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.


~•~
(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.

•

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.

· • ·

Tantalus Muse

This is a piece I'd really like to rework a bit and lengthen.

From the aforementioned misliked Nonfiction course. I guess I didn't mislike it all-in-all, just misliked the way it was taught and the fact that workshopping stories in a Creative Writing Program seems to inherently be:
"Teacher, I can't read this story because the grammar is so bad it's unintelligible."

"Oh, don't worry about that—you don't need to correct it—just push through that and comment on the story."

"But if I can't read to understand it, how can I tell if there even is a story!?"

"Well, that's the assignment..."

Oh, Sisyphean Fates, how you taunt me so‽

The assignment was to write a story (nonfiction) about something you remember one way but found out was, in fact, different than your memory.

I, of course, had just the story...


~•~
(2nd draft)

CRW 309 Creative Non-Fiction
TANTALUS MUSE: The Red-Haired Girl
12/3/08
Final Draft


When I was five years old, my family went to visit my aunt for two weeks, at the end of summer. She lived in a house along the Atlantic shore in Virginia. Her back yard was a wide flat manicured lawn that fell away suddenly in rocky cliffs at the water's edge. There, a pier ran out into the ocean like a long fingertip that pointed into the gray-blue flux of forever. At high tide, the waves would crash up against the rocky shoreline, spraying their salty mist into the cool air, the beads of sweat of its long endeavors. I remember watching the crashing waves for hours wanting to linger on a single wave dissipating into mist, but before I could hold onto the falling drops back into the sea another wave would come along and smash into the remnants of the previous.

I'm sure I watched those waves for hours.

A few minutes, anyway.

My Aunt Gertrude had a proverbially quaint-and-lovely tea garden behind her house next to a koi pond that wrapped around three sides of a small swimming pool. The fourth side of the pool was bordered by a bunk house, long thin deep green fingers of hollyhock vines crawling slowly up its dark fired brick walls. A few sprawling Southern Oaks held a canopy of shade over the garden, towering over a few maples, a single red cedar, and not-so-closely trimmed hedges lining the courtyard. Saw palmettos guarded ever corner, threatening impalement to a three-foot tall five year old, should he venture off the cobblestone path. In the middle of the courtyard of the tea garden the adults would all sit around a glass-topped black iron table and talk about the boring things adults tend to talk about.

I remember the place so vividly—I can still hear the cricket chorus in the evening tune down as the bullfrogs started their nightly swollen throat-song contests that would go on for more hours than most people would believe or ever bothered to sit around and hear—the smell of wet brick and soil and rain and roots. I remember one afternoon out by the bunk house and pool—fallen reddish leaves on the slate cobblestone blown by summer breezes to scrap away days that lasted forever—I first saw my cousin, the red-haired girl.

I guess she was my cousin. I didn't think of her as my cousin at the time, but in the memory, that's the impression I have. When I was five, I didn't make such differentials. She was older than me or my sister. More like my brother's age, I guess. My sister was nine at the time, my brother, fifteen, so I guess my cousin I saw at Aunt Gertrude's would have been about seventeen, maybe eighteen years old.

She had coppery red hair and wore a white summer dress the turned soft yellow or dark amber in the sinking shades of daylight. I followed her through the tea garden and around the wooded backyard, out to the shoreline of the crashing Atlantic. I'd wait for her along the grassy lawn She was nice, and didn't really play any games with me, but didn't mind me following her around like a lost puppy dog, plastic Batmobile in one hand and chewing on my shirt collar. That was a habit I had then. Pull the front of my shirt collar up to chew on until it was soaked with slobber. I didn't mind that sort of thing when I was five. And neither did the red-haired girl.

I remember she thought it was cute that I followed her around, and although I remember we talked a few times, I don't remember the sound of her voice. I remember her smell, like sweet rotten cypress and honeysuckle, and the way she moved, her bare feet seeming to not touch the ground where she walked but getting dirty none the less.

A sure sign that you'd had a good day was seen in how stained and dirty your feet were at the end of it.

Following around the red-haired girl those last days of summer when I was five is a memory that still speaks to me in a wordless language of invisible symbology, a feeling steeped in faith and intuition. Reassurance; the calm certainty that everything is all right. Not so much safe and secure as balanced and still.

Sitting by the koi pond and watching the mammoth goldfish in the dark green waters of the garden pond with the red-haired girl is one of the most blissful places in my memory. And deeply imprinted me in so many ways.

•

There is something very wrong with that vivid slice of the past.

Here is the verifiable evidence of this deeply curious memory: Aunt Gertrude's house wasn't in Virginia, but was, in fact, on a barrier island near Savannah, Georgia; our visit was in Spring, not late Summer; my mother's oft-told story of how I almost drowned when I dropped my plastic toy Batmobile into the swimming pool and dove in after it was in no way exhaggerated.

And there was, in fact, no red-haired girl present at Aunt Gertrude's.

For years after that visit I thought about my cousin, the red-haired girl, and wondered, as years passed, what sort of life she had. When I was older than she would have been when I met her, I asked my mom about her. My mom's a genealogist and historian and she always has the story behind the various weird family members.

"That time we visited Aunt Gertrude," I asked my mom, "Her . . . daughter, I guess it would have been. Maybe sixteen, eighteen years old," I told her, just like my memory held in place, "Whatever happened to her?"

"Aunt Gertrude's daughter?" my mother asked, looking at me like I had a sprouted tentacles from my head.

"Yeah. Isn't that who had the house my the shore, with the tea garden and pool?"

"Yes, Gertrude's house had that wonderful little tea garden in the back courtyard and the pool you dropped your Batmobile in and almost drowned trying to get it."

My mom loves bringing up the highlights of my brushes with death. The local ER had a ward named after me.

"That's the place." I tell her.

My mother's expression of crazed disbelief didn't change. "Aunt Gertrude doesn't have a daughter. I don't know who you're remembering . . . "

Even after several attempts at clarifying, my mother drew a blank on who I was talking about. My brother and sister weren't any help, neither of them remembering anyone at all that I could be remembering.

A figment. A ghost.

I clearly remember spending many hours of each day for two weeks following around and talking to someone who apparently wasn't real in any consensually experienced part of the universe.

Was my memory of a guardian angel? A creepy fetch-spirit? Manifestation of the divine? A succubus come to prey on a little boy?

Hmmm, I don't mind the sound of that.

But then I think, things don't need to have happened to be real.

Memories are real even if the events in them didn't happen in that way. Stories are real, even if they aren't true. Storytelling is creating something that didn't previous exist.

And the non-existent red-haired girl started showing up, wearing various guises, in my stories. Like a shirking shadow of thought, a wisp of impossible memory, my Tantalus Muse would come and tell me a story. I'd write them, but it sometimes seems more like transcribing the words of someone else.

Maybe the red-haired girl is in some other version of this universe and I'm the figment in her memory. Maybe she's the storyteller, that little red-haired girl, in that other universe, and I'm just a character in her tale. The threads of the plot stretch out into the darkness of possibility, and I step forward to find out what comes next.


· • ·

Peculiar Crossroads

In archiving these papers, I come to find out I don't have a copy of the final draft of this one. A fact that annoys and pains me a little. I finished it at school, printed it, and saved it on a flash drive. That flash drive bit the dust and the printed copy was turned it. Being the final paper of the semester, it wasn't returned. [insert myriad frowny faces here].

This does mark (ha-ha) however, the first time i tried writing about the hitchhiking days and Yellowstone and Mark Em—I mean Marcus Amory...

Since we'd been writing parodies in Fiction II, I asked if I could make this assignment a parody as well.

(The references to Orwell in this concern Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma which we read for this class.)

The comment I remember most from Eric May (the teacher whose class this was for) was that there was no sense of Me in this story. I never had any description of Me-as-a-Character. Eric looked at me and, being a wide-girthed man, noted my height. "There's a low ceiling you talk about in the story, but was it a low ceiling to anyone other than you?"


~•~



CRW: Writers on the Road
4/17/08
Creative Essay: First Draft

PECULIAR CROSSROADS


I first met my Dean Moriarty not long after I came off the road. I'd been hitchhiking again--perhaps my longest single stretch of hitching I'd done then, from the magic sweltering Gulf Coast South out to the splosh splawrsh of the rocky coast in Bolinas California where Marin County sticks out its little finger as if testing the waters of the Pacific and then up the angled coastline through Crescent City and beyond--to Seattle where I turned away from the coast and came back through the flat plains of eastern Oregon where it seems that on a clear enough day you could stand there on that dust bowl prairie and gaze back east all the way to the hills and caves of Utah. After a series of flaming Roman candle adventures that took me through a hospital stay (from a motorcade inconvenience that left me with cracked ribs and a headful of missing time) and the hallowed halls of an odd temple in Salt Lake City where the people smiled entirely too much for my comfort, I sat recovering atop a mountain in Colorado with some mad people just burning to live--to move--to experience what the universe conspired to give them. Then, after a few sunrises from those mountains of madness and delirious delights I took my feet back down to the ribbon of highway and shook my thumb for another ride. A few weeks later I had circled around again and was dropped off on the side of the road outside Three Forks Montana and went east into the hissing steam and glug-glug-glugalling of the mud pots and geyser springs of America's own fantasy nature playground called Yellowstone Park. No stranger place had i ever seen--no more wide-eyed had i ever been than when I first set foot in and feasted my road-weary eyes upon the yellow rock veined with hues of blues and reds and obsidian cliffs and porous rock and the steam whispers of holes in the earth that said pssst, pssst, c'mere and I'll tell you a story you've never heard of before and the bubbling waters of iridescent springs that flaunted their abnatural colors like some prehistoric alien peacock strutting and preening across the basins and valleys between proud and protective mountains. It was here, in this almost unearthly landscape that I first encountered the man who would be my Dean Moriarty. Marcus Amory was his name and it was him who blazed like a candle flame everyone else fluttered around like a frenetic mothswarm. I first saw the brightness of his flame my first night in Yellowstone. I had stepped into the small dark smokey lounge that was the employee pub, a wooden bunk house out behind the grandiose log cabin-style Old Faithful Inn, and let my eyes run slow across the walls laden with an almost indecipherable script hand-written graffiti and simple drawings that amazingly never crossed the border from the absurd and vulgar into crass and disgusting. I sat myself down at a table in the middle of the small room and bobbed my head to the mad jazz riffs blowing from the small speakers in the four corners of the room. I nursed a drink of melting ice and wondered what it was that brought me into this place. That same sense of looking--of seeking--of plaintive searching and never resting, never happy with what I've found because I am never really looking for a particular something, just searching out that indefinable anything. It's the seeking that interests me more than what it is that I find. So I sat in this dim, bopping, smokey room and drained the last of the cold water from the remaining ice in my plastic cup and about to cut out of the word-scrawled pub when this fellow I hadn't seen before slipped himself into the chair across the small squared table from me as if he'd always been sitting there and I just noticed him. A bushy-haired nice-looking guy with long fingers that belonged to a jazz piano player or Renaissance painter. He tipped a beer bottle up to his lips, set it back down on the table with a quiet thunk and let loose a bright smile that was the spark of his candleflame. "Hi, I'm Marcus Amory," he said to me and added a little nod to his shining smile. I nodded back to him and felt right off that I was looking at a mad character who just hopped out of a beat novel and appeared in the chair across from me. I nodded and tipped my cup of water in his direction. Without a pause from him to await any comment I might offer Marcus spoke up again and didn't waste time, as if words for him were an inconvenience in conveying what he wanted to impart. "Saturday around noon we're going to be having some fun at my room." He tilted the beer bottle up to his lips again and his eye glinted with a delirious delight. I sat there and for a moment thought I was the mark of someone coming on a little too strong. Like a single pretty girl hanging out at a party that vibrated with too much testosterone, where all the young dudes swung their dicks around with a little too much ferocity. I wasn't sure I wanted to be a part of something as open an invitation as that. "Oh, yeah?" I raised an eyebrow and held a slight grin to show I took no offense even if the invitation was something a little too personal for my interest, "And what sort of fun would that be?" Marcus Amory tossed his answer right out with such an obviously discreet reply that I would either be hep to what he was saying or miss it by a mile and a half. "I just got back from the Jerry shows in Palo Alto." I already wore a Cheshire grin when I finalized the date: "Noon, you say. I guess I'll be skipping work on Saturday..." Marcus Amory and I burned across the landscapes of Yellowstone, the mountains of Montana, and the soft geographies far beyond the physical realms like two mad cats setting fire to the blue note highways of some past poetic time. And as I sit here now, distant and remote from our days together, I reflect on our trips and conversations and lysergic-soaked eep hours of bright dark nights of our souls that seemed to be poured from the eternal archive of mystic experience and steeped in the tea leaves from a lush and exotic jungle where ideas not yet conceived of grow wild on tangle vines before bearing fruit in our minds. I ask the ghost of this memory that is Marcus Amory about those days and nights we spent seeding precious singular moments so that they might flower and bring the beauty of our ideas into being. Marcus Amory moved through place and thought with a fiery intensity and latched onto me through some cosmological ninth sense that told him I would be a willing and able psychonaut to join him on his acid-fueled ramblings down mountain highway and up cliffside trails. I reflect, conjure, and speak to this memory of my Dean Moriarty and question what rules define telling these stories. What defines truth and fiction? What boundaries were breeched and what limits were kept constrained when Jack Kerouac became Sal Paradise and began committing the stories of his life to paper? Where does the thinly-guised fact become fabricated fiction? If I were to write of Marcus Amory and myself--committed in story as Syd Persona--what would I reveal of the psychedelic intimacies he and I shared. And what of the others were who passed though, went along for a distance with, and stepped back with quiet apprehension from? Would I be transgressing any sort of personal privacy they might have reasonable expectation of if I wrote them into the narrative of this slipstream story of hand-painted mini-vans, stumbling glorious wanton hysterical along the boardwalks of Old Faithful's geyser basin and driving, always driving--? Marcus Amory was the maddest beautiful driver I've ever known, which was only appropriate since I viewed him as my Dean Moriarty around whom I fluttered and flipped and kept up the pace with--driving with one hand one the wheel, one hand pinching a joint, his head nodding and bobbing to the music and his smile fixed bright on his face. I think about those times and those events and those people and find myself, even typing this, going back and deleting certain information, altering some truths until their are partial fictions and considering what might be added to this to make it no longer a recollecting tale with minor factual details excised or metamorphosed into subtle fancy. What choices should I make in recreating certain events on the page?—


What choices did Jack make? What observations in On The Road are Jack's and which ones are Sal's? Like my ghostly memory on paper of Marcus Amory, Dean Moriarty was certainly a more beautiful, wild, be-bop-beat mad cat in many ways than Neal Cassady was. But then Neal Cassady wasn't Dean Moriarty anymore than Emma Larkin found George Orwell in her bumbling down the sweltering river of Burma (which isn't really a country at all anymore, except in the past of people's memories). Neal Cassady was a living breathing beautiful laughing angry asshole. Just like any person is. Dean Moriarty was a character, who really and truly existed only in Jack's mind, on the page, and in the hearts of anyone who opened themselves up to the story in which Dean rambles endlessly forever down some long lost highway of hope until he recedes to becomes but a speck on the distant horizon, and then it's goodbye to all that--at least, until the reader reopens the book and starts the journey all over again.


—I go searching, and try to find the truth in my own fiction, the fiction in my truth. And, in searching the canyons and highways of my memory and past I come upon a Southern crossroads, not farm from the ramshackle shotgun shack of Old Bull Lee and encounter Flannery O'Connor standing on the side of some dusty highway waiting for the Misfit to come back from the forest where he walked in with the Grandmother. Flannery tells me not to linger too long--and I don't. Crossroads aren't meant for lingering anymore than road novels are meant to leave their characters stationary for any span. But before I stick my thumb out again to catch a ride away from here and off to some place out there somewhere, Ms. O'Connor tells me, "The Writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. Their problem is to find that location." And then I know what it is I've been looking for all these years. Where I have sought to be. The peculiar crossroads where I will find my past present and future mingling with every highway road and trail I've even imagined, and the divine moment that lifts itself out from the swampy muck of confusion and obscurity and hangs there, just above the here and now, where it shimmers for a moment and then disappears as I keep going further. It's all a mirage, rising like heat waves on a desert highway. It disappears like a fleeting memory of the past that no one holds in their hearts anymore, no one speaks of, no one remembers. I think of Jack Kerouac, following me all these years since I first encountered him, and Sal Paradise who never quite existed for me even when I hopped in the car with him and drove out to San Francisco--him and Dean, Dean and Jack, Jack and Neal, Neal and me, me and Marcus Amory. Me and Jack. I grapple with my own secrets, my own untold stories, my own hesitations and I think back to Marcus Amory and the headlights showing only a small piece of the long dark night we travelled--only the immediate future of the road just ahead of us--and beyond that light only darkness and the mystery of what will be--what could be. I think of Marcus Amory, I think of Marcus Amory. I think of Marcus Am-or-ry.


· • ·