Category: Week 6 – Maus II

Response to post by

Josh,

I am familiar with the angry student’s reaction to being blamed for deeply immoral acts in which they did not participate.  I don’t think any of my students were initially guilty though, in fact, a feeling of entitlement toward the separation from acts of their ancestors or ethnic group is what I have encountered.  I completely agree with your stated dilemma:  “Do we have to ignore history and responsibility to move on?”  Between political correctness and worries about self-esteem, it’s hard to put an idea out there that doesn’t offend someone and still makes a point.  In a much lighter take on a serious subject the Marjane Satrapi book Persepolis, mentions this phenomena in relation to how Iranians are viewed outside of the Middle East.

The protagonist is a bright, outspoken girl who grows up during the Islamic Revolution and the War with Iraq.  Her family sends her to Vienna to attend school where she would be safe.  Marjane makes two trips back to Iran and always feel like an outsider no matter what culture she is in, Middle Eastern or European.  Once Marjane and her mother are ridiculed by their own countrymen in a supermarket for having taken in refugee friends at a time when the food supply in Tehran is sparse.  Later, when Marjane is in a French convent, a nun shows contempt for her because she ate pasta out of a pot instead of putting it on a plate first, “It’s true what they say about Iranians, they have no education.

Responding, “It’s true what they say about you too.  You were all prostitutes before becoming nuns,” gets Marjane thrown out of the boarding house to live on her own, while the Mother Superior writes a letter to her parents that she left voluntarily because she was caught stealing a fruit yogurt.

Marjane’s method of survival is to endanger herself.  When she is in Iran, she constantly flaunts Islamic dress codes and behavior norms.  Once she tries to commit suicide by drinking vodka, cutting her wrist, and taking pills, and laying in a hot bath.  Alone is Vienna, she spends about two months on the streets in the middle of winter, eating out of trash cans and smoking dropped cigarette butts.  Imperiling her health, yet, she luckily ending up in the hospital, she tries again to make a go of it in Iran.  There she goes to a therapist and takes antidepressants make turn her into a zombie.

While talking to psychologists she realizes she has tremendous guilt because, as hard as her life was on the street was, it was nothing compared to the political murders and bombings her family was experiencing at home in Iran.  She will never forget the terror of being arrested on the street or having her favorite relatives executed.  Marjane sustains the collective trauma of the Iranians who lived through that period and the burden of personal family trauma going back several generations to the family of the shah.  She, like Spiegelman, uses writing to convey the times as they were, leaving a detailed and generous view into something I can only imagine.

-Deb

Like many of the other responses to Maus II I too enjoyed the greater interaction between the past and present in this volume.  We see more of the details we needed in Volume I of how the past has shaped the present of who Vladek is and why his relationships are the way they are, but I think more importantly this volume attempts to create a connection between the past and present that is larger than Speigelman’s story.  The simple fact that Spiegelman feels a need to write the story of his father’s survival shows how he sees how this story needs to be told to the contemporary audience, but in this volume we see Art’s struggle to understand that reasoning which I appreciated and made me better appreciate the story.  We see Art’s struggle on page 68 when Art needs to put Vladek’s time in Auschwitz into an understandable timeline, closed and contained.  Vladek responds to Art’s questioning of time saying, “So? Take less time to the black work. In Auschwitz we didn’t wear watches” (Spiegelman 68).  We see the timeline of the right side of the page stretching almost half the page. Spiegelman begins the timeline with Vladek’s entering into Auschwitz in 1944, which seems to negate Vladek’s the struggling and survival prior to Auschwitz presented in Volume I.  However, the timeline Franciose’s exclamation from the present cuts off the timeline, leaving the timeline unfinished and seeming continued into the future.  In Chute’s essay she presents page 68 as a layering of the past and present, but I see it as more a continuation of the past into the present, a history that cannot be contained by a beginning or an end.  I think this need to contain the history of the Holocaust shows a need to keep the past in the past, but we see throughout the novel how that is not a reality.

We see this struggle with the past and its confinement/simultaneous presence through Art’s feelings of guilt and inadequacy in this volume’s beginning.  Art’s therapist pushes Art to question the need for his book and tells him, “People haven’t changed…Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust” (Spiegelman 45).  The therapist states that there is no end to the timeline, people have been the same since before the Holocaust until now – genocide and prejudice still exist.  We see this presence through Vladek’s own racism towards the hitchhiker.  But I think more importantly the therapist questioning of the need for another Holocaust story to push Art shows how history needs to be conformed for the present.  It isn’t that history is confined to a timeline, but that how that time in history is presented gives it an end.  By breaking the mold of creating a nonfiction, biographical comic about the Holocaust he puts an end to the timeline – the past enters into a present medium of history and thus crosses that gap that we see him struggle with in order to understand and present the story.

I recently had a female student from Germany who had gone through the German pubic school system where it is required that students be taught about the Holocaust.  She had read volumes I and II of Maus in the 10^th and 11^th grades and was clearly exasperated by the experience.  Like the reporter wearing the cat/Nazi mask at the beginning of chapter 2 “Auschwitz (time flies)”, she asked why she should feel guilty for something that happened before she was born and expressed dismay at her country’s inability to move beyond the past, or at least allow her generation to move beyond it.

Should time and our removal from events mitigate the horrible things done by “us”?  My student regretted the Holocaust and “felt bad” about it, but didn’t feel a part of it.  Children of Holocaust survivors, like children of American Indians or children of slaves, do remember; as Chute discusses in her references to postmemory, remembering is the burden survivors of collective trauma must carry.  The difference, it seems, depends on which side of the prison fence we view the situation from.

Artie is on the inside looking out.  He didn’t perpetrate the horrors of the Holocaust, nor was he a victim in the camps, but unlike my student, he doesn’t have the luxury of forgetting. Writing in 1978, with Holocaust victims piled at his feet and a prison camp guard tower outside his window, Artie is as much of a victim and prisoner as his father, only his prison is his guilt.(41) Pavel tells him that, although he is in Rego Park and not Auschwitz, he is the real survivor. (44)

On pages 42 – 46, Spiegelman draws himself as a child, implying that he is unable, like Vladek, to extricate himself from his prison.  Artie is compelled by his father’s story; he is as trapped in it as his father was in Auschwitz and Dachau. Vladek’s survival mode is to be as useful as possible to his captors; to be an English teacher, a tin smith, a cobbler.  Most of all he credits he strength and good health for his ability to survive the beatings and anguish inflected on him by his captors.  Artie’s survival mode is to be as useful as possible to his father while surviving  the slights being heaped upon him.  When Francoise suggests staying in “Mauschwitz” a little longer to help Vladek, Artie says he doesn’t think they’d survive.

Artie’s survival mode is also to create “Maus” and to not let the Holocaust become part of the past. Those who wish unpleasant facts to go away, as my student did, need to understand that they are now part of a collective worldview, which is why Maus is required reading in German school systems. As Chute mentions, the trauma Maus represents is unending; there is no closure or finality. Maus is a tale that adds the future to the past and present as Speigleman suggests in his proposed title for a Holocaust Museum exhibit: Never Again and Again and Again.

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.]

Looking through the final chapter of Maus, I’m struck afresh by how many of the images shown are headshots. I’ve been teaching a bit of visual rhetoric in my English 101 class this past week and we’ve talked there about how these type of perspectives in media emphasize emotions of intimacy, directness, honest conversation…

It’s completely understandable why Spiegelman relies so heavily on this particular angle in the last chapter, and throughout the book. As we read in Brown and discussed at length in our class last week, Maus is primarily an exploration in oral history, in memory and imposed meaning. Of course conversation is going to be emphasized!

But it also strikes me that Maus may rely on the printed word a bit more than the previous graphic novels we’ve read. For example, I think you could probably read The Dark Knight Returns and figure out an awful lot of what was going on—“subtexts” and all—from the visual narrative alone.

I’m not sure, as of yet, if you could do that with the visuals of Maus. Rather than a sin of illustration omission, however, I suspect that this has to do with the fact that this piece may contain far more subtexts, far more intricacies than any of the other texts we’ve perused so far. For example, how much can you glimpse, let alone unpack, all the intricacies of the last page of Maus (as discussed by our Chute reading of the week) from visuals alone?

Maybe it’s unfair to compare Maus to Miller. And yes, Watchmen and Sandman both had visual narratives that were also purposefully set off against the written narrative. But I can’t help thinking that the written narrative of Maus is quite a bit more complicated and integral than any other text we’ve examined yet.

Maybe it’s the inherent nature of “nonfiction.”

Again, if nothing else, emotions are simply depicted in Spiegelman’s drawings, forcing our in-depth deciphering process to rest chiefly on the written word. Which we have to do; at both a basic and more complicated level, this is a book about relationships, past and present, as that final page of Maus clearly comments on.

Have you tried looking at these books without reading the words? Imagining a page with nothing but pictures (a lá Eric Drooker’s Flood)? What revelations—if any—has that given you?

As a final, somewhat-related note: I had a hard time with Chute’s point making Spiegelman into an overt modern-day political commentator via bodies in the trees near the road, etc…you?

When reading the second volume of Maus, my mind kept revisiting the PTSD essay we read last week. I was reminded of how there are two different reactions to trauma. The first, and healthier of the two, is going through the trauma but being able to compartmentalize it. The memories naturally distant themselves and morph. The second reaction is when one can’t get over the trauma. Every memory is as clear as if it had just happened.  It effects your daily life, your body is in a constant state of arousal, close to panic. Even though it wasn’t clearly said, I feel as if Anja and Vladek represent these two types.

Vladek wasn’t the restful type. I believe that there was only one moment in the entire story where he was sitting without fidgeting or contemplating what to do next, the moment while they were sitting outside. Mostly the reader’s saw him exercising, walking, counting pills, going over bills and just fretting. This restlessness I attribute to his brand of survivalism.  Part of his PTSD was a constant readiness.  Maybe discussing the events of the holocaust caused some of the restlessness we saw, but the almost distant tone with which he used negates that. If it wasn’t sometimes boastful I feel as if he could have been telling a tale that he’d heard.

His hustling tendencies, admittedly amusing, also seemed like a form of his PTSD. He hoarded his money and wouldn’t spend a dime if a nickel would do. The moment where he goes to the grocery store to return a box of already opened cereal, although a wee bit funny, was also slightly saddening. He also had no shame playing the pity card by using his holocaust survivor status to get the manager to acquiesce.

Everyone in the story claims that Vladek’s penny pinching is not a result of the holocaust, but how he has always been. And yet there is evidence in the previous story that he wasn’t always like that. Such as when his wife had postpartum depression and he took her on a 3 month “honeymoon” to a popular resort for her to get help. This doesn’t appear to be the same guy who wouldn’t pay to get his roof fixed by a professional.

Maybe his PTSD wasn’t as severe as his wife’s…but it definitely shaped him.

What really struck me in the opening pages of Maus II was not so much the metatextuality of Art Spiegelman almost addressing the reader directly, but the way in which he does it.

Art appears in the first pages of the second chapter not as the Art we saw throughout book one and subsequently in book two (i.e., as a mouse) but as a human wearing a mouse mask. This is a definitely a deliberate choice. Spiegelman is distinguishing “Art Spiegelman – Writer” and “Art Spiegelman – Character”. But then the writer version also becomes a character.

It is a strange choice to make. Why does he need to make such a distinction between the two versions of himself? Why doesn’t he just frame his concerns about the project and his discussion with the therapist in the same conceit as previously? Why step outside the book?

I’m not sure I have answers to these questions, frankly. One could say he is just working through his writer’s block, but I think it is more than that. This is a deliberate choice he makes as creator of this world.

I suspect he is making an effort to do a number of things. One, I think he wants to justify his telling of his father’s story not as THE story but as A story. Two, I think he is trying to make it clear that not only is this his “oral” history of his father’s tale, but also his own story of his tale of dealing with his father at the end of Vladek’s life. He is making a clear distinction, not just in time, but in the story itself. His masked reflections on the creation of Maus are meant to be separate and distinct from the story he is telling of his father and hinself. But, because he is aware that he is still telling that story, he has to wear a mask and continue his metaphor.

At least that’s what I’m thinking at this moment.

I have to say, Maus II was certainly better than the first, however, it had nothing to do with Auschwitz.  I really appreciated Spiegelman’s integrations of the real world, into Maus II.  To be honest, before I even finished with Maus I, I was already tired of hearing of the Holocaust.  What can I say?  Maus I provided no real new information to me; I needed something fresh.  Aside from the comical pictures of mice (which only lasted for about 10 pages and then I hardly noticed), Maus I struggled to keep my attention.  Then comes Maus II…different, and I will even venture to say, Better.

Maus II provided a fair depiction of our protagonists, and I a breath of fresh air from the camps of Auschwitz.  I needed it.  It had nothing to do with the content of the camp; as i’ve stated, I believe the Holocaust / Auschwitz story has been worked into the fabric of history so much so that i’m often amazed when people say that the Holocaust was the worst genocide ever, as if they forgot we lost over 4 times as many blacks in slavery.  No, the content received a fair distribution but I loved the view into Spiegelman’s world.  I appreciate the numerous pages of dialogue with him and his wife, and I was thrilled to see that we could take enough breaks from Auschwitz to see what was actually on Art’s mind. Not Vladek’s.  

I think it’s important to note that as much as we may forget (in a stretched way of seeing it) Art is a survivor of the Holocaust.  The events that shaped his mother and father (aside from their union) are a direct input and result into the initial fabric of Art’s character and either through acceptance, or in his case, rejection, I really wanted to see how he dealt with the events.  I loved the images of Art growing smaller and smaller and smaller, and to read the comments: beautiful!  I loved dialogue between Art and the psychiatrist, without it, (unless the reader did some character background) the reader may have never known of Art’s psychiatrist and that he was also a Holocaust survivor.

We are all survivor’s of something, and for the fortunate souls, I would like to hope that they are simply survivor’s of life, as that is a great leap as it is.  However, I can still remember when my great-grandmother used to always say that my cousins and I were survivors of slavery, and I did not understand.  My grand-parents and parents survived segregation and worlds of other hindrances that I hardly call myself a survivor of, but knowledge is passed down.  I learned from my parents, who learned from their experiences and their parents, who learned from their experiences and their parents, and I can’t help but notice that quite a few of my decisions (based on the knowledge of my parents) are directly related to their experiences.  Of course, like Art, I find myself rejecting a lot of my great-grandparents’s and parents’s views on things, but I am so glad he afforded us the opportunity to see that side of him.  His story.

One thing I really couldn’t get over in Maus II was the greater presence of dark humor than compared to volume one. Maybe it’s just me (since I know of at least one other person who didn’t find any of these things funny), but throughout chapter 1 of the graphic novel I kept finding little things that, if not about something as atrocious as the Holocaust, I might have found laugh worthy. That said, I do think that Spiegelman’s (Vladek’s narration and probably some of Art’s creation) language takes on a more fatalistic and ironic tone. I know I mentioned this on the Twitter, but here are the three examples I found early on:

1. 

This image is from page 26. What I find particularly “humorous” is Vladek’s narration at the top of the second panel. “One guy tried to exchange,” he says. Short, sweet, but an entirely ridiculous thought when you consider that this is Auschwitz, why would this “one guy” even think he could exchange anything if he had barely eaten? More to the point, why is this small anecdote included in the story? Of course anything Vladek can remember is gold for Art’s Holocaust story, but this way this memory is presented just seems to have an entirely different ring from most of Vladek’s story. Additionally, the politeness with which the “one guy” approaches the Pole is somewhat amusing. It is almost reminiscent of Oliver, “Please sir, may I have some more?”

2.

Here I find the repetition about chimneys, and the way the dialogue becomes almost prophetic of Abraham’s unfortunate demise, to be humorous. The mirroring of Vladek’s concise and matter-of-fact narration and the fatalistic dialogue included in the scene come together to form a somewhat depressing, somewhat ridiculous and comical effect.

3.

In this frame I see humor in Vladek’s affirmation that the Priest who gave him hope and strength was indeed a Saint. When Art says that “that guy was a saint,” I, as a reader, hope that such a saint would survive the event, but of course, to become a saint one must, quite literally, never be seen again. Also, the abruptness with which Vladek agrees lends itself to a humorous tone. And finally, the excitement with which Art expresses that this priest must have been a saint and then the jarring confrontation of the gruesome reality is so opposite that it becomes comical.

Overall, I didn’t see as much dark, fatalistic humor in the first volume as I did in the second, and was therefore forced to consider possibilities for this difference in tone. Did Vladek’s death while Art was writing the second volume phase him to the point that his tone had completely changed? I don’t know, especially since I don’t know at what point during writing the second volume that Spiegelman’s father actually died (specifically if it was before or after pages 26-28). One idea that I do have is that this dark humor is product of Spiegelman’s increasingly conflicted nature in the second volume. We see Art divided about his work, wanting to continue to tell his father’s story but not necessarily knowing how (not to mention the pressure he gets from outside to make a movie or TV show about this story that he does not want to do). Further, Art’s visits to his psychiatrist reveal more about his possible guilt in even having written the book (though, at the same time he seems to feel guilty about not being able to finish the second volume). Because a lot of the dark humor I showed earlier depends upon either a confrontation of different feelings, or the consideration of something completely ridiculous for the circumstances, in order to be funny, I think Art’s own conflicted feelings about his book and the Holocaust might be the origin of said humor. If Art can’t write a book about something he experienced himself, at least he can write his book in a way that shows he can’t completely understand the reality. He can write the book in a way that shows how ridiculous and absurd the Holocaust was.

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.

I don’t think I was the only one jarred by the scene on page 98 when Vladek shows himself to be quite the racist. I’ve tried figuring out how this fits into the book: is this just another one of Vladek’s less-than-desirable traits? Is it human nature to distrust people different from you (as someone posited on twitter)? Can a lifetime of racism come from one bad experience as a person in a new country? I’ve thought about this a bit, and I think all of the above come into play, but that Art included this in the story as a storytelling device. We’ve discussed the role animals play in Maus, and in Maus II we’ve seen some new animals enter (the American dogs who finish out the Tom and Jerry chain of mouse, cat, dog) as well as the familiar pigs (Poles), Deer (Swedes), and Frogs (French). These animals all relate to each other in different ways (or at least they relate to the mice and cats in different ways), and in some ways they help to mirror the racism we see Vladek exhibit.

There was more than just this instance where it seemed Art was making a point about dehumanizing others, as well as senseless killing in Maus II and I believe as he moved on with the story, he wanted to investigate more of the reasons on how people can do these things to fellow living creatures. I think a good way of understanding why Vladek’s racism was included comes from many of the relationships we’ve seen between the Jews and Poles in Maus and Maus II. The pigs don’t see Jews the same way the cats do in Maus. In fact, some Pigs are more than willing to help hide the mice when things get bad. We can see the same type of dynamic in the car when Francoise says to Vladek, “That’s outrageous! How can you, of all people, be such a racist! You talk about blacks the way the Nazis talked about Jews! (99). But Francoise has it wrong: the connection here isn’t so much between the Nazis and the Jews, but the Poles and the Jews. When people are afraid, they can become wary of others, and an early encounter in New York helped turn Vladek into a racist much the same way many Poles became hateful of Jews because of fear and desperate times. It can be far too easy to blame one’s problems on other people, and this happens to both the pigs and Vladek in Maus.

I think the situation in the car, with Vladek afraid and Francoise and Art offering a safe haven in the form of a ride, helps show the way this dynamic can play out. Some of the poles provided safe havens, others sold the Jews out to the Nazis, who then took that racism to the absolute extreme in Auschwitz and other camps.

Art tackles this concept as well. On page 74 we see him sitting on the porch with Francoise, just one page after the horrible scene in which we get the description of the people unlucky enough to go to the gas chambers, the ones burned alive (73). Francoise says “it’s so peaceful here at night. It’s almost impossible to believe Auschwitz ever happened” and then Art is bitten by a mosquito, “these damn bugs are eating me alive” (74). That’s when he grabs the aerosol spray can and hits the bug mid-flight, leaving two dead bugs on the porch as they go inside.

Here we see Art’s juxtaposition between Vladek’s fear of black people, and the Nazi goal of exterminating all the Jews, including with the use of pesticides. I doubt Vladek would kill a black person as indiscriminately as the Nazis killed Jews or as Art killed bugs, and the same can be said for many of the Poles in the book. Here it seems, Art is trying to drive home the issues of racism, while also showing just how far removed he really is from the holocaust, because it seems he doesn’t even realize the irony of spraying bugs with pesticide because they are pesky, which very much mirrors what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Holocaust.

Art’s racism is more Polish. It is wary and serves to maintain his self-preservation, much the same way the pigs are often depicted in Maus. Contrasted with Art’s indescriminate killing of a mosquito, we see the other face of racism, which has less to do with survival and more to do with blind hatred for pests, much the way the Nazis are depicted in Maus. Of course, killing a mosquito does not make one a racist, but it does provide a little more depth at the issues of othering that come up in Maus, and the different dynamic between the Jews and Poles and the Jews and Germans, especially the Nazis.

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”]

Vladek’s reminiscing in Volume II contained some beautiful moments that I found to be both uplifting and emotionally devastating (I was particularly moved by the scene where Mandelbaum is given the shoes and belt, and the story of Vladek being comforted by the priest).  Yet while these touching moments certainly helped me emotionally connect with Vladek’s experiences, I would contend that the therapy session at the beginning of Chapter 2 may be the most telling moment of either volume. 

With the phrase “A Survivor’s Tale” serving as the tagline for the entire text, it’s evident that exploring different forms of survival will be a recurring theme for Spiegelman.  The dialogue between Art and his therapist puts this idea at the forefront and poses some interesting questions on not only what surviving entails, but also how the act of surviving is viewed by others.  Of course Vladek and Anja are literal survivors of the Holocaust.  But Anja’s suicide and Vladek’s off-putting behavior and personality show they may not have survived the event from an emotional perspective.  Likewise, Art serves in one sense as survivor of his own troubled upbringing, yet also carries severe emotional baggage with him pertaining to both his strained relationship with his father and guilt over his mother’s suicide.  I would suspect Spiegelman uses the tagline somewhat ironically, suggesting that something as massive and as horrible as the Holocaust will scar all who are involved, even those whose contact with the experience is only second hand in nature, as is the case with Art.  

Another question that Spiegelman seems interested in exploring from the therapy session is: what is the ultimate benefit of the survivor telling his or her story?  Art admits to admiring his father for his survival, and from a reader’s perspective, I can vouch for feelings of admiration for Vladek for his will to live, his tenacity, and his kind acts for others in Auschwitz.  Yet the therapy session also brings up the futility of the survivors’ stories, and asks what, if any, lessons we can learn from them.  As Pavel accurately points out, despite all the books written about the Holocaust, intolerance and genocide continue around the globe.  And we seem to even see a microcosm of this futility represented at the individual level with Vladek’s own racism, despite his very personal experiences as a victim of ethnically motivated hate.  I’m not sure if Spiegelman gives the reader any clear cut answers to let us know why it’s important that these stories are told.  But given the dedication that Art (the creator) puts into detailing his father’s story and his own quest to get the story from his father – it would seem to point to an inherent catharsis in the act of storytelling for both father and son.     

John

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.