A BRIEF NOTE ON MAUS AND HAUNTOLOGY, INSPIRED BY METAMAUS

If there's a canon of American hauntological fiction, Maus is definitely part of it (other texts to be included in that list: Beloved, The Shining, a whole mess of Philip K. Dick [e.g. Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said], the New York Trilogy). I'm working my way through MetaMaus right now and this quote from Art Spiegelman is just so perfect, both in explaining why Maus is a hauntological work and why comics are an inherently hauntological medium:

What is most interesting about comics for me has to do with the abstraction and structurings that come with the comics page, the fact that moments in time are juxtaposed. In a story that is trying to make chronological and coherent the incomprehensible, the juxtaposing of past and present insists that past and present are always present--one doesn't displace the other the way it happens in film. (165)

This seems like a formal and material manifestation of Derrida's  "deconstructing, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting 'out of joint' the authority of the 'is.' . . . measuring . . . against the historical experience--and this is history itself--against the experience of that which in the 'is,' in time or in the present time of 'is,' remains precisely 'out of joint'" ("The Time is Out of Joint" 25). In Spiegelman's description, Maus would fail if it gave authority to any "is;" the narrative works precisely because there remains no time or tense that gains priority. Spiegelman points to a passage early in the second volume in which the formal representation of the past and of the present are "butting . . . up against each other." The very rigid and regular grids of the present "have fallen away to reveal what's underneath. . . . By peeling away what would have been six of the panels on that fifteen-grid page, the map of Auschwitz that underlies our present is revealed" (181-82; my emphasis).

Similarly, the introduction to Auschwitz in the second volume--which up to now has been seen only as its iconic front gates--is accomplished via a similar displacement of the primacy of the present moment. In a way to get around the dread he felt at telling this part of his father's story, Spiegelman sought to enter Auschwitz in a way that "doesn't allow for the momentousness of the moment" (188). Thus, the introduction comes through a break in the present--one that reveals that the past was there all along, that any entry into Auschwitz by the narrative is a reentry--when, "after wandering around the bungalow colony with my father . . . a very small panel, a close-up of a snarling Nazi . . . interrupts the fairly fluid stroll through the country. It's very abrupt and perfunctory" (188). The Nazi's shout--ostensibly to the Jews who had been transported to Auschwitz in the truck carrying Vladek and Anja--is multivalent: a call to leave the present moment and a call to the past to expose itself as there in that present moment.

In these reveals, these explorations of the past and present as both always present, Maus is a tremendously uncanny text. It offers up what is to remain hidden in order for the present to assert its authority: the competing narrative of the past, whose presence, formerly skirting by at the edges of awareness, frame, and panel, now becomes fully visible. In this sense, Maus fits with Adam Harper's definition of hauntological art, in which the object possesses:

two stages, or layers. The first layer seems to present something that's in some way idealised - this is often but not always an image involving the past . . . The second "hauntological" layer problematises, compromises and obfuscates the first layer, undermining or damaging it in some way and introducing irony into the work, and represents the opinionated viewpoint of the present. While the first layer might express hope and confidence, the hauntological layer contradicts and undoes this by expressing a satirical doubt and disillusionment.

Here, Maus functions as a hauntological work because the ostensibly idealized life in America that Vladek enjoys in Rego Park is continually undercut by the reintroduction of the past (or the way it functions as an uncanny text). In a mirror of the map of Auschwitz underneath Vladek and Art's present conversation, the back cover of the second volume (reproduced within the body of the text) geographically and temporally displaces contemporary New York and New Jersey into Poland and Auschwitz.

Even Spiegelman's counterpart in the text, Art, cannot escape the past in his present moment of success after the publishing of the first volume. His writing desk rests on the bodies of dead mice, he's bordered by a swastika, and a guard tower looms outside his window. For Spiegelman, this "Time Flies" section serves "as a MetaMaus like commentary on the whole project."

Perhaps even more powerful, though slightly less visceral than the above sequence, is one of the motivating questions Spiegelman describes:

"So, how did you get born when you weren't supposed to?" In a way, taking on my parents' Holocaust story was a way of getting to the primal moment of my birth, because there was no way that they were both supposed to be alive and coupling after World War II. It is a specific journey that has nothing to do with history and everything to do with history; one or both of these people is supposed to be dead, which means that I'm not supposed to be here. (199)

Spiegelman's own presence, his body, destabilizes time and history here, complicating narratives that resist closure and refuse to add up. In this way, the hauntological elements of Maus are, I think, exactly what continue to make it relevant. As Spiegelman points out, casual racism is:

what festered into becoming the Final Solution; and it is what allows our current immigration debates to take certain kinds of appalling coloration now. It is what allows us to call Arabs "ragheads," it's what allows Arabs to think of Jews and Americans as wearing targets around their necks so one can kill them, it's that whole process of dehumanization. I'm not exempting myself, my father, or the Nazis or Poles from it; it seems to be a basic aspect of how tribes organize themselves. (36-37)

The call to remember in Maus, to account, introduces "Guilt . . . an explosive thing to live with, but it may be the price we humans must pay for civilization while trying to learn true Empathy" (158).* It might be possible to pair this statement with the ethical and political aspect of hauntology, its insistence that the present is not the only possibility: "The reason all these ghosts matter, the point of saying It wasn't always like this, is not that it was better then, let's go back, but to remind ourselves that it doesn't have to be this way. . . The ghosts that should most haunt us are the spectres of events that have not yet happened." The spectres raised by Maus, the history that the text bleeds, are not confined to the past, but extend into the returning future in which the preconditions for what takes place in Maus have never been eliminated.

Anyway, if you're a fan of Maus, do yourself a favour and pick up MetaMaus. The three long interview sections--"Why the Holocaust?," "Why Mice?," and "Why Comics?"--are illuminating, with Spiegelman's candid and articulate answers a real joy to read. Added treats: the unedited transcript of his initial interview with his father, Vladek, in 1972 and the DVD, containing audio clips of Spiegelman explaining his work and excerpts from the tape recordings of Vladek telling his story.

*Echoes of PKD's claim that empathy is the necessary characteristic of the human?

PAUL AUSTER, PROFESSORS, AND THE GENESIS OF AN IDEA

I read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy over the summer (how strange that I only refer to summer in the past tense now when the equinox has yet to happen--it's still over a month away), and I'd meant to write about the books sooner, before they'd faded from my mind. I suppose it's better this way, though, or at least in keeping with the feel of the books. I often found myself left wanting more when I finished each individual book in the trilogy; something about them seemed empty and hollow. In the moment of reading, though, I felt satisfied. They are strange books, and they move sort of like nightmares. Everything feels just slightly off, and when you try and move your thoughts around the plot and characters, you can't quite move toward anything definite. Just like in a nightmare, no matter how hard you try to run, you just stand still. And then it's over; you're out and awake and the story has finished without anything wrapping up in any clear way.

There are times that passages catch my eye while I'm reading and they will sort of haunt me. I won't be able to decide if what the passage says is true or not, and the words sort of hammer away in my subconscious, waiting to jump out at me. The final book in the trilogy, The Locked Room, had a couple of such passages. The first reminds me of my favourite lines from Ulysses, which hang above my desk: "Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves" (doing a quick Google search on this passage, it turns out that it is quite popular in general. I didn't know that. It certainly isn't a passage that our attention was drawn to in the Joyce class I took). In Auster's novel:

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge--none of that tells us very much. We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another--for the simple reason that no can gain access to himself.

 On the surface, this seems sort of diametrically opposed to Stephen Daedalus' words (though Stephen does go on to disclaim any belief in the truth of his own words). For the narrator of The Locked Room, we cannot meet ourselves in others because we cannot meet our self. We are unknowable, and even the stories we can tell about ourselves, the tangible evidence of our existence, gives us no insight into who or what we are. I'm not sure how I feel about that line of thought. It would be easy for me to say I disagree, but I'm not sure where I would attack any of the narrator's claims. Similarly, it would be easy for me to say I agree, but I'm not sure where I'd go about finding any support for the claims. It's sort of an anti-Delphic moment: you can never know thyself. I wonder how this might all fit into a Lacanian/Zizekian sense of the Other and the Other's unknowability. Can you render the self as the Other?

What really interests me about that Auster passage, though (beyond the weird echo of Joyce), is that I remember a similar kind of comment kicking off my interest in representations of professors in literature. I'm not usually very good at reconstructing thoughts and how I came to an idea after the fact (once an idea is there, it becomes difficult to remember it as not always having been there), but I can remember the genesis of this one fairly clearly. A group of graduate students were sitting in a conference room listening to a fairly prominent academic talk about his work. After some prodding, he began to relate the narrative of his career (i.e. where he went to school, where he got his first job, how long he stayed there, when he moved to his next job, etc., etc.). When he'd finished--and after someone asked him if he could give us, the graduate students desperate for advice, some sort of hint or clue about what to do with our professional lives based on his own narrative--he said that he couldn't really gives us any advice because that narrative he'd told us had nothing really to do with his life and work. His only piece of advice was to follow our work and ideas.

I remember thinking after he'd said that "I wonder how many professors would say that, even though their lives/careers/work might fit into very tidy and conventional narratives, those narratives bear no relation to their actual lives/careers/work." I'm guessing, and I guessed then, that the number is probably quite a bit higher than just the man who sat in that conference room with us that day. I'm also guessing that regardless of that opinion, any number of outside observes will continue to think of those academics' lives/careers/work in terms of those conventional narratives. So, my next thought--the one I'd like to explore further--was: what are those narratives? There are a whole host of sub-questions beyond that now, but that was my first thought that day. I scribbled some of this down on a sheet of paper and if I looked hard enough through various boxes of notes, I'd bet I could find that paper now.

Well, this post was originally going to be about something much different. I guess, after hours of in-service today and meeting new people and explaining my interests to them and all that I'm in something of a reflective mood. I guess I'll return to Auster (whose name I can't help but say in my head as Auster-D because of a presentation on City of Glass before I'd ever read the book).