Maus

Maus: A Survivor's Tale: I My Father Bleeds History is a graphic novel depicting the author's father's experience in Poland before and during WWII. Art Spiegelman frames the story autobiographically with the process of interviewing his father; the story itself is his father's story. The framing is excellent--it is believable, cutting in and out of the story at just the right moments. It is very meta: for instance, Spiegelman includes several pages of graphic novel within graphic novel, sharing something he purportedly wrote in his younger days about his mother's suicide). The framing is intimate--it shares Spiegelman's frustrations with his father, as well as his attempt to understand him and to understand what happened.

To tell the story, Spiegelman uses mice to represent Jewish people, pigs to represent Polish people, and cats to represent the Nazis. This is an interesting choice, given that Spiegelman attempts to break down stereotypes. At one point, in the frame, Spiegelman discusses with his stepmother his hope that he isn't portraying his father as a stereotype: "It's something that worries me about the book I'm doing about him. / In some ways he's just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew." His stepmother notes that it isn't the war that made him this way--she went through the war, as did their friends, and none of them are as penurious as he is.

The story is moving. It traces Spiegelman's father, Vladek, through his young life, his girlfriends, meeting his wife, his conscription, his time as a prisoner of war, and the gradual Nazi infringements on his liberties until he was hiding for his life. This volume ends just as he is taken to Aushwitz. We see Vladek developing immense practical wisdom and ingenuity as he fights to preserve his life and the life of his wife. We see the way in which no one can be trusted; no one will do anyone else a good turn unless there is money associated with it. The writing is quite good--Spiegelman even charmingly captures his father's unique turns of phrase due to the fact that English is not his father's first language.

The graphic novel is an interesting choice of form for this subject. This is the first graphic novel I've read (my mother used to read to us from a picture Bible when we were children, which was quite similar). It felt sometimes like it was written for children--there are pictures, the language is relatively simple, the sentences are short, and the main characters are animals. However, the content is very serious. And the use of animals works to make the story strange from the reader. It makes us not fall back into our accepted understandings of the past, but rather problematizes them, and asks us to come to these events with fresh eyes.


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