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”)
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Very interesting. With something like the Holocaust, the memory would always be there, lurking in your mind, even in happy times far removed from the tragic past. Anything really horribly traumatic is like that, I think. I'm reminded of how my dad could never quite let go of Vietnam. When he was getting really sick, he thought about the war more and more and dreamed every night that he was still fighting in the jungle. I think undoubtedly humans could be a lot happier if they could forget what they needed to forget. Doomed to repeat the past, perhaps, but happier.
Yes, forgetting can lead to repeating, which is where story telling comes in, I think. Story telling has the dual benefit of unburdening the victim’s psyche a little while adding to the social consciousness.
This author talks about this in the context of Shakespeare (sorry if I’m obsessed). She notes that Hamlet’s dying wish is for Horatio “To tell my story.”
The injunction to “tell my story” is also — as we have seen so often at the close of Shakespearean tragedy — an injunction to perform the play. In Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, in almost every tragedy Shakespeare wrote, this invitation, “to speak of these sad things,” is a way of making tragic events bearable, by retelling them, by placing them at once in the realm of the social and of the aesthetic.
She notes — interestingly! — that Horatio cannot fully do this because Horatio did not hear Hamlet’s soliloquies, which are really the heart of the story. Horatio can only narrate outward events, which is all Art Spiegelman could do if he did not have the first-person account of his father. His mother’s story remains an “outline” because she is dead and the voice in her journals has been destroyed. Art can be her Horatio, but he can be his father's Shakespeare.
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