“The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered – not from yesterday but from a long time ago.” W.G Sebald, interview in The Guardian December 20^th, 2001.

I was very interested in Saul Friedlander’s concepts as described in Young’s article “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past,” especially the concept of collective and deep memory, deep memory being defined as “that which remains essentially inarticulable and unrepresentable, that which continues to exist as unresolved trauma just beyond the reach of meaning” (Young, 667). In order to adequately express an event that combines collective and deep memory Young argues that Friedlander’s hope is for a “uncanny history” that “makes event coherent, even as it gestures toward the incoherence at the heart of the victim’s memory” (668).

Reading Maus – this unconventional Holocaust narrative – made me think of other unconventional tellings of the events surrounding the Holocaust. The one that comes most vividly to mind for me is German author W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, a unique, meditative, and deeply moving (one of the more flooring books I have ever read) work that is less about a historical narrative of the Holocaust as an event, and more about the act of remembrance and the act of retelling. The story follows an unnamed narrator – a historian – who recounts his meetings with a man named Austerlitz, who tells the narrator the story of him discovering the story of his Jewish origins, and of his family; which includes him being sent as a young child by his parents to Wales before the war (you can look into the history of the Kindertransport here which sent over 10,000 children to the UK), and the discovery of his family’s death in concentration camps. Laud’s concept of witnessing is everywhere in this book. We hear of Austerlitz’s obsessive research into his family origins, and interviews with people his parents might have known, including his own nanny, all told by the unnamed narrator (who also speaks of his own act of transcribing what he has heard from Austerlitz). Here we are witness to the witness to the witness. At every step of re-discovering his history, Austerlitz is overwhelmed with deep memories that resurface, including remembering long-lost Czech phrases and visiulazing images of his mother’s face. It is interesting to think of deep memory this way, of something that was hidden so deep in trauma (the trauma not of the camp survivor but of complete displacement) that it has been completely forgotten it. For Austerlitz the act of witnessing (and retelling them to our narrator) the stories of his own life, and that of his relatives, allows him to discover himself on a profoundly personal psychological level.

Sebald also uses similar techniques than Spiegelman, specifically regarding the visualizing of “received history” (669). Sebald incorporates pictures in all his novels; in Austerlitz the narrator uses historical pictures and drawings to illustrate Austerlitz’s research, which highlights the “narrative hybridity” of the text (ibid).

Another way Sebald deals with trauma and deep memory, and what I personally find the most fascinating about his work, is his oblique way of talking about the Holocaust. Mark O’Connell provides excellent examples of this technique in this article. Sebald himself often spoke of his interest in using analogy to describe what he called un-describable events like the Holocaust, and what he terms “the traces of destruction [that reach] far back into the past” (I see similarities to Laub’s theory of trauma here). Throughout the book Austerlitz tells our narrator of episodes in his life that are profound analogies for the Holocaust – but which he is not even aware of himself since we as readers are the only one’s with the whole picture. This makes me wonder if this oblique analogical technique is an effective way of witnessing and dealing with deep memory.

I was really struck by the discussions of media portrayals of missing and murdered women in the Jiwany and Young article. They highlight many of the ways the media fails to represent these women as diverse, three-dimensional members of society. The authors refer to the media’s focus on key frames in describing these women (aboriginal, sex worker, drug addicted), reducing complex individuals – with complex histories and motivations for their actions – to specific terms that pigeonhole. But more nefarious still, these reductions are often complicit with ignoring and reproducing the deep-seated structural and social causes that often enable these kinds of crimes by reverted to moralizing and “othering.” As they say: “racialized status, such as Aboriginality, interlocks with prostitution to position these women in the lower echelon of the moral order” (Jiwany and Young, 902).

This made me think of the social media movement #iftheygunnedmedown, which started as a reaction to the media portrayal of Michael Brown after he was murdered by Ferguson police. It was a response to the US media’s overwhelming use of a picture of Brown in a tank top flashing a peace sign, which allowed mainstream and conservative media to portray him as a “thug” “bad seed” and generally a kid with a violent temperament. What this failed to address was the fact that he had graduated high school and expecting to start college that year. Where were those pictures? This is exactly like what the portrayal of Trayvon Martin was. The pictures circulated were always the same two: the famous picture of him with his hoodie, and one where he is giving the finger to a webcam. Combining innocuous photos with a constant dialogue of him being a “bully,” or having tattoos, or having shoplifted, and the discourse develops an undercurrent of Trayvon in some way “asking for it.” If you want a good example of this racist discussion (and lose a bit more of your faith in humanity) you can read an article here called “Trayvon Martin was apparently a 17 year old undisciplined punk thug, drug dealing, thief and wannabe gangsta.” Like the Jiwany and Young quote cited above, these uneven portrayals paint these racialized victims as part of “the lower echelon of the moral order” (902), thereby justifying the actions done against them as being partly their fault.

I just want to conclude with a link to an interview with director Ryan Coogler (the interview starts at 2:35), talking about his film Fruitvale Station (which is on Netflix if anyone is interested it is a fantastic film), which was based on the police murder of Oscar Grant, a 22-year old black man who was handcuffed and shot on New Year’s Eve at a subway station in Oakland. The film follows Oscar’s last day, his relationships to his family, his struggles, his hopes. Coogler says he wanted to offer a fuller portrayal of this individual, to move away from the sensationalization of media portrayals. He says in the interview: “His character was pushed and pulled in all different directions. Some people wanted to make him a saint, someone that never did anything wrong. Others demonized him and highlighted all the mistakes he had made, as if that was justification of what happened to him. That he was a thug, a felon, not a human being.” Both portrayals, in their different ways, are reductive and problematic.

Works Cited:

Jiwani, Yasmin & Mary Lynn Young. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2006): 895-217.