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Piecing together the past
Telling stories can have therapeutic effect. It helps to piece things
together. In a way, it is linking our memories, chaining them together
wehreever there is a key word, a red thread. Piecing the story together
in the form of a novel, and by attempting to establish coherency by making
the story One, and by doing so, to find sense: that has been the aim of
both Beloved and Maus.
I see both the narratives of Beloved and Maus, in their literary forms,
as attempts to come to terms with the unspeakable past, or, in other words,
to overcome de-humanization.
Ordering the past
Both novels are witness accounts of survivors - Art Spiegelman a second-generation
survivor, Toni Morrison a little down the road, and not a direct survivor
of her story but of the people for who the story is symptomatic and particular.
By relating the story of his parents or her people, both authors attempt
to make some sense of the unspeakable. The act
of witnessing itself is comforting and promises sense, promises to
overcome de-humanization. But the manner in which the authors relate their
narrative to the reader helps also to overcome de-humanization and to inject
sense in the suffering, bring order
to chaos. This is accomplished by the use of what I call anchor-terms.
Art Spiegelman and Denver Morrison: Piecing
together the past
Both Spiegelman and Morrison are witnesses to these narratives. They
tell the story. And both are, in a sense, survivors of the de-humanizing
experience, Art Spiegelman more direct so than Toni Morrison. Art Spiegelman
is a second generation survivor, a "REAL survivor" (p. 44, Maus II) in
the sense that Vladek "in some ways ... didn't survive" (p. 90; Maus II).
Morrison is a survivor in the sense that "who
we were has much to do with who we are", as Newsweek reported on the
new movie Amistad (Dec. 8th, 97)
Art is himself in Maus. Toni Morrison's alter ego is Denver, insofar as Denver is herself the a second-generation survivor of slavery. Denver, like Art, is the innocent who learns about the details of the gloomy past. Piece by piece, she has learned about her mother, and tries to make sense, and not to get caught up in, the tangle of memory. In the end, it is Denver who alone has learned to act normally and go out to seek help for Sethe.
Paralleling that, Morrison is the one who, over the course of telling Beloved, has accounted all the details of the narrative, piece by piece, and who, in the end, can call it "not a story to pass on" - and pass it on. She has mastered the past:
"I
certainly thought I knew as much about slavery as anybody," Morrison told
the Los Angeles
Times.
"But it was the interior life I needed to find out about."
But the past is still here, in front of us, as a book. It won't go away, ever.
Art, in the end, finishes his account with a frame where he is called Richieu after his dead brother. He has mastered the past through his book, but he has not mastered the effects of the Holocaust. They won't go away, ever.
But like Denver/Morrison, Art may dare to set a final point, and draw
a peaceful tombstone. Denver gave Sethe "some kind of tomorrow" (273) by
rescuing her from the tangle of memories, and by taking care of her, acting
as her guardian, warning Paul D, and by "be(ing) there in the day" (272).
In the same way, Art has given his dad peace and rest. Both Sethe and Vladek
are exhausted in bed at the end of the narrative. It remained to the survivors
to take care of the rest.
The Use of Anchor terms
In overcoming the the chaos of the past, Morrison and Spiegelmann make
use of anchor terms.
First, there are terms that helped the survivors to survive.
In Maus, one of the elements that give Vladek's life continuity
and connect him to a higher sense is belief in religious symbolism.
One anchor term here is the Parsha Truma. Vladek's grandfather appears
him in a dream and promises him to come free from the P.O.W. camp on the
day of when Jews read the section of the Thora called Parshas Truma (58,
Maus I). He comes free on that day. It was also the Parsha Truma when he
married Anja before the war, and it was the Parsha Truma when Art was born,
and which he thus read on his Bar Mitzvah at the age of thirteen.
Religious symbolism becomes important again when in Auschwitz, a priest
interprets Vladeks tattoed number and offers him consolation and hope for
survival when discovering that the number totals 18, the Hebrew number
of life (28, II). Vladek remembered that whenever he "was bad."
Mystic symbolism again appears when Anja went to a gypsy woman who
tells her that Vladek is alive, and that she will have "a new life and
another little boy". The frame just before Anja hears her husband is alive
is drawn with the full moon, the date the gypsie woman predicted.
For Sethe in Beloved, the anchor to survive was the thought of her kids. She survived to be close to them. She survived to give milk to her little baby daughter. She survived to give birth to another baby daughter. Her whole life, she survives in order to be a mother. And when she kills her baby daughter, she kills her for her sake. When her sons run away, she worked hard to keep Denver alive.
Secondly, there are the terms that help the survivor's make sense
of their story, and to overcome de-humanization.
In Beloved, the 'Clearing' is such a term.
If only she went to the Clearing, Sethe hopes, she will get more clarity.
An anchor is also 'Baby Suggs' - Baby Suggs
as a slave, Baby Suggs as a preacher, and as an advisor, as a light of
humanity. Another term that helped was to think of the haunting memories
as a 'ghost' that could be argued with, made deals with. In the form of
a ghost, the memories were not so freightening any longer. For Denver,
one such term is also her idea of her 'coming father' who assumes the role
of a saviour. "If only he could be here..."
In Maus, Anja is, like Baby Suggs, a gate to a better understanding. If only Anja were here in the camp, if only Art could read her diaries... 'Anja' promises healing. Like in Beloved, dead loved one's are called ghosts, instead of confronting them as painful memories.
And instead of death and destruction and pain and humiliation and hunger and fear and degradation and horror and de-humanization, and instead of all the camps throughout Nazi Germany, one place is named: Auschwitz. It is a handy term for what is unspeakable. It is a place in Poland and an abstract event in history at the same time. One uses 'Auschwitz' in conceptualization (as on p. 44 Maus II). The whole idea of retreating to terms that couch de-humanization in friendlier terms, as I try to do on my main page 2, is an attempt of anchoring and making sense of the past. - Of course, the whole approach of drawing a comic about a mouse in the country of Mickey Mouse is an approach to render the unspeakable in common terms. Turning men into mice is an anchor itself again. Not human did this unto humans - cats did it to mice. It was really an age-old game.
Of course, sometimes these terms get out of hand.
Escaping death by making oneself useful transforms into the concept
of "its good to know how to do everything", a maxime that Vladek so internalizes
that he will never rely on anybody else again if he can fix it himself.
Transforming haunting memories into the anchor
concept of a ghost hits back on Sethe and Denver
. The ghost literally comes back and tyrannizes them.
And drawing people as mice may also backfire. A troubled Art, shrinked
to child-like size, confesses to his psychiatrist that he may expose
his dad to ridicule. (44, II) Art also wonders that reality may be too
complex for a comic (16, II)
Conclusion
In the end, I think it is safe to say that when a story is being told
in it's entirety, from all the different perpectives that haunt the narrator,
it is pinned down, mastered and related - related to sense
and order through the use of anchor terms,
and related to the greater meta-narratives
that are out there. When these relations are established - and mere telling
or witnessing is an act of relating the unspeakable
to reality in itself -, sense is being made of it. And when sense is being
made of it, or found, then de-humanization
is overcome. It is like searching for the truth of the matter. When
human beings have a sense, a moral they can rely on, or draw out of, then
they can tell themselves a more or less coherent story/narrative instead
of standing in front of the shambles of their lives after de-humanization
ruined it. Reading about the struggles to establish human order again gives
us an insight into and understanding
of our common humanity that all literature aims at.