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).
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