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.
I would agree that the human relationships really do carry through and stick with the reader throughout Maus. I found the father-son relationship between Vladek and Art, clouded with feelings of guilt and blame on both sides for Anja’s suicide, especially difficult to emotionally wade through.
While reading Volume I, my initial reaction towards Art was not a favorable one. His neglectful attitude towards Vladek, and his refusal to even “talk” to his father about his marital issues (pg. 67) give off an extremely self-centered impression of Art as a son. But Spiegelman also shows that Vladek has his own flaws as a father. It seems very telling that the story opens with a two page memory of a young Art needing comfort as a child, but instead only receiving sobering, adult truths from his father. Likewise, the constant bickering between Vladek and Mala serve as a continued reminder of the old man’s spendthrift ways and generally grumpy attitude.
I find Spiegelman’s brutal honesty in the portrayal of his own family situation to be astounding. From an artist’s perspective, Art seems fearless in painting negative pictures of both himself as a son and Vladek as a father. While the reader obviously cannot get a completely accurate understanding of the emotional tenor of Art and Vladek’s real-world relationship, in the context of family presented in the text – both son and father’s behaviors in the story leave much to be desired, and point to an extremely dysfunctional relationship.
“The Prisoner From Hell Planet” puts Art’s guilt and resentment at his mother’s suicide on full display. But his repeated use of “murderer” at the end of the story was probably the most telling and disturbing moment for me as a reader trying to make sense of the father-son dynamic. Art thinking of his father as a murderer for destroying his mother’s war journals certainly seems to underscore his feelings of blame towards Vladek for Anja’s suicide. While the artist is obviously entitled to his own feelings about his father, Art’s use of the word “murderer” did not sit well with me. Especially given the horrors that Vladek had just finished describing, in which real-life murders occurred on a genocidal level – Art’s label towards his father of “murderer” seemed almost offensive. While dysfunctional family life in Brooklyn and the horrors of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe are thousands of miles away from each other (both geographically and thematically), the ending of Volume I created a disturbing emotional parallel between the two for me.
John
Check that – should have said dysfunctional family life in Queens, not Brooklyn.
John,
I felt Anja’s suicide was even more difficult because of all the hinting at it (can’t really call it foreshadowing because we learn how she dies early on) during the segments that take place during the Holocaust. All her proclamations that she dosn’t want to live, could just die, etc. give me the chills because we know at some point–after surviving the Holocaust, she will take her own life. I think in this way, Art is actually trying to take back some of the murderer comments and acknowledge that perhaps his mother’s suicide was not as much his father’s fault as something predisposed in her, something she couldn’t keep down after living with all the trauma that came from surviving in Poland and then Auschwitz. In this way, Art actually seems to be creating a conflicted dialogue for himself: one where he holds his father accountable and one where he tries to understand his mother’s history.
Jared,
I think your reading on Anja’s suicide — the tension Spiegelman makes between blaming his father and trying to understand his mother’s life (and perhaps by doing so better understanding her death) — is spot on. The only thing I could add to it is the fact that I found Spiegelman blaming himself somewhat in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” especially in the scene where he talks about the last time he saw his mother — he turns away from her; the last interaction Art has with Anja is one of his distance from and resentment of her, almost cruelly made clear to Anja by his callous action (103). It is when Anja walks out of his room that the ‘prison doors’ close — “clik!”; the next time we see Art he is in prison, which appears not too different from the state mental hospital Art has recently left. Regardless of how much responsibility he takes (or, perhaps better put, how much he feels imprisoned by his actions) and how much he feels is forced upon him for his mother’s suicide, I found the inclusion of his final interaction with his mother to be quite profound, especially give the final few panels of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” and the final page of Volume I.
It doesn’t surprise me that Art looks to blame — or share blame with — his father for Anja’s death, but by demonstrating the distance Art places between himself and his father, with Art as writer/illustrator showing himself to be “lacking” in many ways as a son, and by telling so powerfully his father’s story of survival and showing how it was Poppa that kept Anja alive through the horrors of the war and Nazi occupation, I feel Spiegelman is showing how limited his (or the character of Art’s) perspective is. By trying to understand his mother’s life — and in doing so telling his father’s story of survival — his father is absolved of some of the blame Art appears to place on him for Anja’s suicide, if only for the reader (and therefore for Spiegelman as author/illustrator/son as well).
The character of Art — as divorced from Art Spiegelman the artist/illustrator of “Maus,” a concept that perhaps deserves its own blog post seeing how often I’m harping on it — obviously feels differently, especially at the close of Volume I when he calls his father a “murderer” (159) for destroying Anja’s diaries, seemingly voicing the feeling he’s held all along regarding who is to blame for his mother’s suicide. I found that note a very strange (and brave) one to end a graphic novel on — I was very much distanced from Art at that moment: the word “murderer” is completely inappropriate, especially given the stories of suffering and survival that Poppa has told Art, the very stories he weaves into “Maus,” and it shows a complete disregard and disinterest in his father’s linger pain in the wake of Anja’s suicide, evidence of which abounds in the text, but is particularly evident in the scene at the bank (127).
As a close, I found Phineas’ post on Vladek’s PTSD [http://samplereality.com/gmu/engl685/archives/279] to be fantastic, especially seeing how the character of Art seems oblivious to his father’s lingering wounds. As “Maus” is Vladek’s story, Art’s disinterest in his father’s pain is all the more apparent, and the “conflicted dialogue” that Jared noted in his comment is intrinsically wrapped up in Vladek’s memories of the war and his lost Anja as conflicting with Art’s own pain (evidenced in “Prisoner”) and feelings of loss and anger.
It IS interesting that Spiegelman doesn’t feel the need to show the infants smashing against the wall, isn’t it? (wink at conversation from last week). Like you point out, I suspect the effect is much more emotional.
Which has me thinking about masks in general. After all, isn’t that what the best fantasy/allegory/fairytales do? Put a bit of a cloak on the obvious facts, place a bit of a spin on our perception of things–and get us to completely reconsider the Truth of the situation (hopefully with more emotional engagement than before)?
Maus’ masks aren’t for hiding. They–along with all the best masks of the world–are for revealing.
I too was thrown off by the choice of mice and the other animals to depict the real history of Vladek. All the other comics we have dealt with in class have used humans to tell fantastical stories. Yes, Watchmen did have a basis in reality and the actual threat of nuclear war, but the story and characters were fantastical. So, why is it that the one comic we have read thus far that deals with a real story feel the need to present the history with non-human forms? Does this reflect something greater, like how modern society views history?
I agree that the use of the mice distances the subject matter and does make it easier to take in, but also gives it a lack of reality or as an actual piece of the past. I think that humans would better engage the reader with the reality of the subject matter (look at the gripping depiction in Art’s comic of his mother’s death) and better bridge the gap between history and reality, and thus proving the relevance of the historical in modern times. Spiegelman notes the distancing in the Brown article stating, “As soon as you tell a story of a survivor and how they survived, you’re not telling a story of what happened” (Brown 96). But I think that a survivor’s story is capable of telling what happened. I have heard survivor’s stories from their lips and it gives one goosebumps, but I did not get that feeling with Maus, and I do not know if it is all because of the use of mice but I think that plays a large factor.
I also feel that the distancing of the material may act as somewhat of a coping mechanism for both Spiegelman and his readers. Spiegelman grew up with the weight of being the son of two survivors of the Holocaust and knew their personal struggles of the war and post-war, so maybe the mice helps provide him with distance in order to relate the story. But I also think this carries over to a culture so embedded in the present and the future, but not as much in the past. Comics are already slightly distanced in comparison to live action in movies or television, so why use mice to distance the story further, especially a historically important story?
I think Lindsay’s comment about being glad that the whole comic wasn’t drawn in the style of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” is instructive here. “My Father Bleeds History” isn’t a shocking, graphic, visceral work exploring the horror of the Holocaust—that approach may have worked, but that’s just not what this story is. In fact, I think the author intentionally avoids dwelling on certain elements like the gas and the ovens because they’re already so familiar, culturally speaking. In any case, hhilton, the Spiegelman quote you cited doesn’t imply that he couldn’t have told “a story of what happened,” the kind you were looking for that gives you goosebumps, but rather that he instead chose to tell a story about the survivor, about the aftermath, and most importantly about how our history shape’s our relationships. Maus is a family story, a story about understanding another’s experience across a generation gap.
Several people have talked about how two things distance us from the actual Holocaust story: the use of mice in place of people, and putting us in the perspective of the son listening to the story be TOLD secondhand instead of thrusting us into the historical moment. To me, it is the latter method that truly creates the important distance, not the former. I agree somewhat with Lars, in that this point of view reveals the limitations on our abilities to fathom not only the atrocities of past, but also the experiences of other people, especially people whose lives have been so different than our own.
The use of mice does necessarily put some distance between us and the characters by forcing us to make that adjustment. However, I’m a little disappointed that so many people felt this over-distanced us and dehumanized the characters. I thought the way they were anthropomorphized, their facial expressions, their habits – these all quite skillfully evoke as great a sense of humanity as many excellent comics have done using human characters – even with human characters, after all, there’s still a gap between stylized (or even realistic) representations and actual human beings. In fact, coming back to the comic-in-a-comic, I thought “Prisoner on the Planet Hell” was a great way to connect us to the characters. The much more detailed art, the shift to a much more personal perspective, and the use of human characters creates a huge impact largely because of how it contrasts with the more distanced story telling up until that point. This shock, and the visual revelation that these characters literally are human, stays with you for the rest of the work.
To me, using the animals is a great way to show how conscious everyone was of these social subdivisions—Jews, Poles, Nazis—and how differently they were treated. More importantly, maybe, the selection of mice uniquely illustrates the somewhat familiar point that Jews were perceived as less than human. The idea of rodents as vermin is even emphasized by the prominent depiction of the rats in Motonowa’s cellar (147). So when Vladek says “In Hungary we could be free to walk the streets again, like human beings,” it wouldn’t have the same impact if they weren’t drawn as mice (151).
A quick addendum, having started “And Here My Troubles Began”: pg 16 corroborates my point that Maus is about “understanding another’s experience across a generation gap” as it applies to the Holocaust.
Artie says: “I know this is insane but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz WITH my parents so I could really know what they lived through! …I guess it’s some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.” (next panel ->) “Sigh. I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams.”
And you see through the way he distances us, by putting us in Artie’s POV, that Maus is very much about that inadequacy, that inability to understand and depict that distant, violent experience he never had.
Jay, I definitely agree with you that the anthropomorphic mice were not a distancing factor. In fact, you could argue that their lack of distinguishing features makes them more compelling, easier to relate to. McCloud makes this overall argument in a chapter of Understanding Comics that we didn’t read: the more abstract or iconic a drawing is, the easier it is for the artist to amplify specific elements of the drawing. By stripping away the more realistic details, the artist can shape the meaning of an image that would otherwise mean something else entirely in a different context (say, a context like real life).