What?
You found a TYPO!!! Wow! Thank you.
No I seriously thought you meant to use that word and I didn’t understand why.
I’d actually love to read something you wrote sometime, should you ever feel like sharing it.
Can’t speak to other Jewish cartoonists (I don’t read that many graphic novels) but I’m wondering why it’s bad that he undercut the reliability of his narrator? The vast, vast majority of the book he takes what his dad says about his past experiences at face value (including times Vladek is exceptionally clever). The only time I think he questions what Vladek says about the past is one place where his dad doesn’t remember an orchestra where there was apparently one attested in the historical record, which I thought was a really interesting way of pointing out the limits of eyewitness testimony, even one that we generally trust.
Now, what Vladek says in the present, about e.g. his relationship with his current wife… well, yes, he obviously is biased in many things he says. But that made it even more interesting to me, because it’s not just a story about a Holocaust survivor, it’s a story about a father and a son who have been traumatized in different ways and don’t understand each other, and even when they understand each other they’re still from such different worlds that it’s hard for them. This spoke very heavily to me as someone in much the same situation – my parents aren’t Holocaust survivors, but they went through traumatic experiences that are almost unimaginable to me, and their trauma informed our family in ways that all of us are still working through. (And I have experienced the same phenomenon of unreliable narration with my parents, where I implicitly trust facts my parents say about the far past, though they sometimes interpret things differently than I would; and they have some definite unreliable spots in the present.)
Granted, every animal in Maus Is non-kosher, except the British fish.
Can’t speak to other Jewish cartoonists (I don’t read that many graphic novels) but I’m wondering why it’s bad that he undercut the reliability of his narrator?
As a storytelling technique, it’s valid and even riveting. As an historical narrative, it’s self-negating. MAUS’s importance as a great comic book is beyond dispute, but I don’t think that’s why it is in so many high school libraries. As a document of the Holocaust, undercutting Vladek’s reliability as a narrator is problematic, as much as the cat-and-mouse cartoon shorthand depiction of a pivotal event of the modern age. Spiegelman isn’t a historian, doesn’t claim to be one, and created a wonderful work that nonetheless lacks a historian’s rigor. Other works by other writers have this, and the distinction should be made to students reading it as part of their school curriculum. I don’t dispute that it was worth some kind of Pulitzer, but there are Pulitzer prizes for journalism, history, biography and autobiography. When touting the importance of this one to young readers, it should be made clear that the Pulitzer Spiegelman got for MAUS was not for any of those categories.
You’ve nailed it. Especially the breakdown in relationships among generations because of fundamental differences that even the most compassionate child cannot bridge. And both having a mother with trauma-induced mental illness myself, and having personally experienced severe depression and suicidal ideation, I was drawn even further into the narrative. Spigelman’s mother was severely depressed prior to the Holocaust and it’s arguable she would have killed herself even if she hadn’t experienced that.
What spoke to me about the story was its universality, and I think the people-as-animals device served to emphasize that universality. For those of us who are not Jewish, it’s easier to psychologically distance yourself from the horror of the Holocaust because there’s always this little part of you that knows, that’s not me. When it’s about a bunch of mice it’s harder to make that distinction between self and other. This is what I remember thinking as I finished it, this isn’t something that happened decades ago that is so far removed from where we are now. It’s about all of us. This is about humanity. And the impact still reverberates.
Thank you @Horatio_Hellpop for your thoughtful analysis.
Incidentally, Spiegelman says that, by the time he needed to show some British people in the story, he was already feeling cornered in by the animal imagery and people expecting some deep metaphor for each nationality (“What would you make Italians as? And the Spanish? And…”) I think this is alluded to in the books when he’s sketching out ideas for Francoise and in the “real life” portion when he visits his psychologist. Anyway, he went “British… uh… fish & chips… sure, why not” and that’s as deep as it went.
At the sanitarium early in the first book, he has rabbits, reindeer, bulls, an elephant walking with a giraffe, an equine (zebra? horse? donkey?), etc. It was just a “Various people living together peacefully” than trying to peg each one to a nationality.
I think the idea that the child of a Holocaust survivor must be so far removed from the source of their own trauma that they aren’t allowed to talk openly about it is… problematic. Writers and artists are forever cannibalizing our own lives to create stuff of value. If someone told me, “You can write about anything but your Mom and the profound impact your mother’s trauma had on your life,” I’d tell them to take a walk. This is leaving aside the fact that his father, the man who went through it all, was an active collaborator telling his own story through his son’s graphic novel medium. So that’s one man who wanted his own story to be told in that way.
Often when we say we shouldn’t talk about this or that thing in our art, it’s just serving the people who want to suppress the truth. Maybe Spiegelman’s truth was too painful for some Jews, I dunno, or maybe some just didn’t think you could make anything meaningful out of a graphic novel – I don’t know to what extent the chosen medium was a factor in their assessment. Or maybe their feelings are totally understandable and valid, but it was still important for him to do it.
It’s worth noting that there have always been prominent critics of people who write about the Holocaust in their own way. See all the heat that Viktor Frankl got for Man’s Search for Meaning. And that’s really not unique to Holocaust-related art; as long as there is art, there will be criticism.
I have read a few books about the Holocaust. I’ve read Night by Elie Wiesel, Schindler’s List, The Diary of Anne Frank, Man’s Search for Meaning, and Maus. Man’s Search for Meaning changed my life philosophically to the point that I gave my son the middle name Victor, after Viktor Frankl. But nothing had as much emotional resonance for me as Maus.
I don’t recall her exact words, but Judith Herman in the landmark clinical psychology book Trauma and Recovery wrote that the path to healing was to speak the unspeakable. And it’s hard. It’s painful. It hurts to say it out loud. And there will probably always be people who would rather you didn’t. But it’s the only way through.
Shit. I just finished Kindred, and it was amazing. I really only read it because I want to read the Earthseed books, but I’m worried they’re just a little too close for comfort right now, and wanted to see if I’d like Butler’s writing. Unfortunately, I really enjoyed Kindred (if “enjoy” is a way to describe it), and know I have to get to it and read them.
I will take you up on that. Soon.
Oh, oky. So I can still teach it in the 6th or 7th grade at that school?
Should we assume that’s a ‘no’?
I think the fact that we have been discussing Maus so thoroughly indicates that it might make a good candidate for inclusion in a high school English course.
I’ll admit, I never thought of including graphic novels in any kind of English Lit course, but maybe they should be. At least one of the story arcs in the Sandman saga might be suitable (Season of Mists, where Lucifer expels all the demons from Hell, and hands the keys to Dream, who is beset by all kinds of beings from various mythologies who want the title to Hell). Or V for Vendetta. I could see some great high school class discussions arising from those.
Interesting idea.
There are lots of graphic novels that aspire to and achieve literary sophistication, and are worth attention in an academic setting. It’s not just frustrated geeks trying to argue for the greatness of Killing Joke or whatever.
For example, Will Eisner’s Contract with God is one of the first books where the term “graphic novel” was consciously applied by the author (Eisner helped popularize the idea), and it’s a genuinely great piece of work. It includes some sexual content that would make it inappropriate for a younger high school class, but I would not hesitate to commend it to an older reader as an example of what the medium is truly capable of.
For a younger set of readers, I would suggest Jeff Smith’s Bone as an extended reading project for an older primary school class. It’s very accessible and slowly grows in depth and complexity, and teaches kids the joys of long-form storytelling. Both of my kids are dedicated readers and I credit Bone in large part with giving them the attention span to sit with a series of books for several weeks when they were younger.
I’m with you there, certainly. There are some that, had they been written in prose instead of with pictures, would be automatic shoo-ins. Heck, Gaiman published Stardust as a prose novel, albeit with illustrations when they were warranted. And that would be another good one to study for various themes.
But I was thinking about more senior high school students (11th and 12th grades). Your idea of Bone for younger readers is a good one. I am unfamiliar with it, outside of flipping through it a couple of times at the comic shop, but I trust your judgment.
Do we have a problem nowadays with young people who are reluctant to read anything that isn’t presented on some sort of screen? I don’t know, and I’m not about to guess, but perhaps if the words came with pictures that occupied a full page (we’re a long way beyond the six-panel comic book page that I remember from my childhood), we might get kids turning pages instead of clicking “Next” and having to enlarge, or scrolling down.
If that’s the case, then I’d suggest that handing them a paper copy of pretty much anything that was mentioned in the “Books You Hated” thread is only going to make them hate literature even more. Perhaps graphic novels are a way to get them to like literature, to understand the ideas behind them, to get the picture (heh), to appreciate what the author is trying to say. Once they get hold of that, then we can move on to words-only books.
Like I said, an interesting idea.
No, we don’t, as far as I know. In my (admittedly limited) experience, I don’t see teenagers reading long-form text (or graphic novels) on screens/devices (whether phones, ereaders, tablets, or whatever) nearly as often as I see them reading physical books.
My experience as a recently retired school librarian mirrors yours. The advantage of ebooks was that they were often available when the physical book would be out. Our students had access to ebooks that were owned system-wide as well as those owned by the public library.
How can you tell whether someone is reading a book on their phone or tablet rather than a magazine or newspaper or a message board or … ? Unless you are close enough to read my screen yourself , I’m not sure how you could tell what I’m reading.