LITERATURE MEETS HISTORY:COUNTER-DISCOURSIVE "COMIX"

Abstract: Art Spiegelman's graphic novels or "comix" books, Maus: ASurvivor's Tale (I and II), constitute an exemplary postmodern example of thecomplex border-crossing of popular culture and high art, on the one hand,and autobiography, history and fictionalized narrative, on the other. Theiranimal allegory and self-reflexive comic book form both distance and proxi-mate the horrific realities of the Holocaust story they tell in both visual andverbal media. While enacting postmodern challenges to the status of historical"fact" and evidence, Maus nevertheless brings the past and its witnessing tolife in powerful ways that have won it a worldwide readership.

The provocative blurring of boundaries and crossing of bordershave long been givens for postmodern art forms. For years now,the border-crossing between high art and popular culture, in par-ticular, has been both decried and celebrated.1 As Andreas Huys-sen argued, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,Postmodernism,2 it is in fact the erosion of the boundary betweenthe elite and the popular that may mark the move from the mod-ern to the postmodern in twentieth-century culture. But genericborders are also losing their comforting defining power, as fiction,history, biography, autobiography, and other genres mix to createhybrid forms that, for some, simply recall the early days of thenovel's formation3 and, for others, foretell the death of the novel -once again. Yet another contentious characteristic of postmodern-1 The best known of the Adornian lamentations is likely that of Fredric Jame-

son, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,NC: Duke UP, 1991); one of the most convincing defenses and celebrationsis that of Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture andPostmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989).

2 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986).3 Cf. Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New

York: Columbia UP, 1983).

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ism has been its controversial relationship with history — that is,"history" understood as both the events of the past and the nar-ratives that tell of them. For some, to challenge the once acceptedobjectivity of historical accounts, pointing to their constructednature, is tantamount to questioning the truth-value of historicalnarrative itself; to others, it is a welcome acknowledgement of thenarrativizing process in which all historians are engaged whenthey select, order, and narrate the events of the past. "Facts"deemed historical are perhaps more made than found.

An active site of challenge on all these fronts has often beencontemporary fiction: from Carlos Fuentes to E. L. Doctorow,from Umberto Eco to Patrick Süskind, from Michael Ondaatje toMaxine Hong Kingston, novelists have been bringing the narra-tives of history (both personal and public) into dialogue with theconventions of fiction (both popular and "high art").

The case of Salman Rushdie is only an extreme version of thekind of ire that this transgressive border-crossing can evoke. Yet(and my choice of novelists to name above was obviously notinnocent) these are also among the best-selling or prize-winningwriters of our postmodern times. This paradox cannot be easilydismissed by arguing that there can be no conflict between popu-larity and formal (or even thematic) innovation in a capitalistworld where the new is privileged - and purchased. In order toexplore more fully the complexity of this paradox, I want to lookat a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning American work about theHolocaust, a work that not only conjoined the visual and theverbal in a startling way, but brought history, biography, andautobiography into the unlikely graphic space of the popularcomic book: Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Talc (I and II).Translated into over a dozen languages (including German4),Maus shows and tells the story of the "comix"5 artist, Spiegelman,and his attempt to show and tell the story of Vladek, his father. Itis a story about the Nazi years in Poland, about the concentration

In fact, parts of Maus were published in Germany before the American bookappeared. See Art Spiegelman, Breakdowns: Gesammelte Comic Strips,trans. Heinz Emigholz (Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1980)."Co-mix" is Spiegelman's term for the "co-mix of words and pictures" thatis his art. This is cited in Margot Hornblower, "The Poet of Pictograms",Time 1 Nov 1993: 68.

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camps, about death and survival. The intensely self-conscious,reflexive presence of the narrating, drawing son frames both thefather's tale and our reading/viewing of this historical allegory inwhich Jews are portrayed as mice and Germans as cats.6

The subtitle of volume I of Maus: A Survivor's Tale is MyFather Bleeds History,7 and its epigraph sets up the animal alle-gory, citing Adolf Hitler: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, butthey are not human." Volume II, And Here my Troubles Began*offers as its guiding epigraph a selection from a mid-1930s Ger-man newspaper article:

Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed. ... Healthy emo-tions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that thedirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animalkingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal.... Away with Jewish brutal-ization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the SwastikaCross!

The governing conceit of Maus (underlined by the retention of theGerman title) is the horror that, just as mice could be exterminat-ed as disease-carrying pests in the home or on the farm, so couldthe Jews be exterminated by the National Socialists. In drawingJews as mice, then, Spiegelman counter-discursively answers backto this cultural association, reappropriating and resignifying anegative image that once fuelled anti-Semitism, in part by showingprecisely how such "mice" were made into the victims of sadisticNazi "cats". When Jews "pass" as Christian Poles in Maus, theywear pig masks tied around their faces; those who pass less well,because of facial features, are shown with masks but also withvisible mouse tails. More poignantly and painfully, Holocaust sur-vivors who, because of the very fact of their survival, do not fee!like "real" Jews, wear mouse masks.

However, the epigraph decrying Mickey Mouse points to im-portant historical connections not only between mice and Jews inthe Nazi imagination but between Maus and the history of the

6 Poles are pigs; Americans (because of their racial mongrelization and theirreputation for friendliness) are dogs. In one reflexive passage, Spiegelmanhas somewhat more playful fun with other nationalities: the French arefrogs, the Swedes reindeer, and a gypsy fortune teller is a (gypsy) moth.

7 (New York: Pantheon, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986).s (New York: Pantheon, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991).

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mass culture form of the comic genre - with its animal creationsfrom Krazy Kat to Donald Duck.9 Like the comics, Maus toocreates a fictive heterocosm, a complete visual and verbal uni-verse. But this one is not Superman's fictional Metropolis; instead,it is the terrifyingly real, historical world of World War II Europe,as narrated by the man who lived through it and told of it tothe son who tries to capture its horror visually.10 When ques-tioned as to whether comics could really offer a valid mediumfor dealing with something as serious as the Holocaust, Spiegel-man replied:

The language I speak is comics. I'm a rotten ballet dancer. So it wouldnever be possible for me to make Maus as a ballet. There's somethingfrightening about eliciting an aesthetic response built on so much suffering.The dangers have to be acknowledged while you are working. It's tricky. Ifyou hear someone has taken on the genocide of the Jews in comics form, itsounds like a terrible idea. But using animals allows you to defamiliarizethe events, to reinhabit them in a fresh way because they are coming at youin a language you are not used to hearing.11

Even if readers do not automatically associate comics with chil-dren's reading and are aware of the complex history of comics inthe United States — its history of avant-garde and undergroundtransgression12 as well as of capitalist cooption13 - the appropri-ateness of this mode for this particular topic can still be an issue,but it is an issue tackled head-on in the books themselves; thedangers of "eliciting an aesthetic response built on so much suffer-ing" are indeed acknowledged, while Spiegelman is "working" onshowing and telling this (hi)story.

9 On the tradition of Jewish comics, see Paul Buhle, "Of Mice and Men-schen: Jewish Comics Come of Age", Tikkun (March-April 1992): 9-16.

10 This is not, in any conventional sense, a "posthistorical" world. See MilesOrvell, "Writing Posthistorically: Krazy Kat, Mans, and the ContemporaryFiction Cartoon", American Literary History 4 (1992): 110-28.

11 Cited in Hornblower 1993, 68.12 Spiegelman is the co-founder of the new-wave comics, Raw. For more on

the underground roots, see Spiegelman's comix tribute to Mad Magazine'scartoonist, Harvey Kurtzman, in the New Yorker 29 Mar 1993: "H. K.(R.I. P.)".

n See Arial Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck:Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, trans. David Kunzle (New York:International General, 1975, 1984).

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Upon its first publication, Maus appeared on the New YorkTimes best-seller lists under the category of fiction; Spiegelmanimmediately requested that it be moved to the non-fiction list. Inpart, it was no doubt the comic book format that motivated theinitial categorization. But Maus often "reads like" a novel in thesame way that Maxine Hong Kingston's A Woman Warrior does:both are autobiographical and biographical narratives, but bothpossess the formal and linguistic structure and complexity (not tomention narrative conventions) usually associated with the novelgenre. For instance, Maus presents dialogue (often accompanyingdrawings of only character's heads) that constitutes fully de-veloped and dramatic interactions, rather than the functionallystaccato cliches of commercial comics. In this, Maus follows in thefootsteps of some of the underground autobiographical comicswork of Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb. Maus also "reads like"a novel because of its complicated dual narrative line. On the onehand, there is a familiar, sitcom14 family situation of a difficult,aging father (Vladek) trying by many means, devious and fair, toget more attention from his son (Art),15 in whom filial guilt com-bats both longings for independence and long-held familialgrudges (some connected to his mother's suicide16). On the otherhand, there is the historical world of the Holocaust, throughwhich the father lives and which the son wishes both to writeabout - and to draw.

Fictionalized dialogues, memory, confession, therapeutic narra-tive, testimonial, obituary, biography, autobiography, history: allthese different modes jostle together self-reflexively in the post-modern space opened up by the mass-market, popular form of thecomic book. That this is a problematic space likely goes withoutsaying. The second chapter of Maus II marks the point in thenarrative at which Spiegelman finally has to draw and tell thestory of Auschwitz, the unpresentable, the unspeakable site of thehorror endured by his family, but not himself (for he was born

14 Ethan Mordden, in "Kat and Maus", New Yorker 6 Apr 1992, calls it "asitcom containing a horror thriller" (91).

15 I will be referring to the "character" here as Art, and the actual artist/writeras Spiegelman.

16 On the absent mother, see Marianne Hirsch, "Family Pictures: Maus,Mourning, and Post-Memory", Discourse 15.2 (1992-93): 3-29.

LITERATURE MEETS HISTORY! COUNTER-DISCOURSIVE "COMIX" 9

after the war). The chapter opens with Art at his drawing table,wearing the mouse mask of his insecurity and survivor-guilt, andtelling of his father's death in 1982 from congestive heart failure.17

Noting that '''time flies",18 Art juxtaposes dates from Vladek's andhis own lives — dates marking the father's horror and dates mark-ing the son's success. During this recitation, he shows himselfsitting atop a pile of Auschwitz corpses. Why? It is because hefeels/knows that the success of Maus I (to which he self-con-sciously refers) was built on their suffering. As American, Ger-man, and Israeli television interviewers (wearing, respectively,masks of dogs, cats, and mice) badger him with questions aboutthe book and his intentions, Art's physical figure grows smallerand smaller, thus visualizing and symbolizing his regression to achild-like state (and perhaps his resistance to the fact that he isabout to become a father himself soon). In order to deal with thisconflict, Art goes to visit his psychiatrist, a Holocaust survivor(and also wearing a mouse mask), who he hopes will assist him inimagining what Auschwitz was like. Even more than a novelist,perhaps, a graphic artist has to imagine, and then actually vis-ualize, before he can draw. But, as Holocaust scholars have ar-gued, Auschwitz is precisely the unimaginable and the unrepre-sentable.19 And yet, it is, in the end, both imagined and rep-resented, in part to ensure that it will be remembered. Because of(rather than in spite of) the defamiliarization and distancing of theanimal allegory, the horror is still powerful; the senseless has notbeen given sense.

There can be little doubt that part of the horror of this narrativecomes from its specificity. This is not the story of "the Holocaust"as a past historical event, an authoritative meta-narrative of theNazi genocide; it is one man's story — as later told to (and then by)his son. (While we have Vladek's audio-taped words, the imagesare Spiegelman's.) Doubly mediated - by memory and by transla-

17 Spiegelman 1991, 41.18 And we see the literal "flies" of time buzzing around the frames and into

the gutters — yet another border that Spiegelman crosses.19 The most well-known articulation of the view of the Holocaust as a radical

rupture in Western history and, thus, in its representational practices isTheodor Adorno's in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York:Continuum, 1973) 360-65.

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tion into a visual allegory - this is a true story, but more specifi-cally, it is a local, individual, particular true story. In the narrative,there is a very real tension for us as readers between what we seeand hear and what we believe: we see and hear Vladek as a dif-ficult, nagging, and irritable aging man, using emotional black-mail on his son, being maddeningly unreasonable with his secondwife; yet we willingly trust this unreliable man to be a reliablewitness and a reliable narrator of his own story - and so weshould. We "hear" his accented vernacular English (from Spiegel-man's tapes);20 we "hear" and "see" his kindness and bravery,even amid the horror of his experience in the death camps (as Spie-gelman draws the story told to him). But we also "see" and "hear"a manipulative, stingy elderly man who drives his son to fear that,in the name of realism, he will paradoxically risk stereotyping hisfather: "IN SOME WAYS HE'S JUST LIKE THE RACIST CARI-CATURE OF THE MISERLY OLD JEW", he worries. This re-mark, however, provokes Vladek's wife to say: "Hah! YOU CANSAY THAT AGAIN." Here, history literally becomes Lenin's"who does what to whom" - not only in the past, but in thepresent, for all is mediated by the listening, drawing son. Wewatch Spiegelman foreground Art's own role in wanting to re-count his father's tale, his own insecurities, his biases, neuroses,and fears. Just as there is no single, consistent Vladek, so there isno single, authoritative History offered in Maus-, it contains, in-stead, several histories, each simultaneously authorized and putinto question. It is one man's attempt to understand (in the pres-ent) the experience of one other man (in the past). What makesthis such a difficult process, one to which Spiegelman constantlycalls attention, is the combination of the private (it is his ownfather about whom he is writing) and the public (it is the horrorand brutality of the camps that he is showing). As commentatorson the books from the very start have pointed out, the personaland unsentimentalized father-son interaction is as much part of

20 Though, when the scene shifts to the past, the accent disappears: conven-tion would have it that he is speaking perfectly his native tongue, even if weread it in English. On Spiegelman's reconstruction of a more marked dialectthan Vladek actually possessed, see Michael Rothberg, "'We Were TalkingJewish': Art Spiegelman's Maus as 'Holocaust' Production", Contempo-rary Literature 35.4 (1994): 670-74 especially.

LITERATURE MEETS HISTORY! COUNTER-DISCOURSIVE "COMIX" 11

the emotional core of the work as is the cat-mouse historicalallegory.21

Despite this allegorical distancing technique, Maus is astrangely realist narrative. Yet, however documentary or realist itsmode (the text is taken from actual tape recordings),22 it alwaysreminds us of the lack of transparency of both its verbal and visualmedia. Its consistent reflexivity, pointing to the utter non-objectiv-ity of the historian or biographer, here raises precisely the issuesthat have obsessed theorists of historiography for several decadesnow, as I mentioned at the start of this essay. Far from beingahistorical because of challenges to some of the assumptionsgrounding traditional historiography, self-conscious narrativeslike Maus enact critical commentaries on the very "making" ofhistory, from what Hayden White calls its "narrativizing"23 to thenature of its documentary archive. Problematizing notions of tele-ology as well as objectivity, of causality as well as totality, Maus'sdouble narrative line simultaneously asserts the validity of thetestimonial and questions the reliability of modes of representa-tion; it accepts both the truth and the vagaries of memory.

To write history (personal and public) as a reflexive comic bookis not to say history is a fiction; it is, instead, to suggest that allaccounts of that history are necessarily "narrativized" accounts,to use White's term, once again. In this particular case, they aredoubly textualized versions, doubly mediated by time and narra-tive modality (both verbal and visual). The events presented in the

21 See Alice Yaeger Kaplan's "Theweleit and Spiegelman: Of Men and Mice",Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle: Bay,1989), which ends with "In Spiegelman, the form - the radical comic strip -brings into the cultural mainstream of the eighties a sixties militancy, withits hallucinogenic imperative to transform our parents' dusty reality. Byusing that radical form to tell his father's story, Spiegelman consecrates itwith his own vision and voice" and claims his parentage in order to freehimself from its bonds (171).

11 The interactive CD-ROM version of The Complete Maus, which allowsauditory access to these tapes (and, visually, to archival photos, prisonerdrawings, earlier sketches, etc.), increases the realist dimensions consider-ably, as did the 1992 Museum of Modern Art Exhibit in New York aboutthe making of Maus (which played the actual tapes).

23 See Hayden White, "The Narrativization of Real Events", Critical Inquiry7.4 (1981): 793-98.

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archival sources - tape-recorded remembrances, documents - areselected and ordered, interpreted and "emplotted" in an explana-tory narrative, given meaning as "facts".24 Historical facts as facts(rather than as events) - even about the Nazi genocide - areconstructed, not found; documents do not possess their ownmeaning, but are given meaning by historians.25 This process isboth underscored and ironized by Spiegelman. At the end of Maus//, Art reproduces an actual photograph of Vladek in a concen-tration camp uniform. The seeming incontestable truth-value ofsuch documentary evidence, however, is immediately underminedby the accompanying narration of how the photo was obtained.Vladek explains: "I PASSED ONCE A PHOTO PLACE WHATHAD A CAMP UNIFORM - A NEW AND CLEAN ONE - TOMAKE SOUVENIR PHOTOS ... ,"26

If, as Emile Benveniste27 suggested, "history" suppresses thedirect, discursive "I/you" of the enunciative situation in favour ofthe "it" of impersonal narration (in which events appear to nar-rate themselves), Maus re-foregrounds the "discourse" of the vari-ous "I"s - Art, Vladek, and others - and their different conditionsand situations of enunciation. It does so in order to ask not only"what happened in the past?" but "how do we know what hap-pened?" The ontological and the epistemological are therefore ofequal concern:28 the past did exist, the Holocaust did happen, butMaus explores how we know that, as well as what we can knowabout it from one man's testimony and one man's very real suffer-ing. There are no universal claims to truth here, but this does notmean that no truth exists. Christopher Norris has (erroneously)attacked the postmodern for effacing "all sense of the differencebetween truth and falsehood, reality and illusion, serious and non-

24 See Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation ofReality", Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 5-27; "The Question of Narrative inContemporary Historical Theory", History and Theory 23.1 (1984): 1-33;and Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,1985).

25 See James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative andthe Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988).

2* Spiegelman 1991, 134.27 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth

Meeks (Coral Gables, FL: U of Miami P, 1971).28 Cf. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987).

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serious discourse".29 Perhaps, at first blush, Maus - the comicbook that frames a Holocaust narrative in a Jewish situation com-edy - might seem to be guilty of just such an effacement. But, Iwould prefer to argue the contrary: the art of pointing to thecomplexity and the difficulty of telling truth from falsehood, real-ity from illusion, serious from non-serious discourse may well bethe more truthful, real, and serious task. Maus asks difficult ques-tions. What is the truth-claim of the documentary here? Is Vla-dek's testimony - told for his son, whom he is always complainingabout and manipulating - a stand-in for the past, a substitute forit? Or is it a re-textualization of an already textualized (becauseremembered) past, a re-emplotting by the son of the father's em-plotted story? History, biography, autobiography — no less thanfiction - are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems.This is the lesson of the postmodern.

Whichever of these terms our particular theoretical bent leadsus to prefer, Maus never lets us forget that it is the story of a storyof history, a textualization of a textualization of very real suffer-ing. The startling difference between the voice of the querulousolder Vladek talking to his son and the calm, considered tone ofthe same man recounting the horrors of the Holocaust and hisown quiet courage is a difference that signals not only protectivedistancing but also the process of narrativizing. Spiegelman obvi-ously wasn't present at all the scenes he presents verbally andvisually in Maus-, nor was Vladek. Like Oliver Stone's films aboutJ. F. K. or Nixon, Maus fictionalizes as it narrativizes, imagines asit recounts actual, remembered events. "Literature" and "history"are not separate or separable categories of discourse today (if everthey were), and it is hybrid works like Maus that have shown thecreative possibilities of cross-border activity between not onlyhigh and mass culture but also seemingly different genres of dis-course. History, like literature, is presented as the site of whatDonna Haraway calls "situated knowledge" — where we can talkabout things like the "politics and epistemologies of location, pos-itioning, and situation, where partiality and not universality is the

29 What's Wrong with Postmodernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,1990)2.

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condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims".30

Vladek's story is partial, not universal; so too is Spiegelman's. ButMaus's reflexive admission of contingency has not stopped eitherstory from having an impact on readers throughout the world -keeping history in memory through memory and its telling.

TORONTO LINDA HUTCHEON

30 Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:Routledge, 1991) 195.