Maus: Two Complex Stories

     I will just start by being honest and confessing I had an enormous amount of trouble coming up with something to write about Maus. Sure, analysing literature is never an easy task. But I just felt overwhelmed with the immeasurable weight and unfathomable pain this story possesses. Spiegelman wondered, at one point in the story, how he was supposed to tell the story he wanted to tell about his father’s life –through a comic nonetheless - when it was just so full of horror. How was he to manage to do justice to reality? Following that line, how am I supposed to write about not only that, but about the added pain of his son’s experience as a survivor’s child? We get two stories here; the ‘survivor’ does not refer only to Vladek, but also to his son Art.

     There are, I’m sure, a number of ways in which we can relate this to what we discussed in previous units. I could say that, for example, this novel is a mixture of things; it is partly a biography, partly a historical account, maybe a memoir. Is it entirely nonfiction? There must be at least some amount of fiction, as the author reconstructs somebody else’s story (all this in a comic!). Is this a modernist thing? Or similar to modernism in a way? It is indeed a mixture of genres, so at least in my head it makes some sense. And the fact that the dark topic of the holocaust is depicted through a graphic novel is quite groundbreaking as well. So maybe this counts as a new technique, connecting it to modernists and their own new techniques.

     Taking this last idea of using a comic to tell a story of the past, I’d like to focus on how it connects the two stories it has, as I mentioned. Throughout the novel the author drew his father telling him the story while mixing it with the drawings of what happened in his father’s story. Thus we get some pages of present, and then some pages of past, and so on. But they intertwine at times, like in the panels attached here. Vladek’s present figure escapes from just one panel and it is put above the panels that show the past. We see his present self, with his tattooed arm, imposed over the drawing of the past when he got the tattoo.

     Hillary Chute explains this: ‘Spiegelman obsessively layers several temporalities in one frame, understood by the conventions of the comics medium to represent one moment in time’. Yes, one frame is supposed to be one moment, either present or past. However, the author connects the past to the present by breaking that rule and doing this. He uses the form of comics to put in a visual way how they are connected, explicitly showing Vladek’s tattooed arm in direct relation to its moment of origin. And this is done several times throughout the novel. Great way of using comic form to enrich the relation between the two stories, this is.

      I’d like to say how this way of telling the whole story – both the past and present – gives us and insight on character development. It would be hard to deny that Vladek, in his old age, is a miser and an annoyingly obnoxious person. But we come to know his story, and we come to know that he survived because of his carefulness – and he really is an extremely resourceful man. And Art is sometimes – if not almost always- shown to be cold, detached of his suffering father; this is probably my personal reading, but I felt somewhat angry when he refused to help his father more than a few times, felt like he was selfishly only after his memories for his book. But we also know that Art has his reasons for being this way: he carries the suffering of his survivor parents, even having nightmares as a child about Nazis chasing him. Even if he did not live it, because of his heritage he is somehow part of that time of history, he grew up under his father’s critical eye, and he mourned his dead mother, victim of something even years after it was over. Both father and son suffer, marked by their haunting past.

      Above all, I think this is what marked me the most about this novel. More than the dark holocaust story –, although there is always something about it that still manages to surprise us, we already know it was terrible, and we have seen and read so many things, that we start to lose our feeling of terribleness, like we know it is terrible but we no longer feel it because we are almost saturated with it -, it was the characters’ relationship that will stick with me. It pained me to see how Vladek loved his son and he just didn’t want to be alone, and at the same time how Art felt the weight of years of pain that didn’t even belong to him.        Moreover, the novel has many small moments that make the story more human. The way the two stories are put together fascinated me, as I feel like it explains so well the characters’ current situation. Again, I found it extremely hard to fully explain the wholeness that I feel this novel is, and sorry if I didn’t make sense at times – it is such a complex thing, I think. I’m sure Maus’ comic form has a lot more to be analysed, so I’d love to read other interpretations –feel free to share opinions! 

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Bibliography:

Chute, H. (2006). The Shadow of a past Time": History and Graphic Representation in" Maus. Twentieth Century Literature, 208.

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