Butler and Shammas

Although the formal construction of both works is radically different – Butler’s novel is a more conventional, chronological account to Shammas’ fluidity, interweaving of folk memory with one family member’s experiences abroad, and moments of metalepsis – Kindred and Arabesques are concerned with genealogical memory as it is experienced, and produced, by a particular actor in a family. Dana, over a “missing” year of her life (or three weeks, depending on which calendar one looks at) becomes an actor in an entire boy’s life and economy; on the other hand, Anton the writer draws from the family memories that have been told to him, throwing himself in at various ages but also completely leaving himself out at times. The roles, then, that Dana and Anton play as protagonists in their families’ histories are concerned with similar issues but experienced differently.

The specific conditions of Dana’s time-travel throw her into an impossible situation where she is forced to play out a role in her own family history. She is a restricted actor, though, which she recognizes and narrates at various points. She seems to be there purely to enable the conception and birth of her ancestor Hagar, with the possibility of non-existence looming should she fail, but this prevents her from lashing out against Rufus too strongly, or encouraging Alice to run away too early. The narrative and genealogy of her family has already been written – it was started by Hagar and passed down in a Bible (Butler 28) – at it is left a mystery how much agency Dana is afforded when experiencing it herself.

Popping into and out of the life of the Weylin farm, it is unclear to Dana whether she is autonomously impacting the people around her, or whether her actions are playing out the slave narrative again and again without meaningful influence. It’s why when her travels are done, she goes to find the historical records of what happened following Rufus’ death, “To touch solid evidence that those people existed” and question whether it might have played out differently (Butler 264). The fact that Butler writes Dana as recounting the events herself, rather than experiencing them in the moment (for example Dana says, “Rufus himself was to teach me about the attitude” (Butler 210), anticipating and drawing connections for the next episode before it “happens”) gives the whole work the sense that Dana is a limited actor who is merely playing things out the way they are supposed to happen. She “participates” in her family’s history, but she does not dictate it.

Dana’s compressed experience of an entire generation on the Weylin farm (her one “missing” year to Rufus’ 25) comes across as antithetical to Shammas’ expansive and pervasive investigation of generations and how Anton fits into the history, is removed from it, and recounts it. The book jumps around frequently, drawing connections across removed times and places through threads of objects and motifs, looking at different events as experienced by this family of Palestinian Christians. At the same time, the book can feel like a labyrinth of vignettes and objects carefully crafted, perhaps with the intention of limiting or restricting Anton the writer. Metafictional moments such as the red feather appearing both in folktale recounting and the stolen draft of Pére Lachaise draw attention to the conflict in “teller” and “tale”; when the “other” Anton, Michael Abyad reveals his documents at the end of the work, one wonders whose story Anton was telling and how much control he had in its formulation. Shammas encapsulates this theme beautifully when Anton asserts,

Uncle Yusef, in his great cunning, gives me a tiny key to use to find my way through the winding chambers of the arabesque…But I know very well that he foresaw it all, down to the smallest detail. He knew that I was destined to retell his story one day. That’s why he so graciously granted me the key that let me into all the corridors but kept the master key in his own hands. (Shammas 227)

For Anton the narrator, writing comes to be a way of acting as an agent in his family’s history, crafting the narrative in a particular direction, despite his feeling that it was determined by outside forces that he would end up in such a position.

For both protagonists, the telling and way that they go about locating themselves in their families’ histories seems critically important to their psychology: Dana reveals thoughts frequently to the effect of how trapped she feels, how she’s losing her present to her past, how she wishes at times she were not inextricably tied to this child who will cause so much suffering; Shammas’ interweaving of many different stories and styles of telling also seem to work to how much Anton bears witness to the history (as Yusef intended) versus how much he is an actor in it, or whether his primary mode of acting is by weaving the tale. Although I feel both works are concerned with the issue of agency as it relates to genealogical narratives and filial memories, and I’ve hopefully shown how these works seek to complicate that theme, I’m not sure where to go from here.

Butler and Haneke

Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and Michael Haneke’s film Caché are both obsessed with the effects of a literal re-living of the past. In Kindred, the protagonist Dana experiences the more literal version of this idea, as she is transported to the antebellum South and forced to physically – as well as mentally – relive the past of her ancestors as a slave. In Caché, the experience of the past is less direct (caused by the chain of reactions that the videotapes produce in the protagonist Georges), but not less haunting. Georges has a series of disturbing dreams and visions, the most interesting example being the boy coughing up blood on Georges’ windowsill. The measure of truth or authenticity behind this vision is irrelevant; the collusion of the boy from the past (who is presumably Majid, culled from the depths of Georges’ memory) and the home in the present tells the viewer that the memory of Majid has vividly worked its way into Georges’ experience of everyday life (if in fact it is Georges who sees this vision, which is its own problematic dilemma).

Both works also have their own logic or set of rules that offer interesting commentary on the way that memory functions. This is especially present in Kindred, which presents a number of somewhat rational rules to govern the way the irrational time travel works. For instance, Dana experiences days and months of time on the Weylin plantation, but when she arrives back in 1976, mere minutes or hours have passed. (This mirrors how our own memories work at times, especially in dreams, which can appear to span long periods of time.) In addition, Kevin can only transport back and forth by being physically connected to Dana. However, the most significant “rule” or “logic” behind the time travel involves the circumstances that dictate the moments of transportation. Dana is only yanked back to the 1800’s when Rufus, the boy and eventual slave-owner, finds himself in a perilous situation. Dana can then only transport back when she finds herself in a state of physical harm and distress. It is more difficult to explain what this says about our own travels from the past in our memories to our present lives, and all of the stops in between. Why can Dana only escape through moments of physical damage and not moments of mental distress, or the moments in which we normally escape into or out of specific memories?

Caché presents a less-defined but still present logic of its own. Georges’ family is only sent videotapes and disturbing, childish drawings. The videotapes are always filmed by a silent source, which never makes its presence felt; the tapes are always a chilling attempt to capture a scene from a rigid, “objective” point of view. The steady, consistent stream of tapes and drawings mimics the unyielding power of painful memory and its ability to bypass our attempts to block its return. After all, one of the most disturbing aspects of the pattern is how helpless the Laurents seem to be (or alternately, is Georges really helpless against the forces of his memories, or does he choose not to deal with them?).

Butler and Haneke

In attempting to compare/contrast Butler’s work with Haneke’s, I was surprised to find myself focusing more on the “science fiction” label that is so readily applied to Kindred than the striking formal differences between the two narratives (namely, that one is written and the other filmed).  Acknowledging the fact that I’ve had relatively limited experience with science fiction books or films, I looked for a simple definition of the term, and found that the Oxford English Dictionary defines “science fiction” as: “Imaginative fiction based on postulated scientific discoveries or spectacular environmental changes, freq. set in the future or on other planets and involving space or time travel” (OED online).

I acknowledge that a one-sentence attempt to define an entire creative genre is inherently reductive, but I do think that the language used here poses some interesting questions, the most pressing of which is this: what qualifies Kindred as science fiction, whereas Caché (or even something as characterized by “spectacular environmental changes” as Time’s Arrow) is not as readily classified as such?  Certainly, Butler’s novel seems a more obvious recipient of the label simply by virtue of the fact that the characters physically travel backwards through time, and that they acknowledge the strangeness of such a rupture.  However, in a sense, the characters in Caché do the same thing—they rewind the tapes, relive moments of the past that often occurred beyond the bounds of their own experience (as is the case when Anne Laurent “experiences” Georges’s conversation with Majid by viewing the tape), and seem to find this backward time-travel as far beyond their own control as do Dana and Kevin, and just as derailing to their present lives.  A tension develops in both works, bred solely by this uneasiness surrounding the moments of backward travel—when will the next tape come? When will Dana be wrenched back to the Weylin house?

 

I suppose one striking difference could arise when considering the notion of the time-traveler’s agency in changing, or setting the course of, the “past.”  That is, because Dana has the power to save and heal Rufus, her relationship with the antebellum South into which she finds herself thrust does seem a bit different than that between Georges’s and Anne’s relationship to their filmed past.  However, I have to wonder (strictly speaking within the constructed frame of the narrative) whether such a difference is actually as glaring as it seems.  That is, before the audience even begins to learn of Rufus and the many woes he brings to Dana’s life, the Prologue alerts us to the story’s outcome—whatever trials we, as readers, are about to witness, Dana has survived to tell the story, so we know that she must have been successful in one way or another. As the story develops, as we come to realize that her mission is in fact to secure her own birth, this image of her limbless—but, above all, living—body accompanies our reading minds throughout all of the trials posed in the novel; in that sense, experiencing Dana has actually been deprived of this agency by narrating Dana (at least insofar as the character possesses agency in the audience’s mind).  In light of that consideration, time-travelling Dana actually seems to exert the same level of narrative influence over my reading mind as Georges and Anne, with whom I experience the story as a sort of co-observer (in the sense that the story—at least the story of the tapes—unfolds for all of us at the same time).

 

One could also claim that subject matter determines whether or not a work is classified as “sci-fi,” based on the fact that Dana travels an incredible distance into the “historical” past (as opposed to a “personal,” experienced past).  Again, though, that seems a bit hazy to me—as readers, we experience Dana’s entire story (with the exception of the Prologue and Epilogue) along one narrative timeline, even though she shuttles between eras.  In Caché, on the other hand, the viewer himself/herself travels back and forth through time—the dream sequences and flashbacks (if that’s how you interpret them) transport the audience, not necessarily the experiencing characters, through “spectacular environmental changes.”  This might be a bit of a stretch, but, at the level of narrative framework, I’m not convinced that Butler’s work possesses an inherently stranger or more fantastical relationship to time than Haneke’s.

With that in mind, my question might now shift to: what is the difference between a work of science fiction (I’ll limit myself to the more “realistic” works that, like Kindred, maintain relatively recognizable character and setting details—no aliens or space travel—and rely mostly on time travel for their fantastical characteristics) and a work that relies heavily on memory, a kind of interior (and, for the reader, “real”) time travel in its own right?

Butler and Wolfe

Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Virgina Wolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway treat very different subject matter. The time periods encompassed, the range of characters explored, and the time spans of the novels all differ drastically. However, both intimately explore the relationship of memory to human connection, both in personal relationships and on the scale of larger communities.

We first see this in Kindred when Dana returns home from her first trip to see Rufus. In order to re-connect with Kevin, she “remembered it all for him—relived it in detail” (Butler 15). In order for her to accept the reality of what had occurred and to integrate herself back into the 1900s, she needed Kevin to have an understanding of where she had been and what had occurred. As her visits to the past grow in length and intensity and Kevin begins to have his own experiences in the 1800s, the importance of sharing these memories and experiences grows. We see a similar need for concrete connection in Mrs. Dalloway, particularly in Rezia and Septimus’ relationship. Septimus’ shellshock forces a separation in this couple much as the forced time travel separates Kevin and Dana. Though Rezia and Septimus’ separation is not physical, it is just as real. For Rezia the space between her and Septimus is palpable, as she proclaims “to love makes one solitary” (Wolfe 22). Probably the happiest moment for the couple occurs shortly before he dies, when the tangible experience of making a hat together becomes a moment for Rezia to hold on to in their relationship. While making the hat with her, “he had become himself then, he had laughed then. They had been alone together. Always she would like that hat” (141). She needs this moment of connection a reminder of the value of their relationship in the midst of all the loneliness Septimus’ illness causes her.

Shared experiences allow for personal connection, but an ever-present lack of complete understanding forces compromise. As Sally recognizes at the dinner party, “she knew nothing about them, only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day?” (88). Even in the best of circumstances, one cannot know all that another person experiences. When the situation is especially complicated, as it is for Rezia and Septimus or Dana and Kevin, the couples must do the best they can to share enough of their lives to maintain some level of intimacy. When Kevin and Dana are desperately trying to connect and re-adjust to life in the 1900s after their longest separation, Kevin’s questions lead Dana to attempt to explain why she would kill Rufus if he tried to rape her. Her explanation of the necessity of forcing Rufus to accept her at least on some level as a person only partially reaches Kevin, but she acknowledges the limits of her ability to connect with him. She accepts that he can never fully comprehend her decision, but “That felt like truth. It felt enough like truth for me not to mind that he had only half understood me” (Butler 246).

Much as Septimus’ mental illness forces a distance between him and Rezia, the social acceptance of the notion that blacks are sub-human in the 1800s forces a distance between Kevin and Dana. This distance manifests itself in their relationship while they are living together in Rufus’ house through their vastly disparate, though both terrible, experiences of life in the 1800s. Dana recognizes the discrepancy in their experiences in Kevin’s response to her comments about the cruelty of what happens to the natives in the West, noting “He looked at me strangely. He had been doing that a lot lately” (97).

On a broader level, the same forces of mental illness and racism which inhibit connection in these intimate relationships can hake difficult the moments of connection that unite communities. In Mrs. Dalloway we see several such moments of unity. The Prime Minister driving by interrupts all normal activities, such that “when the sentence was finished something had happened. Something so trifling in single instances that no mathematical instrument … could register the vibration,” yet the change was tangible, “for the surface agitation of the passing car as it sunk grazed something very profound” (Wolfe 17-18). In this moment, as all other activities are interrupted, the whole city is united in a moment of nationalistic calm. All across London “strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire” (17). And yet Septimus is unable to take part in this connectivity, for the jolt of the car’s backfiring pulls him back in time to the explosions of the war. In Kindred Dana experiences a similar disconnect as she recognizes the forces pulling her and Kevin apart as the very forces preventing any large-scale sense of connection between blacks and whites. The de-humanizing nature of slavery breaks these shared moments of communal consciousness, and Dana’s experiences in the past let her appreciate how fragile this connectivity is. She tells Kevin, “The ease seemed so frightening … now I see why” (Butler 101). The ease with which social forces allow people to disregard the ties of shared experience and humanity scare her, with good reason.

Both of these texts use formal choices of perspective and chronology to showcase how ingrained and yet fragile human connection is, exploring questions of community and loneliness through these two couples and the larger communities they inhabit.

– Hanna Torrence

Butler and Freud

Octavia Butler explores memory’s confusing nature in Kindred, in which her main character, Dana, struggles to deal with the overwhelming experience of returning home after her trip to the antebellum south, where her husband is still trapped. Dana grapples with the dichotomy of her current comfort and her painful recollections, sometimes thinking about the situation at hand, sometimes thinking back to pleasanter times. Her inability to control her memories demonstrates both the tendency to remember happier, if unrelated, events when faced with crisis and the ease at which painful memories come back, even in the most unrelated circumstances.

When Dana first returns to the 1970s, she thinks about her husband’s marriage proposal, not their current separation (Butler 109). Although she takes pleasure from these memories, they have disturbing racial overtones when connected to their master/slave role-play which they had to assume while in the 1800s. She discusses how she would not let him support her while they dated because she wanted independence (108). She talks about how much it angered him when she refused to type his manuscripts (109). And although their interracial marriage is legal, their families did not approve (110). She emphasizes the memory’s details that deal most closely with slavery, labor, and racism, indirectly connecting past memories of her husband to their current situation.

Freud discusses a similar phenomenon called screen memories. Screen memories are memories that connect symbolically to other life events, allowing the subject to remember other, more painful events indirectly (Freud 243). For example, a man remembers how sweet a particular piece of bread once tasted, and that memory shields his fantasy of living a more comfortable, wealthy life (242). In Dana’s case, she remembers working for the employment agency as a source of independence (Butler 108), perhaps as a projection of her desires to escape her newfound slavery. But Freud would not classify Dana’s memories as screen memories per se, since they have both a thematic connection to her current plight and independent significance. A full-fledged screen memory’s “retention is due to the relation holding between its own subject-matter and a different one which has been suppressed” (Freud 234), and would therefore not be remembered on its own, without a suppressed memory to screen. Dana remembers her husband’s proposal as an outlet, not as a blockade.

Butler also explores how particularly traumatic memories can come up at the slightest, most loose provocation and at the most incongruous times. The sight of a blue-haired woman digging in her garden provokes Dana’s memories of the red-headed Margaret Weylin, who kept a beautiful garden without doing any of the work herself. The connection is slim, just flowers, but because Dana has suffered at Margaret’s hands, she immediately thinks about her at the sight of them. Dana also describes how disorienting and disturbing it is to remember certain things, such as a field hand’s whipping, in her apartment. The incongruity of her surroundings and her thoughts troubles her and leaves her physically ill (Butler 115). Some memories, it seems, have no screen, and they come up at the slightest provocation at seemingly inappropriate times.

 

Butler and Amis

One of the constant struggles with history and literature is whether to evaluate the morality depicted within the literature in terms of our modern reading or in terms of the time in which it was written or set—even though the world has not always agreed on what the “right thing” is at any given moment in practice, the general consensus seems to be that some decisions on morals should be inherently simple. Although Kindred is actually categorized as science fiction, while Time’s Arrow is not, the ways in which these narratives deal with time as it differs from forward linear motion require the same suspension of disbelief that is so important in reading science fiction. Through the authors’ sharp contrasts to the normal perception of time, they call into question the concepts of absolute morality and human nature throughout literary history and history in literature.

In Time’s Arrow, the unknown narrator and Tod/John/Hamilton/Odilo shift backwards through time in a relatively linear fashion, passing through every possible period of history where the vast majority of the world has come to realize that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was incredibly immoral, and yet this realization is never directly addressed. While this may be due to the fact that the narrator only experiences “the sense of starting out on a terrible journey, toward a terrible secret” until the great unveiling, thus missing the most relevant time periods for (re)evaluation, Odilo’s greatest acknowledgement of a sense of wrongdoing seems to come only from physical manifestations of guilt, such as impotence (Amis 5). One of the refrains of the section of the narrative in Auschwitz is the phrase “here there is no why,” (125) implying that there is no desire to examine one’s actions, their causes, or their implications, if not an outright desire to avoid examination. This tendency to shy away from making a true judgment call is driven home when the narrator finally says, “I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everybody else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers” (157). In this way, the narrator’s relative nonchalance towards and seeming retrospective understanding of how the persecution of the Jews unfolded offers an unsettling interpretation of how easily a person could do something terrible in a certain context.

Similarly, Kindred’s rapid and unexpected shifts in time seem to make it difficult for the characters to maintain a solid sense of themselves and what they believe to be right and wrong. When Kevin first arrives in the past, Dana needs to step in between Rufus and him before a larger conflict breaks out over differences in laws and preferred vocabulary: she explains to Kevin that Rufus “learned to talk [derogatorily] from his mother.…And from his father, and probably from the slaves themselves,” seeming to give Rufus a context-based free pass, while Kevin himself realizes that there’s “no point” in trying to explain modern concepts of respect to a young boy from the antebellum South (Butler 60-61). As time passes and the past becomes more familiar to Kevin and Dana, Dana finds herself “disturbed” at how easy it is even for them to adjust to their “places in the household of a slaveholder” (97). Although the situation is less than ideal, nothing so bad has happened that the modern people cannot wrap their minds around it. There are also hints of a disconnect in the experiences of the two time-travelers as they perceive the history unfolding around them: when Kevin mentions how fascinating it would be to see the West, Dana replies, “That’s where they’re doing it to the Indians instead of the blacks!” prompting Kevin to look at her “strangely” (97). This strange look gives Dana—as well as the reader—the jolting realization that even a relatively progressive person from a modern time can still have a different affective response to morally faulty history when placed in a certain setting.

When the characters in these narratives suddenly find themselves in societies and entire ways of life where awful practices are occurring, they may try to make a stand, but often find it easier to go along with supposedly standard behavior for their own well-being. In Odilo’s case, the reality of what he is aiding in Auschwitz does not seem to consciously register—when Herta sends him letters suspicious of the work he is doing, the narrator thinks, “Obviously, the misunderstanding will have to be cleared up” (Amis 126). Although the reader can certainly imagine that this thought process occurs because Odilo has already worked himself into the Nazi mindset, the fact that Amis never truly addresses the much larger societal and military pressures beyond Odilo’s immediate circles additionally problematizes any dubious, Nuremburg-esque defense the narrator may make. As far as self-preservation, Dana also seems to makes cautious decisions on which rights to fight for because her risk as a black woman in the slaveholding South is particularly high: when Kevin finds it ridiculous that she is not allowed to stay overnight in his room, she admits that they may need to leave the house if they are caught because the Weylins “might not be willing to tolerate ‘immorality’ from [them]” (Butler 85). While putting the word “immorality” in quotation marks indicates that Dana is making a distinction between what is moral for the Weylins and what is moral for her and Kevin, the notion that she still feels an obligation to operate under a construct of morality different from her own shows that the context of the past has a great deal of control over her, and that it may have the power to gain even more control. Although the relatively removed reader may like to think that some of history’s most terrible concepts should have been impossible with only the use of basic human decency, these novels and their reorganization of time, which should allow the characters to share the reader’s modern ideas of right and wrong, demonstrate how difficult it can be to maintain a stable sense of self and morality outside of one’s own well-defined space and time.

LW

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Print.

Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon, 1979. Print.

Spiegelman and Haneke

In both Maus by Art Spiegelman and Caché directed by Michael Haneke, the reader or viewer is confronted with the effects a traumatic moment in history can have years later with its retelling or repression from memory. But one question that both of these works seem to address in different ways from this joint starting point might be who is in possession, or who is allowed to recount, these memories. In Maus, this tension manifests in relationship between Art and his father Vladek as the former interviews and puts to paper the story (of the Holocaust, but also his present life) of the latter. Caché, on the other hand, suggests the dissolution of a family once a mysterious third-party interferes and begins dredging up the past, specifically the patriarch’s proximity to the Paris massacre of 1961. The narrative techniques of both works, then, both begin to work at what might be understood as an ethics of memory.

As Maus progresses, Art’s insistence on getting the whole story told in chronological fashion and not missing a moment so he can finish his story begins to take on tinges of appropriation. From the very beginning of the graphic novel, Art suggests he does not visit his father much and that they are not close (Spiegelman 11). It is unclear why Art embarks on this project in the first place – to provide a thorough documentation of one survivor’s experience, to pay tribute to his family and heritage, and countless other options – but he becomes captivated with finding his mother’s journals and seems aware of some issues around how he represents his father (131); for instance, the father is almost stereotypically miserly with his broken English in the present, but stands taller, speaks more confidently and fluently in the historical narrative. Yet, Art seems to feel he is entitled to the story, such that he calls his father a murderer for destroying his mother’s side of events (159).

For Vladek, however, his sharing with Art has at least one clear goal: a desire to avoid a repetition of history, or at least prepare Art in case it does. In a profound moment, Vladek grabs Art’s notebook and draws the bunker he built for his family, which is layered over much of the page, saying, “Such things it’s good to know exactly how was it – just in case…” (110). The very next page, Art pulls us back into the history by rendering the bunker and the family hiding in it. In this particular moment, the contrast between Art’s representation of Vladek’s story and Vladek communicating the story himself, and his reasons for it, is made clearer and exposes the tensions of who’s story is being told and why.

With Caché, the father Georges’ relationship to the historical moment of 1961 is called into question by an intruding third party. The class wrestled with the question of whether it was morally responsible for the third party to send the surveillance video tapes and dredge up a past that Georges was variably connected to. The way that the video tapes initially lead him to Majid, the Algerian boy from his childhood, and his various accusations and pursuit of the truth result in Majid’s suicide, demonstrates how Georges’ connection to his past can radiate beyond himself; his memories, and what he chooses to do with them, have consequences in the present beyond his own person. Georges did not choose to bring these memories back, but Haneke seems to be arguing that they serve a meaningful purpose for society at-large and for his family in particular. Specifically, the tapes clearly have an effect on his son Pierrot that lead to an increasing estrangement from his family, such that the final, detached long shot of the film makes many suggestions for Pierrot’s future relative to the Parisian upper class and his family’s history.

The themes of both of these works and the particular generational conflicts in filial transmission of memory show how complicated the issue of memory can become and the various consequences it can have. Vladek seems to feel fine recounting these stories, and moreover feels it is important for Art to know, but Art’s motivations are more complicated as he tries to find where he stands as a postwar, child of Holocaust survivors. He views the destruction of his mother’s records as particularly reprehensible, but the manner in which he represents and seems at times to be using his father only begin to affect him late in the graphic novel. On the other hand, Georges’ refusal to actually engage with the history has percolated into his present, flippantly passing it off with “What more needs to be said?” bodes poorly for his family. His son and Majid’s both enter the picture, then, as characters attempting to make sense of the complicated place they find themselves in as the next generation, and how to use their parents’ stories responsibly, informatively, or perhaps ethically.

Spiegelman and Ishiguro

In class we discussed how Spiegelman’s “Maus” pioneered a new genre of narrative into mainstream awareness. Nowadays, the graphic memoir or autobiography in comic form has become a genre in its own right. Through drawing and hand lettering, the reader is able to see memory through the artist’s hand, and there is both a sense of a more authentic glimpse into a particular history or memory, but also a sense of heightened distortion as the graphic form allows for much more personal subjectivity than the typefaces that are chosen to tell the story of a traditional novel in text.

I would like to explore the formal novelty and departure from zeitgeist that “Maus” embodies in comparison with Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day” and how these two works negotiate the idea of distance in the context of memory and reflection of the past. Both these works revolve around the political upheaval and traumatic carnage of WWII, but manage to place these memories in  different perspectives in relation to their narrators and to their readers.

Spiegelman’s “Maus” possesses a self awareness of its own pushing of boundaries at the formal level. Not only does this Holocaust narrative take the form of comics, which distills the movement of life into sequential panels, like the individual cells of annotated animations, but it is even further removed from an expected historical account by taking place in a representative world of animals, where the persecuted Jews are mice and Nazis are fanged cats. Spiegelman later reinforces this self awareness on page 100 where he includes the insert of his comic “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History.” The difference in both drawing and narrative style between the insert comic and the rest of the graphic novel points to Spiegelman’s deliberate choice to depart from the his past drawing style to represent his father’s history as a story that is visually more removed and less severe than “Prisoner on the Hell Planet.” The visual form of “Maus” allows the reader a peek into the Spiegelman’s own personal choices, his own past that is not completely divorced from his father’s, but nevertheless still more distanced from the retelling of his father’s history in the representative world of “Maus.”

The formal manipulation is much more apparent in “Maus”, but Ishiguro can be found winking between the lines in “The Remains of the Day.” Though the textual form of the novel affords him arguably less freedom than the page of a sketchbook, he too is guiding the reader in a similar way that images in “Maus” function to lead our eyes in and around the page. In particular, what stands out to me is the prologue of the novel which departs from the rest of the novel’s formal structure of parts that have a title page that is labeled by the day, the time of day, and the location of Stevens as he progresses on his journey. This prologue places the author’s presence into deep relief as the reader notices the year, 1956, as an expository revelation for the rest of the novel. 1956 historically marks the decline of the British Empire as the Suez Crisis resulted in Egypt claiming sovereignty over the Suez Canal, once Britain’s passageway to access its colonies and protectorates through the Mediterranean and Red Seas. This historical context does not appear overtly in Stevens’ narrative and it is precisely within this obfuscation and obscuration that we can see Ishiguro’s decision making as an author. He chooses the lens of focus, he changes the perspectives to manipulate foreground and background in a way that is not so different from Spiegelman’s panels.

Similarly to Spiegelman’s self-awareness to the form of his work, Ishiguro’s choice to include this enigmatic prologue points to a number of possibility about how the novel’s form relates to Stevens and his intentions. Stevens seems to be telling his story to a listener or reader who is familiar with the social context of butlers and the conventions of working on a wealthy English manor, but this is further complicated when we consider whether he might be compelled to leave his story as an artifact, and even more compellingly, as an artifact that expunged him of culpability as he tries to come to terms with his regret and guilt in old age.

Finally, I want to discuss the process of consumption of “Maus” in comparison to “The Remains of the Day.” The graphic heavy format of “Maus” can be consumed rapidly—as readers, we can scan through the sparse text at a high speed while letting the images animate the words. Conversely “The Remains of the Day” demands more initial time investment to get through the novel even on a first read. However the text of “The Remains of the Day” in that it has no graphic counterpart is in a sense more straightforwardly consumed. “Maus” on the other hand, does not operate on a direct correlation between its text and image, if it did than it would simply be an illustrated book rather than a graphic novel that relies on the relationship between text and image to achieve more than a visual depiction of the text. There’s a disparity between the process of consumption and creation as we look at both Ishiguro and Spiegelman’s works. Spiegelman takes his readers even further into his own art in his publishing of “MetaMaus” in which he shows his sketches and outlines for Maus Parts I and II. His sketches are almost obsessively planned and meticulously redrawn and reworked, and yet the final product looks effortless and easy in its animated style. Ishiguro does not provide a similar look into his own creative process in relation to “The Remains of the Day” but similarly there is an underlying story of how this work was revised, rewritten, and reworked, and this is not available to us as readers as we consume the final product of a long and labor intensive process.  I would like to pose the question of what work this disparity achieves in our reading of these works.

 

Spiegelman and Woolf

Viewed through the extremely divergent but eerily similar lenses of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the act of memory seems to act as a tool of great resilience and flexibility while also serving as an unmovable barrier, or anchor. It would at first seem logical to point to form as the node of divergence between the two works; that the formal modes of storytelling- a hand-drawn, graphic novel held up against a novel of pure sentences and paragraphs- would naturally, in their different expectations and constraints of construction, create different rules for the allowances and tensions of memory to navigate. But to see form as the basis for memory’s strange workings is to ignore the power of memory as a strong, conducting force behind not only the direction of story-telling but the agency of pushing and preventing certain conclusions.

Within Maus, Vladek’s history and Spiegelman’s process of recreating Vladek’s history seem to intertwine seamlessly from past to present, but often one or the other story will interrupt the process of the other with a sudden jarring leap back into another era and moment. In the very midst of the action and at the moment of confrontation as a POW by a threatening German cat, the present wends its way delicately past even the most vivid of memories. The past is never allowed to completely consume the tale, as on page 51, when Vladek, as a quick aside, notes that “Like you, Artie, my hand were always very delicate” and the image shifts to the suddenly cozy picture of story-telling (51). Vladek does not recall these memories as an self-initiated exercise, but is prompted specifically by Spiegelman’s purposeful visits (“to get more information about his past”) (43). The intertwining of past and present is one purposefully forged by Spiegelman, yet neither he nor his father has direct control of how the past will manage to also affect the present. In these visits, the directive power of memory is made clear; the sharing of a memory’s simultaneous promise of understanding and almost reliving another’s life with the impossibility of ever reaching such a complete understanding drive not only Spiegelman’s visits, but the frustrations, successes and pleasantness of his interactions with his father’s current life.

But while Spiegelman’s journey down memory lane with his father yields a new, shared memory for both father and son (one of telling and one of listening), Clarissa and Peter and all the rest in Mrs. Dalloway seem increasingly isolated by the paths of their memories. In the differences in the way things are remembered, or the different moments in the day that same event is recalled, a greater sense of interiority is created as each character, as a result of sinking further into memory, sinks away from the world.  The selfishness of memory is its ability to drag anyone at any moment away from the very real present and back into the unchangeable past. The hold of the past on the present directs the way Clarissa hears the strokes of Big Ben, the way she reacts to Peter’s reappearance after many years,the way she talks to guests at her dinner party, and its relentless grip on life never allows a moment of peace. There is always a connecting thread between memories and people, and in this way, isolation becomes a curiously sad but sought after method of escape from memory.

The recurring theme in both these books seems to be the struggle against or the acceptance of the pull of memory. Memory seems selfish only in its power, but its power to draw one out of a the very here and now and into an infinitely more ambiguous time and place is both deeply astonishing and revelatory.

Willa Zhang

Spiegelman and Ishiguro

One of the ideas that we have discussed many times in class is what it can mean to be “burdened” by someone else’s memories and life, specifically those of another generation. Some people consider this relationship to actually be burdensome, while others treat it as more of a gift, and even for the same person, this can change depending upon the context. In this vein, Stevens reveres his father in his narrative, which his father will never see, while finding it impossible to put his father on a pedestal to his father’s face. Similarly, Art Spiegelman depicts his often-tense relationship with his father very honestly, while still pouring creative energy into honoring his father’s story. Thus, Stevens and Spiegelman seem to indicate that narrative has played an important role in distancing the narrator from the difficult reality of his relationships so that he can express what he considers to be his true feelings towards his father.

In one of his many discussions of “dignity” and “greatness,” Stevens devotes most of his words to retelling his father’s story, and goes out of his way to explain why this is warranted. He describes his father’s career as “the one [he has] always scrutinized for a definition of ‘dignity,’” and goes on to state his “firm conviction” that his father indeed embodied dignity (Ishiguro 34). When he follows this by saying that his father may not have had every quality that should be expected of a high-quality butler, but that any absent qualities were those that are clearly not relevant, the reader can see the reverence with which Stevens regards his father and Mr. Stevens Sr.’s work as a butler. In this way, Stevens demonstrates how heavily his father’s life has influenced his own understanding of how to carry himself in his work—and thus his life, given Stevens’ complete devotion to being a butler—even though he never finds a way to share this with his father.

Spiegelman’s narrative does not seem to share Stevens’ dedication to depicting his father in a particularly lofty manner, but nevertheless shows (at least the first half of) Vladek’s triumph of the spirit throughout the persecution of Jewish people. The author is the one who originally presents the story idea to his father, explaining that he wants to hear “about [his father]’s life in Poland, and the war,” ostensibly even if no one else does, and alludes to the fact that he has wanted to “draw” this book for a while (Spiegelman 12). His desire to focus the narrative on his father’s personal experience, which he refers to as making the story “real – more human” (23), indicates that he truly cares about his father’s past and how it has influenced the present (for anyone connected to their family), and may also be his way of developing and understanding his relationship with his father without the two of them actually sitting down and discussing how this may be the case.

In spite of their overarching desire to honor the memories and lives of their fathers, Spiegelman and Stevens both find it very difficult to connect with the men who were important enough to warrant so much time and effort. In the pivotal moment where Stevens must limit his father’s household duties, he mentions how little he and Mr. Stevens Sr. have conversed, and refers to his father’s room as a “prison cell,” but seems to avoid thinking any deeper about how his father will truly feel upon receiving this revised task list, or about how he himself must feel as his father ages (Ishiguro 64). Spiegelman has similar problems in dealing with his father on a more intimate level: when he finds out that Vladek is depressed after reading “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” he finds himself only able to awkwardly say, “I-I’m sorry” (Spiegelman 104). When he says to Mala that Vladek normally “doesn’t even look at [his] work when [he] sticks it under [Vladek’s] nose,” this hints at a long-standing complicated relationship among Vladek, Spiegelman, and Spiegelman’s work, upon which Spiegelman does not ultimately deign to elaborate.

Thus, narrative seems to be necessary for Stevens and Spiegelman to actually engage with their fathers and their fathers’ stories, as opposed to reacting (or in Stevens’ case, not reacting) to the immediate situations before them. For better or for worse, these father figures and their burdens have played huge parts in how their sons perceive and interact with the world around them. Although it may not be the express purpose of the narratives to focus on the sons’ relationships with their fathers, narrative seems to have been the best—if not only—way for them to work through their feelings for and understandings of their fathers.

 

LW

Works Cited:

Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Print.