’Life beyond all biography’ : approaches to postmemory problems by Art Spiegelman, Jerzy Kosinski and Haruki Murakami

Abstract

Art Spiegelman, Jerzy Kosinski and Haruki Murakami, under varying classifications and claims to biographical truth, have written testimonies not of their experience, but rather the imagined experienced of others. While we might call one fact and one fiction because the author, or their savvy publisher, has categorised them on a certain .side of the ledger, these statements belie the historical basis of many fictions and the role of fictionalisation in non-fictional accounts. This thesis is an investigation of the ambiguous position of postmemory accounts in literary form, of secondary witnesses who produce narratives as testimony. Postmemory, as defined by Marianne Hirsch, describes those 'whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation', a previous generation themselves 'shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated'. This thesis draws upon a similar historical base to Hirsch's study, using the abundant discourse surrounding the persecution of Jews by Nazism and the commemorative culture of 'the Holocaust'; through a highly documented example of historical trauma and its consequences we might better understand primary and secondary testimonial texts and their origins. Apart from the three texts in question - Spiegelman's Maus, Kosinski's The Painted Bird, and Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - and pertinent material surrounding their production, this thesis also employs critiques written concerning witnessing - in particular texts by Giorgio Agamben and, to a lesser extent, Maurice Blanchot - to expand and elucidate the problems of postmemory. What appears certain from this is that the postmemory account seeks to restore, replicate or reveal an imagined fullness, lost in the incident itself, lost to the unsatisfactory articulations of primary witnesses. Each author, dominated by a history they are divided from, illustrates a different solution to their belated position; each shows the necessity of overstatement when articulating trauma, the need for fictionalisation when testifying to 'life beyond all biography' (Agamben 143).