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        Comics significantly helped develop my interest in reading. As a child (and even now, as a young adult), I adored Archie comics, Asterix and Obelix, and the Adventures of Tintin. However, it took me way too long to get into my first “serious” comic or graphic novel. Only now, in my 4th year of university have I finally gotten around to reading Art Spiegelman’s terrific Maus series, thanks to the reading list of ENGL 474 here at UBC.  One of the biggest misconceptions I had before even reading the book is that this would be a retelling of holocaust history, told through the unique perspective of the comic form. In actuality, the Maus comics are a lot more than mere historical re-enactment. One of the most fascinating themes I found was the idea that traumatic experiences are not necessarily conducive to character building. Rather, these are experiences that linger and haunt a family, passing down the generations one way or another.

         If you want to get a better sense of Art Spiegelman’s influences and intentions for his Maus series, watch this enlightening interview conducted by Phillip Adams. First off, what we learn from the interview is the tremendous influence that MAD magazine had on Art. He mentions that MAD magazine served as a sort of “window” into the worlds of art, literature, and music, albeit, an extremely subverted version of these worlds. It is this same sort of “subversion” that carries onto Maus. In the interview, Art claims that he is resistant to the use of Maus as a crash course into Holocaust history or as he terms it “Auschwitz 101”. Art’s primary intention with Maus is to tell a story of a son trying to understand his father’s life.  In doing so, he does not seek to white wash his father’s own flaws. There are several moments where Art and his father Vladek, have heated arguments, and both characters (author and subject) can come across as unsavory.

One scene in particular that gets brought up in the interview, is located in Maus II, at the end of Chapter 3. Here, Vladek is joined with Art and his girlfriend Francoise on a trip to the grocery store. On the way back, Francoise decides to pick up a black hitchhiker, much to the disagreement of Vladek. After the hitchhiker is dropped to his destination, Vladek vents his racist beliefs about black people or “shvartsers”  (a derogatory Yiddish word) as he calls them (Spiegelman 98-99). Francoise confronts Vladek in this scene, and calls him out for spewing the same sort of racism as the Nazis delved out to the Jews (Spiegelman 99-100). The chapter ends with Vladek saying “You see, kids…we’re home sweet home already…Now we can make a very happy lunch from all my new groceries. Only thank god that your shvartser didn’t take them” (Spiegelman 100).

In James Young’s essay on Maus, he explains that “indeed, it may be Artie’s unreliability as a son that makes his own narrative so reliable” (676). Young essentially says that the moments where Art exposes character flaws in himself, betraying details that his father would have preferred to be private enable the narrative to be more honest. Although I found this a problematic concept at first, that is a son betraying the trust of his father for the sake of being a reliable narrator, Spiegelman has explained the inclusion of that particularly troublesome scene with his father. In the same interview linked above, Art Spiegelman frames the inclusion of that scene regarding his father’s “casual racism”: “There’s a tendency to think of holocaust survivors as martyrs…and one expects one to be made better by suffering. Suffering makes you hurt. That’s all you can say for it. “This quote poignantly shows Art’s frustration with the mainstream media’s depiction of Holocaust survivors as being saintly and that perhaps it would be better if everyone understood that mental trauma does not lead to a strengthening of character, it can be just as debilitating to one’s personality as a physical disease.

                Works Cited

Spiegelman, Art. Interview by Phillip Adams. Late Night Live. Radio National. ABC, Sydney: 7 Oct. 2013. Television.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: and here my troubles began. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. Print.

Young, James E.. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and the Afterimages of History.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 666-699. Print.

 

Curating Trauma

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Upon entering the “Speaking to Memory” exhibit located in UBC’s Museum of Anthropology (MOA), I was greeted by the infamous Duncan Campbell quote regarding the “Indian problem” with an image of the dilapidated St.Michael’s residential school building as its backdrop. Right away, I was hit with mixed emotions. On one hand I admired the frankness in presenting the horrible institutionalized racism of the period, an era when the assimilation of First Nation peoples in this country was thought to be the morally right thing to do. However, I couldn’t help but feel a sort of presumptuous view that this sort of racist attitude is as dilapidated as the St. Michael’s building. I suppose these mixed emotions I felt were emblematic of the challenges in any attempt at creating a museum exhibition of a traumatic human experience.

The written testimonials that filled one of the main walls in MOA’s exhibition are probably the most powerful in terms of emotional impact. The quotes are taken from interviews with First Nations people who unfortunately had to undergo the residential school process. Many of them spoke of considerable corporal punishment, suppression of the indigenous language, and even sexual assault. Oddly enough however, the museum did include a few “positive” testimonials to balance it out. I suppose there’s a good and bad to everything and this was an attempt to show that the residential schools weren’t all that bad for every indigenous person…yet it still felt random amidst the vast majority of negative experiences plastered on the wall. One also wonders if those who said they had positive experiences might have been uncomfortable with sharing any trauma.

I then proceeded to examine the apologies from members of various churches in Canada as well as the Prime Minister. The Anglican Church was possibly the least heart-felt apology in my opinion. Possibly because I interpreted the apology as essentially saying ‘we did wrong, but God ultimately forgives…so should you!’ I found that there was still a hint of arrogance in the Anglican Church’s apology that disregards the extent to which they tried to de-legitimize the spirituality of Indigenous cultures. However, the Presbyterian Church’s apology was much more accepting of their actions and explicitly mentioned that they were perpetuating wrongly held ideals of colonization.  Arguably, the most important apology on display was by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper’s apology was well-articulated and had the right words, but the fact that First Nations groups in Canada have become more vocal in voicing their discontent with the Federal Government in these past few years (“Idle No More particularly gained strength in the last couple of years”) it is hard to believe his words as much more than political rhetoric.

In the end, I do believe that the “Speaking to Memory” exhibition in the Museum of Anthropology is a valuable educational tool. Although I do not believe that ‘curating’ the trauma of residential school victims adds any finality to their healing process, at the very least, it is a small step towards enlightening all Canadians to the darker side of our nation’s history.

Personal Narratives Are All The Rage These Days

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I decided to pursue more information about this whole “memoir-boom” that Dr.McNeil claimed has been happening in recent years. In doing so, I came across a very informative and thought-provoking podcast from the New Yorker, featuring an essayist, memoirist, and critic named Daniel Mendelsohn, which can be found here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/01/25/100125on_audio_mendelsohn.

One of the most fascinating bits of information that I absorbed from this podcast is that St.Augustine’s Confessions could be considered the first legitimate memoir or autobiography ever written and one that has shaped all future memoirs henceforth. Mendelsohn notes that St.Augustine’s auto-biography is the first time that an interior journey is made public, which is something that everyone can relate to as opposed to the memoirs that preceded Confessions, detailing the lives of great military/political leaders of the Greek and Roman eras. This assertion by Mendelsohn seems to conform to our class discussion of “Traditional vs Contemporary auto-biography”.  One could argue that St.Augustine was a remarkable or exemplary individual, but the whole idea of Confessions was to display his sins and focus on his path to redemption. Mendelsohn asserts that this paved the way for the modern memoirs regarding a recovery from addiction since the same sort of psychological release is enabled when one details their sins or the perils of an addiction. Thus, even non-believers have in some form or another, have followed the Augustinian tradition of spilling “dirty secrets”, ones that can be relatable to everyone and humble even the most celebrated people in society. However, Mendelsohn also argues that now more than ever, people are getting overwhelmed by personal narratives due to their abundance in reality tv and the internet; he claims that this particularly makes “phoney” memoirs that happen to get published through traditional print media much more scandalous than ever before. The name James Frey kept coming up in the podcast, so I looked him up as well. As it turns out, he wrote a book called A Million Little Pieces that was intended to be a novel about his struggles with drugs and alcohol, but transformed into a non-fiction memoir when the publisher pressured him into satisfying the high-demand for “hard-luck memoirs” (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/five-fake-memoirs-that-fooled-the-literary-world-77092955/). As a result of scandals such as James Frey’s pseudo-memoir, Mendelsohn proclaims that memoir has sort of become a dirty word with the masses associating it with “self-indulgence” and “self exposure in return for…success, money, literary fame” (The Memoir Boom, New Yorker podcast).

Regardless of memoir scandals, our analysis of Digital Lives in our last two classes has made it quite clear that the appetite for producing and consuming autobiographies and memoirs has increased along with the rise of social media and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, PostSecret, and Six Word Memoir. These online communities are absolutely huge, with over a billion Facebook users and over 500 million Twitter users.  In the very first class of English 474, I asked a question along the lines of ‘What is the societal impact of having constant production/consumption of personal narrative due to social media?’ I will end this blog by recommending that everybody watch a documentary called Status Anxiety hosted by a philosopher named Alain de Buton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_acgqf27CIU). Although the documentary is generally focusing on the social anxieties faced by capitalist democracies compared to monarchical societies of centuries past, many of the claims that are made in the documentary can be related to an excessive consumption of Facebook, and the obsession of having a profile that shows the best representation of ourselves. The damage to self-esteem that can be induced by constant facebook exposure has been studied by psychologists more recently, and I am planning on reading this fascinating study to better understand its effects (http://esource.dbs.ie/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10788/334/ba_smith-duff_c_2012.pdf?sequence=1). In the end, the desire to document our lives, whether it’s the good times or the bad times, seems to feed a fundamental human desire of validating our existence. I guess this means we just got to deal with a constant cycle of “Memoir-Booms” as a result…whether we like it or not.