quasigraphy

I feel I should qualify the following by stating I’ve not slept for twenty hours; this post represents an effort to overcome my circadian rhythm and intense desire to pass out in Irving K. Barber (where I work), which would be extremely unfortunate. My fatigue and sequential curmudgeonism will most likely be reflected in my tone.

I’m going to start with the confessionalism present in both Maus and PostSecret – more obvious in the latter. I’m avoiding Six Word Memoir because the site is weighted heavily toward community curation; the posts aren’t curated by one man in Maryland (constructing a narrative that arguably reflects Frank Warren more than it does the submitter). My first concern while reading PostSecret was that this form of anonymous confessionalism might not have substantive benefit; my impression was that sharing a secret with confidants that one doesn’t know commodifies the secret, turning a revelatory act of trust into a meaningless communication to be packaged and sold. I’ve looked into the sociological and psychological functions of secrecy and confession; according to Anita Kelly’s 1999 review of the field in Current Directions in Psychological Science, there are statistically significant correlations between revelatory acts and health. Kelly further stated to the Observer (run by the Association for Psychological Science) that “there is evidence that by writing about held-back information someone will get health benefits. Someone keeping a secret would miss out on those benefits.” (link) This indicates that PostSecret may very well provide quantifiable benefit to its confessors, and I am certainly not opposed to the site generally; I will forever defend Warren’s right to post secrets.

I do feel that Warren is profiting from a narrative feedback loop that he directly shapes (full disclosure: I don’t much like Warren, based on his interviews, and this paragraph will be subjective and unfair). A diary or confidant would likely provide many of the same advantages, and I don’t think secrecy is necessarily undesirable or inherently unhealthy either; of course, I do not intend to imply that the site is redundant or should be taken down. I simply don’t like it as a piece of art; many of the posts seem maudlin, all posts are archived – removing the temporal impermanence crucial to Snapchat and others – and while I have no argument against the fellow publishing five books of secrets, I do think his curation instills a self-perpetuating aesthetic of complaint that I don’t particularly like. I would certainly like to have thought of monetizing crowdsourced misery first.

For me, the revelatory mechanism in Maus is much more powerful. The narrative documents Vladek’s ‘confession’ as a means of building a relationship; Vladek and his son learn more about each other and their honest communication of memory is the genesis of the work. Anja is reconstructed through this process, as noted by Marianne Hirsch in her 1997 Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory.  Vladek’s confessions are marked by a postmodern self-awareness; this “self-conscious voice” (667) was noted by James Young in “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past[…]” and the function of such is remarked upon in Saul Friedlander’s Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe: “commentary should disrupt the facile linear progression of the narration, introduce altervnative interpretations, question any parital conclusion, withstand the need for closure.” (132) This is a quality I find lacking in Postsecret; in my reading of Spiegelman, the surreal (and inconsistent) animal metaphor on a non-fictional narrative indicates a self-aware mediation, a postmodern coefficient for the intensity of the real Holocaust.

Works Cited

Friedlander, Saul. Memory, history, and the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Print.

Hirsch, Marianne. Family frames: photography, narrative, and postmemory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print.

Jaffe, Eric. “The Science Behind Secrets.” Association for Psychological Science RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2014. <http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2006/july-06/the-science-behind-secrets.html>.

Kelly, Anita E.. “Revealing Personal Secrets.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 8.4 (1999): 105-109. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: a survivor’s tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986-1991. Print.

Warren, Frank. “PostSecret.” PostSecret. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2014. <http://postsecret.com/>.

Young, James E.. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and the Afterimages of History.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 666. Print.