Hannah Lee
Expo E-25 Academic Writing and Critical Reading
Prof. Lisa A. Gulesserian, PhD
December 18, 2020
Existentialism, which gained momentum during World War II, is a philosophical movement that responded to WWII, and the atrocities of the Holocaust. As such I expected to find a scholarly article tying Art Spiegelman’s Maus to existentialism, but did not.
Postmodernism—the literary version of poststructuralism in philosophy—has however been tied to the autobiographical memoir Maus. Poststructuralism grew from structuralism, which was a response to the Existentialist movement. There are slight variations between postmodernism and existentialism—postmodernism focuses on society, whereas existentialism focuses on the individual.
Postmodernism gained popularity in the 1980s and 90s, when the book was written, and in contrast with existentialism, scholarly articles have been written tying postmodernism with Maus. Hye Su Park, assistant professor at Bellevue College writes about postmodernism and its ties to Maus in “Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: A Bibliographic Essay,” a “broad survey” of “Maus criticism” based on ten themes, such as “trauma, postmemory, generational transmission, and the use of English” (146). She states that the “postmodern approach to Maus examines how the text, with its formal and thematic innovations, suggests new ways of reading the Holocaust within the context of self-reflexivity and metafictionality” (Park 156). Hillary Chute, professor of English at Northeastern University discusses the comic form’s ability to “interweave” the past and the present in her scholarly article “History and Graphic Representation in Maus” and “concludes that the graphic narrative in Maus makes possible the ‘postmodern politics’ which refuses ‘telos and closure’” (Chute, 340, Park 158).
Spiegelman, 69 years old at the time, spoke at Harvard and said, “Do I find religion like you’re supposed to at the end of your life?...About the only thing I could find to take solace in was the church of the absurd, the existential… I can’t find it in Jewishness” (Radsken). It is possible that the quote of Spiegelman regarding existentialism reflects a belief he founded later in life- at the time that he wrote Maus, he was religiously Jewish. However, whether he was Jewish or subscribed to the “church of the existential” at the time of writing is all speculative. All we can do is approach the literary text with our own philosophy, the experiences that inform our way of thinking about the world, and the way we comprehend literary texts. Stansilav Kolar, English professor at University of Ostrava “applies the concept of intergenerational transmission of trauma and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory to Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels” (Kolar 227). Stephen E. Tabachnick, Professor of English at University of Memphis, argues in his 2004 scholarly article “The Religious Meaning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus” that Art Spiegelman “seems to demonstrate” that there is “divine intervention in human affairs” in “The Religious Meaning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus” (Tabachnick 1). Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University looks “at Spiegelman’s Maus through the various discursive screens of mimeses” in “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno” (Huyssen 68). Mimesis has a wide range of definitions in literary criticism, mainly that of imitation. While all scholars make poignant and convincing arguments, none mention Existentialism. I argue that Spiegelman’s use of drawings: animal imagery as well as gutter usage, a comic-within-a-comic, and symbolism deal with issues of veracity, proximity to trauma, and societal criticism; viewing these through the lens of existentialism one could see recurring themes of Sisyphean achievements (Artie’s commercial success), fatalism or amor fati (love of fate); personalizing of time and space (blending borders between present, past, and future); anguish, dread, and suicide (characterization of Anja and “Prisoner on Hell Planet”; individualism and alienation (the swastika: Nazi symbolism of hate and conformity). Further we ask why things are drawn the way they are drawn: animal images are used, why pictures bleed to the edge of the page past the gutters; why there is a comic-within-a-comic; and why embed images of the swastika all over the book.
First I will establish that Art Spiegelman tried his very hardest to portray the “objective” truth as best as he could, in order to “prove”, like Tabachnick, that the events that occurred in Maus truly occurred as described. However, where I differentiate my argument from Tabachnick is that Tabachnick believes the events that occurred “prove” the existence of God’s hand in human affair, whereas I believe Spiegelman would explain all the omens and fortune-telling coming true as fatalism in accordance with Existentialism, instead of a religious reading of Maus.
Tabachnick thinks that
“it is clear that Spiegelman is claiming these incidents really happened in his father’s life…Spiegelman always admits when he is forced to fill in a gap in his father’s story because of lack of direct evidence…He usually alerts us to problems of verification precisely where they occur in his text…by…showing his own personal difficulties in dealing with the problem of veracity…Spiegelman has tried very hard to indicate the truthfulness of his story and his struggle to make it truthful. He shows us that he has tried not to embellish Vladek’s history or character in any way. As a result, and because we understand from his frank portrayal of himself that Art Spiegelman is telling a ruthlessly honest autobiographical narrative as well as a biographical narrative based on his father’s testimony” (Tabachnick 8-9).
Tabachnick cites the examples of Lucia Greenberg, where he promises not to share the personal story that “has nothing to do with…the Holocaust,” and Artie and Francoise’s conversation in the car in which he says “in real life you’d never have let me talk this long without interrupting” (I: 23, II: 16). Tabachnick says “this is meant to be humorous, but it makes us aware that sometimes an artist, even of an autobiographical narrative, might be tempted to depart from strict accuracy for artistic purposes, and that Art is not at all comfortable with that fact and will alert us whenever in Maus he is tempted or compelled to do so” (Tabachnick 9). Tabachnick also refers to the orchestra scene which depicts two panels, one with an orchestra, and the second panel, where the orchestra is nearly covered up by the marching men (Tabachnick 9, II:54) “This is a compromise between the two positions” where Artie, from his own education, understands that there was an orchestra while the men marched out the gates that is “well documented,” and Vladek says there was no orchestra and he only heard “guards shouting” (Tabachnick 9, II:54, II:54). Art Spiegelman chooses to draw a scene about a particular historical fact where there is a conflict in the metanarrative between the event as it was and his father’s recollection of it, and Artie has to navigate the waters between the two. Experience is subjective and memory is fallible, and as he is inheriting this story from Vladek, which does not align with things he knows, he wants to reveal a tension (Class lecture November 24, 2020). Thus Art Spiegelman chooses not to write a straight narrative: the transmission of the story is included. “The comics medium” is “not only dialogic—able to represent the competing voices of autobiography and biography in one layered text—but cross-discursive, as when Spiegelman draws against his father’s verbal narration, turning what he calls the “cognitive dissonance” between the two of them…the son battling his father’s verbal testimony with his own visual medium…contradicting Vladek’s firm vocal insistence that no orchestra was present” (Chute 348).
Another example that illustrates how Spiegelman battles with depicting the whole truth is when he worries about how he portrays his father, “denigrating him” as a “caricature of a miserly old Jew” (Tabachnick 9, 1:131). Artie’s psychiatrist psychoanalyzes him and says “it sounds like you’re feeling remorse—maybe you believe you exposed your father to ridicule” (II: 44) There are multiple examples of Vladek’s “parsimony” (Tabachnick 12). Vladek does not want to spend money on wooden matches since he gets paper matches for free from the Pines Hotel lobby (II:20). He returns a box of partially eaten Special K to the grocery store by explaining his life story: his health, how Mala left him and the concentration camps to the grocery store manager, embarrassing Artie (II: 78, 90). He even depicts his father’s racism when Francoise, Artie, and Vladek pick up the black hitchhiker against Vladek’s wishes and Vladek calls him a “shvartser” who will steal their groceries (II: 98-99).
“Indeed, Art Spiegelman goes to great lengths to make his story as accurate as he possibly can, and to convinces us that he is completely truthful” (Tabachnick 9). Even his reasoning for using animal imagery stems from his desire to depict events as accurately as possible. Spiegelman says:
First of all, I've never been through anything like that - knock on what- ever is around to knock on - and it would be a counterfeit to try to pretend that the drawings are representations of something that's actually happening. I don't know exactly what a German looked like who was in a specific small town doing a specific thing. My notions are born of a few scores of photographs and a couple of movies. I'm bound to do something inauthentic. Also, I'm afraid that if I did it with people, it would be very corny. It would come out as some kind of odd plea for sympathy or "Remember the Six Million," and that wasn't my point exactly, either. To use these ciphers, the cats and mice, is actually a way to allow you past the cipher at the people who are experiencing it. So it's really a much more direct way of dealing with the material (Husseyn 75).
“I don’t know exactly what a German looked like who was in a specific small town doing a specific thing” (Witek as quoted by Tabachnick 9). Both Tabachnick and Huyssen use this quote from Spiegelman to illustrate his awareness of his “generational positioning as someone who knows of this past mainly through media representations” (Huyssen 76). Spiegelman knows “the past is visually inaccessible through realistic representation” and any “strategy” is “bound to be inauthentic” (Huyssen 76). Thus “documentary authenticity of representation can therefore not be his goal. But authentication through the interviews with his father is” (Huyssen 76). As a member of the post-Holocaust generation, Spiegelman distances himself from the Holocaust by using irony, humor, and animal imagery (Kolar 232).
“Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal every revealed…Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal….Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross” Maus II (Huyssen 74)
Thus Spiegelman’s “mimetic adoption of Nazi imagery actually succeeds in reversing its implications while simultaneously keeping us aware of the humiliation and degradation of that imagery’s original intention” (Huyssen 75).
Despite all his efforts to be as authentic as possible, Spiegelman draws himself wearing a mouse mask in the beginning of Maus II, which “symbolizes his sense of inauthenticity and inadequateness” (Kolar 235). “The relativity and evanescence of artistic achievement” is “conveyed” by the scene of Artie in “profile” sitting at his drawing table over a heap of dead bodies with flies buzzing around (Kolar 235, Huyssen 79, II: 41). Huyssen argues that the “task of representing time in Auschwitz” “has reached a crisis point”, and the “crisis in the creative process is tellingly connected with the commercial success of Maus I” (Huyssen 79). Perhaps Artie feels disconnected from his identity (Class lecture November 24, 2020). Another reading of this scene points to the commercial success of Maus as a critique of “the culture industry and its irredeemable link to deception, manipulation, domination, and the destruction of subjectivity” (Huyssen 68). An existentialist reading of this scene of a dejected Artie feeling low after reaching commercial success parallels The Myth of Sisyphus. Much like Sisyphus, who is destined to roll a rock up a hill for all of eternity, our achievements in life, whether commercial or artistic or otherwise, are represented by reaching the top of the hill, only for that rock to roll back down again. We must begin rolling that rock up the hill (starting a new task or achieving a new goal) all over again, just as Spiegelman must begin his daunting task of writing another book, Maus II.
Now that we have established Spiegelman’s commitment to authentic mimesis and story-telling, Tabachnick argues these instances with his battles with veracity indicate that that the coincidences and fortune-telling occurred as-told by Vladek and are thus proof of God’s hand in human affairs. While Tabachnick believes the events of the Parshas Truma dream, numerology, and fortune-telling all coming true are divinely ordained, viewing these events through the lens of existentialism points to Nietzsche’s “amor fati” or love of fate. Amor fati is an existentialist belief that we are “fated to do just what we do…’eternal recurrence’…fatalism….concerns what is written in the book of life” (Flynn 42). Thus fatalism determines that past, present, and future are all already set in stone and the telling of the future in Maus aligns with a belief in Existentialism. Tabachnick emphasizes that like Chute, the interweaving of past and present is a recurrent theme in Maus but contends that Spiegelman is also interweaving the future with the past and the present, and that the future is able to be read because of God’s divine plan (Tabachnick 8).
Although I do not disagree with Tabachnick that Spiegelman interweaves past and present along with the future, I believe the emphasis on Jewish religious symbolism in Maus gives the impression of Spiegelman himself being a believer when he is actually leans more to Existential philosophy than to religion. Even within the text there are instances of religion without devotion to religion. Anja’s mother wants the family to stay together, and says “We’ve made it this far. God will still help us!” and her husband chides “Matka! Be realistic!” Vladek narrates “Anja’s mother didn’t like to look at the facts. But finally even she agreed” (I: 107).
Again, religion and existentialism do not nullify each other: Kierkegaard was a devout Christian and one of the forefathers of the Existentialist movement. Indeed, John Rowan, an English psychologist who was one of the pioneers of humanistic psychology and integrative psychotherapy, writes of existentialism and spirituality: “William [West’s]…definition of spirituality went like this: A transient, extraordinary psychological event marked by feelings of being in unity and harmonious relationship to the divine and everything in existence….I don’t see any reason why existentialists should have any difficulty with that” (Rowan 226).
Tabachnick claims in his footnote that “it is worth noting” “that in Numbers 24:9, a few verses after the prayer… Balaam states ‘Blessed are those who bless you, Accursed are those who curse you!’ referring to the relations between non-Jews and Jews,” and that the gentiles who help the Spiegelmans are not harmed, including Mrs. Motonawna, Mr. Lukowski, and Mrs. Kawka (Tabachnick 4). Meanwhile, those who harm Vladek and Anja, “such as the smugglers who betray them to the Nazis, themselves end up in Auschwitz” and the “Jewish ‘rat’” who betrays “their hiding place to the Nazis ends up dead himself, killed at the order of Haskel” (Tabachnick 4). However, Tabachnick fails to mention Ilzecki, who saves Vladek’s life and ends up dead with his wife (I:81) This is an instance where someone helps Vladek but ends up harmed himself in the long run. This is an example of Tabachnick making an omission to fit his thesis that God has a divine plan for Vladek and Anja, and that part of his divine plan is giving birth to Art Spiegelman so that he could create Maus (Tabachnick 10).
Another instance where Tabachnick omits a key detail in order to fit his thesis is when he mentions Mandelbaum’s comment: “My God. My God. My god…it’s a miracle, Vladek. God sent shoe through you” but two panels later Vladek says, “But a few days later the Germans chose him to take away to work…so. It was finished with Mandelbaum. I never saw him more again” (Tabachnick 6, II: 34). In this instance, a direct prayer may have been answered but what kind of cruel god would answer a specific prayer but kill him days later? Tabachnick thus glosses over this major detail when he lists this incident as an example of instance where Vladek’s generosity is considered an offering to God (Tabachnick 6).
Spiegelman merges the past with the present via various literary and illustrative techniques, one of which includes the “blurring of temporal boundaries” “within a frame or beyond it (when is drawings stretch beyond the gutters)” (Kolar 237). One such example is the monumental moment when they arrive at the concentration camp in Auschwitz. Art Spiegelman, calling on his education, already knew what the most iconic thing, the gates, looked like. The size of the image parallels the importance in Vladek’s and Arties mind, but why is there a full bleed to the edge of the page? And why does he put a text bubble over the gates, which are superimposed by Vladek’s narration? (Class lecture November 24, 2020) The bleeding to the edge of the page represents foreshadowing, literally drawn out: it is an illustration of the bleeding between the past, the present, and the future. Even Vladek’s narration reflects the blending between the three temporal times: “we knew the stories—that they will gas us and throw us in the ovens. This was 1944…we knew everything. And here we were” (I: 157, underlines my own). The existentialists liked to personalize time and space; they questioned the objectivity of time, when lived experience drastically altered the perception of time as in the saying, “time flies when you’re having fun” (Flynn 5-6).
Huyssen says that Vladek assumes a safe distance from the past but that in actuality his “whole habitus” has been molded by his experience in the Holocaust. While Vladek is unaware of how he has been shaped by his harrowing experience in Auschwitz and how his behavior has been altered by his trauma, Artie is aware of this fact and always “conscious” of the fact that the “borders between past and present are fluid” (Huyssen 79). Thus, the very narrative structure of Maus works in ways to blend Vladek’s traumatic memory with Artie’s “postmemory” (Kolar 237). Postmemory is “‘distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection’ (Hirsch 1997:22)” (Kolar 228). “According to Hirsch, ‘postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated’ (Hirsch 1997:22)” (Kolar 228).
The “narrator-protagonist” Artie may have been exposed directly to the harrowing events of the Holocaust, but his identity is “profoundly shaped” by the “tragedy of his parents” (Kolar 237). Huyssen asks how one “represents” an event that one never experienced and only knows through media representations “from an ever growing historical distance? All this requires new narrative and figurative strategies including irony, shock, black humor, even cynicism” (Huyssen 81). Through various “formal means (in particular by using anthropomorphized animals) Spiegelman distances” himself from his parents’ trauma. He may be emotionally invested, but he is able to retain a sense of detachment and irony about the Holocaust (Kolar 237). This contrasts extremely with the “embedded comic strip” “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” with its Goya or Munch-esque “blunt looks, cries and screams,” which are “paradoxically” more scary than the images of the Holocaust (Kolar 237, 230). “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” is “dark and stark” with its “wood-cut like, grotesque images” (Kolar 230, Huyssen 73). Kolar says the “distance is nullified” because Art experienced the trauma of his mother’s suicide himself; it is “not mediated but experienced deeply, and thus there is no need for the author to distance himself from it by formal means” (Kolar 229). The “Expressionistic style” contrasts with the “rather detached, understated style of Vladek’s and Artie’s narratives” (Kolar 231). “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” is a sample of his earlier work in 1973 and demonstrates the beginning of Art taking himself seriously as an artist.
Until this comic, “he had done Topps Bubble Gum features” and “only became a very serious artist after Anja’s suicide” (Tabachnick 11). Thus, “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” with its different artistic style, real humans used, and “funereal” background is the only tragedy that affected Spiegelman the most (Chute 346, I :100-103). Not even the Holocaust is ever depicted with human beings in that artistic style, which resonates with Camus’ first line his essay The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide” (Camus 4). The four pages, “framed in black like an obituary in German newspapers, intrude violently into the mouse narrative” breaking the frame” (Huyssen 72). While Husseyn reads into the abrupt pattern changes of this section in the book, Tabachnick focuses on how we “’discover Art’s motivation for gathering his father’s story’” (Tabachnick 11). “Anja’s suicide led Spiegelman to write the cri de coeur that is “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” “( which was written ‘five years after Anja’s suicide)“and indeed Maus as a whole. So the larger or perhaps divine purpose of Anja’s suicide, albeit certainly not her own motivation for it, was to provide the shock that forced Art into drawing seriously” (Tabachnick 11).
While I agree with Tabachnick’s claim that Spiegelman may be “projecting” the guilt of the Nazis onto himself and his family when he calls his father a murderer for destroying Anja’s diaries, when he calls his mother a murderer for killing him in “Hell Planet,” and onto himself for not displaying affection towards his mother when she needed it most (Tabachnick 12), I would add that his own sense of guilt is indeed very real and valid. Spiegelman describes the “last time he saw her” (103). Anja asks “Artie…you…still…love…me…don’t you?” and Artie, “resentful” of the way she “tightened the umbilical cord” turns away and says “sure, Ma” (103). Camus speaks of the importance of showing loved ones, especially suicidal loved ones, concern: “newspapers often speak of ‘personal sorrows’ or ‘incurable illness.’ These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancor and all the boredom still in suspension” (Camus 5).
The characterization of Anja illustrates her as the fallen existentialist hero. Existentialism is about finding purpose in the mundanity of everyday life, to create one’s own purpose even with the ever-looming spectre of anguish and dread. Anguish and dread are distinguished from fear: “anxiety has no direct object, there is nothing in the world that is threatening” (Crowell 10). She is repeatedly shown to be suicidal, we are introduced to Anja as an exceptionally “sensitive,” which is the word the school director uses to describe her (I:18). Upon first going to her house, Vladek searches through her closet“ to see what a housekeeper she was” and finds pills which he finds out is because she was “so skinny and nervous” (I:19). When she finds out most of her family is dead, she becomes “completely hysterical”, saying “Oh God. Let me die too!...Why are you pulling me Vladek Let me alone! I don’t want to live!” but Vladek says “No, darling! To die, it’s easy…but you have to struggle for life” (I: 122). Spiegelman shows through illustration that Anja’s reaction is a direct result of Lolek’s insistence that he will be okay, when instead he “gets put into one of the next transports to Auschwitz” (I: 122) because she is making the same crying facial expression with her nose pointed up to the sky and her mouth in a screaming or wailing contortion. While Anja is in Birkenau she writes to Vladek: “I miss you…each day I think to run into the electric wires and finish everything. But to know you are alive it gives me still to hope…” (II: 53).
The last scene I want to take a look at is the first scene in the story where the image takes up more than half the frame: “here it was the first time I saw, with my own eyes, the swastika” (32). Here we see the side profile or the back of the heads of five mice looking out the window to a Nazi flag. We see the swastika on the covers of the book, on the next page, repeatedly as a sun-like or iris-like backdrop for the scenes describing how one person was forced to sell a business to Germans without receiving any money; were humiliated and forced to carry signs that said “I am a filthy Jew,” instances of disappearances after police visits and “many, many such stories”—synagogues burned, Jews randomly beaten, Jews being forced out of their town and into ghettos. We see the unified conformity of the Nazis and the many acts of violence committed under the symbol of the swastika—a symbol of hate and oppression. Although existentialism is not specifically anti-fascist or anti-Nazi, it is on the whole, very anti-government and societal structures and very individualistic. Authenticity is a main tenet of existentialism and “to be truly authentic is to have realized one’s individuality and vice versa” (Flynn 74). “We cannot appeal to systems of law or convention or tradition as decisively furnishing instructions for life choices; every choice has to be personally appropriated” (Irvine). To be a Nazi is to erase one’s individuality and to follow an immoral code of law; Existentialists “deconstructed social conventions and practices” as “forms of hiding and expressions of fear and ignorance” (Irvine). To follow “normal” conventions is to be inauthentic to oneself, and to be a Nazi is the same, only one must factor in the immorality of being a Nazi with it. “Existentialism is the ethical theory that we ought to treat the freedom at the core of human existence as intrinsically valuable and the foundation of all other values” (Crowell, 1). The “very engagement in the world alienates” one from his “authentic possibility” (Crowell 9). If existentialism is a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of individuality, then one can make very harsh criticisms of the Nazi party and its antithetical stance against what existentialism is all about. Indeed, the very emergence of existentialism as a philosophical school came out during and in response to World War II and the horrors that came out from the Nazi party.
Spiegelman’s animal imagery is an example of his commitment to veracity; the mask in “Time Flies” to Sisyphean perspectives in commercial success; his gutter usage with the bleeding of images to the edges of the page and the blending of borders between past, present, and future; fatalism and the Existential “personalization” of time. The “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” demonstrates Artie’s proximity to trauma of his mother’s suicide compared to distance of postmemory regarding the Jewish genocide, in addition to Anja’s characterization of the fallen existential hero with her constant battle with anguish, dread, and suicide. Finally, we reviewed how Nazi symbolism is the anthesis to existential beliefs. Although not a full review of the tenets of existentialism, I have viewed Maus I and Maus II through the lens of some aspects of Existentialism.
Work cited:Camus, Albert, and Justin O’Brien. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. 1st Vintage International Ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Print.
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Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jac Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), p 102