Fantastical Fact Vs. Fiction

            THIS PAST WEEK, we talked a lot about the methods of storytelling, particularly, in Spiegelman’s method for the telling Maus I &II. We mentioned his certain techniques such as using moments that collapse the boundaries between the past and the present, the real and the imaginary. As a result of the author’s techniques, critiques were categorizing Maus into different genres of literature. Some people thought the story was fiction. It seems that Maus could definitely be classified as a postmodern literary work that clashes many types of genres. But, I would have to say it most resembles a creative nonfiction literary work, presented by an author with a fantastical imagination and perception. Spiegelman preserved the historical legitimacy of the characters and their actions as well as the settings or landmarks. But, he uses fictitious visuals to represent his characters. And, he alters the perception of the Art character in fantastical ways to show us how, in some ways, he actually perceives these real events. For instance, there is that panel of when the doctor tells Art that his mom committed suicide. In real life, the doctor probably did not appear so sinister. But at the given moment, that may well have been how Spiegelman perceived the doctor and everyone else for that matter, at that point in his real life. This is why I feel like Maus is a creative nonfiction graphic novel. The author used representational meaning that was fantastical and fictional to evoke very real meaning in very nonfictional events. All the different animals to represent the Jews, Germans, Polish, Americans, they evoked several different meanings. One was to emphasize the idea that Nazis really did see the Jews as a sub-human race and to evoke the feeling of how the Jewish people really had to live like rats in those concentration camps and while they were in hiding.

            The author literally put himself inside the panels to give the readers a level of credibility. He could not depend on his father’s credibility alone, so Spiegelman gets in the story and tells us, I AM STRUGGLING with this. We, the readers, come to accept the idea that there are going to be holes in this story and Vladek cannot completely explain all the events exactly as they were, but our author confesses this, and by doing so, he exposes himself to us, and kind of throws himself on the table. He leaves himself very vulnerable to our judgement, but he also gains our understanding and trust.

The Art of Storytelling

On Tuesday’s class, we focused on Maus’s emphasis on and dedication to storytelling. The class discussed what elements make a story captivating and worth listening to. This discussion was sparked by the examples Professor Sample gave while testing out his storytelling abilities. First, Sample decided to tell the class a story about when his brother chased him and attacked him with a vacuum cleaner. However, he left out all descriptive details and only listed the basic skeleton of the story. The class was not interested by the story due to the fact that the way in which it was told was uninformative and somewhat boring. So Professor Sample decided to give the story a second try. On his second attempt, he filled his story with a great deal of descriptions. He even went as far as discussing the color and thickness of the carpet in his house. The second attempt at his story was not effective either because the amount of details given caused the story to drag out and the class to lose interest. The amount of detail took away from the actions that were taking place. Professor Sample decided to give his story one last try, proving that the saying “the third time is a charm” is true. On his third try, Professor Sample provided the perfect mix of detail, action, and humor to engage the interests of the class. After deciding that a story is interesting when action takes place, character descriptions are given, and the actions presented are done so in an exciting manner, the class broke into groups and took turns telling their own personal stories to each other.

The storytelling example and exercise was important to the class because storytelling plays such a large role in the graphic novel Maus. The entire graphic novel is one big story told over multiple chapters. Due to the fact that Maus is a true story created from conversations that Spiegelman had with his father, a Holocaust survivor, it is important that we, as readers, are able to identify with Spiegelman and realize that this is a personal story he is choosing to share with the world. By sharing our own personal stories and listening to others stories, we are able to experience (to a point) what Spiegelman experience with his father while gaining the information for Maus.

The Animals of Maus

We talked in class several times about the use of animals to represent people.  I think the use of Spiegelman’s use of animals to represent different ethnicities actually helps to clarify his story.  I think that since many of us grew up watching cartoons or disney movies, we are pretty used to the idea of people being represented as animals.  My guess is that even the older generations of people have seen enough mickey mouse or other similar characters that even they would be used to the idea of personified animals.

It also makes sense from the artists viewpoint that he might choose to represent the different ethnicities as different animals.  When we look at how small the panels are in the book, there wasn’t a lot of room for detail.  He could have made the drawings larger, and added photorealistic imagery to the pictures and later shrunk them down, but we still wouldn’t immediately know who was polish, german, swiss, american, etc.  Plus, how exactly does one try to capture their dead parents’ images accurately in so many different frames?  The minimalistic representation of the people as animals also helps show that different cultures might view all members of one race as the same.

I would guess that using cartoon charicters to portray people also helped to take the edge off of the story.  Speigalman was obviously trying to tell the story as accurately as possible… but since the closest he could get is second or third hand accounts of the story it makes sense that the story is missing lots of small detail and can only be represented by generalizing things like ethnicities or accounts of what happened.

Weekly Roundup on Maus II (March 8-10)

If you’re in group 4, you’re responsible for this week’s weekly roundup. Each student in the group will highlight one key moment from the previous week’s online and in-class discussions. To recall the syllabus:

Follow this formula for the highlights: describe the moment (provide the context and the facts about what you saw, read, or heard), interpret the meaning of the moment (what does it mean?), and evaluate its significance (in other words, why was the moment important?).

You can post your highlight in the comments below (or in a separate post).

Museum

So I found this link to a really crappy 90’s website. If you were on the internet in the 90’s you’ll know what I’m talking about:  http://www.nmajh.org/exhibitions/maus/index.htm

Apparently there was a Maus exhibit at the National Museum of American Jewish History. I really wonder what the exhibit had in it; all I can imagine is enlarged print-outs of the pages. I just thought it was interesting.

Teaching Maus; Critical Comics

In one of the earlier posts (I was searching for it but couldn’t find it) Prof. Sample posits that one of the reasons why Maus may not be more widely taught in the academic world, in particular in high schools, is because of a built in prejudice against the graphic narrative as a medium.  This is a sentiment I agree with.  It also got me thinking about what it would take to establish the legitimacy of the art form as well as what adjustments would need to be made in order to make Maus a “proper” history text.

In the introduction to the Los Bros Hernandez’s Love and Rockets Vol. 1 the author/critic Carter Scholz argues that the main reason that comics haven’t been treated as a serious art form is because they lack a history of criticism necessary to establish an academic tradition.  Initially only Europeans like Umberto Eco treated comics as works of art deserving of critical thought and analysis wrote deeply about the subject.  In Scholz view having a critical body to work from allowed the artists/writers to hone their craft and develop the art form but also said to the world at large that comics are worth of critique, therefore they are worthy of being considered art.  I would argue that in todays comic world that body of criticism does exist, but that sadly outside of Europe and East Asia it is still widely ignored.  How do we change this?  We teach the art form so that the youth going forward will know how to approach and even respect it.

So with that in mind I found these links about how to teach Maus in the classroom.  The first is about using the work as a way to engage less literate students as well as a means of introducing controversial topics, such as guilt and the erasure of atrocities from history.  The second introduces the concept of a Readers’ Circle where the students all read a piece of the work and then convene for a Q&A session asking questions as; “Why does Art shrink when he goes to see his shrink?”

Finally we have Art Spiegelman himself, now 61, talking about a seminar he is to deliver about his work on chronicling the history of the medium.  Perhaps comics most celebrated creator talking the issue of a critical body will be good, no?

I also find it amusing that when I typed Spiegelman into the post, Firefox said it was spelled wrong and suggested Spielberg instead.  Perhaps proving the point Scholz, Sample, and myself are all trying to make.

Conversation with Art

While searching the web I found this interview with Art Spiegelman on YouTube. The interview is about him talking about his drawing style and how he perceives comics.  I find it interesting to see an actual interview with him, because I had this picture in my head of him and really seeing him has made the already real book all the more lifelike to me.  While the interview isn’t about Maus exclusively, I still find it a very interesting video.

 

Art Spiegelman Interview

Meta Maus

So when I was searching the great wide interwebs looking for interesting links about Maus and Art Spiegelman, I ran across the Steven Barcley Agency website’s biography of Art Spiegelman. More interesting  than the (very standard) biography is the link in the right-hand column which lists Spiegelman’s works and has a picture of a book called Meta Maus. Indie Bound and Amazon both list it as coming out in October of 2011, but interestingly, on both sites there is no product description explaining what this book is: another sequel in the series? Something entirely new? Something entirely unrelated?

As it turns out, the book is going to be “like the Criterion DVD [of Maus I and II] that has [Spiegelman’s] notebooks, [his] sketches, rough drafts, interviews, transcripts, photos, historical references made into a work that can sit next to Maus.” I found this description of the book in an online interview with Art Spiegelman, conducted by Rebecca Milzoff. Personally, I’m very excited for this collection to come out as I’m interested to see how Spiegelman organizes or narrates the material. The books are already highly saturated with metamoments so having all of this outside information will make for another of layer of meta in which the author is telling us about being the author who is telling us about being told his father’s story of the Holocaust. Anyways, the rest of the interview is pretty entertaining as well, especially Spiegelman’s take on therapy as vomiting, and how he does not consider his work therapeutic.

Oh, and one last thing that probably won’t apply to many of you, but if you happen to read Portuguese, I found this Portuguese language edition of the book online. I just think it’s funny because on page 41 he’s talking about how the 15 foreign editions of the book like it’s a bad thing and here’s one of them.

Maus II: Auschwitz

I noticed while reading the blog that some people were fascinated by Art’s masterful depiction of Auschwitz and the other camps.  I have to agree with Lauren on this;  seeing those images of sick and dying mice makes you wonder what kind of psychopath would do such things to human beings, and it makes you admire the people who survived against incredible odds.  Again, Art does a superb job of depicting Auschwitz, considering that he has never seen the camp, or the horrors within.  In order to have drawn the death camp so hauntingly, he must have visualized his idea of a place that was the closest to being a real-life hell on earth.  Lauren also makes a good point in that, unless you experienced the Holocaust or something similar, no one would truly be able to understand the atrocities committed in the name of racial superiority.  Everyone gets caught up with the visual representation in Maus, but the dialogue is just as important, too.  The way the accents are captured makes it so easy to hear the characters actually speaking to each other rather than just reading text on a page.

Reflexivity in Maus II

From what I’ve read on this blog and from our class discussion on Tuesday, it seems that everyone is (rightfully) fascinated with the “meta-narration” in Maus II, and I’d like to respond to the commentary we’ve built so far.

Dayneé had a great point about Spiegelman’s reflexive moments as a filibuster, and I agree that they provide a context for Vladek’s story. We discussed in class what happens when Spiegelman breaks the fourth wall on page 41 (the reader is implicated and made hyperaware of the book in their hands,) but I think that moment also aligns the reader with the author. We’re put in the same temporal context as Spiegelman in that moment, and we are reminded that we are not experiencing Vladek’s suffering alongside him, but are perceiving it retrospectively alongside Art (now a character in his own work.)

Considering this in terms of the layered narrative that Emma brought up, if the core of the story is Vladek’s experiences, the secondary layer is Vladek’s dictation to Art, and the third and final layer is present-day Art at his desk, then this reflexive moment pulls the reader from where we became comfortable at the core and puts us definitively in the third layer, as a reminder that while we’d like to imagine we can sympathize with Vladek, we can only truly understand it from the perspective of the present-day historian.

Like what Lauren mentioned in her post, Art frequently refers to his trouble with drawing events or places he’s never seen. He chooses to research and interview extensively to get his images as close to reality as possible, for fear of speaking for Vladek instead of revealing it through this cataclysmic medium. This dedication to the actuality of the event reinforces that earlier reflexivity, to guide us away from appropriating Vladek’s suffering.

Meta-narration and Maus

I also thought that the meta moments in mouse were important in telling the story. It relates more to the reader and allows the reader to know the overall story of the Holocaust, and that Vladak would survive it.  The importance of the meta narrations is that it shows that the characters are self aware the they are going through this tragedy or at least Art Spiegelman the artist and son of a Holocaust survivor. this is important in telling a story that he knows but acknowledging the fact that hearing it and retelling it in your own way are much more difficult than he thought. However he does a good job of trying to get the audience involved with their own visions of his meta narrations of Art Spiegelman and the different things he includes such as when he goes to the house of his doctor and he says in the comic that it would be weird to mention that doctor has a cat as a pet. this entry into the inner views of the characters also is enlightening to show that they as characters are somewhat trapped in a situation that they understand is happening but cant be real. This attitude is similar to peoples reactions to things as horrible as the Holocaust because it truly happened but it is almost stranger than fiction and a tragedy because of that. The breaking the fourth wall is away to show the complexities of portraying the Holocaust in a way that is new but at the same time helps the reader try to understand one survivors story.

Maus: Man in Survival Situations

There was a single page in Maus II that really got my attention and held it.  On page 28, Vladek meets a priest who gives him hope in the camp.  As a Catholic my first thought was “Oh my God! Its Maximilian Kolbe!”  Kolbe is a Catholic Saint who was in Auschwitz.  He was Polish and the priest in the novel is drawn as a pig (so he was a Pole).    Well, as it turns out the priest Vladek met could not have been Kolbe because he was killed in 1941, but the page was still striking to me and I began to think about why.

There are two reasons this page was important.  The first is that it, in a small way, widens who the story is about.  The priest is not Jewish.  And I think Spiegelman may have included it to show others who were in the camp.  It also heightens the fact that within Auschwitz’s walls the traditional divides between people fade.  In a survival situation most of the bias people has is stripped away to reveal the best (the priest and Mancie) and the worst (Yidl) in people.  The priest is a great example of this not only because he reaches out and gives Vladek hope, but because it is a Catholic reaching out to a Jewish man.  The relationship between Catholics and Jews has not always been the best and in 1944 there was still a great deal of tension between the two religions.  Yet, the priest does not see Vladek as an enemy, but a fellow human in need of hope.  Spiegelman includes this story to resonate with more people and highlight how people react in extreme circumstances.

Images of Auschwitz

What I found most interesting about this first section of Maus II was Vladek’s experiences in Auschwitz/Birkenau/Dachau, and how Art chose to represent them visually. Young Spiegelman struggles with this himself, unsure of how to draw such horrendous events that he’s never actually witnessed. Personally, seeing such gut-wrenching images as the sick and dying mice made me shudder at the thought that this actually happened to people—and even crazier, that they managed to lived through it. Maybe I was the only one who did a few Google searches to look up images of the real Auschwitz and the horrors that happened there? I found some pictures of the Kremas and those haunting Auschwitz gates. Even looking at real photographs, it is still hard to imagine that these tragedies happened. I think it’s actually a testament to Spiegelman’s project—I don’t think he misrepresented anything that happened there, because it can’t be represented at all. Even photographs don’t seem to do it justice, and I think that even if a real survivor illustrated Maus, I still wouldn’t understand what seeing those things in real life was actually like.

Also, the more I read Maus, the more I really appreciate Art Spiegelman’s storytelling. Everyone seems to be focusing a lot on the visual representation (myself included, no doubt) but I’ve been thinking about the incredible job Spiegelman does in capturing his father’s voice and dialogue. Everything seems so natural, and the reader is able to catch on to the subtle nuances, like when Art is being sarcastic toward his father or when he’s being inconsiderate or too persistent in pushing Vladek to continue narrating the story. As much as seeing the images on the paper really helped me visualize the story, I felt even more immersed in Art’s narrative pieces—it’s so easy to “hear” the characters speaking in my head, and I think that really sets Maus apart from some of the other books we’ve read in this class (particularly the ones without any words—obviously).

Maus II-

What I liked about Maus II so much was how much time Spiegelman spent on the “alternate” story line (himself and his father as well as his writing of Maus II).  Especially in the beginning where he discussed the issues he went through with the media and his inability to write and draw after his father’s death.  It added a deeper layer to the story but also to the characters within it.  Making the writer a character within the story, and showing the trials of writing the book that is in my hands gives me a greater appreciation for Art Spiegelman.   It also makes his character so much more real and reminds me yet again that what happens in this book is real.

Along with elaborating on his own character, Maus II really elaborated on Vladek’s character.  This book especially emphasized his actions and feelings that exist because of what happened to him in the holocaust.  I felt like I understood Art and Francoise’s frustration with Vladek, but also this sort of guilt for feeling so frustrated with him.  Doing silly things like saving his wooden matches, leaving the gas on all day, or trying to return half eaten groceries frustrated me as a reader, but at the same time made me feel terrible for this man whose earlier days led him to act like this.  Overall I think Spiegelman did an excellent job in the second half of this story of really making everything real for me.  The characters were real, and I felt for them, even if they did look like mice 🙂