Bound: The Atrocity Explanation
Maus Gets Meta
The universe “is not an ethical place,” said Art Spiegleman to the LA Times’ David L. Ulin. But does that mean we must be ethical creatures? That’s some “conundrum,” and one he’s not willing to let be “the take-away” from his mighty Maus. The whole “God has a plan even if I don’t understand it” notion doesn’t “work for” him either. Then again, after putting so much heart and soul into “deal[ing] with the horrors of the history” that is the Holocaust, how could it?
These are just two of the prime questions addressed in Spiegelman’s just-out MetaMaus (Pantheon), a rampant and in-depth revisiting of his breakthrough Maus. Some of the others are: “Why comics? Why mice? [and] Why the Holocaust?” Though he says he’s been answering those over and over since the book first racked. Now Spiegelman also seems to be asking how he might finally get beyond his breakthrough epic (and past those questions), because frankly that mouse mask has become something of a nuisance.
That maus mask also represents something of a milestone — for Spiegelman, and for the art of illustrated history itself. There was of course the special Pulitzer Prize Maus was awarded in 1992 (the first for a comic book), and the subsequent seriousness with which his work helped the form to become embraced (nearly every major museum in the country has by now held at least one large scale comics art exhibition). At the same time, his craft (and craftiness) opened to door to ever more illustrated addressings of the subject, few of which summoned the candor that characterized Spiegelman’s great creation.
As Spiegelman notes in one of the printed exchanges between himself and Hillary Chute, who served as both “chief enabler and associate editor in the project [he] kept resisting,” (and whose interviews make up the bulk of MetaMaus), “comic books have now colonized the Holocaust.” To Speigelman, “the most bizarre was a life of Anne Frank as told to Astro Boy,” which made manga of the subject. Then there were the “fictionalized color series of graphic novels” published by the Anne Frank House itself, which “are very earnest and drawn in a pleasant Tin Tin style,” which kinda “strike [him] as if they’re trying to set [his] work straight by smoothing down the rough edges;” by “trying to make it pretty.” The result “re-enters that maudlin sentimentalizing notion of suffering and how it ennobles,” especially “the primacy” of the suffering of the Jews.
There was nothing ever pretty about that maus metaphor, which Spiegelman expropriated from a score of anti-Semites, most prominently Hitler, who Art infamously credited as his “collaborator.” There could be no genocide without first de-humanizing an entire people, and Spiegelman cites everything from Franz Hippler’s 1940 “documentary” The Eternal Jew (“Just like the Jews of mankind, rats represent the very essence of malice and subterranean destruction.”), to the use of the gas Zyklon B (“a pesticide manufactured to kill vermin”) to show some of the many ways in which this was attempted. Like use of the n-word is (theoretically) supposed to neuter its malice, Spiegelman was using “Hitler’s pejorative attitudes against themselves.” It’s the empowering of the oppressed via the oppressor’s own tools.
While few folks (outside of Israel, anyway) had issues with Jews as die Mauzen or Germans as die Katzen, Poles weren’t so keen on being portrayed as pigs. Consequently, Maus didn’t make it to print in Poland until 2001, and then only because the translator (journalist Piotr Bikont, of the Solidarity newspaper Gazeta) had become so fed up with the continuous misplacing of plates and other sundry reasons for delay, he “set up his own publishing house and publish[ed] it himself.” That, in turn, set off a small storm of protests, including the burning of the book in front of Gazeta’s offices (which Bikont responded to by donning a pig mask of his own), and left Spiegelman feeling “proud!”
“It proves I succeeded at getting at a real issue,” he says, “even if breaking a taboo incurs anger.”
Not all of the source material was inherently negative, however, and Spiegleman makes a point of paying respect to some of the anthropomorphic images that most inspired him way back when, be it an “evocative” photo of a Beatrix Potter ballet (“that had humans wearing very furry, large-sized animal heads”), or a series of “especially solemn and sober” early/mid 20th c. Belgian (?) postcards.
“Then there’s that crazy cat artist in England…” he adds “who went mad and painted schizophrenic, psychedelic cat pictures that I discovered in some Time-Life book on the mind and its aberrations.” Spiegelman’s speaking of Louis Wain (1860-1939), who also owed his career to anthropomorphizing, and who may or may not have gone mad because of it. (Some say Wain came down with a case of toxoplasmosis, of which cats are primary carriers.) Neverthless, Spiegelman “loved Wain’s work before he lost his marbles and after.” And he kept around representations throughout the creating of Maus.
“Why mice?” (or for that matter, “Why cats and pigs and dogs?”), as remarked, is just one of the many questions Spiegelman thoroughly and unequivocally answers in MetaMaus, and the visual source material is just one of the many aspects he thoroughly and unequivocally covers in the extensive Q&A. There’s also a “lightly edited” transcript of his father Vladek’s ‘70s series of interviews, as well as interviews with women who knew his mother Anja “in the camps and after,” a Maus chronology, and a Spiegelman Family Tree. There’s also a hyperlinked DVD that includes all of the aforementioned, in addition to a “metameta” supplement and “Anja’s Bookshelf” (which boasts “two rare 1946 booklets of drawings and cartoons (!) of death camp survivors.”
To say (as the liner notes do) that in MetaMaus “Spiegleman looks inside his modern classic” really doesn’t do justice to the whole of this comprehensive offering. Because here is nothing less than the what gave Maus its mighty roar.
Read it and reap.
