Locating Maus A Survivors Tale as Part of but also Distinct from Holocaust Literature - Research Paper Example

Introduction: This paper seeks to affirm that Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is a distinctive account of the Holocaust. It occupies its own space in the vast body of literature and art that has been generated in response to the Holocaust. It is individual not just by virtue of its intensely personal, post-modernist approach, but also because of its medium that uses both the textual and visual modes of narration. It also aims to compare Maus with other anti-Nazi works of art. The paper will look into the question of the effectiveness of personal accounts. These are retrieved from sometimes unreliable memory and often used in constructing testimonials of the past. The term “graphic novel” which is used in this paper has not been clearly defined and its meaning is still under debate. But it is largely understood to mean a comic book with a long and complex plot that is not published in serials, but as one work of literature. From an article in The New York Times on 11 November 1938 sent in through wireless, the initial stirrings of anti-Semitic activity are evident: All Vienna's Synagogues Attacked; Fires and Bombs Wreck 18 of 21; Jews Are Beaten, Furniture and Goods Flung From Homes and Shops -- 15,000 Are Jailed During Day---20 Are Suicides VIENNA'S TEMPLES FIRED AND BOMBED Central Synagogue Protected Reich Halts Payments To Dissident Pastors Rioting Spreads to Shops Correspondent Is Seized Damage Tops 10,000,000 Marks[.] It started as a pogrom against Jews in Vienna on 9 November 1938 in retaliation to the killing of a German diplomat in Paris, now better known as the “Kristallnacht” or “Night of the Broken Glass.” But it soon escalated into one of the largest, state-driven massacres of modern times. The death tally which has been projected to be between 11 and 17 million (including all groups of people, and not just the Jews), has made the Holocaust a chilling reminder of the extent of atrocities committed on human beings. Works on the Holocaust, whether textual, visual or otherwise are abundant. Some are sweeping in their scope, taking in statistical details and the landmark events in their narrative. Others are more personal, based on accounts of survivors: either oral recordings or from testimonies like journals that they have left behind. Why Maus Stands Apart from other Holocaust Literature: Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, is a graphic novel divided into two volumes, first: My Father Bleeds History and the second, And Then My Troubles Began. It is a re-telling of the experiences of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek during Hitler’s reign of terror. Woven together as a series of recollected memories that Art (Spiegelman as he appears in the book shall henceforth be referred to as “Art”) records from his father on his visits to Vladek’s house. What sets this book apart from other similarly-recorded memoirs is the inclusion of the process of taking down the story. The reader gets to see Art interacting with his father, arranging the story in as chronological an order as possible. The reader can also notice the various conflicts that crop up between them time and again. This meta-textual aspect of Maus adds to it several layers of complexity. It is not just a survivor’s account looking to recreate history; it addresses the problems of “story-telling” as well as themes like coming to terms with one’s past. A point must be made here: in talking about Maus like a book, we might be overlooking its presence as a visual entity. Comic books, which have been seen as just sensational tales of caped crusaders for a long time, have recently turned into a serious art-form. Thanks to the efforts of Will Eisner and others who followed him, the comic book or the graphic novel has become a medium of limitless potential. As Scott McCloud says in his comic book on comic books, Understanding Comics: Comics offer tremendous resources to all writers and artists: faithfulness, control, a chance to be heard far and without fear of compromise… It offers range and versatility with all the potential imagery of film and painting plus the intimacy of the written word. (McCloud, 212) In Maus too therefore, the visual and the verbal play their own parts. Because of the artist-writer’s skill they merge effortlessly; and such is his control that the text and the pictures are sometimes even used to contradict each other. This option of using the visual or the verbal to question the authority of the other is something that prose writers have to do without. For instance, in a scene in Volume 2, Art and his father are walking down the street, recording Vladek’s memoir. At one point, Art asks Vladek if there was a camp orchestra. Vladek says he doesn’t remember one; but Art, from his knowledge of the Holocaust from other sources disagrees with what his father says and draws the orchestra, anyway. (Spiegelman, 54) In “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus”, Erin McGlothlin talks about how the past and the present continually collide in Maus. The narrative of Maus hence gets divided into three layers: “the narrative”, “the story” and “the discourse”. The first layer is Vladek’s memoir as Art collects it; the second layer includes Art’s own interactions with his father and other characters in the book; the final layer is the process of gathering Vladek’s testimony. In this layer, Spiegelman addresses many problems of using his animal metaphor, and writing a book on something he personally has never experienced directly in his book. Although, always in the guise of the mouse-headed Art. Maus is subversive of historical accounts of the Nazi camps and the terror of the Holocaust in other ways also. Spiegelman’s direct relation to the survivor and his insistence on highlighting it in the title for instance (My Father Bleeds History), remind the reader repeatedly of how personal the tale is. There is no detachment in his narration; and as Emily Miller Budick puts it in her article “Forced Confessions: The Case of Art Spiegelman’s Maus”: Even more startling is the fact that the primary title of the work, repeated in both volumes [i.e. A Survivor’s Tale], launches a claim that--implicitly, at least--places in hostile opposition what emerge as the tales of two different and antagonist survivors: the father who has survived the war, and the son who has survived the father. Spiegelman does not venture into statistical data, unless his father’s story requires it. Unlike in Roman Polansky’s movie The Pianist, for instance, here death tolls and news updates on the movement of the Nazi troops are almost left out. In fact, it is Art who is seen to be almost obsessed about being chronological, while Vladek himself takes it lightly. Maus is not a history textbook for schools; it is one man’s story that does not pretend to speak for all Jews at large (Budick, 2001). Marjane Satrapi’s tale of a rebellious family against the oppressive regime in Iran, Persepolis, is similar in theme to Maus. But her mode of story-telling is quite different. Satrapi presents the first part of the story almost completely from a child’s perspective; also, since the narrator in the tale is the writer herself, the difficulties of a secondary narrator dictating his story to the writer of the book, are absent. Other Holocaust Literature: Having established the broad differences that make Maus hard to restrict to any one genre, let us move on to other works of art and literature that have been influenced by the Holocaust. Among Holocaust poems, “The Dream” by Trish McAllister (accessed online) uses the technique of juxtaposition to a macabre effect. Alternate paragraphs speak of different circumstances. On one level, there is a children’s birthday party that the mother, the poet is preparing for; and on another, a woman fearing for her children’s lives and her own (“Are the camps as bad as they say?”) as any Jew under the Nazi regime. The poem works in bringing out the stark contrast between a normal lifestyle and the terror-ridden one that Jews had to lead at the time. The horror that was thrust upon millions of average people used to living in comfort and stability, overnight, is emphasized. A reader, unfamiliar with such oppression too, would relate to the sense of fear and sudden doom that was constantly on the Jews’ minds. A far more disturbing poem, “Frozen Jews” written by Avrom Sutzveker on 10th July 1944 (accessed online), presents a series of images, representative of Nazi brutality against Jews. A lot harsher, this poem shows exactly what the sufferers of the camps lived through. Compared to “The Dream”, where the primary theme is a mother’s fear as the Nazis begin to take over; “Frozen Jews” is a scene right out of the era when the Third Reich was at its peak. The line, “Speech and silence are one”, are moving as they remind the reader of how protest was fruitless in an environment so completely dehumanized. There was no room for mercy or a patient ear at a concentration camp. Among Holocaust films, The Pianist and Schindler’s List have acquired the status of modern classics for their portrayal of true stories. The Pianist, starring Adrien Brody as the Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, begins with radio broadcasts and newspaper clippings that announce outrageous steps being taken by the Nazis to isolate the Jews: massive-scale deportations and the like. However, The Pianist later progresses along similar lines as that of Maus; it becomes one man’s tale of survival. Schindler’s List on the other hand focuses more on the administrative, political angle of the Holocaust. Also, in contrast to the other works, it has a German protagonist who works for the Schutzstaffel (SS), not a Jew. Among artists, John Heartfield’s (1819 – 1968) anti-Nazi work has become renowned the world over for their black humor and insight. Heartfield declared his opposition of Hitler quite clearly and publicly. His work in the 1930s makes plain his scorn of the later Nazi claim that they did what they did “unknowingly”. In a cover designed for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ) in October 1932, Heartfield shows what he calls “the true meaning of Hitler’s salute”, by depicting Hitler with his hand raised in a Nazi salute, but only to accept wads of cash that a figure with an unseen face is bribing him with (image accessed from www.brasscheck.com). Another poster that appeared in the AIZ in January 1934 shows a row of church cardinals bearing the cross made to look like a swastika, as Dr. Ludwig Muller marches by. Muller was a Protestant pastor who wanted the Church to be brought under Nazi ideologies as well. Conclusion: Art and Literature have often taken up the challenge of “expressing the inexpressible” i.e. the inexpressible horrors of the Holocaust. Some have focused on personal scars and the direct fallout of Nazi torture on the lives of real men, women and children. Others have concentrated on criticizing the whole Nazi-Fascist propaganda, and on showing the world the truth of what happened within concentration camp fences. Whatever the approach, Holocaust literature has always been an intense response; not surprising when considering the extremely intense nature of the Holocaust brutality itself. Although the scope of this paper does not include the entire body of anti-Holocaust literature and art, the few examples that have been selected were done so to bring out the differences with the main text under discussion: Maus. Maus, perhaps due to its length of an entire two-volume novel, unlike posters and poems or even a few hours worth of cinema, is a more sophisticated, complex narrative. Conflicts are plentiful in its pages: between Art and Vladek; between the spoken word and the seen image; between the history of textbooks and the history personally felt; between the past and the present, among others. And although it does not resolve any of these conflicts with, it does manage to tie up loose-ends quite satisfactorily. Like most other post-modern texts, Maus does not claim to have the answers to the various crises that face humanity. Its main aim is to be honest about what one man, along with millions of others, has suffered; and how the repercussions of that trauma refuse to leave without scarring subsequent generations. Works Cited “All Vienna’s Synagogues Attacked […]”. The New York Times. 11 November 1938: All. 16 June 2009. Budick, Emily Miller. “Forced Confessions: The Case of Art Spiegelman's Maus.” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, 21.3 (Fall 2001): 379-398. Edinger, Dora. "The Disturbing Stories of the Survivors." We Survived. Ed. Eric H. Boehm. Reconstructionist, 16 (March 10, 1950): 24-25. “Heartfield versus Hitler”. John Heartfield. 16 June 2009. and < http://www.brasscheck.com/heartfield/gallery5.html> McAllister, Trish. “The Dream”. I Survived the 20th Century Holocaust. 16 June 2009. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. McGlothlin, Erin. “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus”. Narrative, 11.2 (2003): 177-198. “Schlinder’s List”. Wikipedia. 14 June 2009. 16 June 2009. Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Sutzvekar, Avrom. “Frozen Jews”. Holocaust Poetry. 16 June 2009. Read More