Spiegelman and White

The most obvious difference in Spiegelman’s representation of memory from other authors we have read is his use of images. Although he still relies on words and written narrative to tell his father’s story, he also uses pictures to convey memories that do not take the narrative form. For example, he draws his father’s family sitting around a dining room table, and while they talk about how hard times have become, he draws his father’s son dumping his food onto the table (Spiegelman 75). The conclusion is, therefore, that although the family is not getting the same amount that they are used to, they are not yet starving. Later, he draws a sign that says “For Every Unregistered Jew You Find: 1 Kilo of Sugar” in a panel about the Jews’ relocation to a ghetto (82), using words to portray the Holocaust without incorporating them into his narrative.

These portions seem to contradict Hayden White’s claim that people feel the need “to give to events an aspect of narrativity” (8), to take true events and tell about them. Indeed, Spiegelman says that he wants to “draw” a book about his father (12), taking his father’s story out of the realm of traditional narrativity. But although Spiegelman portrays parts of the story with pictures instead of words, they still contain the aspects of narrativity White found important for a historical narrative: a moralizing purpose (White 18) and an authority conflict (White 17).

White says that the moralizing purpose in a historical narrative comes from the narrator’s decisions about what to include and what to leave out (14), where to begin and where to end (24). Spiegelman says that he wants to make the Holocaust story personal (23), and to do so he includes anecdotes about his father’s life that were separate from his experiences with the Holocaust. His father argues that such a telling is disrespectful to the event (23), that his story should demonstrate the horrors imposed upon his race and not focus on him personally. But in focusing on his father, Spiegelman manages to draw a story about how the Holocaust affected survivors (hoarding (116), suicide (100)), not just a story about the gas chambers. And he chooses to end the story with the revelation that Spiegelman’s father has burned his mother’s diaries (159), making Maus just as much about the necessity of telling stories from a family’s past as it is about the Holocaust.

White also claims that a historical narrative must concern events which contradict the current social order (17), and the SS certainly threatened the values which Spiegelman, living in America decades after World War II, takes for granted. Hitler’s social system, had it succeeded, would have rendered Maus impossible. Thus Spiegelman’s father’s story takes on a broader meaning: it is both a personal and a historical narrative, letting one man’s story portray broader historical events.

Spiegelman, therefore, succeeds in narrating his father’s story in an unconventional medium: drawing. He portrays simultaneously his father’s personal story and the Holocaust story, personalizing a historical event to show the importance of maintaining these stories and passing them down from generation to generation.

Spiegelman and White

Maus has two sub-titles: a survivor’s tale and my father bleeds history. Each creates a distinct sense of the story to come. The first, reads like a typical novel, a chronologic telling of a story, linear and neat; the second is visceral and visual and inspires a sense of flow, of feeling, of pain both old and new. In Maus we follow the story of Vladek, as narrated to his son, Artie—but we also get glimpses of their lives outside of the recollections. Everything is set in a strange dual context, where we are reading a memory of hearing memories. Hayden White raises the question of what narrativizing history (and memory) means, and his discussions of real and true stories within historical discourses apply quite neatly to Spiegelman’s Maus. White poses the question of why when “real events are properly represented [with] the formal coherency of a story” we are so satisfied. (9) He suggests it lies in human nature: that narrativizing the world is so inherently human that we must do it because it is the only way we know how to remember and discuss our world. In this way, Maus is a prime example. Vladek tells his tale as he remembers it, and often strays into side notes about the people he brings up. Artie serves as the director, and frequently guides his father back on track, back to chronological time—“Please, dad, if you don’t keep your story chronological, I’ll never get it straight…” to which his father answers, “So?”(82) And really, what does it matter if the story maintains linearity? White notes that to be properly received in narrative form, “events must be not only registered within the chronological framework of their original occurrence but…revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, which they do not possess as mere sequence.” (10) Somehow by taking memory down and giving it a form, we impart meaning. In Maus, Spiegelman manages to capture the horrors of being a Jew in 1940’s Europe, the tensions between father and son, husband and wife, and the difficulties that come with growing old with the burden of memory. By taking his father’s story and framing it between segments of ‘real’ time, Spiegelman imports a chronology and sense of flow to it that a list of events, as White would argue, would not have. This structure gives Spiegelman the opportunity to make us aware of the present just as much as the past, and of the changes that occur in the relationship between him and his father as time moves forward both in the story Vladek recollects and in the time that Artie hears it in. Rather than jolting us in and out of time, Spiegelman’s art mixes the past and the present just as the story itself does; while Vladek narrates, we have an image of him as an old man on the bike. We have interspersed through the memories images of Artie listening, of Vladek’s emotions upon recollection. This creates a steady stream of a tale—the tale of a survivor, and also gives us the poignancy of a man bleeding history.