Since the advent of digital technology,
access to information has been on a trajectory toward ubiquity. If there is a
story that has been told or a piece of information collected somewhere through
some experiment, it almost certainly lives within the framework of moving
electrons and a vast cataloguing system of 1s and 0s. Strangely, we can’t actually
see what we call ‘1s and 0s’; they
are simply mathematical representations used to coordinate the translation and
transportation of those electrons. In other words, we have since developed methods
of representation as well as applications that were in a sense unknowable even 170 years ago when a
large portion of the mathematics utilized in the digital realm—Boolean algebra—was
being established. Perhaps that’s the way unknowability
tends—from the past toward the future and not necessarily the other way around.
The exceptions generally predate written language making any of these storylines an inference regardless of whether or not
evidence is presented. So, to the extent that we can look at such evidence of
written historical records, ancient artwork, translated ancient languages,
etcetera; the past is knowable. Of course, this doesn’t account for the accuracy or truthfulness of that evidence but it does give us something to
know.
One
of the most remarkable things about language is that there is an unfathomable
number of combinations of words. That is, there is an infinitude of ways to say
something. So, to claim that something is unspeakable
makes little to no sense. Even if we are referring to the sense of
unwillingness to say something out of remorse, disgust, or other emotional
quality, that does not diminish the undeniable nature of our ability to
actually speak about it or represent it in some way. The very same technology
that was used to produce this paper, with all kinds of strange things happening
in an unseen yet mutually agreed upon as real dimension, can be used to
represent interpretations of our mutually experienced reality through, for
example, word processing programs. But, it doesn’t end there! New realities can be created and
represented, too. Many blockbuster movies nowadays rely heavily upon
computer-generated-imagery (CGI) to supplement footage of actors and actresses
in real-world locations. Sometimes entire environments are digitally created
using footage shot in front of green or blue screens. The point here is that we
have reached an age in which anything
can be virtually represented utilizing the latest advancement in technology.
So, why do we still print books?
Quite
simply, books are tangible. Although we consider what goes on behind these
screens a sort of reality, it certainly is a far cry from actually picking up a
book and reading from it. Processing the information as it is presented to us
on a two dimensional screen is much different than processing information from
a three dimensional object we can hold in our hands. This doesn’t necessarily
mean that one medium is superior to the other; such a description is reserved
for personal preference. However, it can confidently be asserted that both of
these mediums present opportunities for interpretations of what can be
considered “real”. For example, the existence of the Internet has manifested a
common theme of social networking that is generally accepted as real. But, it’s not real; it’s a fictitious realm. Yet, our entire society appears
to have embraced this fictitious realm as the
only reality that matters. People are “friends” with thousands of people
they don’t even know as if that number establishes some sort of significance.
It doesn’t. Again, it’s not real.
Maus represents the struggle of taking a
difficult subject in our real-world and making it palatable even if it means
creating an entirely new reality to do it. That’s exactly what Spiegelman did here.
Perhaps alluding to an overarching theme of dehumanization, Spiegelman chose
specific animals to represent the different ethnicities in this work—cats for
the Nazis; mice for the Jews; pigs for the Poles; and dogs for the Americans.
It is practically a given growing up in a modern industrialized nation to have
been introduced to the horrors of the Holocaust at some point in the form of
one representation or another. Spiegelman uses a rather unique melding of three
storylines—his writing the book; his father’s storytelling; and his father’s
story itself—with a comic book/graphic novel form which offers a realness that
perhaps would not have been achieved had the book been written in a traditional
biographical format. A particular moment in the story that stood out was on
page 232 when Vladek is talking about the cremation pits. “The holes were big,”
he tells Art, “so like the swimming pool of the Pines Hotel here. And train
after train of Hungarians came.” The frame then switches back to the past and shows
in a slightly larger frame bodies being thrown into burning pits reading, “And
those what finished in the gas chambers before they got pushed in these graves,
it was the lucky ones. The others had
to jump in the graves while still they were alive…” Then, in an almost surreal
expansion of this most devastating reality, the largest frame at the bottom of
the page shows flames engulfing bodies, three of which appear to be screaming
in agony: “Prisoners what worked there poured gasoline over the live ones and
the dead ones. And the fat from the burning bodies they scooped and poured
again so everyone could burn better” (p 232). We know these horrible things happened. But still we ask ourselves how in the world could this possibly be real?
That’s the distinctively human caveat: even in the face of evidence, we
individually struggle to accept certain things as real. So when we talk about things being real, what we mean is real to
us. Maus makes the Holocaust real to
us.
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