Inspired by Ian’s post on Chute’s essay, which put a lot of my jumbled feelings about “The Shadow of a Past Time” into words, I’ve decided to take issue with Chute’s reading of the final panel of Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began.
While much of Chute’s essay demonstrates her grasp of the text and the ideas she posits are within Maus, many of her points — most of which can be boiled down to a sentence or two, as Ian does succinctly in his post — are so exhaustively argued that the essay leaves very little breathing room or space for other avenues of thought. While focused on the final panel of Maus, “the penultimate punctuation” of the text, Chute seems completed alluded by one of the simplest, yet most profound observations: Art Spiegelman’s signature is just that, an artist’s signature, a demonstration of Spiegelman’s ownership and responsibility for Maus, something he struggles with earlier on in the second volume.
Others have strongly pointed out the more meta-fictional properties of the second volume of Maus. Indeed, entire sections of the graphic novel are composed of Art Spiegelman’s doubts and concerns about the project he has undertaken, playing not only with Spiegelman’s mice/mask metaphor, but with the full visual potential of a graphic novel — here I am thinking of the pictorial depiction of Spiegelman being reduced to a crying child, not only emotionally, but physically within the confines of the text. While Maus is in many ways Vladek Spiegelman’s life story, the narrative of Maus is actually of the artist creating Maus: interviewing (and, as we see numerous times within the text, pushing his father to recount, perhaps traumatically relive, the horrors he survived) the subject of the story, creating animal masks for his the characters that populate Spiegelman’s rendering of not only his father’s story of survival, but his own story of an artist in the process of creation, and so on.
While I do not necessarily think Chute is completely off the ball with some of her thoughts on the final panel, the idea that she could not see, as I did, an artist saying, “Maus is the story of my father’s survival, but it is my version of his story/history,” perplexed me, especially given how often Spiegelman seems to question his ability and choice to take on a project such as Maus. I felt this panel was not only a tribute to his parents, but a clear cut sign that what we have just read is a story by Art Spiegelman, artist and writer, narrative and pictorial shaper of another person’s story which is paralleled alongside his own subjective account of being an artist in the process of creation, of being a flawed son to a difficult father, of being a husband and father himself, and so on.
Is Spiegelman “buried” by his parents’ history? In many ways, yes, but I do not feel that this is the reason the signature rests in the white, empty space below his parents’ grave — perhaps I would feel differently if the graphic space seemed filled, not only with soil and caskets, but with history, or if I could honestly believe, as Chute appears to, that the panels on the page actually travel “upwards” — when my eyes fell on the gravestone, they stopped. Also, artists’ signatures are typically at the bottom of their work; while I do think that there are points to be made about the signature’s placement and proximity to the grave stone, I don’t think these points should be made at the expense of the obvious.
Are some of the other points Chute makes about the final panel worthwhile, even if only as the beginnings of worthwhile conversations? Again, yes. It would just be easier to take many of her readings in stride had she not missed one of the most obvious and important aspects of an artist’s signature, especially at the end of a text about an artist’s father’s story of survival, a project the artist has struggled with and been humbled by. I think the conversations that could be prompted by the idea of Spiegelman taking responsibility and ownership for Maus are far more interesting than the ones allowed by Chute’s analysis of that final panel.
[Again, riffing off Ian, I was pretty close to titling this post “Chutes Too Narrow.” Yeah, I know. I’m a dork.]
I really like your thoughts about how Maus is about the creative process, and creation itself. I think that adds yet another element that Chute doesn’t touch on as much as she could. The question of resposibility, too, is fascinating. I feel that Spiegelman takes a lot of responsibility – trying to portray everything as honestly as he can, not because it necessarily makes it a better (or more superficially pleasing) story, but because it’s what good stories deserve.
Again, I don’t want to bash Chute too much – her work on talking about comics as comics instead of a glorified illustrated text is very impressive, and something I hope to achieve in my writings. I just think her philosophy contains inherent contradictions which can be profitably explored.