In presenting a "Special Award" to Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1992, the Pulitzer Prize committee decided to finesse the issue of genre. The members were apparently befuddled by a project whose merit they could not deny but whose medium they could not quite categorize. The obvious rubric (Biography) seemed ill-suited for a comic book in an age when ever-larger tomes and ever-denser scholarship define that enterprise. Editorial cartooning didn't quite fit either, for Maus illustrated not the news of the day but events of the past. The classification problem had earlier bedeviled the New York Times Book Review, where the work had crisscrossed the Fiction and Non-Fiction Best Seller Lists. Originally, Maus was placed on the Fiction List, a decision Spiegelman protested in a wry letter to the editor: "If your list were divided into literature and non-literature, I could gracefully accept the compliment as intended, but to the extent that 'fiction' indicates a work isn't factual, I feel a bit queasy. As an author, I believe I might have lopped several years off the thirteen I devoted to my two-volume project if I could have taken a novelist's license while searching for a novelist's structure."1 In a tiny but telling blip on the cultural radar, the Times obligingly moved the volume from the Fiction to Non-Fiction Best Seller List. The veracity of the image-even the comic book image-had attained parity with the word.
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Much attention has been paid to the place of Art Spiegelman's Maus in the world of comics and cartooning by the historians of that genre, while the positioning of Maus a highly mediated autobiography, both personal narrative and at one remove from its subject as a Holocaust memoir is the subject of ongoing debate in the community of Holocaust scholars.2 Few scholarly studies, however, have focused on Maus as a visual narrative: its graphic arrangement of narrative layers and frames, its pictorial treatment of narrative time, and its efforts towards formal unity, exemplified by uses of visual metaphor and metonymy.3 This essay argues that the concerns above, especially the position of Maus as a Holocaust narrative, are most clearly seen in the visual register of the narrative, and that literary critics, trained to read for textual devices, must retrain themselves to see these textual devices in Spiegelman's work. THE LAST WORD The novice reader of Maus will assume that the comic merely illustrates the textual narrative, and is more likely to read the captions and speech balloons than she is to "read" the cartoon images themselves, missing that specific contribution to (and sometimes contradiction of) the stories told within the balloons.4 A scene from early in Volume I illustrates how this happens (Fig. 1). The panels show Vladek Spiegel man, the artist's father, eating dinner with his wife and her family. Vladek has just returned from forced military service in the Polish army and a stint in a German POW camp. In the textual narrative of these frames, Vladek is learning about the strict rationing of food in the Jewish district and about the black market. But another…
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Since its first publication in 1987, Maus has achieved a celebrity that few other comics have ever done. And yet it's an extremely difficult work to talk about. In the first place, what is it? Is it a comic? Is it biography, or fiction? Is it a literary work, or a graphic one, or both? We use the term graphic novel, but can anything that is literary, like a novel, ever really work in graphic form? Words and pictures work differently: can they work together without pulling in different directions?
In the preface to The Western Canon, his attempt to define "The Books and School of the Ages", Harold Bloom says: "One mark of an originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is a strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies."
This is an accurate description of my reaction to Maus. In one way the work stands squarely in the comics tradition, observing many of the conventions of the form: a story about anthropomorphically depicted animals, told sequentially in a series of square panels six to a page, containing speech balloons and voice-over captions in which all the lettering is in capitals, with onomatopoeic sound-effects to represent rifle-fire, and so on. So it looks very like a comic.
It also refers to earlier forms. The stark black-and-white drawings, the lines so thick in places as almost to seem as if they belong in a woodcut, hark back to the wordless novels of Frans Masereel, with their expressionist woodcut prints; and those in turn take their place in an even older northern European tradition of printmaking that goes back to Holbein and Dürer. In telling a story about Germany, Spiegelman uses a very German technique.
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