Witnessing the Witness: Narrative slippage in Art Spiegelman’s Maus

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Witnessing the Witness: Narrative slippagein Art Spiegelman’s MausSusannah Ketchum GlassPublished online: 08 May 2007.

To cite this article: Susannah Ketchum Glass (2006) Witnessing the Witness: Narrative slippage in ArtSpiegelman’s Maus , Life Writing, 3:2, 3-24, DOI: 10.1080/10408340308518311

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AbstractArt Spiegelman’s Maus is notoriously difficult to categorize, andthe confusion that surrounded its initial publication raisesimportant questions about the nature of memory narrative, therole of the authorial voice in “remembered” and “received”history, and the function of representation. In this article, Idemonstrate the counter-discursive potential of memory, and Iargue that though biographical in generic approach, Maus isautobiographical in narrative result. By constant oscillationbetween Vladek’s “Survivor’s Tale” and the survival narratives ofArtie the son and Art the artist, Spiegelman plays with thenotions of effect and affect inherent in memory; Vladek’smemories of his experience in the Holocaust effect (produce)Artie’s story, but by setting off in search of his father’smemories, Art the artist creates the vehicle for their delivery,thereby affecting their reception. Vladek’s experience as aHolocaust survivor is historically real, but the only way for Artto approach it is through memory. By reconstructing his father’sstory, however, Art constructs his own; in the process, bothVladek the memory transmitter and Art the memory translatorare seen to be manipulative. Without denying the reality of aunique and individual experience of the Holocaust, this essayseeks to illustrate the way in which Spiegelman’s textdemonstrates the “palimpsestuousness” of identity and allowsthe reader to re-envision the role of memory in a post-Holocaust age.

When Art Spiegelman’s Maus, an animal-allegory comic book aboutthe Holocaust, made the New York Times fiction best-seller list in

Life Writing | Vol 3, No 2 | 2006 | pp 3–24

Witnessing the Witness: Narrative slippage in ArtSpiegelman’s Maus | Susannah Ketchum Glass

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1991, the artist-author was delighted with the recognition butdisturbed by the classification. In a letter to the newspaper, heacknowledged that “by delineating people with animal heads I’veraised problems of taxonomy for you,” but went on to suggest thatperhaps the editors could add a special “nonfiction/mice” category totheir list (4). As he recounted in a later interview, Spiegelman heardthat there was considerable debate among the editors and that one ofthem suggested ringing the author’s doorbell, and, if a giant mouseanswered, then transferring the book to the nonfiction list.1 Mauswas, of course, moved to the nonfiction side of the ledger, and whilethis initial confusion provides humorous context to the author’sintent, it raises important questions about the nature of memorynarrative, the role of the authorial voice in “remembered” and“received” history, and the function of representation. Who is Maus’sprotagonist? With its masks and competing voices, and the slippagebetween telling, retelling, and interpreting, what does Maus revealabout the nature of subjectivity? How does memory—individual andcollective, relayed and translated—affect agency in our postmoderncondition, and in what way does the nature of what is rememberedaffect the negotiation between past experience and present identity?In exploring these questions, this article seeks to understand thecomplex way in which Maus’s shifting position within the generouslyadaptable category of life writing reflects the intricate influence ofmemory on the formation of identity.

Any scholarly investigation of a text that concerns itself withpresenting a particular experience of the Holocaust negotiates itsway through a minefield of ethical issues. This negotiation ispronounced when textual analysis is pursued through the lens ofpostmodern theory on aspects of memory, representation, andsubjectivity, as I do here. Readers of Holocaust narratives line up ondifferent sides of the theoretical fence when it comes to issues ofagency and responsibility; to many, a postmodern account ofselfhood is incommensurate—if not entirely incompatible—withforms of selfhood that result from actual Holocaust trauma. While Iacknowledge the potential dangers of exploring a Holocaustnarrative in terms of how memory influences and affects the agency

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Susannah Ketchum Glass | Witnessing the Witness

of both survivors themselves and survivors’ survivors, I believe thatthe nature of the medium Spiegelman employs and the genreboundaries he crosses in Maus forces its readers to do just that.

Memory and identity are inextricably linked in Maus: A Survivor’sTale (Volumes I and II); indeed, the subtitle to the first volume—“MyFather Bleeds History”—is a viscerally appropriate one. Vladek’s taleof Holocaust survival carries forth the horror of modern history’scentral trauma in a figuratively fluid state, seeping into every aspectof his son’s attempt to recount that story and staining traditionalnotions of narrative representation. Fittingly, Spiegelman’s Mauscomix co-mix not only words and images but also the past and thepresent, biography and autobiography. In his examination into therole of ethics in life writing, Paul John Eakin observes how “in recentyears, reflecting the circumstance of our relational identities,autobiographies have become increasingly biographical” (9); Maus, Iwould argue, inverts this movement. By telling the story of hisfather’s past, Spiegelman creates for his reader the story of his ownpresent. In other words, testimony becomes testament as the witnessbecomes the witnessed. This is reinforced by the graphic medium inwhich Spiegelman retells his father’s tale; the reader views both theact of witnessing (Artie the son’s solicitation of his father’s story) andthe act of bearing witness (Art the artist’s images of his father’srecollections), thereby duplicating the role of witness as it is enacted.The effect is such that Maus is biographical in generic approach, butundeniably autobiographical in narrative result. Of interest to me ishow Maus blurs the lines between Art’s representation of Vladek’spast and the construction of Art’s own present, thereby revealingmemory as both an inescapable and a pursuable agent in therepresentation of both the self and the past.

In the sense that it destabilizes the boundaries of an event’srepercussions, memory can be seen as a counter-discourse to thenotion of history as an objectified phenomenon. To acknowledge thiscounter-discursivity within the context of a memory narrative of theHolocaust is not, of course, to deny the reality of the experience;instead, it is an attempt to determine memory’s effect on thesubjectivity of its recipients—both those who transmit memories

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and those who translate them. By exploring the unfathomabletragedy of his father’s experience with the unflinching irony of anartist, Spiegelman reveals this counter-discursive potential ofmemory most obviously in the layering of temporal space. Criticsdemonstrate the complexity of the relationship between temporallayers by noting that Maus contains three narrative strands:Vladek’sHolocaust experience, his recounting of that experience to his sonArtie, and Art’s reflections on shaping that experience into a visualnarrative. Of these three strands—distinguishable according toGérard Genette’s useful classification system of story, discourse, andnarrating—I believe the second and third reveal memory as asubversive agent and genre as a shifting construct. Reading Mausthrough Genette’s system, critic Erin McGlothlin notes:

just as the middle level is a metareflection on Vladek’s Holocauststory, so too [the] third level of narrating examines both the originalsite of trauma and the traces of this trauma in the witnessingrelationship. (182)

Seeking to reflect the unspeakableness of the Holocaust in its traces,Spiegelman uses, I believe, these two outer levels of narrative toexpose the irony that Richard Terdiman suggests is the mostcharacteristic tone of any counter-discourse (76).

When the relationship between story, discourse, and narrating isblurred, however, memory’s authorial voice becomes complicated.In Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur notes that the Greeksused two words for what we now commonly refer to as memory:mneme and anamnesis. Mneme designated memory as appearing, as in“popping into the mind,” whereas anamnesis is memory as an objectof a search. In other words, as Ricoeur understands it, “to rememberis to have a memory or to set off in search of a memory” (4). Byconstant oscillation between Vladek’s “Survivor’s Tale” and thesurvival narratives of Artie the son and Art the artist, Spiegelmanplays with the notions of effect and affect inherent in Ricoeur’sunderstanding of the phrase “to remember.” Vladek’s memorieseffect—in other words, they produce—Artie’s story, but by settingoff in search of his father’s memories, Art the artist creates thevehicle for their delivery, thereby affecting their reception.


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For Andreas Huyssen, this interplay of perspectives is an integralpart of remembering the Holocaust half a century after the event. In“Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age,” he suggests:

the increasing temporal and generational distance … has freedmemory to focus on more than just the facts. In general, we havebecome increasingly conscious of how social and collective memoryis constructed through a variety of discourses and layers ofrepresentation. (256)

As a result, memory narratives are rarely contained within asingularly definable, “pure” generic form, nor should they be.Dominick LaCapra discusses the notion of a hybridized genre inHistory, Politics, and the Novel, arguing that hybridized does not mean“blurred” (6). Indeed, he links this understanding of both narrativeform and cultural reality with the larger project of his early work’scritique of historiography, stating that “the past is not an ‘it’ in thesense of an objectified entity that may either be neutrally representedin and for itself or projectively reprocessed in terms of our ownnarrowly ‘presentist’ interests” (10). As I show later in this article,LaCapra’s more recent work on the Holocaust explores memory’srole in this negotiation with history. In Maus, not only the multi-stranded narrative but also the combination of words and imagesreflects these various discourses and layers; indeed, the struggle forauthorial control is often demonstrated in the friction between aframe’s text and its image. At the first intersection of discourse andstory, Artie tells his father he still wants to draw “that book” abouthim (I: 12). As he does so, he envisions his creation of that story,positioning Vladek’s story in his sights, so to speak, as he points athim and then demonstrates his readiness to “frame” that story (we seehim picking up a framed photo in the next panel) (Figure 1). ButVladek’s story looms large, crossing borders and ignoring frameboundaries, as Vladek assures Artie: “It would take many books, mylife, and no one wants anyway to hear such stories” (I: 12). In themiddle frame of a vertical triptych in which Vladek is portrayed threetimes larger than in any other panel, Artie the story-teller is nowframed himself within Vladek’s number-stamped arm and the armsof Vladek’s bicycle, his own memory-vehicle.

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The “variety of discourses” Huyssen sees as constructing memoryis plainly evident in this multi-vocal text, where voices from the pastand the present constantly compete for authorial veracity andcontrol. Vladek has only just relayed his humiliating barn-cleaningexperience for the Nazis as a Polish prisoner of war when he beratesArtie for dropping cigarette ashes on the carpet and complains of theunreasonable expectations of his second wife, Mala (I: 52). Whosevoice do we hear, as the text swings between Vladek’s senselesshumiliation in the past and his peevish complaints in the present?Artie describes to Mala his father’s insistence that Artie as a youngboy eat everything on his plate, before Vladek describes his father

Figure 1: Art Spiegelman, Maus I: 12. Courtesy of Random House.


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starving him to keep him out of the army (I: 43). Vladek describesthe Nazi insistence on curfews and “lights out,” before Artie discovershis own subjection to infantalization—his father has thrown outArtie’s “shabby” coat (I: 68). This type of oscillation throughout Mauscreates a dislocation in context—the question of whose story isbeing told is constantly at issue. In his essay “The Holocaust asVicarious Past,” James Young notes that in a multivocal history:

no single, overarching meaning emerges unchallenged; instead,narrative and counternarrative generate a frisson of meaning intheir exchange, in the process of working through that they nowmutually reinforce. (25)

Art’s attempt to narrate his father’s experience—to present abiographical account of his story—is continuously being challengedby his own need to understand that story and its consequences forhim. His enactment of this impetus, complicated as it is by theimpossibility of making sense of Vladek’s experience and the self-consciousness of being a second-generation survivor, demonstratesthe central roles of both memory and narrative in theautobiographical project. James Olney, who prefers the term peri-autography (“writing about or around the self ”) to autobiography,notes that “memory and narrative, together and alike, are the twomajor epiphenomena of consciousness, the dual defining conditionsof our being human and not something else” (417). However, Olneyacknowledges that these “mutually reflexive acts of memory andnarrative” are “accompanied by the haunting fear that it is impossiblefrom the beginning but also impossible to give over” (xiv–xv). Theneed to give a “voice” to his father’s inhuman treatment in theHolocaust, and the realization that the memory of this experience isan inheritance Art cannot “give over,” account for Art’s ineluctablycentral position in this narrative.

Vladek’s description of the cremation pits at Auschwitz isaccompanied by one of Spiegelman’s most arresting images. Afterrelaying a particularly graphic account of the gas chambers (which heclaims as both eyewitness and reluctant “earwitness” memory),Vladek compares Auschwitz’s giant body-burning graves to the poolat the adjacent resort. The juxtaposition is gruesome, as the reader’s

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eye is pulled to the image of mice—dead and alive—seeminglyswimming in flames, under a caption that reports: “And the fat fromthe burning bodies they scooped and poured again so everyone couldburn better” (II: 72). But these are mice contorted in terrifyingMunch-like screams; it is almost impossible to envision humansbeing burned alive. In fact, as Art’s wife Françoise later remarkswhile contemplating Vladek’s chilling tale, it’s “almost impossible tobelieve Auschwitz ever happened” (II: 74). But Spiegelman subvertsthis unwitting desire to forget the reality of the past in the second,reflective level of discourse. Here, the bugs and the cold of theCatskills night are very real and all too imaginable. As Art complainsthat “these damn bugs are eating me alive” and zaps them withinsecticide, a new representation of reality is forced on anunimaginable Holocaust memory (II: 74). But Spiegelman’s art doesnot actually force, however, but buzzes and stings in a floating zoneof suggestive reference; Art and Françoise are shown casuallywalking inside to escape the cold as poisoned, dying bugs fall to theground behind them (Figure 2).The allusion to the Nazis’ depictionof the Jews as vermin and the Auschwitz reality of gas chambers andburning pits is unmistakable, and Vladek’s memories take on aheightened degree of horror when contrasted against the ease withwhich Artie and Françoise escape their torments. The connection iscomplicated, however, by the artist’s ironic tone of self-representation; as one bug dies outside the borders of the frame, werecognize the blurred lines between Artie’s quest for Vladek’sbiographical past and Art’s realization of his own autobiographicalpresent. This is, of course, the “frisson of meaning” to which Youngrefers: the engagement of memory versus the exteriorizing nature ofdocumentation. As Paul Ricoeur observes in his discussion ofHolocaust literature, “either one counts the cadavers or one tells thestory of the victims” (Time and Narrative 188). The story of thevictims is an ongoing one, and Spiegelman’s ironic depiction of amanageable, escapable present highlights the presence of the tracesof this past, both in his narrator-self and his readers.

This impulse is at work earlier in the same chapter, when Art theartist confronts his own psychological trauma. Overwhelmed by thecommercial success awarded to his witness account, but belittled by


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the implications of surviving the survivor (Vladek has died, Maus Ihas been published, and Spiegelman’s narrator-self is reflecting onthe results), Art admits to his shrink, Pavel, that “No matter what Iaccomplish, it doesn’t seem like much compared to survivingAuschwitz” (II: 44). At this point, Art’s construction of Vladek’s lifehas become the story, and his reflection on this construction withPavel is now the discourse. Having hijacked the story, Art placeshimself in the narrative position of “survivor” (though the significanceof this is complicated by the mouse-mask he wears, an issue to whichI will return). This, of course, has its consequences. Cathy Caruth,exploring the “inherent latency” of trauma (the experience victims oftraumatic events have of only being able to access the trauma inanother time), claims that “survival itself … can be a crisis” (9). Ashis discussion with Pavel implies, guilt about surviving the Holocaustis as real an emotion for Art as it might be for Vladek. But theautobiographical impulse to create and sustain one’s own identity isstrong; one page after admitting his sense of inferiority in light of

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Figure 2: Art Spiegelman, Maus II: 74. Courtesy of Random House.


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Vladek’s survival story, we see the shrunken Art leaving Pavel’soffice, regaining his stature frame by frame as he figures a way toreassert his own ability and reclaim his grasp on the survivor’s story:“Maybe I could show the tin shop and not draw the drill press. I hateto draw machinery” (II: 46). The swastika-like shadows on the wallbehind Art remind us that the Holocaust survival story is Vladek’s,but the following page’s illustration of a barely formed drill pressconfirms Art’s authorial role in soliciting and constructing thememory narrative of that past.

In Maus, Art transmits memory of the past within a biographicalframework, but he explores the consequences of that past through anautobiographical lens. In her recent essay “Happy, Happy Ever After:The Transformation of Trauma between the Generations in ArtSpiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” Victoria Elmwood states thatSpiegelman’s role in his father’s survival story is that of “familialscribe, he who is entrusted with the transmission of family history”(696). While noting that Spiegelman does write “his ownpalimpsestic self-narrative as he refigures his father’s narrative”(696), she suggests that he does so in order to narrate himself “intothe family legacy [of trauma] without appropriating the experienceof the Holocaust as his own” (691). Elmwood is concerned with theway in which Spiegelman succeeds (or fails) to achieve this balance,something she explores under the rubric of heteropathicidentification. While I agree that an important distinction must bemade between appropriating the specific trauma of the Holocaustand reflecting the ongoing nature of that trauma within a project ofself-construction, what interests me is the way in which Maus reflectsthe “palimpsestuousness” of identity.2 Vladek’s experience as aHolocaust survivor is historically real, but the only way for Art toapproach it is through memory; in other words, Vladek’s self isconstructed through the story he tells Art. In the same way, by havinghis narrator-self “redraw” his father’s story, Spiegelman draws hisreader-viewers’ attention to the conjunctive role that memory—Vladek’s, Art’s, and even the reader’s “public” memory—plays inconstructing Art’s narrative.

Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth explores the implication and politicalpotential of this “palimpsestuousness” of identity in her essay “Agency


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in the Discursive Condition.” Favouring the term “discursive” over“postmodern” as a descriptor of our time, Ermarth believes that the“clue to a new understanding of subjectivity, and thus of agency, liesin Saussure’s emphasis on language as a differential, not referential(structural) model” (43). She notes that “identity is not somethingessential and atomic, like the vestigial ‘soul’ of modernity; identity issequence and palimpsest” (47) and that agency is thus “not asingularity but a process, a happening” (46). In light of Spiegelman’sproject, Ermarth’s explanation of subjectivity helps to illustrate thatArt’s presentation of his father’s experience as a Holocaust victim isnot a “placing” of this event as an objectified aspect of Vladek’s pastbut a recognition of the contradictory way in which it exists in hispresent. Vladek is not firstly a Holocaust victim, then an irasciblehusband and demanding father, and finally the biographical subject ofArt’s book; he is all things simultaneously. Similarly,Art is not firstlya survivor’s son, then a teller of that survivor’s tale, then an angst-ridden narrating self, then a critical artist; he is, as Spiegelman’sshifting narrative reveals, all things at once. I see the narrative strandsof discourse and narration in Maus as the rings created when water isdisturbed, not as the multi-tiered structure so often depicted indiscussions of metanarrative texts. Circling around the disturbanceof the story, these rings do not confine separate and distinct aspectsof the story within them but simply magnify the effects of thedisturbance outward.

My assertion that Maus is as much about Art’s attempts to relatehis father’s past—and therefore about Art and his motivations andinterpretations—as it is about Vladek’s traumatizing experience inAuschwitz is not to suggest that the two can be equated, nor is it toassume that Spiegelman’s goal in creating Maus was anything otherthan to depict the horror of his father’s experience at the hands of theNazis. In his harsh criticism of representations of life in theconcentration camps that oversimplify the reality, Primo Levi statesthat the problem lies in our “difficulty or inability to perceive theexperience of others” and our tendency to assimilate others’experiences to our own, “as if the hunger in Auschwitz were the sameas that of someone who has skipped a meal, or as if escape from

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Treblinka were similar to an escape from an ordinary jail” (158). Atthe same time, however, Levi acknowledges the blurring memory ofthose survivors still alive, and he uses much of his book The Drownedand the Saved to stress the importance of representing thecomplexities of the victims’ experience. In Maus, the complex realityof Vladek’s experience is illustrated in the multi-voiced method ofits telling. For Vladek, the reality of the Holocaust is not only whathe physically and psychically experienced at the time but also whathe reconstructs of that experience through memory and his son’squestions. For Art, his father’s experience of the Holocaust is onlyaccessible through what Art hears of this past within the confines oftheir present relationship. While Ermarth’s idea of “identity aspalimpsest” may appear antithetical to the notion of representing theHolocaust victim’s experience as unique, it supports the imperativeof recognizing that within our postmodern state, “there is no infinite,neutral envelope for ‘events’ and ‘individuals,’ not even time, or, atleast not even the neutrality of historical time” (51). Vladek’s storybecomes, in fact, Art’s story, and Art’s need to tell that storynecessarily takes on an autobiographical form.

The figure of the palimpsest is a particularly appropriate one inelucidating what is going on in the relation between memory andnarrative in Maus. With its dual definitions of a manuscript thatreveals an earlier, incompletely erased text and an object or placethat reflects its history, the palimpsest is both a literal and figurative“unmasking” of the past. The visual art of projecting images ontopublic buildings or monuments is perhaps the most obvious exampleof how a palimpsest can work, and since the images in Maus are asimportant as the text, this medium is a useful one to examine in thiscontext. James Young has explored the powerful results of oneartist’s interpretation of how memory can and should be employedin demonstrating the effects of the Holocaust, and his analysis isinstructive in demonstrating how an act of remembrance can“transform the sites of history into the sites of memory” (At Memory’sEdge 62). In light of my examination of the slippage between genericforms in Maus, however, I find a projection performed by thepolitical artist Krzysztof Wodiczko to be especially illuminating.3 In


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1985, while working on a projection onto Nelson’s Column inLondon’s Trafalgar Square, Wodiczko took the opportunity to“redirect” the gaze of his xenon arc slide projectors onto thepediment of South Africa House, placing an image of the Naziswastika over the building’s deeply etched architectural relief of aboat, under which are written the words “Good Hope.”4 This was,of course, at a time when public condemnation of South Africa’sapartheid policies was gathering momentum, and Wodiczko’sprojection enabled viewers to “read” the building through a visualgrid that was intended to provoke a re-thinking, not only of what laybeneath but also of the individual’s place within the public “space” ofhistory. Instead of reflecting the atrocities of the Holocaust, which iswhat the swastika symbol immediately brings to mind, Wodiczko’sprojection relied on collective memory of that “signed” past to reflecton a contemporary situation of human subjugation. In a similar way,by framing his father’s past within his own self-conscious experienceof recovering that past, Spiegelman relies on the reader-viewer’sidentification with a “search for self ” to prompt a more individual—and examined—understanding of the Holocaust.

As Domick LaCapra writes in History and Memory after Auschwitz,“Memory—along with its lapses and tricks—poses questions tohistory in that it points to problems that are still alive or investedwith emotion and value” (8). Representation is, of course, one ofmemory’s tricks. Much has been written about Spiegelman’s use ofthe animal metaphor in Maus, with Spiegelman’s own explanationbeing one of distancing the unimaginable in order, conversely, toforce a fresh envisioning of the trauma. Just as intriguing, though, isSpiegelman’s use of the mask. By “masking” his characters—bothliterally, on occasion, and figuratively, through what LaCapradescribes as a “multiply mediated” text (154)—Spiegelmanfrequently ruptures his own metaphor. He introduces the animalmask when Jews are passing for Poles in attempts to escape Naziround-ups, but then uses it most continuously near the beginning ofVolume II, when Art’s self-conscious discussion with his therapistabout the guilt of surviving questions, through implication, theauthenticity of Jews who survived the Holocaust. In so doing, the

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reader is led to question the motives and authenticity of Art thecommercially successful but psychologically tortured creator ofMaus I.

In the scene with Pavel, Spiegelman plays with an ironicconsideration of an artist’s insecurity to prompt a revisedunderstanding of a survivor’s vulnerability and resourcefulness.Likewise, Spiegelman’s figurative form of masking forces his readersto examine their own motives when reading the complex characterof Vladek. By presenting Vladek’s story within an inner frame ofdiscourse (Vladek’s recounting of his story) and an outer form ofnarration (Art displaying Artie’s dissemination of that narrative), wesee Vladek the resourceful Holocaust survivor through the figure ofVladek the difficult, burdensome father. The depiction invitessympathy but is not always flattering. In his own re-telling of life inthe camps,Vladek often comes across as manipulative and sometimesruthless in his bid to survive. His responses to the Nazi horrors areobviously justifiable, but Spiegelman’s multi-leveled presentation ofthe story presents an ironic subtext. Vladek in Auschwitz extends hislife by bluffing about being a tinsmith, as Vladek in the Catskills bluffshis way into The Pines “guests only” resort for free bingo and prizes(II: 36). Here the link is poignantly humorous, but elsewhere itbecomes troublesome. In the midst of describing time spent atDachau, including his ingenious method of maintaining a lice-freeshirt in order to be allowed food, Vladek stops to manipulate asupermarket manager into exchanging an opened box of Special Kfor new groceries by explaining “how it was in the camps” (II: 90).And on the return trip from the supermarket, in a series of framesimmediately following the depiction of Vladek’s final journey out ofthe hell of the camp in a train he remembers incredulously as one“not for cows and horses, but … for people!” (II: 97),Vladek reactsin racist horror when Art and Françoise pick up a black hitchhiker:“Oy—it’s a colored guy, a shvartser! Push quick on the gas!” (II: 98).The judgment provoked in the reader by this link between discourseand narration is both painful and ironic.

This lack of any veneration of the victim is part of whatfamiliarizes the defamiliarized in Maus, humanizing the mice of thetext. By shocking us with Vladek’s humanity—even as he relays his


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tragic story as a Holocaust victim—Spiegelman’s project asksdifficult questions of its audience. What is it that we expect from avictim, and what is it that we want from a survivor? Vladek ispresented with his foibles intact, and this, as Spiegelman has noted,is intentional:

If only admirable people were shown to have survived, then theimplicit moral would have been that only admirable peopledeserved to survive, as opposed to the fact that people deserved tosurvive as people.5

Levi refutes the tendency to ignore the existence of both good andbad in the victims of the Holocaust. In his provocative considerationof the “gray zone” of the concentration camps—victims who becamewilling or unwilling collaborators—Levi notes that “an infernalorder such as National Socialism exercises a frightful power ofcorruption”; it “degrades its victims and make them similar to itself,because it needs both great and small complicities” (68). To ignorethis fact is to ignore the full consequences of the Nazi evil; toacknowledge it is to believe, with Levi, that “Every victim is to bemourned, and every survivor is to be helped and pitied, but not alltheir acts should be set forth as examples” (20). Though presentedas neither a collaborator nor an evil man, Vladek is, however, fullyhuman—a victim who did what he had to do to survive, and asurvivor who does what he wants to do to live. Art’s portrayal of hisstory, entangled as it is with Artie’s relationship with his father,requires of its audience an engagement with both the personal andhistorical “presence” of the Holocaust.

Unlike Vladek, Art’s mother Anja is, in her absence, beyondcriticism. She offers a counter-discursive position to the book’shandling of the dominant notion of survival; in an oppositional sense,she represents anti-survival. Having made it through the Holocaust,having remembered her experiences and re-written her diaries, shethen commits suicide. Her life is re-told by Vladek and her death isre-written by Art (both son-Art and comix-art). Both Vladek whotransmits memory and Art who translates memory are at work here.Anya herself is silent, a discourse of absence, but the obvious strugglefor control of her story helps to demonstrate how memory is

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constructed in this text. When Artie wants to know about hismother’s experience at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Vladek’s responsesconvey as much—if not more—about his own survival techniques asthey do about Anya. As he remembers it, even in the camp she wasin need of his care; when we do get a poignant glimpse of Anya’ssuffering (she is kicked for allegedly taking a second piece of bread),it is through the heels of the boots Vladek later mends for her sadisticKapo (thus appeasing the Kapo and alleviating Anya’s misery) (II: 63)(Figure 3). Anja’s almost total lack of voice is complicated byVladek’s apparent consumption of her separate identity. Havingdestroyed—in a textual holocaust of grief—Anja’s only form ofagency in the present,Vladek assures Artie that he can tell her story:“I can tell you … she went through the same what me: terrible” (I:158). This is hardly Anja’s voice, as becomes obvious when Vladeksums up his story of survival with a delirious statement of wishfulthinking: “More I don’t need to tell you. We were both very happy,and lived happy, happy ever after” (II: 136).There was, of course, nosuch joyous “happy ever after” for Anja, and the destruction of hertale completes her silence. Artie’s accusation of Vladek as amurderer—presented as a coda to Vladek and Anja’s arrival at themost notorious “factory” of mass-murder, Auschwitz—effectivelycondemns a uni-vocal history and complicates the notion of reliablerepresentation. Resisting the temptation of a totalizing perspective,Spiegelman presents his mice in all their human frailty. Indeed, justas exposure to good does not preclude the enactment of evil (as Naziappreciation for art has shown us), nor does suffering automaticallyennoble its victim. Spiegelman himself argues that “the main thingsuffering causes is pain. It doesn’t necessarily make a better person”(Le).

Inherent in Anja’s death is an echo of the incredulity of post-Holocaust tragedy expressed when one of Vladek’s fellow survivingJews from Sosnowiec is murdered by Polish villagers: “For this hesurvived” (II: 132). Again we’re forced to confront our expectationsof the role of the survivor: Must survival be for something, asopposed to simply against annihilation? Has Vladek succeeded whereAnja has failed? And what do we make of Art’s “survival,” with itsaccompanying commercial success from the story of his parents’ life-


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destroying suffering? The questions that Maus raises are integral toboth a discussion of narrative structure and the projects’ success. Byrevealing Vladek’s memory-narrative to be malleable, rupturedfrequently by both Vladek’s actions in the present and his son’sinterpretation of the past, Spiegelman is able to explore the effectsof the Holocaust, as opposed to simply relaying its reality. Bysuggesting that Maus’s depiction of an author who creates his story byrecounting his father’s is a form of autobiography, I amsimultaneously proposing that calling the text an autobiography is aninterpretive strategy on the part of the reader. The story Art relaysof Vladek’s experience is a personal account of a collective history,one inherited by both Spiegelman and his audience. The essays in TheEthics of Life Writing examine more readily obvious examples of theautobiographical genre, but Eakin’s explanation of the effect of life-writing texts is worth quoting at length:

All of the essays in this collection target texts and their authors, butto the extent that the kind of writing they discuss is an extension ofthe stories we tell about ourselves every day, we all engage in “lifewriting” constantly. When we read it, then, we are not merelydisinterested witnesses of the ethical problems it entails; we areourselves part of the game.… In this sense we are crypto-autobiographers, asking questions about our selves and our lifestories indirectly by observing others as they struggle to findanswers. (14)

Envisioning Vladek’s experience “down there” (to use Levi’sevocative term) is no game; nor is witnessing the witness’srelationship to this memory an easy experience. It is, however, anecessarily familiar challenge, one that demands an engagement withthe questions Art asks of both his father and himself.

The core of any examination or representation of the Holocaustis, in Huyssen’s words, “unimaginable, unspeakable, andunrepresentable horror” (259). He goes on to say:

Post-Holocaust generations can only approach that core by mimeticapproximation, a mnemonic strategy which recognizes the event inits otherness and beyond identification or therapeutic empathy, but


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which physically innervates some of the horror and the pain in aslow and persistent labor of remembrance. (259)

Spiegelman has stated that he never intended Maus to be a historylesson; there are, of course, countless museums and archives ofphotographs and testimonials that provide that function. But whatMaus does do, in its representation of the counter-discursive aspectsof memory and its manipulation of generic form, is negotiate a wayinto the ongoing nature of the Holocaust, the effects of the effects ofthe atrocities. Indeed, the numbing totality of the Holocaust createsproblems with reception. It has been observed that most visitorstouring Auschwitz find the experience so overwhelming that theynever make it to Birkenau, which is considered the more importanthorror to witness.6 And in her study of the use of Holocaust imagery,Marianne Hirsch has noted that despite the plenitude of visualdocumentation, the same very few photographic images are used“over and over again iconically and emblematically to signal thisevent” (7). In fact, Spiegelman himself has used many of these iconicimages as background for his own drawings: the gate to Auschwitzwith its deadly ironic sign “Arbeit macht frei,” the train tracksconverging at the entrance to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and the piles ofcorpses being bulldozed. But these drawings, as Hirsch suggests,enable us:

to move out of their obsessive repetition, for they are both familiarand estranged. And thus they reconstitute a viewing relation thatcannot be repaired, but that can perhaps be reenvisioned in waysthat do not negate the rupture at its source. (33)

Indeed, reconstituting our relation to history, by re-envisioning therole of memory, is the ultimate success of Spiegelman’s Maus. Bydismantling any hierarchy between story, discourse, and narration ina multi-framed text, by acknowledging the multivocal aspect of allmemory narratives, and by defamiliarizing the victim-survivor todraw attention to the role of representation in a memory narrative,Spiegelman demonstrates memory’s powerfully counter-discursivepotential. Illustrating the etymological root of palimpsestuousness(to scrape again) in both its examination of the past and its

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recognition of memory’s influence on present identity, Maus’s multi-layered, multi-voiced narrative negates the option of everdesignating the Holocaust as a “discrete, temporally circumscribedevent” (Levine 325).

Acknowledgement

Images from MAUS I and II have been reproduced courtesy of Random House.MAUS I: A Survivor’s Tale/My Father Bleeds History, copyright © 1973, 1980,1981, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986 by Art Spiegelman and MAUS II: A Survivor’sTale/And Here My Trouble Began, copyright © 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991 by ArtSpiegelman. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division ofRandom House, Inc., New York.

Notes

1 Spiegelman has related this anecdote in a number of articles; he repeats it in aninterview conducted in October 1993, which is included in the “Art on Art”section of the Maus CD-ROM.

2 In her article “Agency and the Discursive Tradition,” Elizabeth Deeds Ermarthcredits Scottish poet and scholar Michael Alexander with coining this term.

3 In his book At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Artand Architecture, James Young examines the work of several artists of the post-Holocaust generation, including that of Shimon Attie, who projectsphotographs of an historical Jewish past onto European architectural siteswhere that Jewish presence is now lost. I encountered Young’s book afterconnecting my interpretation of Spiegelman’s narrative as palimpsestuous toKrzysztof Wodiczko’s work, and though Attie’s projections are obviouslyrelated to the content of Maus, I see the Wodiczko projection I discuss ashelping to illustrate the effect of its form.

4 See pp 116–117 of Wodiczko, Public Address, for an image of the projection andthe author’s observations.

5 See Lawrence Weschler’s essay “Art’s Father, Vladek’s Son,” included in theAppendices section of the Maus CD-ROM.

6 In Mourning Becomes the Law, Gillian Rose comments on observing thisphenomena while participating in a study on how best to preserve Auschwitzas a memorial site.


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References

Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1995.

Eakin, Paul John, ed. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,2004.

Elmwood,Victoria A. “‘Happy, Happy Ever After’:The Transformation of TraumaBetween the Generations in Art Spiegelman’s Maus:A Survivor’s Tale.” Biography27.4 (Fall 2004): 691–720.

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. “Agency in the Discursive Condition.” History andTheory 40 (Dec. 2001): 34–58.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work ofPostmemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001): 5–37.

Huyssen, Andreas. “Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age.” TwilightMemories: Making Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995.

LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1998.

——. History, Politics, and the Novel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.Le, Cecilia. “Maus Writer Speaks.” Campus Times Online 21 Mar. 2002

<http://www.campustimes.org/news/2002/03/21/News/Maus-Writer.Speaks-221003.shtml>.

Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York:Vintage Books, 1989.

Levine, Michael G. “Necessary Stains: Spiegelman’s Maus and the Bleeding ofHistory.” American Imago 59:3 (2002): 317–341.

McGlothlin, Erin. “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in ArtSpiegelman’s Maus.” Narrative 11:2 (May 2003): 177–198.

Olney, James. Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago: TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 1998.

Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and DavidPellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

——. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Rose, Gillian. Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Spiegelman, Art. Letter. New York Times Book Review 29 Dec. 1991: 4.Spiegelman, Art. MAUS:A Survivor’s Tale. Vol. I: My Father Bleeds History. New York:

Pantheon Books, 1986.Spiegelman, Art. MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale.Vol. II: And Here My Troubles Began. New

York: Pantheon Books, 1991.Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. CD-ROM. New York:

Voyager, 1994.

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Terdiman, Richard. “Introduction: On Symbolic Resistance.” Discourse/CounterDiscourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-CenturyFrance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Artand Architecture. New Haven:Yale University Press, 2000.

——. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and theAfterimages of History.” Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and theHolocaust. Eds. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer. Madison: TheUniversity of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Wodiczko, Krzysztof. Public Address. Minneapolis:Walker Art Center, 1992.


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Documents

Witnessing the Witness: Narrative slippage in Art Spiegelman’s Maus