Masked Identity

I’m sure the use of cultural identity in the mice masks can be taken in several ways.  Spiegelman’s use of the anthropomorphized animals certainly put a distance between the reality of World War II and the cushioned world in which we read a book to experience suffering.  However, the basically blank faces of the mice (using only eyebrows and wrinkles for facial expressions) reveal, as Professor Sample said, the meaning of an image entirely apart from the original context.

In addition to this view, McCloud emphasizes that a simple, basic cartoon drawing allows the reader to see himself reflected in the image (36).  In that way we can empathize with, although as Lindsay pointed out, not enter, the world of Nazi Germany.  McCloud further considers the point of being able to relate information on a more intense basis when there is so little interest in the iconic form:  “Who I am is irrelevant.  I’m just a little piece of you.  But if who I am matters less, maybe what I say will matter more” (37).

Comments about Anja’s pills for nervousness, her postpartum depression, the loss of her first child, and witnessing the slaughter of her family led me to see her as she was depicted when she was young – small and petite.  I thought she would just have looked thinner and weaker.  When I saw her as Artie did for the last time in “Prisoner on the HELL Planet”, I was astounded by her bulk and by her dark, heavily lidded eyes.

This juxtaposition illustrates how much the word choices and tone of what Anja said influenced what I attended to – I took her appearance for granted and focused on the events and effects of her tragedy.   In this way, I think we can accept the Jews as mice, the cats as Nazis, and the Poles as pigs in an allegorical way, while imputing all the evidenced characteristics the story straightforwardly lays out.

-Deb

Who is Maus Speigelman?

“Maus” is the second graphic memoir I’ve read this month about the torturous relationship between a father and a child.  Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” and “Maus” both powerfully display the impact a father’s actions have on their daughter/son’s lives, for both good and ill, as well as the adult child’s attempts to understand their own reactions and feelings towards the now dead father.

Both of these powerful stories share another quality: I know very, very little about the authors themselves after reading them, despite the fact that it was all written in the first person, with representations of the authors in both words and image constantly staring up at me in their beautifully economical ways.  When I was priviledged to meet Ms. Bechdel, I was honestly surprised by how shy she seemed.  Her intimate, intellectual, frank, smooth prose didn’t prepare me for the way she seemed uncomfortable among so many strange, eager people (not that I blame her at all – I wouldn’t want to have to talk to me without meeting me first either :-)

To begin trying to explicate why I have this feeling about Maus, I’d like to draw attention to two pages – one the final page of Maus volume one, the other the final page of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet”

The degree of difference in self-revelation is enormous.  Even just one frame – his expresionistic eyes as his mother closes the door – is more self revelatory about how Speigelman sees himself and expresses himself than the little glyph of a slashmark brow over the dot eye in the mouse face representing his fury at his father’s destruction of his mother’s journals.  While still very much symbolic, connotating rather than denotating the eyes and the emotions behind them, the connection to individual humanity is so much stronger in those brief four pages, or even that one frame.

Is there a universalizing, collectivizing goal behind his choice here – to try to mask the individuality for such an important, universal story?  Does Speigelman not value his own personality enough to display it (a refreshing lack of ego or an annoying false modesty?) I find this question interesting when comparing my reaction here to my response to the first appearances of Dream in The Sandman, which I am still convinced are thinly veiled portraits of Gaiman himself.

The universalizing quality of using animal cartoons (a term I use to convey my sense of the level of detail and mimetic quality of the images, rather than derogatory) also seems correlated to the universal, bland nature of Speigelman’s own actions and desires.  These seem like things anyone could imagine themselves doing or feeling – irritation and anger at the demands of his father, frustration at the situations his father puts him in with Mala, annoyance at the manipulations his father constantly practices on him.  I get no real sense of why Speigelman is an artist, either in his life story or what he finds rewarding about this particular medium as he works on Maus.

Even his non-father relationships are oddly cipher-like.  I have no real sense of why he married his wife, though the awkward/sweet/meta conversation that opens the second volume is ingenious.  However, even that uses expository/behind-the-scenes intellectual excitement to distract from the fact that still we don’t know much or anything about their relationship.  In contrast, his father’s dialogue tends to be very self-revelatory, without being very aware of how vulnerable he is being.  The accent, syntax, and constant self-image form an image of Vladek that is a least ten times stronger than the image I have of the storyteller himself.

The Mistaken Value of Mice – Travis Rainey

Art Spiegelman’s work, the reader witnesses the highs and the lows of humanity through the substitution of mice.  Clever idea, and the arousal of humor with such a serious subject is quite interesting, but through all the themes, both artistic and those of character and plot development, I must take much grief from a subject under the surface. 

It appears to me that Spiegelman creates a world of “mistaken treasures”, that is to say where the characters mistakenly place their trust or value with the incorrect people or items; namely, this is a constant problem between Vladek and his son.  It shocks me that Vladek’s son can respond so violently objective in the face of his father at the conclusion of the story.  Vladek is a true Holocaust survivor; Artie can never know the exact pains and adjustments Vladek’s lifestyle required for survival but he (Vladek’s son) is so focused on obtaining raw and balanced material for his book that he is willing to sacrifice his father’s balance of grief with the past.  It makes me wonder if Artie is even (or when was he) concerned for his father’s emotional well-being; his continued digging for his mother’s diary was as annoying as watching the paparazzi hound a celebrity for invasive content. 

Yes his father destroyed a piece of organic history, it was part of his grieving process. Would Artie have preferred he destroyed himself? I have a tough time reading or appreciating material speaking to the Holocaust as I was flooded with the content growing up (I think most of us have received quite a bit of knowledge of it’s events) so I can’t see how Artie can feel that his book was going to be “so” revolutionary.  To the same token, Vladek fails to emotionally or comprehensively understand the world around him. It ALL seems to come to money. Granted, this may have been the trading point for life in the ghettos but as Mala even states, “she” had seen the same ghettos and did not place all her value in the material aspects of wealth.  Vladek’s son is attempting to connect with him on a historic basis and his actions point him where…in the direction of the bank.  Artie has a great idea, Vladek should “enjoy his savings while he still can” but he is so used to saving and placing his value in the concept of saving (never spending…) that it simply cannot happen.

The Banality of Evil in Maus

My apologies to Hannah Arendt.  The phrase “banality of evil” is lifted from the title of her book on the infamous Nazi Adolph Eichmann and the climate in Germany during the pre-war and war years.  Arendt’s thesis is that while great evil was done during the Holocaust, much of it was done by ordinary people.  Many of the perpetrators were not sociopaths or monster, but common citizens who acknowledged the German government and the government’s lie that the Jews were the cause of their problems.  German citizens went on to participate in horrible acts with the thought that their actions were those of normal people doing what the state wanted.  They did not think of themselves the way many of us think of them now.

I think this is part of what Spiegelman is saying in “Maus.”  He makes his point by playing down the tale he tells and mixing into it the banality of the everyday life of a man now in his 70s. The main story line is Vladek’s life during the run-up to his imprisonment in the death camps, but other, secondary tales are related; his life as a Lothario, his marriage, and his wife’s depressions and suicide.  His father’s second marriage to Mala and their apparent incompatibility is another theme in the first volume.  His father’s problems with his eyes and his story about how he found the right eye doctor takes up 14 panels. All of these could be part of the story of any person from that generation and Spiegelman uses them give us the impression of ordinariness.

Spiegelman then blends scenes of horrible cruelty and suffering in to this seemingly ordinary tale, but in a way that doesn’t overly shock the reader. In four pages he takes us from the birth of his brother, Richieu, he and his wife’s trip to sanitarium, to the beginning of the pogroms (pp.30 – 33).  This sequence illustrates how, at the beginning of Hitler’s rule, the war “just happened” to ordinary people.  Unlike in America, where one minute there was peace and the next war, in Europe the climate of hate and brutality began to build slowly over a period of years.  Ordinary people became acclimated to what was going on around them; Jews who were once rich became accustom to having food rationed and businesses confiscated.  Many non-Jews bought into the propaganda and became to think of their Jewish neighbors as less than human.

This is unsettling to me.  The terror of the book slowly builds.  Like the insanity of Nazism slowly taking over Europe. I found myself rereading passages, wondering how I got to a particular point in the narrative.

Anja as the “Source” of PTSD

In our reading from “The Black Hole of Trauma,” one of the things that struck me  was the “subjectivity” of trauma: “the critical element that makes an event traumatic is the subjective assessment by victims of how threatened and helpless they feel . . . People’s interpretations of the meaning of the trauma continue to evolve well after the trauma itself has ceased” (6). The author then gives an example of the women who was raped, but did not develop PTSD until months after when she learned that the rapist had killed another victim. Her understanding of events was suddenly radically altered and it was then that she truly developed PTSD. The facts of the trauma did not change, but her understanding of them did.

When I read this passage, I immediately thought of Anja’s suicide. What made me think of this is Vladek’s reaction to her suicide in the “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” on the insert compared to his reaction to every other death he encounters in Maus I. These seem to be two different Vladek’s, and I don’t think we can account for this solely looking at narrative reliability. What I suspect is that Anja’s suicide suddenly changed Vladek’s understanding of the trauma he’d already experienced and he suddenly loses it.

I don’t believe that Vladek suffered from full-blown PTSD prior to Anja’s suicide because he clearly views himself as not just a survivor, but Anja’s savior. It was his actions (according to his narrative) which allowed them to survive overall. We are shown scene after scene of Anja afraid, ready to give up, ready to die, and Vladek being strong for her and pushing her through everything. He saves her.

Then she kills herself.

It is this suicide which suddenly changes everything for him. Suddenly Anja is no longer a survivor of the Holocaust, but another victim and Vladek was not able to save her.

I think this explains many of his actions since her death. As from our reading he clearly exhibits the following:

Intrusions: Vladek, as he says on page 104, always is thinking of Anja. Reading his son’s comic is just another reminder to him.

Avoiding and Numbing: Organizing one’s life trying to avoid evoking these intrusions. Vladek marries Mala, whom he does not like at all, and burns Anja’s diaries. This last act is a lashing out at the fact that she wrote about all of what she experienced, but didn’t leave a suicide note.

Inability to modulate Arousal: Vladek is constantly getting upset over little issues
and taking it out on his son or wife, moving “immediately from stimulus to response.”

I may be way off base, but these were my immediate ruminations after reading the piece on PTSD, and seemed to make sense to me in explaining the different Vladeks we see.

Narrators We Have to Believe

Early on in Maus, before the Holocaust story begins, Vladek describes his past before the war. Vladek recalls that “I was at that time, young. And really a nice, handsome boy.” Vladek also describes the effect this has on the opposite sex: “I had a lot of girls what I didn’t even know would run after me…people always told me I looked just like Rudolph Valentino” (13). In a similar instance, when Lucia falls to the ground as Vladek leaves he describes himself as having “strong legs” (20).

One issue I have with these passages is that in some ways, they remind me of unreliable narrators I’ve encountered in fiction. While Vladek is certainly not as delusional about his past and present as, say, Brett Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman, or as willfully dishonest as Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, I still feel a familiar hint that someone isn’t being quite honest–or at the very least is playing up their past a bit. This led me to think about reliable narrators, their role and the importance of honesty in a story like Maus.

One issue that comes to play is the role of two narrators. Maus is a strange combination of memoir and non-fiction told through the comic medium. The memoir is all Art’s, a story about father and son. The non-fiction is the mediated story of Vladek’s survival, told to (and recounted/structured/painted) by Art. One of the only novels I can immediately think of that uses multiple levels of narration to tell a story is House of Leaves and without getting too much into that work, let’s just say it’s a mess when it comes to questions about narrator reliability: none of the novel’s three narrative threads are ever presented as completely factual or without their own holes.

Of course, in a story that recounts the horrors of Holocaust Poland, we must rely on our narrators to tell us the truth. A story with such serious subject matter must be told with a high degree of honesty lest it undermine the importance of its message about past atrocities and man’s ability to dehumanize, target and exterminate other men. Our emotional response relies upon this honesty.

It’s also important to note that while I questioned Vladek’s reliability in those early stages, I never felt those notions return as I read on. I wonder if a result of having a mediated story is that reliability always becomes slightly muddled. Or are we just seeing what Art describes on page 131 when he says “…it’s something that worries me about the book I’m doing about him…In some ways he’s just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew.” Perhaps, when it comes to his pre-war past, Vladek really isn’t the most reliable narrator. Does that unreliability vanish when he talks about surviving the war because the events are too traumatic to embellish? It’s pretty clear to me that Art is just trying to create an honest representation of his father, even if the end result will only reinforce some stereotypes. All of this helps reinforce Art’s reliability as a narrator. Still, I sometimes wonder about Vladek’s reliability in those early sections, which has me paying close attention to notions of reliability throughout the text.

So now, I leave it to you: Did anyone else question reliability at any point during the reading? Is it even possible for a memoir/non-fiction text to play with notions of unreliability, or does that immediately place a work in the realm of fiction? Have you seen other examples where mediated re-tellings have hints of unreliability? Or am I seeing something that isn’t there and just being jealous that Vladek was such a ladies’ man in his younger days?

The Story We Know and the Mice We Don’t

Disturbance comes not from the mice, but from us mentally righting the narrative from mice back to men. Brown speaks of this saying, “When you read Maus, you don’t identify the characters as animals. You decipher human beings, and then the metaphor takes hold. You are disrupted, upset. That is the effect Speigelman hoped for…” (108). While I agree with most of this, I have the opposite reaction to the text than to think of the mice as people initially. I read the story, visually seeing that it is about mice, and then I right the depictions of mice as being people, and the story takes a spin constantly. Yes, I do decipher human beings, but only after I have told myself they are mice first.

I am disturbed constantly because I have to rectify the story from the animals being shown to the people being tortured. The dehumanizing effect of the animals humanizes the terror of the events when you right what Speigelman has purposefully made wrong. Right after Brown’s statement, Speigelman is quoted saying that righting the work in your head is a “problem you’re always left with.” That is where the horror lies. Page after page, panel after panel, I am stuck with the mantra “These aren’t mice; these are people; and this story is supposed to be real.”

There seems to be two levels of distance at play with Maus, one that deals with the visual and one through the storytelling itself. Neither of these levels detracts from the story, more appropriately, both add to the experience of Maus. Speigelman forces us to engage with the story by subverting our expectations of the Holocaust tale by using animals for people. The imagery is pulling us into a conversation with the event more fully because we are pushed away from the tale when we think that it is dealing with animals and then immediately pulled further into the tale when we realize the text is dealing with human beings.

The separation only occurs to pull us closer to the tale, as Speigelman suggests his purpose is. He wanted the animals to be a problem we would have to wrestle with. Though, I will admit, and echo what has been talked about in the Twitter conversation, at times, his characterization of the people as animals can be distracting. I would not say it is overly distracting, however, but it might make some too far removed from the story to successfully come back to the realization Speigelman intended.

The other level of distance comes from the storytelling itself. When we are engaged in the story of Vladek, we feel immediacy in the story. Speigelman didn’t have to have to specific backgrounds to make us engaged. We, through the tale, could, to some extent feel like we are there, but then we are reminded often that the story is a tale within a tale, automatically providing a distance between us and the actual Holocaust story. We are at all times given a present tale between Vladek the survivor and Art his cartoonist son as the story is being told, but whenever we get into the Holocaust narrative from Vladek’s past, we are constantly reminded that we are not there, we are being told about it from a narrative we must deal with trusting.

~Kelley

Distancing Mice Masks

Spiegelman’s use of animals to represent specific groups of people threw me off at first and made me think about how to express inexpressible events.  While Brown argues, with Speigelman’s own words to back him up, that the mice masks are used in order to undermine Hitler’s own metaphor for Jews, it seems to work in a very complicated way.  For instance, the fact that Spiegelman uses it for the present as well as the past indicates that this is an ongoing fight against Hitler’s metaphor.  But more interestingly for me, the use of animal masks instead of people made it very clear that this is a story, though as historically accurate as possible.  In essence, the fact that Spiegelman does not use faces, and does not use a great amount of detail, as he did in the comic within a comic, he is drawing attention to the fact that this is a representation and therefore is creating some distance between the reader and the text.

Most Holocaust rememberings that I’ve come across, whether they be movies, books, or pictures, have used the awful details of the stories to shock and disgust viewers into understanding how incredibly atrocious World War II was.  Spiegelman goes in a different direction, and I wonder if the outcome is somehow more emotional.  I’m not disgusted so much with the stories, though that may be because I’ve heard them before.  I’m not focused on the ovens or the torture, even though we do see some awful happenings even in Speigelman’s story (I’m thinking of the children being thrown against a wall and blood spewing out).  Instead, I find myself focused on the human relationships and personal actions of the story.  I wonder if Art will ever try to fix something for his father; if Mala and Vladek will ever get along; if Vladek is ever going to be able to relax again.  I already know that Vladek and Anja made it out alive, but I want to know how they were able to do it emotionally.

My suspicion is that by creating distance between the reader and the text by using animal masks, Spiegelman has allowed me the space to become intellectually and emotionally invested in the story.  Instead of being bombarded by images that would surely inspire nightmares, I can quickly move past the atrocities and see what’s going on around them and beneath them.  A good counterexample to this is “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” comic within a comic – it’s completely emotionally charged in every detail and I cannot really get past that emotional aspect.  Its placement in the story, not as part of the Holocaust, but as a continuing effect of the Holocaust, also makes me wonder if survivor memories of the Holocaust are perhaps harder to face than the Holocaust itself was.  Simultaneously I’m thankful that Spiegelman did not draw all of Maus this way, because I think it would be too difficult for the reader to digest, and in some way disrespectful.  In the same way that Calliope’s rape could be argued as being disrespectful to rape survivors because it’s used as a plot device and laid out on the page in obvious detail; Speigelman’s distance from the subject matter seems to denote a certain amount of respect for Holocaust victims and survivors specifically because he does not try to draw accurate cartoons based on pictures and historical accounts.  The distance created by mice masks, then, is not only for the reader, but perhaps also shows Spiegelman’s distance as well.