Sparkntoes Maus When Art Finds Out That Vladek Threw Away the Pictures of Anja
In Holocaust Lit, we've devoted the past calendar week and a scrap to Art Spiegelman's comic Maus. For me, Maus is ane of the essential books of the 20th Century. There is no praise too high for information technology. Getting to run across Spiegelman a few years agone was a highlight of my life.
I've taught Maus so many times, in so many different contexts, that I no longer need to read it. (Even afterward most xx years of instruction, I can only say this of a handful of texts.) Withal I even so look through it each twenty-four hour period before class. Looking up a specific moment, I'll find myself having read 20 pages without even knowing it, information technology'due south that wonderful. Just it'south quite nice to know a text that well, not to the lowest degree because information technology makes the 24-hour interval-to-day life of my semester a lot more manageable.
For those who aren't familiar with it, Maus tells the story of Spiegelman'south father, Vladek. We learn of his experiences equally a young man of affairs in pre-state of war Poland, his matrimony to Spiegelman's mother, Anja Zylberberg, and the devastation wrecked upon their lives by the war. When the Nazis invade Poland, Vladek and Anja become into hiding, after sending their young child Richieu to spend the war with a relative.
The boy doesn't survive but, amazingly, both Vladek and Anja do, after having been betrayed in 1944 past smugglers who pretended they would go them to Hungary and and so deported kickoff to Auschwitz and then later, separately, to various other camps. Reunited in Poland afterwards the war, the couple are able to get to Sweden and then eventually to the U.s., where Anja has a brother and sister-in-police force who had been visiting the New York World's Fair when the war broke out. Anja commits suicide in 1968, shortly afterwards her brother's death in a auto accident, and after Art himself has suffered a nervous breakdown. Much of the text details Art's efforts in the late 1970s and early 80s to larn more about his father's wartime experiences.
The books—Maus is published in two volumes—thus range between the past (1930s & 40s) and the present (1970s & 80s). They are as much near the fashion Art gets his father's story as they are nigh that story itself. And indeed over the grade of its pages Maus becomes ever more enlightened of this process. The sophistication of its textual layering and its interest in the mediated quality of storytelling make this a crucial text for any class on Holocaust Literature.
The most immediately hitting expression of that mediation is the book's governing conceit: Jews are drawn as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and other nationalities and groups equally various other animals. Really, this isn't quite true: characters are drawn as people with creature heads, leading to much speculation nearly Spiegelman's reclaiming Nazi portrayals of Jews as vermin and playing with the ban on visual representation in Jewish tradition.
Because Maus is and then rich—and because students like it and so much—I spend a lot of fourth dimension on information technology. In the past I've devoted as many as six 50-minute classes to it. Over fourth dimension I've settled on four every bit the optimal number. Here'due south how I divided up the classes this yr:
Day 1: Close reading of the opening two pages of volume ane, a story from Spiegelman's babyhood in which ten-year old Artie, having been left behind past his friends, seeks comfort from his father, who disproportionately and devastatingly replies, "Friends? Your friends? If y'all lock them together in a room with no food for a week… And then you could come across what it is, friends!"
We spent a lot of time not just identifying and clarifying the relationships between by and present and the way that this relationship complicates our sense of what it means to survive and who fifty-fifty counts as having survived (nosotros can read Artie, too, as a survivor, and we already see in this opening scene how our deeply-held just ultimately falsely pious and in fact pernicious belief that survivors must take been ennobled by their experience will exist challenged). Nosotros also considered the grammer of comics, exploring the relationship of words and images that are crucial to the genre, learning about formal terms like panels and gutters (the white areas between panels that are the way comics express time).
Day 2: Nosotros continued the formalist discussion of the showtime form past looking at Spieglman's conscientious combining of words and images. We expect at an early on panel in which Artie, first suggesting to his father that he tell him his story, is framed, enclosed, perhaps fifty-fifty imprisoned between his father's arms, the Auschwitz tattoo clearly visible on one, as Vladek dutifully follows his dr.'southward orders to become some exercise past riding an practice bike.
The care with which individual panels are constructed—Spigeleman in one case said in an interview that the main affair he learned from his begetter was how to pack a suitcase: his panels are similarly jammed with information—is mirrored by the attention to arranging those panels. Noting how important the page is equally a manner of structuring the book'south material, I had us compare two pages that are similarly composed, 1 showing Vladek and Anja on their way to a spa in Czechoslovakia in 1938, where they first encounter show of Nazi dominion, and the other showing their arrival by van at the gates of Auschwitz.
We considered Spiegelman's style of representing and fabricated a continuum ranging from realism to expressionism. As an instance of the latter, we looked at a panel showing Vladek and Anja on the run, having been driven from yet some other hiding place, running along a pathway whose branches form a swastika. Finally, we looked at a two-page spread halfway though the kickoff book where an almost subliminal story is told in the images that ends up reinforcing the one discussed in the narration and dialogue (Vladek is describing how food began to grow scarce in occupied Poland and how heavily the wealthy Zylberbergs had to rely on the black market; in the images, of a large family dinner that attempts to recreate pre-war life, Richieu overturns his bowl and is first punished and and then consoled by diverse family members).
Day 3: Now, having read both volumes, we were ready to tackle the animal conceit, working through why Spiegelman chose to represent the different groups in the style he did. I asked the students to consider the limitations or questionable implications of the metaphor—if Germans are cats and Jews are mice does that mean it'due south natural for Germans to hate Jews? But cats don't' hate mice: they just eat them. Is Spiegelman suggesting the Germans weren't actually responsible for their actions? Somewhen I had them consider the subjective quality of the metaphor, that is, the thought that this is Vladek's perspective, and not some objective merits almost the merits or foibles of different groups of people. In the procedure I had us rails how the metaphor changes as the book goes on. Tellingly volume two starts with Artie wondering how he should depict his married woman, Francoise. As a frog, because she's French? As a mouse, because she converted to Judaism? Does Speigelman's conceit work with non-esentialist or fluid/hybrid notions of identity? Afterwards all, we do somewhen see a mixed German-Jewish couple whose children are striped tabby mice.
More significantly, we see Spiegelman switch from animal heads to animate being masks equally he includes in his story the experience of making of the text. Before, he had used masks when characters tried to laissez passer as something other than themselves (as Vladek does in the streets of occupied Poland, for example). Only in a central section entitled "Time Flies" Spiegelman describes his creative block afterward the success of volume i and the death of his father. Here he and the other characters are clearly humans wearing what are conspicuously visible as animal masks. Referencing the work of the scholar Erin McGlothlin, I explained that our initial distinction between by and present needs to be complicated by the improver of what Spiegelman himself has called "the super-present," a time even more recent, more present, than what has passed equally the present so far in the narrative. In this way, the animal metaphor is ironized and destabilized, fabricated to seem the relics of a by way of thinking nearly identity—though, tellingly, they are not abandoned altogether. After all, in Maus the past never lets go.
Twenty-four hours 4: I told the class I had iii topics I wanted us to consider: (1) gender, especially the text's presentation of women; (ii) photographs; and (3) the last page of volume 2 and the idea of endings more generally.
I started by referring to a line quoted by the brilliant scholar Sara Horowitz in an influential essay on gender and Holocaust literature. Artie asks his father what his female parent experienced when they were separated from each other upon arriving at Auschwitz. Vladek, broken-hearted to proceed Artie from finding out that he has burned Anja'south diaries after her death, tells Artie: "I can tell y'all… She went through the aforementioned what me: Terrible." As Horowitz notes, Vladek hither speaks for a larger tendency in Holocaust studies to efface gender or other indications of subjectivity in the victims. If the Nazis didn't discriminate among their victims then why should we?
Yet men and women didn't feel the Holocaust the same way, and the absence of Anja is a specter that haunts the book from its first pages. (I reminded the grade that the first affair Artie says to his begetter when he asks him to tell his story is: "Start with Mom… tell me how you met.") I had the class tell me what Anja was like. We presently concluded her grapheme is quite circuitous. She is both mentally and physically frail, relying on Vladek to jolly, even not bad her into wellness. Nonetheless she is also strong: highly intelligent, beloved by her teachers, and politically active in ways that might surprise us given her family'south wealth. Vladek explains how he discovered shortly after their spousal relationship that Anja had for some time been translating underground documents into German for a Communist grouping, a clandestine and illegal activity that she narrowly escaped being arrested for. Vladek was livid when he found out—"I ever kept far away from Communist people"—and made his wife an ultimatum: "I told her 'Anja, if you want me you have to go my way'… And she was a practiced girl, and of form she stopped all such things."
Who knows how Anja felt about this and whether she really did give them up or whether the state of war intervened. The point, I suggested, is that Vladek seeks to make her life accommodate to his, merely every bit he does retrospectively when he tells Artie that her experiences at Auschwitz were the same as is. Thus when Vladek later paints Anja as a saint, as the only adult female of his life, we don't quite believe him. Maybe his depiction of how much she relied on him is just another instance of his seemingly clamorous demand to exist in control, to be the complete fixer, a trait that saved his life on more than one occasion in the camps.
Seeing how important it is for Vladek to control his portrayal of Anja, we might wonder if Artie does something like. Yes, he arraigns his father equally his mother's murderer when he finds out what happened to the diaries, and he presents her as a softening influence on Vladek'south brutalizing parenting (she would permit him go leave the tabular array without finishing all of his nutrient, as Vladek would insist). But earlier, in the wake of her suicide, he describes her as needy and smothering, in fact, as having murdered him.
Note, I added, how similar ambivalence characterizes the book'south portrayal of its other main female person character, Mala, Valdek's long-suffering 2nd married woman, herself a survivor. Generally we run into her berated and belittled by Vladek and it'south difficult to know what keeps them together. Is it really, equally Vladek repeats over and over, that she wants his money? Mala seems particularly difficult done by in the volume, and not merely past Vladek. I pointed to a scene in which Artie, leaving his begetter winded after some other long session on the exercise bike, comes across Mala in the kitchen. He mentions the round up in Sosnowiecz that Vladek has just been telling him about. Mala, who had experienced it also, begins to tell the story of her family, including what sounds similar an extraordinary feat of her own, in which she managed to smuggle her mother out of the ghetto. Artie doesn't engage in any way with this fragment of what must exist a remarkable tale. He jumps upwardly to leave, having just remembered somewhere else where he might go along his vain search for Anja'due south missing diaries.
I think this response is really surprising given how much Artie and Mala have in mutual. For example, both pale in Vladek's angel in comparison to their dead precursors (Anja for Mala and Richieu for Artie), merely this secondariness never amounts to any kind of solidarity or amore between them, at least not on Artie's role. To recognize Mala might have required Artie to recognize the strange manner in which he and his father attempt to command and fifty-fifty efface women past subordinating them to their diverse quests. Later on all, in their own means, Artie and Vladek are equally controlling.
We could take kept talking about the text's portrayal of gender for much longer, but I wanted to motility us along and so was glad that someone mentioned the photo of Spiegelman and his mother, a vacation snap from 1958, that Spiegelman includes in volume I. I took the opportunity to segue to the topic of photographs, both actual and imagined. How many existent photographs are reproduced in the book, I asked. Three. Who are they of? One'southward of Artie and his mother, i'south of Vladek, and one's of Richieu. Why are these photos included? It'due south the family, someone replied. Aye, though a family photograph, that is, of all of them together, is naturally impossible. And then the book performs a double motility: it reunites the family but in so doing only reminds us of the family unit's fragmentation.
But why include the photos? Why reproduce them in the text? I got the predictable responses: photos are more than realistic, they remind the states that the events actually happened, they evidence us what the people really looked like and remind u.s. that they are people and non but mice. But were we e'er in doubtfulness of that? Don't we place with these figures so strongly, whether animals or humans or something in between? Why do we need to be reminded that these figures are really people? And why are nosotros and so convinced by the authenticity of photos? In this historic period of photoshop and snapchat and instagram, how can we forget how open to manipulation photos are?
Call back of it this style, I said. What's the photo with Vladek of? He'due south posing in a concentration military camp uniform that he found in a photograph shop afterward the war, on his way home to Poland. Correct: information technology'south the craziest photo—we don't know why the photographer would have something like that and why anybody, non least someone similar Vladek, would e'er want to pose with information technology. So hither the text challenges our behavior in authenticity. The sign that Vladek was in the camps is a photo taken of him later on the camps.
Also, I added, we still haven't figured out why Spigelman would include the photos rather than describe them. After all, he does that more than than once. I speedily referenced a couple of examples from earlier in the book and and then had us wait at a sequence near the finish of book II in which Vladek brings out a box of one-time family photos for Artie to look through. The photos are generally of Anja's family, almost all of whom were murdered by the Nazis: "Anja's parents, the grandparents, her big sis Tosha, little Bibi and our Richieu… All what is left, information technology's the photos," Vladek concludes, calculation, when Artie asks about his own side of the family unit, "So but my little brother, Pinek, came out from the war alive… from the rest of the family, it'southward naught left, not even a snapshot."
Why, I asked the course, would Spiegelman choose to describe these images, which are presumably based on real, extant photographs, rather than using the photos themselves? This was a real question. I've never been able to come to an answer about this question that satisfies me.
I student ventured that these people didn't survive the war, thus they were consigned to the past, which Spiegelman indicated past drawings rather than photos. This was a prissy theory, merely every bit others quickly pointed out, not one that held up. Later all, some of these people, like Vladek'southward brother Pinek, who was hidden by peasants before making his style to Palestine, did survive. And others died in ways other than at the hands of the Nazis, like Anja'south brother Herman, hit past a auto in Norristown, PA, or her brother Josef, a commercial artist who killed himself afterwards an unhappy love matter.
We had reached a dead end in our chat and I had no idea how to move us past it to consider the terminate of the book. At that place were ten minutes left in class: we had both likewise much and too little time. But then a pupil, one whose points are unremarkably a little too obvious, saved the solar day by pointing out that the image of the pile of photos, seemingly having floated downwards from the sofa where Vladek and Artie are studying them and arrayed in not bad despairing drifts, went all the way to the edge of the page. We'd looked at some similar instances before in the week, and I'd suggested a connection betwixt these images and the subtitle of Volume I: My Father Bleeds History. The images that couldn't be constrained past a edge—that bled to the edge of the page—suggested themselves as especially meaning inasmuch as they pointed to the uncontainable nature of history, the inability of the by to stay safely in the past.
And so something really great happened. A pretty quiet student, smart merely not always able to express himself clearly, said: It doesn't matter when these people died or even if they are still live. They are still victims of the war, of the things that happened during that Holocaust. That'due south why the motion picture goes to the border of the page. The war doesn't stop.
I thought this was brilliant and I seized on it as a life raft. Exactly! I cried, repeating the student'due south signal so that others would exist sure to have heard it. The war doesn't stop. That's exactly what we run across happening on the last folio. At this indicate nosotros simply had 5 minutes left and I frequently spend 20 minutes talking students through that final folio. Then all I could do was tell them what I most wanted to say about this ending.
Equally Spiegelman himself has pointed out, the end merely keeps on ending. Starting time nosotros take Vladek'south description of his dramatic reunion with Anja, which, equally we considered in our earlier discussion of his relation to women, we know to be self-serving and imitation: "More I don't demand to tell you. Nosotros were both very happy, and lived happy, happy always subsequently." The repetition of "happy" belies the true state of affairs, which is that much unhappiness followed them afterwards the war: Vladek'southward reluctant move to the United states of america (he wanted to stay in Sweden), Anja'south depression and eventual suicide, the estrangement between father and son; Vladek'southward increasing ill health. I noted that the circle against which the couple embrace might remind us of the circle in the movie poster in Book I of Rudolph Valentino, who the young Vladek was said to resemble. Information technology might also remind us of the spotlight bandage on the young couple equally they trip the light fantastic toe at the spa in Czechoslovakia in the final happy days before the war. It might fifty-fifty remind us of the cycle of the practice cycle from which Vladek tells much of his story. The circle is a sign of futility and circularity as much as perfection, and, in its connection to image-making and Hollywood stars, it intimates the fabricated nature of Vladek's conclusion.
This ending is immediately followed by another: Vladek's wish to finish speaking, to cease creating the story. His fading powers, even the death that we know is not far off, is suggested by his confusion betwixt his sons: "I'm tired from talking, Richieu, and it'southward plenty stories for now…" he tells Artie. Right below this row, even forcing its style into it, is nevertheless another ending, an prototype of Vladek and Anja's gravestone. The fact that the book ends 3 times, as it were, suggests that information technology can have no definitive end, an idea farther supported past the image of the eternal flame on the gravestone. And what nearly Spiegelman's own signature below that? The dates that back-trail it are of form the dates of the cosmos of the work, but information technology's difficult not to retrieve of them as the dates of his own life. After all, one of these endings includes his own erasure and replacement by the sibling he never knew, the 1 he had a weird ghostly rivalry with, as he tells Francoise at the outset of Volume Two.
Thus nosotros ended this class much equally we began the offset one more than a week before, with an assertion of the ongoingness of events, the persistence of the past into the nowadays. Only our agreement of that claim was a lot more complex now than it had been then. I was really pleased with the work we'd washed. In fact I continue to be amazed by this grade. They're nevertheless bringing it every single 24-hour interval. Usually, this tardily in the semester the conversation is beingness carried past a core grouping of actively engaged students while the rest follow limply along. But in this group almost anybody still talks every class period.
I really think they are the best grouping I've ever taught. I'1000 trying to enjoy every minute.
If you lot want to grab upwardly you tin read earlier posts almost the class here, here, and here.
Source: https://eigermonchjungfrau.blog/2016/10/31/holocaust-lit-2016-week-10-art-spiegelmans-maus/
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