Skip to main content

Breaking Genre Boundaries in Maus

Accuse someone who's reading a graphic novel of being into non-fiction and you might get the book thrown at you. These genres don't seem the same, but they actually can be combined as a story medium. After all, this is still a format with regular characters and scenes. It uses captions for words in a normal comic-strip world. Even narrating a longer, more detailed book-length story is done in a comic format. Hey, if it's still graphically relating events, I say let's go with non-fiction graphic novel.

The line can get blurry when it comes to fiction or nonfiction in novels. Yes, we know nonfiction like biographies are supposed to be based on facts. But we've all seen that a little rearranging can help the narrative out. Well, nonfiction writers can use the tools of novelists to create more interesting details. If its' too creative, like say flying space monsters, we know it's fiction. But nonfiction still has many elements from fictional works. Think metaphor and symbolism. It can create the same images and emotions for us that novels do in describing information.

If you believe narrative isn't dependent on its medium to be true, then why can't it be represented in a comic form? After all, the presentation of a story, even if nonfiction, can be any format. In comics, the narrative just happens to be approached through visuals and text. These together can hold up a story enough to make themes and characters feel more concrete. Comics can also give a startlingly realistic impression of characters and events to create a form of history.

As a story of the Holocaust, Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus manages to combined biography, autobiography, and even history. It accomplishes the seemingly impossible through how it tells his father's experience as a Jew under the Nazi regime of World War II. Art Spiegelman gives you two autobiographies in one. You have the story he tells of his relationship with his father. Art is also sharing the story of recording his father's words as he interviews him. These then become the novel you are reading.

Maus literally uses the visual structures of its pages through panel sizes, arrangements, and transitions to show these story lines. There is one in the present, with Art interviewing his father. Then framed in this, another story in the past of those same experiences. The narrative structure interweaves different time frames to tell us these alternate stories. Maus is Art's autobiography. At the same time, it's telling you about the Holocaust so you become a helpless bystander in that time and space. Spiegelman uses this visual overlaying often (45). You get the idea the past is definitely a part of the present here.

Spiegelman's visual art form is also a way to approach the frightening reality of people dealing with terrifying experiences. His graphic novel plays with panel frames and arrangements to represent these horrors. He gives human characteristics to animals to tell you honest things about devastating events. You can't miss these caricatures. Germans are cats. Jewish people are mice. Poles are pigs. Americans are dogs. And so on. Using this unusual visual narrative, you can better digest the historical trauma.

Maus Narrative Time Past and Present
Spiegelman, Art. Maus, A Survivor's Tale. Pantheon Books, 1986, p. 45.

Let's take a look at how Spiegelman shows two visual narrative points, present and past. You see the story from both Art and Vladek's points of view as they talk about his father's going into combat. The text narrative in the present focuses on Vladek's past war experience. This places the reader and narrator in a different time and place outside the scene (45).

There's some scene-to-scene transition happening here (McCloud 71). The reader has to jump between lots of time and space with little explanation about what happened in between. Time is compressed to show different moments at the same time. This makes it hard to guess at the action between panels. You need more of what is called closure to mentally fill in gaps. To understand what's happening and construct a whole meaning (McCloud 63).

You get that more time is passing from the size of this panel. This moment is structured so memories can be easily understood by the reader. The length of the panel gives you a sense there is a pause here (McCloud 101). It clues the reader into understanding the history happening behind the narrative in the present.

You can also see the masking effect in comics here in the blank stereotypes of mouse heads (McCloud 43). Readers can project themselves onto the character and safely enter a frightening situation. Everything else is up to your imagination. This makes the story more important, but less disturbing. Rather than a movie with heroes and villains, this book has found a way to talk about what happened during an unimaginable time.

Works Cited

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. William Morrow, HarperCollins Publishers, 1994, pp. 43, 63, 71, 101.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus, A Survivor's Tale, Pantheon Books, 1986, p. 45.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Analysis of Aya: Life in Yop City

To begin this week's post, I'd like to first address a few things about the author's duty to his/her readers. When we think of reading material from other countries or cultures, what factors are important to us? What information do we need in order to recognize the significance of the author's work? For me, it's important for the author to find some way to connect to me as a reader. Do we share a common experience? Can I relate your story to mine? This is not to say that a writer's work is rendered unimpressive if they choose not to do this. But I do think it goes without saying that most impressionable works hit us emotionally. I also think that an author should be conscious of the world that they are painting for the reader. Is it true what you're writing? Does it provide some sort of insight into the world as you see it? Are you confirming outside opinions of your culture, or are you breaking the stereotypes that have been placed upon you? That being sai...

Junji Ito and the Art of the Uncanny

As discussed in Chapter 2 of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics , the Japanese style of comic book art holds several notable quirks. While early manga artists tended to favor simplistic, yet distinct styles that paved the way for a number of internationally renowned characters, contemporary manga artists have since favored a hybrid style that juxtaposes the cutesy, rounded characters of yesteryear with the realistic and richly shaded settings that have since become popular. Building on this, McCloud describes a phenomenon in which Japanese comic artists have used realism to objectify--that is, to emphasize the "otherness" of certain characters, objects, or places--elements of their work and further separate these elements from the reader. I have chosen the work of one of my favorite comic artists, Japanese horror icon Junji Ito, to further illustrate McCloud's point. Though McCloud describes this phenomenon in the context of Japanese comic book art, he is usi...

The Two Faces of Anarchy in V for Vendetta

As someone who has only seen the movie version of V for Vendetta once many years ago and have never read the graphic novel, I wasn’t exactly sure how similar or different the movie version would be to the graphic novel. I was in for a surprise when I discovered just how vastly different, they are from each other. With that being said, they do have some similarities when strictly looking at the motives of the characters. Let’s dive into those motives and how the author and illustrator of V for Vendetta achieved getting these motives across to their readers. In Scott McCloud’s chapter of Understanding Comics “ Blood in the Gutter ” we are presented with different panel – to – panel transitions, and an introduction to the term “gutter” as being the white space between the panels which is where the audience of reader “takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (McCloud, 66). After finishing reading V for Vendetta , several themes or ideas that were most prevalent...