Meta-Maus

Like the Essay and Response paper for Writing About Film, this was an essay and response assignment on either Octavia Bulter's Kindred or Art Speilgelman's Maus. I wanted to write about Kindred, but that would have been a more difficult effort, and with the work load I had, I wasn't ashamed about taking the easy way out with Maus.

Like Speilgelman is light reading or something...

In assessing my own work, this is mediocre.


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(very 1st draft! almost ashamedly so)


ENG 384
November 10, 2009
Essay & Response: Maus

Meta-Maus

Upon turning onto page 102 of (The Complete) Maus, a curious event occurs; along with the narrative, the style, artwork, and even genre suddenly changes. In effect, the storyteller has suddenly changed the rules in the reader's contract. We slip from one level of storytelling into something deeper. Not merely self-referential and self-aware (although Maus is certainly that), but cognitive of its own self-awareness. This is akin to the subtle difference between sentience and sapience; knowledge and wisdom. In being aware of itself, Maus almost becomes a recursive loop, becoming wise to its own graphic form, as connects to another scene on the palindromic page umber from our first, 201. Through these two scenes, Art Spiegelman tells us of the same personal tragedy twice, in two different methods, each seemingly aware of it other despite a decade separating their creation.

Most obviously, the border on this page has changed from white to black. In the first frame, we are treated to a title header in the gregarious style only comix could have—Prisoner on the HELL Planet: A Case History—with a photograph next to it being clutched by a gnarly hand. From this frame—due perhaps to the overly dark nature of the entire page—the eye is suddenly drawn to the lower left corner, the outer edge, where a more simplistic hand holds a comic book that happens to be the very page we've just turned to in Maus. It isn't unlikely that our own hand rests eerily close to one or the other of the hands drawn on the page. This presents us with a self-awareness we find in meta-fiction; that is, a story in which the storytelling or story being told becomes a part of the shared narrative, most easily exampled by having the author appear as himself in the work. Which is obviously the point in Maus, the difference being this would then have become a meta-biographical memoir in the structural form of a graphic novel.

Here, Spiegelman appears as himself—as a human and not a mouse—dressed as a concentration camp prisoner, telling us how his mother committed suicide in 1968, when he was 20. His father found her when he came home from work. In the final long horizontal panel on the page, Spiegelman stands (dressed as a prisoner) at the periphery of a crowd outside an apartment building. "I'd just spent the weekend with my girlfriend, Isabella. (My parents didn't like her.) I was late getting home … I suppose that if I'd gotten home when expected, I would have found her body…" (Spiegelman 102).

The suicide of Spiegelman's mother is dealt with again in the second part of Maus. Again Spiegelman appears as a human, but in this instance he wears a mouse mask. In the first panel on the page, he sits at his drawing desk where two flies buzz around him. Above the line of the panel are the words "Time flies…" (201). In each of the first three panels on the page, Spiegelman makes two statements referring to two different timelines in each, and in doing so, brings the self-awareness of metafiction once again to be a central issue in considering the story he tells.

In the first panel Spiegelman refers to the death of his father Vladek in 1982, commenting that he and his wife stayed with his father in 1979. In the next panel Spiegelman states that his father started work as a "tinman" in Auschwitz in 1944, and that he himself began working on the current page of Maus in February 1987. It's in the third panel that this dichotomy of timelines draws to its most contrasting points: "In May 1987 François and I are expecting a baby… Between May 16, 1944, and May 24, 1944 over 100,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed in Auschwitz…" (201). In the fourth panel, Spiegelman turns to address the reader face-to-face (albeit, his is covered by the mouse mask). He speaks of Maus first being published. The presence of flies is increasing.

In the last panel on the page—one that takes up an equal amount of space as the four previous combined—Spiegelman slumps over his drawing table, a heap of bodies seeming to be on the floor of his studio while outside the window of the room is a barbed wire fence and prison guard tower. Spiegelman complains that he's had several offers to sell the rights to Maus so a movie could be made from the graphic memoir, but he laments that he just doesn't want to. He then mentions again the death of his mother, "In May 1968 my mother killed herself. (She left no note.) Lately, I've been feeling depressed." A voice sounds from outside the panel—somewhere off the page—and the words are meant as a double entendre: "Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We're ready to shoot!…" (201). Given the context, this could be as much a reference to a director shooting film as to soldiers shooting Jewish prisoners. The heap of bodies remains the focus of both.

Response to "Meta-Maus"

The two scenes discussed in "Meta-Maus" share the connections of metafictional self-awareness, feeling imprisoned, and the suicide of Spiegelman's mother. In the first, what are we to make of this abrupt change in story-telling method? We've gone from an Animal Farm-like tale involving Jewish mice, German dogs, and Polish pigs to the lurid-stylings of 1960s comix involving directly autobiographical human characters set in a recursive metafictional narrative.

Spiegelman wants us as readers to be aware that we are not part of his story, that we are pushed to be outsiders to what he reveals to us. But more than that, he himself is an outsider to his own story, evidenced by the fact that he places himself within the narrative as a human prisoner (from "Hell Planet") because what he tells us about himself is too painful for him to be directly included. This is why he imprisons himself in the scene, and via the title, literally places the event out-of-this-world (on the aforementioned "Hell Planet"). The recursion of illustrated hands holding the book we are reading further emphasizes the removal of direct reader-involvement as well as distances us and himself from the trauma-within-trauma he describes. Surviving a Nazi concentration camp requires one level of distance (which Spiegelman invokes with anthropomorphic characters of mice and dogs) but his mother committing suicide years after that forces Spiegelman to further distance himself from the very thing he wishes to share.

When he mentions his mother's suicide later in a scene titled "Time Flies…" it is with far simpler and less descriptive language (showing the small healing graces of passing time) and amidst a plethora of seeming inconsequential information. This information all suggests that Spiegelman conceals as much as he shows, even if that concealment is superficial.

When Spiegelman tells us that his father worked as a tinman in Auschwitz, it could easily be passed over as insignificant. But nothing in Maus can be taken as inconsequential. Being a tinman involved constructing roofs and walls that would ordinarily be used for protection and security (against the elements and to create a dwelling place), but in context, the skill was used to contain and conceal (minimal prisoner housing and to ensure any sense of "home" would be rife with death and uncertainty).

Spiegelman mentioning the birth of his child alongside detailing the numbers of Hungarian Jews killed in a specific period shows that he is still equating any life as being paid for by the death of others. There can be no small amount of guilt associated with this observation. And again, the recursive, self-aware meta-narrative comes to the fore when Spiegelman sits at his drawing table and his studio alters itself around him to show a pile of bodies that resemble the infamous Belsen heaps with the exterior world transforms into the confines of a concentration camp. Spiegelman still feels trapped by his family's past even forty years later.

Even as he is publicly dealing with his grief and confusion about the Holocaust, Spiegelman struggles with himself as to why and how he does so. It is this internal conflict which drives the themes and structure of Maus to be a story that simply cannot be told in a direct, unadorned manner. In Spiegelman's case, however, that adornment comes not in the form of stylish language and heroic plot, but in self-consciously anthropomorphized animals, animal-masks on humans, and altered identities to reveal the facts of some events. This is a story that could not exist without the structure of metafiction, self-aware narrative, and the deliberate distance imposed upon the reader.

We can never be a part of this story, but we as readers can take the opportunity Spiegelman offers us to take a peek behind his many masks and layers to understand not only the story he tells us, but how he has brought himself to do so and, perhaps most importantly, why he does so.

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Bibliography

"Bergen-Belsen concentration camp."

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Retrieved 00:39, November 7, 2009.

Green, Archie. Tin Men (Folklore and Society).

Champaign, IL:

University of Illinois, 2002. Print.

Rothberg, Michael. "'We Were Talking Jewish':

Art Spiegelman's Maus
as 'Holocaust' Production."
Contemporary Literature 35.4 (1994).
JSTOR. Web.

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus.

New York: Pantheon, 1991. Print.

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