Art Spiegelman's Maus: Holocaust narrative in graphic novel form

Maus

English

Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Summary:

My Father Bleeds History & and Then My Troubles Began

The Novel

Because of its comic book form, Art Spiegelman's Maus I and II had the challenge of having the world take seriously the story of a troubled father and son as well as the devastation of the Holocaust. The comic book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, which illustrates that Maus did, in fact, meet the challenge. Even though it won the Pulitzer Prize, the question still exists as to whether or not Maus is a useful way to study the Holocaust. Because the medium through which Spiegelman brings us the Holocaust is a graphic novel, he has another challenge not only with being taken seriously, but he has the challenge of not exploiting the event in a medium that thrives on exploitation. Young notes that there have been many eyebrows raised concerning Maus and questions regarding "the adequacy of ironic and experimental responses to the Holocaust, insofar as…their transgressiveness undercuts any and all meaning" (666). Doherty also claims that when Spiegelman received a special award from the Pulitzer Prize committee, the committee decided to "finesse the issues of genre" as the "members were apparently befuddled by a project whose merit they could not deny but whose medium they could not quite categorize" (69).

The first book of Maus, My Father Bleeds History, opens in 1978 as Art Spiegelman arrives in Rego Park to have dinner with his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor. The relationship between Art and Vladek is obviously strained and we learn that Art's mother, Anja, killed herself in 1968. Vladek is remarried to a woman named Mala who is also a survivor, though the marriage is an unhappy one and Vladek seems to think she's going to steal all his money. After dinner, Artie tells Vladek that he wants to create a book about his father's experiences during the Holocaust. Vladek begins by telling Artie how he met Anja, how they got married and how after their first child, Richieu, Anja became depressed and had to go to a sanitarium.

Anja and Vladek are forced into a ghetto and then they go into hiding. They try to leave Poland for Hungary in 1944, but they are captured at the border and sent to Auschwitz where they are separated. Hope keeps them alive so that they can find each other again. Vladek also recounts Artie's birth in Sweden and the family's move to the U.S. when Artie was three. Artie dedicates the story to the brother he never knew, Richieu, who died during the Holocaust.

In Maus's second book, and Here My Troubles Began, there is quite a lot of jumping back and forth in history. The story begins with Artie getting news from Mala that Vladek has had a heart attack. Artie and his wife Francoise get in the car and head for the Catskills where Vladek is. In the car with Francoise we learn about Artie's immense feelings of guilt about his trouble-free childhood. He feels bad that he didn't have to endure the Holocaust like his parents and "ghost" brother. He calls Richieu this because he remembers that the dead boy's photo used to hang on the wall and he thought, as a child, that he could never compare with the perfect brother. He also states that he used to think that if he had to choose one parent to go to Auschwitz he would have chosen his mother. He feels guilty about this too.

The next morning at Vladek's bungalow, Vladek tells Artie and Francoise about Mala. They had a fight at the bank over money and she ended up going to Florida. He believes she's going to try to get the deposit back for the condo they were going to buy there.

On a walk, Vladek tells Artie more of the story about arriving at Auschwitz and what happened to him there. Vladek learns that Abraham was responsible for Anja and his capture. Mandelbaum is there with him; they sleep together in a tiny bed. Vladek begins to teach the Kapo English and because of this the Kapo allows Vladek to help himself to some clothes, which he gives to Mandelbaum. Mandelbaum is taken by the Germans to work and Vladek never sees him again. Vladek is kept safe by the Kapo for a couple of months but is then sent to work.

Artie and Vladek keep walking until they reach some kind of private hotel. Vladek tells Artie that they have to be very careful so that the guard does not see them. The two sneak past the guard and sit down to play a game of bingo.

In the last scene of Maus, a dying Vladek addresses Artie as Richieu, Artie's dead brother, his father's dead son. What is clear is that the unassimilated trauma of his first son's death is still incredibly profound.

3. Literary Criticism

In Thomas Doherty's 1996 article entitled, "Art Spiegelman's Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust," Doherty discusses the Spiegelman's "Special Award" for Maus, which was given to him in 1992. The members of the Pulitzer Prize committee were confused by "a project whose merit they could not deny but whose medium they could not quite categorize" (69). The confusion seemed obvious: wasn't the Holocaust biography ill-suited for a comic book? Especially when we live in "an age when ever-larger tomes and even denser scholarship define that enterprise" (69). Editorial cartooning wouldn't have been adequate either since Maus illustrated the news of the past as opposed to news of the day (69). This problem with classifying Maus wasn't the first time the work met challenges. The problem occurred with the New York Times Book Review as well, criss-crossing the Fiction and the Non-Fiction Best Seller Lists (69). Spiegelman responded with a letter to the editor:

'if you list were divided into literature and non-literature, I could gracefully accept the compliment as intended, but to the extent that 'fiction' indicates a work isn't factual, I feel a bit queasy. As an author, I believe I might have lopped several years off the thirteen I devoted to my two-volume project if I could have taken a novelist's license while searching for a novelist's structure' (Doherty 69).

The New York Times obliged and took Maus off the Fiction Best Seller List and moved it over to the Non-Fiction Best Seller List.

In his 1998 article, "The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman's Maus and the Afterimages of History," author James E. Young states that Maus embodies an "aesthetics of postmemory" (669). Maus also suggests itself as a model for "received history -- a narrative hybrid that interweaves both events of the Holocaust and the ways they are passed down to us" (669).

Young goes on to say that Spiegelman, like others who live in this media-savvy generation, born after -- but indelibly shaped by -- the Holocaust, he never tries to represent event he never knew immediately, "but instead portrays his necessarily hypermediated experience of the memory of events" (669). This generation cannot remember the Holocaust, of course, as it actually happened. All we know about the Holocaust is what the people who have experienced it have passed down to us or what they have left in the form of diaries.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale is not the story about the Holocaust but rather it is about the artist-son's recovery of it. Spiegelman said, "Maus is not what happened in the past, but rather what the son understands of the father's story…[it is} an autobiographical history of my relationship with my father, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, cast with cartoon animals" (670). Essentially, Maus is a story about a father remembering what happened to him at the hands of Nazis and his son Artie remembering what happened to him at the hands of his father's telling of those memories (670).