Memory, like truth, is too often perceived in society as fixed, static, and unchanging. It is comforting or reassuring to consider memory as such, to think that our memory is fool-proof and accurately captures our experiences exactly as they happen. This perception is carried over to expectations in the field of autobiography and memoir, perhaps explaining the preoccupation with authenticity and factual truth in the genre. While autobiography is often confronted with expectations of being “true” or “accurate”, the expanding parameters of the genre have largely challenged these expectations, revealing how memory is highly flexible and contextual in time and circumstance.

In what ways do autobiographical works challenge these traditional perceptions of memory? How does the act of memory function in autobiographical texts?

Two very different autobiographical texts, Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus and Dany Laferriere’s memoir The World is Moving Around Me, explore memory in surprisingly similar ways. While they differ vastly  in both content and form, these texts both reveal how memory is highly interested, constructed, fluid, and flexible. In considering a key passage from each text, I will demonstrate the way in which memory functions in these ways, revealing how autobiography is an effective genre in exposing the social construction of memory.

For Spiegelman, the fluid and constructed nature of memory is exposed when Vladek is explaining and visualizing to Art how war prisoners in Auschwitz were evaluated to determine their capacity to work in the camp or be sent to die. This powerful scene features four frames, three of which Vladek is re-enacting the scene with his Art and the last frame shifting to the image of Vladek’s frail, naked figure in Auschwitz being examined not by his son, but a Nazi guard. In this scene, the memory is reconstructed not only by Vladek’s experience that he recounts, but also by Art in producing the story in comic form. The way in which Spiegelman connects these two distinct recollections of memory brilliantly reveals how memory is not static, but fluid even intergenerationally. Erin McGlothlin suggests that this passage illustrates the way in which “the past and the present are intimately interconnected and difficult to separate from one another”, resulting in a sort of “temporal blurring” (179-80). By blurring the memory that Vladek has of the event and Art’s re-membering of Vladek’s memory (post-memory), the present and past become integrated, revealing how the construction of memory is highly fluid and ambiguous.

The “temporal blurring” that McGlothlin identifies in Maus is also present in Laferriere’s memoir on the earthquake in Haiti. This is particularly evident in the passage “Morning Conversation”, in which Laferriere overhears a grandmother and grandson singing and laughing as they all sleep on a tennis court following the earthquake. As Lafarriere reflects on the ability of the grandmother to “spare her grandson the horror of the day” that is the earthquake, he compares this to his own experiences with his grandmother (68). He suggests, “my grandmother tore me from the claws of the dictator by teaching me something other than hatred and vengeance” (68). Just as Art Spiegelman blurs his own post-memory with his father’s memory, Laferriere’s perception of the grandmother and grandchild’s interaction is contextualized in his own memories and past experiences. As a result, his past and present memories are blurred and connected in a meaningful way, revealing how memory making is never fixed or objective.

Memory and the act of remembering play a key role in the production of memoirs, as evident in both Spiegelman and Laferriere’s works. As autobiography is intrinsically linked to memory, it is particularly important to consider the way in which memory functions in these texts not as objective truths, but as social constructions that evolve in both time and circumstance.

Works Cited

Laferriere, Dany. The World Is Moving Around Me. Vancouver: Aresenal Pulp, 2013. Print.

Mcglothlin, Erin Heather. “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Narrative: 177-98. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale : And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Print.