ENGL 685: Graphic Novels

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.