Since our last blog posts, our class has read two works: Maus by Art (Artie) Spiegelman and Basic Black with Pearls by Helen Weinzweig. Maus is a comic that details the story of Art Speigelman’s father, Vladek, as he was sent to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the Holocaust . The comic represents its characters as anthropomorphized animals, with Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. Basic Black is about a women named Shirley Kaszenbowski born to an impoverished family who moves up the class ladder but experiences great dissatisfaction with her life as a housewife. She begins a global affair with a spy named Coenraad as a means of escaping her mundane reality. Both literary works deal with issues relating to memory and trauma and today, I will examine what my peers have said about them, however, when reading the blogs, I noticed that most of my peers decided to write about Maus. Perhaps its comic book style made it more accessible?
In his blog, Geoff discusses the issues related to authenticity. He indicates that while Vladek’s stories may or may not be exaggerated, they still bore a great effect on the author. Geoff also acknowledges that there is a certain difficulty and a certain moral aspect towards retelling traumatic stories. In William’s blog, he compares Vladek Spiegelman to the “tragic hero” character trope, noting that Vladek’s many personality flaws have helped him survived the Holocaust. However, William also believes that these flaws eventually led to the suicide of Vladek’s wife, Anja.
On the otherhand, Megan examines themes of guilt in Maus. She states that guilt can be adopted without wrong doing, as Artie feels for his mother’s death. She notes that guilt is a long lasting feeling and that Artie may be attempting to relieve some of his own guilt by telling these stories. Patrick also examines ideas aroung guilt in his blog. He adds that Artie feels intergenerational survivor’s guilt not only for his parents’ experiences during the Holocaust but also for not born to experience it himself.
In Tessa’s blog, she examines the significance of Spiegelman’s choice to portray specific racial groups as animals. She examines the significance of the predatory relationship of cats and mice, as well as the the fact that pigs are not a part of this food chain. She also recognizes this may be because of the Pole’s perceived unwillingness to help Jews during the War. Suvi also discusses Spiegelman’s choice for representing ethnic groups as animals. She examines how Spiegelman draws a comparison between his family as survivors and mice as survivors while conceding that the mice/Jews would still be no match in a conflict with the cats/Germans. She also draws a comparison to a previous work we read: Persepolis. Suvi recognizes that this work is also a comic about personal experiences which challenge master narratives. Jessie also makes this comparison, adding that the comic medium requires a greater analysis of artistic steal to discern meaning from imagery and symbolism.
Kriveena, on the other hand, wrote about Basic Black. She examines the themes of memory in the novel and how Shirley experiences bad memories about her working class past that associated with Shirley’s childhood city of Toronto. Kriveena also examines the significance of Shirley’s disguise (the black dress and pearl necklace) as a means of veiling her modest upbringings while also interprating the dress as a means for Shirley to hide her identity under a man.
Overall, this week’s blogs examined many aspects of the novels that our class read. I look forward to the final blogging assignment. Thank you for reading!
Until next time,
Aleksei Zhukov