Guilt and Postmemory: Artie's 2nd Generation Trauma

I have read Maus before, but, as always, time and experience have changed my reading of the narrative, and influenced the way I react to the characters. In the past I was very caught up in the anthropomorphism, and trying to determine if making the different nationalities into different animals wasn't, in some way, performing a similar kind of racism, or, at least, universalism, or generalization, as was done to the Jews--that they are somehow all the same, yet different from everyone else. The scene of Artie trying to determine what kind of animal Francoise ought to be highlights this--ought she to be a frog, because she's French, or a mouse, because she converted to Judaism (to please Vladek) (171)? The anthropomorphism also throws into sharp relief the economic and gender issues that complicate this universalization--Anja, for instance, is more recognizable as a Jew, or as a mouse, because her tail is sticking out, "he appearance--you could see more easy see was Jewish", whereas Vladek can get away with pretending not to be Jewish more easily because he has access to finer clothes--"a coat and boots, so like a Gestapo wore she he was not in service" and is more handsome (138). The putting on of different racial masks (like pig ones when they're pretending to be Polish--138, for instance) helps to illustrate the arbitrariness of the racism being enforced on the Jews; for the most part, other than racial stereotypes, their difference isn't visible, so as long as they are able to behave like the Polish people around them, or they run into someone who knows them already, they can move about to the black market; Vladek's good looks and money seem to give him an advantage; he can move a bit more freely than Anja, who looks more Jewish, and is frightened and unable to perform as well as he can; his money and contacts give them advantages that others could not have.

In my current reading, I am very interested in the way Spiegelman draws attention to the artifice of the work; including the section with different options for Francoise's appearance, for instance, or including the conversation with his father about with the comic will be like, collecting his father's voice, inserting the earlier comic about his mother's suicide, the photographs of his family set nearby the illustrated photographs of his extended family (why draw them, and not include them, like he does the others?" and, of course, Book 2, Chapter 2, "Auschwitz (Time Flies), when he depicts himself in the mouse mask, as Anthony pointed out earlier, discussing the success of Maus 1 while the pile of bodies below him gets bigger and bigger.... The photograph of Vladek in the camp uniform from the souvenir shop seems particularly troubling...and that he sends that photo to Anja so she will know he survived! The layers of truth and fiction inherent in that photograph, included in the narrative whose purpose is to explore the complications of the historical trauma of the Holocaust resonate for me. Combine this with the depiction of the very complicated Vladek/Artie relationship, culminating in the second to last panel, when Vladek refers to Artie as "Richieu," and it is very clear that the entire narrative experience is a way of working through the trauma of his past, for which Artie was not physically present, but must still work through, as it has shaped so much of his own identity, his parents' identity, and, now, his own career. Artie does not pull punches on himself or on his father in his depictions; his father is "the miserly old Jew" and he is the annoyed son who views his father as a burden that he would rather pawn off on someone else, like Mala. Layers of guilt seem to define Artie's identity; how can he compete with his ghost-brother; with the memory of his mother; with his father-as-survivor? How can he live up to all of that? And using all of that to somehow gain critical success--he has guilt about that, too. He really seems to believe that "Maybe EVERYONE has to feel guilty. EVERYONE! FOREVER!" (202). It doesn't seem like a trauma as huge as the Holocaust could possibly remain bounded in the memories and experience of the 1st generation, of those who actually lived it; of course it would bleed over into the children of those people, into the second generation, and even further and further from there. And the only way of trying to process that trauma, for those who did not live it, is through connection, like Hirsch suggests, through photography, through postmemory.

Are other kinds of traumas similarly passed down through family and culture? Could the racism of slavery in America and other countries similarly be understood through these kinds kind terms? Isn't all history, on some level, still working on us, shaping us, affecting us?

Maus Response: Icon, Memory, and Performance

As the interview with Spiegelman makes clear and Hirsch’s article further accentuates, Maus is overwhelmingly concerned with memory. Whether it is the memories of Vladek being both represented and questioned (as in the orchestra scene) or the working through of emotional responses to his father’s and his own memories by the narrator, Maus deals with traumatic memory of both the first and post generations. For Hirsch, the intercalated photographs mark the height of the work’s portrayal of the “inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience,” as they represent “the images already imprinted on our brains, the tropes and structures we bring from the present to the past” (106, 120). The photographs mark the site where the narrator can access his father’s Holocaust memories (as well as pre- and post- Holocaust memories), and they bring these memories to life in such a way that they allow for the memories to impact and be taken in by the son. However, in light the questions surrounding Spiegelman’s use of iconic, rather than realistic, mice in the text, I see additional access points between the father’s memories and the son’s, and the reader's, post-memories being highlighted in the text.

While Hirsch sees the realism of photography as pulling the post-generation into the memories of the first, I believe that the open, iconic images employed throughout Maus serve a similar function. For instance, after seeing the more realistic sketches that Spiegelman began with, it seems like the more iconic images pull the reader into the memories even more. By keeping the mice iconic, the reader can more easily see himself/herself in the images. While such imagery does not mirror the flow of memory to post-memory that exists for children in the post-generation (i.e. where memories are shared as photos, stories, nightmarish screams, and other expressions of trauma), they nevertheless extend post-memory to the reading audience. The reader’s face can more easily be grafted onto the iconic characters, thus making the story and its affect more personal.

The use of the more iconic mice, additionally, serves many more purposes. By using the iconic images of animals to metaphorize race, Maus shows how de-individualizing racism can be. In a world characterized by a racialized “us” versus “them” mentality, the fixation on race causes individual differences for all parties to be stripped away. While the mice and cats and pigs may have names in the text, they don’t have many individuating features. As a result, each individual becomes indistinguishable from the species, just as each individual becomes inseparable from categories of race under racism. Furthermore, the use of iconic images highlights questions of performativity within the text. For me, one of the most impactful images in Maus is the opening frame of Chapter 2, Book 2, on page 201, which shows the narrator sitting at his drawing desk wearing a mouse mask. Not only does this image jolt the reader out of a passive interaction with the text’s central metaphor, it also spurs the reader to consider how the artist, reader, and characters perform throughout the text. It suggests that in order for one to begin to understand the extent of the dehumanizing effect of Holocaust racism, one must wear the mask of the radicalized other, even if only for a short time in one’s imagination. Conversely, though, it suggests that identification can only go so far. We cannot become mice, we can only perform as mice. Finally, it causes the reader to become skeptical of the mouse imagery throughout the text. That is, does Vladek put on the mouse mask, or is his the true mouse face? Where does performativity end in the text? Especially when held alongside of the narrator’s claim that “In some ways he’s just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew,” it leaves one to question whether or not Vladek’s post-Holocaust behavior is due in part to his inability to take off the racialized mask that was thrust upon him by the Nazis (133).

Anthropomorphic Mice, Race, and Caricature in Maus

One of the interesting bits of background about Spiegelman's text is that the mice were not originally drawn quite so cartoonishly.  Instead, Spiegelman drew them in a manner that was more realistic/ human-like, clearly based in part on the famous photographs of concentration camp survivors taken by photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White.

Original sketch for Maus

Bourke-White photo from LIFE magazine of liberated prisoners

With this in mind, it's interesting to speculate about just why Spiegelman chose to revise his original mice into something more cartoonish.  Does it have something to do with the icon and identification, as McCloud would have them?  Is Spiegelman's decision to portray the Jews as mice problematic because it fundamentally essentializes race and trades in stereotype?  Or, as we will see more clearly in Book II of Maus, is he trying to suggest something more subversive about race and national identity--and the combined ridiculousness and danger of racism?  Does Spiegelman's choice to use animals in Maus encourage or forestall identification, in your opinion? Would you have responded differently to the mice if they were drawn in the manner of the more realistic, anthropomorphic sketch above?

Another important aspect of the Jews-as-mice, Germans-as-cats, Poles-as-pigs metaphor is its historical accuracy in terms of the stereotypes in currency before and during the war, as well as the preoccupation that many Germans had with whether the Jews were a race.

Beginning during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, roughly coterminous with the Enlightenment's investment in creating scientific and racial taxonomies, anxiety about Jewish racial difference came to center around the Jewish body. Many Europeans became obsessed with the idea that Jews were members of an inferior, non-white race. Part of this obsession centered around the idea that Jews had distinguishable physical characteristics that rendered them decidedly other.

Sadly, many stereotypes found their way into caricature.

 

Above, you can see early examples of Jewish caricature that focus on supposed physical differences of Jews, including large noses and ears, oversized feet, and talon-like nails.

Later Nazi caricature traded in similar stereotypes of Jewish physical difference. (see below)

During this period of anti-Semitic propaganda, Jews were often likened to vermin, particularly mice and rats.

The Nazi film, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal, or Wandering, Jew), one of the most disturbing anti-Semitic propaganda pieces, featured scenes that juxtaposed "typical" wandering Jew with images of rats and mice overrunning various parts of the globe.  This image (a still of the rats can be seen below) suggested that, like vermin, Jews spread chaos and disease, literal and metaphorical, wherever they went.

For more on anti-Semitic stereotypes, you might check out resources such as Sander Gilman's work on The Jew's Body, this book on Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, or this book on Nazi propaganda.

For more early sketches and background on the creation of Maus, take a look at Meta-Maus, Spiegelman's behind-the-scenes account of the creation of his work.

Welcome!

Welcome to our grad comics course! The blog is still a work in progress, but, if you send me your preferred log-in/ email addresses, I will make you blog authors, so we can begin to post. I'm looking forward to our semester together.