Maus Overview Materials

Art Spiegelman’s

MAUS

Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”

Art Spiegelman’s

MAUSVolume 1: My Father Bleeds History

Published 1986Recommended level: Freshman

6 chapters?

Supplemental Materials:

• “The Last Days” documentary• “Labels” activity w/Quicktime video and handouts• “Pyramid of Hate” activity• “Grave of the Fireflies” film• Digital video cameras (required for iMovie project)

Themes addressed:• Intolerance• Isolation

Springboard Activity:

Vocabulary:Gestapo— The secret police of the Nazi regime in Germany.Parshas Truma— The week each year when the Truma portion of the Torah is read.Roh-eh Hanoled— A person who possesses the ability to see into the futureWehrmacht— The name used for the German armed forces between 1921 and 1945.


Biographical Notes on Art SpiegelmanTaken from the Lambiek Comiclopedia

www.lambiek.net

(b. 15/02/1948, Stockholm, Sweden)

Arthur Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and immigrated to the United States with his parents in his early childhood. Spiegelman studied cartooning in high school and started drawing professionally at age 16. Despite his parents wanting him to become a dentist, Art Spiegelman majored in art and philosophy at Harpur College. After leaving college in 1968, he joined the underground comix movement.

The following decade, Spiegelman became a regular contributor to various underground publications, including Real Pulp, Young Lust and Bizarre Sex. Under a variety of pseudonyms like Joe Cutrate, Skeeter Grant and Al Flooglebuckle he drew creations such as 'Ace Hole, Midget Detective', 'Nervous Rex', 'Douglas Comics' and 'Cracking Jokes'. In 1975, he and Bill Griffith co-founded Arcade, an influential comix revue with artists like Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson and Justin Green.

Besides his cartooning career, Art Spiegelman edited several comix magazines. In 1980, he started the magazine Raw with his wife Françoise Mouly. In the pages of Raw, Spiegelman helped reveal important American talents like Mark Beyer, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Charles Burns, David Mazzuchelli, J. Otto Seibold, Kaz and Jerry Moriarty, as well as artists from foreign shores such as Ever Meulen, Pascal Doury, Jacques Tardi and Joost Swarte, among others.

With the publication of 'Maus' in Funny Animals in 1972, Spiegelman's career really took flight. 'Maus' was based on the experiences of his parents as concentration-camp survivors. He expanded this premise into a full-blown graphic novel, which he drew from 1980 to 1986, with the Jews presented as mice and the Germans as cats (the Katzies). The book 'Maus: A Survivor's Tale', earned Spiegelman fame. He completed the tale in 1991 with 'Maus II: From Mauschwitz to the Catskills'. Art Spiegelman received the Pullitzer Prize in 1992.

In the 1990s, besides his illustration work for books such as 'The Wild Dance' and covers for The New Yorker, Spiegelman has used his editorial skills to put together the children's magazine 'Little Lit', containing comics for children and adults. Apart from the contributing members from Raw, this series contains work by artists outside the comics field, such as William Joyce, Maurice Sendak, Ian Falconer, Marc Rosenthal, Claude Ponti, David Macaulay, Barbara McClintock and Harry Bliss. In the wake of the disaster of 11 September 2001, which happened around the corner from where he lives (Greenstreet/Canalstreet), Spiegelman is making graphic novel about the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center in new York.


CHAPTER ONE: The Sheik

Characters:

Art “Artie” Spiegelman: Art narrates the story, drawing on interviews with his father regarding his experiences in World War II and, eventually, Auschwitz. Art’s relationship with his father is strained at times, but ultimately the two share a monumental bond, strengtrhened by the sharing of Vladek’s story.

Vladek Spiegelman: Art’s father and the true protagonist of the story. Vlad converses with his son, often stationed on his excercise bike, narrating the details of his experiences throughout the war. He is a cantankerly old man, stubborn and miserly at times, but very lonesome.

Françoise Spiegelman: Art’s wife.

Anja (Anna) Zylberberg-Spiegelman: Vladek’s first wife. She survived internement in the concentration camps but later committed suicide while Artie was still a child.

Richieu Spiegelman: Vladek and Anja’s first child. He is sent to _____ with the _____ to escape the camps but does not survive.

Mala: Vladek’s second wife and a survivor of the holocaust as well. Though she looks after Vladek and keeps the house up for him, the two clearly are at odds with one another, Mala believing that Vladek is too stingy with his money. She eventually leaves him, taking a large part of Vladek’s fortune with her.

Lucia Greenebrg: Vladek’s lover prior to his meeting Anja

Orbach: A family friend of the Spiegelmans who agrees to claim Vladek as his relative when he is released from the P.O.W. camp.

Mr. Ilzecki: A former customer of Vladek’s who purchases smuggled textiles from Vladek during the occupation.


CHAPTER 1/The Shiek

Summary of events:• Art goes to Rego Park to see his father, whom he acknowledges he is not that close with; the two have not seen each other

in nearly two years (10)• While Vladek rides his stationary bike, Art implores him to tell him about his past, wishing to write a book about his

father’s experiences (12)• Vladek begins his tale, detailing his life as a young man in Czestochowa working in textiles (12-13)• Vladek was involved with a woman named Lucia until introduced by his cousin to Anja Zylberberg (14-15)• After meeting Anja, the two strike up a relationship corresponding via phone and letters; Lucia was not amused (16-17)• At the end of 1936, Vladek moved to Sosnowiec and shortly thereafter he and Anja were married (19)• Vladek backtracks momentarily to recall a moment in which Lucia pleads with him to stay with her instead of going off

with Anja. In retaliation, Lucia sends a note to Anja, warning her of Vladek’s promiscuous lifestyle (20-21)• Vladek immediately goes to see Anja to clear his name and reputation (21-22)• The chapter ends with Vladek telling his son not to include the parts of his story about Lucia in his book; they are too

private. Art argues that it adds depth to his story but promises to keep it out (22-23)

Pre-reading questions:1. What might the title of this chapter be referring to?

Post-reading Questions:

1. Based on the first page, how would you characterize Art’s father, Vladek? What evidence do you have in support of this?2. How would you characterize Art’s relationship with his father? What leads you to this inference?3. What might be the purpose of Art including the details about Vladek’s relationship with Lucia?4. At this point in the narrative (the end of chapter one), what do you feel is the central focus of the story? (Think about

this— don’t just assume what it’s about— look for evidence in the text that supports your notion.)5. Looking at the title of this chapter, “The Shiek,” who or what do you think it’s describing? How is this an appropriate

description?

Points of Discussion:

Postcard of the Great Synagogue of Czestochowa c.1915, which was destroyed by the Nazis on Christmas Day, 1939. The site of the synagogue now houses a concert hall.


CHAPTER 2/The Honeymoon

Summary of events:• Art continues to make regular visits to his father to discuss his experiences (26)• He recalls Anja having a communist friend who requested she translate communist messages into German for him; when

the police come in search of the documents, Anja hides them with another tenant is the building who is subsequently arrested. (27-28)

• Vladek considers breaking the marriage, but Anja agrees to withdraw from such activities. In order to assure Vladek and Anja will be able to raise grandchildren in comfort, Anja’s father offers to purchase a textile factory for Vladek (29)

• Vladek’s first son, Richieu, was born in October of 1937, though he was not to survive the war (30)• Following Richieu’s birth, Anja fell into a depression; Vladek was to escort her to a sanitarium in Czechoslovakia while

Anja’s parents looked after Richieu (31)• On the train to Czechoslovokia they passed a small town where they witnessed for the first time the airing of the Nazi flag

(32)• Stories begin to surface between passengers of Jews throughout Germany falling victim to Nazi oppression (33)• Vladek stays with Anja at the sanitarium until she is well agaian, but when they return Vladek receives word that his

factory has been robbed (36)• Anja’s father helps Vladek reestablish his factory and things begin to stabilize again, however, riots and antisemitic fervor

has started to become a common occurence; still, Vladek opts to keep his family in Bielsko (37)• On August 24, 1939, Vladek discovers he’s been drafted by the Polish army; he immediately decides to send Anja and

Richieu to Sosnowiec (38)• Back in the present, Vladek gripes about his eyes and Artie decides to call it a day (39-40)

Pre-reading questions:


1. What do you think Anja means in the fifth panel on page 37 when she says “When it comes to Jews, the Poles don’t need much stirring up!”?

2. On the seventh panel of page 37 Anja suggests for the first time that maybe their family should consider moving out of Bielsko. Why do you think Vladek shrugs off the idea?


Nazi soldiers harass a Polish Jew by cutting off his beard.


CHAPTER 3/Prisoner of War

Summary of events:• Art begins visiting his father more frequently in order to continue collecting information for his book (43)• Vladek begins to recount his time in the army but interrupts himself to tell about his father putting him on a starvation

diet to keep him out of the army (44-46)• Vladek resumes his tale of being on the front lines, detailing an experience in which he first shot a German soldier,

wounding him at first but then continuing to shoot until the man died (47-48)• After two hours Vladek’s squadron is overcome by the Nazis taken to a P.O.W. camp where they are forced to work

retrieving the bodies of dead and wounded German soldiers (49-50)• Vladek and the other prisoners are transferred to a place near Nuremberg where the Jews are separated from the other

prisoners forced to do labor (51)• After several weeks Vladek and the other Jewish prisoners are moved to a larger P.O.W. camp where they are forced to live

in poorly insulated tents while the Polish prisoners are placed in heated cabins (53)• Vladek exercises and prays daily, also playing chess often and writing to Anja once a week (54)• Six weeks into his imprisonment, Vladek signs on for a labor assignment; he is ordered to make the land level by breaking

up large hills and using them fill in valleys (54-56)• One night, Vladek dreams his dead grandfather comes to tell him he will be freed from the work camp on Parshs Truma,

three months away (57)• True to his dream, on Parshas Truma the Jews in the work camp were rounded up and released to their families (58-59)• Vladek travels by train through Poland, passing through Sosnoiec and stopping finally in German-goverened Lublin (60)• In Lublin, Vladek is informed by Jewish authorities that just two days prior the Nazis had marched a group of 600 released

war prisoners into the forest and shot them all (61)• The Jewish authorities inform Vladek that they have been able to bribe the Germans to release a number of prisoners into

the homes of local Jews to be claimed as relatives; Vladek asks that a family friend, Orbach, be contacted (62)• Vladek is released into Orbach’s custody the next day, where he stays until he is able to convince a train conductor to

smuggle him back into Sosnowiec (64)• Vladek first stops at his parents’ house and finds that his mother is ill with cancer and his father has been harassed by the

Nazis, who forced him to cut off his beard (65)• Vladek is finally reunited with Anja and his son, Richieu, who is now two and a half years old (66)• As Vladek ends this part of his tale, he again grieves the loss of Anja and complains to Artie of Mala’s greediness (67)• As Artie is leaving, he searches for his coat, only to find Vladek has thrown it out, claiming it was too worn out and giving

him a naugahyde windbreaker instead (69)



1. How do you feel about the experience Vladek shares on page 48 in which he wounds and then kills a German soldier? Did he have any other options? Is this acceptable behavior during a war?

2. Why do you think Vladek shows the Nazi soldiers where the man he shot was lying on page 50? Why might this be an important moment in the story?

3. What is “Parshas Truma” and why is this so significant to Vladek?4. After Vladek is released from the P.O.W. camp, why is he transported to Lublin instead of Sosnowiec (pp.59-61)?5. On page 64 Vladek is depicted wearing a pig mask (Poles are depicted as pigs inMaus). What does this mean? How was

Vladek able to pose as a Pole without being found out?6. When Vladek returns home to see his parents, he finds his mother ailing of cancer and his father’s beard is gone. What

happened to his father’s beard and why do you think this was done?7. The last several pages of this chapter bring us back to the relationship betwen Artie and his father. What do these panels

tell us about their relationship?



CHAPTER 4/The Noose Tightens

Summary of events:• Artie resumes his dialog with his father, this time with a new tape recorder (74)• Back in Sosnowiec, Vladek’s family was still well off. Vladek, Anja, and Richieu, along with Anja’s parents, her

grandparents her older sister’s family, and another niece and nephew, were living together under one roof (74)• Anja’s grandmother complains that she is unable to get many of the ingredients she needs to cook properly, although

much can be acquired through the black market, though it is risky (75)• Vladek hears from Anja’s father that the textile factory, along with all other Jewish businesses, has been taken over by

“Aryan managers” (76)• After running in to an old acquaintance, Vladek is able to make some money selling textiles on the black market (77)• After witnessing a number of Jews hauled off by Nazis for failure to produce working papers, Vladek arranges to get a

priority work card from a friend in a tin shop (78)• Over the next year, resources continue to become scarce and the Nazis wantonly take furninshings and other household

possessions from the Jews (79)• Narrowly escaping a brutal mob scene at the train station one day, Vladek is protected by Mr. Ilzecki, who hides Vladek in

his apartment (80)• While in hiding, Ilzecki proposes sending their children to a Polish friend where the boys would be safe, but when Vladek

returns home and broaches the topic with Anja, she furiously opposes the idea (81)




Art Spiegelman Interview by Christopher Monte Smith

BookSense.com: You've been writing and illustrating comic books since the first flowering of alternative comics in San Francisco in the 1960s. What is it about the art form that satisfies you? Are there things that you can do in a comic book that you can't do in any other art form?

Art Spiegelman: Comics are a narrative art form, a form that combines two other forms of expression: words and pictures. Like any other medium, it's "value-neutral." There've been lots of rotten novels and paintings, and zillions of rotten comics. But in the hands of someone who knows how to use their medium, great things can happen. Good comics make an impression that lasts forever.

What was the comic book scene like when you began in the 1960s, and how has it changed?

Classic American comic strips have conviction and innocence. They are built around strong storytelling. All that is left are superheroes. Before the comic book crash that was brought about by the [1954] Senate hearings, there were even comic book phonics textbooks for kids. They have been replaced by TV, the Internet, and video games.

The new book, which you edited with your wife, Françoise Mouly, is called Little Lit. It presents a selection of fairy tales and folklore. Why fairy tales?

The tales are kinetic, filled with transformations. There's a lot to draw and to see. Fairy tales and folklore have withstood the test of time, offering archetypal themes and memorable situations. We wanted to do a book for all ages, that could hold the interest of very young children and grown-ups. Children recognize their own experiences in the paradigms presented in fairy tales. Girls might feel that they're true princesses in disguise, and that their extraordinary sensibility would allow them to feel a pea under 20 mattresses. Incorporating this "canon" of shared stories and types into one's way of thinking is a necessary first step toward literacy. Besides, fairy tales are in the public domain, and, more to the point, there are so many different kinds of tales from the goofy to the mystical, there was bound to be some story that could appeal to the diverse group of artists we invited into the book.

Is Little Lit a book for children or adults?

Well, we insisted to the artists that this was a book for children. We are trying to show that comics are not just for grown-ups anymore.

How did Little Lit come about? Did you approach the authors and illustrators with a request for particular material?

Little Lit grew partly out of our joint love for comic books. There was some back and forth between us and the artists, since we wanted some fresh interpretations of well-known classics, as well as some stories that even most adults would be unlikely to have come across before. We developed it by challenging artists to make works that would grab and hold a child's attention. We didn't give them a vocabulary list, but we did say the stories shouldn't make references to passing fads and fancies in the media, and we asked them not to go into any mode that's ironic or cynical. We told them, you are working with the most demanding audience, because kids really look. They spend time with a book that adults do not. We were looking for sincerity.

The story that you drew for Little Lit is a small gem called "Prince Rooster: A Hasidic Parable" and tells the story of a young royal who thinks he's a chicken. Why did you choose it?

I chose it because it had a lesson to impart without hocus-pocus or magic powers. If you want to help somebody, you have to put yourself in his or her place. You can be as crazy as you want, as long as nobody knows it.

You've said that Little Lit is the first in a series, but there is no "Issue #1" on the cover. What can we expect in the way of Little Lit in the future?

Our goal is to have a Little Lit shelf. Strange Stories for Strange Kids, the second installment of Little Lit, will be out this fall.

Beginning in the 1980s, you and your wife produced the renowned graphic arts journal RAW. What, in your mind, was RAW? Have we seen the last of it?

RAW was a demonstration of just how luxurious comics could be. It was replete with surprises. It was pioneering. RAW the magazine no longer publishes, but RAW the graphics arts publishing experiment continues. RAW has fulfilled its mission. It has helped launch a generation of different comics for adults. What's needed now is to make something for kids. We have put the RAW aesthetic to work in Little Lit, creating alternative comics aimed at kids that also appeal to adults.

When you, Art Spiegelman, sit down to create a comic book, what comes first? The pictures or the words? An idea or a character?

A standard 32-page kids' picture book is a happily controlled format in which to investigate graphic


possibilities. You've got all this room to explore an idea, and it's not necessarily heavy on language. It's a haven. With comics, I figure it out from the inside out. I certainly wouldn't try to be condescending. My assumption is that you have to amuse both the kid in the lap and the person who owns the lap, and not do short shrift to either side of the equation.

One of the artists for Little Lit, David Macaulay, the author of Cathedral, Baaa, and The Way Things Work, used this as an opportunity to learn how comics work. Making the page function as a graphic entity while making each panel an efficient unit of information was one of the hardest things he had ever done, though you wouldn't know it from reading his breezy and playful version of Jack (and his Mom) and the Beanstalk. The sequence of pictures gives you an overall sense of the narrative, while the short bursts of language offer texture and detail. If a kid wants to know why that little creature is crying, he's compelled to decode those few words in the balloon. Comics can be hard to learn, but they're a self-teaching machine. That's why kids can learn from them.

Are you a big reader of comic books in general? What work by a comic book artist is your earliest inspiration? Your most continuing inspiration?

Both Françoise and I learned to read by reading comics. We sacrificed our own prized comic book collection to our kids, Nadja, now 13, and Dashiell, who's eight, so that they could learn to read from them as well. All four of us have expanded to reading "chapter books" and are now avid readers, but still treasure our stacks of comics.

These fairy tales [in Little Lit] have lasted all these hundreds of years because they don't try to gloss things over; they aren't demographically written to whatever our notion of political correctness is at the moment. Kids may not have a lot of experience, but they're got a wealth of very complex feelings and emotions and ideas running through their heads. In Little Lit, there are touchstones that I wish I'd had access to when I was little. Comics help prepare you for the world.

I would say that the Carl Barks's Donald Duck comics are great, great kids' books. They love them. They're exceptionally well-crafted stories. And Little Lulu is especially good and would work very well now because the stories are all about the war between the sexes . . .

very similar to James Thurber's stories, except the girls win most of the time. The characters are very convincing and believable, and the stories are simple, easy to track, and easy to understand. My kids have loved those things. Now, through my son, I'm discovering Tintin, which I kind of missed out on the first time around. Walt Kelly did a bunch of adaptations of fairy tales in a comic book called Fairy Tale Parade before he started the comic strip Pogo, and they're beautifully made. Certainly Mad comics influenced me a lot.

Do you have any books, comic or otherwise, that are indispensable in your life?

As far as children's book authors go, William Steig is my hero. My kids have enjoyed all of the Roald Dahl books a lot. I'd have to mention that Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are was really an especially big hit with Dashiellb . . . so was Curious George.

As for adult books, I liked Kafka when I was growing up as a kid. I read Kafka. That was important to me. Faulkner. See, I can't tell how things influenced me. I can tell I read these things and they stayed with me. Vladimir Nabokov stayed with me, Gertrude Stein stayed with me. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain stayed with me. For philosophers -- well, I read a lot of existentialism when I was in high school, that helped shape me. You see, it becomes a problem when you talk about influences because I think there's lots of stuff that I just picked up as stray strands, you know. It's hard to know.

What do you think the future will be like for comic books?

When I first introduced Françoise to classic American comic strips, she told me she was struck by their "conviction and innocence." Little Lit pays homage to that era by including "Gingerbread Man," a 1943 comic about a runaway cookie by Walt Kelly, the creator of Pogo and an artist on the Walt Disney classic Fantasia. If it's a good story, kids won't think of it as an artifact. Our children Nadja and Dashiell are fans of classic comic characters like Betty Boop, Little Lulu, and Krazy Kat. When something is good, it can stay alive, it doesn't

matter what the style is.


On Spiegelman's Maus I and II

[The following is the text of a lecture prepared by Ian Johnston for students in Liberal Stuides 112 at Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, Canada. This text is in the public domain and may be used, in whole or in part, without permission and without charge, provided the source is acknowledged. The text was last revised on December 28, 2001]

Introduction

Today I'd like to offer some discursive general reflections on Maus I and II, exploring somewhat gingerly the relationship between the artistic style of the book and our attempts to make sense of it, to derive from it a coherent shared understanding of what's going on. This issue of the relationship between the form and the content (a somewhat artificial distinction, I admit, but a useful starting point) is a particularly fascinating and important aspect of this text (for reasons I'll be exploring in more detail later).

Let me begin by raising an obvious question: What is the central concern of these books? That might seem a question relatively easy to answer, but I'd like to suggest that the answer is rather more complex than it might at first appear. And exploring an answer will enable me to telegraph where I'm going with this lecture.

One might be tempted to respond to the above question by claiming that the central concern of these books is the Holocaust, and, to some extent, that's obviously the case, since the main narrative focuses so much attention on a particular prisoner's experiences in pre-war Eastern Europe and the death camps. But it's also clear enough that the book is centrally about something different, something more complex and elusive.


Spiegelman, after all, makes no attempt to illuminate the Holocaust by focusing on what we might call the big picture (an exploration of the larger historical, political processes which gave rise to it). Nor is he concerned to provide an overall sense of the scope of the horror (as a historian might do, for example). His focus throughout is on the particular details of his father's experiences which are not, in the context of Holocaust literature, remakable (his father has no new perspective to add to what we already know about his horrible event—his story is, if I may use the expression, an ordinary man's experience of extraordinary circumstances). And a considerable part of the book is taken up with his father's and his own experiences after the war.

In fact, the book is set up rather differently than what we might expect if the point is first and foremost an examination, a re-telling, of a Holocaust narrative. For it's made clear to us from the opening pages that the main issue here has something to do with the relationship of Artie and his father, that, in a sense, the experiences of Artie's family in the Holocaust are less central than a more elusive question—Artie's relationship to those experiences years later. I want to begin by stressing that, although these issues (the Holocaust experiences and Artie's relationship to his family) are obviously intertwined, they are not the same. And I want to do that in order to stress that Maus I and II are not (and should not be approached exclusively as) another Holocaust-survivor narrative, but are rather an attempt to confront a collateral issue: How does one make sense of a Holocaust narrative? Or, more particularly, how does one, as an artist and the child of Holocaust victims (and thus someone with deeply personal and permanent emotional roots in those horrific events), make imaginative sense of the Holocaust?

The Hero of the Book?Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”

One way of appreciating the significance of the questions mentioned above is to think for a moment about an apparently simple question: Who or what is the main issue in the book? Who is the hero (the main subject under scrutiny, the source of most interest)? The answer to these questions may not be so simple as the questions suggest.

At first glance, one might be tempted to see Vladek as the main character. After all, the central narrative describes his experiences, and he (or at least his symbolic equivalent) is our main contact with the Holocaust experiences we witness. The book tells his life story (more or less). However, there are some problems here. For a start, Vladek is not a particularly complex or sympathetic figure—either before, during, or after the war. He survives largely as a matter of luck (combined with a good native intelligence), but his experiences have left him crippled emotionally, and he has learned nothing particularly momentous as a result of his experiences—there's little sense that he understands or has even attempted to understand his experiences and its effects on him. They haven't left him with anything significant he can tell his son to help him adjust to the loss of his family. The text at times seem to go out of its way to emphasize Vladek's limitations as a human being (his racism, for example, or his treatment of women, his inability to deal with Artie), as a victim, as someone very ordinary, without any privileged insight into what has happened to him or why. If we are seeking here some illumination of the events we witness, that does not come from anything Vladek has to offer.

Then, there's the figure of Artie, Vladek's son and the artist-author. Now, he is in many respects much more interesting and complex than his father, because he takes on the task of trying to make some artistic sense of his own pain, the emotional scars he carries as a


result of his family's experiences. And this issue—the relationship between the artist and the story he is trying to create—appears repeatedly in the foreground as we witness the artist wrestling with his own feelings (with his wife and father and his psychiatrist, or by himself) and, more important than that, with the adequacy of the book he is trying to create in order to explore that pain.

[Parenthetically, it is important to mention that we need not make any immediate connections with Art Spiegelman's life outside the text and the interpretation of Maus. It seems obvious enough from the character's name and his profession that he is closely based on the author himself—but exploring this issue does not require that we move beyond what is given to us in the text. And the interpretation of the text would not differ if we learned, for example, that the entire story was made up and had little immediate connection with the real artist outside the book. This caveat is a useful way of reminding us that there is no need to supplement our understanding of the book with material imported into it from a special knowledge of the author's biography (something not provided in the text itself).]

In fact, the issue of Artie as an artist striving to give symbolic shape and narrative form to his family's experiences in order to cope with his own pain is such a persistent feature of the books that the matter of central concern at times moves beyond Vladek and Artie and becomes the text itself: can the artistic result—Artie's attempt to "catch" his family's past—provide whatever it is that Artie needs or wants, that is, satisfy him as an artist and a human being? In that sense, we might be tempted to nominate the text itself as the hero and to describe the main focus here as not one on human character (Vladek or Artie or their relationship) but as something else: the adequacy of this work of art as an exploration of a range of different issues. In other words, the most fascinating thing about this text may well be, not the particular narrative it gives of the characters


involved, but the way it calls attention to its own genesis, its own artistic style, and its own success or failure.

The Artist and His Art

In calling attention to its own creation, Maus locates that origin in the emotional pain of the artist, Artie, who is driven, for reasons he does not fully understand, to come to terms with his family's past (his brother's death, his mother's suicide, his father's wartime experiences). That phrase "come to terms with" is, of course, excessively vague, but clear enough, I think, if we see in it a desire to reach some sort of emotional understanding of something deep within himself—to give it an intelligible shape, something that will provide significance and perhaps a sense of closure to what has up to now been a shapeless intense inner pain.

It's important to grasp this last point: Artie, as an artist, does not wish merely to express his pain (he can do that with the psychiatrist)—he wishes to find an adequate artistic way of reaching an emotional understanding of his pain. That requires finding a suitable artistic way of distancing himself from his complex inner feelings, as it were, establishing a distance between his own inner feelings and the work he is creating, so that he will be able to communicate (to himself and others) in an intelligible way some insight into what he feels. The issue, then, is the adequacy of what he is creating. This is an important issue for an assessment of any important work of art, of course. But what I'm claiming here is that in this book the text itself raises this issue repeatedly and explicitly, so much so that it becomes (arguably) the central concern of the books.

By way of explaining this in more detail, let me draw here on one of the most famous analytical concepts in literary criticism this century,


T. S. Eliot's notion of what he calls the "objective correlative":

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. . . . The artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion. . . . ("Hamlet and His Problems," from The Sacred Wood)

Eliot here is indicating a key issue in the creation and the interpretation of works of art: the form in which the artist chooses to present whatever it is she has to communicate. The success of the work, Eliot points out, depends above all on the adequacy of the symbolic form to the emotion which the work is to convey.

This concept reminds us (if we need reminding) that the creation of a work of art is a form of exploration. It is not the case that the artist begins with the work clearly and totally formulated in her imagination. It is much rather the case that the artist begins with an idea about an "objective correlative," that is, with a sense of how she can take the imaginative feelings within her (which may be strong but shapeless) and give them some initial form, some shape outside herself, something which the audience or the readership can accept in such a way that the form communicates something that is emotionally intelligible. The "objective correlative" may be (indeed, one suspects it often is) merely an initial artistic gamble which, if it works, then provides some impetus to the development and clarification of the welter of feelings inside the creative artist.

And that gamble may, of course, not work, so that the result is muddled, unintelligible, and confusing (Eliot introduces his


"objective correlative" principle in an essay on Hamlet in order to make the point that Shakespeare, in some important ways, failed in this play—that is, the artistic gamble did not work as it should have). There's no way to guarantee what will happen once the author launches his artistic gamble, since the work which results will depend upon the way in which his imagination works with the symbolic form he has launched (and which makes its own demands as he proceeds). Anyone here who has tried to write poetry, fiction, or music or to paint a picture should understand readily enough this notion of an initial gamble on the symbolic form and of its success or failure.

Spiegelman present Maus to us as an artistic gamble, and, in the figure of Artie, raises some important questions about the extent to which that gamble is paying off. I'll have more to say about this later, but let me offer a couple of specific examples of Spiegelman's initial artistic decision.

The Comic Book Style

The first, of course, was his decision to set up his artistic exploration as a comic book. Naturally, he could have used plenty of other forms (poetry, novel, music, essays, diary entries, and so on), but as a professional comic book artist he, understandably enough, moved to his artistic strength. That's a unique gamble (something that has contributed to the book's fame and generated some heated debate) because until Maus appeared, the popular conception of subjects fit for comic books did not generally include serious treatments of deeply-rooted historical evil like the Holocaust.

Incidentally, the objection that a comic book is not a suitable artistic form for such a serious subject is a point of view we can (and should) respect, but not one we have to agree with. A person who


makes such an objection may well be indicating some real difficulty he has with squaring his understanding of comic books (based on his own experience) with his emotional response to the Holocaust, but that's his personal response and hardly a valid artistic generalization. People's artistic preferences can always interfere with their response to a particular art work (as in, for example, productions of Shakespeare's plays, where spectators often tend to have decided preferences for and dislikes of particular production styles—Elizabethan, modern dress, historical accuracy, and so on. Such preferences do not and cannot establish that some production styles are, in themselves, appropriate or inappropriate, even though we recognize the importance of personal preferences in our aesthetic responses. The test is surely the quality of the result—that is, how the style has been used in this case).

It's not part of my purpose here to discuss particular details of the comic book style, except to note that this form of art which involves a sequential series of "boxed" pictures arranged spatially on two facing pages at a time permits Spiegelman constantly to juxtapose present and past in a way that keeps alive in front of us the central thrust of the text—the relationship between the family's past and Artie's present. The style does not encourage us to get seduced into the father's story without constantly holding onto the fact that the attempt to understand that story is the main concern here.

The comic book style is uniquely equipped to achieve this, because it can keep past and present alive before us in a way rather different from other art forms. Unlike a film or a novel it does not have to fade in and fade out (i.e., alternate past and present). In dealing with a comic book, the readers always experience a particular "boxed" image in relation to those around it and to the entire layout of the two pages. The shape of the boxes, their size relative to each other, and the visual patterning of images and the calligraphy of the script


all help to shape our response to the text, but always in the context of other images on the page. And, most important, the reader controls the pace of the experience—he can linger on a particular image, shift his attention back to a previous one, move on quickly to a dominant image further ahead on the page, and so on.

These matters are fascinating to pursue in more detail, but they are not immediately germane to my main purpose in this lecture. So I'll have to settle for one example of what I have been talking about. Spiegelman's narrative moves back and forth from modern-day New York to the dislocation of his father's experiences in the 1930's and 1940's. The transition back and forth is evoked visually by the structure of the panels in the respective parts of the narrative. In modern day New York, for example, the panels tend to be all more or less equal in size, and we move to them in a logical way from left to right. The artistic style tends to remain the same, without sudden interruptions or jarring contrasts. As we start to move to the father's memories, however, the easy flow often becomes instantly upset, and visually we have to sort out where we are and where we are going. The transition points often invite us to linger on some evocative contrasts (pages 12 and 13 of Volume I, for example, force us to contemplate conflicting images of the old and young Vladek under the number tattooed on his arm; the image sets up symbolically the contrast the book is seeking to explore)—how did we get from there to here, and what does it mean?

This point becomes almost a repetitive pattern within both books, and the visual contrast between past and present becomes a constant reminder of the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility of fitting in the father's experiences into the framework of an easy, regular, and predictable pattern. Given that one of the main themes of the book is the attempt to sort out the relationship of the past to the present, the visual form of the comic book is here used in a rich and fertile


manner keeps this issue always in front of us visually, without any awkward shifts back and forth.

[As I mention, there's a great deal more one could (and perhaps should) add by way of paying tribute to Spiegelman's enormously subtle use of the comic book style here. I refer readers interested in pursuing these matters to look into Scott McCloud's extremely interesting book Understanding Comics.]

The Beast Fable

A second gamble is the decision to cast the story as a beast fable—that is, to symbolize the human interactions with different animals and groups of animals (as in, say, Animal Farm). In terms of that concept of the objective correlative, this decision has the effect of establishing some distance between the author and his story, of making the depicted fiction something less immediately related to his own personality and distress.

We can appreciate the effect of this decision (and are meant to appreciate the effect) by comparing the beast fable style with an earlier gamble, that section called "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," which uses a completely different style—a much more intense, immediate, and personal expressionistic style. This has the effect of cranking up the intensity of the art work but to such an extent that it becomes much less accessible—a private nightmare rather than a publicly intelligible vision (there's a sense here that the artist is creating far too close to his own immediate personal feelings). One senses the pain, but loses the ability to reflect upon it or understand it. And the style is so excessive that it leaves the artist with no room to alter the dynamics or the subtlety of the art. The contrast between the art in this section and in the rest of the book helps to make the point about how much more effective, especially over the long haul,


the apparently simpler style of the beast fable is in shaping the artist's experiences in such a way that we can contemplate them and come to some understanding of them.

In fact, the contrast between these two styles may well serve to remind us again that, where powerful feelings are the issue, it's not always necessary to find an immediately symbolic expression where the overt power in the language seeks to match the intensity of the feelings (as in nightmarish expressionism). There may well be an important artistic point in using a much quieter and more subtle artistic language precisely at such times (some of the most effective songs or poems of desolation and despair and pain are often very quiet, apparently simple blues melodies and lyrics)—and for the reasons suggested, in Maus a more immediately powerful language of pain might well bring the work too close to the intense but muddled personal feelings of the artist; whereas, a more "objective" language (like the symbolism of a beast fable) may encourage a more eloquent and dispassionate text, and therefore perhaps something more emotionally honest, intelligent, and clear.

Now, the beast fable metaphor is something which, to judge from the immediate reactions of students, people find interesting, agreeable, and clever—artistically it works to keep readers involved in the story—the gamble seems to have paid off. But I'd like to linger on it for some time in order to make the point (in case it needs to be made) that what is going on here is much more subtle than might at first appear.

How are we supposed to interpret the animal imagery used throughout Maus? Some people have made the obvious suggestion that this form creates an obvious allegory, in which the different types of people are characterized in a simple, one-to-one manner with the characteristics of the animals which represent them. And to


a certain extent this is true. Depicting the Jewish people as mice, for example, summons up a host of contradictory associations which, in fact, conveys an assortment of different attitudes towards the Jewish people: small, loveable (like Mickey Mouse), harmless, on the one hand, and yet verminous, repellent, and ugly on the other. Portraying the Germans as cats brings out the power and malevolence of the entire Holocaust experience, the point being that cats don't just kill mice: they capture them, play with them, and then kill them.

So the allegorical basis of the story seems clear and unambiguous. But is it? In a sense, the story is always calling attention to the adequacy of that allegory, and it's by no means clear, as we read the story, in what the mousiness of the Jewish people consists. Is it because that is what they, in effect, are? Or is it the case that they are mice because that is the way they are perceived by others (note the example of the mouse who claims he is not Jewish but German—his claim makes no difference because that is the way he is perceived and has been labelled)? Or are they mice because they perceive and think of themselves as mice?

But what's particularly interesting is how the imagery in Maus frequently calls into question the basic artistic gamble on which most of the story rests—that's one of the most intriguing and challenging features of the text. For example, the fact that throughout the story, people can put on a mask and assume the identity of another animal species strongly suggests that a part of this story is trying to tear down any allegorical framework in order to evoke the absurdity of racial stereotyping which is the basic framework for any allegorical understanding of the differences between human beings—but which is also the basis for the artwork in the book.

This point becomes particularly evident in the opening of the second volume, when the artist is trying to sort out how to draw his wife, a


French woman who has converted to Judaism. Here the text pauses to draw explicit attention to the absurdity of trying to classify people into racial groups and unite them under a common animal symbol—and it does so in a way that calls into question the validity of the artistic conception Artie has chosen to tell his story.

Why is this section in here? Why is Spiegelman deliberately mocking (or at least challenging) his own art? I would suggest that it is an attempt to put pressure on us to question the adequacy of such a beast fable. Of course, the Holocaust took place very much as a beast fable, with the different groups falling into clearly identifiable classes, each with its distinct characteristics. And the event required that people subscribe to the classification system, that is, accept it as the reality, both with regard to themselves and to others—classification systems only work if people believe in them. But, this moment suggests, such an easy classification is absurd and arbitrary.

Spiegelman has deliberately held off this radical challenge of the metaphor basic to his entire book because by this point the reader herself is an eager participant in the classification system established without fanfare at the start—the reader has gone along with the game, so to speak, has given her imaginative assent to the beast fable. Now story itself is, in effect, pulling the rug out from under itself, calling attention to the absurdity of dividing people up into different animal groups (that is, the absurdity of the entire artistic undertaking), and enabling us to assess our own complicity, the ease with which we, too, after the horrible facts, imaginatively accept the premise essential to what went on.

But the issue is even more complex than that, because we then, in what is perhaps the most evocative image in the book see the author himself at work (on p. 41 in Volume II)—he is definitely not a


mouse but he has on a mouse mask, wrestling with the consequences of the success of his first volume, sitting on top of a pile of dead mice. What's striking here in this remarkably powerful image is the mask—as if the author himself can only continue working by assuming the metaphor he has already exploded as absurd. It may be merely a mask, but it's the only thing protecting him from the rotting corpses (and the flies buzzing around and above them).

The point here is that what started out (perhaps) as an apparently simple allegorical metaphor has become much more complicated—something absurd, but necessary. If the classification system encouraged by the beast fable is an arbitrary and cruel fiction, it is also, in a sense, indispensable. How else are we to understand experience if we don't adopt some system of classification, some basic metaphorical construct which enables us to launch an attempt to understand, even though we have to admit the metaphor is absurd.

It may be significant that this important image of Artie at work—a section that indicates he has found no closure with the success of the first volume—is followed by the session with the psychiatrist. Here both men adopt mouse masks (which the art work establishes definitely as masks over human heads not as allegorical mice). The fact that in both of these scenes the author is depressed and unsure of himself suggests that, in spite of the great commercial success of what he has done so far, he is not at all sure if what he is doing is what he ought to be doing. At any event, the success hasn't led to whatever it was he was hoping for at the start—and the duplicity of the mask—the art work suggests—is an important part of the issue (the panel which suggests that the success of volume one has prompted Hollywood capitalists to market mouse paraphernalia is a particularly savage swipe, not just at Hollywood, but at the effectiveness of what he has been doing with his art).


Of Mice, Schematic Mice, and Men

But if this beast fable has the effect on us which I'm suggesting, if, that is, it catches us up and then catches us out and complicates our understanding of what's happening in this text, then one important reason is that we are not really dealing here with mice, cats, pigs, frogs, and dogs, but with schematic animals, especially schematic mice. What I mean by that term "schematic" is this: the depictions of mice are not naturalistic—they are by contrast highly schematized. For the most part all we see of the mouse is the outline of a head, the eyes, and the mouth (and occasionally the tail). We are confronting the cartoon outline of an animal. For Spiegelman makes no attempt to render his mice life like—that is, like real mice. In fact, as we enter this book, we move from much more naturalistic mice on the cover and on the inside jacket, to obviously schematic mice in the first panels and throughout the book.

Why is this important? To get a sense of this I'd like to borrow an idea from Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics. He talks about a spectrum of art from the fully subjective to the fully objective. What he means by this is that an image can insist upon its factual reality apart from us (i.e., invite us to treat it objectively) or it can invite us to identify ourselves with the image (i.e., draw us into the subjective experience of being inside that image). McCloud argues that the simpler and more schematic the representation of an image, the more subjective it becomes and, thus, the more easily and quickly we can identify with it.

For example, consider the simplest form of a human face, a circle, with dots representing the eyes a simple line representing the mouth, no more. Such a picture makes no pretence towards objectivity, towards representing anyone particular. And so anyone viewing this


face can, in effect, see himself in it. There is no particular detail to disqualify such a subjective identification. As soon as I begin to put in particular details (e.g., hair, glasses, a moustache or beard, and so on), I am changing the effect of the picture. I am, in a sense, increasingly objectifying it, pushing it further and further away from the general viewer in a direction which leads, ultimately, to a photographic representation of a particular person, objectively realized—someone who is clearly not an image the reader can immediately identify with (by contrast, such an identification is explicitly denied by the "otherness" of the naturalistically rendered face)..

[It might be interesting to note, parenthetically, that, according to a famous Hollywood story, when Walt Disney first drew Mickey Mouse, the creature was very close to an objective portrait of a mouse, with body hair and a distinct animal appearance. The comic did not start to become famous until Walt heeded the advice of his brother Bill and took the hair off the mouse and put the mouse in clothes. Now, all of a sudden I am not dealing with an objectified mouse but with an everyman mouse, whose character I can enter.]

Now, as McCloud point out, the schematic portrayal of faces is often a common technique of comic books (one thinks immediately of Curious George or Tintin), so that the reader is instinctively drawn to identify with, to enter the experience of the character presented in such a manner. That's particularly the case when, as in Maus and many other comics, the schematic face is surrounded by much more naturalistically rendered objects and people, often heavily shaded or coloured, so that the blank spot on the face (in Maus the white patch of the mouse's face) immediately stands out as the highlight of the panel because it's the brightest spot (often the only bright spot) in the panel (something strongly emphasized by the black and white style).


In fact, a good deal of Maus works that way—especially when we are dealing with Vladek's wartime experiences. The panel is full of heavy and naturalistic depictions of tools, guns, fences, helmets, boots, and so on, even blueprints, but the mouse faces remain open blanks into which we can project ourselves (one has to admire how much expression Spiegelman can put into a face with a minimum of detail). So the experience of reading the comic is, in effect, to place ourselves in that particular and detailed context—and a good deal of the text's effect comes from the skill with which Spiegelman allows us to do that. Certainly, there is nothing naturalistic about the mouse faces which inhibits such imaginative identification.

That's particularly true of the mice, whose faces are far more schematically rendered than the more naturalistic cats or pigs (they have more details on their faces and thus are more objectively realized). So as we read Maus, there's a subtle and continuing artistic pressure for us to place ourselves in the position of the mice, especially of young Vladek, so that we get a much more immediate sense of his experiences as our experiences—as it were, we enter into the world of the objects and setting with which he has to deal.

But there are moments when Spiegelman challenges this easy identification with Vladek and calls into question his own artistic style—forcing us to break our contact with the narrative and reflect upon just what's going on here. What sort of a book is this? What is the relationship between the enjoyment I am deriving from my reading and what the book is trying to say? Let me mention one such moment—a particularly interesting one—the scene where Vladek and Anja are hiding in the cellar and have to confront a rat (I, 147).

This picture brings into play a complex series of associations. The rat, for example, is very real. This is no schematic rat. And in the scene the mice are hiding from or scared by the rat. But the mice are


telling each other that it is not a rat; it's only a mouse. But, of course, that's not true. The composition of the frame puts the reality of the rat right into the foreground, and the object behind it is rendered in a naturalistic fashion—the cellar is real enough. So we are in a real place, back in historical time. At the same time, we are, as it were, inhabiting the consciousness of the schematic mice—we are there in the scene.

The reality of the rat, however, and the reference to the fact that it might be a mouse punctures the allegorical basis which makes the Jews mice. The frame reminds us that what is at stake here is not mice, but people with whom we have closely identified. There's a sense here that Spiegelman is deliberately straining the beast fable metaphor to the breaking point in order to call into question the adequacy of that metaphor (and thus of his entire text).

Spiegelman doesn't offer us any sort of a commentary on how we are supposed to respond at moments like this. What we are to make of it he leaves up to us. But here and elsewhere throughout the books the complex interaction of schematic symbolic mice with the hard objective reality of rats and other real animals (for the German "cats" lead around dogs) and of the solid and usually dark objects creates unusual tensions in the reader—we are always on the point of recognizing the absurdity of what we find most effective in the text. The story is always threatening to unmask itself as something false, something fictional, merely art—not life.

There's a telling moment in the story where we are suddenly forced to acknowledge this process with something of a jolt. That occurs in II, 134, where Spiegelman inserts a photograph of young Vladek in his prisoner's stripes (with a schematic mouse right beside it). This is a startling moment, for that photograph is rudely interrupting our subjective identification with the mouse-Vladek. Once again,


Spiegelman seems to be pulling the rug out from under his own text, because this photograph says very clearly, "Vladek is not you. See here—he was a particular, objective, different young man. These are not your experiences. They are his." Once again, the art work seems to be calling attention to its own limitations, its own ability to deceive, to seduce readers into a false relationship to the story—if that photograph is Vladek, then whose story have I been following and how am I now supposed to deal with it, now that it has rudely reminded me of its own artificiality.

The End of the Story

This feature of the style may help to illuminate the rather curious, even unsettling ending of the narrative, which seems to insist upon the ambiguity, perhaps even the failure, of the entire enterprise. We see the reunion of Anja and Vladek—our expectations rise for the major chord of a happy ending. But Vladek's words ("We were both very happy, and lived happy, happy ever after") are, of course a lie, since the mother committed suicide soon afterwards and Vladek continued an unhappy, ill old man. That's followed by two panels which insist that nothing has been worked out—the father's last words fail even to recognize Artie, confusing him with the dead son Richieu. It's hard to sense here that Artie has achieved whatever it was which drove him to explore his father's past.

The final image is strange—the tombstone of Vladek and Anja, with their dates, and under that Art Spiegelman's name and dates. What does this suggest? Is the entire family now dead? The artist's name and the dates which presumably refer to the writing of Maus, like a painter's signature at the bottom of a painting, are one last reminder that what we have been dealing with is a fiction, something made up. What is its relationship to the truth symbolized in the grave stone—the reality of his parents' lives? That's up to us to sort out.


This characteristic tendency in Maus of forcing the reader to confront the fact that she is dealing with something made up, an artistic interpretation of reality, gives Maus a distinctly post-modern emphasis, something which tends to shift the main emphasis away from the significance of the story or the characters in it (of the sort common in traditional narratives) and onto more teasing questions about the nature of the relationship between the art, the representation of the story, and what we might call the reality of the family's life.

Perhaps that's why, in the end, the story of Maus fails to offer any consoling "solution" to the problems out of which the urge to produce it arose. There is no solution—there is only the attempt, the probing, frustrating, in some ways contradictory attempt to explore (if art has to find some imaginative "solution," then, in a sense, this attempt has failed—the text makes that clear enough). Spiegelman's artistic style, his habit of calling his own narrative repeatedly into question, of cancelling any apparent resolution, deliberately cuts us off from being seduced by the fiction into reading more into it than, in his view, it offers. That's the reason why, as I suggested at the start, the key issue here may well be the status of the text itself, rather than any "lesson" which clearly emerges from the human interactions depicted in it.

Why then write the book at all? The text itself offers a possible answer. In his conversation with the psychiatrist (II, 45), Artie states, "Samuel Beckett once said: 'Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness'"—which would seem to indicate that all attempts to shape a human response to experience, including, of course, Maus itself, are a futile waste of time (a "stain"). But then he adds, "On the other hand, he SAID it". That interchange, to me, indicates as clearly as anything why this text


matters. Artie addressed his pain—he spoke out. If what he produced is inconclusive, contradictory, and elusive, he did the only thing any of us can do—he made the attempt.


Art Spiegelman's MAUS: Working-Through The Trauma of the Holocaust

"Whether commentary [...] is built into a structure of a history or developed as a separate, superimposed text is a matter of choice, but the voice of the commentator must be clearly heard. The commentary should disrupt the facile linear progression of the narration, introduce alternative interpretations, question any partial conclusion, withstand the need for closure [...]Such commentary may introduce splintered or constantly recurring refractions of a traumatic past by using any number of different vantage points."

Saul Friedländer, "Trauma, Transference and Working-Through," History and Memory 4 (1992): 39-55.

Robert S. Leventhal

Copyright (c) 1995 by Robert S. Leventhal, all rights reserved. This text may be shared in accordance with the fair use-provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law. Redistribution and republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the written permission of the author.

Trauma, Working-Through, and the Problem of Historical Understanding

One of the most significant attempts to understand the response Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”

to the Shoah is through the texts and terms of Freudian Psychoanalysis. In his decisive essay of 1916, Mourning and Melancholia, referred to many times in this archive, Freud distinguishes between two fundamentally distinct modalities of moving through the trauamatic loss of a beloved object. In mourning, the subject grieves for the loss of the beloved, and gradually comes to terms with that loss through the sustained reflection regarding the multiple meanings of that loss. Mourning is characterized by an initial withdrawl from the external world of things and events, and centers upon the subject's feeling of the loss of a significant aspect of one's life. In melancholia, however, there has usually been a highly ambivalent relation to the beloved object, and the subject becomes isolated, depressed, and experiences this loss of the Other as the loss of him or herself. The melancholic reaction to the traumatic loss of a beloved is characterized by extreme self-devaluation, to the extent that the subject might actually believe that he or she is responsible for the death or departure of the Other, that he or she is a "murderer" him or herself responsible for the "killing off" of the Other. Or, conversely, the subject views him or herself as the abandoned object, having been "left" by the dead Other, and might view him or herself as a victim, as the wounded or hurt recipient of this traumatic loss that the Other has "imposed."

In the Neo-Freudian Theories of Winicott, the attempt has been made to articulate the process of "working-through" the traumatic loss of the beloved object more precisely. Winicott's famous phrase "Mourning without empathy leads to madness" has often been cited as the key to his theory, whichis that there must be an empathetic witness to the pain of this traumatic loss, that the person who suffers this loss must be able to give testimony to someone as a way of working-through or processing this loss, and that finally certain "transitional" or "intermediate" objects might be necessary in order to move from the state of dependence and reliance on the Other to a renewed state of self-sufficiency after the traumatic severance.


The difficulty with this type of understanding is its insistence on a singular empathetic Other who hears the testimony of the witness, and thereby bears witness to the traumatic loss in a therapeutic manner. What does it actually mean to "work-through" a traumatic loss? and what does this mean with regard not to an individual, but to an entire people? Many of the normative claims of psychoanalysis are present in this type of approach: the hope is that a gradual reintergration of the meaning of the lost object occurs and the fact of the loss helps the subject to grow beyond this dependency in the construction of a self that is able to tolerate and understand alterity and is not rigidly defined. This is the thesis of Eric Santner's Stranded Objects.


The Postmodern Melancholia

In much of what has been written about the Holocaust in recent years, one can notice a tendency to discuss the Holocaust and the responses to it in terms borrowed from the description of Melancholia. One of the most obvious instances of this can be seen in Lyotard's connection of Auschwitz and the unrepresentable in The Differend. Here, the sublime, which since Kant has been the singular individual's struggle of the Idea in the face of overwelming experiences, is utilized to characterize the sense of the Shoah: the individual is to "bear witness" to the unpresentable and inexpressable loss, for no language, no vocabulary can even approach the horror of Auschwitz. Auschwitz becomes a limit that defies phrasing. This is also present in the work of Cathy Caruth, "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History" Yale French Studies 79 (1991) and in her material in the edited issue of American Imago 48 nos. 1 & 4 (1991). Trauma here is not merely seen in the Benjaminian sense of the condition of history and historicity, but that History itself becomes viewed as traumatic. As Dominick LaCapra has pointed out in his recent book Representing the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell, 1994), this conflation of history with trauma might itself be the uncritical result and symptom of posttraumatic, unworked through identifications and investments. An example of what LaCapra is hinting at might also be the work of George Steiner, in which Auschwitz signifies an irrevocable loss of language, and the German language in particular. For LaCapra, one of the great challenges of postmodern and poststructuralist readings of the trauma inflicted by the Shoah would be to reflect on the ways in which they themselves participate in a melancholic reaction to the event.

Cultural Besetzung: The Canon and Canonical Texts


One of the ways in which a culture betrays (in the sense of "allows to become clear") its own "investments" or Besetzungen, to use Freud's term for the psychic endowment of certain things, is in its priveleging specific ways of thinking and writing, certain forms of presentation, the selection of specific genres as being "apt" or "appropriate" for certain tasks. An analysis of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List could show that the primacy of the (visual) romance in some way governs the institution of filming in that film. There is a vast difference in this respect to Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and to Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, Ein Film aus Deutschland. As Primo Levi sought to articulate the discursive and logistical space of Auschwitz, Syberberg attempts to actually enter into the distorted puppet-show of German Fascism, the "black studio" of German (film) projections and fantasies, the nostalgiac, melancholic state of Postwar, Postholocaust Germany. Lanzmann's Shoah equally does away with conventional narrative schemes and totalizing representation, presenting the Nazi Genocide in a series of detailed "researches" or "inquiries," and utilizing not a single foot of documentary film from the thirties or forties. Lanzmann's film allows the contradictions between the testimony of the perpetrators and that of the victims to stand. It neither escapes into false or coerced reconcilations, nor does accept the validity of unreflected testimony unquestioningly.

The way in which a culture organizes, "disciplines," and reads a certain event is an excellent way to find out about that culture's "troubled areas" or "hot spots." The philosopher Berel Lang has argued in his book Act and Idea of the Nazi Genocide that there are only certain appropriate and ethically responsible ways of representing the Shoah. In this respect, many crtics have said that the Holocaust requires an "elevated" genre, that it is the stuff of "high" literature and should not be "desecrated" by allowing low genres to communicate the destruction of the European Jews. There would at


first sight seem to be an inalterable cultural hierarchy of forms, media, genres: the novel, the tragedy, a poem, a scholarly essay or book might be considered acceptable; on the other hand, a satire, a parody, a comedy, a farce -- these would not seem to be eligible for "appropriate" forms of literary representation. But the fact is that both within these genres and modes, as well as with regard to the genre or mode itself, there are both "high" and "low" forms; and what is radical, chic, or revolutionary at one historical juncture might be quite reactionary or conservative at another. My view is that Spiegelman, precisely by utilizing the "comic-book" as the textual medium of a story of the Holocaust, succeeds in breaking the "taboo" or "ritualized fixity" of confronting the Holocaust. It also subverts the assignment of the "comic" to a genre of kitsch and "popular culture" in a twofold way: first, insofar as it supercedes the traditional genre in terms of the scope of its presentation; secondly, insofar as it presents a historical catastrophe in a medium usually reserved for hero-construction and morality play.


Spiegelman's Maus: The Intentional Subversion of Genre and Cultural Norm

Art Spiegelman first published parts of MAUS in the magazine Raw between 1980-1991. Volumes I and II of the book Maus: A Survivor's Tale appeared in 1986 ("My Father Blleds History") and 1991 ("And Here my Troubles began"). Maus is the use of a traditionally "low" genre -- the comic strip or book --for serious, grave material. It is a conscious, intentional inversion of a norm, a hierarchy, a cultural order. It is a very "strong" (in the Bloomian sense) rereading of one survivor's tale and the transmission or testimony of this tale to the son; it is at the same time a strong revamping or reconsideration of the generic possibilites of the "comic" itself.

The reduction of the players to cats (the Nazis). mice (the Jews), pigs (the Poles) and other national stereotypes offers a conscious, intentional miniaturization and reduction, pointing up not merely the process of compression, simplification and devaluation not merely of the Nazi's practices before and during the Holocaust, but the reduction and simplification present in many "responses" to the Holocaust as well. In this way, Spiegelman literalizes the call for petits recits so prevalent in postmodern discourse today, especially in the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard. On another level, there are multiple narratives and kinds of texts in Maus: in addition to images, dialogue boxes, and commentary, we find maps of Poland and the Camps, diagrams of hideouts, real photographs from the family archive, detailed plans of the crematoria, an exchange table for goods in Auschwitz, and a manual for shoe-repair. Here are some of the various text-types that one finds in Maus:

The reader moves through several different "historical subject-positions" and narrated events; there are the pre-holocaust, the


Holocaust, and the postholocaust, but also, within one time-frame, there can be other times and places co-present as well. Maus thus juxtaposes and intertwines past and present, the different subject histories of each protagonist, and the very different cultural contexts of Nazi occupied Poland and Rego Park, New York. The very title of the books is a powerful reworking of the convention: Maus rewrites the cultural norm and invents a new discursive space to address the questions of Jewish trauma, guilt, shame and, perhaps most importantly, the transmission of these conflicts from one generation to the next, especially in the case that they are not sufficently worked-through.

Maus encompasses many small narratives: not merely the story of Vladek (Artie's Father) and Anje (Artie's Mother, who committed suicide after surviving Auschwitz and coming to America), but of Artie himself in his struggle to understand his family origins and himself. It addresses the constant resurfacing of a traumatic and "unmastered" past on a number of levels: the death of his brother, Richieu, of a poison given to him by the woman who was taking care of him as they were about to be sent to Auschwitz to be gassed, the suicide of his mother in 1968, and the murder of the European Jews. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than at the end of Volume I "My Father Bleeds History," where Artie asks Vladek for Antje's diaries. Vladek first tells Artie that the Diaries are gone, and then finally remembers that he himself had destroyed them -- burned them to be exact -- in the depths of depression. Vladek not only burned the diaries -- in a ironic enactment of Nazi Book-Burning -- but he sadistically adds salt to the wound when he tells Artie: "I looked in, but I don't remember [...] Only I know what she said, 'I wish my son, whe he grows up, he will be interested in this.'" Artie, who himself suffered a depression after his mother's suicide, calls Vladek a "murderer," unable himself to understand Vladek's action as itself an act of acting out the legacy of the Holocaust. In this transmission circuit, Artie is tied to his father, and we see this played


out in Maus in his complete dependence on Vladek for the narrative of his own story.

The "broken" relationship between Artie, Vladek, and this unmastered past is exemplified in the broken relationship Artie has to his own Jewish heritage. In Maus I, Vladek is in a German work-camp and has a dream in which his dead Grandfather comes to him and tells him that he will leave this place and go home to his wife and child on Parshas Truma. Artie then asks his father what Parshas is, unaware of the symbolic and literal meaning of this in his life and in Jewish tradition. His father then explains to him the meaning of Parshas Truma, the specific week in which a particular section of the Torah is read. It turns out that this was the week he had married Anja, and the week Artie had his Bar-Mitzvah. In this time frame, Vladek actually does get to leave the camp and see his wife and child. The broken circuit is thus restored in the text precisely because of Artie's interest in the narrative and the construction of the text Maus itself. But the evidence of a failure in the transmission of culture and tradition, the traces of this broken connection to the past and to history is present to the extent that Artie must now relearn this complex history.

Maus is allegorical, not merely to the extent that it treats the individuals as figures in a much more complex and global story, but insofar as its very textual structure is comparable to the allegorical structure of the emblem, with a graphic image elucidating the text, as well as a superscript expressing the "topic" or "theme," the actual statements of the individuals in the frame, and often a subscript containing unconscious thoughts or afterthoughts. In Maus, the image is never left to stand alone, but is always caught up in the differential between narrative, image, dialogue and reflection. In this manner, an opening or aperture for critical thinking on the transmission of past trauma is created.


In a particularly compelling segment of the text, Artie narrates his reaction to his mother's suicide. A comic book within the comic book Maus entitled "Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History," this text-within-the-text recounts Artie's own incomplete or failed attempt to work through the trauamatic loss of his mother, his own melancholic and masochistic tendencies to internalize the dysfunction of his family and his mother's depression, and the degree to which his writing bears the mark of that loss and is itself a type of working-through in its own right. The subtitle "A Case History" mocks the case history in psychoanalysis, in which the patient is "cured" of the incessant return of the traumatic past through rigorous therapeutic intervention. In "Prisoner from the Hell Planet," there isn't any easy closure, and the suffering individual remains captive in the prison of his own masochistic melancholia, the jail cell of his own wounded self, not really understanding the unconscious connection to the melancholia of the mother and the unconscious identification with the damaged father.

Traversing the breach between past and present, Father and Son, language and image, manifest and latent, Spiegelman's Maus bears witness to the process of bearing witness, and the technical and technological requirement of writing and tape-recording in order to produce a narrative of the trauma and thereby alleviate the symptomology of depression and withdrawl that is the danger of a past left to fester as an unhealed wound. Paul Celan's essay Meridien states that every piece of authentic writing has a date and a place: it speaks a specificity, and in that specificty it gestures towards an Other. Spiegelman's Maus, in transmitting the story of the father through the son, does not avoid or gloss over any of the difficulties entailed in working-through trauma, which, as we know, always brings with it some degree of "acting-out". Maus enacts the difficulty of working through a traumatic historical past that defies attempts at mastery, and is a visceral presentation of the postmodern fragmented self struggling to come to terms with this damaged and wounded


history in a conscious manner. Maus II ends with the reunification of Vladek and Anja after Auschwitz. In the final scene, Vladek tells Artie he is tired of talking: "I'm tired from talking, Richieu, and it is enough stories for now." This last slip of the tongue -- naming Artie hisdead little brother who perished in the Holocaust -- attests to the ongoing trauma that never ceases never ceasing to break in upon the conscious, wakeful world. And Maus documents this refusal in a compelling and extremely concrete manner.


Maus Overview Materials

Documents

Transcript of Maus Overview Materials