Category: Thoughts on Teaching and Learning

"Murderer": A fitting final utterance to Art
Spiegelman’s novel, Maus.

All the brutality one expects in a poignant presentation of the Holocaust and
Nazi evil is present in this book, this "remarkable work" that Jules
Feiffer describes as "awesome in its conception and execution . . .
at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book."
As author/mouse protagonist Spiegelman departs from his father at the end of
Book I (subtitled "My Father Bleeds History")—briefcase in one
hand, cigarette in another, head down—he utters this depressing final
statement, "murderer." But he is not talking of the Nazis. His father
is the murderer, for Spiegelman has just learned that his father long ago, distracted
by grief and confusion over his wife’s suicide, destroyed the journals she had
kept of the war and Holocaust—journals she had intended to be a legacy
to her son.

Thus we end on a mighty ambivalence: the son exploding/apologizing, the father
exploding/apologizing, the father shaken at the son’s disrespect, the son pleading
for information, the son, mollified and leaving in peace but uttering alone,
again, and finally, the word, ". . . murderer."

Of all the powerful dimensions of this work—its compelling stories, its historical
sweep, its psychological layers—and of course all the issues of media, text,
poetics, and rhetoric—it is the father-son relationship that I connect to foremost
of all. Art’s relationship with his father is taut with mixed feelings: of annoyance,
respect, understanding, awe, contempt, despair, pride, grief, and more. In this
sense, the book is probably resonant to every child who had a father, or rather
every child who had a father who was present as the child grew into adulthood.
But there is something about the quality, or perhaps the actual content, of
the relationship—both aspects, the positive and negative—that reminds me of
my relationship with my father.

My father could be a difficult man, but reading a book like Maus makes
me look to the Depression, World War II, and all the other stresses of the twentieth
century as causes of that difficulty. And I should be honest: some of the difficulty
stems from my personality, with its inward ways, much like Spiegelman’s. For
I need but look at my brothers, Joe in particular, who has written most lovingly
and accurately of our father’s uniqueness. Take
a look at his touching and fun memoir here. But there is something in Spiegelman’s
portrayal of his father that rings an eerie bell. The frugality, the directness,
the aggressive care of both men are striking. Nothing of hesitation or shyness
in either of these men. And yet at the same time, the shocking tenderness from
time to time. Can these qualities be attributed, somehow, to the effects of
living through the twenties, thirties, and forties and surviving despite it
all?

Or is it just a matter of being in a family and taking what comes with the
territory? Maus raises questions of family dynamics of incredible and
deep resonance. Spiegelman interweaves tales of marital discord, parental scolding,
and typical family squabbles with episodes of unspeakable heroism, courage,
and good and bad fortune. Through it all there is one given: survival. On the
one hand there is an incredible closeness in this family (all families) that
allows the most extreme circumstances just to be. It all hangs out there—in
"dissolution," I’d call it: an agreement to look beyond the unresolved
matters in a way that is completely natural in families, as it is nowhere else.
On the other hand, there is the opposite of closeness and tolerance and acceptance,
for here are people so different, so uninvolved . . . just so very
different. Part of the magic of Maus is its portrayal of two "aliens"
sharing a space and entering into one another’s world. The father brings Art
into his past—not only the war, but also his youth and life, including
his early romances, his struggles to establish himself, his rhythms of life.
And the son attempts to bring the father into the writer’s/artist’s world he
inhabits. That’s something I never attempted with my father, and I’m not sure
I could, so I envy Spiegelman that expression and honesty.

The depictions of the family ambivalences are not all as poignant and disturbing
as the heart-wrenching final word of Volume 1. Some of the narration is borderline
humorous. There is the episode when Art, at the conclusion of one interview
session can’t find his coat. We soon find that the father—who is a renowned
miser, (a stereotypical Jewish miser, Art fears)—has thrown out Art’s
coat. For the father has (1) bought himself a new coat, (2) decided that Art’s
coat was shabby, and (3) decided to give Art his old coat. Art is incredulous:
"Oh great, a Naugahyde windbreaker!" And here is a case where Spiegelman’s
artistic talent comes to the fore: for the depiction of Art/mouse in the puffy
jacket conveys the archetypal embarrassment every child has suffered at the
hands of parents who find ingenious ways to exert control and inflict humiliation.The
expression on Art’s face as he walks home, slouched in the puffy jacket (it
should be noted he is thirty years old at the time), is priceless, as is his
comment: "I just can’t believe it. . . ."

In the context of such disbelief and anger and frustration, Spiegelman tells
his father’s story. Compassion, awe, and tender love are thrown into the telling
in a way worthy of the complexity of family life and the suffering of a terrible
World War. In all, Maus is a "survivor’s tale" that takes
us into unexpected dimensions of just what survival is. In its seamless interweaving
of tales—further complicated by our own connections to them—we are
often, like Art himself, left incredulous, but we are grateful for the experience,
the honesty of it, the reality of it—all in a comic book about a family
of mice that escaped the exterminator.