Hillary Chute’s analysis of Maus presents a truly admirable, rigorous, complex yet unified look at how the form Spiegelman chose creates the narrative (and by narrative I want to combine not only the bare meaning of “sequence of events in time” but also the connotations of comprehension by placing events in a framework, relating events to each other in a causal manner – the creation of meaning through storytelling, in other words). She explicitly rejects the facile acknowledgement of form by previous critics (remarking that there’s much more than mere connotations – just because Spiegelman is telling an unbearably serious story in a medium dominated by unserious things doesn’t mean that’s a particularly significant aspect of why Maus is important).
However, I think in her conclusions, which I believe are basically that Spiegelman’s work presents a multivocal/discursive/anti-closure narrative (historical and otherwise, though the focus is primarily on historical given the central comic) fail in their attempt to champion this view of meaning.
Chute (and, she implies, Spiegelman) rejects the idea of closure, of one voice telling a story and one interpretation or meaning for all events. However, I think she doesn’t deal with several factors which undercut this reading of Maus (and the underlying philosophy of her analysis).
In her analysis of Maus, Chute relies/supports her claims heavily by quoting Spiegelman. Given that comics criticism is still quite nascent, or at least nascent in respectability, the intentional fallacy inherent in this use of Spiegelman’s interviews is understandable. Additionally, such use is given much weight when the work itself is completely suffused with Spiegelman’s voice, telling us what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling, what he’s trying to do with this formal device. However, such a strong, univocal presence in her text (and Spiegelman’s, if Chute’s interpretation of his goal is reliable) contradicts the idea of a multiplicity of voices presented with equal weights.
I must acknowledge that Chute does include a loophole by arguing that the effect of the devices employed by Spiegelman is combinatory – that any new effects can be added to the ones she described – but she spends too little time considering alternative or contradictory interpretations of the devices used. She could get around my own reading of the diaphragm frame around Vladek’s younger self as he begins his exercise on the bike as a Hollywood or theater spotlight, derived from the Sheik references in this chapter by saying that this doesn’t contradict her own (and Spiegelman’s) purposes in seeing it as a static wheel, an eruption, and many other things – but the fact that her pronouncements on the effects of the formal devices are so final leaves me with strong doubt as to the practicality of the underlying claims of openness. Even her rejection of the facile critics (mentioned above) seems rather at odds with her final position.
Chute’s real target, however, is not the unsophisticated in comics analysis critics, but the idea of closure – of one monolithic meaning, imposed on a narrative (or all narratives). Such a concept is small, Chute implies, one man or group of men (like the Nazis) imposing their morality (a word she uses to mean absolutism) on others, opposed by ethical (the idea of communal values, instead of absolutist ones, it is implied) comics which present the world as packed with multiple layers of meaning and experience.
And indeed, a univocal approach to meaning can be terrible, as Spiegelman portrays in the German’s final (and only) solution – the ultimate closure for six million Jews. I believe that these dangers are raised whenever a claim to absolute meaning appears in a person’s mind – because we are finite, limited by our own experiences. But I also believe that reality makes most sense when understood as absolutely meaningful. Instead of seeing this absolutism as small, narrow, selectively imposed by one man or group of men sharing the same views, I think that the absolute meaning of reality (and reality as portrayed in comics) is too big to be comprehended by one perspective. The multiple perspectives present initial, superficial contradictions, to be sure, but I believe that attempts to resolve them are neither futile nor unhelpful. Instead, reading a work like Maus, which uses its form so brilliantly to present the layers of past and present as an experience unique to its telling helps me understand both the dangers and beauties of living in our universe.
[I though long and hard, and eventually rejected this title. But I really like it, so I’m including it in the text here. “Down the Chute: Comic’s Postmodern Rejection of Absolutism”]
Your last paragraph is obviously the work of someone who has wrestled long and hard with all things post-modern.
Well said, sir!