About Mice and Guilt

Maus has certainly been a success since it was first published in the 80’, after all it was the first graphic novel to be awarded a Pulitzer prize, but right now I do not want to write about Spiegelman’s achievements, nor discuss the story, I want to focus in a very particular theme found in Maus: Guilt. I will be treating the different dimensions of guilt that I found in Maus as “kinds of guilt” since I feel it is something that transcends fiction and is therefore too complex to be treated as just one thing.

Survivor guilt:

The most striking feature of survivor guilt is its moral judgment of self-blame. It is directed to the survivor's undeserved survival in contrast to other's deaths. Fink, G. (2010).

In this case, it might be evident for some readers the sense of guilt that Vladek was feeling.

Probably, he felt guilty for having outlasted his son Richieu and Anja’s parents, but most importantly, Anja. As it is made evident throughout the novel, Vladek was not telling Art the story of how he lived during the holocaust, we could even go as far as to say that, for Vladek, the story he was telling was about Anja and the holocaust was mere background, consequently, her suicide must have been the most painful and devastating source of survivor guilt for Vladek.

Second-generation:

It could be confused with the Survival guilt previously mentioned, but in this case, we are talking not about the actual people who survived the holocaust but rather we are talking about their children. According to Berger, A. L. (1997), this sense of guilt that second-generation witnesses experience, can have diverse origins; for instance, they can feel guilty for not  fully understanding the suffering their parents endured, for not having experienced it themselves or even for the suffering itself, in a way that is as Berger mentions “quite undeservedly.”

Author’s guilt:

Another kind of guilt that really caught my attention while reading Maus, was that of the author’s. I am talking particularly about the second tale (A Survivor’s Tale) in which it is explored the guilt that Spiegelman felt after the great success of the first book.

I would say that in the image above, Art’s success is portrayed as being something almost rotten since it was built on the death and suffering of so many people.

In relation to the author it is also interesting that being a second-generation witness of the holocaust and write about it can bring in itself a great burden, according to Berger, A. L. (1997), Ellen Fine points out very cleverly that “if he dares to speak the name of the dead, the post-Holocaust writer must bear the burden of guilt for inventing memories that are not his own.” This kind of guilt actually sounded quite familiar to me, nowadays, young people in Chile usually have something to say about the dictatorship, but some feel uneasy when it comes to sharing their point of view because they have been constantly told that they are not entitled to have an opinion in the matter as they did not live during that period, people end up with an awful sense of guilt just for having something to say.

The guilt of a reader?

Finally, I think maybe we could even find guilt in the reading of the story, in the enjoyment of a tale that is about suffering, about how people were mistreated, tortured, and killed. Maybe, even the reader can recognise in him/herself a sense of guilt after acknowledging the enjoyment that such a reading produced.

Art Spiegelman talked during an interview about people who would tell him that they really enjoyed his books suddenly realising that such enjoyment could be regarded as something negative, he said that “there's something horrific about enjoying the fact that so many people died, and that's really a very serious issue and a central dilemma.” I certainly have mixed feelings about it, but I would to know what do you think, did you ever feel guilty about enjoying this novel or any other media about the holocaust?

Bibliography

Berger, A. L. (1997). Children of Job: American second-generation witnesses to the Holocaust. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Fink, G. (2010). Stress of war, conflict and disaster. Amsterdam: Academic Press.

Spiegelman, A. (2003). The Complete Maus. Penguin Books

The Holocaust Through the Eyes of a Maus (Art Spiegelman). Retrieved August 13, 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blvg3gnvhku