Art Spiegelmans Maus: Comics as an artistic and philosophical medium

PREPARED BY N. LESLIE DELA CRUZ, PH.D. PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT

Points for discussion

y A short history of comics y Some key concepts from Understanding Comics by

Scott McCloud (1994)

  

Definition of comics Some early forms of sequential art The interaction of word and image

y On Joshua Browns Of Mice and Memory (1987)  The narrative structure of Maus  Memoir as history  The metaphor of mice

A short history of comics

y Comic books have long

been dismissed as reading materials for children and semi-illiterates. However, since the late American comic book creator Will Eisner published A Contract with God in 1978, a new genre of comics emerged.

A short history of comics

y Eisners narratives deal

with serious (one can even say, existential) themes, such as despair, alienation, and betrayal, all in the context of the blue collar life.

A short history of comics

y Shortly after the commercial

success of Eisners serious comics, Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, a 12-issue series about neurotic superheroes set in alternative-history United States.

A short history of comics

y While the latter still featured

caped figures with fantastic powers, it also dealt with darker political issues. Moore will later mine this Orwellian theme in his classic V for Vendetta.

A short history of comics

y Outside the West, the art of comics storytelling has

also flourished in Japan, due largely to Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989). The creator of the Astro Boy series, he is considered to be the grandfather of manga and anime.

A short history of comics

y Among his many ponderous works is his eight-volume

Buddha series, a lavishly illustrated collection of Siddharta Gautamas adventures.

Definition of comics
y Comics refers to the medium itself, not a specific

object such as comic book or comic strip. (McCloud 1993, 4) y Will Eisner, a seminal comic book artist, defines comics as sequential art. y McCloud (1993, 9) further refines the definition as Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.

Definition of comics

Some early forms of sequential art

y Sequential art has been used throughout human

history, since the ancient times, to convey information or to tell a story. E.g. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Aztec manuscripts

Some early forms of sequential art

Some early forms of sequential art

The interaction of word and image

y Integral to comics is the interaction between word

and image. Surrealist Ren Magrittes famous painting, The Treachery of Images, demonstrates this paradoxical interaction.

The interaction of word and image

The interaction of word and image

y McCloud (1993, 24-25) refers to Magrittes painting

in explaining the vocabulary of comics.

The interaction of word and image

y McCloud refers to Magrittes painting in explaining

the vocabulary of comics.

The interaction of word and image

y Thus, contrary to the

popular idea that comics is simplistic or childish, the medium actually encourages the creative use of the imagination.

The interaction of word and image

y For example, Joshua Brown, in his critical analysis of

Art Spiegelmans Maus, observes that the mice are not individualized in terms of faces, but in terms of gestures or actions.
Desperation Embarrassment

The interaction of word and image

y I didn't want people to get too interested in the

drawings. I wanted them to be there, but the story operates somewhere else. It operates somewhere between the words and the idea that's in the pictures and in the movement between the pictures, which is the essence of what happens in a comic. Art Spiegelman, interview with Joshua Brown

The narrative structure of Maus

y Maus is the story of two survivors of the Holocaust.

The first is Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew who, along with his wife Anja, survived Auschwitz and came to live in Queens, New York. There, Vladek and Anja raised their second son, Art, their postHolocaust child. Art grew into adulthood under the shadows of his parents' past, the darkest appearing in 1968 when Anja committed suicide. Art himself is the second survivor, although at first his torment seems self-indulgent compared to the elemental horror of his parents' experience. (Brown, 1987)

The narrative structure of Maus

y Throughout Maus, Vladek's story is paralleled by

Art's attempts to come to terms with the opinionated, tight-fisted, and self-involved father whose personality was formed in a world and through an experience so completely divorced from his own. The ghosts of this past swirl around Art who is haunted by the irretrievable experiences of the dead, their residue found in familial relationships characterized by guilt and manipulation. (Brown, 1987)

Memoir as history
y Some have questioned the

objectivity and accuracy of Maus as history, which raises the issue of objectivity in the writing of a memoir y Spiegelman looked at photographs and viewed period films in order to come up with realistic art

Memoir as history
y However, the testimony of Vladek

himself is revealed in the book as unreliable, blurring the line between memory and fiction y Furthermore, in the interests of space, Spigelman had to rewrite the dialogue rather than present verbatim transcriptions of his conversations with his father y Vladek also destroyed Anjas diaries, which could have provided a more complete picture of the story

The metaphor of mice

y Through the metaphor Maus palpably confronts the

reader with the social relations of Eastern Europe of nations divided by nationalities and by culturallyconstructed, politically-exploited stereotypes. (Brown, 1987)

The metaphor of mice

y By drawing people as animals, Spiegelman evokes

the stratification of European society that had seemed dormant but soon exploded into an orgy of racism. When you read Maus, you don't tend to identify the characters as animals. You decipher human beings, and then the metaphor takes hold. You are disrupted, upset. That is the effect Spiegelman hoped for. (Brown, 1987)

The metaphor of mice

y Spiegelman tackled Hitler's metaphor to undermine

it. The horror of racial theory is not rationalized or supported by the metaphor; it is brought to its fullest, tense realization. (Brown, 1987)

The metaphor of mice

y Maus captures the terrible relationship between the

lost world of European Jewry and the present. It portrays the frustration of a son who grew up in a different setting, trying so hard to understand the world that shaped his father, to grasp the stunning dimensions of an unfathomable experience. "Unknowableness" is the void separating the two generations, and the awareness of the limitations of understanding, of how remembering and telling captures and, yet, fails to capture the experience of the past, permeates Maus. (Brown, 1987)