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The Paws of a Maus

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blood thumps staccato in my throat  |  my eyes flap and flutter like injured birds not able to alight on any one thing  |  i don't remember how to breathe—isn't it supposed to be automatic  |  i don't want to write about this i don't want to write about this i don't want to ... i ... really don't.

(Spiegelman 165)

The trepidation that I clearly feel about discussing the graphic novel Maus is born of two things. First, the Holocaust is an immense and painful event, like a body whose skin has been removed leaving nerve endings uncovered and unprotected. And second, I don't want to say the wrong thing, interpret something the wrong way, or do anything that adds to that pain. But Maus is important. And I am going to talk about it.

Did you know that mice have ingeniously evolved paws? Seriously. Unlike most other quadrupeds, mice have more digits on their back paws than their front. Along with the unique upper structure and joints of their paws, this reversal of the standard digit position allows mice to run swiftly backwards into their burrows and boltholes. 

Cats are the exact opposite. They have five digits on their front paws and four on their back. And, wow, are they efficient little paws! Tipped with unforgiving, reaching, snagging claws built perfectly to catch small prey like mice. Sometimes the cat wins, and sometimes the mouse. But mostly it's the cat.

This evolutionary win/lose summation bears a pretty fair resemblance to that of the non-fiction graphic novel Maus, by Art Spiegelman. Maus details Spiegelman's personal family narrative as Polish Jews caught in the Todesgriff of the Holocaust (okay, we're here, and quickly leaving my authorial safe space behind). Spiegelman creates a stark visual dichotomy between the Jews, depicted as mice (die Mäuse), and the Germans/Natzis, depicted as cats (die Katzen). The message—that the Jews are inescapably vulnerable—is communicated to readers with an immediacy other print mediums just can't replicate. The animals, and their typical predatory relationship, are iconic. They are an understandable system of symbology whose meaning would have even been clear to early humans.

Spiegelman's artistic choice to have recognizable icons—already filled with any number of associations, abstract concepts, and stratified layers of deep meaning—enact his family's history is an incredible move. It allows readers to receive a huge amount of information when a text-only approach would take much longer, and perhaps be less visceral. In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud discusses the push and pull between imagery and text which is unique to visual sequential art (51). This interplay provides an amazing breadth and depth of meaning for readers.
(Spiegelman 102)

There's another important aspect to Spiegelman's use of icons: their simplicity allows readers to enter the narrative easily, quickly engaging and empathizing. This effect is most apparent when readers stumble into the expressionist style mini-comic "Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History" pictured above. The simple black outlines and vertically lined backgrounds of previous chapters momentarily give way to heavy crosshatching, deep shadows, and humans (Spiegleman 102-105). This sudden change pulls readers up short and reminds us that Spiegelman's mice are a whole lot more.  Between Parts I & II of the graphic novel there's an even more jarring reminder of the real world outside the novel's pages: the photograph of Richieu (at the top of the blog) which stands as an epigraph for Part II. Both of these examples provide a useful juxtaposition between the iconic visual world of Maus, and the very real, very non-fiction side of the narrative. These things happened. These people hurt. And that pain is writ so clearly... well, you can't help but feel it. 

One more thing you should know about the paws of a mouse: those unique little back paws that let mice run backwards are also responsible for helping them stand strong.

Apparatus
  • Modern mice and cats split from their larger genera at about the same time: 6 to 7 million years ago
  • Modern humans didn't hop to their feet with a substantial brainpan and the gray matter to fill it until about 200,000 years ago
  • German Translations
    • Todesgriff- death grip
    • Holocaust- inferno
      • Yiddish- destruction
      • Hebrew- catastrophe
Works Cited
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Collins, 1993.
Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. Pantheon Books, 2011.









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