Maus II struck me as a much more detailed account of the father-son relationship than Maus I because more the of graphic novel takes place in the “present” as opposed to Vladek’s memories. But what became clear through this relationship, to me, is how it is riddled with the past and exists in its current form specifically because of the past.
In Maus I we see Art in an unsympathetic light. He’s more concerned with getting Vladek’s story than in talking with this father about his current life. He’s quick to leave when Vladek starts talking about Mala, and is impatient with his father’s requests for help. In Maus II we see Art in perhaps even a worse light as he refuses to help his aging father beyond a weekend visit. Art will not consider letting his father moving in with him or moving in with his father after Mala has left the senior Spiegelman.
But in Maus II we also see more of why Art would need to distance himself from his father. The most striking example of this to me is Vladek’s blunt racism and complete inability to understand that he is perpetuating racial hatred, of which he himself was a victim. We also see the absurdity of Vladek’s actions when he goes back to the supermarket to return food that he wasn’t going to eat, even though the boxes were already opened. His obsession with saving money and food go beyond socially acceptable limits and enter into the arena of the absurd. This absurdity is what Art has dealt with his entire life and with which he no longer has any ability to be patient.
What’s so interesting in this dynamic is how it also shows the perpetuation of history, and not necessarily in a simple action – consequence sort of way. We easily understand Vladek’s need to save money and food after reading his story of surviving on hardly any food and desperately needing money in order to bribe people either to get food or to look away while he escaped. This is easily understandable. His racism is not. His racism tends to show the other side of his learning process. It almost seems that as much as he was struggling to survive, he somehow adopted some of the hatred that the Nazis had and simply directed it to a different racial group. In essence he is a victim, but also a perpetrator of the kind of thoughts that lead to the atrocities he has survived.
While Art, thankfully, does not adopt his father’s racism, he still has such a strong emotional repulsion to the very things that his father learned from the holocaust. His intolerance could be understood as another variation of the holocaust’s effects and thus showing how the experience of such trauma is perpetuated. While our reading for this week argues that graphically Spiegelman shows that the past is in the present, I wonder if there’s another layer that I’m not able to reach. This layer would be the one where Art is also haunted, but not necessarily by the Holocaust so much as by its effects on his father. The only thing that I can think of that really shows this is Art’s intolerance with his father. Of course we see Art growing up with his father’s stories, but I wonder what absurdities Art has picked up and I wonder, also, if that’s part of the reason he was in the mental institution that he refers to in Maus I.
Art is affected by the Holocaust, not through his immediate interaction of going through it, but through the experiences and guilt he has by seeing his father’s struggles. Art sees Vladek deal with the aftermath of the Holocaust as his health and mental stamina deteriorates, and while Vladek is dealing with a first string reaction to the actual events, Art is “haunted” as Lindsay shares because he only has his father’s experiences to deal with. Vladek can articulate his hardships by calling on these memories, and, not having direct experience, Art only feels guilt because he can never know what his father has gone through, and he can’t prioritize his own needs over his father’s because he knows that 1.) he’ll never have the Holocaust hardships that his father and mother had to go through and 2.) he feels that he also cannot live up to his brother’s life, which was also tragically taken during the Holocaust.
We do get a lot more from Art in volume two. We see him paralyzed as a writer as he thinks the Holocaust is too grand a thing for one person to capture; we see him go to therapy; and we see him shrink literally as he deals with writing down Vladek’s story after Vladek’s death. After talking to a psychiatrist who also went through the Holocaust, Art becomes empowered and willing to give the novel another go, but he does shrink, becoming more and more like a child as his father’s story takes over his life once again. It’s almost like he feels like he can’t grow up because he’ll never have to deal with the things that his father dealt with, and he also seems like he’s stuck in a child-like state competing with his dead brother, while his father is still alive.
While I do think like Lindsay that Art can come across in a bad light for his treatment of his father, I found Art to be much more sympathetic in this volume than I had seen him be in the first. We get to see more how hard it is for Art to be with his father because his own troubles can never compete and Vladek is obviously troubled and affected by his experiences to a crippling degree, also as Lindsay pointed out. I do see Art as being somewhat cold to not want to live with his father, even for a short while, but I can’t fault Art for this because of what we have seen in Vladek’s penny-pinching and racist behaviors and because the child not wanting to live his adult life in close quarters with a parent is nothing new, even if it is different in this situation.
I feel like we got a better-rounded story this installment, as we do get the past along with the present. We weave in and out of Vladek’s story to deal with Art’s struggles and his father’s struggles before his death. We also get to see more of Vladek the man instead of Vladek the survivor. In turn, we get more of Art the person than Art as Vladek’s bitter son and archivist.
~Kelley
Interesting thoughts, Kelley and Lindsey. Perhaps it says more to my own reactions that I was completely sympathetic with Art’s reactions to his father. For me, Vladek’s complete refusal to love his son as a person rather than a prop to his own life was so horrifying that Art’s rejection, distancing, and attempts to diplomatically maintain distance (physical, psychological, and emotional) seemed not only reasonable but necessary, given the amount of trauma Vladek’s behavior had already inflicted upon those around him.
But perhaps this is merely another way Vladek traumatized Art – by showing him that the only kind of survival possible is a hyper-selfish one.
I think my frustration with Art’s editing of his own life comes not in that he hides his personality completely, but that there are very specific questions that I cannot find answers to. Why is Art a comic artist? Why does his marry his wife? What kind of person is he outside of his relationship with his dad. All of which are somewhat unfair to ask of a work like Maus – though I think there is some merit in looking at these questions even in relation to the father-son-survivor dynamic central to this story.