Art Spiegelman’s work Maus, a graphic novel, is haunting. It is a portrayal, told through the son of an Auschwitz survivor, of the Jews during World War II. Only, Spiegelman’s work is a little different than the usual representation; within the pages, the Jewish people are drawn as mice, and the Nazi’s as cats. This seemingly simple device has a hugely powerful effect and Maus I: My father Bleeds History and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began deservingly won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. “Maus compels us to bear witness in a different way: the very artificiality of its surface makes it impossible to imagine the reality beneath” – Newsweek.
I agree wholeheartedly with this review; it is the very juxtaposition of medium, comics, and content, the Holocaust, that leaves the reader forever changed. The Holocaust, as Spiegelman himself notes in Maus II, has been revisited over and over again, in many different forms. However I think, even when the book was published in 1986, the people of the Western world were already desensitized to the vivid reenactments that were put forth in the visual form, that is movies. We are trained to watch movies that depict the visual terror, and remind ourselves, “this isn’t real”. Which is I think why Maus was so successful; there is something about watching cartoon mice, so innocent and small, getting punished in the pages Spielgelman drew. Because it was something we are not yet desensitized to, Maus punched us in the gut in the way many movies attempted to, but failed.
Which is why, I was disappointed, when doing a little further digging, to discover that Spiegelman published another work as a companion in 2011, MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus. MetaMaus is a compilation of what went into the making of the Maus. It includes Spiegelman’s original interviews with his father, drafts of the work, a DVD of photos and videos, and interviews of Art Spiegelman himself. This unveiling of the process of Maus leaves me underwhelmed; it was Maus’s very disconnect from reality that made it as successful as it was. The Telegraph Review echoes these thoughts: “On the one hand, it [MetaMaus] consolidates Maus’s status as a canonical work, about which we need to know everything, and emphasises its claim to historical testimony… On the other hand, however, the almost overwhelming presence of all this stuff emphasizes that history is far from a straightforward retrieval of “facts”, but rather involves a complex process of accumulation, sifting and construction”. Though their dissatisfaction stems from a slightly different place, it echoes what I’m feeling. It’s like learning how magic tricks work. Once you know, once you see the details, see how the trick was constructed, you can’t see the magic of the trick any more. You can only see the mechanisms behind it.
Again, critically, I wonder what the intention was behind publishing a work like MetaMaus. I can’t help but feel as though it was created mostly because the publishers knew, with Maus’s success, that people would buy the book. And there is no doubt they also knew that publishing MetaMaus would create a resurgence of interest in the original work, giving readers “an opportunity” to read Maus with a different lens. However, I think that this may have backfired. MetaMaus changes the reading of Maus. But it’s not for the better.