In our reading from “The Black Hole of Trauma,” one of the things that struck me was the “subjectivity” of trauma: “the critical element that makes an event traumatic is the subjective assessment by victims of how threatened and helpless they feel . . . People’s interpretations of the meaning of the trauma continue to evolve well after the trauma itself has ceased” (6). The author then gives an example of the women who was raped, but did not develop PTSD until months after when she learned that the rapist had killed another victim. Her understanding of events was suddenly radically altered and it was then that she truly developed PTSD. The facts of the trauma did not change, but her understanding of them did.
When I read this passage, I immediately thought of Anja’s suicide. What made me think of this is Vladek’s reaction to her suicide in the “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” on the insert compared to his reaction to every other death he encounters in Maus I. These seem to be two different Vladek’s, and I don’t think we can account for this solely looking at narrative reliability. What I suspect is that Anja’s suicide suddenly changed Vladek’s understanding of the trauma he’d already experienced and he suddenly loses it.
I don’t believe that Vladek suffered from full-blown PTSD prior to Anja’s suicide because he clearly views himself as not just a survivor, but Anja’s savior. It was his actions (according to his narrative) which allowed them to survive overall. We are shown scene after scene of Anja afraid, ready to give up, ready to die, and Vladek being strong for her and pushing her through everything. He saves her.
Then she kills herself.
It is this suicide which suddenly changes everything for him. Suddenly Anja is no longer a survivor of the Holocaust, but another victim and Vladek was not able to save her.
I think this explains many of his actions since her death. As from our reading he clearly exhibits the following:
Intrusions: Vladek, as he says on page 104, always is thinking of Anja. Reading his son’s comic is just another reminder to him.
Avoiding and Numbing: Organizing one’s life trying to avoid evoking these intrusions. Vladek marries Mala, whom he does not like at all, and burns Anja’s diaries. This last act is a lashing out at the fact that she wrote about all of what she experienced, but didn’t leave a suicide note.
Inability to modulate Arousal: Vladek is constantly getting upset over little issues
and taking it out on his son or wife, moving “immediately from stimulus to response.”
I may be way off base, but these were my immediate ruminations after reading the piece on PTSD, and seemed to make sense to me in explaining the different Vladeks we see.
No doubt there is definitely credibility in this theory Phineas, but I am having an issue with tossing responsibility of Anna’s death or the resultant of PTSD of Anna’s death and for me, it does come down to the narrative perspective. I’m not so convinced that the Vladek illustrated in the “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” is the same Vladek we have witnessed the entire book. We receive the account from what I am determining as an unreliable narrator but moreover, the account of Anja’s death is the first piece of serious history that we do not receive from Vladek’s perspective…I wonder why that is…
Phineas, I started reading your post quite skeptically…but by the end, I do think you have some really excellent points–as least as far as the character that we meet within the pages of Maus. Clearly, the suicide is the most acute event in Vladek and his son’s immediate, mutual timeline…but of course, in the end, when comparing the impact of all the dire events that occurred, I begin to feel like it devolves into a chicken vs the egg argument.
In some ways, I think “Prisoner” is meant to act as a foil to “Maus I” — in it we see only Art’s perspective and feelings in the days leading up to and after his mother’s suicide, and we see only a Vladek warped (even pictorially) by grief. “Maus I” is Vladek’s story — a story which, as Phineas pointed out, seems to be one not of Vladek as survivor, but Anja’s savior. Throughout we see how much he cares about Anja, how often he saves her, and her death as it is presented in the text is intrinsically wrapped up in the war, in their survival, in Vladek’s life and reasons for living.
I think an argument could be made (even if it is perhaps one of emotional weight as opposed to textual evidence) that Vladek lives for Anja, lives to save her, and her suicide after the war wrecks him, even after all they’ve already survived. And even if he survived only to survive, and ensured Anja’s survival only out of feelings of love, he did save her — but even though he saved her from the Nazis, he could not ultimately save her in the end. Vladek does not seem to curse the Nazis as much as he longs for his wife: we never hear him yell, “Damn you, Hitler!” (or something along those lines), but we do see him crying out for Anja in the bank and in other less extreme ways throughout the text. In this way, the horrors Anja and he survived pale in comparison to the horror of losing Anja, of not being able to save her.
I really like this idea – not that it necessarily excuses Vladek’s capriciousness, but it does have a strong narrative appeal, in that the story Vladek tells himself cannot have the happily ever after all stories innately strive towards (I would argue even tragedies derive their power from this, in that they must convince themselves that their failure to reach the happily ever after is worthwhile).
I think Phineas is onto something with his diagnosis of Vladek’s PTSD, though I wouldn’t say Anja is the “source” of the trauma so much as the focal point, the moment when his PTSD blooms as he repositions all of his past experiences and resubjectivizes the ordeal of the Holocaust.
That said, I want to tentatively counter the argument that Vladek “survives” solely for the sake of Anja. That’s a very romantic notion, and one that on the surface even Spiegelman himself might seem to be suggesting. But I think he subtly undercuts such a Hollywood-style narrative, and you can see a microcosm of this reenacted on the pages that seem “outside” the memoir itself, i.e. pages 7 and 9.