We Didn't Wear Watches

The concept of time is something that I have written about previously, and it is a concept that is very much present in Art Spiegelman’s Maus II. Part way through the work, Spiegelman’s character Art is obsessing over finding a precise time-line for his father’s stay in Auschwitz. Art and his father go back and forth, his father offering the time frame he knows while Art dissects the arithmetic of the number of months. “BUT WAIT!” is Art’s response when the months his father outlines do not add up correctly. Art is not at all focused on the magnitude of the subject that his father is speaking of. Art has just found out that his father spent somewhere near to 10 months in a Nazi concentration camp. Nearly one year of toiling in desolate conditions, with death as a constant companion at his shoulder, watching those around him disappear, and Art can only focus on exactly how much time was spent at each job. This obsession with time as a measure is not unique to Art, but this example allows one to see how the obsession can blind a person to what is truly important.

As we travel, regardless of whether we are on a special trip or going through our daily life, we follow a schedule that allows us to make it to each and every place we want to go in a reasonable fashion. Knowing precisely what time it is, from year to month to day to hour, is paramount to functioning in our society. The measurement of time is taken entirely for granted even whilst it worms its way into every part of our lives. Art’s father did not have the luxury of knowing what time it was in Auschwitz, and his lack of knowledge most likely liberated him in a way that Art and the reader could never understand. Art’s father must rely entirely on his memories to form a chronology of what happened to him in the concentration camp, and in doing so is able to present an outline of his stay there that is completely and totally his own. He cannot rely on the measure of time to tell Art what happened. He cannot say that on x day of x month, this this and that occurred. Instead, his travels are made so much more enlightening and meaningful because he has total autonomy in deciding how to remember what occurred. Time fetters Art and all of us where it cannot fetter Art’s father. According to Art’s father, “In Auschwitz we didn’t wear watches,” and perhaps this very happenstance is what will forever divide Art from his dad.

The most important idea that I will take away from this class is the power of mental travel. I have never before truly considered travel to be anything other than physical, and now I can say without a doubt that mental travel oftentimes covers miles to physical travel’s inches.

The Creative Force of Language

          I began reading "Maus II" by Art Spiegelman with the hope that the concept that language enjoys a particular relationship with reality might be touched upon within the frames of this story. Within a few pages, the caricatured Art says the following: "I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams", and in the next frame "I guess I bit off more than I can chew. Maybe I ought to forget the whole thing". Of course, the "whole thing" is far from forgotten. Spiegelman proceeds to craft a literary and visual (for the first time this semester, discounting some illustrations in Lewis) recreation of the experience of the Holocaust. 

           There is something unique about the experience of reading a written caption that describes the imagery sketched out by Spiegelman. "The others had to jump in the graves while still they were alive" reads a caption depicting one instance of genocide in the graphic novel. And after the meaning of those words takes hold, it is then that the reader recognizes the image for what it is, and in so doing really visualizes the horror. The sudden discovery that perhaps you are not quite as jaded as you once thought by mainstream media's fascination with violence is always a little shocking. That is the reaction that I encountered when reading "Maus II". Despite the effectiveness of films such as "The Pianist"and the opening sequence of "Inglorious Bastards" (amongst many others) in visually representing the atrociousness of the Holocaust, there is almost a sense of reassurance that results from realizing that genuine emotional reaction to the depicted reality still occurs. 

          That such reactions do occur, I believe, is a direct result of the efficacy with which language is capable of describing reality. When we visualize an image, we experience an emotional reaction to (this is a truism) a picture. These reactions are often violent, overpowering, inspirational, and highly affective. But when we read words that cause an emotional reaction, what we react to is not a presented image but rather a conceptual understanding. To read the words "the others had to jump in the graves while still alive" is to understand a conceptual proposition of true horror. We see images, and we "feel" images, but we do not understand them as deeply as we understand language. When we are overcome by words, we are overcome by the power of an idea and that is a mode of emotional connection that I am not sure visual imagery is capable of constructing. 

          My favorite idea that we touched upon this semester concerns the power of language to shape reality; that is why I was looking for a segue within the text of "Maus II". A few semesters ago I spent many months studying Wittgenstein's philosophy of language. In a few words, he believed that words form propositions, and propositions are truly pictures of possible realities. Later on in his life, Wittgenstein came to assert that these propositional pictures possess an internal sense, which is to say that propositions do not need to be compared to reality in order to ascertain their truth (they make sense within themselves), and that language contains its own meaning apart from reference to the external world. For Wittgenstein, how we talk about things necessarily impacts how we think about things: linguistic concepts are inseparable from mental concepts. 

          When that semester ended, I believed that I possessed an adequate, though underdeveloped, appreciation for Wittgenstein's philosophy. But I did not. That appreciation finally arrived this semester, as I read "Our Sea of Islands" and put serious thought into the idea that language is capable of shaping reality. I am slowly working my way through Wittgenstein again, and like all genuine encounters with good ideas, my literary and philosophical beliefs are slowly adjusting to what I think is true. 

          There is a real world out there, and language is how we relate to it. When we use words to describe it, we paint pictures. The pictures that we paint must be true, but we possess the ability to determine which truths are essential, and which less important. Yes, there is evil in the world, and in the modern age there are all sorts of appeals to ugly mechanistic determinisms such as evolution and economic necessity and natural inequality. But we paint our picture of reality through the words we choose, and just as all pictures possess perspective, so we too enjoy the power to accentuate the better elements of our world. When we paint, might we not relegate the ugliness of the world into the chiaroscuro and tenebrism that illuminates the power of light through contrast? 

Maus II

The first thing that struck me about this “survivor’s tale,” to use the label given to the work on the front cover (aside from the unexpectedly beautifully crafted depiction of the characters as animals, of course), was the self-awareness of this text. During various moments of the text, we learn that Spiegelman is writing this tale of his father’s time in Auschwitz, and his time after the concentration camp. Spiegelman also depicts scenes of interviewing his father, adding a level of awareness for the reader that the author is acknowledging his task. Further, there are sections in which Spiegelman is talking with his wife about the difficulty of the venture he is undertaking and in which he discusses with her which animal he should draw to depict her (11-12). And finally, there is a moment where Spiegelman is depicted as a man wearing a mask of a mouse, an acknowledgement on the part of the author that his choice to depict the characters as various animals was a distinct and intentional one (41). So basically, Spiegelman is a man writing about himself as a mouse who knows he is really a man writing about himself as a mouse writing about his father’s time in Auschwitz through interviews with his father.

These various aspects of the text’s awareness of itself are fascinating to me, as most self-aware texts operate on a much more singular plane. The author acknowledges the reader, for example, or the fact that he is writing about his own life. I am struck by the intensity of this work, and how much more potent that must be for Spiegelman. I am wondering how he came to the conclusion to tell this story in this particular form, and especially how he came to include all of the details of, for example, the car ride with his wife or the appointment with the psychiatrist in which he describes the process of writing the book, which is the thing we hold in our hands physically as read about the very process that created it. In our collaboration seminar we have been discussing product vs. process, and I am wondering how this played out in both of these scenarios. Did Spiegelman write his father’s story, and then intertwine the stories of the interviews and the outside moments? How did he decide where to weave into a full narrative, placing us into the camp with his father, and where to maintain the interview setting? As someone who is naturally drawn to these complex issues of the awareness of authors and texts, I found this reading to be one of the most compelling throughout the semester.

            One of the most surprising things I have discovered this semester is that travel can be found and experienced in even the most everyday moments. I have always believed that someone can bring herself out of her comfort zone even while in a place geographically comfortable to her, but thinking about this in the context of travel has made me see this in an entirely new light. I want to work harder to live each day as a traveler, as an explorer, of myself, of the world around me, and of the intersection of those, which is this beautiful life I have been given.

Identity in Maus

           Identity is central to Maus. Art Spiegelman is seeking it from the novel's first page, when he is sketching out various human figures in animal forms (Spiegelman 171). He is trying to draw his wife, as if she were a cartoon animal in his comic universe. A frog? A moose? A rabbit? A mouse? What is she? If she is a mouse, that would rank her among the Jews, who are depicted as mice in Spiegelman's comic universe. But she's only just "converted" to Judaism (171). Is she truly identifiable as a mouse, as a Jew by birth, descended from Jewish parents? The questions are ceaseless and to a point self-defeating. And, who cares? Does it even matter? Well, yes it does matter, and it is Art who cares. And it is Art who plumbs away at this enigma of identity through the form of a graphic novel, in which he hopes to both identify (seeking identity) the human condition by identifying (giving identitiy) man and the human condition through animal imagery. By making men mice and dogs and cats, he hopes to mine out their human identity.

             Art is a traveler in this sense, seeking a solution, seeking identity. His life to this point has been at odds. He has inherited both the horrific and inhumane past of his parents and also been given the beautiful and liberating opportunity of a future in America. In the center of these two forces of past and future is he, Art Spiegelman, who hopes to stitch the two disparate eras together with artistic representation.This question, which compels the novel's narrative, is the crux of his efforts and the solution to this question is the linchpin to his family's two disparate eras: "How am I supposed to make any sense out of Aushwitz ... of the Holocaust?" (174). Art's enormous task is to make identifiable, make recognizable the event and the people involved in the event that effaced people's identities with crytpic numbers scrawled down their arms, dehumanize them with inhumane treatment and persecution, and, with gas, with bullets, with starvation, with disease, wiped them out, some 6 million plus.

          Art approaches his question in what seems a very childlike matter, by drawing animals and having them talk. However, this is far more sophisticated than what it appears. Art is identifying humans with animals, not vice versa. In this way, he mines human identities, which the Nazis have been made obsolete, out of these animal representations. For example, the Jews, which are perceived as a nameless, general mob are depicted as mice. Often throughout the text, the facial expression of these mice are depicted as uniform. Such is the case in the panel where the faceless mob, some alive and some dead, are burned with gasoline. As a scrum of mice yelp in pain, the text box reads: "the fat from the burning bodies they scooped and poured again so everyone could burn better" (232). Their expressions are of monolithic pain, their identities dehumanized and converted to fuel for fire, their identity as Jewish people burnt out and blown as smoke. They seem without identity.

          However, it is exactly in this non-identity that the read perceives identity, for the act of making them all the same causes the reader to ponder how awful it was that they were made nameless and humanless. Within this blinding sameness, the reader immediately attaches to any character that exhibits personality and garners sympathy for them. Art's father is one natural choice, but also Abraham, Mandelbaum, the priest are especially interesting for the reader. In this seemingly faceless and unhuman representations, the reader finds a human identity and, thus, the human identity, in the body of an animal, is that much more salient. And humanity too becomes that much more salient and special.

        Therefore, though Art perhaps does not reach a definite resolution to his question, he at least finds a clue or two. Humanity, it seems, is more than just a corporal form. There is something metaphysical about the human condition that is instantly recognizable, even if that man is drawn as a pig or a mouse. Making sense of the Holocaust, therefore, is accomplished by finding what glimmers of humanity are to be perceived, even if just in a word of hope or in an insight to one's individual plight, and hoping to build, glimmer by glimmer, a narrative that might bring to light the humane in the inhumane, identity in non-identity.

The most interesting concept I came across this semester was in how art can be a conduit to travel. Like when Eustace is vacuumed up in the painting. Art, representation, yields to traveling and finding a peace within Eustace. And just as the painting performed that travel for Eustace, the writings of various authors can do the same for us.

The Paradigm of Storytelling

          The instance of traveling seen in Maus II is not very much different from the traveling we, as a class of readers, do. As author Art Speigelman traces his father's experiences at the infamous concentration camp of Auschwitz, detailing his own journey into the stories and how he escapes (or does not escape) them, he is simultaneously drafting the reader's perspective. He encounters his father's story on a walk with a few curious questions, most likely with reservations about dredging up the emotions that come part and parcel with such a traumatic experience. But as the novel progresses and the father comes closer and closer to his reunion with his wife, Art becomes feverishly involved as a necessary component of the story. He pursues his father with a tape recorder while insisting that the details be laid out and the saga be completed so that he may know as if he was there. His father burns the records so that the story may die but Art redrafts them so that the story may live.

          Though a reader may sit removed and at first impartial to the story, s/he rapidly takes a journalistic dive into the morbid challenges of the human spirit, genuinely interested in the lives put on display. It's voyeurism with a heart of good intentions. We know how the story ends right from the introduction of the book: the father lives, the mother survives but kills herself and son Richieu is dead. The only interest left for the reader, then, is to pursue the story the way Art did, to let it swallow them until they appear as nothing smaller than children. Art relinquished his ownership of the story before the deals and commercialism came knocking at his door and he maintained it long after the story's conclusion; we are expected to follow suit. The graphic novel essentially demonstrates the divorce between story teller and story, between author and reader, and all other paradigms that might exist in any form of storytelling.

          Readers may draw from a story what they will, deconstructing the parts and reorganizing them into theses and criticisms and commentaries and other curious examples of “listening”, but ultimately there is a tacit submission to the authority of the one who owns the story. We are visitors, i.e. travelers, to an exhibit established by the storyteller and the line is drawn there. Art may never recover the correspondences between his father and others, or the pictures-never-to-be of his relatives, but what he cements into his books—the story and picture of his father—is all that he has seen, or can see, or rather, to extrapolate, what his father prefers we see. Likewise, we may not enter a book and alter its contents, only benefit from what the storyteller believed was important to impart to his/her listener.

The Same Story Through Different Eyes

Vladek’s story of the Holocaust in Maus is a riveting one, but it is also one that nobody can truly understand. His life is one of such suffering that it is beyond the scope of anyone’s comprehension that has not experienced it him or herself. This is not to say, however, that it is impossible to properly empathize. During our discussion of Krik? Krak!, it was noted that all humans know suffering. Although some people’s suffering, like that of Vladek’s, is more profound than that of others, the human capacity of empathy relies only on caring. Although neither Art nor the reader can ever understand what Vladek experienced, we can feel suffering along with him.

            Since we, along with Art, are unable to truly understand the conditions through which Vladek survived, we bring our own experiences and emotions to our interpretation of the story. For Art, Vladek’s accounts of his past serve as explanations for his current self. Through the stories, Art is able to see his father as he once was instead of the irritable old man as he is today. Art is also further able to understand the worship his parents had for his deceased brother and the suffering the experienced at his loss. There was guilt in Vladek’s own survival and he was left with a son who could never fathom what he had been through. Art sees his fathers past through the lens of his own childhood experiences.

            I also experienced Maus in two separate ways. I read the graphic novel in full last year while I was studying abroad in Glasgow, Scotland for a comparative literature class on “the hero.” I experienced the story completely differently because I was looking for different things than I was while reading it in the context of travel literature. Instead of viewing Vladek as a hero for his survival and commitment to helping his family, I looked at him as more human, linked to others in their shared suffering. I saw how the commonality of suffering brought people together when their worlds were falling apart.

            From this semester, the most fascinating thing I learned was the social norm behind tattooing in the Pacific. I found this so interesting because tattoos are seen completely differently in our own society. Instead of being a symbol for endurance and adulthood, tattoos here are seen as somewhat counter culture. 

Scars

I don’t have any tattoos.  My concept of a tattoo is a deliberate permanent marking to symbolize, commemorate, or advertise an idea.  I have one in mind, but I don’t have the motivation or boldness to get it.  However, I do have two slit-shaped scars on my pelvic area from the hernia operation that I had when I was three years old.  I was born with it, and my mom noticed the little bump of the hernia when I was in the bathtub.  I obviously had no idea the severity or seriousness of the situation; I just went to the pediatrician’s office a few times and knew that I had to go to the surgeon in February, and he would fix me.  The morning of my surgery I was calm.  My parents both drove me to Einstein Hospital in the Bronx, and I only remember clutching my Tiger stuffed animal.  The anesthesiologist told me that he would put me to sleep and made me count to ten, but I don’t remember making it to ten.  The next thing I knew there were lights and a clamp that tracked my pulse on my big toe that I kept kicking off.  I was wheeled into the recovery room where I watched my favorite movie, Sleeping Beauty, and the boy in the bed next to me played video games.  I was surprisingly calm, accepting, and compliant throughout the whole process so far, but of course at this point I was growing either restless or irritated; I remember sitting there crying—sobbing—to my mother to take me home.  Please just take me home.  She would try to calm me down, but I was just so insistent.  I remember the anxiety crawling up my throat, exiting me through my shouts and tears.  When I returned home, my grandparents and aunts and uncles were waiting at my house with gifts and balloons.  I was happy to be home because everything was going to go back to normal—except for the bandage covering my stitches right under my belly button.  My mother is a nurse, and in true medical fashion she was inspecting it all the time, nagging me that the bandage needed to come off soon.  One day that day came, and the bandage came off, revealing my Siamese-cat-eye slanted scars that I have until this day.  That is my only tattoo.

            A very small passing aspect of Maus II is the reference to the Auschitz prisoners’ tattoo they received when they first arrive at the concentration camp.  Similar to my scar from the surgery, they did not choose their permanent marking, but they were coerced to get it.  The experience was also terrible and painful in which the room smelled like burning rubber and fat.  The sight of it brings back the vivid story of how it got there in the first place.  Vladek can retell the story as if it had happened a few days ago; he illustrates the in depth essence of the experience at the camp.  The tattoo, just like my scar, evokes a detailed stream of consciousness back to the exact moments.  We are transported back to the experience and are able to retell our story.

            These memorable marks are not limited to my personal account and the plot of Maus II but rather extend throughout the string of all of the works that we have studied throughout the semester.  Though each work does not explicitly employ “tattoo,” the common theme is that there is a connection to the past and there are pieces of the past that are permanent and progress with the characters.  Whether it is tangible or intangible, there are ideas that are carried with the characters that force them to hold on to something in their past and affect how they handle the future.