Talking about metafiction in Maus is complicated because the book’s genre is a little ambiguous – if it’s a biography, then a self-consciousness about writing the book is pretty standard. Still, there are several moments where Spiegelman breaks out of his mouse allegory and/or dramatically changes the perspective, and I would call these “meta” moments. I’m thinking specifically of the first page of the chapter “Auschwitz (Time Flies)”. Regardless of whether this section qualifies as being “metafiction,” I found this to be perhaps the most powerful page of the book.
Like “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” it depicts Art as a man rather than a mouse, and it takes a much more personal point of view. By drawing the people in this section as humans with literal animal masks tied on, Spiegelman cracks the veneer of his metaphor. This reminds us sharply of the humanity behind the story’s rodentine characters, but it also hints that, in a way, the author is hiding behind his allegory. What makes this section so impactful, to me, is how it grapples with the idea that any attempt to communicate these experiences is feeble and hopeless.
Art talks about the story’s events and describes the success of the first volume with flies buzzing around, and then there’s the large bottom panel with him at his writing desk surrounded by the emaciated bodies of Auschwitz victims. This perhaps implies that his success so far has been somehow built on top the tragedy of the Holocost, but it also expresses a feeling of being overwhelmed by the subject. As a writer spending years working on this book, he’s surrounded by this horrible history, but it’s something he knows only second hand and he faces the impossible task of communicating that experience. He tells his therapist, “Auschwitz just seems too scary to think about…so I just LIE there.” That the bodies are not only in his office, but in the street outside his apartment as he walks to his therapist shows just how immersed he is in the topic. It’s like it’s haunting him, hounding him everywhere he goes.
On that first page of the chapter, Spiegelman plays with our perception of time by relating the major events of his story out of order. He begins with Vladek’s death, which is shocking to the reader because we haven’t come that far in the narrative. By listing all these important moments tersely and in a matter-of-fact tone and contrasting that with him writing atop the Auschwitz victims, we see how he’s struggling both to express these occurrences to the reader and to truly understand them himself. By playing with time, we see how the past and present are interconnected, how these characters are forever in the shadow of history. Even Art, who wasn’t born until after the war.
Spiegelman creates that distance we’ve talked about, chiefly with the point of view, but when he does zooms in, it makes it all the more memorable.