Art Spiegelman (1948- )
Spiegelman was born in Stockholm,
where his parents had first been taken after the war. The family
then moved to the United States, settling in the New York suburb of Rego
Park in Queens. Growing up, he was somewhat isolated because, as
he says, he wasn't particularly good at sports and playground games; consequently,
he was frequently to be found in the library. He cites as literary
influences Franz Kafka, Faulkner, detective writers of the "hard-boiled"
school, and Mad Magazine.
In the 1960s, Spiegelman worked for Topps
chewing gum, creating trading cards; he was the originator of the "Garbage
Pail Kids" series of cards. He also began contributing to underground
comics (comix), which were then experiencing a resurgence. He later
founded the comix journal Raw, which he edited along with his wife.
He has written and lectured on the history and aesthetics of comix and
teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Spiegelman underwent a nervous breakdown and
was hospitalized in the 1960s. In 1968, his mother committed suicide,
which became the subject of a comic, "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," which
is included in Maus. Of "Prisoner," Spiegelman says, "I wasn't
even certain I was gonna let it get published. I was just doing it
because I needed to do it." (Goffard) It was published, however, appearing
in Short Order Comix in 1973.
Maus, on the other hand, was written
with a view to publication, but also served a personal need for the author
working through his own past and its intersection with historical events.
Volume I of Maus was published in 1986; volume II appeared in 1991
and received a Pulitzer Prize the following year. Various portions
of the book had appeared earlier in comix, and Spiegelman says that he
worked for 13 years on the project, beginning in 1978. This included
extensive travel to visit the concentration camps and sites of his parents'
lives.
Spiegelman denies any overt teaching impulse
in the production of Maus, but says he is gratified that the book
has found "a secondary life as a teaching tool." Any desire he has
to teach is fulfilled by teaching about comic book artists (Goffard).
In 1993, Spiegelman produced a controversial
cover for the New Yorker's Valentine issue. The cover
shows a Hasidic man kissing a black woman; at the time, a serious conflict
had erupted between Hasidic Jews and African Americans in Brooklyn, and
both parties objected to the cover.
"Maus represents a new strand of Jewish-American self-construction. . . Spiegelman transgresses the sacredness of Auschwitz by depicting in comic strip images his survivor father's suffering and by refusing to sentimentalize the survivor." (Rothberg 665) |
Harvey Blume says of Maus that it is "just about
unclassifiable," and Edward Shannon asks: "What
is Maus? Biography? Autobiography? History? Prose? Comic?
Book? Even as it defies the definition of human beings into preestablished
slots, it defies definition of itself." (16) Most critics agree that it
crosses genre categories between the novel, comix, autobiography, and biography,
as well as bridging a division between high and low culture. The
mix of genres raises questions about the classification of the book, but
also about the nature of classification itself -- an important issue in
terms of its subject matter.
Maus was initially placed on fiction
bestseller list of the New York Times but was shifted to the nonfiction
list at the artist's request; Spiegelman says
. . . it turns out there was a debate among the editors. The funniest line transmitted back to me was one editor saying, let's ring Spiegelman's doorbell. If a giant mouse answers, we'll put Maus in nonfiction. (Blume)Edward Shannon notes the problems created by the comic book genre, with its expectations in the public's mind of fantasy, excess, and a particular illustration style.
The depiction of Jews as mice and Germans as cats
reflects comic traditions with which the readers may be comfortable; this
choice enables the author to address the Holocaust in a different way,
as an animal fable. The cat-and-mouse game not only provides an effective
metaphor for Nazi-Jewish relations, it also subverts the comic tradition
of the funny animal (Shannon 7). However, the depiction of nationalities
as animals "is the most problematic aspect" of the book, because they support
ethnic stereotypes and tend to oversimplify political issues (Gordon 84).
Spiegelman notes that the images he uses for the
different nationalities in his book
are not my images. I borrowed them from the Germans. . . Ultimately what the book's about is the commonality of human beings. It's crazy to divide things down along nationalistic or racial or religious lines. . . These metaphors, which are meant to self-destruct in my book -- and I think they do self-destruct -- still have a residual force and still get people worked up over them. (qtd. in Shannon 11-13).Shannon argues that the metaphor eventually falls apart under the weight of its signification, marking the failure of language "because of the utter impossibility of the truth being communicated" (Shannon 11). However, he argues that the comic format is also essential for this problematic language, since it enables Spiegelman to exploit the metaphor of cats and mice in a passive (visual, not overtly textual) way (13).
The story of Spiegelman's family provides a complete
history of the Holocaust, "including its influence on survivors' children"
(Tabachnick 154). But it is a Holocaust story that breaks with tradition,
in showing the complex reactions of the Jews who were caught up in the
horror; these are not noble heroes or passive victims, but people who will
try anything to survivee. Thus, we see Vladek, the "epic hero" in
Tabachnick's classification (above) is definitely
a flawed character, who is ready to abandon his wife if she continues her
association with Communists, who seems more interested in money than in
love (rejecting Lucia, with whom he has had a four-year affair, because
she has no dowry, and noting Anja's family's wealth). And we see
the spectre of Jews betraying other Jews: by cooperating with the Gestapo
in organizing the Jews for selection (p. 88), in working as guards
escorting Jewish workers from the ghetto in Srodula to Sosnowiec (p. 106),
and, finally and most horribly, the Jew who reveals their hiding place
to the Gestapo (p. 113). Vladek's story also conveys a sense of the
world reduced to a cash nexus: everyone, Jew and gentile alike, requires
payment for assisting the Spiegelmans. Even money is not enough,
as Vladek's relative Haskel is unwilling to risk aiding Vladek's in-laws
because it would be too difficult to arrange false work papers for the
older couple.
If the world revealed by Vladek's story is one of
struggle and self-interest, with victim and oppressor alike presented as
venial and corruptible, it also allows Vladek to rise to the occasion.
The elder Spiegelman escapes from the Holocaust through his cleverness
in devising better "mouseholes" (the hiding places diagrammed on pages
110 and 112), his ability to pass himself off as a non-Jew (by speaking
German, for instance), his ability to "organize" food under a variety of
circumstances, and his friendships from before the war, which provide him
crucial support at times when he most needs it.
Survival is also shown as a matter of luck, as in
the many instances when Vladek escapes transportation through a chance
meeting with an old friend, the incidental negligence of a Nazi soldier,
or some other means. Age, too, is a factor, as he is fortunate to
belong to an age group that the Nazis need. To a significant extent,
survival during the Holocaust was a matter of staying out of the camps
as long as possible; those taken to Auschwitz near the end of the war were
more likely to make it simply because they were not starved long enough
to die (or to be "selected" for the ovens).
That there is no escape from the Holocaust story
is illustrated by the panel on page 125, where Vladek and Anja have seemingly
evaded the tightening Nazi net one more time, and wearily head for Sosnowiec,
questioning "Where to go." But the path they walk on is a maze, shaped
like a swastika, suggesting that wherever they go, they cannot escape the
terror of the camps. The silhouette of a factory-like building in
the distance, suggestive of the crematoriums of Auschwitz, silently states
that all roads lead to the ovens.
"The survivor in Maus I's subtitle is a reference to both Vladek, who survives Auschwitz and his wife's suicide, and Art, who, by surviving the trauma of his youth, his mother's death, and his relationship with the ‘maddeningly intransigent, stingy, and manipulative' Vladek . . . has become ‘the real survivor'." (Shannon 6) |
Blume quotes Todd Gitlin that "Maus
[is] the primary example of postmodernism still engaged with ethical concerns."
That it is postmodern emerges both in its blending of genres and in elements
of metafiction (or, since it is not fiction, meta-narrative). "Metafiction"
refers generally to fiction that is aware that it is a fiction (i.e.,
contains elements such as direct address from a character to the reader,
stepping out of the scene, etc.), that calls attention to itself as fiction,
and finally, that is as much about the process of telling a story as it
is about the story itself.
Neither the Holocaust story itself nor the story
of Art Spiegelman coming to terms with his parents' experience necessarily
requires the numerous scenes of Art collecting information from his father,
of the two debating over what should be included and what left out, and
(in the second volume) of Art working at his drawing board to create the
comic Maus. The tale of how this tale comes to be told, the
metanarrative,
is one of the three narrative genres that Tabachnick identifies (above)
coexisting in Maus: i.e., the kunstlerroman or story of the
artist's development.
Spiegelman said in an interview, "In Maus
I actually made a decision counter to Maus being postmodern -- and
yet it is anyway. The narrative I got from my father certainly wasn't
conveyed in chronological form. I had to make a choice early on whether
to keep the chain of thoughts as it came from him -- the association of
ideas that would lead from an event in the 50s to another in the 30s, say
-- or employ a 19th-century notion of continuity that allows for chronology."
(Blume) Despite Spiegelman's efforts to establish a straightforward
chronology, however, the book is constructed of series of flashback episodes
and frequent threats to break out of the chronological mode. For
example, Vladek returns to the story of Lucia after he has already reached
his marriage to Anja, and in the present-day narrative often wants to skip
around. Vladek jumps back from being drafted in 1939 to the story
of his father's efforts to keep him out of the army in the 1920s,
and Art himself provides a flashback in the "Prisoner on the Hell Planet"
sequence.
Furthermore, the effort to create a chronological
sequence out of Vladek's somewhat disjointed testimony is documented as
metanarrative. Both the fracturing of ordinary temporal order and
metanarrative are characteristics of the postmodern. Iadonisi notes
another feature, the "temporal seepage" between past and present, as illustrations
and text bring the two periods into contact: "The past's intrusion into
the present is a characteristic of Maus's metanarrative." He interprets
this seepage of past into present as a coping maneuver that "helps Art
. . . survive a psychologically chilling reality" (45-46).
The contest between Vladek and Art for control of
the story, which manifests itself early on in the dispute over whether
or not the Lucia Greenberg episode belongs, continues to affect the story
throughout. Vladek seems at times to wish to discuss something other
than the Holocaust; it is Art's obsession with the topic, as the child
of survivors, that keeps returning them to the story.
The relative positioning of the characters
of Vladek and Art in various panels, along with dialogue between the two,
show how they are struggling over the control of the story. For example,
Art refuses to hear Vladek's complaints about Mala and forces his father
back to the past narrative whenever Vladek begins to complain, and the
perspective shifts in the two panels where father and son argue over whether
to include the story of Lucia in Art's book (Iadonisi 52-53). Note
that in the latter case, Art gets his way despite apparently giving in
to his father's wishes; we see both the story of Lucia (part of his father's
story) and the debate between father and son (part of Art's story).
Here we see that the metanarrative of how the story was told takes precedence
even over Art's self-image, as he presents himself reneging on a promise.
Art could have presented his father's affair with Lucia without revealing
that he had promised to keep it out of the story; its presence demonstrates
just how much the metafictional aspects of the book come to predominate.
Sources: Blume, Harvey, "Art Spiegelman:
Lips," On-line interview; Cory, Mark, "Comedic Distance in Holocaust Literature,"
Journal
of American Culture 18, 1 (Spring 1995) 35-40; Goffard, Chris, "The
Man Behind Maus: Art Spiegelman in his Own Words," On-line interview;
Gordon, Joan, "Surviving the Survivor: Art Spiegelman's
Maus,"
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 5, 2 (1993) 81-89; Iadonisi,
Rick, "Bleeding History and Owning His [Father's] Story: Maus and
Collaborative Autobiography," CEA Critic 57, 1 (Fall 1994)
41-56; Rothberg, Michael, "‘We Were Talking Jewish': Art Spiegelman's
Maus
as ‘Holocaust' Production," Contemporary Literature 35, 2
(Winter 1994) 661-87; Shannon, Edward A., "‘It's No More to Speak':
Genre, the Insufficiency of Language, and the Improbability of Definition
in Art Spiegelman's Maus," Mid-Atlantic Almanack 4
(1995) 4-17; Tabachnick, Stephen E., "Of Maus and Memory: The Structure
of Art Spiegelman's Graphic Novel of the Holocaust," Word and
Image 9, 2 (April-June 1993) 154-62).
Other Internet Resources for Studying Spiegelman's Maus:
Page updated March 4, 2003