For this week in English 474, we have been reading Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels, Maus and Maus II, which depict the story of the Holocaust as told by Art’s father, Vladek and span the years 1930’s (pre-Holocaust) until 1945, when the Holocaust ends.The difference lies mainly in that Maus breaks a fourth wall.

Compared to other Holocaust stories I have read, such as Weisel’s Night and Frank’s Diary of Anne Frank, this book I found quite different. It is a story both of Vladek and also of Art’s story of writing that story. As a reader, my attention was split between reading about Vladek and the Holocaust, and also paying attention to the nuances of Art’s process of getting the book done and his own struggles and guilt with that.

I believe that while Art is the witness or rather, the person who recognizes Vladek’s trauma, we are called to be the witnesses of Art’s own struggle with transcribing that trauma. We, by reading Maus, are witnesses to Art’s guilt at betraying his father (who didn’t want certain parts of the story shared). We are witnesses to his obsessive research to get the historical detail right, which he talks about an interview entitled:The Holocaust Through the Eyes of the Maus with Marcia Alvar where he was able to find drawings by survivors, and his numerous trips to Auschwitz and Poland and with his responsibility to himself as well, as an artist and as a son.

In reading Maus, Young and watching his interviews, I realized that he has undergone a lot of mental struggle to get this work published, and in his own right, these mental struggles can be considered forms of trauma as well that we must recognize as readers. 

Works Cited:

“The Holocaust Through the Eyes of a Maus.” Interview by Marcia Alvar. Youtube. Washington, 1991. Television. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLVG3GNvHkU

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus Ii: A Survivor’s Tale : and Here My Troubles Began. New York: PantheonBooks, 1991. Print.

Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. London: Routledge, 1992. Web. 23 October 2014.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week, we were tasked to write a paratextual analysis about a life narrative of our choosing. I chose Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, which is a memoir based on a semi-autobiographical novel Jeanette Winterson had written prior to Why Be Happy.

In writing that analysis, I engaged with Whitlock’s book, Soft Weapons and in it she mentions something that really got my mind working over the week: “Young (1997) is inclined to downplay the usefulness of symmetry—putting oneself in the place of others—in favor of working toward moral respect through asymmetrical relations, which recognize differences of history, social position, and experience that cannot be transcended.”

Before having read this argument, I always tried to understand an autobiography by finding myself in the work. I wanted to understand what place the author was coming from and the only way I knew how to do that was to find similarities between the character and I. Did she go through something I had gone through? Was her social situation one I am currently in? I tried to understand her through the lens of my own experiences. In other words, I relied on symmetrical patterns to identify with the author and her story better.

Young’s argument suggests an entirely different perspective in that it asks the readers not to focus on the similarities but to focus rather on the differences. It talks about accepting that the author and the reader (us) come from different places—historically, socially, and experientially, and allowing that acceptance to be the source of understanding. If we learn to acknowledge those differences, we are then allowing their truths to simply be, without our own truths superimposed onto theirs. In doing this, we start actually respecting the authors’s stories.

This argument sets us up to think more critically about the kinds of readers we could be. Reading is not a passive thing; it is an active engagement with the words written on the page. We as readers have the agency to decide how to understand a life narrative.   How will we choose to interpret and understand? What kind of readers are we going to be?

Works Cited: Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006. Chicago Scholarship Online. Web. 7 Oct 2014.