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?
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