Comics significantly helped develop my interest in reading. As a child (and even now, as a young adult), I adored Archie comics, Asterix and Obelix, and the Adventures of Tintin. However, it took me way too long to get into my first “serious” comic or graphic novel. Only now, in my 4th year of university have I finally gotten around to reading Art Spiegelman’s terrific Maus series, thanks to the reading list of ENGL 474 here at UBC. One of the biggest misconceptions I had before even reading the book is that this would be a retelling of holocaust history, told through the unique perspective of the comic form. In actuality, the Maus comics are a lot more than mere historical re-enactment. One of the most fascinating themes I found was the idea that traumatic experiences are not necessarily conducive to character building. Rather, these are experiences that linger and haunt a family, passing down the generations one way or another.
If you want to get a better sense of Art Spiegelman’s influences and intentions for his Maus series, watch this enlightening interview conducted by Phillip Adams. First off, what we learn from the interview is the tremendous influence that MAD magazine had on Art. He mentions that MAD magazine served as a sort of “window” into the worlds of art, literature, and music, albeit, an extremely subverted version of these worlds. It is this same sort of “subversion” that carries onto Maus. In the interview, Art claims that he is resistant to the use of Maus as a crash course into Holocaust history or as he terms it “Auschwitz 101”. Art’s primary intention with Maus is to tell a story of a son trying to understand his father’s life. In doing so, he does not seek to white wash his father’s own flaws. There are several moments where Art and his father Vladek, have heated arguments, and both characters (author and subject) can come across as unsavory.
One scene in particular that gets brought up in the interview, is located in Maus II, at the end of Chapter 3. Here, Vladek is joined with Art and his girlfriend Francoise on a trip to the grocery store. On the way back, Francoise decides to pick up a black hitchhiker, much to the disagreement of Vladek. After the hitchhiker is dropped to his destination, Vladek vents his racist beliefs about black people or “shvartsers” (a derogatory Yiddish word) as he calls them (Spiegelman 98-99). Francoise confronts Vladek in this scene, and calls him out for spewing the same sort of racism as the Nazis delved out to the Jews (Spiegelman 99-100). The chapter ends with Vladek saying “You see, kids…we’re home sweet home already…Now we can make a very happy lunch from all my new groceries. Only thank god that your shvartser didn’t take them” (Spiegelman 100).
In James Young’s essay on Maus, he explains that “indeed, it may be Artie’s unreliability as a son that makes his own narrative so reliable” (676). Young essentially says that the moments where Art exposes character flaws in himself, betraying details that his father would have preferred to be private enable the narrative to be more honest. Although I found this a problematic concept at first, that is a son betraying the trust of his father for the sake of being a reliable narrator, Spiegelman has explained the inclusion of that particularly troublesome scene with his father. In the same interview linked above, Art Spiegelman frames the inclusion of that scene regarding his father’s “casual racism”: “There’s a tendency to think of holocaust survivors as martyrs…and one expects one to be made better by suffering. Suffering makes you hurt. That’s all you can say for it. “This quote poignantly shows Art’s frustration with the mainstream media’s depiction of Holocaust survivors as being saintly and that perhaps it would be better if everyone understood that mental trauma does not lead to a strengthening of character, it can be just as debilitating to one’s personality as a physical disease.
Works Cited
Spiegelman, Art. Interview by Phillip Adams. Late Night Live. Radio National. ABC, Sydney: 7 Oct. 2013. Television.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: and here my troubles began. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. Print.
Young, James E.. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and the Afterimages of History.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 666-699. Print.