Tag: Maus I

Anja as the “Source” of PTSD

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.

Narrators We Have to Believe

Early on in Maus, before the Holocaust story begins, Vladek describes his past before the war. Vladek recalls that “I was at that time, young. And really a nice, handsome boy.” Vladek also describes the effect this has on the opposite sex: “I had a lot of girls what I didn’t even know would run after me…people always told me I looked just like Rudolph Valentino” (13). In a similar instance, when Lucia falls to the ground as Vladek leaves he describes himself as having “strong legs” (20).

One issue I have with these passages is that in some ways, they remind me of unreliable narrators I’ve encountered in fiction. While Vladek is certainly not as delusional about his past and present as, say, Brett Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman, or as willfully dishonest as Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, I still feel a familiar hint that someone isn’t being quite honest–or at the very least is playing up their past a bit. This led me to think about reliable narrators, their role and the importance of honesty in a story like Maus.

One issue that comes to play is the role of two narrators. Maus is a strange combination of memoir and non-fiction told through the comic medium. The memoir is all Art’s, a story about father and son. The non-fiction is the mediated story of Vladek’s survival, told to (and recounted/structured/painted) by Art. One of the only novels I can immediately think of that uses multiple levels of narration to tell a story is House of Leaves and without getting too much into that work, let’s just say it’s a mess when it comes to questions about narrator reliability: none of the novel’s three narrative threads are ever presented as completely factual or without their own holes.

Of course, in a story that recounts the horrors of Holocaust Poland, we must rely on our narrators to tell us the truth. A story with such serious subject matter must be told with a high degree of honesty lest it undermine the importance of its message about past atrocities and man’s ability to dehumanize, target and exterminate other men. Our emotional response relies upon this honesty.

It’s also important to note that while I questioned Vladek’s reliability in those early stages, I never felt those notions return as I read on. I wonder if a result of having a mediated story is that reliability always becomes slightly muddled. Or are we just seeing what Art describes on page 131 when he says “…it’s something that worries me about the book I’m doing about him…In some ways he’s just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew.” Perhaps, when it comes to his pre-war past, Vladek really isn’t the most reliable narrator. Does that unreliability vanish when he talks about surviving the war because the events are too traumatic to embellish? It’s pretty clear to me that Art is just trying to create an honest representation of his father, even if the end result will only reinforce some stereotypes. All of this helps reinforce Art’s reliability as a narrator. Still, I sometimes wonder about Vladek’s reliability in those early sections, which has me paying close attention to notions of reliability throughout the text.

So now, I leave it to you: Did anyone else question reliability at any point during the reading? Is it even possible for a memoir/non-fiction text to play with notions of unreliability, or does that immediately place a work in the realm of fiction? Have you seen other examples where mediated re-tellings have hints of unreliability? Or am I seeing something that isn’t there and just being jealous that Vladek was such a ladies’ man in his younger days?