Reading Art Spiegelman by Philip Smith

Author:Philip Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Narrative offers a means to articulate, in part, a disruptive, shattering event within a familiar framework and thus provide (in many cases) a sense of closure. The healing role of narrative is also detailed by Frankl, who contends that by transforming a series of otherwise meaningless events into a sequence and viewing their experiences as a narrative, certain death camp prisoners and survivors were able to create meaning and thus mitigate some of the impact of trauma. ‘Those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfil’ Frankl submits ‘were most apt to survive’ (2004, 109). This is the cornerstone of his branch of psychology, ‘logotherapy’ (etymologically ‘word-therapy’), which seeks to establish emotional stability by equipping patients with a clear sense of purpose. For Frankl, meaning promises a future resolution that justifies present suffering.

The meaning Vladek provides for his story is that his love for his wife sustained him through Auschwitz and that their reunion was his reward, making the story, in essence, a romance (attendant to which is the familiar three-act structure, which can be casually described as ‘want-lose-get’). When Vladek remembers his story, he identifies his drive to be reunited with Anja as his purpose. He recalls thinking ‘only how happy it would be to have Anja so near to me’ (Spiegelman 2003, 224). One of his strong memories is the (unsuccessful) plan he formulated to have Anja moved so that she could be closer to him. The Lucia story is distasteful and incongruous with the love story he is crafting and so he asks Artie to remove it. By arranging his narrative in such a way, the reunion with Anja offers the promise of a final cathartic conclusion. Vladek’s intuitive understanding of the role narrative can play in relation to trauma and identity might call for a new examination of the act of burning Anja’s diaries; those diaries represented a threat to Vladek’s own interpretation of the events. He chose to destroy them rather than allow them to destroy the fairy tale version of his experience.

Despite his apparent madness, then, we find that Vladek’s insistence upon a familiar narrative format told in a chronological order with a cathartic reunion and a sense of meaning at its close creates exactly the kind of story Spiegelman seeks to avoid. A familiar narrative framework threatens to distort, reduce, and cathartically resolve the questions raised by the Shoah. Such actions run directly counter to Spiegelman’s desire to make manifest the terrible implications of the Holocaust for Enlightenment rationality, but for the victim of trauma this may not be undesirable. Indeed, the cathartic resolution of the horror of the Holocaust may be exactly what they want, and Vladek may be a prime example of such a process. Vladek does not seek the absolute accuracy of a deposition, nor is he conscious of the offensive ramifications of a Holocaust story in which the audience is provided with an uplifting sense of having been ‘saved’ or, indeed, of the dangerous ramifications

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