Graphic Memoirs Delve into Trauma and Memory
Two recent graphic memoirs—Artificial: A Love Story by Amy Kurzweil and Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family by Jordan Mechner—voice the perspective of a second or third-generation survivor concerned with the question of preserving and transcending traumatic memory. Both Mechner and Kurzweil harness the intimacy of the comics medium to tell powerful stories about their grandparents’ Holocaust experiences and splice together past and present to tell their own personal stories as well.
Art Spiegelman’s Maus: My Father Bleeds History proved that comics are well-suited for second-generation graphic memoirs. As Hillary Chute, expert on comics and graphic narratives and an English professor at Northeastern, writes, “Within the pages of Maus, the horror of Vladek’s past—the murderous disaster of the Holocaust that Spiegelman has called ‘the center of history’s hell’—invades the present, refusing to stay separate or closed off.”
Comics’ panels and boxes visually depict the working of time and memory, writes Chute, with “the ability to powerfully layer moments of time, like in a single panel from Spiegelman’s Maus, in which the legs of girls hanged in Auschwitz in the 1940s dangle from the tops of trees in the Catskills as the Spiegelman family drives to the supermarket in the 1970s.” The cartoonist can experiment with the flow of time by changing the size and shape of panels on the page, and can tell multiple stories simultaneously: “the cartoonist gets to experiment with presenting time, with duration and motion.”
The frames on a comic page mimic the fragmentation of memory. Retelling his father’s story in the comics medium allowed Spiegelman to vicariously experience, and honor, his father’s memories of the Holocaust, while at the same time showing how trauma from the Holocaust is epigenetic.
The comics’ ability to feature multiple frames on a page allows authors to tell multiple stories. In Artificial, Kurzweil tells three simultaneously, that of her father, grandfather and herself, splicing them together so the reader follows the trajectories of three generations in her family, all trying to preserve the past. As Amy tries to craft a life as an artist and falls in love, her father Ray tries to create a chatbot to re-animate and preserve his deceased father, Frederic, a conductor and pianist from Vienna, who fled the Nazis a month before Kristallnacht in 1938. To create this chatbot, the author’s father, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, has been saving his own father’s papers in storage (both books have a character who stores, or perhaps hoards). He asks his daughter, Amy, to help him.
In Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family, Jordan Mechner layers together several stories from the past and present: the book is a re-telling (or re-playing) of how he created the video game Prince of Persia, the failing of his marriage, along with conversations with his father who fled Austria in WWII, and his grandfather’s voice, re-telling his experience fighting in World War II. His grandfather’s story appears in typewritten font, as his words are straight from a memoir, which Mechner, in the story, is in the process of uploading to WordPress, to save it for posterity. Mechner’s father escaped Vienna at age seven, fleeing with his own father to France, and then staying with a relative while his father fled to Cuba, with the hopes of eventually getting to America.
Both Kurzweil and Mechner take advantage of how the panels on a page can be arranged into what Chute calls “boxes of time.” In one page of Replay, after we read about how Germany bombed France, where the author’s father sought safety as a child, we see two frames side by side—on the right, the author staring in the present at his laptop, pondering his father’s experience, while on the left, an image of the author’s grandfather, gazing out to sea while he imagines his son pleading with him to take him with him to Cuba. Our eyes see both frames simultaneously, and feel the
emotions of two people, past and present, blended for a moment.
Mechner’s father embraced repression of emotions as a survival strategy, telling himself when he was a child in war-time France that he was dead. In creating this re-play of his father’s story, Mechner releases these emotions. Mechner’s creation of the video game Prince of Persia mirrors his act of writing this graphic narrative. He creates a “shadow man” for the game’s hero whom the hero has to defeat: “Only by embracing your shadow self can you become whole,” he writes. In the same way, only by re-telling the story of his grandfather and father, coming to terms with the trauma, can he, in effect, become whole.
Preserving memories, though, becomes a stumbling block between Mechner and his wife. At one point, Mechner’s wife (spoiler: they divorce) critiques his packing up possessions into storage before he moves to France. She would rather he focus on the present, saying, “the darkness stored in these boxes is palpable. It’s the physical embodiment of your family’s shadow energy. Four generations of pain and trauma.” This reference to boxes reads as a nod to the boxes (or frames) on the pages of this book, which contain darkness, pain and trauma. But unlike boxes in storage, the boxes on the page allow readers to experience his family’s story, creating catharsis rather than repression.
Kurzweil’s memoir also serves as a way to preserve memory. She is drawn to her father’s attempt to keep his own father’s memory alive. She, too, has a desire to re-animate her ancestors. As she writes, “Fred and Hannah are the artists of my ancestry, the soul rising from the doctors, scientists, and engineers of my father’s line, the only line that I can draw clearly into history, since all my mother’s extended family perished in the Holocaust.” This, too, is a self-referential moment in the memoir, a metaphor referring to her book project: Amy’s hand-drawn lines on each page allow her to re-animate her father’s family line.
Early in Artificial, Amy talks to her boyfriend about the Greeks’ concept of kleos, “It means literally ‘to have one’s name on the public’s lips.’ It’s their path to immortality. Like if you can be spoken about forever, you never really die.” She envisions an immortality that centers on love: “I hope the story of my self is that love spreads me out across bodies and cities”. She realizes that love is trying to seek to understand someone, to understand their patterns just as her father does in order to create the chatbot. Each of these books, then, is a labor of love, an effort to understand those who came before us in order to transcend the self and the trauma of the past, and move forward into the future.
