SOURCE: Wilner, Arlene Fish. “‘Happy, Happy Ever After’: Story and History in Art Spiegelman's Maus.” Journal of Narrative Technique 27, no. 2 (spring 1997): 171-89.

[In the following essay, Wilner observes that Maus employs a variety of ironic juxtapositions to examine the unique difficulties of representing the Holocaust, such as the escapism associated with the comic book genre versus the grim realities of the World War II.]

Although George Santayana's injunction—to remember the past lest we be condemned to repeat it—has become a cliché, more recent students of history have observed that the study of the past does not necessarily provide insurance against its reiteration. Hayden White, for example, suggests that “[n]othing is better suited to lead to a repetition of the past than a study of it that is either reverential or convincingly objective in the way that conventional historical studies tend to be” (Content 82). Similarly, Cynthia Ozick argues that “‘Never again’ is a pointless slogan: old atrocities are models (they give permission) for new ones” (“It Takes a Great Deal” 196). Art Spiegelman's Maus, one effect of which is to provide historical documentation of the Holocaust, succeeds in affecting hearts and minds precisely because it is neither “reverential” nor “objective” in the common sense; rather, it is—to use a term that Ozick has applied to civilization and that cannot be applied to conventional historical narratives—“custom-built.” (Garry Trudeau, in a review of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, called Maus an “anomaly, virtually the sole exemplar of promise fulfilled” in the comic book tradition.) The uniqueness of Spiegelman's achievement is, I would suggest, largely a function of zeugmatic strategies that yoke traditionally disjunct forms and conventions. The use of such strategies evokes the perception that the coherence encouraged by figuration—analogy, metaphor, and other sorts of juxtaposition—is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Thus readers are offered at once an illusion of comprehensibility and a constant reminder that any totalizing vision in which they may take comfort is not manifest in the events portrayed but is rather the product of moral and esthetic choices fostered by human will and creativity.

The most obvious disjunction is, of course, between the escapism usually associated with cartoon panels¹ and the horrific realism of the subject, but Maus also includes many other ironic juxtapositions or tensions:

• —The psychological and relational complexity manifested by Art, Vladek, and other “characters” vs. the deceptively simplistic portrayals of individuals as “stereotypical” animals. Vladek, for example, is both an individual of extraordinary heroism and a neurotic, bigoted old man; Art is the vastly gifted artist and the guilty little boy, the man immortalizing his father in history and the “cannibal” nourished by the death and memory of his ancestors.
• —Private history (e.g., Art's guilt and ambivalence with respect to his mother's suicide, the spectral presence of the brother he never knew, his father's inadequacies, and his art) vs. public history (the “story” of the Holocaust). Because it can never be accommodated to a psychologically or emotionally familiar pattern, the unfolding in narrative time of the “public” history of the Holocaust cannot be considered cathartic in the classic Aristotelean sense, as telling his “story” is for Vladek and recording it is for Art. Ironically, we already “know” the public story, while the private ones are still being played out in the course of the narrative. And it is these private stories embedded within the larger public one which agitate us because we cannot predict their direction or outcome (e.g., at the end of Maus I, Art calls his father a “murderer”). Still, in another way, Maus conflates the public and the private, so that each becomes the other: Vladek resists consulting a marriage counselor to save his failing relationship with Mala because, as he tells Art, he doesn't “want that a stranger should mix into our private stories” while at the same time ignoring the likelihood that the success of Art's book will in fact widely publicize many intimate details of Vladek's personal life. Conversely, it is only because Vladek's private story is a Holocaust story that it demands reconstruction; the narrative of Maus is generated by the facts of European history from 1933 to 1944, facts to which the excruciating story of Vladek, his (mostly annihilated) family, and his ruined community bears a synecdochical relation, recapitulating in miniature the panoramic sweep of history.
• —The voice of Vladek recounting horrors in the presence of the tape recorder vs. the tradition of “normal” oral family history. Art's story is consciously an act of reconstruction (II [Maus: A Survivor's Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began] 16) of “a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams.” The fact of a reality worse than dreams inverts the “normal” processes of childhood whereby our nightmares are far worse than the reality of our everyday lives. Artie grew up with the sounds of his father's anguished sleep-cries, sounds he thought “all grown-ups made while they slept” (II 74).
• —The insufficiency of stories as sources of truth vs. the power of stories to maintain, restore, and perpetuate individual, family, and group identity. At the end of Maus II, Vladek tells Art that after his remarkable reunion with Anja, “we were both very happy and lived happy, happy ever after,” whereas readers of Maus I know better: they have a vivid impression of Art's anguish after Anja's suicide. Nonetheless, Vladek feels able to die after he has told his son “enough stories.”
• —The juxtaposition of horror and humor. Consider, for example, the grotesque slapstick elements of the scene involving Mandelbaum in the concentration camp: with a shoe he cannot wear and pants that fall down, he loses his spoon while trying to pick up the pants, and drops his soup.
• —The use of startling analogies to “familiarize” the horrific. An especially disconcerting instance is Vladek's observation that the mass graves dug for victims of the gas chambers “were big, so like the swimming pool of the Pines Hotel” (II 72).
• —The juxtaposition of both 1) graphic images of the most intense human suffering, ironically portrayed by mice, and 2) the portrayal of the petty obsessions (e.g., Vladek's pill counting) and the ordinariness of everyday life (II 73-74) with Vladek's “objective” documentary style of testimony (“Prisoners what worked [at the mass graves] poured gasoline over the live ones and the dead ones. And the fat from the burning bodies they scooped and poured again so everyone could burn better” (II 72]).

The discomforting linking of heterogeneous elements works against the psychological “closure” demanded by the comic strip format (a perceptual phenomenon defined by McCloud as “observing the parts but perceiving the whole” [63]), so that the resulting text is simultaneously a complex set of coherent interlocking narratives—the story of the Holocaust as recalled by Vladek and recorded by Art, the story of how the story came to be, the story of how the artist comes to terms with the meaning of the stories he is telling—and a testament to the ultimate incomprehensibility of the Holocaust and to the impossibility of representing it within the logic of narrative structure. That is, the synecdochical relation of narrative to “reality” points to its own inadequacy: the perceivable parts encoded in stories can never be commensurate with historical events that engender them and do not pretend to be. Vladek can never tell enough stories to make Art—or us—understand what happened, much less why or how. Nonetheless, Vladek's narrative of his experiences during the war, and the contextualization of these experiences within a time before and a time after, does achieve a kind of internal coherence to the extent that it manifests the expected structure of retrospective biography. Maus thus enacts from a postmodern perspective the tension between the fundamental human impulse to make meaning of history and “the consciousness which is engulfed and overwhelmed by the enormity of stark actualities …” (Zavarzadeh 41).

One of Spiegelman's most daring choices is his use of animals to portray ethnic groups, most obviously Germans as cats and Jews as mice. The brilliance of this decision is evident in its several simultaneous effects. First, it points to the grim moral underpinnings of the fable tradition, in which might makes right, the strong exploit the weak, and any chance for survival depends upon a combination of luck, foresight, cynicism, and resourcefulness. This artistic decision also horrifically invigorates what James E. Young (Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust) describes as the Nazi use of “figures” as an instrument of the “final solution”: Jews as “vermin,” running through the Warsaw ghettoes for their lives, the use of the roach gas Zyklon-B for extermination, etc. (93). The fact that Jews are humans, not rodents, is made emphatic by the portrayal of them with mouseheads, just as the truth that Nazis are not instinctively predatory animals, but human agents responsible for crimes against humanity, is made more suasive by the comparison with cats. Moreover, the figuration of, on the one hand, prey and predator, and, on the other, vermin that must be exterminated for the betterment of society, is intensified by the echo in maus of mauscheln (derived from the name Moishe), a “sick” language attributed by nineteenth-century Germans to Jews. Sander Gilman defines mauscheln as “the use of altered syntax and bits of Hebrew vocabulary and a specific pattern of gestures to represent the spoken language of the Jews” (139). The Yiddish-inflected English with which Vladek (who is also fluent in Polish, German, and Scriptural Hebrew) tells his story stands in ironic defiance of the Nazi attempt to silence the Other.

In his use of cartoon animals, Spiegelman also suggests the paradoxical power of metaphor as an instrument of both evil and good. As Young observes, although metaphors may seem to trivialize and distort, they are in fact “our only access to the facts, which cannot exist apart from the figures delivering them to us. … If carried to its literal end, an injunction against Auschwitz metaphors would place events outside of language and meaning altogether,” ironically fulfilling the Nazi goal of “mystifying” events (91). Indeed, Spiegelman incorporates a critique of the power and limits of metaphor into the structure of the narrative. On the one hand, he recognizes the grim efficacy of the Nazi liberalization of metaphors when Vladek recounts how he had to level huge mounds of dirt as a starving P.O.W. in the forced labor camp: “we had to move mountains” (I [Maus: A Survivor's Tale I: My Father Bleeds History] 56). On the other hand, he acknowledges that in ordinary times, ordinary figures of speech, even (or especially) the most hyperbolic ones, will be used unself-consciously, that is, with no fear that the figurative could be made literal. Thus, Francoise can observe during a peaceful moment with Art that “It's almost impossible to believe Auschwitz ever happened” and in the next breath Art can complain that “these damn bugs are eating me alive” (II 74). A quick whoosh of insecticide takes care of the problem; the insects drop—like flies. In context, however, the incident is itself a gruesome reminder that Auschwitz did happen; two pages earlier, Art has portrayed the suffering of Jews (“mice”) burned alive, an instance of “pests” exterminated. The two scenes are retrospectively joined by the illustration that begins Chapter Two, “Auschwitz (Time Flies)”: a portrayal of the agony of burning “mice” in a panel being invaded by scavenging flies (II 39). In the panels that follow, the same flies hover over Art as he sits at his drafting table overlooking a mound of corpses, plagued with guilt over the success of Maus I as he works on Maus II. Here is the power of Auschwitz to make the literal horribly metaphoric, as the flies conjured up by Art's tormented mind cannot simply be swatted or sprayed away. Without Pavel's therapeutic counsel, they might indeed “eat him alive.” Spiegelman's careful orchestration of these allusions reveal the artist's exquisite sensitivity to his representational choices and thus undercuts any facile response to the limitations of metaphor.

Ironically, the distancing of the reader implicit in the portrayal of cartoon animals makes the overwhelming nature of the subject more vivid. In this regard, Adam Gopnik has astutely observed that the animal heads attributed to humans in this narrative reflect “our sense that this story is too horrible to be presented unmasked” and that in this way Spiegelman's artistic ‘problem’ was analogous to that of the medieval religious artist:

For the traditional illuminator, it is the ultimate sacred mystery that must somehow be shown without being shown; for the contemporary artist, it is the ultimate obscenity, the ultimate profanity, that must somehow be shown without being shown. … We want an art whose stylizations are as much a declaration of inadequacy to their subject as they are of mystical transcendence.

(33-34)

In a similar vein, Irving Howe speculates that Theodore Adorno's famous dictum that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz reflects a primal sense (codified in ancient religious proscriptions) that some things are too terrible to be looked at or even to be named. Such taboos, Howe suggests, are intended “not to enforce ignorance, but to regulate, or guard against the consequences of knowledge” (181). Spiegelman's “masked” presentation allows the reader to confront dreaded knowledge; paradoxically, this knowledge is made more accessible and thus more consequential by our consciousness of the artistic strategies that must mediate between us and a reality too stark to bear transparent representation.

If Spiegelman's brilliance as an iconographer is manifest in his daring decisions about graphic modes,² his mastery of narrative strategy is equally evident. And here, I think, Hayden White's attribution of metaphoric and metonymic processes to the construction of narrative is especially applicable. White's point is that in coping with a set of events that are “unclassified and unclassifiable,” we “utilize both metaphor [a sense of similarity underlying disparate elements] and metonymy [a sense of difference underlying juxtaposed elements] in order to ‘fix’ it as something about which we can meaningfully discourse” (Tropics 96). Spiegelman's use of juxtaposition exploits the possibilities of metaphor and metonymy at once. His technique enables both analogy and distinction by drawing attention to parallels but insisting on differences. The swimming pool at the Pines Hotel is not a cremation pit, and the point of the comparison—the similarity in size—has the effect of reinforcing the horror of the numbers of murdered people by highlighting the difference in size between a normal grave and a mass one and thus the chasm between human behavior that recognizes the value and dignity of an individual life and human behavior that values degradation and death. In this instance, then, the annihilative capacity of the Nazi use of metaphor that transforms people into vermin and into things is resisted by the distinction-making implications of Vladek's analogy, a resistance similar to the effect of planting animal heads on human bodies. The same process is at work, I think, in Vladek's comparison of one of the Auschwitz crematoria to a “big bakery” [II 70].³ Moreover, while the provocative use of figuration draws attention to the constructed, artifactual nature of the text, Spiegelman continues to acknowledge the reader's desire for the coherence and meaningfulness of stories. In Maus, the human need for narrative and the power of its “truthfulness” is revealed in several ways: not only in Art's self-conscious crafting of Vladek's story (both biography and autobiography), but in his ironic use of the fairy tale convention in the opening of Maus II (in which he imagines his French [frog] wife Francoise, magically transformed by a mouse rabbi into a “beautiful mouse”); in the truncated and unassimilable anti-fairy-tale narratives of characters such as Vladek's nephew Abraham, Mandelbaum, and Felix (the Belgian boy who screams at night); and in his father's recording of his own story (a nightmare) into a fairy-tale.

The brief tale of Mandelbaum (II 29-35), swiftly told, and heartbreaking in its ironic counterpoint of “miraculous” salvation and inexplicable annihilation, is both story and anti-story. The “miracle,” of course, is achieved through human agency (Vladek's ability to trade his knowledge of Polish and English for special favors from a kapo) and human compassion (Vladek's willingness to take risks for a friend); but since Mandelbaum has pleaded with God for a piece of string to hold up his pants and a wooden shoe that fits, he concludes that God “sent shoes through you [Vladek].” Twice Vladek tells Art that Mandelbaum after receiving the string and the shoes “was so happy,” the measure of happiness having been redefined by life as “prisoner on the hell planet” (to borrow Art's phrase for his own inner torment following his mother's suicide). For a moment, at least, Vladek and Mandelbaum seem to have won a victory.

In the very next panel, however, we learn that several days later Mandelbaum was “chosen” for a work detail and soon died. “Nobody could help this,” Vladek says. The “nobody” of course refers only to prisoners, since, like the “miracle” that made Mandelbaum cry with joy, Mandelbaum's death is also the effect of human agency, and its brutality is made vivid by Art's portrayal of his father's conjectures regarding how Mandelbaum might have “finished”—perhaps he was shot under the pretense that he was trying to escape, or was kicked in the head because he couldn't work fast enough, or got sick and was shoved in the oven. The horror of Mandelbaum's story, as a story, is that it is devoid of meaning; that is, it does not conform to any prior notions we have of cause and effect, the rules of war, justice and injustice, or even ironic reversal. Certainly there is irony (and, as mentioned above, even a kind of slapstick comedy) in the portrait of the once rich and powerful businessman trying to hold his pants up while retrieving his spoon and juggling a bowl of soup. But the narrative offers us no way of understanding or—to use White's term—“emplotting” this reversal of fortune. White defines employment as “the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot-structures, in precisely the way that Frye has suggested is the case with ‘fictions’ in general” (Tropics 83). No prior narrative structures tell us how to read Mandelbaum's story; he is a “nice” man (Vladek's term) whom we see at his lowest point, from which he is momentarily redeemed through Vladek's cleverness and good will—and whose meaningless murder soon thereafter we are left to imagine.

Moreover, the uncertainty of how Mandelbaum ended denies us a measure of closure we might otherwise have. Perhaps, we may think, it does not matter whether an innocent man “went up the chimney” or was shot and left to rot or was dumped in a mass grave. But Vladek's precise descriptions of the possible alternatives remind us that how someone dies does matter—not least because “when” is usually implied in “how”—and that under ordinary conditions we are particular about the ways we can be morally and legally engaged in the circumstances of death (witness, for example, the precise justice with which rewards and punishments are meted out in folktales and the highly prescriptive practices and rituals governing the administration of capital punishment). While Mandelbaum's story, therefore, has elements of comedy, of tragedy, and of pathos, it ultimately resists encoding and remains in Art's reproduction of his father's narration a bare chronicle of a life and a death, Kafkaesque in its starkness: a “nice” man, once happy and affluent, is starved and tormented for reasons no one can express. The victim is momentarily given hope by a friend and shortly thereafter dies a terrible death.

The essentially plotless “story” of Mandelbaum can be taken as a metaphor—or more precisely a synecdoche—for the incomprehensible sequence of events called the Holocaust. Thus, neither Mandelbaum's life and death nor the Holocaust as a whole are granted the coherence—and hence the dignity—of a story. A story, as Paul Ricoeur has observed, “must be more than just an enumeration of events in serial order; it must organize them into an intelligible whole, of a sort such that we can always ask what is the ‘thought’ of this story” (65). Emplotment thus has a transformative function, reconfiguring events into an apprehensible pattern:

To follow a story is to move forward in the midst of contingencies and peripeteia under the guidance of an expectation that finds its fulfillment in the ‘conclusion’ … [or] ‘end point,’ which, in turn, furnishes the point of view from which the story can be perceived as forming a whole. To understand a story is to understand how and why the successive episodes led to this conclusion, which, far from being foreseeable, must finally be acceptable, as congruent with episodes brought together by the story.

(66, 67)

No such fulfillment, no catharsis is possible when the “endpoint” of the story, the denouement of the “plot,” is also the “final solution,” an attempt at annihilation so complete that, if it is successful, the events (or “episodes”) leading up to it will not only defy attempts to “configure” them in any way but will also deny their own existence. Such denial creates the paradox that the point of the story is that it can never be told because there will remain no evidence that the sequence of events—not to mention the “characters” such as Mandelbaum—that comprised it ever existed.

Framing Mandelbaum's story is that of Vladek, the survivor, who is himself struck by the inexplicable contrast between his own fate and his friend's: “You see how they [the Nazis] did? And I had it still happy there. For me it was not yet the end.” While Mandelbaum's death bears a synecdochical relationship to the web of events surrounding it, Vladek's survival—in its insistence on its difference from that with which it is compared—is metonymic: his narrative is the testimony of life against death. What is equally important, it is an insistence on what it means to be human, the living proof of resistance to what can never be accepted as human behavior. Vladek's victory “against darkness in an age of darkness” (Fackenheim 96) is to write his own ending, not only by surviving but also by encoding his own stories into the structure of a fairy tale in which he is agent as much as victim and in which he and Anja live “happy, happy ever after.” More than this, it is to have his life story recorded by his son, a son born after the war, the living legacy of two survivors whose wife is pregnant with a granddaughter whom Vladek will not live to see, but who bears the family name.

The tension in this sort of emplotment has its source in the desire to impose meaning—moral coherence—on a set of events that always resists such attempts, and this is a tension of which Vladek and Art are keenly aware and which is thus always before the reader. If Vladek's survival is merely luck or randomness, then life and death do seem totally meaningless. But to take credit for surviving is to somehow diminish those who did not survive. Clearly, Vladek is caught in this dilemma, which is necessarily left unresolved. Judaism, nonetheless (or all the more), enjoins its adherents to live lives of moral coherence. The competing pressures—to make meaning and to resist imposing meaning where none can ever reside—are portrayed exquisitely in Vladek's human—and humane—insistence on both pride and humility, and in his son's tortured struggle both to commemorate and to demythologize his father's heroic stature. On a number of occasions Vladek calls himself “lucky”—he is “a lucky one” in Auschwitz when the prison uniform “fit[s] him a little”; “lucky” that the Polish kapo whom he is teaching English is capable of showing him a bit of kindness; “lucky” that he remains strong enough to carry heavy soup pots after months of privation and abuse; and “lucky” to find a piece of paper in which to wrap the extra, lice-free shirt he has “organized” in order to guarantee that he will be fed. Supporting this insistence on the role of luck is Art's therapist Pavel, also a survivor, who cautions him against the conclusion that there is some way to explain why some lived and others did not: “It wasn't the best people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was random!” (II 45). And, having witnessed the deaths of Mandelbaum, of Vladek's nephew Abraham, and of the Belgian boy who dreams of his wife's cooking, we know that this is so. Without luck, even with all the courage and ingenuity in the world, Vladek, like almost all of his family and Anya's, would have died. He could have been killed, for example, instead of only beaten by the guard who caught him speaking to Anja in Birkenau, or succumbed to starvation, or, as he nearly did, to typhus.

Yet Art, having lived always in the shadow of his father's hellish experiences, tells his therapist that he admires Vladek's survival against all odds: “Well, sure, I know there was a lot of luck involved, but he was amazingly present-minded and resourceful” (II 45). And, as Art tells the story based on his father's recorded narrative, it is these very qualities that in fact shine through. His knowledge of languages and his skills as a craftsman gain him privileges and extra food. He scavenges and saves, “organizes” and makes deals both with other prisoners and with kapos. He is willing to take calculated risks (as when he communicates with Anja through Nancie and supplies her with food packages) but is never foolhardy (he is unwilling, for example, to join his comrades in trusting the German guards to let them escape in exchange for bribes as the war nears its end ([II 83]). Vladek prides himself on his foresight and resourcefulness, telling Art, for example, that his friends always came to him for paper, a rare and valuable commodity which he “found and saved.” When Art asks why others didn't save paper, Vladek replies, “Ach! You know how most people are!” Similarly, while others quickly consume their meager rations, Vladek exercises superhuman discipline, saving half of his bread against the possibility of even worse conditions to come or perhaps an opportunity to make a trade (II 49). He survives the ordeal of the sealed cattle car by rigging up a hammock on two hooks near a window, using a blanket he has managed to retain. Through the window, he reaches snow on the roof, preventing dehydration and trading snow with other prisoners for sugar. Clearly, Vladek is not “most people.” In the story we are offered—dictated by the father and retold by the son—he is especially capable and quick, ingenious and courageous. Thus, Vladek's physical and mental endurance, his resourcefulness and amazing self-possession do endow him with a kind of heroic stature, Pavel's insistence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Moreover, Art's recognition of his father's “present-mindedness” points to an underlying moral theme as well as an issue of narrative representation. As the Nazi exterminators become more aggressive, survival often depends on one's ability to make snap judgments about seemingly impossible “choices.” In this sense an essential element of Jewish culture—an ethically valid life lived willingly in accordance with the sacred rhythms and rituals codified historically in the Commandments—becomes irrelevant because impossible: during the Nazi terror, life is lived in and for the moment, cut off from historical contexts and thus from God's holy covenant as both past and future dissolve into chaos. To think of horrors already suffered is to despair (as Anja would have done after learning of Richieu's death had not Vladek insisted that she not give up [I 122]); to entertain the specter of inevitable gas chambers and crematoria (as Tofa did) is also to despair. In the ghetto, in the prisoner-of-war camps, in Auschwitz, life and death depend on present-mindedness in situations that offer no context for informed decision-making because they have no analogy to personal or historical experience. More often than not, Vladek's instincts drive him toward the lesser of two evils—as, for example, when he chooses, against the advice of other prisoners of war in 1939, to volunteer for labor assignments with the promise of “housing and abundant food” (I 54). Sometimes, however, neither of the evils seems “lesser”: should the Jews of the Sosnowiec ghetto obey the order to register at the Dienst stadium or try to hide in their homes? (“To go it was no good. But not to go—it was also no good.”) And on one tormenting occasion Vladek capitulates to Anja's refusal to believe that she must give up her baby son to hide with Ilzecki's Polish friend as “the noose tightens” in 1942 (I 81). A year later, feeling there is “no choice,” they send Richieu for safekeeping to the Zawiercie ghetto, where his short life ends.

Yet, forced to make a series of crucial decisions in an increasingly savage world that is both arbitrary and cruelly systematic, Vladek never relinquishes his belief that he does have at least some choices and thus retains his moral stature. He tells, more sadly than bitterly, of both Jews and gentiles so desperate under the Nazi terror that they descended to betraying others. (Indeed, he and his family are given up to the Gestapo by one such “rat.”) He will not be among them. And, resourceful as he is, he has contempt for “kombinators”—schemers and crooks such as Haskel who are willing to take bribes but not risks (I 116). Vladek, of course, is no saint. As noted above, he survives partly because he, too, is a schemer, but never at the expense of others: when a young couple offers him all their remaining jewelry (two watches and some diamond rings) in exchange for his advice on how to escape from the Srodula ghetto, he takes the small watch but refuses the other items because “they needed these to live.” The obvious contrast with Haskel, who appears to feel no remorse when he fails to save Vladek's in-laws after gladly accepting their jewels, reveals that a struggle for moral freedom can endow with dignity a life scaled down to the bare question of existence. Vladek's moral triumph is to have been sharp-witted and pragmatic without descending to exploitation, present-minded but not a kombinator. His focus on the present is contextualized within a transcendent ethical framework. In preserving his own life and the lives of his loved ones and yet not depriving others of a chance to survive, Vladek, raised in an observant Jewish home (we recall that he donned a prayer shawl and faithfully recited the daily prayers in the prisoner-of-war camp), enacts what has been called the basic tenet of Jewish ethics: do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. As Jonathan Sacks has observed, Judaism requires of its followers a dual dedication: “The covenant is more than a series of vertical commitments linking individual Jew with God. It is also a set of horizontal bonds linking Jews with one another in collective responsibility” (207). Thus, Vladek's present-mindedness, which helps to save his life, is rooted in a history and a tradition that allow him to emerge also with human dignity.

In addition, Vladek's ongoing obligation to make wrenchingly consequential choices is one aspect of the narrative that endows it with the dramatic power necessary to engage the reader relentlessly. Spiegelman thus confronts the problem of how to introduce novelistic tension in writing about the Holocaust. Irving Howe has defined the problem in this way:

The Holocaust is not, essentially, a dramatic subject. Much before, much after, and much surrounding the mass exterminations, in which thousands of dazed and broken people were sent up each day in smoke, hardly knowing and often barely able to respond to their fate, have little of drama in them. Terribleness, yes; drama, no. … The basic minimum of freedom to choose and act that is a central postulate of drama had been taken from the victims. The Nazis indulged in a peculiarly vicious parody of this freedom when they sometimes gave Jewish parents the ‘choice’ of which child should be murdered.

(189)

One must agree with Howe that it is absurd to ask what kind of freedom was available to victims of terrorism and torture. Mandelbaum, like most of Vladek's and Anja's family, like millions of others, was not given the option to survive. Instead of choosing, these victims were chosen—“selekted”—for annihilation in a gruesome Nazi parody of God's choice of the Jews to enter a sacred covenant enjoining them to faith, compassion, justice, and mutual accountability. Indeed, the ghosts of the murdered are always before us—made more haunting by Art's portrayal of them “before” as living, breathing individuals (who can forget Richieu asking his grandpa for another cookie or Tofa's determination to avoid the gas chambers even at the most horrifying price?). Yet Maus is a “story” in the conventional sense in that it chronicles the survival against all odds by a man whose character and choices were a factor in that survival. Vladek's narrative, while documenting powerfully the horror of the ‘final solution,’ portrays its protagonist and many of those around him as agents as well as victims, still defined by the nature of their responses. Spiegelman thus embodies the tension between the coherence of a narrative informed by a personal victory that seems at least in part to have been earned and the knowledge that this victory is only to have survived as a moral human being with never-healing psychic wounds—with unimaginable and meaningless suffering. Through this tension Spiegelman is able to tell the truth that although no explanations, no logic, no coherence is possible, each of us seeks to impose a set of meanings on our lives—to find continuity and reason, sense and justice. And because we are constantly reminded of the impossible task of finding such meaning in a historical chronicle of horror, no complacency or trivialization is possible. Juxtaposed with Vladek's “happy, happy ever after” are the photos of parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles, and a small boy named Richieu—Vladek and Anja's firstborn—who never emerged from ghetto or concentration camp.

In the enforced silence of these witnesses, Adorno's plea not to try to represent what happened shadows the narrative. Somewhat surprisingly, the survivor/therapist Pavel is sympathetic to this position, suggesting that since “the victims who died can never tell their side of the story, … maybe it's better not to have anymore stories.” Yet Pavel's comment appears in a book whose very purpose is to tell stories, and Vladek dies only when he has told all the stories he remembers up until his remarkable reunion with Anja in 1944. “More I don't need to tell you,” he says to Art, asking him to turn off the tape recorder. The tombstone memorializing Vladek and Anja merges with the last two cartoon panels, identifying the end of Vladek's testimony with the end of his life. At the close of a life of devastating, incomprehensible loss—including what he calls “a tragedy among tragedies,” the murder of his “happy, beautiful” first-born son by a desperate aunt who, rather than submit to the gas chamber, chose death by poison for herself and the children (I 109)—Vladek ends his story not with bitterness and hatred, nor with a cry for revenge, but on a note of triumph: he and Anja survived, found each other and were “happy.” The names of Vladek and Anja and the birth and death dates on their joint tombstone are underscored by Art's signature and the dates (1978-1991) of the composition of Maus, the text that is itself a unique and extraordinarily eloquent monument to his parents. The double gravemarker signals their final reunion against all odds and a transcendent meaning for “happy, happy ever after”; the dates, in contrast, place the events narrated squarely within a concrete historical time, where, as Howe observes, the facts of the Holocaust must remain, lest they be abstracted and romanticized as somehow transcending history: “About this most extreme of human experiences there cannot be too much documentation, and what matters most in such material is exactitude: the sober number, the sober date” (182-83).

Maus does offer us numbers and dates, and also the specificity of photographs and of diagrams that illuminate Vladek's testimony regarding the desperate construction of ultimately doomed hiding places and the grim efficiency of gas chambers, crematoria, and chimneys. As such it bespeaks an unnatural rupture, an irreparable cleavage from the promise of faith and redemption. But because Maus is also a record of a family history passed from father to son, it addresses not only the past but also the future. It represents historical continuity, the beginning of a process through which future generations can be united and Jewish identity preserved. That such goals can be accomplished only within the boundaries of history is made clear by the commentary of modern Jewish philosophers. Martin Buber has observed, for example, that in Judaism “the suprahistorical molds the historical but does not replace it” and that “Jews are a community based on memory” (129). Similarly, Yosef Yerushalmi has suggested that “only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people” (9). The transmission of stories is a means not only of recalling the past but also of forging connections with younger generations and with those to come, connections that are the essence of community survival. As I have suggested above, Maus reminds us that the Holocaust mandated an eternal present, denying its victims both the manifestation of God in a historical past and the possibility of a future. Vladek's recitation is therefore a reclamation of the continuity essential to Jewish existence or, as Geoffrey Hartman has put it, a “remembering forward”:

In the camps [victims] were systematically deprived of foresight: though they saw all too forcefully what was before their eyes, their ability to discern a normal pattern that could eventually be expressed in the form of a story was disrupted or disabled. … To remember forward—to transmit a personal story to children and grandchildren and all who should hear it—affirms a desegregation and the survivors' reentry into the human family. The story that links us to their past also links them to our future.

(324-25)

The profound yearning for such linkage is painfully evident in the dedication of Maus II both to Richieu, the child whose life, like those of millions of others, was horribly truncated and to Nadja, the grandchild who will know and remember. By acknowledging the inadequacy of stories and also the necessity of telling them, Spiegelman's painstaking memorial insists—as Emil Fackenheim maintains we must—on the “blasphemy” of seeking a purpose in Auschwitz and the inevitability of seeking a response.

However, as we analyze the complexity of Art's response, we need to acknowledge independently the nature of Vladek's. First, implicit in Vladek's amazingly detailed and coherent recitation is not only the need to bear witness to atrocities so transgressive of normal human experience that those who were there “couldn't believe even what's in front of their eyes” (II 73), but also a sense that the world has learned no lessons and that a repetition is not unlikely. It is not enough to tell his son that Jews in the Srodula ghetto constructed hidden “bunkers” to escape summary execution or deportation to Auschwitz. He insists on drawing a detailed diagram of the cleverly concealed living space built in the cellar beneath the kitchen coal bin, a spot that resisted detection by the Nazis and their dogs: “Show to me your pencil and I can explain you … such things it's good to know exactly how was it—just in case” (I 110). The bunker, of course, does not save Vladek and Anja from the camps (forced to move to a different house, they are ultimately betrayed by an informer); but it kept them a “little safe” for a short time while “others, what didn't have such a good place like what I made, they kept being taken away” (I 111). This, therefore, is the sort of practical knowledge that Vladek must pass on to his only surviving son—just in case. Second, in contemplating Vladek's state of mind, we should also consider his guilt at having destroyed Anja's notebooks during a period of depression. Vladek tells Art that at the end of 1943, when Anja knew that most of her family, including Richieu, had been killed, she responded to the terror and starvation in Pesach's shoe-shop bunker by sitting “the whole day and night … writing into her notebook.” We also know that when Anja killed herself in 1968 “she left no note.” Because Art himself suffers a kind of survivor guilt after his mother's death, we can understand his anger at Vladek for ensuring that her voice will never be heard. And surely Vladek understands, too, which is why he can tolerate hearing his son curse him in a fit of rage and call him “murderer.” In addition to being a chronicle of horrors, a testimonial, a fairy tale, a cautionary tale, and a gesture of belief in the future, Vladek's story is a remembrance of his dedication to Anja and an act of repentance for sinning against her in a fit of the kind of despair he presumably did not permit himself while she was alive. In burning Anja's diaries, he attempted to destroy unbearable memories, manifesting a “present-mindedness” quite different from the sort Art admires. The revelation of that destruction in Maus, the knowledge that her words went up in smoke like the lives to which those words would have been a testament, makes the absence of Anja's voice a vivid, ghostly presence. In the Jewish tradition, the transmission of familial and communal history from parent to child is a sacred obligation, and it is one that Anja evidently took seriously; even as he confesses what he has done, Vladek tells Art that although he remembers nothing of the journal contents, he does know that she wanted Art to have them (“I know that she said, ‘I wish my son, when he grows up, he will be interested by this’” [I 159]). It is altogether fitting, therefore, that Vladek should expiate his obliteration of Anja's words with a narrative that idealizes their life together without diminishing the inexpressible torment that ultimately destroyed her.

Appropriately, this obligation to respond, and thus to represent what is inherently unrepresentable, recalls the receptiveness to contradiction inherent in the Midrash tradition of Jewish exegesis, which demands that we contend with precisely those events that in their enormity appear—and may indeed be—irreconcilable with the continuity and coherence of historical narrative. In his meditation on the survival of Judaism after Auschwitz, Fackenheim points out that the nature of Midrash (Talmudic Rabbinical commentary) is to embrace paradox—the most fundamental one being the bond between a perfect God and an imperfect world—through story: “… Midrash does not ‘grope’ for ‘concepts’ in order to ‘solve problems’ and dissolve paradox. The midrashic Word is story. It remains story because it both points to and articulates a life lived with problems and paradox—the problems and paradox of a divine-human relations” (263-64). Like the “mad Midrash” that Fackenheim describes in the works of Elie Wiesel, Maus is an act of resistance to absurdity in an absurd world. Even as Art agonizes over his own inadequacy and laments that “reality is too complex for comics,” his amazing work contradicts his own assertion. Finally, as we say goodbye to what Ozick has called “possibly the rottenest of all centuries,” we are left to ponder the paradox that, perhaps more than any history book or documentary, it is a comic book of horrors that enables our children and ourselves to confront the meaning of history and our own roles in shaping it.

Notes

1. Adam Gopnik points out that the popular association of cartoons with children and with triviality reflects a lack of historical understanding. His argument is that Spiegelman's brilliant use of comics “work[s] not against the grain of the cartoon but within its richest inheritance … exploring the deepest possibilities unique to the form …” (31).

2. For an analysis of the evolution of Spiegelman's graphic style in Maus, see Joseph Witek (ch. 4).

3. In a cogent and provocative essay Cynthia Ozick has argued for the moral basis of metaphor: it is the metaphoric imagination that enables us to identify the “other” with ourselves, and such an identification is the essence of morality, enabling us to understand the heart of the stranger (“Metaphor” 278-80). But, as Ozick has argued with equal passion, morality consists also in distinction-making, i.e., in the capacity not to assimilate the “other” to ourselves and to refuse to be assimilated to the “other” (e.g., the avoidance of “cannibalism,” Nazis turning Jews into mice). See, for example, “A Liberal's Auschwitz” and untitled response to “Is Our Schizophrenia Historically Important?”

Works Cited

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Gilman, Sander. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Gopnik, Adam. “Comics and Catastrophe.” The New Republic, 22 June 1987. 29-34.

Fackenheim, Emil L. The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem. New York: Schocken, 1978.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. “The Book of the Destruction.” Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Ed. Saul Friedlander. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. 318-34.

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McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Ozick, Cynthia. “It Takes a Great Deal of History to Produce a Little Literature.” Partisan Review. 60.2 (Spring 1993): 195-200.

———. “A Liberal's Auschwitz.” The Pushcart Prize. New York: Avon, 1976. 149-53.

———. “Metaphor and Memory.” Metaphor and Memory. New York: Vintage, 1991. 265-83.

———. Untitled response to “Is Our Schizophrenia Historically Important?” Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review 6 (Fall 1972): 87-93. Rpt. as “On Living in the Gentile World” in Modern Jewish Thought: A Source Book. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Shocken, 1977. 167-74.

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———. Maus II. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991.

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White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

———. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington, 1982.

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