Art Spiegelman, "Maus. A Survivor’s Tale

 

I : My Father bleeds History, New York 1986 ISBN 0-394-74723-2. – 160 p;

 

 

II And Here My Troubles Began, New York 1991, ISBN 0-679-72977-1 – 136 p.

Read from to September 9^th to 17^th to 24^th 2021

My Rating 

 

I haven’t read many graphic books until now, even though my own daughter is a quite well-known cartoonist. But even a neophyte like me can recognize a masterpiece, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus is definitely one, with its amazing way of developing the distressing theme of the Holocaust using a mixture of tools from different arts.

In fact, this is what fascinated me most, the way narrative conventions, like timeline fractures, narrative voices, styles mixtures (either collages or insertions of panels from other author’s books), transgress not only the boundary between fiction and reality, as it happens in any memoir, but also the boundary between drawing and writing.

The book begins with a foreboding flashback, a memory from the narrator’s childhood, in 1958: he was in Rego Park, New York with his friends, rollerskating when one of his skates became loose, and the fact his friends didn’t wait for him made he return home crying. His father told him then that a good way to verify who your friends are, is to be locked with them in a room without food, for a week. Then the narrators’ portraits are displayed, accompanied by a simple but poignant biography:

 

Almost every chapter is a round trip from present to past to present: Art is the voice of the present narrative, depicting domestic scenes (father counting his pills, complaining about Mala, his second wife, throwing out his son’s coat and giving him his old one, asking Artie to help him repair the roof even though he knows his son is not very useful) and Vladek is the voice of the past narrative.

Both stories create the portrait of a quite ordinary man, sometimes faulty and sometimes true, sometimes weak and sometimes strong, sometimes petty and sometimes generous, no better and no worse from any other human being, who had been caught like a mouse in History’s trap and had been fortunate enough (if fortunate is really the word) to escape from it to tell the tale.

Behind the gruesome tale of the Father we have a glimpse of the Son’s tale, he too an indirect victim of the same History: we learn about his strain relationship with his father whom he cannot help but consider guilty for the suicide of his mother, and about his own survivor’s guilt for all his father had gone through. The author finds a brilliant way to present this internal conflict, by drawing the narrator as a mouse while speaking to his family (scenes in which he is son, stepson and husband) and as a human being wearing a mouse mask while speaking to the outside world (scenes in which he is the Author).

 To jumble the timeline until the very end, the last panels are about Anja’s return and Vladek calling Art Richieu, only the grave tombs restoring the implacable order.

I won’t talk about the animal symbolistic, for Jews represented as mice, Nazis as cats, Christians as pigs, and Time itself as a swarm of flies it is self revelatory. I will only observe that the choice of mice had less to do with fables stereotypes and more with the following quote from a newspaper article, published in Pomerania, Germany in 1930:

“Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed… Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal… Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!”

With the collage technique, the story leaves once again the fiction realm and steps into reality: two photos are inserted in the second volume: one of his brother Richieu, who was killed by Nazis when he was five, and the other of his father after the war, in a refugee camp. Intertextuality is also present: we find some panels of another book the Author drew in college, after his mother committed suicide, called Prisoner of the Hell Planet.

About the drawing itself I can only say I liked it a lot, although my approach is empirical, given that I am not versed in the intricacies of the drawing technique. However, if my review is not convincing enough, here is a quote from Umberto Eco on the fourth cover, that captures much better the ineffable charm of the book:

“Maus is a book that cannot be put down, truly, even to sleep. When two of the mice speak of love, you are moved, when they suffer, you weep. Slowly through this little tale comprised of suffering, humor and life’s daily trials, you are captivated by the language of an old East European family, and drawn into the gentle and mesmerizing rhythm, and when you finish Maus, you are unhappy to have left that magical world and long for the sequel that will return you to it.”