Cultural Critique

Cultural Critique 55 (2003) 101-151

Memory as Forgetting
The Problem of the Postmodern in Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Spiegelman's Maus

Eric Berlatsky

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In one of poststructuralism's most-quoted statements, Jacques Derrida declared in his Of Grammatology that "there is no outside-the-text" (1974, 158). While Derrida (and many of his deconstructive followers) are principally interested in revealing the internal contradictions of foundational philosophy based on binary divisions (or at least the ways in which such philosophies have been traditionally interpreted), his above declaration also suggests the impossibility of finding truth, not merely in its transcendental philosophical sense, but also in the possibility of a material and historical referent. This assertion of the textuality of existence and the difficulty/impossibility of accessing a reality outside of representation and signification were not (at least initially) applied specifically to "history" as a concept by Derrida, but its implications in the postmodern world still resonate, particularly, as we shall see, in the case of traumatic events and historical incidents that serve as sites of communal and individual identification for oppressed peoples. Likewise, one of the most prominent philosophers of the postmodern, Jean-François Lyotard, asserts that postmodernism (and modernism itself) ¹ takes place in the realization that Enlightenment rationalism and scientific positivism are not tied to objective truth and reality, but rather are merely "language games," like narrative itself, that create "the effects of reality," that, in a postmodern age, become "the fantasies of realism" (Lyotard 1984, 74). In this context, "realistic" fiction, "objective" history, and positivist science not only become misled in their attempts to configure the world as an eminently understandable and coherent [End Page 101] system, they also become ideologically charged deceptive practices that posit an immanent and essentialized world where none exists (a realization that is linked to Derrida in its emphasis on textuality and "language games" rather than on reality and essential truth). ²

This postmodern/poststructural emphasis on the "real" as inextricable from the constructed and the textual has also found its way into both historiography and historical fiction (particularly in that breed of postmodernist fiction labeled "historiographic metafiction" by Linda Hutcheon) with potentially troubling social and political repercussions. This is particularly the case because of the ways in which the historical real is a site of political contestation.

In this essay, I investigate the ways in which the inaccessibility of the real and the truth as discussed above has political and social repercussions in the "politics of memory." To do so, I look closely at two works of postmodernist fiction ³ that deal explicitly with the politics of memory and what Lyotard has labeled the "withdrawal of the real" (1984, 79). Both Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Art Spiegelman's Maus propose and illustrate the traditionally central importance of both individual and collective memory in advancing the political interests of oppressed peoples, particularly in protecting a communality and shared identification from the effacing powers of "official" or institutional history. However, both authors also point to the ways in which memory itself (both individual and collective) is inextricable from textuality and can itself be a mode of political oppression. In doing so, both authors foreground the difficulty for socially and politically oppressed peoples to participate in their own coherent and stable identity formation and representation through memory in an age identified as postmodern. Through the investigation of two texts preoccupied both with memory and with a postmodern aesthetic, I will show how they reveal how postmodernism can be not only productive in its destabilization of power, but also problematic in its difficulties in offering concrete and stable counterdiscourses that do not themselves participate in oppression. Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Spiegelman's Maus stage the problem of the postmodern ⁴ in the theater of memory by foregrounding memory's necessity in resisting power, while admitting its own tenuous ties to the real and its implication in the abuse...