Research Essay

"Happy, Happy, Ever After": The Transformation of Trauma between the Generations in Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale

Victoria A. Elmwood

Biography, Volume 27, Number 4, Fall 2004, pp. 691-720 (Article)

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Biography 27.4 (Fall 2004) © Biographical Research Center

“HAPPY, HAPPY EVER AFTER”: THE TRANSFORMATION OF TRAUMA BETWEEN

THE GENERATIONS IN ART SPIEGELMAN’S MAUS: A SURVIVOR’S TALE

VICTORIA A. ELMWOOD

They didn’t want you to know the past. They were hoping in this way you could escape it.

—Carolyn Forché, “The Notebook of Uprising”

The central problem of identity in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is the author’s need to write himself into a family from whose founding trau- ma he was absent. We can look to Maus’s multitiered metanarrative structure for evidence of the productive, though not always cooperative, interaction taking place between father and son that allows for a relationship in which Art Spiegelman creates an identity for himself with respect to his parents’ experience of the Holocaust. The illustrator’s biography of his father’s expe- riences in Auschwitz seeks to narrow the psychological rift between himself and each one of his family members, whether deceased or still alive. Spiegel- man is most successful in creating a place for himself in the family by solic- iting, shaping, and representing his father’s story. In his mediation of Vla- dek’s biographical narrative, Spiegelman develops a balance between his own voice and that of his father. Since the father and son have difficulty getting along in person, the comics medium provides a space in which both men share input in the eventual product. In addition, Spiegelman’s role as narra- tive facilitator provides a means by which he narrates himself into the fami- ly legacy without appropriating the experience of the Holocaust as his own. The deceased, however, present a greater challenge to reconciliation via nar- rative endeavor. While Spiegelman presents a more detailed memory of his mother Anja than of his brother Richieu, who died before his birth, Anja is generally seen through Vladek’s eyes, with the noteworthy exception of

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“Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” which depicts the aftermath of his mother’s suicide. Spiegelman himself is too traumatized by Anja’s suicide to incorpo- rate her voice into Maus. Surprisingly, Art contrives a normative model for a relationship with his ghost-brother, but the posthumous sibling rivalry puts Spiegelman in a no-win situation in which survival of the death camps is prized as the only validating experience available to Spiegelman family members. Of the family members absent at the time of Maus’ s composition, the mother of whom he possesses knowledge proves more challenging to depict than the older brother whom he has never met. Maus successfully rep- resents the non-memory of Richieu and Vladek’s authentic account, but the two-volume graphic novel cannot make a satisfactory space for Anja, whose presence in the narrative is fragmentary and doubly mediated.

Though this transmission of familial memory might be characteristic of all cross-generational inheritance, the passing down of such personal histories becomes especially problematic and disruptive in the case of the children of traumatized individuals. The disruptions resulting from the Spiegelman family traumas take the forms of fetishes, silenced testimonials, and specters —memories of the dead that continue to influence the living. The relation- ships that Art has with his father, mother, and dead brother all bear signs of trauma, signs that show how gaps and absences created by extreme events can bleed into the next generation. I’d like to suggest “transformation” as a more appropriate descriptor for the narrative work done in Maus because it carries the implication of transmission as well as change in the process of that transmission. This change is key to a more practical conceptualization of the ways that trauma is transferred over generations; we should see our parents’ biographies as factors that help determine the ways that we interact with the world. In his treatment of the Holocaust, Spiegelman struggles to articulate an identity within his own family tree while at the same time intervening in complex public debates on the ethics of visually representing the Holocaust. More specifically, he uses the graphic novel to demonstrate the benefits of using the medium in such a way that official, historical accounts of the Holocaust are brought into conversation with individual, private accounts of its survivors. As a result, the reciprocal limitations of history and memory as fields of knowledge are mitigated by the consideration of the two together in a single discursive space in which neither is given privileged status. By con- sidering eyewitness accounts and documented historiography together, the reader is repeatedly made aware of both the shortcomings and the strengths of each, particularly in the context of historical traumas.

As the witnessing of events firsthand can have traumatic effects on the primary memory of an individual, so can the secondhand witnessing of

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traumatic events. Shoshanna Felman has studied the effects of viewing Holo- caust testimonials on her own students. After viewing videotaped first-person accounts from Yale’s Fortunoff Archive, Felman’s students experienced shock, displayed hyperbolic speech patterns (silence, stammering, and effusiveness), and felt distinct disorientation as a result of watching the testimonials, which suggests that the audience of such traumatic testimonies can bear their own, less severe marks of trauma (49–50).1 Working from Dori Laub’s assertion that narration of events can help to refigure a self whose integrity has been threatened, Felman’s students attempted to abate their feelings of shock by writing their own testimonies about the witness experience (51–52).

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“I’m not telling rumors but only what I really saw”: when eyewitness accounts meet docu- mented historiography, readers see the shortcomings and strengths of each. (From Maus, A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Page 70.)

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Trauma’s capacity to be inflicted vicariously is the subject of Marianne Hirsch’s project as well; she explores the effects of traumatic events on those who are born after or who have somehow otherwise avoided a particular trauma experienced by a relative or close group member. She uses the term postmemory to describe the relationship of survivors’ children to the events that inhabit their parents’ memories. These events are grasped only indirect- ly by the second generation, in a highly mediated but still very moving fash- ion. For example, children may be aware of their parents’ ordeals from sto- ries told by those parents or relatives. Alternatively, this second generation may be aware of their parents’ experiences as those experiences have shaped their own lives. Due to this distancing mediation, the second generation’s postmemories are sites of “projection, investment, and creation”—blank spots that serve as catchalls for the varieties of harm that humans can inflict on each other. The second generation’s own memories take a back seat to or exist in the shadow of traumatic memories to which they have only limited and highly charged access (“Memory” 8). We might roughly think of this overshadowing of one’s own experiences by those of one’s parents as a pre- empting of consciousness by others’ memories. Hirsch conceptualizes this difficult relationship as one that can be instrumental in coping constructive- ly with the memories of those with whom one is implicated by “family or group relation” (“Memory” 9). She proposes Kaja Silverman’s “heteropathic identification,” defined as “feeling and suffering with another,” as a model for the second generation that must seek resolution with respect to their par- ents’ (or guardians’) traumas. Such empathy is productive only if the experi- ence and feeling of the other are not subsumed in an “appropriative identi- fication” in which “the viewer can too easily become a surrogate victim” (“Memory” 17). Thus, the second generation is warned to exert caution in its struggle with the traumas of its figurative or literal parents—to negotiate a distance, a refusal to appropriate the experiences of others that still allows a critically distanced rapprochement that avoids unethical claiming or a pro- longing of the first generation’s witness of trauma. This endeavor produces what Hirsch defines as “a hybridized narrative” (“Memory” 16).

Maus’ s success, as a hybridized narrative and as therapy for Spiegelman, depends largely on his ability to claim the Holocaust without claiming to have experienced it. This essay investigates the specific ways that Spiegelman devel- ops his own hybridized narrative in the autobiographical sections of Maus. Art, the character, becomes integrated into the Spiegelman family as esteemed chronicler, and also introduces elements of his own trauma—Anja’s suicide— which establish an indirect link between Art, the Holocaust, and its after- effects. From the fragments of the familial ties that remain, Art Spiegelman

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sutures together his own set of familial relationships, including the dead in the piecemeal family portrait that we glimpse throughout the two volumes of Maus.

CLAIMING THE HOLOCAUST’S AFTERSHOCKS

Maus maintains roughly two levels of narrative time: a late 1930s/early 1940s wartime narrative, and a late 1970s/early1980s reconstruction of that narra- tive—the story of Vladek’s experiences before, during, and just after WW II, and the story of Spiegelman’s interviews with his father. There are some instances in which the author deviates from this dual chronology, and those instances are noteworthy. The initial occurrence takes place before Spiegel- man even begins the story of the interviews. Importantly, the first images that we see in Maus represent events taking place in Rego Park in 1958. While playing with friends, Artie, the child avatar of the cartoonist, breaks his roller skate and is promptly abandoned by two other boys who race off to a near- by park. As Artie walks back towards his house in tears, his father asks why he is crying. Upon hearing of the incident, Vladek responds to his young son, “Your friends? . . . If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week . . . THEN you could see what it is, friends!” (6). The preface inserts the reader into the narrative by opening with the perspective of Art as a ten- year-old, a perspective that we never look from again. Most of the narrative oscillates between Art’s depiction of Vladek’s wartime narrative and Art’s depiction of his relationship with his father, but aside from the single pho- tograph of Art and his mother in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” the comic depicting Anja’s suicide that he reproduces in Volume 1, the preface is the only representation of Art as a child that we see. Our position as readers is first aligned with the young, confused Art, who grows up in the shadow of the Holocaust and for whom all experience withers in comparison to his father’s wartime trials.

Further into Volume 1, My Father Bleeds History, it becomes plain that Art is a significant character in this Holocaust narrative, particularly if we con- sider the extent to which Art’s conception of the project shapes its final draft. James E. Young points out that Art attempts to correct his father’s story when Vladek begins not with Anja but with a previous girlfriend—that is, Art asks Vladek to start the story with his origins, rather than his father’s childhood or with his parents’ deportation (678–79). It is as impossible to have Maus with- out Art as it is to have it without Vladek; the extent of the project reaches well beyond Vladek’s survival story. We might say that the survival story ends only with Vladek’s death, and that Spiegelman has become part of a story that

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greatly influences his own, but also one in which he is only peripherally involved. The Maus project gives Spiegelman a central role in his father’s sur- vival story: familial scribe, he who is entrusted with the transmission of fam- ily history. But Spiegelman is no simple Dictaphone, no blank slate to be passively imprinted with his father’s testimonial. As part of the sacred Jew- ish responsibility for passing on the family and community history, Spiegel- man writes his own palimpsestic self-narrative as he refigures his father’s nar- rative in the form of what Spiegelman designates as commix, which connotes the “commingling” of word and image in Maus’ s particular representational medium (Young 672). The negotiations of these two different media paral- lel the endeavor of writing his story into Vladek’s; the one (Art’s) is depend- ent on the other (Vladek’s) for the substance that it illuminates and clarifies.

The concept of commingling becomes even more emblematic of Maus’ s project when we consider the seamless mixing of personal and public infor- mation that obtains within. At a further remove, we can see the implications of Maus not only for Spiegelman and other members of the second genera- tion, but also for the much contested terrain of art and the representation of the Holocaust. In particular, photography and objective historical docu- mentation serve as the two main headings under which Spiegelman provides compelling responses to complex problems created by the disciplinary sepa- ration of history and memory, and by the attribution of transparent authen- ticity to visual records of historical events. These issues, which I designate public in opposition to the intimate or private Spiegelman family story, are less obvious than the challenges that Art confronts with his dual chronolog- ical narrative frame. However, by discussing both the public and the private problematics of representation in Maus, we can come closer to collapsing the hierarchical divide between history and memory, while still acknowledging the epistemological limitations implied by each.

Spiegelman suggestively begins his two-volume narrative with a poignant illustration of secondary witnessing that suggests the kinds of psychological difficulties that result for the second generation from the stresses of realities that they have only experienced indirectly. This initial episode in Rego Park stands out as a paradigmatic second-generation episode in which the child’s woes are discounted by the magnitude of his parents’ traumas. Unable or unsure of how to comfort his son, Vladek disregards Artie’s experience as trivial, contrasting a children’s spat rather dramatically to his own survival of the Holocaust, suggesting the extent to which Artie grows up with the Holo- caust as the main benchmark against which to measure his own life. In “Mauschwitz,” Chapter I of Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began, we see Art relating childhood Holocaust fantasies to his wife, Françoise Mouly:

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I did have nightmares about S.S. men coming into my class and taking all us Jew- ish kids away. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t obsessed with this stuff. . . . It’s just that sometimes I’d fantasize Zyklon B coming out of our shower instead of water. I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my par- ents so I could really know what they lived through! . . . I guess it’s some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did. Sigh. I feel so inadequate try- ing to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams. (2: 16)

Despite Art’s denial of any obsession with Holocaust culture, it seems that he has been profoundly affected by his parents’ past. His nightmares and morbid fantasies, while not necessarily symptoms of trauma per se, certainly reveal a child whose everyday imagination is haunted by events to which he has no direct connection. This lack of connection is compounded by Vladek’s fragmentary processing of his own traumatic experiences.

The narrative of Vladek’s time in Auschwitz is notably nonchronological. It consists of brief episodes, anecdotes, and character sketches. Attempting to account for the overall time his father spent in the camp, Spiegelman draws a time line of his father’s internment, but is unable to settle with his father on a definite account of Vladek’s whereabouts during a year in the camp. As Art attempts to rehearse the duration of Vladek’s tenure at the tin shop, as an English teacher for a barracks supervisor, and doing hard labor (“black work”), Vladek alters his story, saying that he went back to the tin shop after the black work. Art then protests that this adds two months to Vladek’s orig- inal account, to which Vladek retorts “We didn’t wear watches in Ausch- witz!” (2: 67–68). The incoherence of the Auschwitz leg of Vladek’s story relative to the rest of his narrative and to the loss of his sense of time both suggest the kind of gaps in the record that are caused by traumatic experi- ence. Not only does Art lack direct access to his father’s experiences, but the fragmentary memory that Vladek possesses of those experiences makes for an even greater mediation of that access.

The extent of the mediation separating Vladek’s experiences from his own narrative recollections and from Art’s perception of them prompts Art to look towards more objectively grounded accounts of events in Poland and in Auschwitz. In addition to rendering illustrated versions of official relocation notices and personal papers bearing clearance stamps (1: 82, 86, 90), Spie- gelman supplies the reader with a map of Poland detailing the dates of annex- ation and occupation for its different regions (1: 90), and a map of Ausch- witz, complete with instructive labels for the different barracks giving the numbers that they accommodated (2: 51). Both maps appear on the back covers of the volumes in which they appear, and laid over these larger maps are smaller maps of Art’s Rego Park neighborhood (Volume 1, complete with

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a drawing of the Spiegelman home), and a road map of the region of New York and New Jersey that includes the section of New York City where Rego Park is located (Volume 2). Together, these two back covers emphasize the disjunction (or in Vladek’s case, the lack thereof), on both a local and region- al scale, of the contemporary and the historical, the nightmarish and the quo- tidian. Indeed, the presence of a bar code and ISBN number on both covers is an eerie reminder of the kind of meticulous record-keeping and large-scale industrial production that facilitated the Nazi Hebricide. The layering of these images disrupts the reader’s understanding of homelike spaces, encour- aging us to think of Auschwitz as an everyday reality, just as we might think of Rego Park as an everyday reality. On the Rego Park map, a department store is labeled, and an arrow points in the direction of the nearest New York City airport, while the Auschwitz map is labeled meticulously with boxes that indicate the locations of crematoria, barracks, workshops, S.S. headquarters, and the camp’s approximate capacity.

In their degree of magnification, these four different maps (two close-up and two regionally focused) foreground different experiential frames that cor- respond to the kinds of experience outlined by history and by memory: the general and the individual, respectively. By juxtaposing two different levels of resolution, Spiegelman encourages us to see the events of one as contigu- ous with the events of the other. By viewing a small road map of the Catskill Mountains on the same page as a much larger, local map of Auschwitz and Birkenau (Auschwitz II) and their train tracks, we are struck not only by the way the familiar inflects the alien, but also by how the experiences and ties existing in one local area persist in another regional area almost half a cen- tury later.

Spiegelman repeats this juxtaposition of the personal and the historical at other points in Maus, especially when Vladek’s story seems vague or per- spectivally limited. Perhaps the most outstanding instance of this occurs on page 54 of Volume 2, when Art asks his father about the orchestra reported to have played at the gate of Auschwitz. This half page consists of four frames, the left-hand pair of which takes up two-thirds of the allotted space. These two large frames on the left both depict prisoners marching out of the Ausch- witz gates under armed guard, but only the first frame shows the orchestra, as Art announces it in the smaller frame to the right. In the frame below, we see only rows of striped uniforms marching out of the gate, but the tops of a cello, tuba, and conductor’s wand are just barely visible above the heads of the internees. To the right of this panel, Art insists that the orchestra’s presence at the gates is well documented, to which Vladek replies, “No. At the gate I heard only guards and shouting.” Here Spiegelman is not merely forging a

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compromise between two conflicting accounts; he is creating a space in which both accounts seem valid. While evidence of the orchestra is present, it is relegated to the margins of the picture frame, which is dominated by rows and rows of prisoners and an armed guard.

This panel is actually a visual composite that interlaces personal memory and historical accounts to explain and validate both stories to a relatively equal degree. Here, there are two conflicting truths, one backed by historical documentation, the other by eyewitness. While the inclusion of the orchestra allows for the representation of a disciplinarily verified phenomenon, its era- sure validates the experiential truth of Vladek’s account, in which there is no orchestra amidst all the shouting and marching. Though this experiential truth may not be the objective truth, we can look back to the aforementioned frames in which Art argues with Vladek about the amount of time he spent at each job he was assigned to in Auschwitz. The period in dispute, towards the end of 1944 on the timeline, is covered over by a word bubble coming from Art’s wife, who conveniently interrupts the dispute. Again the visual acts as a vehicle for the verbal dispute, as well as for its abrupt interruption and the resulting impasse, deferring the question of objective chronological actu- ality and giving greater space to the experiential reality of the eyewitness. We see an equally interesting alignment of documentary accuracy and personal eyewitness when Vladek draws schematics of the various hiding places that the Zylberberg family and Vladek occupied before they were turned over to the Gestapo (1: 110, 112).

The appearance of different accounts together, made possible by the graphic novel form, suggests the extent to which Maus surpasses the photo- graphic medium in its capacity to create a nuanced representation of public and private Holocaust narratives and narratives of the children of survivors. Though photography is given a certain status for its ability to document objectively, the inclusion of different kinds of photographs in Maus inter- venes in complex ways in debates about the place of the photographic in the study of the Holocaust. Monica Bohm-Duchen identifies several ways that photography has been used in Holocaust art: documentary (as opposed to aesthetic), conceptual (questioning the privileged authenticity attributed to photography), and “the self-consciously artistic” (233). She adds a fourth category, which is characterized by the use of “contemporary photographic imagery of a highly personal, often autobiographical nature,” which is “less intent on making general statements about the significance [of photography and images] than on exploring one effect on one artist, one family now” (231). The autobiographical nature of its endeavor suggests that Maus under- takes a similar project, but I’d also like to consider Spiegelman’s work as

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falling into this category in that it troubles the rather narrow, individual scope that Bohm-Duchen attributes to the autobiographical creative efforts of the second generation. Spiegelman is invested not only in drawing per- sonal conclusions about his relationship to the Holocaust, but also in inves- tigating the significance of the contrast between individual eyewitness mem- ory and official historical documentation as two separate forms of knowledge. The different kinds of photographs included in Maus, however, present a more complex statement that I shall return to later in my essay.

Maus is occupied with interrogating the significance of the past for the present. It is especially important for Spiegelman to achieve access to the family legacy of Auschwitz because sharing in this legacy is the sine qua non of Spiegelman family membership. The immediacy of this legacy manifests itself in some surprising ways. Vladek’s experience as a POW in Poland in 1939, for example, would much later influence the text that Art would read at his Bar Mitzvah. Captured by the Germans, Vladek is sent to work in POW camps where the conditions are, to say the least, less than salutary, and doubly so for Jewish POWs. During his internment, he has a dream in which his grandfather informs him that he will be set free on the day that the pas- sage of Parshas Truma is to be read from the Torah. By consulting a rabbi, Vladek discovers that Parshas Truma is three months away; on the day that he is liberated, Spiegelman’s father realizes that it is indeed the day of Parshas Truma. Though this release is far from the desired end of a safe return to his family in Sosnowiec, the Parshas Truma episode becomes a shorthand signi- fier of Vladek’s escape from death in POW camps.

In the next few frames Vladek tells Art that Parshas Truma was also being read during the week of his marriage to Anja and the week of Art’s own birth. It is thus, he continues, the portion of the Torah that Art recites for his Bar Mitzvah (1: 57–59). Art’s coming into Hebraic manhood, then, is predicated on his father’s dream prognosticating release from the POW camp. Parshas Truma comes to stand in for Vladek’s brush with death—a brush that Spie- gelman hints prepares Vladek in many ways for the ordeals he would suffer in and just after Auschwitz. The causality of the Parshas Truma dream becomes distorted. Instead of predicting the day of Vladek’s release from the POW camp, the dream is conflated with the guarantee of survival in a broader con- text. In this sense, the Parshas Truma incident—the guarantee of survival— becomes a fetish,2 popping up at key points in Vladek’s life and banishing the threat of death and disappearance: in his marriage to Anja, his release, the birth of his son, and his son’s attainment of Jewish male maturity. Art’s iden- tity, then, becomes a function of his father’s biography in yet another way. The sacred texts he reads have significance that is familial, not personal. Implicit

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here is a privileging of the father’s legacy and a burdening of Art with the imperative to measure up. That this crucial linkage refers back to a period that significantly predates his father’s camp experience foregrounds Art’s prob- lematic status in the family as a non-survivor. It is this subsumption of Art’s life under the exigencies of Vladek’s past that Spiegelman is trying to reverse, which is why he begins Maus not with Vladek but with himself. While the book’s central interest is Vladek’s survival story, the ways in which this story affects Art’s self work to structure the narrative from without (the editing and composition process) and from within (the interviewing process).

In relation to Vladek, Spiegelman’s perseverance involves his discovery of a way to connect himself to Vladek’s narrative—to implicate himself in what has become a familial ur-narrative. In a sense, Art becomes a member of the family through his inscription of this narrative. Even more complexly, he negotiates a position that allows him family membership without having played a role in the Holocaust while still acknowledging that lack. Engaging with problems of postmemory in his narration of events that he himself has not witnessed, Spiegelman must renegotiate his “relationship to the memory of events,” as Young puts it (670). In this, the cartoonist seems to suffer the fate that Dominick LaCapra fears for members of the second generation: that they will take the Holocaust as “a founding trauma and thus a paradoxical, perhaps impossible source of meaning and identity” (177). How can the Holocaust not be such a site for the postwar child of survivors? Despite LaCapra’s concerns, however, Spiegelman has found meaning and identity in his (indirect) relation to the Holocaust.

THE GHOST-BROTHER: SIBLING RIVALRY

The issue of Spiegelman’s identity and his relation to his parents’ experiences becomes even more problematic when we consider his mother, Anja, and his dead brother, Richieu. Though Anja is absent from the text, she is not the most fabricated member of the Spiegelman family in Maus. “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” is prefaced by the search for Anja’s diaries, and followed by Vla- dek’s narration of Richieu’s death at the hands of his aunt Tosha, who poi- sons herself, Richieu, and his two cousins rather than be sent to the camps. Richieu’s absence, too, proves to be problematic for Spiegelman both in real life and in the text. If he has difficulties representing his mother, who raised him, his difficulties representing Richieu are not bound by the same feelings of lack that we will see with Anja. How does one represent a boy that no one knew, who had little chance even to exist? How can Spiegelman represent an idealized brother of whom he feels that he is the negation? Not only are there

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almost no memorial remains of Richieu, in Vladek’s narrative or otherwise, but what does remain bears little relation to the reality of what the little boy might actually have been like. Richieu appears in Maus as a site of investment for Art’s anxieties about what he perceives to be his shortcomings in his par- ents’ eyes.

Though Richieu’s death occurs two-thirds of the way through Volume 1 (109), he appears at several later points during the narrative. In World War II story-time, we see Vladek and Anja learn the news while in hiding near the ghetto at Srodula—thirteen pages later. On the frontispiece of the second volume, we are greeted with a picture that we assume is Richieu. Above the picture, the caption reads “For Richieu,” and below it, “And for Nadja.” The implications of grouping together his dead brother and living daughter are striking, indeed. Given the feelings that Art has towards Richieu, one hopes that he is attempting to connect the two generations, invigorating the mem- ory of the dead son with the hope that the living granddaughter represents. However, this hope threatens to turn into the same pressure that causes Art to frame himself as the anti-Richieu. This odd configuration of family inher- itance and the eerie conflation of the not-so-recently dead with the familiar living leaves Art conspicuously on the margins. We might conclude opti- mistically that he is a second-order replacement for the real thing, a copy of the original; his existence is validated largely by virtue of his relationship to the original.

Talking to Françoise in the very beginning of Volume II, Art wonders how his childhood would have been had his brother lived. Though he says that his parents never discussed the boy and that he never thought about him as a kid, Richieu seems to have had an impact on young Art. “The photo never threw tantrums or got into any kind of trouble,” he says to Françoise, “it was an ideal kid, and I was a pain in the ass. I couldn’t compete. They didn’t talk about Richieu, but that photo was a kind of reproach. He’d have become a doctor, and married a wealthy Jewish girl . . . the creep” (2: 15). Far from being a blank, Richieu’s photo is a site of great investment for Spie- gelman—it “blocks the work of forgetting” in Art’s interaction with it as an undefeatable adversary. Unlike Anja, whom Art knew, there are no real memories for the photo to erase, and thus the photo acts as a site for memo- rial investment. But Art’s attitude towards the photo is mediated by his father’s direct connection with the boy that it represents. Richieu becomes, for Art, a function of Art’s own troubled relationship with his parents. The idealized dead boy’s phantom presence serves to exonerate Art from feelings of guilt resulting from his estrangement from his parents by shifting the cause for such alienation away from himself.

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The “sibling rivalry with a snapshot,” as Spiegelman calls it, stands as a vivid illustration of what it means to be deeply affected by postmemory, by the effects of transgenerational distancing from significant events by which loved ones have been intensely influenced. Artie transforms the memory of Richieu into the specifications of his own psychological landscape, one in which he feels like an outsider, estranged from parents with whom he does not share a crucial bond. Sibling rivalry is a common everyday phenomenon that wards away the frightening unreality of the Holocaust’s horror, but the sibling rival’s status as ghost prohibits nonetheless any kind of escape from the isolating estrangement that Art feels towards his parents. In Art’s imagi- nation, Richieu is aligned with Anja and Vladek because of their common experiences, leaving Art firmly at the bottom of the family order.

This fabricated semblance of normative family life proves finally to be a feeble shield, and the imaginary sibling rivalry works to increase Art’s feelings of inadequacy as the descendent of survivors. In the end, the death of a fam- ily member prohibits Spiegelman again from engaging in the therapeutic nar- rative practices that serve him so well with Vladek. Such is the predicament of the second-generation offspring of the traumatized and especially so with those from whom the trauma in question is also an historical event. They must find ways to include their parents’ trauma within their own story in a way that neither appropriates nor subsumes the parents’ experiences into their own. Not having lived through these experiences, the second generation can- not lay direct claim to these, but only to their aftereffects, having experienced those by virtue of prolonged intimate contact with the first generation.3

Hirsch calls this transference effect “heteropathic identification”: “feeling and suffering with another” (“Memory” 9). She stresses the need to maintain a critical distance to avoid “appropriative identification” in which “the view- er can too easily become a surrogate victim” (“Memory” 17).

Spiegelman’s negotiation of this tricky terrain is of special note in “Pris- oner on the Hell Planet.” He is directly traumatized by Anja’s suicide, but not directly by her experiences in the camps, and does well to keep these two trau- mas distinct, though they are undeniably linked. He resists making her trau- ma his own, as he resists appropriating or identifying himself with Richieu’s death. Instead he sets himself up in opposition to Richieu as rival, not as sur- rogate. Though Spiegelman himself constructs this binary, which gives him no small amount of grief, Vladek collapses it with a word in the penultimate frame of the narrative when he says to Art, “I’m tired from talking, Richieu, and it’s enough stories for now” (2: 136). The blurring of the living son with the dead one brings Maus to an end with a reminder of memory’s mal- leability, in that Vladek can mistake Art for Richieu, but also a reminder of

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traumatic memory’s fixity, in that the dead boy is still present to the griev- ing father. The distinction between the two boys, however, is compromised by Vladek’s expectation that Art should somehow replace or otherwise fill Richieu’s shoes. Here, again, the imaginary Richieu functions not to impute a fictional normativity to the family structure, but to foreground Spiegelman’s own feelings of inadequacy next to an idealized sibling. Though this panel on the final page may be read optimistically as Vladek’s long overdue recogni- tion of his second son as part of the family, the indirectness of this inclusion nonetheless undercuts the “happy, happy ever after” bedtime story ending.

THE ABSENT MOTHER: GAPS IN THE TEXT

Art’s most affectively significant connection with the Holocaust is through the trauma that he experiences upon his mother’s suicide. Maus’s emphasis on the absence of Anja’s personal diaries, which were burned by Vladek after her death, and Art’s impulse to return repeatedly to his mother’s death, imply that her absence paradoxically constitutes Art’s connection to the Holocaust. Anja’s noteworthy absence from Maus exposes Art’s traumatization by her death. The only instances in which we see Anja through Art’s eyes occur in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” and these four pages reflect the cartoonist’s inability to nar- rate or to represent his mother as a result of the gaps created by the trauma of her death and the guilt that wracks Art’s conscience in its aftermath.

We might seek to make sense of Art’s inability to narrate his own version of Anja by first considering the ways that the traumatized are impaired in their ability to narrate or represent. In her work on the narration of trau- matic events, Cathy Caruth argues that trauma and history share a similar trope: both are founded on a problematic absence (12). She draws largely from Freud’s theories about trauma in her conceptualization of the similar structures of history and trauma. Freud is interested in the way that mani- festations of a trauma (say, heavy combat) repeat the events in question with- out those events having been integrated and given significance by the sub- conscious. Consciousness serves as a buffer zone that helps us anticipate and react to our environment, and the trauma penetrates or disrupts this buffer zone, constituting a breach of the self. Since it is through this self that we make sense of our bodies’ experiences, the breach of self disables our ability to make sense of traumatic events. In a way, these experiences refer to death— the dissolution of the self and the subordination of the body to material forces that violate the structural integrity of the body. It is the conscious- ness’s survival of death and its subsequent return as something different, how- ever, that is of particular concern to Caruth. The traumatic neurosis is not about the brush with death, but a problem posed by survival in the face of

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those fragmentarily recorded experiences. “What does it mean,” Caruth asks, “for consciousness to survive?” (61).

Trauma is characterized by the subject’s inability to assimilate fully an event; the event is not completely experienced by the subject as it happens. After a latency period, the mind returns neurotically to the event itself, struc- turing the consciousness around the fact that the mind is ever preparing itself to re-survive the traumatic experience all over again (Caruth 59–61). Accord- ing to Freud, the mind’s objective in obsessively repeating the record of the traumatic experience is to “master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (qtd. in Caruth 62).

History is built around a similar struggle with gaps. We make history out of the residues of events that are no longer available to us except in the form of artifacts, documents, photographic records, and leftover accounts of eye- witnesses. As the traumatized subject returns repeatedly to the incompletely grasped event, so is the historian necessarily drawn back to the historical event. It has taken place and is over with, gone except for the material traces that bear witness to it. As with trauma, though, just because the event is over does not mean that its effects do not continue to resonate for some time (Caruth 11–12). The impulse to return to the past, the fascination with recovering the past in the many forms in which it persists, is a response to the same drive that motivates the traumatic neurosis. With memory, the particu- lars of the witnessing are foregrounded, and the historian must sift through these particulars to get to the generalizable events and details that can be taken as history. Maus’s representation of Anja as a human in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” unmediated by Vladek’s memory, shows signs of the trau- matic narrative gaps that Caruth and Freud mention. Anja’s appearances in Maus strongly suggest that her suicide is Art’s central trauma, in that he reaches considerably less resolution with regard to her suicide than he does with Vladek’s alienating wartime experiences.

Though Anja appears via her husband’s narrative as a character through- out both volumes of Maus, we are only shown a single interaction between her and Art. This interaction is one step removed from either time frame of the narrative, and it depicts Art’s last conversation with his mother. After a terse exchange with Vladek in his Rego Park garage, Art asks his stepmother, Mala, whether Vladek is angry with him. She responds that the reason for his father’s mood might be related to an old comic of Spiegelman’s that Vla- dek had recently found. To Art’s dismay, the comic in question is the afore- mentioned “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” a four-page narrative about Anja’s suicide and its aftermath that Spiegelman had published a decade earlier. In

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this small comic passage, we can see that the problems surrounding Spiegel- man’s relationship with his mother are at least as complex as those sur- rounding his relationship with his father.

This section (1: 100–103) comes just a few pages after a passage in which we see Art looking through Vladek’s belongings in an attempt to find his mother’s diary of the Holocaust, written after the fact with the intention that Art should see it later (1: 92–93). Aside from featuring human characters, “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” is most obviously different from the rest of Maus because of its graphic style, but perhaps more significant is that it rep- resents past events that Spiegelman himself has actually witnessed. In a fam- ily replete with trauma, this is Art’s direct and unmediated experience of it. No longer in a position outside of the main series of narrative events, Spie- gelman has a much more difficult time finding a viable position for himself as a character/narrator. His own involvement in the episode of his mother’s death causes a crisis of self-representation that hinders Spiegelman from reaching any kind of narrative or psychological integration of this series of events within his own life narrative.

The comic is set in 1968, and opens with a picture of Anja dressed in a swimsuit with little Artie to her right (we assume), kneeling with her hand resting on his head. This is the first of three real photographs that are repro- duced over the course of Maus, and it is no coincidence that the other two are of Richieu (2: frontispiece) and of Vladek (2: 134). Much has been made recently of the status of photography in Holocaust art and representation. In addition to Marianne Hirsch’s foundational work, Ernst van Alphen, Barbie Zelizer, and Dora Apel, among others, have all contributed to thinking about photography’s status and the different uses to which it has been put. Van Alphen, for example, considers the photograph to be the metaphorical emblem of the individual survivor’s experience, arguing that the photograph loses meaning in its imperviousness to change, its immutability. He compares the eternally static photograph to the traumatic memory that must be reiterated and endured unchangingly—“the visual equivalent of a broken record” (101).

The photograph of Anja in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” is just such a broken record for Spiegelman. Perhaps the most striking thing about the picture is how little it gives us. The reader is left with a feeling of emptiness; the two figures are too small to have distinct features, and though the cap- tion under it reads “Trojan Lake, N.Y. 1958,” there is only flat brushland and sky in the background. Though we may, I argue, safely assume that the two people in the photo are Art and Anja, no such notation is included on the margin of the photo. The barrenness of the photo suggests the tenor of Art’s feelings—or rather, the monotony of them. While the photo resists the

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idealization of Anja, it also refuses to display any emotional dimension to either figure. The affective illegibility of this photo creates an impression of febrility or stasis, suggesting that the Spiegelman who includes the photo (and “Prisoner on the Hell Planet”) is no closer to effectively mourning his mother’s death and rendering it narratively than the Spiegelman who drew it in the first place (van Alphen 110).

Following Barthes, Hirsch argues that photographs simultaneously con- fer presence and absence: “Life is the presence of the object before the cam- era . . . death is the ‘having-been-there’ of the object—the radical break, the finality introduced by the past tense” (“Family” 6). The photo’s inclusion in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” frames it as a site of lost plenitude, a fore- grounding of the past tense-ness of the photo’s topos. We feel a keener lack of what the picture excludes about Anja Spiegelman than what it includes of her: the photo is a residue of a former plenitude. In “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” there is something about narrative and the representation (or approx- imation) of Anja’s speech that is more vivid than her photograph. The pic- ture is a corpse, a void, a reminder of our current position of lack, of which the photo is a mocking and empty reminder.

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Photography as broken record: placed in the opening panel of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” the photo creates an impression of emotional barrenness, suggesting a lost plenitude and a lack of effective mourning. (From Maus, A Survivor’s Tale I: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pan- theon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Page 102.)

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This may be due in part to the context in which we view the picture. Com- pare the placement of Anja’s photo to that of Vladek’s toward the very end of the second volume. Vladek sends this photo, in which he’s dressed rather eeri- ly in a clean camp uniform, to Anja as evidence of his survival. The picture is taken as a testament to life and material presence, and is used in that way both in real life and within the narrative of Maus. While the picture is undeniably a testament to things past, the context that frames it foregrounds photogra- phy’s potential for preservation. Nevertheless, the mother’s photo corroborates Barthes’s claim that “Not only is the photograph never in essence a memory, but it blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory” (91). Anja’s photo is positioned as a memorial, as a reminder of that which no longer exists. The insufficiency of the photo to recall the mother is reinforced by the narrative gap that is left by the absence of her diaries, as well as by her failure to leave a suicide note to explain her action. I suggest that Spiegelman chooses not to recreate his mother outside of Vladek’s narrative, with the exception of “Pris- oner on the Hell Planet,” because his memory of her is disabled by the trau- ma of her suicide. This disabling of memory is only advanced by the reliance on photographs as the repositories of some essential truth of the lost person.

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Vladek’s photograph: a testament to survival and material presence—in life and in Maus. (From Maus, A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Ran- dom House, Inc. Page 132.)

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In her refreshingly original work on the photographs of women survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators that were published in the months after the lib- eration, Barbie Zelizer highlights the ways that pictures of these women were used either to reinforce gender norms or to ignore gender-specific experience completely in the context of historical atrocity. Due to the unfortunate unavailability of Anja’s narrative, this is also true of Spiegelman’s Maus. We see Anja through her identity as mother of the artist, but remain unable to see her freed from the lens of gender. Whether she appears as a mouse or a still photo, her identity is always a function of her relationship to the Spie- gelman men. Both Vladek and Art are unable to present her outside of the framework of traditional gender roles, much like the women who appeared in the post-liberation photographs that pervaded the newspapers and jour- nals of 1945. Spiegelman is unable even to supply a working version of his own Anja that differs notably from the somewhat infantilized, frail invalid whom Vladek depicts.

It is important to note that nowhere else in Maus do we see Anja through Art’s eyes; he includes no childhood memories, vignettes, or even small details that would suggest anything about his own relationship with Anja. As Dora Apel notes, “Experience that has not been processed cannot be narrat- ed, constituting trauma, not memory” (56). We only see Anja as an effect of Vladek’s memory, in which she is painted as weak, frail, and naive, but also as eloquent and charming.4 Even while in the work camps, according to Vla- dek, he must take steps to ensure her survival. For example, he notes her lack of physical strength as shown by her tendency to spill the soup tureen, and his success at smuggling extra provisions to her through a mutual contact (2: 53). We hear no examples of her capacity for survival or psychological endurance, or even a first-person account of her own frailty. Seen through Vladek’s loving eyes, she is his charge, vaguely helpless, dangerously weak, and in constant need of his care and protection. Art can only include her in the narrative by reproducing an already published account of her death in which the younger Art is only capable of narrating his last interaction with her. Even then, the rendering of her that we do see is determined by her iden- tity as Art’s mother, as she begs him for validation while he turns away to avoid the maternal tie that he is being asked to vindicate. The narration of her last words to Art defines her more by the codified gendered behavior that it displays than by her personal traits: “Artie . . . you . . . still . . . love . . . me . . . don’t . . . you?” The woman who had the strength and hope to tran- scribe her experiences after the fact for her son to pass on remains mute, and Spiegelman seems no closer to being able to process and narrate his experience of her suicide and her life as he saw it while growing up. She is relegated to

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a brief flashback towards the end of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” dead even in the first frame of the brief comic.

In “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” the twenty-year-old Spiegelman comes home late from a weekend spent with his girlfriend. Upon discovering a crowd outside of the house in Rego Park, he is led away from the scene by a relative and taken to a doctor’s office, where he is informed of his mother’s suicide (1: 100–101). Art is expected to support emotionally his distraught father, but the funeral proves to be too much for Art to take. Sitting in an anteroom, he is reproached by a family friend for not being a better son. At this point, Spiegelman writes, “I felt nauseous . . . . the guilt was overwhelm- ing!” (102). It is at this moment in the narrative that the image style shifts, suggesting that the aporias and gaps that are characteristic of trauma narra- tives translate curiously when they appear in a visual medium. Though the whole comic uses deliberately skewed perspective and hyperbolic proportion- ing, the expressionistic quality of the images becomes even more exaggerated in the two frames beneath these words. In one frame, the awning and front sign of the funeral home, as well as the Stars of David on the awning, are cubistically layered and repeated in the frame as Art slumps out of the build- ing, hiding his face in shame. This deliberate exaggeration of incorrect per- spective and object size occurs at one other point in the strip, at the moment in which the doctor informs Art of his mother’s suicide. Spiegelman’s own notation of his debilitated psychological condition concurrent with this change in graphic style suggests the distortion of experience that Caruth and others have associated with trauma. With this second instance of graph- ic distortion, the narrative collapses, and we are left with another whole page during which Art unsuccessfully seeks for a way to come to terms with Anja’s suicide.

It is noteworthy that Spiegelman’s narrative breaks down after he leaves the funeral home. He briefly mentions visits from Vladek’s friends (whom he believes hold him guilty for Anja’s death), but is unable to formally end his narrative. “For the most part, I was left alone with my thoughts,” Spiegelman writes, under which we see a crowded frame with four tiny pictures and four captions integrated into the pictures themselves: “menopausal depression,” “Hitler did it!,” “Mommy!,” and “bitch.” The pictures, from top to bottom, show a representation of Anja’s nude corpse in the bathtub, a pile of bodies with a swastika on a camp wall in the background, a miniature of Anja read- ing to Artie at bedtime (with the child in a camp uniform), and Anja’s fore- arms as she slits her own wrists with a razor. In the lower right hand corner of the same frame, the adult Art leans with his hand over his forehead. The artist runs the gamut of explanations for her death and emotions in reaction

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to it in a single, very cramped 2” x 3” square, suggesting the cramped, stifling “headspace” in which this emotional struggle takes place.

The middle of the page shows a representation of his last interaction with her. The graphic style here is disconcertingly undistorted, especially for a flashback. We might think of this odd normality, the straightforward visu- al style, and narrative progression as an attempt to fake a normative narrative memory of an event that Spiegelman cannot transfer into what van Alphen (after psychologist Pierre Janet) refers to as narrative memory : “mental con- structs which people use to make sense out of experience” (102). A closer look at these frames reveals the weakness of the narrative artifice here. Anja is already a ghost in these four frames. As she comes into his room late at night, her body is in the exact same pose for each frame, and her eyes are hollowed out with dark circles beneath. Even the wavy “flashback” lines of these four picture frames separate them from the rest of the graphic passage, in which the picture frames are formed in the standard straight-line style. Her halting speech represents her in greater depth than does her photograph on the first page, but the reader is still struck by the iconic nature of her appearance here. She enters, asks a question, and is banished by the young artist. In the fourth frame, Anja closes Art’s bedroom door, and we see a close-up of his guilt- ridden face—perhaps an insertion of postmortem filial remorse that Spiegel- man wishfully rewrites. The image of her nude corpse (which appears twice in four pages), as well as the three or four frames that draw out her last inter- action with Art in a relatively normal perspectival style, are both direct evi- dence of the young artist’s traumatic return to the psychological site of his mother’s death. The impact of this event on Art might be further gauged by considering that these four pages are republished and reread by Art, whose illustrated hand appears holding the first reproduced page.

Spiegelman’s inclusion of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” reveals his own emotional paralysis, with the strip acting as a placeholder or, we might say, a dummy that seeks to imitate the appearance of a successful processing of a traumatic memory into a narrative indicating closure or resolution. It is the only section in Maus that appears as black print on black pages, standing out visually even when the book itself is closed, a black hole of memory—some- how undeniably still there in its very absence. La Capra writes of this section:

There is a sense in which Artie seeks a memorial to the missing mother, a necessar- ily inadequate gift of mourning that tries to compensate both for her suffering in life and for her untimely, unjustified death. . . . Anja seems to become a phantas- mic archive that Artie hopes will provide him with a point of entry into the elusive, seemingly redemptive past that he tries to recapture. Indeed, at times she seems to be her lost papers, and when they are destroyed, she almost shares their fate. (172)

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The limitation of Anja’s tragedy to this brief space in the narrative suggests that Maus is (perhaps by necessity) a patrilineal text. At no other point does Spiegelman progress beyond the groping muddle of conflicted emotions about his mother’s fate (as well as the fate of her diaries). All other represen- tations of Anja are the effects of Vladek’s narrative and not of Art’s own memories of his mother. Never do we glimpse Anja through, say, young Artie’s eyes. We learn more about Vladek as a person by the way he depicts Anja than we do about Anja’s consciousness and perspective. Her relative invisibility stands out as a marker, creating a tension by foregrounding the obvious absence of a considerable part of the story. The last page’s fairytale “happy, happy ever after” ending provides a formulaic close to a narrative in which the characters demonstrably do not live happily ever after. The impos- sibility of a happy ending to this story gestures towards Anja’s death, but it is a cursory gesture, despite its telling position at the very end of the narra- tive. The obvious insufficiency of this stock narrative gesture underscores the widely acknowledged assertion that the traumas of the Holocaust resist nar- rative structuring. While we can observe the tangible marks of trauma and the limits of the narrative form, we are no closer to imagining what Anja’s own story might have looked like, and it is her absence that is the most sig- nificant in Maus.

Spiegelman is less successful in his attempt to negotiate a place for his dead mother within the main narrative of Maus, and thus less successful in working through his grief. Instead, he seems to be merely reenacting the event. LaCapra opposes the act of working through (mourning) to that or reenacting or repeating (melancholia). The former entails a distancing of oneself from a trauma, while the latter entails an identification of oneself as victim, bringing about a retraumatization, and retarding the profession of any healing (Hirsch, “Family” 16). Perhaps Spiegelman is confined to melancho- lia because he is within the story in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet”—within it as a flawed son and as a scapegoat, unable to reconcile guilt and anger, and more importantly, crippled by the lack of a text from which to draw, whether oral or written (“She left no note!”). In the case of Spiegelman’s relationship to Vladek’s story, the act of narration (interviewing, editing, compiling, sketching) enables him to build an important place for himself in the record of family memory from which he is initially excluded. By contrast, his expe- rience of and implication in his mother’s suicide, and the lack of any verbal record of her life, prohibit him from positioning himself as impartial com- piler and archivist, which is where he finds validation in his work with Vla- dek’s story.

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Text—even an oral text—allows Spiegelman to maintain some narrative control, an objective position of knowledge from which to assert and impli- cate himself in the narrative. This is not the case with “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” which suggests that he has less success in coming to terms with his own trauma than he does with that of his father. Textual evidence serves to ground him as an interested, observing party writing a sensitive and careful- ly handled representation of his father’s survival story. Spiegelman’s own sur- vival story proves to be more difficult for him to handle, leaving us uncer- tain as to how the trauma of Anja’s suicide will be met by young Nadja, the daughter of Art and Françoise. How will it complicate her relationship to her father, and her own awareness of the presence of feminine voice in her fam- ily, one half of which has been directly or indirectly traumatized or silenced by the Holocaust, and one half of which has not?

HISTORY AND MEMORY

The photos that appear in Maus serve the same function as the diagrams, maps, and schematics: they acknowledge the significance of personal mem- ory in the context of large-scale historical events. The three photos are dis- tinctive not for what they reveal, but for what they hold back. Unlike those chronicling the liberation and its aftermath, Spiegelman’s personal family photos are significant because of what they do not show. While the piles of corpses recorded by photographers during the liberation to document the atrocity of the Shoah confer anonymity upon their subjects, the photos of Anja, Richieu, and Vladek are contextualized to emphasize the tragedy of their deaths as individuals. These photos are meaningful to the reader because Spiegelman has conveyed in part the individual life stories, without which the photos would mean little or nothing to the viewer. That we must know the stories of Art’s family to view and to understand properly their likenesses and the significance of their inclusion in Maus also foregrounds the lack of similar information in non-personal, post-liberation Holocaust photogra- phy. Our readings of those pictures are also framed by the text that they accompany, but we seldom if ever find out any details about the individuals who appear in the photos that surpass the immediate textual occasion that they supplement. Here, again, Spiegelman makes a subtle and important dis- tinction about different kinds of photography and the ways each contributes to historical or personal documents. The personal photo is much more dif- ficult to interpret because the outside viewer must rely on insider (in this case, family) knowledge to be able to attribute significance to the photo. The viewer’s need for intimacy while looking a personal photos ironically is best

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exemplified by a passage towards the end of the second volume in which Vla- dek presents Art with a shoebox full of Anja’s old family photos that had been saved from destruction by a neighbor of the Zylberbergs.

Though this episode does not depict the only instance of actual photos reproduced by Spiegelman as illustrated photographs of tiny mice-people, it speaks clearly to our questions regarding the status of photography in Maus. As Art rifles eagerly through the box of old photos, Vladek narrates the story behind each person who appears in them. Because of Vladek’s ability to inform Art (and us) about them as distinct individuals, and to narrate Anja’s family tree through them, these illustrated photos are more poignant than the unyielding actual photos included in Maus. The only place we see photo- graphic Holocaust imagery is in the picture of Vladek in a camp uniform taken in a photo shop after the liberation, which calls into question the authentici- ty attributed to documentary Holocaust photography. We are reminded that there is no way to know whether these images have been staged, altered, or contextualized by the verbal content with which they are conjoined (Zelizer 248). Here, actual photos gesture towards the private lives of families and friends that are not accessible without a guide to narrate and tell the viewer about the photos. In hearing the life stories of aunts, uncles, cousins, and nephews, we are reminded of the importance of personal memory as opposed to mere photographic documentation, and the fact that the stories of the liv- ing bodies and their families give something to us that photos of mass graves cannot. They remind us that the historical and personal are intertwined, and that although they may be isolated for the sake of certain disciplinary con- cerns, these two types of knowledge both serve to enrich, support, and chal- lenge our understanding of the lived past and our own relation to it.

Finally, Spiegelman addresses the tendency of official historical docu- mentation to flatten out variety and overlook complexities in its attempts to establish a clear picture of a historical object. Primo Levi cautions against the danger of representing the Holocaust in ways that tend “toward simplification and stereotype” (Apel 11), and in her essay “Surviving Images,” Marianne Hirsch argues in favor of the need for a more diverse array of documentary images to promote a more complex understanding of the Holocaust. Echoing this concern, Dora Apel argues that overly sentimentalized treatments of the Holocaust risk “reducing the horror of mass murder to an over-literalized and fetishized image that can only be regarded as kitsch” (19). She notes the extent to which artists who address the Holocaust avoid the easy resolution of a redemptive or heroic narrative, and their resistance to exploiting (and thus exhausting) the power of images such as smokestacks, barbed wire, trains, and mass graves (20).

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Though it is impossible to avoid reproducing these images in an illus- trated biographical narrative of an Auschwitz survivor, Spiegelman handles such iconic imagery in a way that resists their tendency to become “stock shots” (Zelizer 248). In his depiction of smokestacks, barbed wire, wooden bunks, and trains, Spiegelman often calls attention to their iconicity through graphic means, by blatantly repeating the exact same image over and over. For example, identical smokestacks, bunks, and railcars appear throughout volume two. Alternately, he includes the personal remembrance or witness of an identified source, calling attention to specific context and personal sig- nificance. For example, just before Spiegelman’s illustration of a crematorium Vladek comments, “You heard about the gas, but I’m not telling rumors but only what really I saw.” The next page contains a detailed set of blueprints and illustrations of the different parts of death camp crematoria, and it is notably the only page in Maus with no people/mice (2: 69–71).

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The intertwining of historical and personal: by adding personal memory to documentary, Maus’ s illustrated photos support and challenge our understanding of, and relationship to, the past. (From Maus, A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman, copy- right © 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Page 114.)

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CONCLUSION

In Maus, Art Spiegelman negotiates the difficulties of heteropathic identifica- tion with varying degrees of success. Vladek proves to be the easiest for him to deal with in terms of working through (LaCaprian “mourning”) as opposed to reenacting the trauma (LaCaprian “melancholy”) visited upon the Spie- gelman family. Through the composition of Maus, Spiegelman insets him- self as a character in the text in an effort to make a place for himself in the family with relation to its experiences during the Holocaust. Art becomes family scribe and a transmitter of family history. Within this role, Spiegelman can use his status as editor, compiler, and animator to achieve a degree of narrative control and dominance over who gets to tell which stories. Anja proves to be more difficult for Spiegelman to integrate into the narrative, because his witnessing of the aftermath of her suicide constitutes a firsthand experience of trauma for him. She is the most problematic member of the family for him to come to terms with, as least here in the commix medium, and Vladek’s portrait of her foregrounds her hyper-femininity to the exclu- sion of individual personal traits that would distinguish her regardless of her gender. Art’s struggle with the trauma of his mother’s death is not a wasted endeavor, though, as “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” provides evidence for the graphic or visual manifestation of trauma, which is often considered only with respect to the written word. The inclusion of her photo underscores the illustrator’s emotional impasse in how little it actually tells us about her, mimicking Spiegelman’s inability to access productively the events surround- ing his mother’s suicide. The dead son Richieu poses a relatively less daunt- ing task of familial narrative construction for Spiegelman. His characteriza- tion of Richieu as rival sibling at least hints at the shadow of a normative family structure, and serves to reassert Art’s own distinctness. Art’s disobedi- ence as both child and adult, however, negatively distinguishes him from his dead brother. Because Richieu is less central to the family structure, his importance, compared to that of Vladek or Anja, is fairly minor.

LaCapra distinguishes history from memory, emphasizing that each should be thought of as informing and challenging the other. History is something that transcends the boundaries of the single viewpoint, including in its scope “elements that are not exhausted by memory, such as demo- graphic, ecological, and economic factors” (20). Memory, on the other hand, is the result of a first-person witnessing of a set of events that is characterized by the witness’s personal feelings and experiences, the circumstances that adhere to the particular (20–21). Several of Maus’ s visual devices serve to highlight the connections and conflicts between history and memory: the

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history book-like diagrams that Spiegelman includes, Vladek’s crude schemat- ics drawn on notebook paper, actual family photographs that resist inter- pretation, illustrated family photographs that are given considerable depth by Vladek’s commentary, and the appearance of iconic images within inti- mate personal passages. In visually juxtaposing memorial and historical ele- ments, Spiegelman creates a dual perspective that includes the combined accounts of father and son. The abstract narratives of the historical discipline constitute a processing of large sets of related events into an orderly format that enables us to create a narrative trajectory of which we are a part. While private narratives certainly inform the historical record, they are also impor- tant in the extent to which they differ from it in content and scale, remind- ing us of the roles that individuals play in large-scale historical trends or events.

As readers, our attention is called not only to certain events that hap- pened to one man victimized in the Holocaust, but also to his son’s struggle to understand the ongoing effects of those events on his father and himself. Here memory informs history in that Art’s and Vladek’s interaction bears the marks of ongoing trauma. Though there are relatively few artifacts left to be gathered, the Holocaust continues to affect its survivors and their descen- dents with the weight of its legacy. Anja’s suicide and Vladek’s estrangement from his second son reveal the ways in which the events of the Holocaust have created an echo that still affects survivors and their families. Indeed, this ripple effect poses the question of the extent to which any major historical event reaches into the future, prompting us to wonder about the lines that we draw in our thinking about such large-scale events—geopolitical, gener- ational, and economic. These lines must be drawn to articulate a boundary for an object of study. But what is left out in this study, and how might we gesture towards it in other, overlapping disciplines? History and memory can exist in reciprocal relation; memory works in ways that extend the effects of historical events. While memory can serve as historical evidence, it serves also to fill in the gaps of absent events with the material particulars of those who speak their (primary) memories in mediated forms to others (secondary memory). The witnessing of historical events can charge us with very per- sonal investments, and those investments can reproduce themselves in the courses of life action that they endorse. We are not, as Fitzgerald suggests, borne ceaselessly back into the past, but the past bears us inexorably towards the future through memory.

Many of the questions I pose here are also concerned with the therapeu- tics and ethics of collaborative biography. To begin to answer the need for an ethics of narrative in the special case of postmemory, we might look to the

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concept of heteropathic identification, in which survivors’ children find a way to claim the event itself that acknowledges their distance from the trau- matic events in question. It is a matter of finding a way not just to acknowl- edge the distance between themselves and their parents’ traumatic experi- ences, but to make that distance central somehow to the process of plotting an identity. Thus a refusal to identify with or to claim the witnesses’ traumatic events themselves is paramount to the ethical handling of postmemory—its definition as such necessitates this care. The danger of trivializing the effects of trauma is the primary concern here. If the line between the traumatized and those affected by their traumas is blurred, we risk reducing the signifi- cance of the truly life- and mind-threatening borderline experiences that we designate as “traumatic.” Quite significantly, Spiegelman uses the visual ter- rain of Maus to envision the graphic depiction of mediation itself, encour- aging a more complete understanding of the phenomenon of postmemory and of the blind areas created by broad historical narratives.

The therapeutic potential that I suggest for postmemorial narratives is in line with the ethical treatment of those narratives. The second generation’s heteropathic identification with parental survivors’ traumas upholds the therapeutic demand that trauma be worked through (mourning) and not reinflicted (melancholia). We might say that the ethics of postmemory pre- figure its therapeutics. The trauma will be reinflicted if the second generation identifies excessively with trauma that affects them indirectly. While this alignment of ethics and therapeutics may seem more than a little too perfect, I merely suggest this as a starting point for further inquiry. Indeed, perhaps it is to the potential sites of conflict between ethics and therapeutics that we should look. For example, Benjamin Wilkomirski, the Swiss clarinet-maker and author of Fragments, who claims to have survived the Nazi camps as a child despite all evidence to the contrary, presents one well-known test case. Michael Bernard-Donals claims that though Wilkomirski most probably did not live through the camps, his identification as a survivor serves some ther- apeutic purpose with regard to a different trauma from his early life in a Swiss orphanage, complicating our notion of what constitutes the phenom- enon of witnessing (1312–14). Though the uses of identity and narrations of the self may seem innocuous in some cases, stories like Wilkomirski’s show the potential for unethical claiming that the territories of identity and self-narration present.

Memory has been used as historical evidence, but it extends well beyond the boundaries of the historical knowledge that it informs, just as history similarly offers reassurances of accuracy, and a scope that is absent from indi- vidual accounts. Different from physical artifacts or documents, however,

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memories of real events transform witnesses in unforeseeable ways. While traces of those historical events may fade, the effects of certain events on wit- nesses can have lasting impact to the extent that the repercussions of those memories do not necessarily come under the same statute of limitations. Whether those witnesses attempt to integrate, eradicate, or reincarnate certain events in their memories, those memories continue to affect witnesses and their loved ones long after the material evidence of major events becomes static. Memories can be dealt with in such ways that wounds are reopened, claimed by those who are not direct witnesses, or worked through and even integrated into an account of individual or group identity. It behooves us to be aware that memories are not inert, static quantities, but are fluid and sub- ject to change. We must continue to ask ourselves how best to harness mem- ory’s potential to act as an agent of change, both historical and personal.

NOTES

1. The question remains as to the exact relationship between the viewers’ traumas and the narrators’ traumas. A deeper inquiry into this subject would investigate the extent to which the old or original trauma was transferred to the audience, as well as the ques- tion of whether these symptoms of trauma are signs of a new trauma, created by the act of witnessing these survivors’ narratives.

2. For more on fetishes, see Freud 19–21. I use fetish here to signify a metonymy in which the signifying link is ruptured and the thing itself is focused on, rather than that which it represents. This magnification and distancing of the representative part functions to disavow or bypass the whole that it represents and paradoxically comes to bring pleas- ure in and of itself, detached from meaning or significance.

3. This theory whereby a second generation experiences the aftershocks of a trauma as a result of proximity to its parents of course presupposes the familiar bourgeois nuclear family model of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that most psychoanalytic theory takes as a given. The limitations of this approach are myriad, but apply in enough cases to be relevant.

4. In narrating their courtship, Vladek mentions his concern over the variety of pharma- ceuticals he discovers while snooping in her medicine cabinet (1: 19), notes her debil- itation after Richieu’s birth (1: 31), and belittles as foolish her decision to hide com- munist literature for a friend (1: 28). In contrast, however, he speaks highly of her intelligence and talent as a writer (1: 17).

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