Art Spiegelman’s widely acclaimed graphic novels, Maus I & II, depict a father’s retelling of his experiences in the Holocaust to his son. Art’s father Vladek, a Polish Jew, begins his story with how he met Art’s mother, Anja, shortly before the outbreak of WWII. Vladek’s story spans two volumes, more than ten years, and ends with his and Anja’s reunion after the war. Simultaneously, Maus visually depicts Vladek’s recounting of his Holocaust experience in the late 1970s, as Art documents his father’s story in graphic form. Many critical responses to Spiegelman’s chosen genre (or some would argue medium) of Maus have examined the productive connection between the visual and the verbal aspects of the text, as readers are confronted with and are forced to negotiate both dimensions. The connections and disjoints between the comic and textual forms provide ample opportunities to mine Spiegelman’s work. However, Marianne Hirsch explores Spiegelman’s use of three black-and-white photographs that mark the only visual departure from the comic form in Maus.

In “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Post-Memory,” Hirsch examines how photographs function within Spiegelman’s text and the ways in which documentary (photos) differ from aesthetic (comic form) in the context of Maus. She explores these visual representations as documenting both memory and “post-memory,” which belongs to a survivor’s child “whose life is dominated by memories of what preceded his/her birth” (Hirsch 8). To illuminate the power of photographs, Hirsch draws on Susan Sontag’s assertion that photographs “state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction” (Sontag qtd. in Hirsch 5). As photographs capture the visual essence of living, in the most realistic detail possible, they also serve to remind viewers of what will be, or has been, lost. Hirsch argues that this ability of photographs to capture life in a moment, and then remind us of loss and death, is particularly haunting.

Hirsch also highlights the specific characteristics of Holocaust photographs, emphasizing that their context is equally important to our reception of them as their content. She claims that our knowledge of their place within the Holocaust experience “increases the horror, as we add to the bodies, or the hair, or the shoes depicted the millions which remain unrepresented” (Hirsch 7). Examining family pictures within this context, Hirsch argues that the viewer “fills in what the picture leaves out: The horror of looking is not necessarily in the image but in the story we provide to fill in what’s left out of the image” (7). As viewers encounter family photos of Holocaust victims, those who were lost during and after, they encounter a disjoint between a perhaps ‘happy’ image and the knowledge they possess about the trauma of the Holocaust. Hirsch analyzes the photo of Anja and Art in smiles and swimsuits on page 100 of Maus I. As Hirsch observes, this photo is directly opposite a panel showing a desolate Art; his speech bubble reads, “In 1968 my mother killed herself…She left no note!” (Spiegelman 100). Here we can see how Spiegelman draws out the potential of photographs to unsettle the viewer, as a full-of-life image is paired with a textual death.

Hirsch’s claim that Holocaust photographs invite, or rather force, viewers to visually ‘fill in the blanks’ is an intriguing one. I would like to extend this analysis to encompass the medium of the graphic novel more generally. As the comic form is visually rudimentary, in that it lacks colour and intricate detail, (a conscious choice, no doubt), I wonder if viewers encounter this same disjoint between comic renderings of the Holocaust and their knowledge of the horrific trauma that occurred. For example, on page 72 of Maus II, Spiegelman has drawn the burning of prisoner mice – some alive among the already dead. The visual in somewhat abstract and not-intricate, the large flames engulf most of the picture, obscuring the piled bodies. The faces of the mice which we can see are obviously in agony, though they are still the faces of mice. In this particular example, viewers encounter an abstract, unfocused, very unreal representation of one horror of the concentration camps. This abstraction and departure from reality may be Spiegelman’s attempt to emphasize the inability to capture, and for readers to interpret, such an unspeakable trauma. It may also be Spiegelman’s attempt to evoke the imaginations of viewers as they “fill in” the realistic details that the image lacks. Perhaps this is one way in which the medium of the graphic novel is so effective in communicating horror; it forces viewers to imagine the unimaginable.

Works Cited

Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: “Maus”, Mourning, and Post-Memory.” Discourse 15.2 (1992): 3. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Print.

Carl Beam, on his art: “I play a game with humanity and with creativity. I ask viewers to play the participatory game of dreaming ourselves as each other. In this we find out that we’re all basically human” (Witnesses 34)

Walking in to MOA’s current exhibit “Speaking to Memory: Images and Voices from St. Michael’s Residential School,” I was struck by the enormous present-day photographs of the school that covered the museum’s walls. They were huge, life-size, tinted yellow, and grim. Inviting, ushering, confronting. They are the first objects an observer encounters upon entering the gallery, providing a powerful framework in which to view the rest of the exhibit. Words by the Indian Residential School Commission and the Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs overlay these images, and both excerpts speak on policies of aggressive assimilation. Dr. Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Minister, is quoted: “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.” I then wondered how these gripping images, in conjunction with words of assimilation, worked together to elicit a reaction from witnesses: are we, for a moment, absorbed in these visual spaces as well? What are the implications of such an absorption? How do they change our reception of testimony? I found the prominent use of visual and physical mediums in “Speaking to Memory” to be a powerful method of collapsing barriers between listeners and speakers/witnesses and the witnessed, essential to the successful reception of testimony.

One critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) is that it privileges a “talking cure,” and emphasizes a verbal re-telling of traumatic experience as the most effective method of healing (Whitlock 79). A large part of the TRC is the collection and sharing of survivor testimony. While many survivors have found this process to be beneficial, critiques of the TRC highlight how this emphasis on talking and listening can also work to reinforce the divides between those who divulge their experiences of trauma and those who bear witness. In her article, Naomi Angel draws on Paulette Regan’s scholarship regarding the relationship between settler-listener and Indigenous survivor-speaker. Regan asserts that empathetic reactions to survivor testimony can be “colonial in nature” (qtd. in Angel 13). A deconstruction of this problematic relationship can be achieved by “unsettling the settler within” (Regan qtd. in Angel 13). This includes the settler’s recognition of their involvement in causing the trauma. After viewing the “Speaking to Memory” exhibit, I wondered how visual mediums, like the images of St. Michael’s, could serve to unsettle viewers, and thus open them up to receiving testimonies in a more effective way.

They command attention. Unlike small text on a page, these images visually confront observers; as they walk into the gallery, viewers not only see these life-size images, but are taken in to them, and the space of St. Michael’s. In the small enclosure featuring the bread mixer, this visual and spatial transportation is most evident. Here, observers can literally step inside the physical space of testifiers as they read survivors’ stories about this mixer on the wall. There is something disturbing about tangible evidence and in this small space, the mixer’s presence, and all of its connotations, cannot be ignored.

Our class discussion on Tuesday touched on how testimony is received differently in varying contexts. How reading a history of Indian Residential Schools at home in one’s pajamas is a vastly different experience from walking through a gallery exhibit of survivor testimony, in MOA, at UBC. I think the use of visual and physical materials in “Speaking To Memory” effectively unsettled viewers as we were taken out of our familiar, comfortable classrooms and placed in the classrooms of St. Michael’s. As students, we were confronted by a school very different from our own. And it is anything but comfortable. For those of us who come from backgrounds of privilege, such images may have made us uncomfortable with our pasts and even our present – we attend class on unceded Musqueam territory everyday. Even if this unsettling only lasts for a moment, a brief glance through a survivor’s eyes, it is enough to cross that divide between speaker and witness.

While I do not mean to trivialize the trauma experienced by those who attended residential schools, the phrase “To walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” comes to mind. It is often said that to best understand someone else, one must see from their perspective. This attempted understanding is crucial in the production and reception of testimony. Whitlock asserts that in order for testimony to be successfully received, and hopefully acted on, it must generate “the affective response of witnesses who will respond empathetically and intersubjectively” (80). Through visual mediums, observers can glimpse through a survivor’s/artist’s/speaker’s perspective, thus opening the possibility for a productive dialogue. Overall, I found the multi-media format of “Speaking To Memory” particularly effective in presenting new ways of seeing/hearing/witnessing and understanding survivor testimony.