Butler and Spiegelman

In this course, we have studied a number of different manifestations of memory, including individual and family memories— that is to say, memories one holds of past events in one’s own life and memories passed down among generations within a family. Kindred by Octavia Butler and Maus by Art Spiegelman each include elements of both types of memory, but they also explore the subject of cultural memory.

Maus and Kindred explore two of the most horrific human rights violations of the past 200 years—slavery in the United States and the Holocaust—both of which rightfully became permanently embedded into the memories of those who were directly affected by them as well as their descendants. Between these two works, we as readers are able to see the formation of a cultural memory from several vantage points: Octavia’s as a direct participant when she gets transported back to slave times, Art Spiegelman’s as a member of the generation that immediately follows the creation of a cultural memory, and Octavia’s as a citizen in the twentieth century, over a hundred years after slavery had ended in the United States. This temporally varied presentation of the life of a cultural memory begs the question of how time affects how an individual processes said memory.

While no one would argue that either the Holocaust or slavery will ever be forgotten, there are many voices that claim that memories held by a particular cultural group eventually lose relevance to new and evolving issues faced by the aforementioned group. Slavery is a good example of this phenomenon: it is commonly mentioned during discussions regarding racism in the United States by those who believe that its role as a period in the history of oppression remains important in the fight against the remnants of that oppression. However, there are also many people who deny its continuing importance, citing that because our society is so far removed from the slaveholding society of the 1800s, the discussion of slavery is no longer a fruitful one to have.

Although Butler and Spiegelman certainly don’t deny the transformative effect that time has on the perception of cultural events, they seem to take the position that cultural memories retain an importance to the cultures that hold them in a sense that transcends the historical. Both of them write from the point of view of characters who didn’t go through what their ancestors went through—even Octavia did not live the full life of a slave despite how long she spent stuck in her family’s past. But through their respective experiences of their family’s history—Spiegelman’s through his father’s retelling of his story and Octavia’s through her inexplicable transportation to the past—they both learned invaluable lessons about the profound cruelty that humans are capable of.

The most important lesson they seemed to learn is that people are generally products of their time periods—Rufus called his father fair even though he held slaves, Vladek Spiegelman described certain aspects of life in the ghettos as not so bad despite the human rights violations he and his family endured, and each of these people were right enough given the historical context in which they lived. However, the fact that many behaviors were socially acceptable at one time does not make them right, and as such, terrible atrocities were committed by those who neglected to think critically about what they and those around them were doing. Cultural memories, therefore, can serve as warnings of what consequences there can be when society as a whole refuses to question its own preconceived notions, and to dismiss them as irrelevant to later conversations is to make oneself vulnerable to the type of closed thinking that led to things like slavery and the Holocaust in the first place.