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.

Spiegelman and Shammas

A perfunctory read of Arabesques by Anton Shammas and Maus by Art Spiegelman would leave anyone with the impression of having read two totally dissimilar works. Perhaps the most obvious reason for this is that the former is a traditional novel and the latter is a graphic novel, two genres that are fundamentally different in nature to the extent that their differences are often the source of conflict within the literary world with regards to the question of what constitutes a “real” novel. But further differences arise more subtly than that. Even the two works’ formal similarities have the effect of alienating the novels from each other. For example, each is a tale told by a son of his family history, and as such, each strings together a cacophony of memories that are deeply entrenched in their respective cultures and time periods. However, because Spiegelman and Shammas come from such radically different backgrounds, their mutual approach towards the presentation of memory results in stories that, despite taking place at roughly the same time (although Shammas’s story continues long past Spiegelman’s), seem so distant from one another as to ostensibly take place in completely disparate realities.

However, despite the ways in which the two authors’ subject matter and presentation thereof may differ, both accounts provide a glimpse into the nature of recounting memory, especially those memories which have been passed down within families, which Shammas describes best upon arriving in Iowa City:

Now here I am sitting in Iowa City, more than twenty years after I left the house of my childhood, and for the first time in all these years I feel that I can conjure up the house of my childhood in the village, the smells and the sights and the textures, which now for the first time I describe to Shlomith, who has never set food there. “I have to come away so far from it,” as Amira would have quoted from the Alexandria Quartet, “in order to understand it all.” (149-150)

Both books examine the effect that temporal and physical distance have on the act of recounting memory, and both seem to explicitly or implicitly come to the conclusion that quite contrary to the traditional notion that memory fades with time, memory in fact can be augmented in positive ways the more steps removed the teller becomes from the tale.

Although we can’t know the nature of the transmission of memory that took place between Vladek Spiegelman’s liberation and flight to America and the writing of Maus, Maus was certainly the most meaningful and widely accessible way he ended up telling his story, many years later and through the words of his son. His hesitance to release his story is characteristic of many Holocaust survivors, notably Elie Wiesel, who told his own story only after refusing to do so for ten years. Once he finally allows his son to write what would become Maus, his retellings become somewhat self-conscious in nature. He often finishes up anecdotes with statements like “we couldn’t have known at the time, but that would be the last we saw of that person” or “little did we know how much worse things would get.” In The Tale, Shammas employs similar techniques, jumping forwards and backwards in time to tell the reader when is the next time we will encounter something or letting us know something that he at the time did not.

Both stories, then, present memory in a way that does not strictly confine itself to recounting the events that transpired as accurately as possible—they both also take on the responsibility of amalgamating their memories into a coherent story, sometimes moralizing, sometimes extrapolating, sometimes filling in perceived blanks. In this way, both authors make an argument for time and retelling in the art of remembrance: while stories certainly change in composition and different tellers have different reasons as to why they wish to recount the memory, these changes result in a permutation of the original memory that can be as useful or perhaps even more so to others as it is or was to the person doing the remembering. By delving into this facet of memory-telling, both Spiegelman and Shammas blur the boundaries between memory and story and explore what causes a memory to outgrow itself and become instead a history, a myth, a novel, or something else.

Freud and Ishiguro

“Screen Memories” by Sigmund Freud is a paper named after its subject matter in which Freud explores what constitutes a screen memory and its implications on a person’s life both by theorizing about the matter and by examining the screen memories of several actual patients. At the conclusion of the paper, he defines a screen memory as a memory as an actual yet seemingly innocuous/unimportant memory that derives its meaning not from what is being remembered, but from what is being suppressed—the screen memory being a conglomeration of symbols to give us clues as to unlocking the suppressed matter which may not be memories at all but wishes, desires, or fantasies.

This paper is, as I say, a paper: unlike Remains of the Day, it is not a novel nor prose nor a work of fiction at all. Thus, the most fruitful way it interacts with Ishiguro’s novel is not in how they compare formally, but in how we can use Freud’s concept of screen memories to examine Mr. Stevens as both a character and as a narrator of his own life.

Throughout Remains of the Day, Stevens establishes himself as a professional of the highest caliber, going so far as to swear off his own personal feelings in favor of the dignity he so values. However, just because he doesn’t allow himself to be anything other than cold, detached, and consummately professional doesn’t mean he has eradicated emotion within himself. The concept of screen memories provides a useful means of unpacking the memories he chooses to share and indicating to the reader what emotions Stevens had suppressed.

Stevens generally recounts his memories with a great deal of specificity, but in certain instances he becomes fuzzy on the details of something. For example, on pages 226-227 he describes the day he came upon Miss Kenton crying. In this recollection, the image of Miss Kenton seems to have overpowered his memory of the circumstances of coming upon her crying:

As I recall, there was no real evidence to account for this conviction [that Miss Kenton had been crying]—I had certainly not heard any sounds of crying—and yet I remember being quite certain that were I to knock and enter, I would discover her in tears. I do not know how long I remained standing there; at the time it seemed a significant period, but in reality, I suspect, it was only a matter of a few seconds […] I cannot imagine I would have delayed unduly.

We can reasonably that this memory—and the fact that it has stood out in his mind despite the fact that it apparently did not seem very important to him at the time—indicates a certain romantic affinity for Miss Kenton that Stevens never allowed himself to consciously realize. In this way it is similar to a screen memory: the subject matter is not as important as Stevens’s relationship to the subject matter, that is, his unconscious, suppressed love for Miss Kenton being the reason that this otherwise innocuous moment should persist for so many years in his memory. It does, however, differ in that for Freud, a true screen memory tells its story through symbolic imagery: for example, Stevens could have vividly remembered the snow falling outside because the white of the snow unconsciously reminded him of the white of Miss Kenton’s dresses or something along those lines. This particular memory is more literal than the ones Freud discusses in his paper, but it captures the general gist of a screen memory.

In this way, we can keep screen memories in mind when listening to Stevens’s story—it is a useful interpretive tool that we can use to remind ourselves that the details of Stevens’s life and the secrets that Mr. Darlington kept are at least as important as what Stevens doesn’t say, that is, the true feelings he has now or that he had at a given time that he has denied even to himself for all these years.

Genre

A genre constitutes a means of classifying literature (Mikics). “Genre” is a term so deceptively basic and so deeply embedded into our collective understanding of literature that many readers, authors, and critics tend to use it without fully exploring two major areas of interest within genre studies: first, what distinguishes one genre from another; and second, what place genre occupies in the history of literature.

The first question has been tackled by a number of critics, but in his article “The Origin of Genres”, Tzvetan Todorov provides a useful amalgamation of the thoughts of these critics regarding the criteria of genre which he presents in four categories:

1. The semantic—the meaning of a text.
2. The syntactic—relationships that are internal to a text.
3. The pragmatic—the relation of a text to its readers.
4. The verbal—the intent behind the words within a text.

It is due to these aspects that, for example, the historical fiction Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden and the autobiography Geisha, A Life by Mineko Iwasaki cannot share the same genre. Although they both present accounts of the same basic experiences, they differ semantically in that Memoirs of a Geisha uses Iwasaki’s actual life story as the basis upon which to build a fictional story, whereas Geisha, A Life is a historically accurate depiction of her life. This, in turn, effects a pragmatic difference: readers can glean a sense of realness and authenticity from Geisha, A Life that they cannot get from Memoirs of a Geisha.

The second question has been subject to more dispute among critics. Some 20^th century critics have rejected the notion of genre as a concept of continuing relevance. Writes Maurice Blanchot: “A book no longer belongs to a genre; every book arises from literature alone.”

In Todorov’s estimation, this apparent disappearance may be explained by the tendency of authors to attempt to intentionally depart from generic conventions. However, this is not truly a rejection of genre: conscious departure from a genre necessarily implies acknowledgement of and guidance by said genre. Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow is acutely demonstrative of this phenomenon in its timeline. The story is told reverse chronologically—a clear subversion of the usual order in which narratives are told. But by subverting this norm, Amis implicitly affirms the narrative genre by making the reader constantly aware of its usual presentation of chronology.

Sometimes these departures from generic norms become in themselves so commonplace that they evolve into a new genre unto themselves. Therein lies Todorov’s argument against the idea of disappearing genres: “It is not ‘genres’ that have disappeared, but the genre of the past, and they have been replaced by others.” (Todorov)

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow, Or, The Nature of the Offense. New York: Harmony, 1991. Print.

Blanchot, Maurice. Le Livre À Venir. N.p.: Gallimard, 1959. Print.

Golden, Arthur. Memoirs of a Geisha. Thorndike, Me: G.K. Hall, 1998. Print.

Iwasaki, Mineko, and Rande Brown. Geisha, A Life. New York: Atria, 2002. Print.

Mikics, David. “Genre.” A New Handbook of Literary Terms. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. 132-33. Print.

Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Origin of Genres.” New Literary History 8.1 (1976): 159-70. Print.