Butler and Spiegelman

In what ways can genres that challenge the literary authority of the novelistic form represent history in an arguably more authentic way? Is authenticity in representing the historical found more in the objective account found in textbooks, or more in the subjective account of a diary or oral history? These are some questions that I’d like to discuss in relation to Spiegelman’s Maus and Butler’s Kindred.

Both of these works share a formal alienation from the accepted authority of a conventionnal literary novel. Maus is a graphic novel and Kindred bends the genres of science fiction and historical fiction, and despite being outside of the conventional form of a literary novel, both works seek to confront a ‘capital H’ history that is filtered through the lenses of unconventional forms.

In Maus’s account of the Holocaust through personal intergenerational history through the layered narratives of Artie and Vladek, reality is suspended in Spiegelman’s representational world of animals. Similarly, in Kindred, Dana’s cyclic journeys through time place the narrative firmly outside of the real world and pushes it into the realm of the fantastic. But, for all the self conscious genre bending work that these two works accomplish in their unconventional form, there is a very specific attention to preserving the detail that they represent in their respective historical events.

Maus’s comic format allows for the reader to also be a see-er as Spiegelman shows Vladek’s memories drawn on the page and also Artie’s process of talking to Vladek to record his story. Spiegelman’s panels are packed full of details just how Vladek packs his possessions closely and obsessively in his New York home in the present of Maus. Even though they are drawn as mice, we are immersed in a world constructed by a subjective memory that is at the same time a crucial piece of objective history.

While Maus operates through two distinct points of view with respective temporalities, Kindred places Dana’s singular point of view in her present and her embedded genealogic past. She is inextricably bound to this deep past by a supernatural tether and thus the reader is able to view the past through her present self. We are privy to her thoughts and reactions when she is transported to the Wyelin estate, and we can see how she frames her experience within the past with her other life in her temporality. The rules of the world of Kindred are not given explicitly to the reader. We know that Dana is bound to Rufus and sucked backwards in time when his life is threatened and we know that her very existence in the present is contingent of Rufus and Alice having children together, but other than that there is no metaphysical explanation of time travel that is explicated in Kindred. The suspension of these ‘rules’ places Dana’s subjective experience in a position of authority as objective reality is effectively suspended through the use of time travel in the book.

Maus’s representational world of cartoon animals also takes the question of objective reality, and thus strictly objective history off the table. The stylized drawings allow the reader to take the narrative content at face value without struggling with the idea that this is a graphic novel that wholly encapsulates and represents the entirety of the Holocaust. Both Kindred and Maus use a suspension of the conventional form to subvert the authority given to written histories and canonized literary accounts of history. Through unconventional elements like the comic form and sci-fi conceits, Maus and Kindred afford themselves a freedom that is detached from the demands of works that seek to more fully represent an accurate mimetic form than in genres that seek to subvert these constructions of truth in unexpected ways. In both works, it is the very lack of narrative and representational reality that allows the reader to find a closer subjective experience of these eras through personal narratives that place themselves outside of conventional generic forms.