The Figuration of Art, History and Self: Art Spiegelman’s Maus as a Palimpsest

Abstract

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1991, Art Spiegelman’s Maus is an iconic work of world art. Seldom does one come across a work that challenges the parameters of its own creation in such a radical way. A graphic novel that is both biographical and autobiographical, history and fiction, memoir and comic art, pushing generic integrities to collapse upon themselves, Maus has deserved the critical and popular success it has garnered worldwide.

A testimonial to the never-ending horrors of the Holocaust, Maus has popularly been read as an attempt at exorcism of the author’s demons, and perhaps with him of a race caught in the warps of history and time. As the narrator tries to tell the story of his life, through the story of his father’s experiences in Nazi Poland, he creates theriomorphic creatures to define the parameters of human existence in the sub-human dimensions of unspeakable nightmares of history. Disney’s beloved Mickey Mouse and the cat and mouse chase of children’s stories assume Kafkaesque grotesqueness in the mice, cats, pigs and sundry animals that ‘people’ this authorial world divided across religious and political affiliations. Through the passive aggressive narrative of the Oedipal struggle between the father and the son emerges the story of lives caught in the whirlpool of timespans, continents, memories and generations.

My paper seeks to explore the complexity of the visual-autobiographical articulations of selfhood through the intersections of genre, history and language. The layers of remove that frame this novel can be understood as the constructive aesthetic of Spiegelman’s effort in illustrating and writing Maus. The ironical self-distancing of the author and characters make this work of self-writing-illustrating unique beyond the pale of mere self-reflexivity. It is not simple a book about the writing of a book that encapsulates a piece of history. It goes a step ahead to talk about identity as fraught in the process of remembering, writing, re-writing and reading. Spiegelman’s narrator Art is a mouse on account of his Jewish roots that cannot be shaken off, but assumes the mask of one, too, because the task of writing and publishing need one to make a mask out of one’s most personal sentiments. My paper further argues that the remembered history in Maus can only ever be constructed one, which complicates the understanding of the text as a testimonial/memoir/history. By exploring the visual and verbal language along with the paratextual elements of the novel, I will finally posit that Maus is a text that writes and re-writes itself across a range of selfhoods, meaning-making and search for closure that is perpetually deferred and thus unreachable.