On collective trauma, address, and Maus

I’m Tired from Talking, Richieu

Art Spiegelman

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale

My Father Bleeds History; And Here My Troubles Began

Pantheon Books, 1986 and 1991

First serialized in Raw, 1980–1991

I knew Auschwitz the way a syllabus can deliver a place: a name, a date, a wound that belonged to other people and seemed, by the time it reached me, already closed. Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful had taught me to distrust that distance. In the film the camp becomes real because one father turns it into a game for one child, and the cost is visible in what he does, hour by hour. I trusted that scale. A monument would have left me where I already was. One altered life did not. I opened Maus expecting the same lesson, and for a while the book gave it to me. Then the father came home, and the lesson did not end.

Jeffrey Alexander’s account of cultural trauma let me see what the opening pages are doing. An event becomes a cultural trauma, he argues, when members of a collectivity come to feel that a horrendous injury has marked the group’s memory and changed its identity in a way that cannot be revoked, and when that feeling is carried by a story told to a wider audience. Maus begins under a sentence that sorts a people out of the human race, and then it draws the sorting as species: Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs. Mary Jane Collier distinguishes the identity we claim for ourselves from the identity other people assign. The sentence at the front of the book is assignment. The masks are what assignment looks like once a culture has agreed to see it. Violence needs that simplification. So does the “we” that survivors and their children still have to say.

The masks would harden into the stereotype they depict if the pages stayed at the outline. Inside the category “mouse” there is a vain young salesman, a depressed mother, a communist kapo who hates a prisoner for having owned a factory, women hanged near a workshop for smuggling ammunition, neighbors who hide someone and neighbors who threaten to call the Gestapo. Collective trauma assigns one fate to a people. It does not produce one kind of person. Stuart Hall described cultural identity in two movements, and the book lives between them. One movement is inheritance: a people drawn back together through a common mark and a common memory. The other is difference, the life that will not sit inside the mark. Staying with those differences is what keeps mourning from repeating, in a gentler voice, the category the perpetrators used.

This is why the single life is not a smaller history. I had learned from Life Is Beautiful to prefer the person to the panorama. Maus keeps the person, and it makes the panorama audible as character. Vladek’s habits of counting, mistrust, and care as control are easy to file under personality. They are also the group wound, still operating in a kitchen in Rego Park. Without the collectivity, the habits look merely private. Without Vladek, the collectivity remains a monument I already knew how to walk past. The impression that stays is the change in one man. The change goes deep because a people was revised in him.

The sharpest intercultural scene is the household, and it begins long before anyone names a theory. Edward T. Hall’s high-context communication describes a message in which most of the meaning is already inside the person, and very little of it is coded in the words. Who could be trusted in the ghetto, what a loaf of bread meant, why a locked door is a form of love: that knowledge lives in the father and does not cross. Art’s English is fluent and still too thin for the experience. Vladek’s English is broken and thick with it. Howard Giles would call the son’s fluency convergence, a shift toward the tongue of a country that was not there, and the father’s accent divergence, the past refusing to be translated out of the room. Their conflict is easy to mistake for an ordinary quarrel between parent and child. It is also a failure of shared meaning.

Françoise makes the negotiation of identity even clearer. Art cannot decide what animal she should be. A mouse is the inheritance, too automatic. A rabbit is too gentle for the history he wants the mask to carry. A frog is what his father would assign. She has converted. French history, the Dreyfus Affair, collaboration, and an American Jewish family are all in the conversation, and none of them tells him how to draw her. The identity she claims and the identity other people assign occupy the same few panels, and neither wins. The scene is funny. It is also a compact model of intercultural communication: two people trying to name each other across histories that do not match, while a third history, the father’s, waits on the phone.

Collective trauma travels by stories, and it travels just as powerfully by the stories that are stopped. Anja wrote notebooks. They might have given the group’s memory a second voice, a woman’s voice, from inside the same events. Vladek burns them. The son’s fury is personal, and it is also a fact about whose pain is allowed to enter the record. Marianne Hirsch calls the second generation’s relation to such a past postmemory: a connection mediated not by recall but by the stories, images, and behaviors among which the child grew up, so deeply received that they can feel like memories of one’s own. The burned notebooks make that mediation necessary, and they make it guilty. After Anja’s suicide the silence has no note attached. The event itself is not repeated. Fear, anger, unfinished grief, and the struggle over who may speak are handed down in ordinary rooms. Silence, here, is communication.

Art’s own guilt belongs to that inheritance. He was not in the camp, so his sorrow feels illegitimate to him, and the illegitimacy is part of what he received. He wants to understand a reality worse than his darkest dreams, and he knows that comics will leave things out and bend what remains. He says reality is too complex for comics, that so much has to be left out or distorted, and Françoise tells him to keep it honest. Perspective-taking can bring him to the gate. It cannot put him inside his parents’ hours. The honest line in the book admits the limit and then keeps drawing. Later the dates occupy one page: his father’s death, his mother’s suicide, a child on the way, the success of the first volume, and a week in May 1944 when more than a hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were gassed. “A long time ago” is a feeling available to people the story did not revise. For this family the group’s past is still a present tense.

There is a further problem of address, and the book is unusually honest about it. Once Maus is published, the trauma is translated for readers who do not belong to the group. Reporters arrive. Offers arrive. The son sits on a pile of corpses and is told they are ready to shoot. Alexander’s claim has to reach an audience if the injury is to be recognized as collective rather than private, and Spiegelman draws the shame of being that carrier. Collective memory, when it leaves the community, becomes representation, interview, even a product. He does not pretend the translation is pure. He shows why it is still owed. Intercultural understanding has this cost, and the book refuses to hide it behind piety.

The last pages hold the person and the group in one slip of the tongue. Vladek finds Anja and insists on the sentence he wants: they lived happy, happy ever after. Svetlana Boym’s restorative nostalgia wants the lost home repaired and the story closed. For one panel the book almost lets him have it. Then he is tired of the tape recorder, and he calls his living son by the name of the child who was murdered. “I’m tired from talking, Richieu.” Reflective nostalgia stays with the longing and will not complete the return. Collective loss has a personal address. Postmemory speaks by accident. Love and substitution share a sentence. A reader from another time and another culture can hear it, and can hear the distance that remains. This name was never ours. The man who confuses the names has been shaped by a history our sympathy will not undo.

A course in intercultural communication is trained to hear a kind of good news in survival: strain endured, habits revised, a person able to live in more than one world. Young Yun Kim describes adaptation as a movement through stress toward growth. Vladek’s resourcefulness can be told in that key. He sells what nobody wants, he crosses borders, he reaches Rego Park. What the growth story cannot receive is the form the resourcefulness takes at home, or the name he uses when he is tired. I can use Alexander to see why a comic is one of the forms in which a collectivity’s wound is claimed. I can use Hall, Collier, and Giles to see a household in which meaning fails to cross. What I cannot do is call the last slip a bridge, or call the survivor’s competence a recovered life. I came to Maus believing, as Life Is Beautiful had taught me to believe, that one changed person teaches history more deeply than a grand narrative. I still believe it. The grand history stays true, and it stays far. One voice brings it near. The pages after that nearness are what the course has to learn how to hear: a people defined from the outside, a family negotiating across generations and more than one culture, a silence where a mother’s account should be, and a son trying to carry a group wound into a language the group did not live in.

Works cited

  1. Alexander, Jeffrey C. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, University of California Press, 2004, pp. 1–30.
  2. Benigni, Roberto, director. Life Is Beautiful. Melampo Cinematografica, 1997.
  3. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001.
  4. Collier, Mary Jane, and Milt Thomas. “Cultural Identity: An Interpretive Perspective.” Theories in Intercultural Communication, edited by Young Yun Kim and William B. Gudykunst, Sage, 1988, pp. 99–120.
  5. Giles, Howard, Nikolas Coupland, and Justine Coupland. “Accommodation Theory: Communication, Context, and Consequence.” Contexts of Accommodation: Developments in Applied Sociolinguistics, edited by Howard Giles, Justine Coupland, and Nikolas Coupland, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 1–68.
  6. Hall, Edward T. Beyond Culture. Anchor Books, 1976.
  7. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence & Wishart, 1990, pp. 222–37.
  8. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. 1, 2008, pp. 103–28.
  9. Kim, Young Yun. Becoming Intercultural: An Integrative Theory of Communication and Cross-Cultural Adaptation. Sage, 2001.
  10. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. 2 vols., Pantheon Books, 1986–1991.

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