Research Essay

Midwest Modern Language Association

History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization" in Art Spiegelman's "Maus: A Survivor's Tale" Author(s): Lisa A. Costello Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 39, No. 2, Special Convention Issue: History, Memory, Exile (Fall, 2006), pp. 22-42 Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20464185 Accessed: 27-12-2018 19:31 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide

range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and

facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

https://about.jstor.org/terms

Midwest Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

in Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale

Lisa A. Costello

The rhetorical implications of Holocaust memorialization are intricate; the Holocaust is both personal (family) history and a collective (national/global) history.' There are fears concerning the disappearance of historical memory both because of the "previously prevailing belief that the Holocaust would pass into oblivion with the passing of survivor witnesses" (Sicher 7) and because of Holocaust denials, most recently exposed in com

ments from the President of Iran, who in 2005 called the Holocaust a "myth" (Vick 1). Moral desensitization has also been a concern in terms of visual memorialization where "the reduction of the [published Holocaust] archive images and their endless repetition," as well as their decontextual ization, could pose problems for Holocaust remembrance (Hirsch 218). Thus, the traumatic memory of the Holocaust must be re-created contextu ally for every generation in order to combat the tendency toward what Saul Friedlander has called a "premature foreclosure" of memory and what Ruth Wajnryb terms a "generalized will toward amnesia."2 The historicity of this context is dependent upon the social, political, and artistic paradigms that necessarily shift from generation to generation. Memorialization of the Holocaust has taken many forms in the sixty years that have followed it. The memory of this event seems more present now than directly after the war, but an increasing awareness of the limits of representing this memory has also cast a shadow (Sicher 355). Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale recontextualizes this history by addressing such limits of representa tion, functioning as a unique form of Holocaust memorialization, which elicits what I term "performative memorialization." Performative memorial ization 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)-com bating tendencies toward collective amnesia or foreclosure.

Thought and memory naturally categorize, often generically.3 Thought seeks ways to differentiate one thing from another, using analogy and tem poral markers or by delineating boundaries. It is not insignificant that the

22 History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

genres of the Holocaust have evolved (in some cases) from narrative and autobiography to more hybridized forms. Maus, the two-volume story of Vladek Spiegelman's survival of the Holocaust, told through his son's interpretation of their interviews, is an extreme case of hybridization, combining narrative, autobiography, biography, cartoon, film, and photog raphy into a polyphonic genre. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejz er have also called Maus a "historical document, a second-generation mem oir, and a metafictional analysis of the problems of representation" (66-67). These are among the many genres present in Maus; however, I

will discuss the aforementioned six genres to argue that hybrid genres are inherently performative. My aim is not to identify the multitude of genres at work in Maus. Rather, I will chart the movement of such genres through Spiegelman's complex visual and textual narration and how this move ment creates a performative dialogic. In examining how Maus resists the boundaries of genre, we see that it is able to elicit an evolving dialogue with the past and present of Holocaust memory by addressing multiple audiences and multiple histories. Maus consists of layered genres and rep resentations-multiple genres are woven into the two layers of narrative: visual and textual-as a dialogic of history and memory. Through these generic movements and representational shifts, Maus speaks to re-visioned memory intertwined with history for a performative, evocative Holocaust absence made temporarily present.

Discussing Maus as a text exemplifying performative memorialization requires an explanation of the "performative" in terms of audience and textual elements. To call the reader into the story is to force an active rather than a passive participation. For instance, the temporal jumps or fragmented narratives typical of postmodern writing do not allow the read er to simply absorb information. Readers must engage with texts in order to understand them. But even subjectively re-experiencing the suffering of the Holocaust at an emotional level can be only a fraction of the reality.

Marianne Hirsch and Dominick LaCapra have noted aspects of working through Holocaust trauma in this way, where an emotional response can be productive. Hirsch uses the term "postmemory" to discuss the re-lived trauma experienced by second-generation survivors. The experiences of their parents "are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right" (219). LaCapra calls historians' emotional response "empathetic unsettlement" (41). Theorist Kaja Silverman terms such response "heteropathic identification," in which the response is not simply a sympathetic pity but "comes with respect for the other and the realiza tion that the experience of the other is not one's own" (qtd. in LaCapra 40).4 In each of these cases, such response is not limited to children of survivors or historians but can be applied to any reader, as Hirsch notes. But this is only one aspect of audience response.

Lisa A. Costello 23

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Other scholars such as Della Pollock, Henry Sayre, and Judith Butler have called narrative techniques engaging audience "performative." Perfor mative writing makes language itself perform. It creates movement by call ing attention to the production of the text in order to challenge the bound aries of textuality.5 Performative writing, writing as doing rather than writing as meaning, has the possibility of fragmenting "regressive reitera tions of 'textuality"' (Pollock 74). In writing performatively, using writing that is evocative, subjective, and citational, regressive reiterations of textu ality are fragmented; the writing makes meaning through the movement of text production (process)-but also through the movement of multiple perspectives (content).

Pollock identifies "writing as doing" as when the meaning in writing becomes less important than the meaning inherent in the "continuous/dis/continuous act of writing." Performative writing is thus "a way of describing what good writing does" (75). But as Vivian M. Patra ka has made clear, delineating the performative in relation to Holocaust texts requires particular attention to history, an attention not present in

most definitions of the performative. I define performative Holocaust writ ing as "writing as doing and as meaning." Postmodern conceptions of text and the performative emphasize subversion and transgression through lan guage play and new constructions of language (Patraka 7). Indeed, Pollock stresses the need to eliminate references to the "old world" to write "into a new one," much as Butler suggests creating new realities (Pollock 75).6 Yet for Holocaust texts, writing history and references to the old world are intimately connected to the act of writing itself.

Although Pollock sees good writing as writing that does something, her space of performative textuality privileges process over content. For the performative to work in a Holocaust text like Maus, process depends pre cisely on content. Recontextualizing Holocaust memory for a new genera tion requires constant reference to what has come before (content as his torical fact) in addition to forms that challenge boundaries through the process of their production. To say this reality is "recontextualized" and "displaced" rather than made new indicates a better sense of the move ment embodied by Maus (Hirsch 218).7 To discuss genres and representa tions in terms of how language performs within them requires Holocaust scholars to go beyond critical posturing. The event has preceded and exceeds any representation of it. How writing performs action in Maus is a consequence of content and process acting together. The author and the subject interact with the event and the audience-memory and history to recontextualize both. To simply say reality is made new because of per formative language would be a mistaken proposition.

For Pollock, several aspects of the performative must be at work for writing to perform action, including the evocative, the subjective, and

24 History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

the citational. But much as Patraka reconceives Butler's notion of the performative to account for history, I redefine the parameters surround ing Pollock's aspects of performative writing. First, although Holocaust texts exhibit these performative aspects, Pollock's writing as "doing" should not overshadow the meaning of writing-it is not a process over content issue when discussing Holocaust discourses. Process and content exist in collaborative strength; the tensions of these two aspects work in concert equally. This tension-the movement I argue is present in Maus-creates the action of performative writing in this Holocaust text. Multiple genres highlight process and multiple narratives highlight con tent, illuminating how performative writing reflects meaningful content through the meaning-making process of writing. This action is an aspect of performative memorialization. The author engages with history and memory (content) and with the object itself: writing (process). Second, performative memorialization also depends on a listening audience and a chorus of voices, an aspect I will return to later. Pollock's performative aspects as they relate to audience do not, nor do they attempt to, account for an audience's particular reaction to Holocaust texts. Part two will dis cuss audience as an integral part of performative memorialization; the audience that reacts to and participates in performative Holocaust writ ing extends the chain of communication of Holocaust discourses over time.8 Before that, however, I will discuss the performative aspects in

Maus's layered genres and narratives-the evocative, the subjective, and the citational-to describe how process and content in constant motion create action.

The Movement of Layered Genres and Narratives The multiple genres present in Maus create a performative destabiliza

tion through movement. Through the layering of genres, as well as the lay ering of voices, the focus of Maus becomes both process (writing as doing) and content (history) as ways to make meaning from Holocaust memory. Such performative subjectivity, the juxtaposition of multiple genres and narratives, reminds us that, in representing the Holocaust, a complex con versation is at work-not simply a dialogue of various voices or a dialogue between author and reader-but a Bakhtinian dialogic with several partici pants, including audiences, along a chain of communication.

Returning continually to the idea of multiple layers of genres and repre sentations that interact with the author and history is the basic paradigm within which the performative elements of performative memorialization are enacted in the genres and narratives in Maus. Evocative performative writing "operates metaphorically to render absence present" by connecting the reader to what is other (not present) in the text "by re-marking" it (Pollock 80). It does not aim to report about a "verifiable event" but

Lisa A. Costello 25

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

strives to "create what is self-evidently a version of what was" (80). In ref erence to the Holocaust, this indicates marking the representation of the Holocaust as a representation of real events and absences that cannot be recovered. But the evocative in performative Holocaust writing does aim to report (to some degree) on a verifiable event. Subjective performative writ ing does not refer to conventional mirror-reflections of autobiography as a "coherent self across time" but rather as a "contiguous . . . relation between the writer and his/her subject(s), subject-selves, and/or reader(s)" (86). It is not simply the self in plural that is performative but the movement forward and between selves to form multiple perspectives and relations. Citational performative writing is writing that is "rewriting, as the repetition of given discursive forms," to reveal "the fragility of iden tity, history, and culture constituted in rites of textual recurrence" (92). Because identity cannot escape its construction, performative elements can exert "counterpressure" where the repetition is a "repetition with a difference" (92). Repetitive elements in performative Holocaust writing exert counterpressure precisely through the process of their recon textualization.9

Before discussing how Maus embodies and recontextualizes Holocaust discourse through its visual elements and arguing that these visual ele ments are performative, it is essential to note that the Holocaust was one of the first atrocities to be extensively recorded on film and in photogra phy. These visual images have imprinted themselves upon collective, visual memories of this history. The audience of a book like Maus, therefore, is likely to have such knowledge of the past. This knowledge is an elemental aspect of performative memorialization; process and content make mean ing through writing that is evocative, subjective, and citational, and depend upon on this level of previous knowledge in the audience in order to exist in and resist reiterations of textuality.

Spiegelman uses multiple genres and techniques of representation to evoke and subjectify particularized memory and history. Through his movements, he both exists in and resists Pollock's "textuality" and creates a space for multiple perspectives to emerge. In speaking to the audience's familiarity, Spiegelman resists expectations that what he narrates will repeat what has already been seen and yet exists in the textual re-presenta tion of familiar history.

The genres in the visual narrative in Maus, for example, incorporate ele ments of cartoon, photography, and film, all of which display a degree of the subjective, the evocative, and the citational. Subjectively, Spiegelman is a cartoonist by trade, not a historian. The use of cartoon as his primary visual genre reflects Spiegelman the author. Sequential cartoon art typical ly utilizes panel size to control rhythm in the text, according to Will Eisner (ladonisi 52). And according to Rick ladonisi in his discussion of Maus as

26 History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

collaborative autobiography, regulated frame size and single camera angles indicate a story flowing along at one pace (52). Interruptions in this pat tern, ladonisi claims, are purposeful in order to bring the reader's atten tion to particular drawings or points in the story. Figure 1 is a good exam ple of this type of unregulated frame size; it incorporates closed frames, open frames, and superimposed frames (Maus I 61). Subjectively, the car toon art genre is Spiegelman's forte; he controls frame size and rhythm according to generic parameters and in opposition to such restraints. But he also incorporates other visual elements that reflect the citational and evocative nature of Maus.

The sequential cartoon genre tends toward citation. It is usually pre sented in a multi-frame, horizontal, still format. The cartoon stills are con tained on one page or strip, often telling a longer, serialized story. Serial cartoons actively engage the audience, which expects that each volume, though it stands alone, must not contradict other volumes that came before or those that come after. As a citational form, cartoon repeats its discursive forms but also rewrites itself within these forms; it repeats characters, frames, and drawing styles, for instance, but represents these within new narrative frames and singular drawings. Thus, the cartoon genre looks back to previous "volumes" to create new volumes. Maus cites other Holocaust texts and, in certain instances, Maus II even cites Maus I. The performative element of citation in Maus puts Holocaust material that was previously represented into a new context, while telling a previously untold story-his father's-as well. Maus repeats, in some respects, what came before but with a difference.

Visually, Maus utilizes elements of photographic technique as well. In contrast to the cartoon, which employs several still frames at once, pho tography produces one still frame at a time. Some traditional cartoon for

mat is retained in Maus, with bubbles enclosing speech and rectangular signposts indicating narrative. But even with the use of such generic mark ers, Spiegelman does not narrate the story sequentially. The visual narra tive of the past often competes with the present, as does the textual narra tive. One way movement is achieved is through these temporal jumps. Thus, Spiegelman presents "a 'time frame' of the past as well as the pres ent" but with a "complete halt" at the end of the page, he also "evokes the freeze-frame or photographic still, equivalent in narrative terms to reading the entire page as one synchronic unit" as Levine notes (321). In this way, Spiegelman's temporal jumps evoke elements of photographic techniques but do not reproduce them. He discusses a verifiable event as a representa tion but seeks, "self-evidently," to create his version of these events. Mul tiple evocations of visual documentation speak directly to the larger histo ry without trying to reproduce it and thus recontextualize and individualize this history.

Lisa A. Costello 27

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

u/5 1 Rr1'rs . 36w%% ft HR Zt 5 ww( AA%- V?'5 A VERX 13'A S?UA

SS# s~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I 11w 1

~~~~IK. we 5h

ALI. of1--W

I IMOVOWYOO WM ACLEAWft IrTVL ftf ToulA WA A

Figure 1. From Maus I: A Survivor's Tale/My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman, copyright ?) 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Page 61.

28 History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

In addition to the use of photographic techniques, Spiegelman cites actual photographs in Maus, as Hirsch has noted.10 Not only does Spiegel man draw versions of well-known photographs, such as the Arbeit macht Frei gate in Auschwitz, he also draws versions of lesser-known photo graphs, such as the clandestine photos taken of Sonderkommandos burning bodies (Maus I 157; Maus II 72). Spiegelman also uses his drawings to cite multiple perspectives, evoking events that have been photographed by sev eral people in several places. Figure 1 is also an example of this kind of citational performance. Spiegelman cites the reportage of a mass execution witnessed by Jewish authorities and related to Vladek and other prisoners of war (Maus I 61) and evokes the photographic images of other mass exe cutions by Einsatzgruppen that were photographed in places like Vilna and Riga before the Final Solution was implemented."I

Maus is also citational in terms of its relation to film production and evocative in its reference to film imagery. Film is produced on a single filmstrip, where frames are seen in rapid, active succession, incorporating several visual elements in each frame. In Maus, every frame of the cartoon series is likewise complexly layered with visual and narrative meanings. But as a cartoon, these frames are viewed at a slower speed than film, more like slow motion-a technique in film that is meant to highlight par ticular activities or scenes (Bordwell and Thompson 197). Certain frames, such as in Figure 1, can be read horizontally or vertically, unlike typical cartoons but similar to canted camera angles and moving camera shots in film.

Another example of the use of filmic elements is found in Figure 2 (Maus I 26). Although ladonisi uses these pages to illustrate a verbal

wrestling match between Artie and his father as they collaborate on Vladek's biography, he claims that while Spiegelman zooms in and out, the panels in the present are "generally uniform in size" and "'the camera angle' generally remains unchanged" (52). This observation neglects, how ever, the formidable skill and precision with which Spiegelman performs his art. The frames in Figure 2 are, in fact, subtly varied in both size and camera angle. Frame is never a neutral border; it provides a vantage point that defines the image for us (Bordwell and Thompson 208). In Figure 2 the drawings begin with a high angle, medium long shot, in which we are looking down on Artie and Vladek. This moves to a straight on medium close-up, to a low angle, medium close-up, to an extreme close-up-all drawn from varying angles of Artie's perspective. And as Bordwell and Thompson note, although framings such as these can reflect meaning in the text, they often do not, which underscores the layers of ambiguity present in Spiegelman's techniques (218-19). Hence, the text of Maus per forms constantly, retaining the participation of the audience on many lev els through the creation of multiple spectator perspectives-a movement

Lisa A. Costello 29

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

9thI weritb k li poit*f.ro?d J to ViSKt wvg father

Kct hS'story. f

,NM mAK *w(t#r it'r's 6 fILLS Flos DAV.Y too.."O1S . ,c W^ARt, t soRf> M'Y fILLS ,. ot>9^@ s^ m If p I L-1-S - iA0ec s. . At.p M YAL, 1 0*s

--al5 W"? I mot AbO MOM tip> | $OX P.AV!e rk 1i1y

tv/ It < WT4;<-I >il .

SWF~P SEFAE UAW~ E'oY

Figure 2. From Maus I: A Survivor's Tale/My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman, copyright ?3 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Page 26.

30 History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

that keeps readers off balance, even uncomfortable. In addition, his cita tion of other historical perspectives in film and photography evokes the presence of other victims and other histories. This suggests to the reader that Vladek's history is one among many but also outstanding enough to fill a singular biography. Spiegelman's incorporation of several media tech niques layered onto and intersecting with one another performs visually to bring the past into the present without allowing either to eclipse the other.

In terms of the textual narrative, Spiegelman uses layers of genre as well, utilizing elements of biography and autobiography that, again, reveal elements of the subjective, the citational, and the evocative. Specific uses of language in Spiegelman's narrative reveal the layering of the biographi cal and the autobiographical voice but also evoke other voices.12 In refer ring to Auschwitz as "Mauschwitz" on the title page of chapter one in

Maus II, for instance, Spiegelman particularizes the term by linking it directly to his drawings-undercutting the way in which this term, "Auschwitz," is used metonymically to stand for the Holocaust in general (9).13 In Maus I, however, Spiegelman quotes his father using the term 'Auschwitz" as he enters the camp at the end of this volume. Spiegelman uses both his father's version and his own version of narrative details. And by highlighting how one term, "Auschwitz," inevitably obscures other like terms (without lessening its impact alone), Spiegelman evokes the unnamed death camps, such as Treblinka, Chelmno, and Sobibor, and the voices of those victims as well.

Additionally, both Maus I and Maus II open with a narrative depicting Spiegelman as a major participant. This subjectively places Artie in a major role in this retelling of his father's story. In many scenes where Artie engages with his father in the present, he draws himself in the background and his father in the foreground. On page 12 of Maus I, for instance, Spiegelman draws his father in the foreground as he rides a stationary bicycle. The extreme close-up focuses on the tattoo on his father's arm. The close-up frame and the foregrounded figure of Vladek emphasize how much Vladek's past bleeds into Artie's present, but Artie never fades com pletely into the background. The tattoo looms over Artie's head, showing that Auschwitz remains central to their strained relationship, typical for

many second-generation survivors.14 A scene in Maus II exemplifies the layers of biography and autobiogra

phy within visual genres that subjectify, cite, and evoke Holocaust history and memory in the textual narrative. At the top of page 54 in Maus II, Artie and Vladek discuss Vladek's march from the barracks to work. In the first frame, Spiegelman draws the marching workers with an orchestra in the background. In the next frame, in a frontal perspective, he and his father walk together in the present. The third frame shows the marching workers farther along, with the orchestra now obscured behind the men. The

Lisa A. Costello 31

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

fourth frame is a view of them walking, now drawn from behind. Visually, this conversation is opened by Spiegelman and closed by Vladek. This reveals much about their relationship, but the first frame is revealing for other reasons.

Even though Vladek has not described an orchestra, Spiegelman has included one in his drawing, referencing and privileging "well-document ed" history and his own research. In the third frame, directly under the first frame, the orchestra is obscured, giving credence to Vladek's perspec tive. Spiegelman himself explained that these frames were an example of how he and his father collaborated on this biography: "'[T]here's a wrestling match in terms of the deposition-how to portray it,"' he states (ladonisi 52). These two frames are juxtaposed, are the same size, and contain the same basic elements. In drawing these frames next to the frames of Vladek and Artie talking, each pair of frames speak without overshadowing the other pair of frames (although the frames of the past are larger), reflecting the collective dialogic of history and memory that exists alongside the personal dialogic of history and memory; they inform each other. Much like the linguistic versions of Auschwitz described above, such manipulations create a narrative "truth" and subjectivity from several perspectives.

When dialogues and heteroglossic voices are present within a text, they act as "destablizers" of the autobiographical self, according to Susanna Egan writing on autobiography and Maus. Egan points out that such desta bilization need not only be written, for "not only is dialogue frequently oral, in origin at least [as it is in Spiegelman's text], but the exercise of interaction and the foregrounding of the processes of mutual recognition also invite dialogue in generic terms, among genres, within genres, and from genres beyond the traditional autobiographical canon" (13). Such destabilization is similar to performative subjectivities in that it creates movement. For performative subjectivity, the juxtaposition of multiple genres and narratives, and the foregrounded presence of process and con tent in the meaning-making process indicate an important conversation, not simply a dialogue of various voices or a dialogue between author and reader but a Bakhtinian dialogic with several participants, including audi ences, along a chain of communication.

Audience While Holocaust memorialization finds meaning in the act of writing,

in the retelling of Holocaust history through texts, Hirsch and others have shown that the active participation of the reader must also play a role in texts of remembrance. Pollock's performative writing does include distinct references to audience.15 In Holocaust texts, however, these aspects of audience are inadequate. Although several aspects of performative writing,

32 History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

as she defines it, do explicate some of the ways in which Maus elicits per formative memorialization, in terms of audience, the performative is inap plicable as a whole because Maus is a historical text based in a real, factual truth. The audience does not simply co-write texts and respond to the "play" of language in order to re-create each text for themselves. There is an inherent responsibility to also know and respond to history.16

This conception of audience(s), as knowing and responding to history through an engagement with Holocaust discourses, is the second aspect of performative memorialization. The movement of genres and narratives engages the author, the subject, and history, but active audience engage ment is crucial for this whole dialogic communication of author, subject, history, and audience to occur. For responsive understanding to occur for a particular audience requires a level of participation I claim is elicited by author and subject, not only through the movement of genre and narrative but also through gaps created by temporal jumps, authorial self-reflexivity, and direct audience address. This, together with the performative quality of the language-that which evokes, cites, and subjectifies-creates action. The reader is required to translate the competing messages of process (author and subjectivity) and content (history and memory as citational and evocative) in order to make meaning of this text. In the act of making meaning in response to the act of writing, the author, subject, text, and audience perform a complex dialogic of interaction.

The difficulties in communication that Artie and his father encounter in the relation and translation of Vladek's story are a reflection, therefore, not only of their complex interpersonal relationship on a subject/object level but of an entrance into uncharted genres and dialogues with collec tive history and collective audiences, where the regulations for communi cation between speaker and audience are not yet clear. In discussing speech genres, Bakhtin refers to this communication between speaker and audience as a "responsive understanding," which is integral in attaining a "finalized wholeness of the utterance" (76).'7 Bakhtin iterates responsive understanding-in speech or in writing-as involving "dialogic overtones" that reflect conversational speech. A speaker, whether in conversation or in a novel, cannot speak into a void. Every utterance depends upon what came before it and what will come after it (91). These types of stable utterances, or "speech genres," exist along a chain communication that exists on a continuum of time (60).

Speech genres are regulated-we must be able to predict certain pat terns in order to communicate. The same is true for generic conventions in literature. This does not translate into strict boundaries in every case, for even when several genres are mastered, the individuality of utterances within them can be revealed and "more flexibly and precisely . .. reflect the unrepeatable situation of communication" (80). Thus, an utterance

Lisa A. Costello 33

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

consists of a semantic referent (object) and an author (subject), which determine the choice of genre and composition style. But the choice of genre or style is also influenced by the "expressive aspect" of the "emo tional evaluation of the referentially semantic content" of the utterance (84). In Holocaust texts, this involves a particular attention to history. The

writer of any Holocaust text carries the weight of this history at all times.18 Thus, genre selection and individual utterance are original but also predetermined, to a certain extent, by what has come before.

The links between object, subject, and composition, however, are not isolated. These utterances are always already located on a chain of speech communication. Glejzer observes the Lacanian "seeing" chain as retroac tive but, even though the seeing is retroactive, it does not account for the speaker/respondent on this chain in the future.19 That is, every utterance is related to another, and the "experience of each individual is shaped and developed in continuous and constant interaction with others' individual utterances" (Bakhtin 89). This is true of utterances that came before, "authoritative utterances" that are "cited, imitated, or followed" but also true of utterances that succeed them (88). The author is therefore in a dia logue with the object and all the responsive understandings that came before and will come after.20

The utterances contained in Maus create a chain of communication between author and subject (memory)-and event and audience (history). Maus converses not only within itself but with other discourses of the Holocaust, not only retroactively but also in a forward motion, knowing that other texts necessarily must follow. Thus, Maus creates a dialogic of history and memory by conversing in and through this narrative by subjecti fying, evoking, and citing-Spiegelman's mother and father, other victims, Holocaust imagery, documented history, and visual Holocaust documenta tion techniques-and creates a dialogic by speaking and responding to audiences.

In Bakhtin's terms, communication-oral or written-does not exist merely between and for two people. He proposes his dialogic as a quadrant of communicating participants.21 The occurrence of responsive under standing for a particularized audience requires active participation, a par ticipation I claim is elicited by the author and his subject through the

movement of genre transitions, temporal jumps, authorial self-reflexivity, and direct audience address. This, together with the performative quality of the language, creates action. Cathy Caruth cites Lacan in noting that "words are passed on . .. not in the meaning of the words alone, but in their repeated utterance, in their performance: a performance that, in Lacan's text, takes place in the movement of the repetition and the gap" between the words and their translation (104; emphasis added). Spiegel man creates movement through repetitive citation, subjectification, and

34 History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

evocation, a movement which not only creates this gap between words and their translation but also creates a gap in representation between the writ ten and the visual. The audience's apprehension and understanding of these movements involve complex translation work in tracing the move

ment of layered representation in the past and the present and pinpointing history and memory along the chain of communication and, thus, elicits active engagement.

An example of performative memorialization engaging the reader com pletely in this dialogic of history and memory on one page is in Figure 3 (Maus II 51). Artie often interrupts Vladek's story with a question about his mother, Anja. Here, Artie interrupts Vladek by saying, "Tell me about mom. Were you in touch with her in Auschwitz[?]" evoking her name through repetition (51). The evocation of Anja's name teases out a little

more of her story each time Artie asks his father about her, and marks and re-marks her absence. The inclusion of her photograph and Richieu's in other sections of Maus indicate other histories-other perspectives that Spiegelman must dialogue with. In this way, he enacts further links in this chain of communication. In this case, it is a dialogue with the past-the past that includes but cannot contain those who are absent.

On this page, Vladek also describes how Auschwitz was split into two camps: Auschwitz I (where he was) and Auschwitz II Birkenau (where Anja was). Spiegelman draws Vladek's description of the physical layout of Auschwitz on one page. The bird's-eye-view map drawing is citational, echoing actual schematic diagrams and aerial photographs of the camps. But this repetition is performatively different because the map is drawn as a cartoon. Spiegelman's subjective relationship to his parents' history is also laid out graphically on the page. The conversation Artie has with Vladek is drawn in individual and unconnected frames that frame the larg er drawing onto which they are superimposed: a drawing of the layout of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II Birkenau. These frames indicate that the story itself still seems fragmented to Artie. Each frame stands by itself. The fact that the individual frames do not entirely enclose the larger, cen tered drawing, indicates that Vladek's telling of the story when it includes

Anja is incomplete; it does not make Artie's subjective history whole but rather fragments it further by creating more questions and, therefore, more gaps in this history. The horizontal and vertical frames at the bottom right corner could both be logical continuations of the frames above, tex tually and visually, indicating the movement and instability inherent in this retelling. This page, as a synchronic unit, is not linear and is not closed. And yet, the corner frames-both mentioning Anja-serve as anchors that hold the story together visually. It is an allowance for Anja's untold perspective, which reminds the audience that there is an absent perspective here-there are millions of absent, unrecoverable perspectives.

Lisa A. Costello 35

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

5L ME ABOT MOM. tt %E BEG6WINNG I KH".W ThI I ouRP OUT W'Y WoRYP4RO WERE You IN 1OC. T YA- OtlN HER UtMBk, APK 1ART FROM BISKFN WNtiNr MAOE9A WITV H4ER i A V5COW'T I 4E WA TKER%E.. BtNREtpU& F lE. W RiEACH I 6 t4iLl.

4<,

, lemPtAug tz

ofPantheonBooks,adivisionofRandomHouse,Inc. Pag 51.f 5imf D

3 HXCstoy anT Memoy i f a Dalogic of "eformtiv Meolia tion" MS F 50 t

Figure 3. From Maus II: A Survivor's Tale/And Here My Trouble Began by Art Spiegel man, copyright C) 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Page 51.

36 History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Subjectively, there is a movement forward and between selves, forming multiple perspectives and relations. Thus, a performative dialogic is creat ed that indicates other participants, speakers from the past and respon dents in the future (beyond Artie himself) in a conversation that remains open and prevents forgetting or foreclosure.

These references to Anja are "disturbances" in the narrative, and their power lies in their status as "fragments of a history we cannot take in" or the evocative, thought-provoking nature of the unknown (Marianne Hirsch qtd. in Charlson 111). Henry Sayre calls these disturbances "intru sions," which constitute the naturally imperfect performance of any com munication (94). These interruptions can also be seen as the boundaries of individual utterances, boundaries that are determined "by a change of speaking subjects." The speaker chooses to "relinquish the floor" to allow for others' responsive understanding (Bakhtin 71). In Maus, these intru sions-these evocative, subjective, and citational references-indicate the other histories Spiegelman converses with. Such fragments speak as whole utterances-in the Bakhtinian sense-as the chain of communication between Artie, his father, his mother, and their immediate family history. At the same time, the utterance communicates only a moment in time along a continuum, a moment that echoes with the void of Richieu's unspoken voice as well as the unspoken voices of Vladek's and Anja's fam ilies, their families, and their families' families. Each interruption, in turn, opens a space to allow the audience to respond. Maus, in this sense, cre ates a recontextualized communication, an "'in-between' space, that inno vates and interrupts the performance of the present," a space that halts regressive reiterations of textuality (Bhabha 7).

The chain of speech communication here is a fusion of the performative and a whole utterance, allowing the heteroglossia of voice and genre to enter a continually shifting dialogic of time (history) and context (memo ry) with the reader. The text speaks, the author speaks, the survivor speaks, history speaks-and the audience and the history that follows reply. With each page of this text, this activity is reenacted and, through this movement, Spiegelman avoids resolution, exists in and resists Pol lock's "textuality," creating a space for multiple perspectives to emerge. As a dialogic between memory and history, it is also a conversation that remains open and demands a response from the audience, from other authors, from Artie himself-a response that would acknowledge responsibili ty, for the past and for the future.

In Maus, Spiegelman's text performs through the presentation of meaningful content and through the process of the writing act. Yet Maus utters speech/text that is necessarily wedged between the past and the future-between the fear that the traumatic past of the Holocaust recedes too much and the concern with what might become of this past for the

Lisa A. Costello 37

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

generations that follow. This is not to say that Maus becomes a static text and thus regressive or abject-quite the contrary. By positioning itself along a continuum of time, Maus becomes a living part of Holocaust histo ry. It reacts to past, present, and future, positioning itself in-between but not definitively. The movement in the text creates fluid boundaries in his tory, challenges textuality, and creates a layered, performative dialogic.

Maus speaks reflexively to itself and to audiences and authoritative utter ances as well, eliciting through these complex movements the performa tive memorialization I describe.

Louisiana State University

Notes

1. The use of this term instead of "Shoah" follows the usage of major scholars like Marianne Hirsch and Efraim Sicher.

2. See Saul Friedlander's article "Trauma, Transference and 'Working Through' in Writing the History of the Shoah" (52). Ruth Wajnryb has noted that some have denigrated as "compulsive" the need for Jews to "represent and re-represent expe rience." But the "Jews not wanting to forget is marked only because it stands out against a larger generalized will towards amnesia" (79).

3. In discussing the manner of construction in interpretive explanation, Geertz notes that "[ijnquiry is directed toward cases or sets of cases, and toward the par ticular features that mark them off; but its aims are as far-reaching as those of mechanics or physiology: to distinguish the materials of human experience" (22). 4. LaCapra's primary discussion involves historians' deep reactions to studies in trauma. He notes that "being responsive to the traumatic experience of others . . . implies not the appropriation of their experience but what I would call empathetic unsettlement" (41). Cathy Caruth, a noted scholar on trauma, has also stated that writing cannot create an awakening in the author but can create a chain of commu nication in which awakening is created in the reader, from whom action and change can emanate (102-03). 5. Delia Pollock locates "textuality," where "all discourse is encompassed within a multilayered, reflexive/reproductive 'text,'" as the space between writing as defined by Theodore Adorno, who claimed a "fading aesthetic margin" in which boundaries of genre had anticipated essentially the "collapse of both referential and normative meaning systems" in postwar literature, and Julia Kristeva, who saw writing as "its own object/subject, which unduly un/writes itself. . . sometimes in abject horror" (74). 6. According to Judith Butler's notion of the performative, what is "reiterative and performative constitutes a reality that is in some sense new" (Patraka 6). Patraka accounts for the "real" that is the history of the Holocaust (absent from Butler's definition) by redefining Elin Diamond's sense of performance and the performa tive in a Holocaust performative as the "doing" and "the thing gone" (7).

7. A certain level of desensitization can occur, especially in the presence of hordes of violent images that bombard and interpellate the modern subject daily. But in actuality, Marianne Hirsch argues, if this repetition is displaced and recontextual ized by post-memorial authors like Spiegelman, it can become a "mostly helpful

38 History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

vehicle of working through a traumatic past" for the author and his/her audience (218). 8. This aspect of an evolving chain of communication, though discussed in brief, cannot be fully realized in part two of this article. An elaborated discussion of the evolution of Holocaust discourses is contained in a longer work.

9. Pollock cites Bhabha in The Location of Culture as part of this explanation of the citational.

10. Hirsch has written extensively on the use of photographs in Maus and the theo retical impact of photography in general in Holocaust texts both in "Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory" and in Family Frames (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997).

11. Such photographs, for general reference, can be found in The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures (Lincolnwood: Pubs. Intl., 2003); original photo graphs are located in various Holocaust archives and museums. Photos from an execution in Palmiry Forest outside Warsaw (238), bodies in ditches near Lvov (244), people awaiting execution near Balti, Romania and Vilna, Lithuania (246), and the largest execution of 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar near Kiev (251) are contained in this reference work. Spiegelman does not draw Figure 1 to reproduce any of these photos specifically. Rather, his drawing is a composite of elements of all of them, suggesting the multiple perspectives inherent in the collective history as he recounts his father's memories of his particularized history.

12. Several authors have noted this layering of biography and autobiography besides Iadonisi. (See Victoria A. Elmwood, and Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer). 13. In contrast to this, several authors have discussed the powerful way in which

metonymy works in Holocaust texts to suggest absence and gaps. For more infor mation on this, see Bernard-Donals and Glejzer, who discuss Maus, and Michael Rothberg who discusses Ruth Kluger's work. I suggest here that the repetition of these metonymical tropes can induce expectations in the audience that, in turn, create passive reading. Spiegelman uses recontextualized repetition to disturb the telling of the tale. This allows the audience to respond. See my section on audience in this article.

14. See Hirsch's "postmemory" in "Surviving Images" and Family Frames.

15. Pollock discusses the ideas of performative writing as nervous and consequen tial. The nervous attends to the "contesting" of "social texts" to which one may be "indentured" (91). The consequential assumes "negotiation" where the reader becomes a "co-writer" of the text (95). Maus contains an aspect of the nervous in that Spiegelman resists being "indentured" into the "social text." But, although he does feel the weight of telling his father's history (note in Maus where he draws himself as small or where the bodies are piling up around his desk as he works), his writing act moves forcefully forward, directly into the social text, because it must. He is writing a history, and though this writing is subjectively not static, it is implanted with facts that do not change. Spiegelman does not contest the social texts; he simply recontextualizes them in order to tell his father's history and the collective history?to speak to one reader or to thousands. In terms of the conse quential, a co-writer could be considered similar to the reader being brought into the story, as Hirsch has suggested. With regard to traumatic history, however, negotiation can occur only to a certain degree. The emphasis is on negotiation as recontextualization, not as rewriting or co-writing.

Lisa A. Costello 39

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

16. For Patraka the Holocaust performative has a built-in "accountability" where play is limited. The two positions " (of reverentiality and play) comment upon each other: it is postmodernism that sees the deadness of that reverential gesture toward the Holocaust, but it is the Holocaust (and its goneness) that marks the point at which discursive play becomes a screen to keep the dead at a distance" (8). 17. An utterance is a unit of speech that is individual, "but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances" (Bakhtin 60). "Understanding can only be attained through a dialogue between speech subjects, where the wholeness of an utterance is determined by the com plex relationship of a referentially semantic theme, authorial intent, and generic finalization (76). Similar to performative writing, the elements of Bakhtin's dia gram of a whole utterance?theme, plan, and genre?work in conjunction with one another. Semantic finalization in creative works is relative in that it does not expect to exhaust all themes; rather, it expects a certain degree of finalization with in the parameters it has delineated. These parameters are delineated by the author.

The author, or speaker, chooses the subject, its boundaries, and also the generic form the subject assumes. The semantic object is directly linked to the author/sub ject and is consequently limited by it because it is now related to "its individual circumstances, its personal participants, and the statement utterances that preced ed it" (77). Such subjectivity is then applied to the choice of genre and manipulat ed and individualized.

18. See Patraka's notion of "accountability" above.

19. See Glejzer, "Maus and the Epistemology of Witness."

20. The performative act of writing and the audience, within the parameters I have described, still do not constitute, in whole, performative memorialization. The relations that come into existence after the initial act of writing, even if the writing continues to perform, are crucial and must be critically examined in postmodern re-presentations of the Holocaust?relations I examine in a longer work.

21. Glejzer notes in "Maus and the Epistemology of Witness" that the "seeing" in Maus is "not a content, not a knowledge that we hope to transmit as a whole" (130). Likewise, Bakhtin's responsive understanding is not a finished "whole"; rather, it is a moment along a continuum. Each utterance is a "link in a very com plexly organized chain of other utterances," a chain that does not involve simply a speaker and a respondent communicating in sequential time (69). This chain of communication moves backwards and forwards and involves the speaker (author), the addressee (particular audiences), the object of discussion (history and text), and the superaddressee (the audience for whom responsive understanding is pre sumed) (paraphrase of Holquist xviii, with my additions in italics). And the com

munication evolves: the speaker is also, at times, a respondent, and the addressee often becomes a speaker.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M. M. "The Problem of Speech Genres." Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans.Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michale Holquist. Austin: U of Texas I> 1986. 60-102.

Bernard-Donals, Michael and Richard Glejzer. Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation. Albany: State U of New York P, 2001.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

40 History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Rout ledge, 1990.

Caruth, Cathy. "Traumatic Awakenings." Performativity and Performance. Ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. New York: Routledge, 1995. 89-108.

Charlson, Joshua L. "Framing the Past: Postmodernism and the Making of Reflec tive Memory in Art Spiegelman's Maus." The Arizona Quarterly 57.3 (2001): 91 120.

Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres in Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999.

Elmwood, Victoria A. "Happy, Happy Ever After: The Transformation of Trauma between Generations in Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale." Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 27A (Winter 2004): 691-720.

Friedlander, Saul. "Trauma, Transference and 'Working Through' in Writing the History of the Shoah." History and Memory: Studies in Representations of the Past 4.1 (Spring-Summer 1992): 9-59.

Geertz, Clifford. "Blurred Genres: The Reconfiguration of Social Thought." Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic, 1983. 19 35.

Glejzer, Richard. "Maus and the Epistemology of Witness." Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust. Ed. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003.125-40.

Hirsch, Marianne. "Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory." Visual Culture and the Holocaust. Ed. Barbie Zelizer. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001. 215-46.

Holquist, Michael. Introduction. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. By Bakhtin, M. M. Trans.Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michale Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. ix-xxiii.

Iadonisi, Rick. "Bleeding History and Owning His [Father's] Story: Maus and Col laborative Autobiography." CEA Critic 57.1 (Fall 1994) 1: 41-56.

LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

Levine, Michael G. "Necessary Stains: Spiegelman's Maus and the Bleeding of His tory." American Imago 59.3 (Fall 2002): 317-41. Project Muse. 2002. Louisiana State U. 1 Dec. 2002 <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

Patraka, Vivian M. Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust. Blooming ton: Indiana UP, 1999.

Pollock, Delia. "Performing Writing." The Ends of Performance. Ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York UR 1998. 73-103.

Rothberg, Michael. "Between the Extreme and the Everyday: Ruth Kluger's Trau matic Realism." A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 14.1 (Summer 1999): 93-107.

Sayre, Henry. "Performance." Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Ventricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 91-104.

Sicher, Efraim. Introduction. Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz. Ed. Efraim Sicher. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1998. 1-18.

Lisa A. Costello 41

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pan theon, 1986.

_. Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991.

Vick, Karl. "Iran's President Calls Holocaust 'Myth' in Latest Assault on Jews." Washington Post, 15 Dec. 2005, final ed.: A1 + . LexisNexis. 2006. Louisiana State U. 2 Feb. 2006 <http://global.lexisnexis.com/us>.

Wajnryb, Ruth. The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2001.

42 History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization"

This content downloaded from 34.195.88.230 on Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:31:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms