Considering Maus : Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust (review)

Almost twenty years have passed since the publication of the first volume of Maus, Art Spiegelman's critically acclaimed Holocaust "comix"-memoir-biography. Academic interest in the work shows no signs of abating—why? In the introduction to her edited, interdisciplinary volume, Deborah R. Geis responds indirectly by summarizing some of the oft-cited unique characteristics of Spiegelman's "survivor's tale": the fabulistic characters, the technically unorthodox "cinematic style" (p. 2), the postmodern incorporation of the "difficulty of telling" (p. 3) a story of the Holocaust and its second-generation impact, and the book's deceptive simplicity and visual economy.

Six of the eight essays collected in this volume have been published previously, but they are worth re-reading in the context of Geis's organizational scheme. She brings them into conversation with one another and with a shared body of secondary literature in three loosely defined parts. The first focuses mostly on Spiegelman himself, as both author and character, and on the sometimes audacious choices he made in bringing Maus to fruition. The second considers the Maus volumes within the genre of Holocaust testimony, asking where and how to situate these idiosyncratic texts. The third section takes a still wider view of the Maus volumes as ongoing cultural productions.

David Mikics's contribution, "Underground Comics and Survival Tales: Maus in Context" (one of the two essays originally published in this volume), places Spiegelman's seminal work within and against the underground graphic traditions out of which the artist first emerged. Most illuminating in this discussion is Mikics's Judaic spin on Maus. He calls attention to the work's specifically Jewish narrative techniques; for example Vladek Spiegelman's Jacob-like tricksterism and ordinary heroism are set against mainstream adolescent comics' super-heroism. Vladek's survival is cast here as both heroic and blessed—by "God, fate, or chance" (p. 23). But the recipient of the fabled blessing becomes the one granting it in the second volume's penultimate scene. In that scene, Artie (Art Spiegelman) receives the blessing that his father meant, in his confused, death-bed state, for Artie's dead brother Richieu. While Mikics's reflections on Maus are original and illuminating, Arlene Fish Wilner's more theological Jewish readings of the work's heterogeneous levels of narrative emplotment ("story" and "history"), as they are presented in her essay in part two of the collection, are less successful.

Hamida Bosmajian likewise probes the father-son relationships in this "double autobiography" (p. 26), referring to "Artie" as "an orphaned voice and self that seems more lost than his author" (p. 27). Wide-ranging in her analysis but relying too heavily on quotations, Bosmajian argues that Artie orphans himself in the process of capturing his father's looming trauma: the master narrative of Holocaust survival marginalizes the son. In telling this story, Art reveals "unresolved childhood issues" (p. 30). Bosmajian should be wary of psychoanalyzing Spiegelman's work overmuch. Critics of so-called "second generation" literature—who, in a parallel process of over-psychoanalyzing, too often neatly classify children of survivors as a homogeneous collective—should also take note of this tendency. In a way, Spiegelman's own representational technique in Maus—Jews and Germans appear as mongrel mouse- and cat-people, among other animal-human forms—itself suggests a critique of the tendency to typecast any social group. Nancy K. Miller's essay, "Cartoons of the Self," closes this section by further investigating Maus's "intergenerational paradigm . . . as a form of self-narrative"; among other observations, Miller most fruitfully considers here Art's relationship with "his (dead) mother" (p. 45). Anja Spiegelman is doubly absent in these tales, both because her suicide predates the narrative present of the father-son exchanges in Rego Park, and because her own self-narration, her own voice, was silenced when Vladek burned her diaries. As Miller expertly shows, a significant strand of...