Family History

I am well aware

that by no means

equal repute

attends the narrator

and the doer of deeds.

—Sallust

Reading Maus seems to have awakened in me thoughts about how one preserves the past, about historicity, truth, honesty, and memory. Why do people attempt to record versions of events that happened to them, their family members, complete strangers, fictional characters? The cautious optimist in me would like to believe that people do these things for unselfish reasons—that the whole game of creating literature about the past is more than simply meticulous narcissism. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in his book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (which is in many ways a critical work about the historicity of such events as the Holocaust) writes: "Human beings participate in history both as actors and as narrators. The inherent ambivalence of the word 'history' in many modern languages, including English, suggests this dual participation. In vernacular use, history means both the facts of the matter and a narrative of those facts, both 'what happened' and 'that which is said to have happened.' The first meaning places the emphasis on the sociohistorical process, the second on our knowledge of that process or on a story about that process." So if he’s right, then where does this leave the backward gazing among us? How aware are we supposed to be of the process of creating historical forms when we create those forms? What is the distinction between the two? What is lost in translation? Did something happen if it was never recorded? Where does non-fiction fall into the category of history? What means does graphic non-fiction have to convey is historical content? In Maus, the world we’re given by Spiegelman is highly fictive, if not entirely fictional. The characters are “real people,” one could suppose, but they’re conveyed as animals, which inflects the whole project with an air of fictionalism. Why did Spiegelman do this? Where does he see himself in Trouillot’s mode: how wide a stance does it take to straddle the line between historical subject and narrator?

When I was reading the first volume, I actually stopped and thought about whether I should attempt something similar to this project. Should I ask to record the life stories of older members of my family? Would it seem like I’m not-so-subtly suggesting death is on the way? I know that, if I did lose a loved one, and if I let the opportunity to talk to them about the things they lived through pass, I would regret it. I was pleasantly surprised to be tasked with this post, since the question of my own family’s history had been on my mind. I know that if I did choose to make a serious project of it, I would have to resort to prose. I completely lack the ability to draw. What would I discover? What would I discover about myself? These are my questions, my fears, my hesitations.