Trauma and PTSD in Maus and A Gesture Life PDF

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Patel 1 Trauma and PTSD in Maus and a Gesture Life A dominant theme in the plethora of Holocaust literature and films is PTSD among the soldiers and their families. In Maus I and II, Spiegelman reinterprets and expands on the comic form and traditional mediums of telling history to express and relate his father's experiences. He explores and addresses the burden of traumatic memories of war veterans and the second generation of survivors. Prot posits that trauma victims are often unable to recall their trauma and are therefore present in their narratives only symptomatically (34). In A Gesture Life, Hata narrates the story of his experiences in the war. He reveals he is traumatized through his evasive voice, the novel’s disjointed chronology, and other characters' counter-narratives in the story. Hata develops a functional narrative to make up for the absence of the events that led to his trauma (Lee 235). However, he attempts to confine the intrusion of his trauma, making the narrative ultimately a story of his trauma repression. This paper will compare and contrast the themes of PTSD and trauma in A Gesture Life and Maus discussing the symptoms of suppressed trauma and its impact on individuals and families. “Trauma can haunt its victims forever and render them mute”, (Workman 255). Workman also posits that trauma victims’ narratives are attempted accounts of past events. Still, the trauma from the events is “so powerful as to overwhelm capacity for comprehension of those who live through them” (255). The feelings are therefore repressed and therefore transformed into an absence reasserting itself in distressingly symptomatic ways. Trauma victims attempt to move “retrospectively but not necessarily linearly from some current state of unease and blindness back toward some prior revelatory moment in which what was revealed was too heinous or ugly or frightening to give subsequent recognition to” (Workman 256). Therefore, in conversations with trauma victims, as Spiegel learns, it is a disjointed attempt to access what cannot be

Patel 2 accessed. Moreover, these conversations feel like attempts to access something that is secretly locked and cannot be accessed. Consequently, the victim accounts are fragmented and sometimes difficult to follow due to the absence of memories that lead to repression. In A Gesture Life, the protagonist is a self-proclaimed Japanese immigrant, Franklin Hata is born in Korea and now living a seemingly fulfilled life in America. While Hata has an evasive voice and involuntary intrusion of his past, the narrative is a structural representation of both the trauma and adoption theory. One of the most traumatizing memories he has is the death of K, a comforting woman he had known and grown fond of during the war. Incidentally, the death of K explains the reason for the lack of clear origins, which had traumatized Hata even before the beginning of the novel (Lee 230). He constantly refers to himself as a Japanese, except when K asks for his Korean name, he mentions in the narration of how he “had one at birth, naturally, but it was never used by anyone, including my real parents, who … wished as much as I that I become wholly and thoroughly Japanese” (Lee 235). Moreover, in the same paragraph, he remembers how “the day the administrator came for me was the last time I heard their … birth-name for me” (Lee 236). This implication was used regardless of the fact that his claims develop a dissonance within the narrative. It indicates that his birth-parents' death is no more than a story he created to distance himself from his Korean origin. The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment states that some trauma survivors have problems regulating their emotions, such as anxiety, anger, shame, and sadness, especially if they experienced trauma at a young age (47). Consequently, to block out the trauma, “some individuals find creative, healthy, and industrious ways to manage strong effect generated by trauma” (Center for Substance Abuse Treatment 15). Sometimes the brain will hide the memories, keeping them from consciously accessing to protect the individual from the emotional

Patel 3 pain of recalling the events (Center for Substance Abuse Treatment 15). Conversely, Hata is an unreliable narrator because he had shielded himself from the pain of his trauma through selfdeceiving techniques. It becomes a characteristic of Hata’s voice throughout the narrative. Additionally, Hata’s voice is distant, and he narrates the stories as if he was not experiencing them himself. For instance, when a comfort woman commits suicide, he narrates the events as though he had no presence himself. Even the events that should rightly elicit some reaction from him remain unremarked, “complaining that the wait would be longer, as now there was one fewer than before” (Lee 109). He, however, demonstrates some emotion when there is mention of his origin. For instance, when the corporal at the military camp “crudely referred to the comfort girl as chosen-pi, a base anatomical slur which also denoted her Koreanness,” Hata remarks that “there was a casualness to his usage … which stopped me cold” (Lee 250-251). Here, he subtly but undeniably marks the word “choice” with emotion lacking in most of his narrative. In the Japanese army, Hata is oppressed and faces numerous challenges. However, his trauma does not just stem from the events in the army but also his origin. In retrospect, Hata understands that he is lost when he references to himself in K’s presence “[I]f I can speak for that young man now … He did not know it, but he hoped that if he could simply be near to her … he might somehow be found” (Lee 240). It is a rare admission of how lost he felt and how badly he wanted to find himself. His self-deception becomes an issue when he meets K because he attempts to describe himself as Japanese and develops a narrative for those around him. There is, however, a clash between his real identity and the fictional story. He therefore objectified and saw her as a means to access his Korean identity and ensure the future identity of his narrative. As a result, he continuously experiences involuntary remembrance, which interrupts his fictional narrative and creates an unchronological structure

Patel 4 where his past becomes dominant despite his attempts to avoid addressing it. Workman suggests that this “intrusion of past into present results in the conflation of time that is so characteristic of trauma, with the consequence that its victims are arrested in some gossamer-like but inescapable web, thereby inhibited from any movement into the future” (Lee 258). The physical merging of the paragraphs demonstrates Hata’s Conflating of past and present and that he cannot hold his memories to make sense of them, but he faces their re-emergence, causing him to be possessed by his trauma. Similarly, Maus narrates Vladek and Anja two survivors of Auschwitz who resettle in New York. Art, their son, writes a record of his father’s memories. Vladek demonstrates signs of PTSD and trauma. Despite surviving the Holocaust, Vladek loses his first son to the Nazis, loses his wife to suicide, and barely escapes the Holocaust alive (Spiegelman 110). He expresses all the signs of trauma throughout his narration and in the little things he does. His past experiences can be tied to his Frugalness, tidiness, work ethic, and independence. Mala constantly complains about Vladek having so much money saved up, but he refuses to spend it. Art walks into his father’s kitchen and finds Mala crying at the table. She tells him that his father treats her like a maid. Vladek only gives her $50 per month, and she is forced to use her savings for most things (Spiegelman I 98). He has hundreds of thousands of dollars at the bank but will not spend any money. As Art states, his stingy nature is linked to the Holocaust when Vladek’s store was robbed, and all his possessions were taken from him. He and his family had nothing, and they relied on food stamps. Being at the point where he had to literary starve during meals had a great impact on Vladek. He saves money so that he never puts himself or his family through that situation again. Furthermore, one time while walking with Art, Vladek picks some phone wires from a trashcan. Art asks him why he cannot just buy the phone wires to which Vladek says,

Patel 5 "Pssh. Why always you want to buy when you can find!?" (Spiegelman I 118). His thrifty and stingy nature is expressed throughout the narrative. Additionally, Gestapo, the official Nazi police, had pure hatred for the Jews and would need minimal provocation to kill them. The Jews, therefore, had to keep their items organized and “out of the way” so as not to give the Gestapo any reason to be upset with them. Therefore the anxiety to keep things neat is a value permanently instilled in Vladek. Vladek, in the narrative, is bothered by dirt and feels the need to keep his spaces neat and clean constantly. When Art accidentally spills cigarette ash on the living room floor, Vladek is upset and berates him for making a mess. "Mala could let it sit like this for a week and never touch it" (Spiegelman I 65). He continues to state that his ill-health kept him from cleaning the mess which bothered him. Like Hata, Vladek also experiences selective memory because he chooses only to remember the good things about his wife (Spielgelman I 56). However, it is clear through her constant need for love from Art and her apparent suicide that she was depressed and insecure. He wishes that she was there with him. He says that Mala is driving him crazy because she keeps asking about his will. "If Anja were here, everything would be different with me" (Spielgelman I, 75). Vladek also compares Anja to Lucia and insists that he chose her because she was the image of the perfect wife for him. Unlike Lucia, Anja was neat, wealthy, fluent in various languages, and intelligent. Anja was also the only woman able to bring out his generous and heroic characteristics from him. Like Hata, Vladek does not have a chronological thought process and does not want to speak of the real events that occurred. First, Vladek does not wish to speak about his wife, Anja. He avoids the topic for as long as possible and only tells Art the “good” parts. He also refuses to speak about what Anja had written in her notebooks which could be

Patel 6 because he genuinely does not remember memory suppression) or that the memories are too painful for him. Memory suppression is a common symptom of PTSD as the brain tries to compensate for traumatic memories as a survival mechanism (Prot 29). A Gesture Life and Maus are narratives that demonstrate the impact of trauma on victims of war and the Holocaust. While both Vladek and Hata try to assimilate into society, the disjointed narrations allow readers to delve into the impact of the trauma on them and their families. The novels offer great insight into the traumatized mind where the literary structures themselves are dominant keys to understanding. By mirroring real victims' accounts like Hata and Vladek, readers are forced to understand the challenges accounts of trauma pose for both victims and those forced to listen.

Works Cited Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. "Understanding the impact of trauma." Trauma-informed care in behavioral health services. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (US), 2014. National Center for Biotechnology Information, June 16, 2021 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/

Patel 7 Lee, Chang-rae. A Gesture Life. Granta Books, 2001. Prot, Katarzyna. "Late effects of trauma: PTSD in Holocaust survivors." Journal of Loss and Trauma 15.1 (2009): 28-42. Tandfonline, retrieved June 16, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1080/15325020902925506 Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A survivor's tale. Vol. 1. Pantheon, 1997. Workman, Mark E. “Obscured Beginnings in Personal Narratives of Sexual Jealousy and Trauma.” Narrative, vol. 12, no. 3, 2004, pp. 249-262. Project Muse, retrieved June 16, 2021 doi:10.1353/nar.2004.0017....