When Art Spiegelman published MAUS I in 1986, he transformed the medium of comics and greatly affected the American literary world. His work experimented with the traditional form of the comic strip at the same time that it altered forever the content associated with the medium. Spiegelman's choice to depict the Holocaust and its aftermath in a medium often associated (rightly or wrongly) with children, cartoons, and simple caricature changed both the landscape of the comic and that of Holocaust representation. Comics or "comix," as Spiegelman dubbed them, were suddenly taken much more seriously than ever before. MAUS I and II appealed to a broader audience than did the conventional comic strip. When MAUS won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (after the publication of the second volume in the series), Spiegelman's work drew even greater attention. Since the publication of this magnum opus, he has become one of the comix medium's greatest advocates, traveling the country with his Comix 101 presentation and arguing for the importance of the form.
Spiegelman was born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden. His parents, Anja and Vladek, who appear as central characters in MAUS, were refugees, survivors of the concentration camps and World War II. Using the medium of the comic and the figures of the cat and mouse to represent Nazi and Jew respectively, MAUS tells Spiegelman's parents' stories, as well as his own. After getting his start by editing and writing for the graphic magazine RAW, in which early drawings from MAUS were serialized, Spiegelman went on to draw covers for The New Yorker for a number of years, eventually falling out with the editors due to the political nature of many of his drawings.
How does Spiegelman's medium affect his message in MAUS? Is there something sacrilegious about his representation of the Holocaust? Do we read his work as straight memoir, fiction, or some hybrid in-between genre? Has he chosen the appropriate vehicle for telling this story
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=1611731&m=1617176
ReplyDeleteThis brief clip is an interesting story and interview with Spiegelman on the literary power of comics. This includes some audio clips from Spiegelman's recordings of his father's voice, which is quite haunting after reading Maus and the Hirsch article about the positioning of traumatic images.
Though Spiegleman’s decision to relate his parents’ experience in Poland during the Holocaust within the genre of the graphic novel might easily have come across as “sacrilegious,” he manages to avoid offending his readers through his skillful handling of the subject matter. This has, I think, in large part to do with the meta-fictional, memoir-like quality of the novel. Instead of simply giving us the story of Vladek and Anja’s experience during WWII—which might have seemed exploitative and even, perhaps, to those of us who’ve read many Holocaust stories, somewhat hackneyed—we see instead Spiegelman, the writer and graphic artist, struggling to come to terms with not only his parents’ horrific past, but also his father’s overbearing personality. While, for instance, the memoir-like aspect of the novel allows Spiegelman to “get away with” many depictions of his father as the “stereotypical Jew,” his use of self-reflexivity throughout the text enables him to address the problems inherent in such a depiction. What’s more, on page 201, he comments on the guilt and inner turmoil that has resulted from his having received critical acclaim for the first half of Maus. Thus the novel becomes a story not just of Vladek and Anja’s experience during the Holocaust but of Art Spiegelaman’s attempt to record that history. And it is this self awareness, I think, that ultimately lends the novel so much of its gravity, and rescues it from appearing sacrilegious.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Hirsch's point that Spiegelman's images are both familiar but distant, allowing the reader to gain access to a deeper understanding of the images that does not rely on repetition. Instead of the repetition of the same images making us numb to the significance of the event, the repetition in cartoon form actually allows the reader to view the image as if for the first time. To me, this is not sacrilegious to the holocaust tragedy, but it allows the reader to access the history with a new understanding. The photographic images are so horrific, they can impose a post-traumatic effect of rejecting and forgetting the image to protect the psyche. The cartoons allow the images to affect the reader, but not turning the reader away.
ReplyDeleteNicole, I agree with your point about the cartoons allowing the images to affect the reader without turning the reader away. Even in viewing the images of bulldozed bodies in Hirsch, my impulse was to turn away. And yet with Maus, I can see both sides of the sacrilegious argument. It all depends on how someone wants to mourn or engage with the Holocaust.
ReplyDeleteA survivor, a survivor's son, a victim's daughter, a distant kid in a history class - all these people will bring different expectations to the tragedy. Comics, or, as Spiegelman coins, comix, traditionally get stereotyped as a "light" genre, the stuff of funny papers and fantasy. So if someone who holds such a stereotype comes across Maus, his or her impulse might be to cast it off as offensive and belittling. Which is a strange irony (and perhaps this is a stretch), considering how stereotypes and belief systems were what drove the Germans to their atrocity.
But then I think of Spiegelman and his process for creating Maus. Without even considering all the meta-narrative here for a moment, think of what it feels like for an artist to put pen to paper and create something where there was nothing. Spiegelman is recreating a history that is both personal and awful, and even though he is using animals as stand-ins for humans, such a substitution likely didn't make the illustration of corpses and gas chambers all that much easier.
I agree with Leah regarding the need for Maus to have a certain self-reflexive element that allows for Spiegelman to comment on his depictions. Without this layer, Maus couldn’t possibly do the same work. Yet I ultimately found the metafictional aspects much less disruptive than in some of the other texts we’ve read this term. I think the reasons for this lesser degree of disruption are many, but I suspect that in part the medium of the graphic novel offers greater narrative flexibility, primarily because of the layering that Elmwood mentions. Spiegelman prepares readers for this layering (i.e. he teaches readers how to read his text) early in the narrative. When Vladek explains his youthful good looks to Artie, he says, “People always told me I looked just like Rudolph Valentino” (15). The panel for this depiction shows Vladek in the contemporary timeline talking to Artie while riding a stationary bicycle. A movie poster in the background advertises The Sheik. I assume the poster is not really there on the wall but is a projection of Vladek’s memory. The fact that the actor and actress are portrayed as mice further lends itself to the idea of projection because this would appear to be Vladek’s inserting himself into the iconic actor’s role. This panel does something interesting with time because the poster and the movie to which Vladek refers are not even from the time period he’s engaged in relating to Artie, but would be instead from more than ten years prior to Vladek’s narrative. In one panel, Spiegelman crosses a number of chronological boundaries in a manner that fluidly leads readers into the next panel. Perhaps this is why this particular panel lacks the border that defines and delimits most of the panels in the text. This method of layering becomes more important to the text itself when it’s used to in panels that reflect the experience of Auschwitz. The maps Elmwood discusses are a good example of this layering. The opening panel for Maus II shows an overhead view of Auschwitz and Auschwitz II, but these are partially obstructed by two other layers: a map of New York and a picture of Vladek dressed in prison uniform (166). Here again, a cross-section of time is represented and the fact that Vladek in uniform is superimposed over the other layers (forming the “top” layer) seems to imply that his status as prisoner in Auschwitz overshadows his status as immigrant or U.S. citizen. In a text-only medium, these disruptions would disrupt the narrative a great deal more than they do here, so despite the fact that the metafictional aspect is in many ways the story in Maus, it seems to me that the medium lessens the disruptions that are typical of the metafictional technique.
ReplyDeleteI’m intrigued by how the book examines issues of its composition and reception within itself. In Leah, Nicole, and Jason’s comments, we see how the genre of the graphic novel and the genre of Holocaust narratives can be fraught with numerous issues of imperfect representation in cartoon forms and missing records and documents regarding the Holocaust in a sense draw attention to how all retellings suffer. But instead of annihilating the evidence as Vladek does before Artie can obtain the mother’s diaries and letters, Artie struggles to tell the story while drawing attention to its flaws of representation, documentation, and varying reception of the work. Spiegelman’s self-awareness of the narrative he’s creating and the fact that he’s making money and getting recognition through rendering the atrocities of the Holocaust while also facing reporters who are asking “what message you want them to get from your book” (202). The metaphor of using varieties of animals rendered as nationality is troubled in interesting ways that draw attention to its flaws as well and ameliorate the effect of the metaphor breaking down, whether it happens when “real” dogs and cats enter the scene or when characters wear masks of different nationalities. He shows how all these animal identities are somewhat “put on” as masks.
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