“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.