• Introduction
• Extracts
• An American Literary Tradition?
• The Profanity of Mauschwitz
• A Postmodern Spiderman

"A comic book about the Holocaust has no place in any respectable American literature class." It took me three weeks of e-mails to my high school English teacher to convince him that Art Spiegelman's MAUS deserves, in fact, demands to be read by students of American literature, not merely for its content, but also for its form, technique, and theme. In his book, Art Spiegelman draws his father's biography during World War II and imprisonment in Auschwitz. My teacher's arguments were essentially that the gravity of the Holocaust is belittled by the form of a comic strip, and that the book's themes and plot are not "American" in nature. While the Holocaust is a gruesome blot on the face of history, he argued, it is not an American blot, nor is its expression. My responses, scattered though they were in our correspondence, are now ordered in what I believe to be their most logical form: after a brief tribute to Herman Melville (Extracts) follows a discussion of what makes MAUS so distinctly American (An American Literary Tradition?), then a defense of Spiegelman's animals (The Profanity of Mauschwitz), and finally a look at MAUS as a postmodern undertaking and its significance in American literary trends (A Postmodern Spiderman).

Mr. Seaquist, if you're reading this, thank you for creating the backdrop for my final paper! --Liz

• "Fifty million people were killed in World War II. If that is the first sentence, what could be the second? There is nowhere to go, except to add that writing the sequel is the obligation of postmodernism."

Limon, John. Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism. New York, Oxford Univ. Press; 1994.

• "Samuel Beckett once said: 'Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.' On the other hand, he SAID it."

Speigelman, Art. MAUS II. New York: Pantheon Books; 1986.

• "'Would you say a man in a concentration camp had the right to commit suicide?"

"Hell yes."

"Then why not a man in an American corporation?"

"But that's differnt. He aint bein tortured."

"You think not? And why not a man in the American Army?"

Jones, James. From here to Eternity. New York: Avon; 1975.

• "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human."

Adolf Hitler

• "'. . . in America cats have nine lives, but we--were less than cats, so we got three. The life before, the life during, the life after' She saw that Persky did not follow. She said, 'The life after is now. The life before is our real life, at home, where we was born.'

'And during?'

'This was Hitler.'"

Ozick, Cynthia. "Rosa." Qtd. in Joshua Brown's Of Mice and Memory.

It seems natural to question the choice of MAUS for a course entitled "American Literary Traditions": it is a story of the Holocaust and chronicals a man's life as he is herded through Eastern Europe during World War II. Ostensibly, this criticism is formidable, but upon a closer examination, MAUS proves to be a distinctly American undertaking with distinctly American themes.

To read documents of American history is to imagine "the land of the free." America has traditionally fancied itself to be a beacon of freedom in a stormy and uncertain world when, in fact, it has its own sordid history of oppression and violence similar to many other nations. It is easy to overlook the plights of Native Americans, African Americans, women, and other groups that have been deemed inferior throughout U.S. history, but they are essential to understanding the ethos of American literature. Even as Americans have experienced these hardships, so have they written about them. It is not difficult to see, then, that a story about the Holocaust is not far removed from the American experience and its expression in literature.

Furthermore, Spiegelman's story is set against the backdrop of a father-son relationship disrupted by immigration and a generation gap. This uniquely American phenomenon is familiar to the great majority of first generation Americans. The children of immigrants are (and have been) faced with the difficult decision of how much to assimilate to their new culture without turning their backs on their heritage. Art Spiegelman meets this challenge head-on as he marries a French woman, has "sibling rivalry with a snapshot" of his dead brother, copes with his mother's suicide, and grapples with his father's past (MAUS II, 175). While each of these situations would be significant in any culture, they take on special meaning when considered in the context of a first generation American. MAUS is as much a biography of Vladek Spiegelman as it is an account of Art Spiegelman's specifically American dilemma.

Also American is the conflict of economic gain that seizes Art after the publication of MAUS I. He feels a certain amount of guilt as he capitalizes on the sufferings of his father and all who died at Auschwitz. When the media sees the success of MAUS I, Art is offered movie deals and a miriad of other commercial opportunities in a way that America has traditionally valued. Art finds himself fending off American entrpreneurialism at every turn until he can no longer concentrate on creating MAUS II, but succumbs to the distractions and feelings of guilt that it instills.

While it is true that much of the action of MAUS takes place in Eastern Europe, each chapter is framed by the conversation of Art and Vladek, which is set in the United States. The themes and background setting are American, and therefore confront American issues while still detailing the Holocaust. It is far too easy to segregate Holocaust narratives into a category far removed from the American experience, but MAUS challenges the reader (whether purposely or inadvertantly) to apply the lessons of the Holocaust to the realities of American life. A failure to recognize this connection validates Pavel's observation:

...look at how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What's the point? People haven't changed... Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust (MAUS II, 205).

"It's a comic book about the Holocaust." --and suddenly I had lost my audience. For those who have not read Art Speigelman's MAUS (and for some who have), the idea of a comic book about the Holocaust seems particularly horrible and belittling. That Art tells his father's story using cats and mice for Nazis and Jews (respectively) could well be mistaken for inappropriate if not taken in context.

Art's mission in creating MAUS was not that of the average historian. In addition to working with oral history to create cohesive chronology, he was also working with a very personally significant subject. During the course of the novel, he comes to terms with his relationship with his father and its significance to the Holocaust. As he indicates on the cd-rom extension to MAUS is that his discoveries are "too profane to show directly." He describes comics as an art of indication, in which he alludes to his story through graphics and dialogue.

Relatedly, Art relies on the reader's sense of justice to fill out much of what is lacking in his animal figures. A kind of active participation is necessary, as Art indicates in an interview:

You can't help when you're reading to try to erase those animals. You go back, saying: no,no, that's a person, and that's a person there, and they're in the same room together, and why do you see them as somehow a different species? And, obviously, they can't be and aren't, and there's this residual problem you're always left with.

The reader is left to resolve this "residual problem," and is confronted with the harsh reality of Nazi racism. Art sets the tone at the start of MAUS I with Adolf Hitler's chilling quote: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human."

Mr. Seaquist's (said teacher) charge (paraphrased and touched-up a bit): Comic book novels do not exactly represent a driving force in American literary history. In fact, far from being a prevailing influence, comic books have existed as something of a subculture, never finding prominence in mainstream literature. MAUS is not representative of our literary traditions.

My response: Sure, historically, comic book gurus have gotten about as much respect as today's cyberpunks, but that is not the point. MAUS is much more than just another volume of Spiderman, it is a continuation of wider trends in American literature. In addition, it may also be time for comic books to receive more public appreciation for their prowess in portraying a plot.

MAUS is not traditional in the sense that many people think of literature, but as we plod through the 20th century and look back at American writing, MAUS's technique emerges more clearly as part of the postmodern movement. Each volume is utterly aware of its own form, which allows Art to "talk" to the reader in a way that most novels cannot. Art acknowledges the difficulties of accomplishing his task and shares them with his audience, so that instead of writing at his readers (as realism, romanticism, and modernism are consigned to do), he writes with his readers. For example, where both MAUS and Toni Morrison's Beloved explore memory and its possibilities (as well as its limitations), MAUS can uniquely show the reader how Vladek tells his story. Ultimately, Art constructs history chronologically from his father's narrative, but not without showing his audience that memory is nonlinear. He works through this obstacle as the story unfolds, so that the reader gets a full sense of the difficulty of the historian's job.

In a very postmodern way, Spiegelman subverts the form of previous novels and breaks the barrier between storyteller and audience. Though each scene from MAUS is clearly framed (literally and figuratively), there is no clear inside or outside to the story, which is taking place on no fewer than four independent levels. The first of these levels is Art's conversation with his father. This narrative is what drives the action of the story, but it is no more or less significant than the second level of the novel, which is Art's conversation with the reader. This keeps the reader informed of the motives and feelings of the author. Both of these levels are aided by the third, which is the graphic dimension of the novel. This innovative form expresses all that which the dialogue does not. A light-hearted example of this brings a smile on page 77 of MAUS I, when Anja disciplines Richieu during a political discussion at the dinner table. As here, the graphic dimension gives the reader at a glance what might cost other novels pages of narrative. Finally, the fourth level of MAUS is what is not taking place either in the dialogue or in the pictures. Spiegelman expressed it best himself in an interview with Joshua Brown:

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. So, by not focusing you too hard on these people you're forced back into your role as reader rather than looker.... One analogy I've used before is that these faces are a little bit like Little Orphan Annie's eyes If you look at those blank disks you see a lot of expression, but it's taking place somewhere other than on that piece of paper. And by keeping the faces relatively blank, relatively similar to each other, you end up entering into and participating more in bringing this thing to life as a reader. In that sense it's a little more like reading.

Art purposely keeps the drawings simple so that the reader will necessarily infuse her own imagination to fully grasp each frame's importance. This method is in keeping with a postmodern framework in that Art combines Vladek's testimony with the reader's imagination, and thus begins to explore the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Ever-present in MAUS is the understanding that much of the Holocaust is unknowable. The reader is first struck with this realization when Vladek reveals that he has burnt all of Anja's diaries, and then again when Pavel poignantly remarks that "the victims who died can never tell THEIR side of the story, so maybe it's better not to have any more stories" (MAUS II, 205). MAUS acknowledges this absence of knowledge, so that while remaining factually accurate and graphically representational, an element of fiction still exists that subverts the traditional understandings of both fiction AND nonfiction.

So my answer to Mr. Seaquist? It is true, comics are not part of the romantic, realist,or modern traditions, but MAUS uses them in a way that makes the postmodern tradition proud. Moreover, MAUS is an excellent challenge for the English scholar entering the 21st century: it experiments with different forms of expression and then goes further to utilize technology with a cd-rom extension. This may not be what many Americans are familiar with, but it certainly represents an evolution in literary technique and an advance in communication technology that we must not discount lest we become the victims of a hit-and-run on the information super-highway.

A note to comic book gurus and cyberpunks: I have not forgotten you. Art Spiegelman's accomplishment was built on what many Americans already knew: comic books and technology have literary value that is only now beginning to be recognized. While I did not fully appreciate the literary value of either before encountering MAUS, I hope that both Mr. Seaquist and myself will no longer depreciate their contributions to popular culture, intellectual trends, and American traditions.