“Reading” Art Spiegelman’s Maus

After spending time in class discussing Art Spiegelman auto/biographic series Maus I and Maus II, a new understanding of their complexity was uncovered. As students of literature we are trained to analyze text and find and interpret different levels of meaning within a written work.  This task becomes even more complex when reading the graphic novel format of Maus because it is also requires the reader to “read” and analyze the drawings as well. This interpretation of the combined text and corresponding images in Maus done in class made this necessity apparent.

In a journal article by Jeanne C. Ewert, Reading Visual Narrative: Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” she discusses this multi-level reading of the graphic novel. Spiegelman’s artistic license, the insertion of his own pictorial interpretation of events results in her observation that this:

“[R]aises larger issues of narrative control and authority, and prefigures one of the other principle themes of Maus: its status as memoir ― a pictorial record of Vladek’s experience” because, [w]hile Vladek’s own voice speaks every word, Spiegelman’s drawings tell the son’s version of his father’s story. The spoken word is immediate, the drawings, at one remove” (88).

For me it is the very complexity of having to read the words and pictures together that I find so fascinating.  Here the subjective account of Vladek’s life is depicted in the subjective way in which Spiegelman draws them.  It becomes a kind of double memory because although Spiegelman has taken note of or has recorded the events and experiences his father Vladek has shared with him, Spiegelman is working on memory (and/or artistic license) to depict the actual environment in which they took place.

In The book Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, they provide an appendix called “Fifty-two Genres of Life Narratives” (183).  Here they provide the different definitions of these life narratives, one of which is Memoir.  They include a quote by Nancy K Miller from the memoir she wrote, Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death.  Smith and Watson say that in writing her memoir Miller considers “the etymological root of the word” (198). The root is from “Middle French memoire … written account, description (from c1190 in Old French)” (OED online).  Miller points out that memoir is “the double act of recalling and recording… to call up from the heart [and what] resides in the province of the heart is also what is exhibited in the public space of the world” (198).  This is very evident in the “memoir” Maus where Art Spiegelman includes his ambivalence about writing his father’s accounts along with his troubled relationship with his father.  It also occurs as Spiegelman’s and his father’s accounts are “described” in Spiegelman’s veiled and sometimes subversive drawings of events.  Spiegelman’s craft as an “illustrator” of stories in the genre of “comics” allows him to use the strength of his “visual” voice to tell his father’s story while “revealing” his own.

Works Cited:

Ewert, Jeanne C. “Reading Visual Narrative: Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ ”. Narrative. 8.1 (2000): 88. Print.

Watson, Julia, and Sidonie Smith. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.