Maus now Selected writing

Recently removed from the school curriculum in Tennessee, Art Spiegelman's iconic Maus has radically shaped our understanding of the Holocaust and of graphic-arts possibilities since its publication in 1980. Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern, Chute gathers commentary on the book's outsized influence to this day, drawing on distinguished writers from Philip Pullman to Ruth Franklin.

An omnibus of criticism attests to the enduring legacy of Art Spiegelman's masterpiece. Editor Chute, a scholar who specializes in graphic narrative in general and Spiegelman in particular, curates a collection that draws on works from around the world (including pieces translated from German and Hebrew for the first time) and different disciplines (journalism, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology). The book includes pieces from the 1980s, before Maus had been published in book form in 1992 (it was serialized from 1980 to 1991), and it extends into the current political climate, when it remains hailed as a cultural milestone but is also often threatened with banning from libraries and school curricula. The contributors examine an array of pertinent questions: What does it mean to translate such a uniquely devastating experience into the form of a comic? What is the relationship between the artist and his subject and between father and son? Is it unseemly for such a work to provide entertainment or even meaning in the wake of the Holocaust, not to mention profit and prestige for its creator? How can the creator re-create something he was too young to experience, despite interviews and extensive research? There is much information on Spiegelman's successful request to have the book shift from the New York Times bestseller fiction list to the nonfiction list as well as the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize. The exhaustive obsessiveness of Maus criticism seems by now to have transcended the Joycean level, but the contributors present convincing cases that the work can bear such critical weight. From Ken Tucker's visionary review of the early work in the Times through Marianne Hirsch's introduction of "postmemory" to describe Spiegelman's relationship to the material, the essays are sure to generate dialogue among literary historians, critics, and scholars as well as the legion of Maus mega-fans across the globe. Other contributors include Adam Gopnik, Philip Pullman, and Alisa Solomon. A valuable resource for the cottage industry of Maus research. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

"The Shadow of a Past Time": History and Graphic Representation in Maus By Hillary Chute In In the Shadow of No Towers, his most recent book of comic strips, Art Spiegelman draws connections between his experience of 9/11 and his survivor parents' experience of World War II, suggesting that the horrors of the Holocaust do not feel far removed from his present-day experience in the twenty-first century. "The killer apes learned nothing from the twin towers of Auschwitz and Hiroshima," Spiegelman writes; 9/11 is the "same old deadly business as usual" (np). Produced serially, Spiegelman's No Towers comic strips were too polit­ically incendiary to find wide release in the United States; they were largely published abroad and in New York's weekly Jewish newspa­per, the Forward. In the Shadow of No Towers powerfully asserts that "the shadow of a past time [interweaves] with a present time"; to use Spiegelman's own description of his Pulitzer Prize-winning two-volume work Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Silverblatt, 35). In one telling panel there the bodies of four Jewish girls hanged in World War II dangle from trees in the Catskills as the Spiegelmans drive to the supermarket in 1979. The persistence of the past in Maus, of course, does figure prominently in analyses of the text's overall representational strategies. We see this, for instance, in Dominick LaCapra's reading of the book's "thematic mode of carnivalization" (175), Andreas Huyssen's theorizing of Adornean mimesis in Maus, and Alan Rosen's study of Vladek Spiegelman's broken English.3 Most readings of how Maus represents history approach the issue in terms of ongoing debates about Holocaust representation, in the context of postmodernism, or in relation to theories of traumatic memory. But such readings do not pay much attention to Maus 's narrative form: the specificities of reading graph­ically, of taking individual pages as crucial units of comics grammar. The form of Maus, however, is essential to how it represents history. Indeed, Maus 's contribution to thinking about the "crisis in represen­tation," I will argue, is precisely in how it proposes that the medium of comics can approach and express serious, even devastating, histories. "I'm literally giving a form to my father's words and narrative," Spiegelman observes about Maus, "and that form for me has to do with panel size, panel rhythms, and visual structures of the page" (Inter­view with Gary Groth, 105, emphasis in original). As I hope to show, to claim that comics makes language, ideas, and concepts "literal" is to call attention to how the medium can make the twisting lines of history readable through form. When critics of Maus do examine questions of form, they often focus on the cultural connotations of comics rather than on the form's aesthetic capabilities--its innovations with space and temporality. Paul Buhle, for instance, claims, "More than a few readers have described [ Maus ] as the most compelling of any [Holocaust] depiction, perhaps because only the caricatured quality of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of an experience beyond all reason" (16). Where Michael Rothberg contends, "By situating a nonfictional story in a highly mediated, unreal, 'comic' space, Spiegelman captures the hyperintensity of Auschwitz" ( Traumatic Realism, 206), Stephen Tabachnick suggests that Maus may work "because it depicts what was all too real, however unbelievable, in a tightly controlled and brutally stark manner. The black and white quality of Maus 's graphics reminds one of newsprint" (155). But all such analyses posit too direct a relationship between form and content (unreal form, unreal content; all too real form, all too real content), a directness that Spiegelman explicitly rejects. As with all cultural production that faces the issue of geno­cide, Spiegelman's text turns us to fundamental questions about the function of art and aesthetics (as well as to related questions about the knowability and the transmission of history: as Hayden White asserts, " Maus manages to raise all of the crucial issues regarding the 'limits of representation' in general" [42]). Adorno famously interrogated the fraught relation of aesthetics and Holocaust representation in two essays from 1949, "Cultural Criticism and Society" and "After Auschwitz"--and later in the enormously valuable "Commitment" (1962), which has been the basis of some recent important meditations on form. In "Cultural Criticism" Adorno charges, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (34). We may understand what is at stake as a question of betrayal: Adorno worries about how suffering can be given a voice in art "without immediately being betrayed by it" ("Com­mitment," 312); we must recognize "the possibility of knowing history," Cathy Caruth writes, "as a deeply ethical dilemma: the unremitting problem of how not to betray the past " (27, Caruth's italics). I argue that Maus, far from betraying the past, engages this ethical dilemma through its form. Elaborating tropes like "the presence of the past" through the formal complexities of what Spiegelman calls the "stylistic surface" of a page ( Complete Maus ) , I will consider how Maus represents history through the time and space of the comics page. Excerpted from Maus Now: Selected Writing All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.