Maus: Review Paper
Spiegelman, Art. Maus : A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
Maus tells the story of one survivor’s experiences leading up to the Holocaust using mice, cats, pigs, and other animals. It also tells the subtler story of a son struggling to understand a father who lived and was shaped by a world completely alien to him. Maus received several awards, was lauded in magazines, and highly reviewed in newspapers. The highest praise came in 1992, when it won the Pulitzer prize for special category literature. As a comic book work it accomplished what was thought to be impossible; for a comic book, a genre relegated to children, to be considered one of the best literary accomplishments. Maus showed the true depth the genre could produce.
Maus was written and illustrated by the accomplished cartoonist Art Spiegelman. The story blends several oral accounts taken from multiple interviews with his father and is bolstered by secondary accounts from other survivors to enhance accuracy. Spiegelman did exhaustive research to ensure that the loose line illustrations conveyed the sense of the time period and were evocative of pre-War Poland. It was originally released in several parts and finally collected into a digest sized graphic novel.
By using the comic book form, Spiegelman was able to explore history with both visual and written story telling. Oral history is fluid; a collection of nonlinear events pieced together chronologically. Spiegelman involved the reader in the process by using dialect and illustrating his own experience of understanding and relating oral histories. He allows the reader to experience the act of digression and interruption. These simple techniques proved dramatically engaging. They helped tell the secondary story by allowing the reader to associate the frustration the son felt in collecting the information necessary from his father.
Spiegelman embraced the power of a reader’s inference by choosing the comic book as his medium. “Much of the power of Spiegelman’s book lies in his discourse with the reader, a discourse that exists between the panels, beneath the narration and dialogue”(Brown 92). There is a sense of the unknowable that permeates his attempt to tell the history of the Holocaust from one singular survivor’s point of view. By not filling in the blanks, the space between panels, he creates a specific sense of space that is separate from the history as a whole.
Spiegelman’s visual allegory portraying the different social strata of pre-War Poland with different animals is a direct reference to Hitler’s quote: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.” (Spiegelman 1). There is a strange anthropomorphic quality to the characters because they are portrayed as animals but are undoubtedly human. They are humans wearing the costume of animals. Allowing the reader to distance themselves slightly from the events by using animal characters gives the audience space to identify more readily, to connect with the emotions of an event more personally. By taking away humans as subject matter, Spiegelman gives the reader the ability to see each character as a version of themselves instead of as a specific person, as an other.
The choice Spiegelman made in structure, dialogue, and simple artistic portrayal help capture an emotional story by conveying the sense of the unknowable within the relation of one generation to the next and highlights that same feeling within the events that led to the Holocaust in one survivor’s story. It has gaps in history, it is unreliable, and by being both unknowable and unreliable conveys a touchingly human story. Maus as a literary construct finally managed to blend the world of art and storytelling seamlessly giving the reader a chance to experience history in an entirely new light.
Work Cited
Brown, Joshua. "Review: Of Mice and Memory." The Oral History Review spring 16 (1988): 91-109.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus : A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
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