There are some fundamental questions that Maus asks about comics and history and what kind of history the two of them make together.
- How does the process of writing a history connect with the history itself?
- How accurate can any history be? What does the past mean in the present?
- What are autobiographical comics? Autobiographies? Biographies? Histories? Fiction? Does it matter? What happens when comics show history?
It's helpful to think of literature as having form and content. Content is the water, and the glass is the form. It's how you receive the content.
The form can change: 
But the content is the same. Or is it? In the examples above, it doesn't exactly matter what you drink the water from, as long as you get the water. One glass is messier. One is taller, but it's not THAT big a deal.
Literature is more complicated because form and content work together. They are not just independent items mixed and matched like a rubik's cube. Some forms are difficult to drink from:
Others are not very appealing:
The form may actually enhance the content. It may change the content.
Comics are not glasses, nor is the content just some water, but we can see how form and content can have a complicated relationship. Comics are a form that affects the content of Maus and allows us a richer view of the Holocaust because it shows us how complicated and convoluted such histories are. Chute argues that "[comics] can make the twisting lines of history readable through form" (200) and that Maus in particular "engages [the ethical dilemma of writing history] through its form" (201).
I won't go into all of the arguments Chute makes to support this claim. Mostly, her close readings of scenes show us how two images appearing at once on the same page, crossing one another, next to one another, gives us a lot of VISUAL information about the difficulty of writing this history. We see how Spiegelman wants to make order out of Vladek's history while Vladek wants to get rid of it. We see how Art both pushes himself into the narrative and then feels like an imposter for trying to represent the Holocaust. We can also see how Maus shows the complicated nature of history itself, like Russian dolls:
Joshua Brown, who is quoted in Chute's article, says that "Vladek's account is not a chronicle of undefiled fact but a constitutive process, that remembering is a construction of the past" (qtd. in Chute 206). This is the point I tried to make in class on Monday. History is not simple, and the comic version might be the best way to show how un-simple it is, how many voices are really nested within the narrative. Here's another reminder from Spiegelman in the Chute article: "The number of layers between an event and somebody trying to apprehend that event through time and intermediaries is like working with flickering shadows" (qtd. in Chute qtd. in Brown--can I do that? :)In other words, there is a LOT going on, and Maus is ABLE to show all the complications of this history, which make it far more than any movie or documentary or text memoir ever could. In fact, dare I say it, Maus is better at showing the Holocaust. Comics are the BEST choice.
Sez Artie: "If comics have any problem now it's that people don't even have the patience to decode [read] comics at this point....I don't know if we're the vanguard of another culture or if we're the last blacksmiths."Word.
So, let's keep this in mind as we read Persepolis, another historical memoir, this time an autobiography:
- Satrapi uses a very iconic style for her characters but she does not choose to make them into animals. How does this style work to her benefit? How does it detract from her narrative?
- There are not many ladies in the world of comics. How do you see gender represented differently in this comic? Find some examples.
- Check out the following pages in Persepolis: 61, 77, 102, 103.
I really found the juxtaposition of past and present to be an art that formed many moments into one continuous flow. In other words, Spiegelman made it seem/look easy, not difficult. If we hadn't been placing so much emphasis on the challenges he had in portraying the history accurately I would have read the book without even a thought of such adversities. I really thought the transitions were seamless throughout.
ReplyDeleteI think the success of Maus is that it works on many levels. There's another artist I really like, Alison Bechdel, and she did a great graphic novel called Fun Home. Then, she did a really meta-story about her mother and her writing her relationship with her mother that was...really unreadable. There were large sections of quoted text and "action" scenes of the artist typing and talking to her mother on the phone. Right. The meta-history of Maus is pleasant because it doesn't impede the unfolding of Vladek's story.
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