Skip to main content

The Paws of a Maus

By
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.









Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Analysis of Aya: Life in Yop City

By
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bringing Africa into the Fold

By
The comic Aya: Life in Yop City does a fantastic job of illustrating a culture different from the more popular Western variety. For those reading this, have you ever considered Africa in any way that was not influenced by main stream media? No? Well me either. It is sad to say, but my view of Africa was just - more or less - a vast land of chaos and poverty. Why? Because is that not what the media would have us believe? As a western country ourselves - presuming, of course, that you are reading this from the US or some European country - we do not consider other nations to have much value in comparison to our own. Because we have created a Eurocentric view of what society should be, we have disallowed other countries to feel that their own culture is worth portraying in novels or media. For example, most people are lead to believe that Africa is riddled with disease, famine, and "uneducated" people who are in dire need of help. This just isn't true! There are places ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Two Faces of Anarchy in V for Vendetta

By
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...
Post a Comment
Read more