Maus-A Survivor's Tale, I & II
Finn, Molly
BOOKS A comic book that sears your heart MAUS, A SURVIVOR'S TALE, I MAUS, A SURVIVOR'S TALE, II Art Spiegelman Pantheon, $18 & $23, 153 & 136 pp. Molly Finn Maus is a comic book about the...
...When Artie learns this he walks out of the last frame of Maus I muttering "murderer...
...24: 28 February 1992 Commonweal...
...On the next page an international crew of aggressive reporters is firing questions and thrusting microphones at him...
...The usual frame measures about 1 3/4 by 2 1/2 inches and often includes three or four vividly drawn characters set in a brilliantly descriptive background...
...Spiegelman's drawings of these two reveal in a few lines a deep love and caring that would take many words to express...
...He has used this unusual form—his own artistic medium— to reveal with drama and graphic detail a vision of the most horrible event of our time...
...He relates his history in accented English, and we come to know him as he was thirty years ago, a self-confident and resourceful young man who must learn how to do a little bit of everything to survive—and even to help others to survive...
...Period furniture is accurately drawn, cars are the right model and vintage, clothing and uniforms match—in fact are emblematic of— the characters' work and position in society...
...As the frames progress he grows smaller and smaller until in the last one he is a baby...
...Just keep it honest, honey," says Françoise...
...With an artist's magic, Spiegelman expresses an entire range of human emotion with these simple invertedtriangle faces and using the gestures of their simple bodies...
...Vladek wears glasses on his mouse nose and dresses just like an uncle of mine who lives in Rego Park...
...Or a reflection of her frailness...
...Art Spiegelman doesn't spare himself, and he doesn't spare us...
...It passes the story on...
...he answers "WAH...
...In Maus I Vladek, an ailing, selfpitying Holocaust survivor, is prodded by his son to tell the history of the Spicgelman family beginning with its comfortable middleclass life in a small city in Poland and moving through Nazi persecution, flight, squalor, and narrow escapes...
...But Spiegelman doesn't leave it at that...
...The framework of this autobiographical memoir is a series of interviews between the young cartoonist-writer, Artie, now living in Soho with his wife Françoise, and his father Vladek, who lives in Rego Park, Queens...
...As in any comic book, the entire story is told simultaneously in words and tiny drawings...
...But Françoise doesn't let it drive Artie crazy...
...Please don't worry about protecting your sensibilities from anything so supposedly vulgar...
...Bitch...
...The person addressing us is Art Spiegelman, the author, in his own voice, reflecting about the events since the the success of Maus I. At the bottom of the page Spiegelman is saying, "Lately I've been feeling depressed...
...In a further comment on the press conference, Spiegelman draws himself as a television-shaped robot saying, "My projections of what others now expect from me...have bent me out of shape...
...Françoise helps Artie recall his own experience as the child of survivors, and to figure out how to "reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams...
...Anja herself committed suicide in 1968, when Artie was twenty...
...Yeah...
...He is sweating, bewildered, and miserable...
...Spiegelman...we're ready to shoot ! " And the drawing board is revealed to be perched atop an enormous pile of corpses, hence the flies...
...In response to the question, "Could you tell our audience if drawing Maus was cathartic...
...Hitler did it...
...The story continues in Maus 11, moving to Auschwitz, and ending with an ecstatic reunion between Vladek and his wife Anja...
...He complains about his poor health, to the extent of alarming his vacationing son with a telephone message that he has had a heart attack...
...Vladek narrates the Nazi persecution...
...A balloon at the extreme right says, "Alright, Mr...
...And his mother's suicide: was this a result of what happened to her at the hands of the Nazis...
...Yeah, me too," says Artie, " 'til I have to spend any time with him—then he drives me crazy...
...so much has to be left out or distorted...
...Seeing a crowd of these stylized faces makes the story universal, and potently conveys the victimization of a vulnerable, identifiable group...
...Mommy...
...Artie always wears a white shirt and black vest and smokes constantly...
...Before, after, alongside of, and during these father-son interviews we are back in Queens, where Artie grew up, or at Vladek's rented cottage in the Catskills, watching father and son struggling with their memories, their feelings about each other, and their efforts to come to terms with two terrible losses...
...After the birth of Richieu, Vladek lovingly accompanied Anja to a hospital in Czechoslovakia where she spent three months recovering from depression...
...And as Art walks home, he begins to feel better...and grows back to his normal size...
...She listens to Vladek and says, "Poor guy ...I feel so sorry for him...
...Toward the end of the session, a specific technical problem the artist is facing is discussed—how to draw the tools and equipment his father would have used when he worked in a tin shop near Auschwitz...
...I should be home working...
...The comic strip form economically and starkly makes the author's point...
...With alternating expressions of disgust, disbelief, and frustration, Artie listens to Vladek complain about his second wife Mala, who is also a Holocaust survivor and whom he accuses of being wasteful and trying to steal all his money...
...Larger frames emphasize a place or an event and allow the artist space to draw the most expressive of his bleak landscapes, including railroad yards, camps, and scenes of horror and destruction...
...In a remarkable passage titled "Time Flies," Artie is shown sitting at the drawing board...
...He is wearing the usual white shirt and black vest, smoking the usual cigarette, but rather than a mouse head he is wearing a mouse mask, and the air is full of flies...
...In Maus 11 Artie's wife Françoise is there to help him figure out the growing complexities of the task he's undertaken...
...Vladek and Anja's son Richieu died during the war: he was poisoned by his aunt rather than given over to the Nazis (the aunt then poisoned herself...
...Françoise earned her mouse face upon her marriage to Artie by converting to Judaism "to make Vladek happy...
...Economical, accurate, as distilled as poetry and as intimate as a diary, Maus brings a message of horror and inhumanity, and of the excruciating complexities of survival, love, and loyalty...
...The Jews are mice, the Germans cats, the Poles pigs, and so forth...
...Artie is bitter about his mother's death...
...Is Vladek stingy and self-pitying because of his experiences...
...I mean, reality is too complex for comics...
...Almost every one of these larger frames is a small masterpiece that rewards study and contemplation...
...He did his homework, carefully researching not only the tools in the tin shop, or how to repair shoes, but how to look into hell and pass on the vision to future generations...
...It breaks your heart...
...Does he use his history to gain sympathy...
...As he talks to his son, we see how his experience never leaves him...
...But that's not the end of the story...
...The conversation he has with Pavel, his Holocaust-survivor psychiatrist, probes personal, psychological, and philosophical dilemmas and raises necessary questions without finding easy answers to any of them...
...Molly Finn Maus is a comic book about the Holocaust...
...Spiegelman does not claim to understand the effect of the Nazi persecution on his parents...
...But for the most part the mice Commonweal 28 February 1992: 23 are interchangeable...
...And trying to do it as a comic strip...
...Somehow I'm profiting from genocide...
...In Maus I, published in 1981, Spiegelman succeeded in communicating at least part of his vision of the Holocaust...
...In Maus II Artie must deal with the paradox of that achievement...
...Artie rushes to the phone, comes back to tell his wife Françoise, "He didn't even have a heart attack...he just wanted to be sure I'd call him back...
...Spiegelman ingeniously depicts all the characters in the book as animals—that is, as people with animal heads...
...Even worse, Vladek has destroyed Anja's wartime diaries and all her personal effects...
...In a four-page comic about the suicide, published in 1972 and incorporated into Maus, Spiegelman depicts himself "left alone with my thought...
...In the next sequence he climbs down from his chair, down the pile of corpses and, still the size of a tiny child, goes off to see his shrink...
...But nothing can make him happy," Artie retorts...
...Pavel is able to give him a little information from his own past...
...In the thirteen years it took Art Spiegelman to produce this short masterpiece he subjected his own sensibilities to the fires of Auschwitz and they are highly refined...
...Do you feel better now...
...Menopausal depression...
Vol. 119 • February 1992 • No. 4
