Monday, February 25, 2008
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?
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Absolutely. And I thought that was a really interesting aspect of the book. I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't expecting any of that really personal stuff about the father-son relationship. But it wound up being a huge part of the story, the part that struck me the most deeply, too.
Art obviously felt tremendous sympathy for his father. He wanted to know about everything he had been through. I got the sense that he wanted to give his dad that free pass on his behavior, and if he had been someone else's dad, he could have.
I think the relationship is also tied up in Art's feeling about the Holocaust. He was telling his wife that he almost feels guilty for not having to experience it with his parents, that he almost wishes he had been there. And he talks about how he can't visualize the concentration camp and can't truly understand what it was like. I wonder if he feels sort of resentful that this experience that occurred before he was even born should drive the course of his childhood and relationship with his parents.
Interesting quote from a Spiegelman interview:
You grow up as a survivor's kid - it seems to be a common denominator - that as a kid, you're playing baseball or whatever and you break a window and then your mother or father says, "Ach, for this I survived?" And that's a heavy load to carry around for breaking a window with a baseball - or less. And it tends to make kids who grow up to become doctors, lawyers, professionals, overachievers of one kind or another, who tend to try very hard to make things easy for their parents. And for whatever mad molecule is in my particular genetic makeup, I was in rebellion against my parents from an early age and had a very difficult time coming to terms with them.
Great insights, Erin, and that Spiegelman quote is very telling. He begins "Maus I" with his father doing a similar thing: comparing Arts' experience with his ornery playmates to being in a concentration camp.
It amazes me that anyone could go through something like that and ever be even relatively sane again. That they could go on to have even an outwardly normal life is mind-boggling to me. How do they ever fit their knowledge of those horrors into daily life? How do things ever have meaning again? It was really interesting to think about the various reactions: Art's mother killed herself (like Sophie in "Sophie's Choice"); his dad became an exaggerated version of his wartime self; his stepmom was more able to put the experience aside. I really wanted to know more about her story. Did anyone else? But I can see how that would have loosened the narrative too much.
Of course Art felt resentful that something he never expereinced defined his life. Plus he lived under the shadow of a martyred older brother whom he never met. The real son can never compete with the imaginary adulthood of the dead son.
I am not sure that the father's behavior was all a direct consequence of his experiences in the Holocaust. Is it possible the characteristics he had before Nazi invasion (being a tight-wad, a shrewd business man, ability to act in his own self-interest) were part of what helped him survive the ordeal? Those traits were then exacerbated by the trauma so that they became the controling forces in his life. But the Holocaust only magnified them, didn't create them.
That's a long way to say maybe he had the seeds of being a jerk from an early age. I guess that means I didn't have overflowing empathy for the father. At least for him as he acted in his adult son's life.
As to how do you go on,
Compartmentalization, it's an amazing human talent.
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