Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Article on Maus
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-86386340/forced-confessions-case-art.html
For this blog post, I chose to use the article "Forced confessions: the case of Art Spiegelman's Maus" by Emily Budick. Budick writes about how both Maus: A Survivor's Tale Part I: "My Father Bleeds History" and Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began don't center only on the biography of Art Spiegelman's father, Vladek, but also on Spiegelman's relationship with with his father.
She concludes in her article that "by the end of the narrative, Art, the author, in part by portraying himself through his less successful, less reliable alter ego Artie, has transformed his role from implicated, even aggressive, narrator-participant into a sort of detached psychic medium who consents, despite his own discomfort and self-endangerment, to let the voice of the past speak directly and unmediated not so much to hims, as through him; furthermore, he permits that voice to speak not only to us, the reader of the text, but to the many ghosts that constitute this past." Budick also points out that Spiegelman avoids the distance and objectivity associated with the historian's role by making it clear that he is not a historian at the beginning of the book and that the "historical veracity of the story... is not its only justification or goal." She further notes that the first book expresses the "intimate and likely fraught relationship between the narrator and his protagonist". It also identifies the father's pain as not only his; it is also shared by his son Art. By the end of the books, Vladek's story can only be kept alive by someone else, but his survivor son cannot escape the burden of historical narrative and as a survivor of the inherited trauma, "struggles to survive what is not only the bleeding away of the father's life but the flow of his already hemorrhaging life's blood into that of the son." As a result, Art experiences his inheritance of his father's history as nothing less than an assault, however unintentional, on the part of the father - a demand as it were".
In short, Art Spiegleman writes about his father's story because he feels that he is obligated by a pain that is inherited.
For this blog post, I chose to use the article "Forced confessions: the case of Art Spiegelman's Maus" by Emily Budick. Budick writes about how both Maus: A Survivor's Tale Part I: "My Father Bleeds History" and Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began don't center only on the biography of Art Spiegelman's father, Vladek, but also on Spiegelman's relationship with with his father.
She concludes in her article that "by the end of the narrative, Art, the author, in part by portraying himself through his less successful, less reliable alter ego Artie, has transformed his role from implicated, even aggressive, narrator-participant into a sort of detached psychic medium who consents, despite his own discomfort and self-endangerment, to let the voice of the past speak directly and unmediated not so much to hims, as through him; furthermore, he permits that voice to speak not only to us, the reader of the text, but to the many ghosts that constitute this past." Budick also points out that Spiegelman avoids the distance and objectivity associated with the historian's role by making it clear that he is not a historian at the beginning of the book and that the "historical veracity of the story... is not its only justification or goal." She further notes that the first book expresses the "intimate and likely fraught relationship between the narrator and his protagonist". It also identifies the father's pain as not only his; it is also shared by his son Art. By the end of the books, Vladek's story can only be kept alive by someone else, but his survivor son cannot escape the burden of historical narrative and as a survivor of the inherited trauma, "struggles to survive what is not only the bleeding away of the father's life but the flow of his already hemorrhaging life's blood into that of the son." As a result, Art experiences his inheritance of his father's history as nothing less than an assault, however unintentional, on the part of the father - a demand as it were".
In short, Art Spiegleman writes about his father's story because he feels that he is obligated by a pain that is inherited.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)