Art Spiegelman’s Maus does exceptional work in recovering James Young’s “post-memory,” the experience that reflects “back on memory, revealing it as equally constructed, equally mediated by the processes of narration and imagination” (Young 669). Art follows his “media-conscious generation” in instead “of attempting to portray the events of the Holocaust” he draws “about the event of its transmission” (670). If I have any critique of Young’s point, it is that he does not fully express how the cartoon nature of Maus so heavily contributes to this new historiography that “integrates both the contingent truths of the historian’s narrative and the fact of the victim’s memory” (668).

Jeanne C. Ewert seems to echo Young’s sentiment that “Vladek’s own voice speaks every word” while “Spiegelman’s drawing’s tell the son’s version of his father’s story,” a process that makes the “spoken word… immediate, the drawings at one remove” (88). This one remove, I believe, is the most important facet of the narrative: the visual indicates the distortion wrought by traumatic witnessing without making the narrative any less ‘truthful.’ In this distorted reality we are able to accept the truth of the Vladek’s account while appreciating its status as “received history” (Young 669). The choice to use funny animals to represent this distorted reality reflects Spiegelman’s own motivation in doing so. From an interview quoted by Ewert:

The reason was, if one draws this kind of stuff with people, it comes out wrong. And the way it comes out wrong is, first of all, I’ve never lived through anything like that… and it would be counterfeit to try to pretend that the drawings are representations of something that’s actually happening. (92)

Another text that embraces this “one remove” of the visual is 2008’s Waltz with Bashir. In that film, director Ari Folman searches to recover his memories of the 1982 Lebanon War and his own participation in it as an Israeli soldier. To do so, he interviews friends and veterans, some in possibly recreated bar discussions and others in more traditional studio settings. But all the included scenes are cartoon, whether they be the animated recreation of the witnesses’ experiences or else the interviews themselves.

The film is very concerned with the elusiveness of memory, situated on a premise that Folman has created false memories to hide his indirect participation and guilt in relation to the Sabra and Shatila massacre. It is not funny animals but the “real people” Spiegelman fears to illustrate, Folman having lived through the collective experience of the war. Thus the motivation and form of the “one remove” of cartoon is different. For Spiegelman, it is a way of expressing his own incapacity to represent the events of the Holocaust; for Folman, it is to denote the inherent difficulties in recovering memory as shaped by the “processes of narration and imagination” (Young 669).

In a powerful act of breaking this one remove, Waltz with Bashir’s final scene cuts to real documentary footage of women wailing at the site of the massacre, decrying the horror that has just been committed. The singular traumatic event is so real it transcends even the distorted memory of its participants much like the inclusion of Vladek’s photograph in Maus (II: 34) brings the Holocaust back to stark and unfathomable reality.

Works Cited

• Ewert, Jeanne C. “Reading Visual Narrative: Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”.” Narrative 8.1 (2000): 87-103.
• Folman, Ari, Serge Lalou, Roman Paul, Yael Nahlieli, Gerhard Meixner, David Polonsky, Yoni Goodman, Nili Feller, Boaz R. Buskila, Ori Sivan, Shmuel Frenkel, Ronny Dayag, and Max Richter. Waltz with Bashir. Culver City, Calif: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2009.
• Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
• Young, James E. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and the Afterimages of History.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 666-99.