Maus

"Eleanor: In Maus what we have is a great intergenerational narrative about the Holocaust. On the one hand, you have stories and flashbacks to the artist’s parents, who were living through the Holocaust in Europe. That’s then interspersed with his own experience of growing up Jewish in America, with the intergenerational trauma and heaviness of that. The book is also able to really unpack certain questions like identity, how one becomes Jewish and how we play with these ideas. One of the things in it that has always really stuck with me and that I thought was really affecting is he draws all of the different people’s nationalities as different animals. So Jewish people are mice and German people are cats. Polish people are pigs and French people are frogs. And there is a really lovely scene, written between him and his wife. His wife has converted to Judaism but is originally French. And he says, ‘Well, I’m not sure how I’m going to picture you in this scheme I’ve come up with.’ It’s very meta—he’s talking about the process of writing this. And she says, ‘Well, I’ve converted to Judaism, so surely I’m a mouse?’ It’s a really lovely way of talking about things like, ‘Okay, well, what is the artist’s process? What do we mean by identity? And how do we put this all out on the page?’ I think that’s one of the most effective things about Maus . It’s able to say, ‘Here are all these ways that we deal with complex issues of trauma, identity, history, how do we get through all of that?’ This is not so easy, but it is able to lay it out like that. It’s a beautiful way of showing what goes on behind the scenes, and how all of this is a constant struggle and something that has to be remade, relearned and retold. Neil: Definitely. It’s a hard thing to read for me because many of my family perished in the Holocaust. I read it when it came out. There was Maus I and Maus II . It left a real big impression. There’s notes that resonate with my grandparents, who were German, and what they had to go through. They had to flee and were caught up in the Second World War and were immigrants. It’s a hard read, a tough story to tell. It’s also about Art Spiegelman. He’s able to tell his story as well, because it’s not just about his father, it’s about his relationship with his father. This is the thing: before the Holocaust his father seemed a very different man from when he was raising his son in America. He had hopes and dreams, he had a career, he was charismatic. But you see him at the end of his life, worrying about money and very neurotic. This experience he’s undergone has changed him and there’s legacy in that. All that trauma trickles down to his son. That part of the story is quite powerful. There’s something interesting about this notion of trauma. It doesn’t have to be the Holocaust; it could be slavery . The trauma gets carried down through the generations. It’s not just the person’s story, but it’s the grandchildren’s story. The legacy that it leaves it ripples out, it doesn’t go away. This book is really good because it demonstrates that. It’s a nice way to record one story, but there’s so many different ripples. Eleanor: I think what it does is it fools people into thinking that it’s going to be lighter and easier, when what it actually does is it adds levels of complexity that wouldn’t be there otherwise. Because of the assumptions that we have about what comics are and what they mean, it brings people in. People are like, ‘Oh, it’s a comic. How hard can it be?’ It fools them into thinking that they can come and engage with it because it can’t be that bad. Obviously Maus is much heavier than the book we’ve done, but one of the things that’s really helpful about writing a medieval history comic is that people say, ‘This is not daunting. It’s in a comic form. It’s accessible. This is something that I could read.’ Same thing with Maus . If you say, ‘Oh, do you want to read an intergenerational reflection on the trauma of the Holocaust and what it does to people?’ A lot of people would be like, ‘No, I’m good. That doesn’t sound like a fun time to me’. But if you say, ‘Ahh, look at the mice!’ it makes it easier. You’re along for the ride, but you don’t realize that you’re traveling on the journey. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Neil: I totally agree with you, Eleanor. I think the complexity comes when, as creators, you’re making a comic book, because not only are you writing something, you also have to think about visualization: How do I draw it? Do I do it in colour? What’s the linework going to be like? How am I going to do bubbles? What font should we use? There’s readability, flow of the page—the whole making of a comic. And storytelling is a component that can get forgotten. There’s writing a comic, there’s drawing a comic, but both those things are speaking to how to tell a story. That’s quite hard. It’s like asking a comedian what makes a good joke. How do you tell a good comic story? Eleanor: I love to hear that because that is exactly what we were aiming for. I do think that that is something that graphics really help—whether we’re getting people to reflect on the absolute horrors of war, or some complex ideas like monasticism, or the concept of othering. We’ve also got a pretty good breakdown of the Ottonian Renaissance, which I thought we handled nicely. I’m happy with how we’ve been able to tackle the complexity through using pictures. And I think that is one of the things that successful graphic histories do. Drawing up this list, I’m struck by how many graphic histories are personal. This is the case of Maus , of Persepolis . I was also thinking about putting Fun Home , Alison Bechdel’s book, on there which is, again, a family history. It’s almost as if one of the things that graphics are able to do is help people tell their own story in a particular way. A lot of the time, our own memories are very visual—the way that we remember things is with a little movie in our minds, almost. So it’s really easy to put that out within a picture. What Neil and I were trying to do was make a movie where there isn’t one that exists. So it’s slightly different. When I was pitching the book to Icon, there’s the bit where you say what’s comparable that’s on the market. And I was like, ‘No, sorry. That’s why it would be useful, because there isn’t anything like it out there. That’s not to say that there aren’t wonderful graphic histories, there certainly are, just not for the medieval period. Neil: Mostly, if you Google ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘book’ there are only books with just words or Horrible Histories for this particular topic, so it’s nice we’ve been able to do it. Eleanor: They’re usually for children. Neil: When friends hear I’ve done this book, they think I’ve done a children’s book because of the cover. They ask if it’s suitable for their kids. I have to ask how old they are because there is some sexual stuff in there. We talk about prostitution and sodomy. There are some things in there that aren’t really kid-friendly. Eleanor: I say 14 and up. It’s a bit frustrating, because when I get into these discussions, I do say it’s good for teenagers , but the moment someone sees pictures, they think it’s for children. I don’t want people to write it off and say, ‘Oh, it’s for teenagers, it’s not for adults.’ Eleanor: Obviously, you have to streamline things. Doing 1,100 years of history in 176 pages is not easy, it has to be said. We really worked on showing the complexity of a really long period of time with more streamlining and less simplifying, finding the right line to walk. It’s interesting, too, the difference between our book and a personal history like Maus . Of course you’re not going to show every single part of your own life. You’re only going to use the bits that are relevant to the story. Whereas if you’re doing an impersonal history, people say, ‘Why isn’t this in there? Why isn’t that? Why isn’t every single bit of everything in there?’ It’s because it’s impossible. I had to choose what I thought the largest and most important themes are. I used first-year university courses that I’ve taught as the basis for the book. We’ll have a week on iconoclasm, a week on the Vikings , a week on farming, and so I just thought about it in the same way. Then I had to get all these elements in. I wanted people to read the book and have what I’m trying to get first years to take away at the end of the year. It’s an introduction and then we’ve got a further reading list if you need more. It is funny, though, how people want more from something that’s ‘history’ than they do from a personal history, even though the same thing applies in both. Yes, we’re now almost rethinking how we use the term ‘medieval’ and saying, ‘Okay, well, maybe we do just mean this period of time.’ For something to be medieval, it’s got to be between ancient and modern—that’s what it is. And then it’s like, ‘Well, what do we mean by ancient and modern?’ That’s what we’re having to rethink. On the one hand, it’s great to bring global history in, it’s really important. I don’t think that it pays to be completely Eurocentric, even though I am a Europeanist. At the same time, maybe making the entire world go on Europe’s definition of what the medieval period is as a timeframe is better. What do we mean when we say medieval? That’s a huge question."

"This is an amazing book. Like all the books I love, it gets the reader to see the world with fresh eyes. But Maus is also unusual in the way it combines a deeply serious topic with a genre not usually taken very seriously. It’s about the Holocaust. It’s also a comic book, in which the various characters are depicted as animals – the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats etc.. The combination of a comic book and the Holocaust itself is startling. But on top of that, Speigelman breaks another taboo in moving back and forth between the story of his father, who was a Holocaust survivor, and his current relationship with him, which is full of resentment and complaints. The notion that an author writing about a Holocaust survivor would include unflattering portrayals was shocking to many. But for many more—the book has won numerous prizes and been translated into many languages—a bracing reality had challenged a soothing but dishonest sentimentality. I’m Jewish myself and have known children of Holocaust survivors and they almost all have a certain kind of guilt at their own success in life after what their parents had to live through. I think the brother who died in the book functions in that way for Art Spiegelman. The book is so honest. It’s so clear eyed. It steadfastly refuses to do the politically correct thing about the Holocaust. It wants to tell what Spiegelman sees as the truth and that includes not only the horrors his father went through, but also the obsessions and phobias it left his father with which he, as his son, has to deal with. The idea that a comic book could make you cry is extraordinary. I didn’t cry when I went to see Schindler’s List , but Maus made me cry."