Gluey Tart: Takes on Maus

I hate Maus. Let me count the reasons why. I’m not allowed to hate it, for one thing; I always find that annoying. I’m not crazy about portraying Jews as mice and Poles as pigs and so on (I won’t go into why – better critics than I have already beaten that horse). (OK, I can’t help it – Nazis were humans who killed Jews, who were also human – people killing other people, not one species killing another species, not cats hunting mice, for heaven’s sake.) (Also, pigs? It doesn’t really matter to me whether he meant that insult or not; that’s the kind of thing that happens when you start getting cute about genocide.) I’m full on offended by “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” and Spiegelman’s tossing the word “murder” around. (That story is about his mother committing suicide, and he says, “You murdered me, Mommy, and left me here to take the rap!” He also calls his father a murderer for burning his mother’s journals without letting Art see them.) I could write essays about each of these topics, but I’m going to stay focused (well, focused for me) on my main problem with Maus, which is that I believe it’s morally wrong to batten on the pain of your people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Postmodernism. I’m aware of it. And narratives help us understand atrocities like the Holocaust. And the children of Holocaust survivors experienced their parents’ memories in a unique way. And how is it wrong for a writer to work out his demons by telling a story? Plus, mice are cute! Everyone loves mice. I don’t actually disagree with any of that, except maybe postmodernism, but there isn’t much I can do about postmodernism.

My objection is to Spiegelman grabbing his parents’ painful past and carrying it in a fireman’s hold through an obstacle course of writerly tropes to emerge, triumphant, a Pulitzer prize clutched in one hand and an Eisner award in the other, proud and satisfied about making the graphic novel serious and literary and worthy of a couple million graduate theses. He is excessively eager to define himself by his relationship to his parents – that is, my fucked up parents fucked me up, damn it. And who can argue? It’s the Holocaust! You can’t argue with the Holocaust. Of all the writers who have ever written about how their lives are ruined by their damned crazy parents, anyone laying claim to the Holocaust hits the mother lode. It renders anyone’s personal trauma unassailable and worthy of interest.

I am going to assume Spiegelman undertook this project as a way to come to terms with his own pain – an understandable motive, although the subsequent publication of more Maus and the egregious In the Shadow of No Towers might make one wonder, if one were mean and lacking in tact, about the relationship between Spiegelman’s career and his willingness to schmaltz up whatever major tragedy lands at his doorstep. Maybe it’s a chicken and the egg thing – he could be attracted to these themes because of the way his psyche was constructed (by his damned crazy parents). Either way, he thought it was OK to publish this story about mice Jews and cat Nazis, but he almost certainly didn’t expect everyone in the world to decide it was a brilliant masterpiece.

That probably means I shouldn’t hold it against him, but… But. (“Everyone I know has a big but,” sayeth the sage Pee Wee Herman; “What’s yours?”) This sort of thing reminds me of people who write true crime books. Beyond the “Look at me! Look at me! Be impressed by my pain!” thing (and isn’t that why God invented psychiatrists?), I can’t help thinking that putting murder out there for profit and some measure of fame (because we don’t publish things unless we hope people will read them) is wrong. Is it more or less wrong to exploit your own tragedy than someone else’s?  On the one hand, you have more of a motive than simply latching onto a story that might sell (although that is part of your motive; otherwise, you’d keep a diary or something). You’re working through something that is, in some sense, yours. On the other hand, your own family becomes grist for the mill, and even if they acquiesce, you’re still using them.

I already hear the collective grumble of irritation saying it isn’t exploitation if it’s art. Art transmutes exploitation into something else, something with a higher purpose. And I believe that, too – to a point. What rises to the level of art? This isn’t the time or place to throw down on what art is or isn’t, thank god, but I don’t subscribe to the “50 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” theory. You know, “everyone else thinks it’s the best comic ever, so if you don’t think so, you can’t call yourself a sentient being and you also suck donkey balls.” Well, you say “sweeping metaphor,” I say “somebody get me some damned insurance so I can see a psychiatrist and tell them how my parents fucked up my life.”

Not that I’ve actually read the thing, mind you. I don’t want to, I don’t need to, and you can’t make me. Does this mean I’m not allowed to have an opinion? It does not. I have picked Maus up countless times, willing the book to do anything but annoy me. If you are an educated and intelligent reader and accidentally let it out that you sometimes read comics, everyone assumes you love Maus. They start talking about it as if it had performed three perfect miracles. And because: 1) I hate to disappoint (oh, please – Kinukitty is the most gracious of creatures); and 2) I hate to miss out on things, I pick it up, I read a few pages, I put it back. (I actually have a similar relationship with Gravity’s Rainbow, which I used to keep with my horror books – except  I think Gravity’s Rainbow really is art.) I have done this countless times and have probably read about half of the book, over the last 20 years. I have also read a certain number of essays and blog posts, and listened to a certain number of conversations, and rolled my eyes at a certain number of over-carbonated bookstore recommendations.

The brilliance of Maus would not coalesce for me if I could but force myself to read those missing pages. The Poles would still be characterized as pigs, the Holocaust would still be ugly, and the book would still stink of entitled self-pity.
 
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71 thoughts on “Gluey Tart: Takes on Maus

  1. “….I’m not allowed to hate it, for one thing;….”

    What’s left more or less unsaid in your post is that audience and critics are more implicit than the artist is in perpetuating these biases. Extra value is given to certain works merely because the subject matter is the Holocaust. And this might be the case from obvious cases like “Schindler’s List” to more venerated ones like Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah.” The latter film especially I think has been highly overrated. It’s not a bad film by any means but in the end it didn’t achieve anything that hasn’t been done by other artists years and years before it was first released. But it does get called “The Greatest Documentary Ever” by various writers.

  2. “Extra value is given to certain works merely because the subject matter is the Holocaust.”

    It’s the Holocaust in particular too. Other tragedies can get bonus points, I think, but the Holocaust is extra special. If Maus (or Schindler’s List) had been about the Holodomor, there’d be a lot less interest, it seems like.

  3. I doubt most (American) people even know what the Holodomor is. Not arguing against the art that depicts the Holocaust is, I think, a side effect of the social stigma against Holocaust deniers. Many years ago, my grade school had a concentration camp survivor come to speak, and he kindly answered all our innappropriate children’s questions (but what did you eat? what were the bathrooms like? did you still get to play games?) One child asked him if it really happened, because his dad said it was all a big lie. Looking back, I still remember the horror on all the adult teachers’ faces and the powerful social stigma that kid got. The speaker was very gentle and explained that yes, it really happened, yes, he was there, and so on, and we were all, as kids, satisfied (knowing as we did that adults sometimes lie like rugs for reasons unknown) but we all also learned that you don’t talk back about the Holocaust ever. In college, when everyone I knew was orgasming about Maus, I found it offensive and creepy (and really let the nazis off the hook–cats can’t help chasing mice, but people have self control, sheesh, killing Jewish people is not the natural order of the universe for crying out loud) but I kept my trap shut because I thought my own offense at Maus was possibly offensive.

  4. this hits at the heart of what i’m writing in a piece about another “serious” funny animal comic re: the ethics of using anthropomorphic animals at all when the “anthro” directly relates to existing human society. your point is elegantly and succinctly put. but what if all the Poles were ALSO cops?
    joking aside, this was my favorite hate-piece so far. i’ve admired your writing style before, but it’s put to good use expressing heartfelt outrage.

  5. i’ve found that anthropomorphization is a give and take. it’s more successful when the characters are informed by animal behavior i.e. “Sam the fox is so sneaky” since these inferrences about animal personalities are human projections. when we try to shoehorn human society and order onto an ecosystem, like in the case of MAUS, it’s clumsy and offensive and diminishing of both humanity and animals.

  6. “I doubt most (American) people even know what the Holodomor is.”

    I didn’t know what it was until recently, when I had to read up on it for work. It made an impression though.

    I think one of the things about the Holocaust for America is that it’s the hideous, mega-atrocity that we actually did something about. I know folks say we should have done more, but realistically we fought a massive war against the perpetrators, and the Nazis who did it were our enemies and remain a touchstone for evil — both because of the Holocaust and because we fought them, and those two things reinforce each other.

    With the Holodomor, we didn’t do shit, and then allied ourselves with the perpetrators for understandable Realpolitik reasons…it’s just a more complicated narrative all around.

  7. I’ve been away from H.U. for a while, and I’m thinking that this review may not have been the best way to reintroduce myself to what’s been going on here. And this comment will probably not help matters.

    How am I supposed to read this? The piece is so desperate, so needy, so frantic in its desire to be taken as daring — all the while winking and parenthesizing itself away from anything that might resemble a real argument.

    Indeed, by the end, I started to wonder if I had been duped by an elaborate parody of a spluttering hate-review. How else to account for an essay that begins with expressions of the very “entitled self-pity” — I hate it because I’m not allowed to hate it — that it ultimately attacks?

    How else to excuse a review that worries about how one isn’t allowed to “argue with the Holocaust” — but spends much of its time griping about how the book in question doesn’t take genocide seriously enough?

    How else to describe a piece of writing that wants both to attack and to embrace the idea that “Art” — or rather real art — can transmute tragedy into “something else”? Or that wants to celebrate the fact the book remains unread — take that, book! — and then wishes to walk back that claim “a few pages” at a time.

    But above all, I don’t know what else to make of a review that is so insistently about the reviewer, even as its main claim — perhaps its only claim — against MAUS seem to be that Spiegelman, intentionally or not, made the Holocaust all about him.

    Critic, hate thyself.

  8. Hmmm…it is a personal review in some sense…but you don’t actually learn anything about the writer’s personal life or background, I don’t think. And surely there’s a fairly clear line between talking about ones own opinions in a review and making the Holocaust about oneself?

    I also don’t really know why it’s a contradiction to suggest that a refusal to allow argument with the Holocaust is also a failure of seriousness…

  9. Peter: Criticism is often personal? That’s a legitimate avenue from which to approach work?
    The exasperated tone of your comment, what with the stentorian “How else-” seems like a parody in itself of the righteousness of the comments section. Is this a meta thing? I’ll need to put another pot of coffee on if we’re already going meta.

  10. If I hadn’t read stuff like “Animal Farm” years before reading “Maus” (and lord knows how many underground comics), I may have had a problem with the anthropomorphism aspect of it.

    But, in my opinion, it works just fine — especially in light of Spiegelman’s underground roots.

  11. Putting the actual review aside for a moment, I have a love/hate relationship with Maus. On one hand, it is a compelling story for sure, presented effectively, and Vladek’s tale deserves to be told. On the other, without the funny animal gimmick, I wonder if it would have captured the imagination of worldwide audiences and apparently redeemed the medium of comics all by itself, a sentiment that makes me roll my eyes every time. It is always described as strengthening the narrative, but it seems like a cheap way of insulating the reader from the events, really.

    Vommarlowe is right on the money. As a Jew myself, one who disagrees with the path Israel’s government is taking, I have to struggle with my own “THE HOLOCAUST” guilt every time I say “What’s happening to the Palestinians is pretty shitty” This effect is what makes the Holocaust and to a lesser extent other events such as the Munich massacre go to subjects for anyone who wants some easy gravitas.

    I can’t forget to mention, one of the things I admire Maus the most for is Spiegelman’s willingness to be frank about his father’s own hypocritical racism. I’ve always felt that Jews get a pass for this sort of thing way too often in Western society. Nobody is willing to be the one to say that going around calling black people “schvartzes” is pretty terrible, because the Holocaust. Look at the genuine astonishment some people have with people offering even the lightest amount of criticism against Israel, acting as if any sort of offense at the nation’s behavior is some sort of savage attack on world Jewry. It’s quite galling.

  12. I’ll be glad to walk my rhetoric back a few steps. Clearly, there are many times when one should hit “send comment,” and minutes before a grumpy Gender class isn’t one of them.

    However, after looking at a few of the recent entries — and I am loving the hate-fest endeavor and the discussion overall — I am a bit surprised by how many of the recent pieces skew ethical. The problems that many of the “haters” have with their chosen objects focus more than I would expect on whether the art and artist are morally suspect.

    The review of MAUS ultimately reduces to this — to the question *not* of whether the book is good, but whether its *creator* is good. The problem with cats/mice/pigs imagery? It’s not right to “get cute” with genocide. The problem with “Hellp Planet”? It’s “offensive” to label a victim “murderer.” And the problem of the book as a whole? It is “morally wrong to batten on the pain of your people” — or even yourself.

    But the strangest opprobrium? The problem with liking and recommending MAUS is that it makes those who don’t like it feel bad (and feel bad for feeling bad). Suddenly the real victim is the critic.

    When I said I thought the original piece was possibly a sly parody, I was joking. But only partly joking. I think that with each set of parentheses, kinukitty started to realize that he or she was really in on the joke the whole time. And that made it an interesting — if ultimately an infuriating — read.

  13. Russ, Animal Farm is an interesting comparison. I think Orwell uses the animal metaphor more deftly. Specifically, he’s not just comparing the working class to animals; he’s comparing the situation on a farm (with animals as workers) to the situation in factories/farms (with working class as workers.) So the real-life relationships reinforce his message, rather than undercutting them (as turning the Holocaust into predator/prey arguably does.)

    In addition, there are humans in Animal Farm…and the pigs end up turning into humans/exploiters themselves…. The use of the animals, and the distance between that and reality, gets woven into the narrative…whereas in Maus it’s treated almost entirely as meta-narrative.

    I think the bottom line is that Orwell really treated his story as allegory. In Maus,the use of funny animals seems very much tacked on; you can’t tell Animal Farm without Animals, but you really could pretty much tell Maus without mice. Spiegelman explores and talks about the tacked-on-ness of the conceit at various points (as when he contemplates what species his wife should be), but it all seems pretty forced (to me). Acknowledging a gimmick doesn’t make it less of a gimmick; in some ways it just makes the gimmick seem more half-assed.

    Caro talked about this a fair bit, but damned if I can find it. Maybe it was just in comments? Either way Google is not helping me….

  14. Peter, I think that asking folks to pick the worst comic ever is bound to generate ethical responses. It’s hard to imagine how a comic that’s merely formally bad, or that doesn’t plug into any particular moral issues, could be as bad (for example) as that dreadfully racist Thomas Nast cartoon I posted yesterday. Just as I think choosing a best comic will almost inevitably also be an endorsement of the creator’s vision and genius and to no small extent worldview, choosing a worst is going to lead you to the opposite of that.

    Or put more simply — a bad comic might not raise ethical questions. A worst one often will.

  15. Noah wrote: “I think the bottom line is that Orwell really treated his story as allegory. In Maus,the use of funny animals seems very much tacked on; you can’t tell Animal Farm without Animals, but you really could pretty much tell Maus without mice.”

    You really think so? That’s not something that crossed my mind when I originally read “Maus.” Perhaps it was because, knowing Spiegelman’s underground roots, and having read so much anthropomorphic underground comics, it seemed a logical and resonable extension of what was a common underground presentation method.

    maybe that was the problem… I should have read it as if I were “a man from Mars.”

  16. How about Katz (http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2012/03/katz-v-maus-counterfeit-or-critique/)? It seems to adress some of the critiques that the essay poses ( using different animals to represent different nationalities = the holocaust was humans vs humans, not some other species vs humans).
    Rumour has it that the author plans to release a MetaKats this year or 2013, it’ll make a nice comparison to maus/metamaus.

    Couldn’t find a english review of the book, but here’s a portuguese one, that nobody will read: http://lerbd.blogspot.com.br/2012/02/katz-anonimo.html

  17. Thales, I haven’t seen Katz…though there was a really funny parody of Maus a while back with papa maus nattering on and on about his experiences selling weed.

    Russ…I think linking it to underground comics makes sense, but doesn’t necessarily get around the sense of it being tacked on. Basically you’re saying he used funny animals because of genre conventions.

  18. Noah — Kind of.

    The mice/cats metaphor simply did not seem out of place. Cats usually kill mice when they come in contact with them — often after toying with them for awhile. They do so instinctively, without remorse, and in line with the theory of natural selection.

    The Nazis before and during World War II viewed the Jewish population in Germany and the nations they invaded in a similar, Darwinistic manner, and treated them accordingly.

    Which is why I think Spiegelman’s usage of these two basic anthropomorphic elements was actually quite canny and apropo.

  19. Kinukitty:
    “Not that I’ve actually read the thing, mind you. I don’t want to, I don’t need to, and you can’t make me. Does this mean I’m not allowed to have an opinion? It does not. ”

    Yes, it does.
    At least no opinion that should in the slightest be taken seriously.

    This follows on the Jason review of ‘Berlin’, where he gleefully farts about while avowing he’s never read the work he condemns.

    Is this a trend in the hatefest, Noah? If so, I feel like a fool for researching my own contribution, and for shelling out good money for a re-read of the object of my attack.

    Kinukitty also is incapable, by her own account, of finishing ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ (a novel I read in two sittings, age 16)– yet she proclaims that it “really is art”.

    How would you know?

    Your contributions to this site consist of [self-censored]

  20. Oh, chill out Alex. Different people took different approaches. I’m happy to have more researched efforts, and also happy to have less rigorous ones.

    As I’ve said before…I don’t think it’s the case that you have to be rigorous to have an interesting opinion. On the contrary, I think it’s useful to have a conversation which includes people with different levels of buy-in and interest. If you don’t like something, often you don’t want to spend as much time with it; I think that’s a pretty natural reaction, and I don’t think it means that you shouldn’t be allowed to talk about it.

    Both Jason and kinukitty are pretty clearly using a personal/performative approach rather than a scholarly one. If you don’t like it, that’s cool…but it’s something I’ve always had on the blog, and will continue to print on occasion, because I enjoy it and think it’s worthwhile.

  21. “Not that I’ve actually read the thing, mind you. I don’t want to, I don’t need to, and you can’t make me. Does this mean I’m not allowed to have an opinion?”

    Why should anyone care about your opinion of a book you haven’t read? Talk about postmodern!

  22. “Either way, he thought it was OK to publish this story about mice Jews and cat Nazis, but he almost certainly didn’t expect everyone in the world to decide it was a brilliant masterpiece.”

    You probably haven’t read much about Spiegelman if you think he was surprised to have everyone call him brilliant. He’s a guy who holds himself in very high regard, or at least that’s my impression of him. I started reading Metamaus (a book-length interview in which he discusses the book at great length and shares research materials, sketches, etc.), and even though I tend to view Maus pretty favorably, I couldn’t handle his evident self-satisfaction at having created the greatest comic of all time. That sort of thing might be unavoidable when a special Pulitzer category gets created just to honor you, and people spend decades heaping adulations on your work, but instead of keeping humble and continuing to making comics, he let it all go to his head, and he’s made a career out of telling everyone how great he is.

  23. Hey Robert; I just answered this…but I can try again in a different way, perhaps.

    When people feel alienated from a work, they often don’t engage with it. That’s what being alienated from the work means. Fans of a work, or scholars of a work, or people who are invested in the work, tend to assume that you’re disqualified if you don’t engage. As a result, you tend not to hear from people who find the work alienating, or who really don’t like it.

    I think you can learn something from people who find a work extremely off-putting or alienating…but you can’t learn anything from them if you dismiss their opinions or contributions out of hand.

    I’ve read Maus a bunch (probably all the way through at least twice; sections of it probably ten times?) But the idea that the central metaphor is not only problematic, but absolutely facepalming dumb hadn’t occurred to me in quite that way. So that seemed a worthwhile insight to me (though of course that doesn’t mean it’ll be useful to everyone.)

  24. You’re the editor here, and if you got something from it, OK. But as I read through this, I felt like Kinukitty was engaging with a straw man version of Maus. And when I got to the sentence about not having read it, I suddenly understood why. I don’t think Kinukitty’s alienation made this “review” worth reading. At the very least, the author should have let us know that she/he hadn’t read the work being reviewed at the beginning–not at the end. I would feel less insulted by it–because I would have skipped reading it.

  25. I mean…not to suggest that anyone should take the Holocaust or great literature lightly, since that would be wrong, but…it’s a pretty funny piece. It might be possible to enjoy it from that perspective even if you don’t agree with it, maybe?

  26. Let me know if you want me to write a bad review of some comic I haven’t read and pull a wacky reveal at the end of the post. That’s the kind of no-research-required empty calories writing I can sink my teeth into.

  27. “The mice/cats metaphor simply did not seem out of place. Cats usually kill mice when they come in contact with them — often after toying with them for awhile. They do so instinctively, without remorse, and in line with the theory of natural selection.

    The Nazis before and during World War II viewed the Jewish population in Germany and the nations they invaded in a similar, Darwinistic manner, and treated them accordingly.

    BIG NOPE to all of this.

    Nazi eliminationist ideology had NOTHING to do with Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, as it conflicted with their racist pseudoscientific rational. Darwin’s texts were burned as official Nazi policy.
    Much as Vom already pointed out, implying these simplistic labels to human beings diminishes the complexities and horror of their behavior. The Jews of Europe were not a prey species, and it is not part of any “natural” selection process for them to be systematically murdered by their fellow man.

    This reading of history that the Nazi regime treated their conquest in a “Darwinian” (?????) manner is both shallow and factually incorrect.

  28. Michael — Sorry, you can’t let ol’ Darwin off the hook so easily just because there were people who took his theory and twisted it to fit their own agendas. Greater minds than mine have been arguing both sides of the issue for more than 100 years.

    The article linked to below isn’t a bad starting point, but my views are are actually based on reading Darwin and hundreds, if not thousands of articles, papers, books and other material about World War II during the past 40-odd years.

    http://www.discovery.org/a/5069

    Waving away the obvious connections between Darwin’s theory and the evolution of 20th Century racism does not make it so.

    It doesn’t mean parts of Darwin’s theory were not correct, it simply means that parts of his theory were seized upon by some to shore up their racist beliefs.

    To argue against that fact, according to the article linked to above, is “absurd.” I wholeheartedly agree.

  29. I thought the funny animals presentation was effective because it blunts the sheer physical horror of the story. A lot of holocaust art comes to feel emotionally draining, melodramatic or even tastelessly manipulative. Had he drawn humans the impact would have been more gut level and I suspect many people would have found it hard to read, or engage with at a more intellectual level. I suspect the funny animal thing is key to the books wide success.

  30. I’d agree that Darwinism and racism have often gone together. I don’t think that necessarily makes using cats as Nazis and mice as jews a particularly thoughtful or insightful thing to do.

  31. Evan, I think your right that the animals distance the narrative, and make it more palatable. Again, though, I don’t necessarily know that that’s a good thing aesthetically. I mean, should art about the Holocaust be palatable? For example, does making the Nazi’s a different species make it easier to dismiss their actions as something inapplicable to the reader?

  32. Lots of oppressive groups have used perfectly valid science for vile uses.

    Personally, I loathe the cat portrayal because it makes it too easy (IMO) to see the Nazis as ‘naturally’ preying on others. Which is a very comfortable lie. Evil people came to power because otherwise normal people put power into their hands.

    Not because they’re cats, but because normal people can lose their moral compass during times of rampant inflation and/or hardship, just as other people might choose the path of good (the small craft rescue at Dunkirk is a good example of normal people doing the right thing under extremely trying circumstances). Any of us, at any time, could go towards evil or good–it’s a choice, not a set of prey drives. It’s not inevitable, so I personally find the cats distasteful. It’s too easy for us (whoever we are as readers) to nod knowingly and ‘know’ we’re safe since we’re not cats. As it were. Instead of knowing that catdom lives inside all of us, if we fuck up badly enough.

  33. Evan wrote: “A lot of holocaust art comes to feel emotionally draining, melodramatic or even tastelessly manipulative. Had he drawn humans the impact would have been more gut level and I suspect many people would have found it hard to read, or engage with at a more intellectual level. I suspect the funny animal thing is key to the books wide success.”

    You know, that’s a good point. I’ll bet Orwell may have had that same thing on his mind when he wrote “Animal Farm.”

    Comics-wise, Walt Kelly did the same thing in “Pogo” to some degree. I’ve seen at least one example of his non-Pogo political cartooning (a full-page cartoon in, I think, “Collier’s”) and it came across as heavy-handed.

  34. Charles wrote: “Russ, not all Darwinists are Social Darwinists. And not all Social Darwinists are Eugenicists. Darwin wasn’t Spencer.”

    Or Haeckel. But I never said he was.

    Frankly, I don’t care about Ben Stein’s movie, nor the religious rationale behind it, but the article linked to above makes reasonable points about the obvious and proven dangers of taking portions of Darwin’s theories and blindly or nefariously applying them to people.

    And even Darwin’s hands aren’t clean here, for despite the rebuttal in the article you linked to, it’s pretty clear to me from reading his works that Darwin did not think “all men were created equal.”

    I’ll try and check out the two books, though.

  35. Charles, didn’t Darwin flirt with eugenics in the Descent of Man? I should really read that…it’s definitely not in Origin of Species, but I understand he at least circled round it in other work….

  36. The nazis didn’t “twist Darwin’s theory to fit their own agendas.” They didn’t use Darwin’s theory. The Origin of Species and similar texts were banned.

    From Guidelines of banned books:

    6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Häckel).

    6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).

    Furthermore the Discovery Institute is a n ideological Creationist propaganda mill.

  37. Michael — For cryin’ out loud… Google Darwin and Nazis and read any one of many articles NOT by the Discovery Institute that discuss the same thing.

    And I hate to break it to you, but even a conservative can be right sometimes.

    Have you even READ “The Descent of Man?”

    While in it Darwin does, to his credit, argue that man is a single species, he routinely discusses “higher races” and “savages,” contrasting them, and pointing out the moral and cultural differences between them — clearly indicating in a matter-of-fact manner that in almost every instance the “savages” were unable to adapt when they clashed or intermingled with more “civilized” races.

  38. I googled ‘Darwin nazis’ and found either creationist bullshit, or stuff like this and this.

    Noah, from what I’ve seen, Darwin didn’t circle around eugenics. Consider this quote from DofM:

    With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

    The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.

    As for his use of “savages,” well, he was of a particular time, but this article gives a pretty good overview of his abolitionist views. I think anti-racism was better served by Darwin’s theories than racism.

  39. ——————
    MG says:

    …I have a love/hate relationship with Maus. On one hand, it is a compelling story for sure, presented effectively, and Vladek’s tale deserves to be told. On the other, without the funny animal gimmick, I wonder if it would have captured the imagination of worldwide audiences…
    ——————

    No, it would not. Surely Spiegelman — if not as smart and thoughtful as Alan Moore — was aware the “gimmick,” which indeed is what it is, had all manner of troubling implications. (Why, it’s not only natural, it’s good for cats to hunt and kill mice!) For every apposite correlation — American soldiers, depicted in the book as dogs, natural enemies of cats, referred to themselves as “dogfaces” — there is an unpleasant one, Poles as pigs. (I think, that unlike his earlier comment to offended Poles as to why he drew them that way, “because they ate a lot of pork,” his intent was malicious, and fairly so. Poles were as a nation, viciously anti-Semitic, eagerly aiding the Nazis in killing Jews; being rendered as pigs is but a mild “punishment.”)

    Yet, the stylizing nature of the “gimmick,” the way (far from Disney or bad children’s book cutesyness) Spiegelman drew the characters, created an effect more interesting than straightforward realism.

    The no-doubt jealous Harvey Pekar griped in the letters page of “The Comics Journal,” if Spiegelman wanted to depict the horrors of the Holocaust, why not draw it in a realistic style?

    Well, as Joe Sacco has repeatedly shown, such an approach can be powerful indeed.

    But other approaches have their own value. As Bunraku puppet theater ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunraku ) shows (“why not use live actors?” some would gripe. “It would be more realistic.”), drama enacted by figures which are a remove from humanity (just as children’s books feature animals acting like human beings) exerts its own appeal.

    ——————
    evan says:

    I thought the funny animals presentation was effective because it blunts the sheer physical horror of the story. A lot of holocaust art comes to feel emotionally draining, melodramatic or even tastelessly manipulative. Had he drawn humans the impact would have been more gut level and I suspect many people would have found it hard to read, or engage with at a more intellectual level. I suspect the funny animal thing is key to the books wide success.
    —————–

    Yes, most perceptive and well-expressed! (Is this the superb Evan Dorkin I am addressing?)

    Gotta go to work…more to come! (But yes, Noah,”Animal Farm” is infinitely better served in its central conceit.)

  40. As lots of critics have pointed out, it seems pretty clear that Spiegelman wants to look at and interrogate the notion that race has “essential qualities”–So…sometimes the folks in Maus are people with animal heads, sometimes people with animal masks…etc. Introducing these variants undercuts the notion that there is some kind of natural predator/prey relationship (another fairly common claim, btw…Robert Harvey makes the argument in his book The Art of the Comic Book). Anyway…I like the use of the animal metaphor, it immediately spawns this kind of discussion about “natural roles” vs. socially constructed ones…bringing into play the excesses of Nazi rhetoric itself. If you actually read the book (sounds strange, I know), however, there’s no sense that anyone’s actions are somehow a natural result of their animal lineage…In fact, the animality of the characters is not known to them (though an earlier version played it differently)…

    Got sucked in a bit there…but not too much

  41. Eric there’s no sense that anyone’s actions are somehow a natural result of their animal lineage…

    There’s no sense to you.

    Artistic intent and artistic result: not necessarily the same thing.

    Yes, I’ve read the book. Do I get to have an opinion now? My opinion is that regardless of intent, using cats and mice plays much harder on the folk-tale inevitability of cats chasing mice (and thus nazis being killers and mice victims) than is appropriate for a thoughtful look at the Holocaust.

  42. “I like the use of the animal metaphor, it immediately spawns this kind of discussion about “natural roles” vs. socially constructed ones”

    But…it spawns the discussion from an idiotic starting point. The roles aren’t naturally constructed; nobody now thinks they’re naturally constructed. Everyone just about knows that the Nazi ideology is monstrous, and people who don’t sure aren’t going to be talking about Maus.

    I’m sure Spiegelman is interrogating these notions, but that doesn’t mean he’s doing so intelligently. It seems like a dunderheaded metaphor employed leadenly. IMO.

  43. Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way, Noah. I meant, to Eric there is no sense of the animals acting out of prey drive etc. That his statement was written as universal, but should have been qualified as being his (to him there is no sense, etc) not that he has no sense in general.

  44. Noah, I think that art about the Holocaust now has the luxury of being palatable because there is so much art about the holocaust that isn’t palatable. There is a high probability that a reader of Maus will have seen Sophie’s Choice or read Night.

    I don’t think making the Nazi’s a different species made it easier to dismiss their actions. It seems to me that in realist depictions of the holocaust it can be hard to get past sheer emotional reaction. If the work is well done the audience feels dread, sadness and terror. There is certainly a place for work like this and there is plenty of work like this produced. Maus doesn’t work like that and because that niche is filled it doesn’t need to. Nazis in these realist depictions are something the audience reacts to, not something the audience relates with. They fear the nazis, they hate the nazis, maybe they think something like “how could people do that?” the nazis are seen as monsters. By encouraging some detachedness in the reader with the funny animals conceit allows the reader to see the situation in less sentimental terms, which makes the nazis humans and not monsters, even if they aren’t drawn as humans. Or something like that but less confused.

  45. —————–
    Evan Zuk says:

    Noah, I think that art about the Holocaust now has the luxury of being palatable because there is so much art about the holocaust that isn’t palatable…
    —————–

    Into which range does this one fall, I wonder? “Warsaw art museum buys Zbigniew Libera’s ‘Lego’ concentration camp”: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2012/01/lego-concentration-camp-warsaw-museum.html

    ——————
    Nazis in these realist depictions are something the audience reacts to, not something the audience relates with.
    ——————

    Yes. Though — as shown in Jason Lutes’ great “Berlin,” discussed on another thread here — it is possible to make them “relatable”…

  46. I always read the cat/mouse thing as emblematic of disparity in power, rather than as relieving the Nazis of any fault. I think the idea that Maus can be read as absolving the Nazis in any way is frankly baffling.

    Besides, Maus isn’t about the psychology of the Nazis. There are other books about that — Maus is under no obligation to be an omnibus treatment of the Holocaust — it’s supposed to be a family memoir.

    That’s not to say that some of the other points made here aren’t dead on — I think they absolutely are. Spiegelman’s relationship with his father, his mother’s memory, his guilt, and his use of the pain of others is fraught, and, yeah, in retrospect, after In the Shadow of No Towers, can be easily read as pretty icky.

    What saves it from these critiques, to me, at least, is that he doesn’t whitewash his own actions or motivations. We’re all free to conclude that he’s kind of a dick to his dad in the story — and he is — while being glad we got to read Maus anyway.

  47. “…and the pigs end up turning into humans/exploiters themselves….”

    Um, hello, SPOILER ALERT?!!?

  48. Completely agree with Robert Boyd above. You wasted my time by not mentioning you hadn’t read it until the end, and as a result don’t plan on wasting any further time on this site’s nattering shenanigans. The site had my attention as a reader and lost it by showing you don’t deserve it.

  49. My point was that the actual characters/people in the book are not aware of their “animal” species, etc. That is, the Nazis don’t “act” as if their pursuit of Jews is an instinctual one…despite the Nazi rhetoric to the contrary. Likewise, the mice don’t act like mice… In fact, there are “real” animal mice/rats in the books, and “real” animal cats, etc. There are plenty of ways in which the book encourages us not to see this as an animal species predator/prey relationship… This being the case (obviously imo…any of these comments are personal opinions…it hardly seems necessary to say so), the logical critique is “why bother with the animal metaphor if it’s clear it’s more or less meaningless”— I think there are a bunch of good reasons for it… which I discuss in my own book chapter on Maus… but mileage will vary, obviously.

  50. Bah.

    Maus is done funny animal style because that’s the only way Spiegelman could tell his story and he wanted to tell his story because he needed to. In the end it was all done for want of a good analyst.

    to think of it as “Spiegelman grabbing his parents’ painful past and carrying it in a fireman’s hold through an obstacle course of writerly tropes to emerge, triumphant, a Pulitzer prize clutched in one hand and an Eisner award in the other” is to both completely misunderstand the context in which it was written and the reasons for why it existed in the first place.

    Spiegelman didn’t set out to make more Holocaust literature, though of course that is now how Maus is treated, but to write down his own personal history, about how his mother’s suicide fucked him up, how his relationship with his father formed him and to do that he needed to tell the story of his parents and that was of course impossible without telling of their experiences in the Holocaust.

    Spiegelman is of course well aware of the objections against the animal metaphor (though “people will think the Holocaust was a good thing because cats kill mice is a particularly stupid one) and breaks it down repeatedly over the course of the story, especially once the real world catches up with it. He shows himself in a mouse mask, sitting at his drawing table on a pile of corpses (faithfully reproduced from a famous picture made during the liberation of the death camps) and so on. In story too, there’s also the character of the German jew protesting he doesn’t belong in the camps with all those poles and yids, that he fought for the kaiser.

  51. He may have “needed” to tell it, whatever that means, but surely he didn’t “need” to publish it. You put it in public, people are justified in reacting to it as if you decided to put it out there in public.

    I don’t think the objection is that it people are going to get confused about the cats and mice exactly. The objection is that the art is itself confused in its use of a predator-prey relationship. It’s meant to be cute and clever, but it ends up just being flat and kind of dumb.

    And that’s my reaction to the variations on the theme, too. The mouse mask, the pile of dead bodies, the agonizing about whether or not the representation is adequate…it all just seems clumsy and over-determined. A novel that used its metaphors with so little subtlety would be laughed out of the pulitzer committee. The accolades accorded Maus are condescending.

  52. Is hating postmodernism not the most boring thing you could possibly hate at this point?

    Not being allowed to hate Maus is poppycock. Everyone* wants to take a shot at Maus because of its status at the most canonized “graphic novel” ever. There are interesting reasons for hating it, too, but kinkutty hates it for boring reasons. It has been taken down well and defended well, but this post is just whining.

    P.S. Postmodernism! Booga booga booga!

    *Not everyone.

  53. I wanted to just rather belatedly comment on Peter’s use of the “this is so clearly ridiculous it must be a parody” shtick- aka the “Poe fallacy.” There should really be a name for the fallacy of invoking this fallacy– and maybe nowhere else is better than in discussing Maus, which certainly seems to me to function )in a possible reading) as a parody of how Americans use narratives of the Holocaust to do stuff like justify all Israeli bulyism, allegedly related yet unprovoked American interventions in the Middle East, what have you. “Spiegleman’s fallcy?” “Elie Wiesel’s fallacy?”

  54. I have far less problem with Prisoner on Hell Planet than I do with the rest of the book.
    In terms of autobiographical comics, I’m far more comfortable with the essay where the author depicts himself in prison garb and tell the reader “I feels like the real victim”, than I am with the autobiographical comic where the author has other characters (his therapist, etc) tell him “you are the real victim”.

    The first feels honest and the second is just bad writing.

  55. Pingback: And here my troubles began… | Collin Comp II (MW)

  56. Every so often, I search the net to see if anyone besides me finds Maus to be a trivialization of the Holocaust and little more than Speigelman’s psychotherapy. It’s nice to see that I am not alone. If still in a very small minority.

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