Ethical Diversions

The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman

Katalin Orban

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135466398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First Published in 2005. This study focuses on a group of related texts which have struggled to rescue, rather than eliminate, the paradox of answering the original question: Why ethics rather than nothing?

Chapter One

“Mauschwitz”: Monsters, Memory, and Testimony

Between Monsters and Monuments

In thinking about the unreadable monstrosity of the incalculable, I will begin with a book of monsters, Art Spiegelman’s Maus.¹ I am not only referring to the “monstrous” human-animal characters of this book (its notorious mice-who-are-not-mice), but to all the ways the work insists on speaking irreconcilable, heterogeneous languages, which in their confused and unfused formlessness evoke a difference that is not captured in simple contradictions. It is this impossibility of presentation that presents itself as the formless or even malformed²: the monstrous (monstruosus) that passes “beyond the possible,… is without status, without law, without a horizon of reappropriation, programmation, institutional legitimation” and manages to indicate (monstrare) some excess given up to readability.³ This is akin to what Lyotard defines as a differend [différend] between two idioms, “wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be” and “suffers the wrong” of not being able to signify in the idiom of the litigation—a wrong that cannot be stated, this situation itself being the wrong.⁴

Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a book that revels in this conjunction of the otherness and portentousness of the monstrum, in the deformation that invites the obsessive reading of an unreadable shape and ceaselessly refers the captivated gaze away from itself. As a monstrous response to the Holocaust, Maus works “to reveal… what every representation misses, what is forgotten there: this ‘presence,’ whatever name it is given by one author or another, which persists not so much at the limits but rather at the heart of representation; this unnameable in the secret of names, a forgotten that is not the result of the forgetting of a reality—nothing having been stored in memory—and which one can only remember as forgotten ‘before’ memory and forgetting, and by repeating it.”⁵ In order not to become a “forgetting of a reality,” no matter how elaborate, Maus bears witness to the fact that its witness has to miss the Holocaust in some sense, and in doing so, it bears witness to a larger writing problem: to inadequation in responses to the Holocaust. Thus, the recurring question of the monstrous representational heterogeneity of this work is how to inscribe and remember the Holocaust without forgetting that such a memorial consolidation and inscription is itself a prerequisite—or more radically, a mode—of amnesic effacement. Maus presents de-formations of the body (the human-animal bodies familiar from mediaeval representations of monstrosity), of language (broken), of signification (in the interpenetration of hand-drawn words and pictorial signs), and of narrative.

But what does this elaborately monstrous representational language have to do with an ethics of alterity? The monstrosity of Maus not only exploits and exceeds the heterogeneity that is a given in comics, but is also inextricably entangled with time and the other: an ethicized memory and testimony. In Spiegelman’s comic book, most narrowly defined as the story of a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp, it is the problem of memory around which the triple linkage of temporality, ethics and alterity emerges. The question of responsibility is locked in with the question of memory: the book presents memory as first and foremost a responsibility, while responsibility figures primarily as related to memory, acts of remembrance, and the form and content of mnemonic representations.

Far from suggesting a simple and definitive commitment to memory, however, the responsibility that emerges through the problem of memory is troubled and paradoxical, for Maus is also the story of the survivor’s son, one Art Spiegelman, who conducts a series of interviews with his father in pursuit of the father’s and the absent mother’s memory. Even though the father’s story originates the sons in a chronological sense, the text links the two in a structure that extends the interview into a more general dialogic narrative design. In this lengthy testimonial interview, where memory is inextricably intertwined with dialogue, so is responsibility with response, and the emphasis on this response as responsibility begins to complicate, if not undermine, the work of memory as a solitary project. However pressing responsibility is—and responsibility seems at first glance to equal the work of memory here—the same work poses the threat of irresponsibility as well. “Memory stabilizes subjects and constitutes the present. It is the name we give to the faculty that sustains continuity in collective and in individual experience,” claims Richard Terdiman in Present Past, a study of the nineteenth century “memory crisis.” While this may be necessary for “the world [to remain] minimally coherent,” there is no guarantee that this stabilizing project will stop at minimal coherence.⁶ Once the ethical is conceived as fundamentally threatened by any presumption of normative universality, memory too seems to pose its own potential threat to the ethics of memory. This is the case insofar as memory is implicated in building continuity and (at least provisional) totality. Levinas calls attention to this aspect of memory in the reflections of Otherwise than Being on skeptical discourse: “[T]he couple skepticism and refutation of skepticism has to make its appearance alongside of the reason in representation, knowing and deduction, served by logic and synchronizing the successive…. The periodic return of skepticism and of its refutation signify a temporality in which the instants refuse memory which recuperates and represents” (Otherwise 167). Like de Certeau, in his celebration of the small nomadic tactical maneuvers of the weak that are unregistered in a retrospective overview, Levinas insists on the significance of the instant, the momentary event which cannot be gathered into a continuous time, except at the price of losing its eventful, dramatic character. When Maus attempts to negotiate an ethics of memory with an ethics of responsibility to the other, it explores possibilities of refusing a “memory which recuperates”—or rather only recuperates. It experiments with a memory that retains no more and no less “referential security”⁷ than it needs in order to point to a traumatic object which is not fully known—a memory that attests to the breakdowns and interstices of its own recuperation. What Spiegelman’s book pushes towards is a responsibility for memory that responds to the other’s memory, memory’s other, memory as other. In this responsibility both the epistemology of testimony and the performance of witnessing matter, but in their dynamic relationship—supporting, disrupting, and exceeding each other—neither overrules the other. This ensures that recuperation cannot fill up the memorial project, nor can it empty it out, the latter of which is the danger of the idealized, a-historical “rupture” of Levinasian skepticism, when divested of its dynamism (its “periodic return”). Thus Maus stages the construction of memory’s monuments while resisting memory’s monumentalizing tendency, disclosing the problems of disclosure time and time again.

Memory and forgetting have long functioned as a pair of binary oppositions and have accordingly been invested with changing, but most often diametrically opposed, values. Maus, however, does not choose memory over forgetting; rather, it steadfastly favors response, relation, and the hazard of impurity in both memory and forgetting, without ascribing any essential, intrinsic good or evil to either. The humbling confusion of memorial (or amnesic) projects—the intermixing that enforces the “errors” that throw one off—is privileged over the success of memory or oblivion in a way that is characteristic of the most self-conscious Holocaust narratives. Accordingly, Maus is not a book of testimony in the conventional sense, but—in a paradoxical temporality—a book of response where response makes testimony possible and imperils its perfection. This follows logically from the books somewhat sacrilegious suspicion of its own testimonial project—its own impulse to self-consolidate and purify by exclusion and erasure.

Classified!—Enigmatic Afflictions and Synthesizing Pleasures

Maus is a scandalous work, appropriately enough for the scandal it takes on. Not only does this “Survivor’s Tale” scandalously dare to be a comic book, but it is also a comic book. In the sense that survival is archetypically non-tragic, and comedy tends to favor “structures favoring life”—to use Thomas Pynchon’s phrase in reverse—some might say that Maus, as a comedy of terrors, takes the (tragi-)comedy of survival too seriously. In the midst of all the sadness and incomprehension, it is quite possible to laugh at times while reading this book. I think that if one considers Maus as a whole work (instead of isolating its Holocaust core, a separation the narrative structure of the work does not allow in the first place), it is a mistake to say, as Sander L. Gilman does, that Spiegelman has “self-consciously stripped [the commix] of any comic, humorous, or witty content or intent.” After this inference of authorial intention, Gilman repeats this claim in two even starker versions: once as a pseudo-empirical statement of reader response (“It is clear, in spite of Des Press title [“Holocaust Laughter”], that no one ever actually laughed while reading Maus”) and a second time as a general law based on deductive reasoning (“Such works can generate no laughter”). What Gilman’s interdictum fails to register is that Maus—and the reference is each time to Maus and the “work”—cannot be simply equated with its representation of the Holocaust. Consequently, should it retain any “comic, humorous, or witty content or intent,” this does not automatically mean that the work is a comic representation of the Holocaust, and it is this representation that is “intended to evoke laughter.” This slippage brackets all the narrative and representational complexities of Maus—and most of the black humor and wit is related to the present family dynamic, relationships, and personalities, and to Art’s problems of representation, which are haunted by the Holocaust, but are different from it. Tellingly, Gilman initially attributes all such jokes to perpetrators laughing at the victims and singles out these jokes as the single genre that invites laughter in this context. (Exceptions to his claim are, in fact, very common, at least in a Central-European context.⁸) He attributes so much danger to this laughter that he consistently dismisses this black humor as “virtually foolish in [its] inadequacy,” laughter in response to this humor by other’s than the survivors as “inexplicable,” and ultimately includes all readers in a universal, and in this case prescriptive, “we”: “Why is it that, if humor does have a function in ameliorating the effects of the Shoah, we are so very uncomfortable imagining laughter in the context of the Shoah?”⁹ Coming from someone who clearly appreciates Maus as a work and prefacing a more nuanced analysis of the comic in recent films about the Holocaust, these strong words are a measure of the transgressive inappropriateness of Spiegelman’s work, which is increasingly difficult to register as the book rises higher and higher in the canon of Holocaust literature.

At first glance, it seems this transgression depends primarily on the choice of Auschwitz as a theme: it is Auschwitz that the comic as a world view and comics as a genre are improper for. Using “the funnies” for Auschwitz is not funny. Or, in Gilman’s terms, it cannot be funny if it is to be serious. This clearly plays a crucial part in the transgressive impact of Maus, but the improprieties of this work are far more numerous and diverse, reflected in a rather colorful variety of critical reductions. In fact, I will argue that the diversity and heterogeneity of these improprieties is crucial to the difficulty of normalizing Maus and is the reason why its monstrous language so powerfully invites obsessive reading, sorting, and ordering.

The monstrous language created in Maus has lent itself to a variety of benevolent simplifications such as the book being useful but childish education for children “whose reading skills are undeveloped”¹⁰ and thus aesthetically wanting. The Washington Post’s praise, too, displayed on the back cover of the first volume, assures readers of the simplicity of the book (“A quiet triumph, moving and simple”). My praise will be the contrary: unlike countless examples of Nazism-turned-kitsch—a phenomenon observed and decried by Saul Friedländer in Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death¹¹—Maus does not offer simplicity and easy closure and is a profoundly ethical performance not in spite of its scandalous impurities, but because of them.

Maus poses category trouble wherever one turns: it easily brings the categorizers of the Library of Congress and the Pulitzer Prize to tears. The Library of Congress has it under:

Spiegelman, Vladek—comic books, strips etc.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)–Poland–Biography–comic books, strips etc.

Holocaust survivors–United States–Biography–comic books, strips etc.

Spiegelman, Art–comic books, strips etc.

Children of the Holocaust survivors–United States–Biography–comic books, strips etc.

It is possible to surmise from this list that Art Spiegelman is the son of a Holocaust survivor, a Polish Jew by the name of Vladek Spiegelman, whose life is the subject of the “comic book etc.” called Maus. While these conjectures are not false, they are certainly not true. Maus is not quite what the Library of Congress calls a comic book. It is much rather etc. It is biography only to the extent it is autobiography. Vladek, as one of the characters observes in the book, in some ways did not survive after all, not to mention Spiegelman’s younger brother, Richieu, poisoned by an aunt during the war so that he could escape deportation, and Spiegelman’s mother, Anja, who committed suicide in 1968, both of whom never made it into the Library of Congress.

It is not that Maus does not fit the accepted system of genre and subject categories (clearly no work of art is adequately described by them), but that it performs and thrives on the destabilization of a wide variety of categories and binary oppositions. It makes the boundaries between writing and speech, writing and image, graphic and photographic image, human and animal, mother tongue and foreign language, document and fiction, high culture and low culture vitally important. Yet, for all their significance, Maus also makes these boundaries sufficiently uncertain, producing the significant and the indeterminate in a combination that is likely to unsettle the local Library of Congress operating in every reader. Each of these uncertainties reverberates in all the others, each creating ripples and folds in a texture that becomes primarily defined by these impurities and exceeds what one might simply identify as generic ambiguity. The result is a hybrid texture that exceeds in complexity a dialectical play of opposites; not a monster to scare you off, then, but a monstrous texture to lure you in its gaps and folds, to bind you to your impossible tasks beside, between, beyond.

The heterogeneity of Maus is a critical cliché; virtually no interpretation of Maus has neglected to discuss this feature of the book in some fashion. What I want to emphasize more, however, is how the work blocks together many differences of different kinds so that their regulation by one term—even by “Auschwitz”—becomes impossible. Lyotard’s analogy for such “blocking together” of the irreconcilably heterogeneous is anamorphosis in painting—in Holbein’s Ambassadors, for instance—where the co-presence of the two images and spaces of representation cannot lead to a spatially or temporally unified appropriation; focalizing one by necessity disperses the other, making it unrecognizable and formless. If Lyotard’s reading of anamorphosis is reluctant to unify these distinct forms of representation, it manages to regulate them as distinct yet inseparable “components of the visible.”¹² It is this move which is obstructed and constantly challenged in Maus, where the volatility of regulating terms thwarts the stable ordering of difference. By repeatedly displacing the difference that seems to matter, Maus manages to indicate “what is not inscribed, … what has no place … in the geography and the diachrony of the self-assured spirit, because it is not synthesizable” and what “cannot be forgotten, does not offer a hold to forgetting, and remains present ‘only’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. “Mauschwitz”: Monsters, Memory, and Testimony
• Chapter Two. Familiarity and Forgetfulness in Walter Abish’s Fiction
• Chapter Three. Pinpricks on the Ars(e) Narrandi: Liminality and Oven-Games in Gravity’s Rainbow
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index