| Abstract | Both these works, therefore, foreground the role of a mediating figure who dramatizes the work of recollection and, by so doing, both emphasize the process itself of reconstructing the past as filtered through the consciousness (and complicity) of a belated witness in the fusion of then and now. Maus goes much further, of course, in this direction than [Claude Lanzmann]'s film, both because the director's personal concept that drives the film is off camera and can only be inferred by the viewer and because [Art Spiegelman] is far more than a mediator. He is directly implicated in the solicitation of Vladek's life narrative -- for his own psychological need as the survivor's son to uncover the family's history and in the service of his vocation as a graphic artist to invent a suitable mode of telling. The originality of Maus, which exposes an all too familiar story of the traumatic legacy transmitted by survivors to their children, lies not just in the shock of reducing the Holocaust to an affair of comic book animals with disconcertingly ironic effects. It lies even more in the self-conscious exposure of its author's ambivalences, the sharing of his doubts and misgivings, his sense of guilt and inadequacy in undertaking the entire enterprise and the process of working through these conflicts, in both psychological and artistic terms. The result, as Hans Kellner observes, is that "Spiegelman is both the author of the work and a character in it.... He does not create his tale (and yet he does); it does not happen to him (and yet it does)." In this kind of "self-reflexive history," "the moment represented must itself be the moment of representation, the process of creating the text," so that "representing the Holocaust becomes representing `coming to know the Holocaust'," a stance that Kellner labels one of the "middle voice." What is more, he concludes, the whole process is one through which the author himself is changed.(8)
[Mathieu] too was an "afterward" child, but now in the third generation "afterward" represents liberation and not a guilty bondage to the terrible past. In "writing the book of [Esther Litvak]," he had absorbed her obsession and had internalized her as an image of death inside himself. At one moment when he is writing, he imagines that "something in him, which he calls Esther, is dead," and his "desire to kill this thing mingles with his desire to write about death, and make it his nourishment -- a twofold, antithetical yet identical, desire for life and death" (135). Now at the end, he can say: "Esther is no longer in me. I've ejected her.... My child must live, not simply survive. It's my duty as a father to allow him this life to which he's entitled. No direct line from Esther to this child. Except maybe through this book. But only a book, nothing more." He resolves never to tell this "afterward" child that he had a sister named Esther, or if he must, he'll say she died in an auto accident. "My book will have blotted her out" (204).
(26). See [Marianne Hirsch], "Family Pictures." Subsequent articles by Hirsch coincided with my writing of the present essay: "Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile," Poetics Today 17 (1996): 659-86, and "Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy," in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory (Hanover, NH, forthcoming, 1998). See also her book, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA, 1997). Hirsch uses the term "postmemory to describe the relationship of survivors' children to their parents' experiences, which they `remember' only as the stories and images with which they grew up.... Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated, not through recollection but through projection, investment and creation." It "characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that they can neither understand nor recreate." Postmemory can be extended beyond the circle of survivors and their children to include "a space of remembrance, more broadly available through cultural and public, and not merely individual and personal, acts of remembrance, identification and projection.... It is a question of adopting...experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one's own life story" (cited from the ms. of "Projected Memory," 4-5). Others speak of "second-generation" witnesses in an extended sense or of "absent memory." In this essay, I have preferred to use "vicarious memory" to describe a similar phenomenon.
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