Thoughts on Art Spiegelman's Maus and Michael Frayn's Copenhagen by Janet Oakes April 2007

Maus and Copenhagen were most interesting readings for our last 'Reason and Passion' class in light of our ongoing debate regarding optimism and pessimism about the human condition.

We end on a decidedly pessimistic note with these works that address two of the most horrific tragedies of the 20th century, the Holocaust and the Atom bomb, both irrefutable evidence of human aggression and destructiveness. The enlightenment ideals of reason and progress are shattered in the wake of these catastrophic events. Yet both Spiegelman and Frayn bear testament to the resilience and brilliance of the human spirit by creating beautiful, complex works of art that grapple with and transform these horrors, helping us to struggle for insight and understanding rather than turn away in apathy and despair. The class noted that these are only two examples of the extremes of man's inhumanity, other examples were Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia, neighbor slaughtering neighbor in Yugoslavia, the decimation of our first nations peoples, and the devastation and destruction (from drugs) in Vancouver's Downtown East Side. 

Maus and Copenhagen pick up the questions regarding morality that thread throughout the tapestry of our readings (Kant, Charles Taylor, Jane Jacobs). Are we all culpable by ignoring/allowing these horrors? Are we all capable of committing these atrocities? Why does man turn against man in these ways? In Maus and Copenhagen we see the limits of reason, a perversion of reason, reason utilized to increase the efficiency of destruction. 

Art Spiegelman's layered, two part, graphic memoir, Maus, chronicles his parents story as they endured and survived the Holocaust, and also describes his difficult relationship with his father and the intergenerational effects of the trauma. Maus portrays the brutal efficiency of the concentration camps: the order, the careful record keeping. This perversion of reason, focusing obsessively on detail and efficiency (like the privileging of economy, performance and productivity over human life that Dickens critiques in Hard Times) seems to distance those committing the atrocities from the reality of their actions. Mechanistically following procedures provides a sense of competence and achievement, but reason is only applied instrumentally, the Nazis are in denial about the profound irrationality at the heart of their actions.

Spiegelman often mentions the apprehension he feels related to trying to express these inexpressible horrors. Like the Nazis, he gets lost in detail; he also has ways of distancing to make the trauma more manageable. His work is Art Therapy, turning passive to active, not by identifying with the aggressor, but by drawing. The drawing is masterful. He masters chaos and destruction, unspeakable horror, and transforms it into a work of art. He titrates the trauma, breaking it down into manageable units, containing it in the small boxes of the comic book format, so he/we only have to look at one little piece at a time. By presenting the characters as animals, cartoon classics, cat and mouse, he makes it more accessible. 

It is in the nature of cats and mice to be predators and prey. This displacement disguises and distances the truth that it is also in the nature of humans to be predators and prey, that human beings cruelly brutalize and murder other human beings. Eros and Thanatos do battle through Spiegelman. He works through the horrific details of the holocaust, his mother's suicide, his survivor guilt and struggle with depression. Maus, his triumph of creation over destruction, tells the story of how love can conquer.

Just as Maus employs aspects of reason to remember, reconstruct and understand past events, Michael Frayn's characters (Heisenberg, the leading physicist of the German atomic bomb team, his old teacher/mentor Bohr and Bohr's wife Margrethe) meet after death in Copenhagen to try to remember, reconstruct, and understand what had transpired when they met in Nazi occupied Denmark. Their conversation provokes our questions about their motivations, innocence and quilt and questions about how self interest limits of our own morality. 

The postmodern form of the play, replaying three possible versions rather than following a linear narrative, parallels the physics of these scientists. Nothing can be determined with certainty in Quantum Mechanics, only a statistical probability can be known. The 'Uncertainty Principle', explains that it is not possible to determine the position and momentum of a particle at the same instant, and 'Complimentarity' shows things to have contradictory properties (i.e. light is both waves and particles). The play attests to how these paradoxes also exist when trying to understand human actions and intentions, as Heisenberg says, " it's like being in a dream. You can never quite focus the precise details of the scene around you." (7) 

The play also explores the indeterminacy of the human memory; Bohr, " a curious sort of diary memory is." (6) As Frayn says in the postscript, "What people say about their own motives and intentions, even if they are not caught in the traps that entangled Heisenberg, is always subject to question - as subject to question as what anybody else says about them. Thoughts and intentions, even one's own - perhaps one's own most of all - remain shifting and elusive." (99)

These Physicists thought and worked at the cutting edge of science and reason. But even these most intelligent humans struggle with blinders, selfishness and even destructiveness. They have difficulty facing the profoundly immoral underlying purpose for their science, the development of atomic weapons. Maus and Copenhagen reveal the limits of human reason, how denial flaws reason at its foundation. With the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb, the unexamined premise that is necessary to kill other groups, nationalities or races reveals a profound irrationality in human nature. What is this irrational emotion or "passion" at the heart of us? Is it fear, fear of the 'other', or aggression, a murderous rage? Do these human atrocities confirm Freud's theory that Thanatos, an aggressive, destructive drive, is a fundamental part of human nature? Are the tensions between our individual survival instinct and the needs of the group irreconcilable? 

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud calls our tendency to project our hostility and destructiveness onto another nearby group 'the narcissism of small differences'. Heisenberg expresses something of this when he says, " We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets. Never to be reconciled, to our fellow countrymen, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family, to our children." (78) Resolving the conflict between these loyalties and moral dilemmas, between concern for one's own survival, protection of those closest to one, and the good of mankind as a whole are the great challenges to human reason. Michael Frayn describes the limits of reason in his postscript, " - the whole possibility of saying or thinking anything about the world, even the most objective, abstract aspects of it studied by the natural sciences, depends on human observation, and is subject to the limitations which the human mind imposes, this uncertainty in our thinking is fundamental to the nature of the world." (99)