Vulnerable Lives: Secrets, Noise, Dust

Abstract

This essay attempts to open up the amorphous parts of a story enveloped by secrets and the noise of gossip and innuendo. Considering the complex circumstances of a young Jewish refugee woman’s life—the extraordinary times in which she fell in love, fled Austria to Bolivia to marry a man who offered to save her parents, divorced, and then died in 1943, perhaps by suicide—the essay highlights the vulnerability of lives on the verge of catastrophe. Such a telling engages what Carolyn Steedman designates as “dust”: both the “obdurate set of beliefs” that construct an official story and the ephemeral affective dimensions that persist in the interstices of the small archive left behind. It shifts the temporality of testimony from the aftermath to the before, not to find a point of origin but to listen for the resonances and reverberations enabling a multiplicity of meanings to emerge. (MH and LS) Permission: Excerpt from Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, by Art Spiegelman, copyright © 1973, 1...