[In the following essay, Witek presents a detailed analysis of Art Spiegelman's Maus, describing it as a significant work of art and literature that powerfully illustrates the impact of sequential art.]

The clearest sign that something unusual was afoot in the 1980s in the sequential art medium came in 1987, when the National Book Critics Circle nominated a comic book by Art Spiegelman for its annual award in biography.¹ Comic-book readers had long known of the work of Spiegelman, first as an artist, writer, and editor in the underground comix, and later as the coeditor of the avant-garde comics and graphics anthology Raw. But few people were prepared for the public acclaim for Spiegelman or for the media attention on the comic-book medium which accompanied the 1986 publication in book form of Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale.²Maus garnered hundreds of reviews, almost all of them favorable, some wildly so, and the book quickly drew worldwide attention as “the Holocaust comic.”

In Maus, a comic-book artist named Art Spiegelman tells the story of his father, Vladek, a Polish Jew who, with Art's mother, Anja, survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Taking his epigraph from Adolf Hitler, “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human,” Spiegelman draws the characters in Maus as anthropomorphized animals; mice are Jews, cats are Nazis, pigs are Gentile Poles, and so on. Maus tells only half of Vladek Spiegelman's story; the book ends with the arrival of Vladek and his wife at Auschwitz in 1944.³ Though Spiegelman's project is as yet unfinished, the unprecedented critical reception for Maus has changed, perhaps forever, the cultural perception of what a comic book can be and what can be accomplished by creators who take seriously the sequential art medium.

If Jack Jackson's Texas histories raise controversial social and political issues, Maus leaps foursquare into “the most difficult ethical problem of the 20th century.”⁴ Serious literature in comic-book form is a relatively recent and slightly unsettling concept in American culture, but a comic book which takes on the Holocaust as a subject compounds the problem of artistic decorum a hundredfold. One powerful school of thought on the Holocaust denies the very possibility of any ethically responsible representation of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews. The concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel puts the case most forcefully: “There is no such thing as a literature of the Holocaust, nor can there be.”⁵ T. W. Adorno echoes Wiesel: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”⁶ In this view, to aestheticize in any way the profound evil of the Holocaust is to appropriate for one's own ends the unique experience of the victims of the gas chambers. In a society which views comic books as essentially trivial, Maus thus might appear as a grotesque degradation of the Holocaust, mocking the catastrophic sufferings of millions of human beings as the squirming of cartoon rodents.

But to acknowledge the insufficiency of art in the face of the abyss of human evil poses its own paradox. The imperative need for humanity to remember the Holocaust demands that the events in Europe before and during World War II somehow be turned into language. Are our ethical responsibilities to the victims of the Nazis and to posterity mutually exclusive? We must ask, “How does a ‘respectful silence,’ one that fully recognizes the mystery, the passion, the awesome uniqueness of the Holocaust, differ from the silence of neglect. Silence is silence—nothing more, nothing less—and it is silence that may, finally, be the unforgivable crime of those who could have spoken, but who did not, of those who could have joined the post-Holocaust debate, but were afraid.”⁷

The arguments of those who oppose literary representations of the Holocaust cannot be brushed aside easily. Perhaps it is the case that to assimilate the Holocaust into our usual structures of thought, to pretend to “understand” the unthinkable, is a move that accepts the attempted genocide of European Jewry as one event among many in history, one which raises the possibility that the horror might happen again. Yet the Holocaust will not simply go away; its legacy is always with us, in the death camp survivors and their families and in contemporary international politics. If silence about the Holocaust is too problematic an option to embrace, the question then becomes one of authority and authenticity. Who has the right to speak? And when does the gap between art and life become so wide that fiction becomes a blasphemous lie? These are heady questions indeed to pose to a comic book, and it is a mark of Art Spiegelman's skill and courage as an artist/writer that Maus confronts and at least partially answers them.

Spiegelman's authority to speak on the Holocaust stems from a personal psychological necessity. In Maus, a frame tale around Vladek's biography shows in a series of present-day vignettes the mouse-narrator Art's difficult relationship with his crotchety and often insensitive father.⁸ Though Maus was nominated for the Book Critics Circle Award in biography, it is perhaps more precisely an autobiography. In order to live his own life, Art must understand his relations with his parents. To do so, he must confront the Holocaust and the way in which it affected Vladek and Anja.

In the framing episodes, the mouse cartoonist Art visits Vladek to collect his father's memories for the book which will become Maus; he asks questions about the details of the story and tries to understand the implications of what Vladek tells him. The connection that Art and Vladek achieve in the telling and writing of the Holocaust story is continually undercut by their awkward and frustrating encounters in their everyday lives. The ostensible subject of the book, the Holocaust, is finally subordinated to the relationship between Art and Vladek as they collaborate on turning Vladek's memories into art. Maus is thus in large part about the process of its own writing.

This self-reflexivity and the psychological need to which it points are especially evident in the story “Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History”, a comic book embedded in the larger narrative of Maus. “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” is a four-page depiction from Art's point of view of the nightmarish events surrounding Anja's suicide in 1968; Spiegelman published the story in an underground comic book, Short Order Comix no. 1 (1973). In Maus, the story appears when a friend of Vladek's second wife, Mala, also a death camp survivor, sends a copy of the comic to the Spiegelmans. The presence of this story in Maus is perhaps Spiegelman's boldest and most brilliant stroke; it breaks the narrative flow of the Holocaust story and explains the emotional stake Art has in understanding his parents' lives. The characters in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” are humans; the story even reproduces a photograph of Art and Anja on vacation in 1958. The disruption of the animal motif passes without comment in Maus; never are the characters aware that we see them as mice.

Throughout Maus, Spiegelman's drawings are spare and almost primitive, with a minimum of line and only sketchily rendered details in the panels. But “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” is drawn with white lines on black scratchboard in a sophisticated and highly textured style that recalls German Expressionist woodcuts. The discrepancy in the way the two narratives look emphasizes Art's role in shaping his father's story. The plain, understated visual style depicting Vladek's Holocaust narrative matches the old man's flat and unemotional tone, just as the claustrophobic compositions and grotesquely exaggerated perspectives in the comix story approximate Art's overwrought mental state at the time of his mother's death. “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” shows that Spiegelman's visual style is a narrative choice, as constitutive of meaning as the words of the story.

“Prisoner on the Hell Planet” is a surreal first-person narrative casting Art as a prisoner of the guilt and paranoia inherited from his loving but emotionally oppressive parents. Art wears the striped pajamas of a concentration camp inmate, and the story implicitly connects his psychological suffering with his parents' ordeal in the Nazi camps. At the start of the story, just after he reports the fact of his mother's suicide, Art sets the emotional scene: “I was living with my parents, as I agreed to do on my release from the state mental hospital 3 months before.”⁹ At the end, the last three panels pull away, leaving Art in a metaphorical prison cell of grief and guilt. He addresses his dead mother,

Congratulations! … You've committed the perfect crime. …

… You put me here. … Shorted all my circuits … Cut my nerve endings … And crossed my wires!. …

… You murdered me, Mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!

Spiegelman undercuts Art's hysterical self-dramatization by giving the last word to another inmate, who says, “Pipe down, Mac! Some of us are trying to sleep!”¹⁰ Only in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” do we discover Art's motivation for gathering his father's story. Art cannot afford a silence about the Holocaust—respectful or otherwise.

He must confront the Holocaust in order to come to terms with the qualities in his father which made his own life so oppressive and guilt-ridden: the miserliness, the domestic tyranny, the personal insensitivity. Maus offers no sentimental apotheosis between father and son; each episode shows that the two men grow closer as Vladek recounts the past, only to have the familiar tensions arise once more when the anecdotes are over. Spiegelman has said of the cathartic function of writing and drawing Maus:

In order to draw Maus, it's necessary for me to reenact every single gesture, as well as every single location present in these flashbacks. The mouse cartoonist has to do that with his mouse parents. And the result is, for the parts of my story—of my father's story—that are just on tape or on transcripts, I have an overall idea and eventually I can fish it out of my head. But the parts that are in the book are now in neat little boxes. I know what happened by having assimilated it that fully. And that's part of my reason for this project, in fact.¹¹

By submitting his parents' experience to artistic form, Spiegelman attempts to control the legacy of the Nazi crimes in his own life. This therapeutic psychological process may well be seen as a distortion of history, and to put the Holocaust into “neat little boxes” may be a doomed effort to control the uncontrollable, as writers like Elie Wiesel suggest. Yet “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” shows the alternative. As his stay in the mental hospital indicates, Art has already been psychically damaged by the Holocaust; to fail to assimilate its consequences into his present life would be to ensure that the Nazis continue to torture Jews a generation after the fall of the Third Reich.

Like the problem of authority, the question of authenticity in fictional representations of the Holocaust appears overtly in Maus. Historical accuracy is important to Art. He consistently tries to persuade Vladek to supply the physical and emotional details which will set the scene and make clear the chronology of the complicated process by which the Nazis classified, segregated, and eventually moved to exterminate the Jews of Poland. But in historical narratives emotional truth is as important as period detail; a history must be both factually accurate and convincing as a truth-telling. While Art must draw out from his father the minutiae of the Final Solution, Vladek needs no urging to be honest about himself. Vladek is bluntly candid about the things he did to survive—the smuggling, bribery, black-marketeering, and string-pulling that helped him to keep himself and his wife alive while millions around them were dying.

In Maus Spiegelman never sentimentalizes Vladek's survival, nor does he gloss over the personal difficulties he has with his father. A more conventionally sympathetic view of Vladek would dilute the complexity of one of the most fully realized characters in American comic books. Spiegelman told an interviewer, “One of the things that was important to me in Maus was to make it all true,”¹² and despite the stylization of human beings as mice and cats, Maus makes good on the central tasks facing historical narratives—it is both convincing as a recreation of a past time and gripping in the story it tells.

Art Spiegelman maintains that the stylization of Maus is the very thing that enables him to write an authentic Holocaust narrative at all. He told an interviewer:

If one draws this kind of stuff with people, it comes out wrong. And the way it comes out wrong is, first of all, I've never lived through anything like that—knock on whatever is around to knock on—and it would be counterfeit to try to pretend that the drawings are representations of something that's actually happening. I don't know what a German looked like who was in a specific small town doing a specific thing. My notions are born of a few score of photographs and a couple of movies. I'm bound to do something inauthentic.

Also I'm afraid that if I did it with people, it would be very corny. It would come out as some kind of odd plea for sympathy or “Remember the Six Million,” and that wasn't my point exactly, either. To use these ciphers, the cats and mice, is actually a way to allow you past the cipher at the people who are experiencing it. So it's really a much more direct way of dealing with the material.¹³

The subject matter of the Holocaust makes an enormous and immediate claim on the sympathies of an audience. In addition, the specific details of the extermination process are terrifying enough, yet perhaps more intolerable than the sight of mounds of rotting corpses is the realization that human beings are capable of creating them. As a result, in viewing representations of the Holocaust, audiences tend to slide with some relief into stock, often sentimental, responses rather than confront the threatening material anew. Spiegelman addressed the problem when he told an interviewer, “It's one of the banes of so-called Holocaust literature that when you're reading it you hear violins in the background, and a soft, mournful chorus sobbing.”¹⁴ By depicting the Jews and Nazis as animal figures Spiegelman can defamiliarize his too well known story and can sidestep the “already told” quality of the Holocaust. He escapes as well the over-determination of meaning that the use of human characters would entail. The minimal lines with which Spiegelman delineates his characters permit a wide range of expression and gesture without too closely approaching existing human facial types.

The thematic role of the primitive drawing style in Maus becomes especially evident when we compare the full-length epic to Spiegelman's first attempt to work the Holocaust material, a three-page story entitled “Maus,” first published in an underground comix title, Funny Animals [sic] no. 1, in 1972.¹⁵ “Maus” introduces some of the basic premises of the longer work—the animal metaphor, the frame device of the old Jew telling of his life to his son—as well as some of the same anecdotes, most notably the betrayal of Jews hiding in an attic.¹⁶ But “Maus” also has some false notes which show how completely Spiegelman reworked his artistic approach when he set out on the longer project. For instance the mouse-narrator is named “Mickey,” a one-shot joke whose Disney parody adds nothing to the Holocaust narrative. Later, the persecuted mice find shelter in a factory that manufactures kitty litter; again the humorous overtones of the detail work against the seriousness of the story itself.

Maus too is humorous at times, but the comedy is grimmer and more sharply focused on the historical situation, as when a scheming Jewish collaborator, a “kombinator,” sells bootleg cake in the ghetto, only to find that he has put laundry soap into the batter instead of flour.¹⁷ The animal metaphor is much more thoroughly applied in “Maus” than in Maus (the mice are small enough to hide under bags of kitty litter, for example). In the shorter version Spiegelman was able to tell the story without referring to Jews and Nazis at all (the oppressors of the mice are simply “die Katzen”), but such indirection was awkward and artificial in the full-length telling of the Holocaust story. Spiegelman's move away from stressing the animalness of his characters indicates how the genre of Maus likewise moves away from the animal fable toward a much more original application of the funny animal genre to history.

In “Maus” the faces of the characters, both mice and cats, are highly detailed and individual. Heavy shading and fully mobile mouths allow a wide range of near-human expressions, and the large, sad eyes of the mice make an especially strong pull on the reader's sympathy. The hooded, black-rimmed eyes and pointed fangs of the cats, in contrast, preclude any reader identification with them. The physical scale in “Maus” nearly approximates the natural relation of mice and cats; the Nazis tower over the much smaller Jews. The stylistic gestures of Spiegelman's first try at his father's story amount to overstatement, as the artist was the first to realize. When he set out on the full-length Maus project, Spiegelman considered a number of different drawing styles, including one using scratchboard. An example of this experiment was reprinted in an interview with Spiegelman; it is a cross between the expressionist woodcut style of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” and the highly detailed cartoon style of the shorter “Maus.” Spiegelman rejected this sophisticated visual style in favor of a more direct and immediate one which simply polishes his initial penciled breakdown sketches.

Spiegelman spoke of his efforts to match an appropriate illustrative style to the Holocaust material and explained:

One solution I thought was interesting involved using this Eastern European children's book wood engraving style that I'd seen in some books of illustrations. But I found myself thoroughly dissatisfied with these woodcut illustrations after a day or so. My problems with the drawing are, I would hope, obvious. First of all, it banalizes the information by giving too much information and giving too much wrong information. It becomes like a political cartoon. … The cat, as seen by a mouse, is big, brutal, almost twice the size of the mouse creatures, who are all drawn as these pathetic furry little creatures. It tells you how to feel, it tells you how to think, in a way that I would rather not push.¹⁸

The subject of the Holocaust carries its own built-in value judgments and to a certain extent renders a work impervious to criticism; as Spiegelman's wife and co-editor of Raw, Françoise Mouly, said, “When he's doing a story on this subject matter, nobody's going to criticize and say, ‘Yeah, they should have killed all the Jews!’ The subject already has a certain sacred element to it, and the scratchboard drawing reinforces this.”¹⁹

Spiegelman finally opts for a style in Maus which renders the figures minimally, with just dots for eyes and short slashes for eyebrows and mouths. The effect is, as one writer has said, that the characters look “as if they were human beings with animal heads pasted on them.”²⁰ The masklike quality of the drawings becomes part of the text itself when the mouse-Jews disguise themselves by wearing masks which bear the pig-faces that indicate Gentile Poles in Maus. Readers can see the strings holding the masks on, yet the characters themselves take no notice. Though the mouse faces are often blank, with few individual attributes, Spiegelman is able to make each Jewish character, at least, distinct and recognizable. (The faces of the Nazi cat-soldiers are usually hooded by their coal-scuttle helmets.) Differences in the characters are indicated not by facial features but by more general pictorial techniques—gestures, posture, and clothing. Spiegelman performs subtle wonders of characterization and expression using only two dots for eyes and two lines for eyebrows, and the unobtrusive quality of his drawing is one of its strengths. The rejected woodcut style contained so much information as to trap the reader's gaze within individual panels. But the more open and spare panels of Maus allow one's eye to flow smoothly from scene to scene, and we fail to sense that we are constantly being manipulated into reading at a predetermined pace.²¹

In the panel of the betrayal in the chandelier bunker the differences between the first “Maus” and the book version demonstrate how Spiegelman's later approach tries to eschew overt prejudgments about the characters and the episodes. In “Maus” the turncoat mouse has a hooked nose, his shaded eyes echo the malevolent expressions of the cats, and he points to the hidden mice with a beclawed finger. The faces of the mice are dominated by their large oval eyes with black pupils, and one of them sheds a tear as the Jew whom they helped turns them over to the exterminators.

In the final version, the informer's face is nearly averted so that we cannot see his expression, and his pointing finger is a much more neutral gesture. The mice are no longer squashed beneath the attic roof, as in the first version; they sit upright, dismayed but not terrified at their betrayal. The Gestapo cats, while still threatening in demeanor, are more equal in size to the mice, and their expressions are less stereotypically villainous than in the “Maus” panel. For all its simplicity of line, the Maus panel is a more sophisticated sequential art device. The Nazi's harsh command (“Juden Raus!”) physically links the two halves of the composition and leads the eye up from the Nazis in the lower room to the mice looking down from the attic; the split caption forces a reader to move back down to the bottom of the panel, emphasizing the sequence of events. Thus even though the Maus panel is much less detailed, the experience of reading it is more dynamic and controlled than in the rather static “Maus” version.

BEAST FABLES AND THE NOT-SO-FUNNY ANIMALS

The central difference between “Maus” and Maus is that the first version is an allegory, thinly disguised at best, while the second is an animal comic book. The distinction makes all the difference. That is, though anthropomorphized animal cartoons and comics undoubtedly trace their formal origins to beast fables and folktales, the “funny animal” genre of comics has developed its own distinctive, peculiar conventions and metaphysics.²² Most readers of Maus have struggled to understand how a Holocaust comic book can be so compelling and why the unlikely genre of “talking animals” seems so paradoxically appropriate. Many reviewers have attributed the book's undeniable power to Spiegelman's representational strategy and have cited sources and antecedents for depictions of humans as animals which range from medieval Jewish illuminated manuscripts to Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse.²³ But while Maus extends the possibilities of sequential art, it does not repudiate the heritage of its comic-book form, and to understand how the animal metaphor in Maus works requires a consideration of the traditions of “funny animal” comics.

Some of the greatest achievements in American popular culture have used animal characters. Walt Disney's world-famous characters Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck dominated animated cartoons for decades, but Otto Mesmer's Felix the Cat, and Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, among many others from the Warner Brothers studio, were likewise central to the development of American animation. In newspaper comic strips, George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse were only the most prominent of scores of animal comics; Walt Kelly's gently satiric Pogo began as a comic book before moving to the newspaper comics page.

Perhaps the best animal comic books of all are the works of Carl Barks, creator of that preeminent cartoon capitalist Uncle Scrooge and the writer and artist of hundreds of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories for more than twenty years. Barks's Donald Duck is a very different character from the short-fused blowhard of Disney's animated cartoons. His hot temper remains, but the comic-book Donald is a complex person whose humorous misadventures arise out of his intrepidity, his curiosity, and his emotional bonds to his nephews and to his rich uncle. The keyword here is “person.” Barks always conceived of Donald as a human being who happened to be shaped like a duck, and this curious indifference to the animal nature of the characters is a distinguishing mark of the “funny animal” tradition in popular narratives.

In traditional animal fables, human characteristics are abstracted and projected onto animals; George Orwell's Animal Farm is a sophisticated modern version of this allegorical tradition. Beast fables link into a system of well-established correspondences based on the natural attributes of species; foxes are cunning, wolves voracious, mules stubborn, cats curious, and so on. The specific qualities may vary according to the thematic function of the animal character or to fit cultural conventions about the particular animal, but the quality itself is central to the animal's narrative role. The “funny animal” genre takes these allegorical meanings as a starting point but then proceeds to ignore, qualify, or reverse them. For example, the “mouseness” of Mickey Mouse is only tangentially related to his essential character. It suggests that he is nonthreatening (Mickey could not be a wolf, for instance), but he is not timid or sneaky, nor does he live in a hole. Mickey's arch-enemy is Black Pete, a cat, but Pete often allies himself with dogs and even monkeys. In the animated cartoon Tom and Jerry, the basic premise is the archetypal antagonism of cats and mice, but the stories themselves usually revolve around the discovery by the cat and the mouse that they need each other.

In Krazy Kat, the giddy surrealism of the strip begins with the reversal of traditional animal qualities; the cat loves the mouse, the dog loves the cat, and the mouse aggressively attacks the cat. Where the beast fable uses animal characters to engage an elaborate language of conventional meanings, the “funny animal” genre often uses those meanings only to establish relations among the characters, and the “animalness” of the characters becomes vestigial or drops away entirely. (Thus Donald Duck has no wings and cannot fly without an airplane.) Mickey Mouse poses a conundrum of animal metaphor; his friend, Goofy, is a dog, but he also owns an appropriately canine pet, Pluto. In this case, the species are subordinate to their relation; Mickey is essentially a man, and Pluto is “man's best friend.”

Animal comic books have generally been aimed at young readers, and their predominant mode is humor. But Maus is not the first animal comic for adults. The underground comix gleefully plundered all the comic-book genres, and the animal comics came in for their share of appropriation and parody. The most notorious example is Air Pirates Funnies (1971), in which a number of comix artists depicted Disney animal characters such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse taking drugs and having sex.²⁴ Many other comix artists exploited the animal comics for their own ends.²⁵

The most thorough exploration of the conventions of animal comics comes in the work of Robert Crumb, whose Fritz the Cat became one of the only underground comix characters to cross over into the popular media when Ralph Bakshi produced an animated feature based on the character.²⁶ Other Crumb animal characters include Those Cute Little Bearzy Wearzies, Dirty Dog, and Fuzzy the Bunny. The comix transmutation of the talking animals genre into the “not-so-funny animals”²⁷ culminates in stories such as Crumb's “The Goose and the Gander Were Talking One Night.”²⁸

In this story a suburban husband and wife discuss modern anxieties as they put their children to bed, share a cup of tea, take a walk, and watch the late show on television. The details of the setting are quintessentially bourgeois, with mismatched chairs around the kitchen table and homemade potholders hanging above the stove. But the characters themselves are geese; their feathery tails protrude from the backs of their jeans. They are aware that they are animals (the husband says, “I'm a pretty average guy … just your normal everyday goose. …”), but they think of themselves as human, too. The angst-ridden father says, “Why do I think we're doomed? Oh, I dunno. … It's everything, I guess. … Just the way the human race keeps going head-on with population and technology an' all that. …” The basic metaphor in “The Goose and the Gander Were Talking One Night” functions as does the mouse-metaphor in Spiegelman's work.

In Crumb's story, the father's feeling of helplessness in the face of the “collapse of this man-made system of things” makes him feel as if he were as silly and ineffectual as a goose. His gooseness becomes part of the furniture of the story, enabling us to see past the intentional banality of the setting and conversation to the real-life situation it depicts; we are aware that these are talking geese even as we ignore the fact. Here, as in many of his animal stories, Crumb super-imposes the conventions of animal comics onto a mundane and threatening modern world. In Maus, Spiegelman's extension of the animal metaphor from Crumb's kind of satiric social commentary into history, biography, and autobiography was made possible by the underground comix, which first showed that the “funny animals” could open up the way to a paradoxical narrative realism.²⁹

There is something almost magical, or at least mysterious, about the effect of a narrative that uses animals instead of human characters.³⁰ The animals seem to open a generic space into a precivilized innocence in which human behavior is stripped down to a few essential qualities, and irrelevancies drop away; as Spiegelman says, using animals becomes “a much more direct way of dealing with the material.”³¹ In Maus, the initial premise of cats and mice effectively presents the power relations between the Nazis and the Jews, and it suggests as well the predatory nature of the Nazi oppression. It makes the term “extermination” resonate powerfully, and deepens too the scenes of Jews in hiding, as in Spiegelman's chapters “Mouse Holes” and “Mouse Trap.”

The metaphor also raises some problems. Given that cats chase mice in the course of the natural order, if we thoroughly apply the animal metaphor to Maus, the Nazi Final Solution can be seen not as a moral collapse of cosmic proportions but as a logical and necessary acting out of natural roles. But the animal metaphor in Maus functions simply as a premise to be absorbed and then put out of mind; we respond to characters who are human beings, not animals. Says Spiegelman, “The metaphor is meant to be shucked like a snakeskin.”³²Maus attempts always to allow its readers to make the moral judgments, and the animal metaphor does not extend so far as to grant moral absolution to one side or the other.

The tenuousness of the metaphor appears at the many times it is broken or calls attention to itself. For example, the Spiegelmans fail to remark on the human figures in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet.” In one remarkable episode, as Vladek and his wife are hiding in a cellar, Anja screams that rats are crawling on her. Vladek replies, “Those aren't rats. They're very small. One ran over my hand before. They're just mice!” The story returns to the present as Vladek tells Art, “Of course, it was really rats. But I wanted to make Anja feel more easy.”³³ The panel set in the past and the one in the present are linked by the figure of a large, realistically drawn rat with a malevolent expression. The incident stresses that the Jews and Nazis are mice and cats only in relation to each other; the metaphor is a way of seeing humans, not a literal characterization.

In the first section of Maus, Part II: From Mauschwitz to the Catskills, Spiegelman addresses directly the nature of the metaphor. In a wonderfully self-reflexive and comic passage, Art's wife, Françoise, finds him sketching and asks what he's doing. Art replies, “Trying to figure out how to draw you. …”

“Want me to pose?”

“I mean in my book. What kind of animal should I make you?”

“Huh? A mouse, of course!”

“But you're French!”

“Well … How about a bunny rabbit?”

“Nah. Too sweet and gentle.”

“HMMPH.”

“I mean the French in general. Let's not forget the centuries of anti-Semitism. …

“I mean, how about the Dreyfus Affair? The Nazi collaborators! The—”

“Okay! But if you're a mouse, I ought to be a mouse too. I converted, didn't I?”³⁴

Throughout this scene Françoise is, of course, already drawn as a mouse. The passage emphasizes that the metaphor is a conscious device applied by the artist; we see the characters as mice and cats, but they perceive themselves as humans. Spiegelman uses the animal metaphor to evoke general associations of predation, extermination, and bestiality, not to assign a set of allegorical meanings to his text.

HISTORY AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Jack Jackson's histories support their claim to truth by means of their realistic, quasi-photographic rendering style, their convincing, if unconventional, dialogue, and the documentary evidence that surrounds the text in the appendixes and suffuses the narrative within the panels. Art Spiegelman takes a different tack; a Holocaust narrative with mice and cats as characters cannot pretend to be a documentary. Maus relies on the personal situation of Art and Vladek to make good its truth claim; Vladek's is the authenticity of an eyewitness, while Art has a psychological need to hear and render the truth. Art's role as an interlocutor is crucial to the narrative. Since Art evinces little historical knowledge to start with, Vladek must explain, to Art and to us, the specific details of how the process of the Holocaust worked, and these details are one of the book's great strengths. As one reviewer says:

Spiegelman makes the bureaucratic sadism of the Germans uncannily vivid—all the steps and reroutings and sortings and resortings that preceded mass murder. Maus is a work of hyperrealist detail. Nobody could have anticipated that a comic book about the Holocaust could have told so much about the way this particular endgame was played out: precisely how the black market worked within the ghettos; exactly what happened, in sequence, when the Germans occupied a town; why in 1943 a Jew would have thought Hungary a haven, and how he would have tried to get his family there.³⁵

Gopnik is right about the vividness of Spiegelman's treatment of his material, but it should be no surprise that sequential art can explain the sequence of events so clearly. The linked but separate boxes in comics have always lent themselves to process analysis, and “how-things-work” comics are an important subgenre of educational comic books.³⁶

What Maus does do in an unprecedented way for a comic book is to combine seemingly disparate genres and narrative approaches into a single seamless story. The funny animal overlay on history is a bold move, as we have seen, yet Maus does even more; it makes Vladek's Holocaust story and Art's psychological quest into a single narrative which blends public and private history. These two strains emerge early in Maus, in one of the book's most problematic passages. Vladek describes to Art how, as a young man in Czestochowa, Poland, he dated a local girl and eventually threw her over for Anja Zylberberg, who became Art's mother. Vladek tells Art that he doesn't want the story of his bachelor amours in Art's book, saying, “It has nothing to do with Hitler, with the Holocaust!” Art protests, “But Pop—it's great material. It makes everything more real—more human. I want to tell your story, the way it really happened.” Vladek says, “But this isn't proper, so respectful. … I can tell you other stories, but such private things, I don't want you to mention.” Art finally acquiesces, “Okay, okay—I promise.”³⁷ But of course, the story is in the book anyway.

Art and Vladek never discuss this subject later, and nothing within the text indicates that Vladek ever relented. This apparent betrayal of Vladek's trust is troubling if we simply identify the cartoonist with the author of Maus, and we have grounds for doing so. The biographical blurb on the book's jacket features a self-portrait by Art Spiegelman: the mouse-cartoonist working at his drawing board. But the animal metaphor immediately distances the narrator from the real-life author; Art Spiegelman is not a mouse. The ambiguity appears in interviews when Spiegelman speaks of “the mouse cartoonist” and his “mouse parents.”³⁸ Any writer, even (or especially) an autobiographer, creates a fictional persona when he or she begins to write. In autobiographical comics, where the writer imagines not simply a verbal “I” but a physical figure for his own character, the relation between writer and narrator becomes even more complex. The ineluctable fictionality of any narrative, even the most thoroughly “objective” history or autobiography, allows a shifting identification between author and character; Art Spiegelman is a cartoonist and his father is a Holocaust survivor, but neither is a mouse made of ink, even though Maus asks us to believe that they are, and the book succeeds when we acquiesce. “Realism” thus becomes a conspiracy between writer and reader, not an essential relation between certain texts and the world of experience.

Spiegelman points to this inescapable discrepancy between text and world in the latest installment of Maus. As Art and Françoise drive toward the Catskills in response to a desperate call from Vladek, Art worries that his work in progress is “presumptuous,” saying, “I mean, I can't even make any sense of my relationship with my father. … How am I supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz? … of the Holocaust?”³⁹ In a soliloquy lasting eleven panels on two pages, Art pours out his fears and insecurities, with only an occasional comment from his wife. In the last four panels Art directly addresses the problem of imagining and representing the Holocaust.

Sigh. I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams.

And trying to do it as a comic strip!—I guess I bit off more than I can chew. Maybe I ought to forget the whole thing.

There's so much I'll never be able to understand or visualize. I mean reality is too complex for comics. …

Françoise: Just keep it honest, honey.

See what I mean. … In real life you'd never have let me talk this long without interrupting.

Hmmph. Light me a cigarette.⁴⁰

When Art implicitly betrays his promise to his father, the incident fits perfectly with the characterization of the narrator throughout Maus. If Vladek takes no pains to retouch his own actions in the Holocaust story, the writer of Maus is careful to show Art's failures as well; the cartoonist is more concerned with writing his book than with protecting his father's feelings. At the very end of the published Maus, Art learns that Vladek has destroyed Anja's journal of her wartime experiences which she was saving to give to her son. Art, who has been searching for these diaries to give a balanced perspective to his parents' story, explodes in anger and frustration: “God DAMN You! You—you murderer! How the hell could you do such a thing!!” The book ends with Art walking away after a partial reconciliation with his father, muttering, “… Murderer.”⁴¹

Though the tensions between Art and Vladek are unresolved at the book's stopping point, the motivations of both characters are clear and convincing. Vladek burned Anja's papers in a fit of grief after her suicide, and Maus has made clear how painful her death was to her husband. For Art, the writing of the Holocaust book has become his closest connection to his parents; his mother's writings represent for him much more than just documentary support for his project. In a book about mass death, Art's outburst, “Murderer!” resonates back through the story. In “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” Art accuses his mother of psychologically murdering him by killing herself; now he blames Vladek for killing Anja, perhaps figuratively by destroying her words, but perhaps more literally by driving her to suicide with his miserliness and emotional tyranny.

Moral judgments in Maus become extremely dicey indeed. To call Vladek a murderer after hearing of his ordeal at the hands of the Nazis seems shockingly inappropriate, yet Art's patent need to understand his mother's life at least explains his brutal words, if it does not excuse them. At other points in the story, Art's impatience and intolerance with his aging and ailing father are balanced by Vladek's pettiness and insensitivity. For example, when Vladek tries to dragoon Art into repairing the rain gutters on Vladek's house, Art refuses because his father is too cheap to hire a handyman. The result of Spiegelman's presentation of these mixed motivations and conflicting desires is that Maus presents no exemplary characters, and the book generates no moral center from within the text to dictate how we must judge either the past story of the Holocaust or the present-day relationship between the mouse-survivor and his mouse-cartoonist son.

Thus Maus differs from most other comic-book tellings of history, with their didactic, persuasive, or sensational impulses. For example, Jack Jackson's Texas histories both educate readers about forgotten heroes from the past and confront the origins of problems which have formed our present; Harvey Kurtzman's E.C. antiwar histories use thrilling war stories to argue against the glamorization of militarism. But Maus is not an educational comic in the traditional sense of teaching facts; it exploits the familiarity of one of the central events of Western civilization to tell a very personal story. Nor does Spiegelman's approach in Maus resemble standard comic-book formulas, such as horror and adventure. The horrific reality of the Nazi extermination camps is ill suited to the often puerile conventions of adventure comics, and even the horror genre usually falls flat when dealing with the overpowering Holocaust material.⁴²

What saves Maus from trivializing or sentimentalizing its difficult and emotional subject is its often ruthless examination of the psychologies of Vladek and of Art and the graphic simplicity of Spiegelman's style. The underground comix included autobiographical and confessional comic-book stories, and as we shall see in the next chapter, Harvey Pekar recently has transformed autobiographical comic books in his American Splendor. But Maus is sui generis in American comics because of the bold way it focuses Vladek's biography and Art's autobiography through the lens of world history. Art tells Vladek, “I want to tell your story, the way it really happened,”⁴³ then proceeds to depict Vladek's passage through the hell of the Holocaust in a comic book with Jews and Nazis as mice and cats. In so doing he embarks on a project which ultimately proves that sequential art is a medium whose potential for truth-telling is limited only by the imagination and the honesty of the men and women who use it.

Notes

1. The eventual winner was Donald Howard for his Chaucer: His Life, His Work, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987).

2. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). The chapters of Maus were first published serially in Raw.

3. Subsequent chapters of Maus will appear biannually in Raw.

4. Richard Gehr, review of Maus: A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman, Artforum, February 1987, p. 10.

5. Elie Wiesel, “For Some Measure of Humility,” Sh'ma 5/100 (31 October 1975), 314. Wiesel's statement appears in Alvin Rosenfeld, “The Problematics of Holocaust Literature,” in Confronting the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 4.

6. T. W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 34.

7. Jack Fischel and Sanford Pinsker, preface to Literature, the Arts, and the Holocaust, Holocaust Studies Annual, vol. 3 (Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill Publishing, 1987), x.

8. The distance between the author Art Spiegelman and the narrator of Maus will be discussed more fully below. I will refer to the writer as “Spiegelman,” the mouse-character as “Art.”

9. Maus. 100.

10. Ibid., 103.

11. Art Spiegelman, interview, “Fresh Air,” National Public Radio, December 1986.

12. Spiegelman, interview, “Fresh Air.”

13. Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, “Jewish Mice, Bubblegum Cards, Comics Art, and Raw Possibilities,” interview by Joey Cavalieri (New York, 1980-1981), Comics Journal 65 (August 1981): 105-106.

14. Spiegelman, interview, “Fresh Air.”

15. Reprinted in Comix Book no. 2, ed. Denis Kitchen (New York: Magazine Management, 1974): 51-53.

16. The “chandelier bunker” episode appears at Maus, 113-117.

17. Ibid., 119.

18. Spiegelman and Mouly, “Jewish Mice,” 116.

19. Ibid.

20. Harvey Pekar, “Maus and Other Topics,” Comics Journal 113 (December 1986): 56.

21. Spiegelman discusses the flow of the text at Spiegelman and Mouly, “Jewish Mice,” 116-117.

22. The term “funny animal” is particularly inappropriate in discussions of Maus, but it is the most common name for comics featuring anthropomorphized animals; “talking animals” is another. “Genre” too is a problematic term. A Mickey Mouse strip can partake of the “funny animal” genre, the western adventure genre, and the picaresque genre all at once.

23. See, for instance, Adam Gopnik's list of examples in his review “Comics and Catastrophe,” Atlantic Monthly, 22 June 1987, pp. 29-34.

24. Air Pirates was successfully sued by Walt Disney Productions for copyright infringement in a precedent-setting First Amendment case which established limits on the use of copyrighted characters in parodies.

25. Other animal characters in the comix include Gilbert Shelton's superhero parody, Wonder Wart-hog, Bob Armstrong's Mickey Rat, Bobby London's lecherous Dirty Duck, and the absurd picaresque insect Coochy Cooty by Robert Williams; the struggle between man and intransigent pet cat was played out in both Jay Lynch's Nard n' Pat and Shelton's Fat Freddy's Cat. More recently, Reed Waller and Kate Worley's Omaha the Cat Dancer continues the underground heritage of animal comix for adults.

26. Crumb took no part in the making of the movie and disavowed it after its release in 1972.

27. The phrase is Richard Gehr's, Artforum review, 10.

28. Best Buy Comics (San Francisco: Apex Novelties, 1979).

29. Spiegelman himself toyed with the conventions of animal comics in strips such as “Shaggy Dog Story,” reprinted in Spiegelman and Mouly, “Jewish Mice.”

30. For example, the works of Carl Barks which feature human beings are flat and undistinguished compared with his complex and compelling duck stories.

31. Spiegelman and Mouly, “Jewish Mice,” 106.

32. Art Spiegelman, in Ron Mann, director, Comic Book Confidential (1988), motion picture.

33. Maus, 147.

34. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, “Chapter 7: Mauschwitz. Being the Beginning of Maus, Part II: From Mauschwitz to the Catskills,” insert in Raw no. 8 (1986): 154. (The pagination in Maus, Part II is consecutive with that of Maus, Part I.)

35. Gopnik, “Comics and Catastrophe,” 30.

36. For example, the seminal comic-book creator Will Eisner spent years working on sequential art maintenance manuals for the United States armed forces. More recently, the CIA supplied anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua with assassination manuals in comic-book form.

37. Maus, 23.

38. Spiegelman, interview, “Fresh Air.”

39. Maus, Part II, 157.

40. Ibid., 158.

41. Maus, Part II, 159.

42. See, for example, Lee Elias and Bill Dubay's “Rebirth,” Epic Illustrated 23 (April 1984): 75, which uses graphic depictions of the death camps to set up a rather hackneyed reincarnation theme. The outstanding comic-book use of the Holocaust is Bernie Krigstein's stunning tale of paranoia, guilt, and vengeance, “Master Race,” from E.C.'s Impact no. 1 (March—April 1955), in which a former death-camp commandant, now hiding in America, confronts one of the victims of his brutality on a New York subway.

43. Maus, 23.