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
I read Maus much differently and it’s interesting to see how other people interpret it. Despite the cartoons of mice, cats and pigs, I always view them as people. All their respective animals help me do is quickly understand which “side” a character is on. I also found issues of trust and mediated storytelling to be important in this work, and wrote my blog on it. One issue I’ve always had is the feeling that I am not there, as you describe. Most of my experience with the Holocaust has been all secondary source material: History Channel specials, books, movies, and that one primary-source document by Anne Frank I’m sure we’ve all read.
In this sense it’s harder to feel the reality of the Holocaust and I think that may also be one of the roles the animals-as-people theme in Maus plays. Art wasn’t there either and those representations help convey the disconnect that most everyone who wasn’t there must feel. The fact that some people still maintain the Holocaust didn’t happen also helps reveal that disconnect: to some people, even those of us who know full well it happened, we can never really experience the trauma and horrors of that time, and even when we imagine the trauma and horrors of that time, the people may as well be animals, because we’re far enough removed that empathy–and even to a high degree, sympathy–become impossible. The most we can do is understand what happened and try hard to prevent history from ever repeating itself. Cats and mice can convey that as well as people in Spiegelman’s retelling.
I agree w/Jared. I think of them as people by the time I’m finished reading the first page…I do think there are other things I take from their animalian depictions (see my comment on Jared’s post), but I personally never lose sight of the nonfiction element of the story.
That said, I think you are quite right to bring the word “distance” into the discussion. It is a very curious idea to consider what Maus would look like w/people instead of mice, cats, etc. I do think playing with narrative distance is a very important part of the discussion…and like I said on Jared’s post, being reminded–as you said–that we are “not there,” actually enhances the real truth of the story for me.
I actually felt a loss of impact due to the characters being literally dehumanized. I understood the simplicity of the Jews being represented as mice, basically alluding to prey and being powerless. And following those lines making the Germans into cats, the natural enemies of mice and ruthless predators, as an easy to follow plot device.
But with this plot device Art Spiegelman is also maintaining a difference, creating a feeling of “otherness”. What has always struck me about the holocaust, and genocide generally, is the senselessness involved. Millions died in those camps just because of their culture, sexual orientation, religion and alliances. A human in judgment of another human.
But when you create a tangible difference, cat vs. mouse, some of that senselessness is lost. My mind was able to protect itself, distance itself from the actual atrocities committed. Like the Germans/Cats I couldn’t distinguish the Jews/Mice in their uniformity. Without gender indicative clothing I wouldn’t have been able to notice male or female. I couldn’t attach myself to the characters properly because there were no distinguishing marks, no emotions to pierce the blankness of their faces.
The story alone caught me. Maybe that was part of his intent.
Thanks for bringing up these points regarding emotional and narrative distancing. Spiegelman plays with distancing a lot, both formally and thematically. The animal metaphors are just the tip of that…