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.
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.
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| 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.
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