that he had undergone. As Andrea Liss points out, the treatment of guilt and experiential reality point to the problems of translating one’s experiences (54). This arises from a close association with the events and one’s own experience; history thus, has to be bled out. The conditions of the ghettoes are described in the work for this precise reason. The veracity of these conditions too can be verified through archives of the holocaust that have been stored (Life in the Ghettos n.p.) The fact that the account of the events of the holocaust is built using fragments of conversations is significant. This is an example of the use of oral narratives to construct histories. Not only does this point to the need for the narratives of common people who were victims and survivors of the holocaust, it also highlights the problems inherent in written narratives. Oral narratives are able to tap into areas that written ones are not and make the history one of the people rather than that of the rulers (Brown 93). Art’s desire to recover his mother’s diaries is for a recreation of another side of the history that his father recounts. The novel makes it explicitly clear that it is unable to account for the experiences that women may have undergone, attributing it to a clear lack of material. The importance of these narratives as gateways to the person who narrates it is made clear through the repeated reference to Vladek as a “murderer” (159 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History). In fact, there is a suggestion that Anja’s lack of an audience to listen to her story may have been partially the cause of her death. Thus, both the male characters suffer from guilt in relation to Anja as they were unwilling to lend an ear to her memories or in fact, her version of history. The inability to move on following Anja’s death for Vladek and Art represents this guilt regarding the silencing of Anja’s story. The assertion is that the process of recounting history, though painful, can also be cathartic. It is interesting how guilt can be passed on from one generation to the other. In the case of the Spiegelman family, the ghost figure of Richieu haunts both the parents- Vladek and Anja- and Art. The presence of the absent sibling, Art jokes, creates a weird sibling rivalry. His inability to live up to his parents’ vision of perfection may be a manifestation of his felt inability to live up to their suffering and hardships. The strained relationship with his father may be a manifestation of this very inability or even impossibility. The elevation of Richieu to an almost saintly status may also be because of the guilt that the parents may have felt as a result of the fact that they survived the war while he did not. The seemingly innocuous photograph of the dead child thus conjures up images of guilt and self-hatred in the parents, which they transpose on to their living child who is then left guilty of not living up to his parents’ expectations. The effects of the holocaust, according to Maus, cannot be gauged merely in terms of cold statistics such as the death toll. It needs to be understood in terms of the permanent damage that it caused its survivors. Spiegelman goes one step further in positioning members of his generation, the children of the survivors as victims of the event as well. The holocaust was then, an event that left impressions on people who survived and future generations. War and the accompanying violence sets off a chain of guilt. In both parts of Maus, Art Spiegelman recreates scenes of the holocaust, connecting it to the present context and revealing its manifestations in terms of the guilt that its survivors face. He does so through a series of revealing conversations that shocks one in order to acquaint one with a shameful episode of human history. Works Cited Brown, Joshua. “Of Mice and Memory”. The Oral History Review 16.1 (1998): 91-109. Web. 27 July 2014. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 2000. Print. “Life in the Ghettoes”. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Web. 31 July 2014. < http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007708 > Liss, Andrea. Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust. London: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Print. Read More