Over the past week, the class has explored the complicated nature of representation and specifically, the relationship between James Young’s “received history” in comparison with inherited memory. The use of comics, genre and the inherent shortcomings of re-presentation came up in many of the blogs with regards to Art Spiegelman’s Maus I & II.

James blog returns to questions around the exigencies of life narrative and points out how the mundane and banal life stories are often deemed insufficient to be incorporated into the literary canon. Similar to how Fred Wah negotiates the categorization of Diamond Grill from life narrative into “biotext,” Spiegelman’s MetaMaus rejects comics as a genre and argues that it is a mere medium instead. James suggests that both these texts reject genre not as a way of going against the grain but as an attention-seeking marketing ploy.

While an unconventional way of telling a Holocaust narrative, comics illustrate (quite literally) the show-and-tell nature of Art’s Maus. Vivian’s blog post explores comics as a mode of mediation whereby the author “interprets his interviews with his father and makes the decision to represent characters as animals.” Through this mediation, Art attempts to reach a form of authenticity by weaving real photographs into his text in order to fix the shortcomings of re-presentation. The function of these photographs within the “received history” is “a testament to the lives of those who are no longer alive.” Stephen similarly points to this feature and compares it with Ari Folman’s cartoon Waltz with Bashir about the Sabra & Shatila massacre, which in its final scene, cuts to “real documentary footage of women wailing at the site of the massacre, decrying the horror that has just been committed.” Stephen explains how Spiegelman’s use of animals in combination of real photographs is perhaps “a way of expressing his own incapacity to represent the events of the Holocaust.”

However, it is this very combination and integration of words and art that Leona So argues to be a better depiction of Vladek’s Holocaust story. Unlike other Holocaust texts, the comics allowed So to “visualize and connect with the story” better. Here, Leona was comparing Maus with Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, whereas Raffaella brought the comic in conversation with the film adaptation of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. The disturbing depictions within Maus of the concentration camps, the struggles of daily life and cruelty experienced by Vladek “enhances his humility as a survivor.” On the other hand, the film lacks the broader depictions of Anne’s life during the Holocaust and thus fails to present us an effective understanding of the individual’s life narrative.

It is perhaps the flexibility and inclusivity of comics which Matias points out as a “vehicle for the perceptual reorientation of certain historical events and periods.” Here, he recounts how Mafalda, a comic strip in Argentina between 1964 and 1973, came to re-present the Argentinean experience during those years. Kendall’s post similarly advocates how comics act as a subversive text and an arena for social commentary or critique. In turn, comics transcend the sacredness and sensitivity of Auschwitz and portray Vladek as a flawed and real person instead of the sentimentalized and tragic Holocaust victim.

With these thoughts in mind, I would add that the work of Art Spiegelman, especially Maus II, is extremely self-reflexive in its writing and invites the readers to consider the medium/genre of comics. The character Artie announces, “I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams” (II, 16). Adding unto the Holocaust narrative, Art’s tapestry of real photographs, visuals and text presents the readers with this dilemma: how do we go about witnessing witnessing, what are the appropriate methods for re-presentation, how does “received history” affect the narrative and how comics function within literature.

Works Cited:

Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Print.

Young, James E. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History.”  Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, Issue No. 3 (Spring, 1998): 679. Web. Oct. 26, 2014.

“She named names” is a memorable line from the Seinfeld episode “The Race” where Elaine gets her boyfriend blacklisted by a Chinese delivery restaurant; a comedic scene that reinterprets the often damaging and volatile political act of disclosure. The naming of individuals whether they are spies or criminals is a tactic used by governments to create a curated frame of reference for the public perception – the United States government, for example, recently named five Chinese army officers that it charged with cyber espionage. However, there has been a strong focus on naming the Other and providing a counter frame for conventional public discourse whether it be serial killers, war or epidemics.

As Ben L. Martin notes, “names can be more than tags; they can convey powerful imagery.” For example, Maggie De Vries’ book Missing Sarah as well as Wally Oppal’s Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry both provide a counter-narrative to the Robert Pickton story and intentionally highlight the names of the victims. Similarly, there have been resolute efforts to name those killed in Gaza during the 2014 Gaza-Israel conflict by featuring a large banner hung on the famous Pigeon Rock in Beirut, Lebanon.

At the same time, the act of naming can reveal much of our biases. A recent post by Mic has pointed out how the global media is unjustly reporting the Ebola outbreak: infected individuals outside of Africa are often named in news articles and headlines while victims in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia are reduced to numbers. A clear instance of this is the coverage of a case where an infected Spanish woman is named in the headlines whereas African patients remain a statistic. This perpetuates racialized discourse and reinforces the Euro-American-centric narrative. The critical nature with which naming has taken ground in recent years is a positive step towards providing a counter narrative to unsettle the complacency of conventional discourse.