History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization" in Art Spiegelman's "Maus: A Survivor's Tale"

Abstract

The rhetorical implications of Holocaust memorialization are intricate; Holocaust is both personal (family) history and a collective (national/global) history.' There are fears concerning disappearance of historical memory both because of previously prevailing belief that Holocaust would pass into oblivion with passing of survivor witnesses (Sicher 7) and because of Holocaust denials, most recently exposed in com ments from President of Iran, who in 2005 called Holocaust a myth (Vick 1). Moral desensitization has also been a concern in terms of visual memorialization where the reduction of [published Holocaust] archive images and their endless repetition, as well as their decontextual ization, could pose problems for Holocaust remembrance (Hirsch 218). Thus, traumatic memory of Holocaust must be re-created contextu ally for every generation in order to combat tendency toward what Saul Friedlander has called a premature foreclosure of memory and what Ruth Wajnryb terms a generalized will toward amnesia.2 The historicity of this context is dependent upon social, political, and artistic paradigms that necessarily shift from generation to generation. Memorialization of Holocaust has taken many forms in sixty years that have followed it. The memory of this event seems more present now than directly after war, but an increasing awareness of limits of representing this memory has also cast a shadow (Sicher 355). Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale recontextualizes this history by addressing such limits of representa tion, functioning as a unique form of Holocaust memorialization, which elicits what I term performative memorialization. Performative memorial ization is a layered memorial activity that performs in every Holocaust genre to create a temporally fluid, Bakhtinian dialogic between author and subject (memory) and event and audience (history)-com bating tendencies toward collective amnesia or foreclosure. Thought and memory naturally categorize, often generically.3 Thought seeks ways to differentiate one thing from another, using analogy and tem poral markers or by delineating boundaries. It is not insignificant that