Spiegelman the ‘Holocaust Hagiographer’? The Art of Representation by the Second

Generation Survivor

Celia Smith (2012) An abridged version of Final Honour Schools Paper 8, B.A. English Literature & Language, Oxford University

Introduction‘Why Comics? Why Mice!? Why The Holocaust!?’ These questions introduce Art Spiegelman’s recently published MetaMaus (2011), a reflection on the making of the comic-strip stylisation of his father’s memoirs, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986, 1991). The series of questions is staggered over three panels to stress the amassment of critical pressure directed at one who has chosen to aestheticise Holocaust testimony. The critics’ words are drawn in spike-edged speech bubbles with a bold typeset suggestive of raised voices; they overpower the biographer (‘Yikes!’ Spiegelman says, toppling off his chair).

The portrayal is emblematic of two strands within the discourse of Holocaust literature – one socio-political, the other cultural. The first of these strands is ‘the culture of victimisation’ view held by some political scientists (Finkelstein, 2003) and encoded in Spiegelman’s interrogator-defendant framework; the idea that the Holocaust is an ideological representation of an historical event that nowadays constitutes a form of false iconography: ‘a crass exploitation of Jewish martyrdom’; a ‘sacralisation of the Holocaust’; an insistence on ‘a black-and-white distinction’ between ‘diabolical perpetrators and saintly victims’. By foregrounding his own vulnerability as a [second generation] survivor figure, Spiegelman gestures towards the idea that ‘survivors have been … revered as secular saints, who one never dares question.’ In contrast to this scorn for the misrepresentation of the Holocaust, Spiegelman’s introductory image also suggests a trending theory within cultural studies; that the processes behind representation are more important than the survivor’s representation per se. The beginning of MetaMaus suggests its poststructuralist ideology. This is even more broadly manifest in its digital collection of self-reflective interviews, transcripts and private notes - all of which showcase the artist’s work in progress (note - MetaMaus includes a DVD-R

containing a digital reference copy of the Maus books with linked audio and visual files). Right from the start, Spiegelman’s MetaMaus raises an interdisciplinary question about the technical work that goes into representing the Holocaust survivor as an idealised subject.

In my essay, I explore how second generation Holocaust writers deal with survivors who could be perceived as ‘hagiographical.’ I also make a formal study of how second generation Holocaust writers portray survivor memories that are close to but not their own; how this so-called ‘aesthetics of postmemory’ might influence the representation of the survivor figure. My focus is on the comic-book memoir of Vladek Spiegelman The Complete Maus (1993), by Art Spiegelman. This text informs my understanding that the Holocaust literature of the contemporary period collapses the notion of the typological secular saint and installs in its place a projection of ideas about the complexity and instability inherent in the representation of the Holocaust survivor.

Definition of TermsBefore a literary analysis of the texts, I will define several terms that will be used throughout this essay. I have used the word ‘hagiography’ to type the survivor as a character within a representational narrative. This is a subgenre of biography that refers to the writing of Saints Lives (agios meaning holy, graphia meaning writing). It focuses on persons living in imitation of Christ, in retreat from the world, dedicated to God. The defining qualities of such figures are their ‘exceptional and influential moral virtue’ (Lee, 2009). Eschewed by Jewish biographers as an intrinsically Christian subgenre, the term ‘hagiography’ is rarely run together with utterances about the Holocaust. In fact, Art Spiegelman recently rejected the suggestion that he ‘heroised’ his father on the grounds that to do so would have been to glorify

suffering and reduce the complexity of his personality;

‘[Hagiography] comes from this really Christian notion that suffering redeems – actually all suffering does is cause pain, and so there are good people and bad people who are made to suffer, a whole spectrum of them, and all you can really say about suffering is that it stinks … It was important for me not to turn Vladek into some sort of martyr.’

Nonetheless ‘hagiography’ as a label has been used contemporaneously to refer to the life-writing of ‘secularised saints’ or ‘Exemplary Lives’ (Lee), which is a common way of regarding figures who have endured persecution. We should note at this point that saintliness is distinct from heroicism. According to biographical theorists Cubitt and Warren (2000), discourses of exemplarity overlap with discourses of heroicism, ‘but the two are not co-terminous.’ A ‘hero’ is an instigator of history rather than a character of moral virtue. S/he may be defined alongside a saint as ‘any man or woman whose existence … is endowed … not just with a high degree of fame and honour, but with a special allocation of imputed meaning and symbolic significance.’ Traits of the hero therefore include agency and the embodiment of ‘collective emotional investment’. In the text I have chosen to study, the biographer undercuts this hagiographical mode; Spiegelman challenges the one-dimensionality of the Saint’s Life. Spiegelman subverts the idea of the survivor as a site of ‘agency’ by emphasising his own role as the driving force of the narrative. Another subgenre label I will use to refer to the writing of a survivor’s life is ‘[Holocaust] testimony’, which I understand in Robert Eaglestone and Michael Rothberg’s sense of a text that narrates a witness account of the Holocaust, but which is distinct from the fictional realm by the fact that it defies identification to the reader (2004, 2000). According to Eaglestone’s analysis of first generation survival literature, testimonies draw attention to the insufficiency of language as a signifier of the experience of the concentration camps. Testimonies thus prohibit the reader from ‘putting one’s self

in their place’, one of the primary acts of reading literature. By working against an illumination of the personal experience of the Holocaust, these testimonies instead ‘force open those worlds we might imagine’, opening a confrontation with ‘what the human mind can and cannot do’ (see box 1). Michael Rothberg defines such texts as ‘antirealist’: prose narratives that attempt not to reflect a traumatic experience mimetically, but to produce it as an object of non-knowledge. An important formal term I will use to describe the construction of a survivor’s biography is ‘postmemory’. This word is connected to Henri Raczymow, a second generation French novelist who described his sense of his parents’ Holocaust experience as a ‘mémoire trouée’ (‘memory shot through with holes’). This metaphor well captures the indirect and fragmentary presentation of a traumatic memory that has been passed down from survivor to the child of a survivor. Marianne

Hirsch (1997) has also described how writing about the Holocaust in the second generation constitutes a flawed mediation of an already flawed first-hand account, since the original memory is itself characterised by sensations of loss, violence or displacement. Such writing is therefore from the outset characterised by disjuncture: ‘the aesthetics of postmemory … is a diasporic aesthetic of temporal and spatial exile that needs simultaneously to (re)build and to mourn.’ The fractured aesthetic

Box 1. Eaglestone cites two prolific writers of Holocaust literature and their overt belief in the

break between language and reference: Elie Wiesel in Night (‘We speak in code, we survivors, and this code cannot be broken, cannot be deciphered, not by you no matter how much you try’) and Primo Levi in If This Is A Man (‘We say ‘hunger’, we say

‘tiredness’, ‘fear’, ‘pain’, we say winter and they are different things. They are free words, created and

used by free men who live in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and

only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature

below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing

but weakness, hunger, and knowledge of the end drawing nearer’).

of postmemory is pictorially discernible in the mixtures of visual media within both texts.

My final clarification is in reference to ‘second generation Holocaust writers.’ Conventionally a ‘second generation survivor’ refers to a child of a Holocaust survivor. I apply the term generally to refer to any writer of Holocaust literature born of parents who witnessed the events of the Second World War. I use this term to refer to Art Spiegelman (b. February 1948), whose parents were sent to Auschwitz. However, I apply the term generally to refer to any writer of Holocaust literature born of parents who witnessed the events of the Second World War. I support Geoffrey Hartman’s belief that all those alive in the present day who are not themselves Holocaust survivors are nonetheless privy to the general experience of the first generation and are therefore ‘witnesses by adoption’. I agree with biographers Anne Karpf and Alain Finkielfraut who endorse this idea of a collective human relation to the Holocaust. In spite of being themselves the children of survivors, these writers suggest ‘you don’t need to be the child of survivors or even Jewish to have an ongoing sense of exclusion’ (Eagleston, 2004). The narrative of that event is publically disseminated and available to us all; thus ‘we are all heirs of the Holocaust’.

Postmemory and Spiegelman’s CubismCentral to an understanding of Art Spiegelman’s aesthetic in Maus are the nuances of the definition of ‘postmemory’. The idea grows out of the basic theory of ‘memory’, as defined by Kerwin Lee Klein (2000), Mary Warnock (Elam & Gedi, 1996), Maurice Halbwachs (Eaglestone, 2004) and Marianne Hirsh (1997). They suggest that memory is a remembering faculty that contributes to one’s consciousness of self; the understanding of one’s ‘own continuity through time’(Warnock).

It is involved in ‘experience, recognition and consciousness of identity through diversity of experience’ (Lee Klein). Also memories need ‘continuous feeding from collective sources and [are] sustained by social and moral props’ (Halbwachs). In summary, memory is both public and private, inextricably involved with identification, embedded and yet not static. It is out of this complex that ‘postmemory’ has developed. Hirsh suggests that there is an aporia at the centre of having a ‘postmemory’. This is because it involves processing a memory received at one remove, which is an intrinsically imperfect endeavour since the definition of memory dictates the fact that we can never fully comprehend another person’s memory. The incompleteness of postmemory is further emphasised given the context of a traumatic event such as the Holocaust, which involves themes of desolation and destruction. Hirsch suggests that the sense of incoherence created by a ‘postmemory’ of the Holocaust therefore leads to a creative impulse amongst writers to fill in the blanks left by memories of devastation. The sense of loss felt by people who have a postmemory of the Holocaust instils a need to ‘re-member’ one’s cultural heritage: ‘Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object… is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. This is not to say that memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past. Postmemory characterises the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.’ (1997, 22)

Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a work of postmemory in that it is indirect and secondary; a narrative mediated by the father and shaped by the son. Throughout Spiegelman shows how Vladek’s telling of the primary memory is mixed with his son’s feelings about reconstructing it, creating a conflict of authority between the two figures. This is suggested in the first chapter, where Spiegelman creates a cubist image of Vladek pedalling on his Exercycle and the two of them

talk about the Maus project (M, 14, cf. Fig. 1). Vladek’s cycling dominates the page, travelling on the bike from the second tier down to the fourth. Although the page is split into eight panels, a fragmented but nevertheless visible version of him sitting on the bike emerges in the whole page. It’s synthetic: ‘you can see his head on one tier, his arms on the other, and his legs pedalling on the bottom’ (MM, 209). As Vladek gets on the Exercycle to pedal, there is a cinematic analogue between the spinning of the wheels and the telling of the narrative (Vladek’s ‘spinning of the yarn’; MM, 209), which dis-solves the scene into a flashback of Vladek

as a young man. The multi-perspective of the cubist page allows Spiegelman to portray Art seated in his childhood room, framed between the bike’s handlebars with Vladek’s tattooed number visible on his left arm, overhead. In doing so, Spiegelman suggests the biographer’s entrapment in the ‘grip’ of Vladek’s narrative, with Art’s postmemory of the camps literally and figuratively hanging over him. Spiegelman thereby keeps his own response to the Holo-caust within the subtext of the page despite the fact that the dominant image appears to be Vladek’s recollections of his experience.

Whilst this page may be read as a way of conferring agency to Vladek, endowing him with an instigative force that revives past narratives, the page may also be interpreted as a way of undercutting the subject’s agency in order to highlight the biographer’s postmemory. Indeed, Spiegelman’s manipulation of spatial and temporal linearity is a defamiliarising trope that causes the reader to re-evaluate the scene. Spiegelman’s management of the page suggests that Vladek’s memory, like his bike, is static; it can only be dynamised by the work of an external actor.

Another example of Spiegelman’s cubist imagery occurs on page 276 of Maus (cf. fig. 2), in which Vladek and Art discuss what happened to Vladek’s side of the family during the war. In this portrayal we see the Holocaust survivor consulting old photographs, which serve as burdensome reminders of the past. The page shows a combination of eight panels with a mixture of close-ups of Vladek’s body parts. These combine to construct one large image of Vladek sitting hunched and forlorn on a sofa. On his left side, we see his hand clutching a picture of his family; on the right, a speech bubble hovers on his shoulder containing a transcription of his family’s death which he is communicating to Art. Spiegelman’s complex graphic implies that a visual object can instigate the realisation that the memory (of the Holocaust’s victims) is carried not only on the shoulders of

its survivors, but also by the children of the survivors. There is an analogue between the cartoon-photograph that Vladek holds and the framework of the graphic novel; both are visual objects that externally recall the events of the past. Extending this, we can read the cartoon-photograph and the graphic novel as momento moris, reminders of the fragility of human mortality. Spiegelman thereby uses the cubist page to implicitly vouch for the commemorative value of his comic-book medium (in spite of his father’s disregard for it).

Memory and Artistic InnovationSpiegelman further emphasises the creativity of the biographer by inscribing the comic with a real photograph that ultimately suggests the supremacy of the cartoonist’s art over the historian’s material object. In a book where characters are depicted through an animalistic metaphor of Jewish mice and Nazi cats, it is ironic that the inclusion of the one real albeit posed photo gives the reader far less information than the figurative narrative (M, 294, cf. fig. 3).

The photo was taken as a souvenir and portrays Vladek in a starched prisoner uniform post-Auschwitz. Whilst the reader can use the image to gain some information, it misleads the reader in other regards. For example, the photo verifies Vladek’s claim to be an attractive man; his self-proclaimed comparison with Rudolph Valentino on page 15 of Maus is not self-aggrandisement. Yet the jauntily angled cap and fleshed out, relatively high-spirited face shown by the photo is at odds with the dreadful experience to which Maus is testament. Spiegelman describes how the photo’s real value lies in the way it draws the

reader’s attention to the information provided by the comic-book’s other graphics, and how it compels a re-evaluation of what one thought one knew to be true: ‘to be left with a photo that tells you something, but only in relation to the drawn and written telling around it, informs what you thought you knew by making you re-examine it’ (MM, 220). The act of including a material object within the narrative is therefore not an endorsement of historicist biography; rather, Spiegelman suggests the photo’s inferiority to the more symbolically dense quality of his antirealist cartoons. It is on these multi-perspective graphic portrayals that we should therefore focus our conception of the survivor’s representation.

In MetaMaus Spiegelman furthers an emphasis on the biographer rather than the subject by showing how his reliance on his father’s memory led to an expansion in his artistic innovation. Since Vladek’s recollections were characterised by inconsistency and incompleteness, Spiegelman had to decide at one particular stage whether to use artistic license to supplement an elision in Vladek’s memory. This transpires as Spiegelman describes the labour-intensive interviewing and transcription process of Maus. Spiegelman explains that he would begin to transcribe material he had gained through interviews with Vladek, only to find out it would be nearly verbatim to something he had been told before; Spiegelman would then have to extract the differences between versions of a story to try to locate some very specific bit of information, which would then serve as a basis for a further round of interviewing. Spiegelman rejects the idea that Vladek might have been withholding information; instead, he acknowledges the inadequacy of using Vladek’s memory as methodological process and embraces it as part of his narrative: ‘I remember my frustrations when he would recite almost word for word an event he’d told me before. I guess that’s how memory works though - it gets replaced by language … It wasn’t like there was a text and he’d only be willing to read certain parts of it to me at certain moments. I felt like I was being given fairly good access to what he could get access to himself … Memory is a very fugitive thing. And I was aware of it at the time as part of the problem and part of the process.’ (MM, 28)Spiegelman thus not only

notes the problematic aspects of memory, but harnesses it as a way of exploring the graphic medium. We see this in one sequence where Spiegelman mentions to his father the well-known fact that an orchestra played for the inmates as they marched through the Auschwitz gate every morning on their way to work: ‘An orchestra?’ Vladek asks in amazement, ‘No. I remember only marching, not any orchestras’ (M, 214, cf. Fig. 4). In the first panel of this page, a group of inmates march with an orchestra in the background. Below, after Vladek has contradicted the account of the orchestra, the inmates are depicted marching past the band so that

they cover up the musicians - only the tops of their instruments are now visible; ‘I have the orchestra being blotted out by the people marching because that’s all he remembers,’ Spiegelman explains (MM, 31). In the last panel of the sequence, Vladek and Art are in the present, debating the orchestra’s presence. Spiegelman knows from all the research which corroborates its existence that the Auschwitz orchestra must have been there - but Vladek is sure that it was not. Spiegelman’s graphics manage to incorporate both views. In this Rothberg model of antirealist Holocaust literature, Spiegelman accommodates both objective history and personal memory with a dexterous formality that is emphatic of the biographer’s ultimate power to shape the memory of the Holocaust survivor.

Poststructuralism and public and private memoryElsewhere in MetaMaus Spiegelman

suggests the violability of survival narrative by highlighting the fallibility of his own memory. In a sequence in Maus II where Vladek manages to talk to his wife Anja in Birkenau, Spiegelman stops himself from making ‘what would have been a terrible error’ (MM, 32). In his notes there is a sketched sequence in which Vladek is actually talking down from the roof he’s mending to Anja whilst accidentally eliding an anecdote from Holocaust survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Borowski’s autobiographical work is a collection of short stories, one of

which takes place in the same exact camp as the Spiegelmans and which features the protagonist talking to his lover about her hair. Spiegelman describes how Vladek had explained how unhappy and ashamed Anja was about her appearance in the camps (MM, 32). The specific anecdote, however, of talking to a loved one from a distance and finding out about her shame, meant phraseology within Borowski’s autobiographical fiction passed into Spiegelman’s dialogue between his parents: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll have hair and our children will have hair,’ Vladek ventriloquises (M, 216, cf. Fig. 5). It is not Vladek’s testimony talking here, but Borowski’s protagonist. If Spiegelman had not proof-checked his notes, he might have ‘re-entered into [his] father’s story an act of unconscious plagiarism.’ In the final image, Spiegelman corrects his sketch to remove the elision (M, 216. Fig. 6). Yet, this admission of the biographer’s fallibility strengthens the conception of a Holocaust survivor’s narrative as contingent on the imperfection of the mediator’s memory.

The above examples from Spiegelman’s Maus emphasise the importance of fabrication within a narrative written by a second generation Holocaust writer. In doing so, they leave the reader with a question about the power of the biographer’s role in shaping the first generation memory. The historicist act of including Vladek’s posed photo turns out to be an advocacy of the biographer as a postmodern artist capable of transmitting his own perspective within scenes focused on his father. The creative act of including the Auschwitz orchestra (in spite of his father’s stated ignorance of it) is a further show of the biographer’s power to transpose an objective view of history over his father’s subjective rejection of its existence.

The final example of Spiegelman’s unconscious confusion over the events of his father’s life brings to the fore the notion of the fallible storyteller – an indication of the ease with which a biographer can elide veracity within Holocaust testimony. In all, Spiegelman’s agenda seems to suggest a self-critical examination of the biographer’s role in the treatment of his subject. In this antirealist reckoning of his father’s survival tale, Spiegelman combines personal and public sources of recollection to create a poststructuralist text emphatic of its intricate methodological make-up.

Conclusion Spiegelman refracts light away from his subject and onto the compositional process that goes into aestheticisation of Holocaust testimony. Spiegelman does this by foregrounding his own avant-gardism; we see this in his use of cubist pages, in his mixture of the concrete visual image with the cartoonist image, and in his palimpsestic blurring of images in the scene where the presence of the Auschwitz Orchestra is disputed. This formal tendency towards multi-perspective is influenced by the aesthetic of postmemory, which is defined by inchoateness. Some critics are concerned that such literary strategy makes the description of the survivor ‘more familiar, less exceptional,’ and so easier to

assimilate. However, these views underestimate the work done by adding a layer of fabrication to biography. This poststructuralist, self-referential testimony does not aim to debunk the virtue of the Holocaust survivor; rather, it aims to demystify the work of the biographer. In short, Maus seeks not to de-rarefy the survivor-figure, but the biographer-figure. Thus Maus suggests that the theme of second generation Holocaust writing is to look beyond the survivor’s exceptionality in search of more thought-provoking notions about what lies behind the narrative. Spiegelman should not be feared for his experimentation with survivor testimony; his artistic play reminds us to stay alert to the representative process, and so to remain sensitive to the narrative offered to us. As has been recently affirmed by Holocaust Scholars Langer and Franklin: ‘we do not simplify the challenge of interpretation, which is difficult enough, by seeing around the books we read the aura of a holy text’; rather it is the reader’s attentiveness to the artistic process that is key: ‘if a distance remains between us and this literature, the fault is ours.’ CELIA SMITH (03/2012).

This essay is an edited version of a longer essay entitled ‘“Holocaust Hagiographers?’; representation of the survivor in the second generation, from Spiegelman to Angier’. It was awarded a First Class Certificate from the University of Oxford. Smith’s work towards this essay was supervised by biography scholars Elleke Boehmer and Hermione Lee.