"The Power of Forgetting"

I’m reading this collection of essays about Shakespeare’s plays, called “Shakespeare After All,” and in the “Hamlet” essay, the author, Marjorie Garber, says something that made me think of “Maus” and how its various survivors, including Art, were able to function after such tragedy. Any thoughts on this?

Friedrich Nietzsche saw memory as that which distinguishes human beings from animals. Cattle forget, and so they are happy. Humans remember, and so they suffer. “In the smallest and greatest happiness,” he wrote in his essay on history, “there is always one thing that makes it happiness: the power of forgetting.” Human beings, both individually and as a people, “must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember.” And in the same essay Nietzsche also wrote, with a glance, unmistakably at “Hamlet,” that the past has to be forgotten “if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present.”

(The Nietzsche essay she refers to is “The Use and Abuse of History”)

Amy's Pick

I should have picked this two weeks ago. Sorry. The short time frame means you have been saved from several obscure picks I was considering. Instead Didion, a memoir of the year after her husband's death. Enjoy.

"Getting in touch with my inner racist"

Rather strange Speigelman essay in Mother Jones: "Getting in touch with my inner racist"

The ending

I found the ending pretty sad. First we see Vladek and Anja's reunion after the war, and Vladek says, "We were both very happy, and lived happy, happy ever after." But we know that's not true. Anja eventually committed suicide, and Vladek became a miserable old man. And in the last line, Vladek confuses Art with his dead son, Richieu. It's as though the tragedy of the past will never really be over for this family.

"Prisoner on the Hell Planet"

What were your thoughts on the comic within the comic, Art's reaction to his mother's suicide? The comic depicts his mother's suicide and his father's reaction. Art is wearing a concentration camp uniform throughout. In the last panels, Art is shown in prison, and he says, "Well, Mom, if you're listening ... Congratulations! You've committed the perfect crime ... You put me here ... shorted all my circuits ... cut my nerve endings ... and crossed my wires! You murdered me, Mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!"

I found this rather disturbing. What was your reaction?

All there is to know

Have you seen this Leonard Cohen poem about Adolf Eichmann, who was considered the mastermind of the Nazis' "final solution"? I think of it every time I read something about the Holocaust.

All there is to know about Adolf Eichmann

EYES - Medium
HAIR - Medium
WEIGHT - Medium
HEIGHT - Medium
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES - None
NUMBER OF FINGERS - Ten
NUMBER OF TOES - Ten
INTELLIGENCE - Medium

What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?

Comparisons

Do you see any parallels in the struggles for survival in "Maus," "The Road," "A Thousand Splendid Suns"?

I saw something of Desdemona and Lefty from "Middlesex" in Vladek and Anja — the same sense of bewildered sadness of people ripped by war from their native land and cast upon the shores of America, a busy, naive country that was largely ignorant of and indifferent to their personal pasts and struggles. I keep trying to imagine what it would be like to be uprooted as an adult and replanted in a foreign country. It's really something. And on top of that, to have a personal history of unspeakable suffering.

Lost history

What was your reaction to Vladek's destruction of his wife's journals?

Empathy II

I'm always shocked when I see people who have been victimized by prejudice victimizing others. I always — naively — expect them to have been ennobled by their suffering, to be empathetic, to know what matters. And yet the author shows his father, a Holocaust survivor, being racist toward a black man. Why do you think the author included that episode?

Vladek

What connections did you make between the father's Holocaust experiences and his life in New York?

Honesty

I was really moved by the sheer honesty of these books — not just the author's honesty that his dad often drove him crazy, but the honesty of the concentration camp story, how it wasn't just a simple tale of good and evil, how it managed to convey the complexity of human behavior under extreme stress. Any thoughts on this?

Empathy

I think the thing that struck me most deeply about "Maus" was the depiction of the father-son relationship — how the fact that his parents' Holocaust experience was the huge, inescapable fact of their existence and yet how they had all this "normal" strife and personality conflicts like family members do. When I was reading it, I thought anyone who lived through the Holocaust should get a free pass to be a jerk or a tightwad or whatever else their psyche needed and the rest of us can only look on with infinite understanding. But I know it's one thing to hold that theory and another thing to actually practice it when faced with the everyday reality of a difficult person. Did you feel this struggle in the narrator?

Graphic storytelling

First, the obvious question: What did you think of the "comic-book" treatment of this serious subject matter?

Tessie

What was your impression of Tessie? Did she seem kind of vaguely developed to you? And, if so, did that seem intentional, like she was just supposed to be one of those moms who blend into the background? I remember one passage in the book where Cal likens himself to his mom and says they both liked to just watch people and hang back rather than being the center of attention. That made a certain amount of sense. But I also kind of expected something bolder from her character, given who her parents were.

Cars, cars, cars

One could write an essay on the use of the automobile in "Middlesex." It's one of the uber-American things about the novel. Not only is the book set in Motor Town, but a lot of important scenes take place in cars, like Zizmo's fake death and Milton's real death, Lefty's "photograph" business that paired sexy women and cars, the bootlegging business, Sourmelina's use of Zizmo's car as a show of independence, Desdemona's distrust of cars, Lefty's job at the Ford plant, Cal's odyssey across the country in strangers' cars, Cal's first and last kiss with the Object in the farmer's car after the accident, and Milton's obsession with Cadillacs. This last really resonated with me because my grandparents always had two Cadillacs, one for him and one for her, those super gigantic ones that were the ubiquitous and unimaginative status symbol of the business class.

Cal gives the best description of a Cadillac I've ever encountered: It was like climbing into someone's wallet.

Weird

Did you have a sense that the narrator was saying something particular about human sexuality? It's weird, but Cal seemed the most "normal" to me, or maybe "conventional" is the better word. I mean, we have the grandparents who were actually siblings (we can say circumstances forced them together, but really they liked each other before that), and Sourmelina who was gay, and the Object who was probably gay, and the parents who, weirdest of all, got off on that clarinet fetish. Cal was really just a guy who liked girls.

Kim's pick

"Maus: A Survivor's Tale" is a Holocaust memoir by Art Spiegelman. It won a special Pulitzer in 1992. I've read some graphic narratives by Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi that I dearly loved, even though I'm not generally drawn to the graphic genre, and they both acknowledged a huge debt to Spiegelman as a mentor who tackled serious subject matter in comic book form. There's actually Maus I and Maus II, and I'm guessing that we'll want to read both.

Greeks modern and ancient

The narrator refers to his story as "my midwestern Epidaurus" and says Jimmy Zizmo is "the one wearing the biggest mask." What did you think he meant by this?

Beauty

Julie says, "Beauty is always freakish." (p. 217)

For me, this foreshadowed her acceptance of Cal's uniqueness. Do you think this is a view of beauty the narrator shares?

Place and person

The narrator refers to the street of his childhood home as Middlesex Boulevard and to the house as Middlesex. And, of course, there's the natural allusion to his body as being a kind of middle sex. What connections do you think the author intended us to make here?

(There's an awesome description of the house on p. 258).