Many artists, from poets to dancers, have
admitted that they see their art as a way of releasing all their emotions and
showing their reality. For instance, the poet Langston Hughes always argues
that he wrote about his own experiences as a black person because he wanted
everyone to know how being a “negro” was. However, he used also his poetry as a
way of showing the other poets that black artists were capable of creating
masterpieces too. For Art Spiegelman, his greatest work “Maus” was not only the
means he chose to share his father’s experience during the Holocaust, but also
an opportunity for him to actually have a relationship with his father. In his
own words: “as an adult, I just had no relationship to speak of, but kind of
wanted one, wanted a way to come to terms with him, and this book afforded that
by giving me the relationship of interviewer and interviewee to replace son and
father”.
Maus
is a graphic novel that recreated the experiences lived by Vladek Spiegelman
during the Holocaust. In the book, Jewish are depicted as mice, Germans as cats
and Poles as pigs. Art has stated in many interviews that this was not a
metaphor created by him, instead, he depicted the metaphor Hitler had come up
with. He relied on both modernism and postmodernism views of art so as to tell
a story through images and words because each separately was not enough to
describe the impact that this event had on his family and on all the people who
lived during that time.
As
stated above, Spiegelman’s Maus explored the tension between this father and
son, who do not get along well. We discover that their relationship is distant
from the very beginning, when Art says: “I went out to see my father in Rego
Park. I hadn’t seen him in a long time- we weren’t that close” (Maus, 1980).
Nevertheless, the first pages showed a little son whose father was there for
him when things got hard, as any present parent does. But, Spiegelman
doesn't glamorise his father as some kind of hero. Vladek comes across as
irritating, manipulative, exasperating, and even bigoted." (Talbot,
2012). Then, what happened with them? The Holocaust.
After the Second World War, Vladek’s
compulsive behavior started bothering his son, who decided to take distance
from his father. However, as his father gets old, he regrets the decision of
not having spent enough time with him or even having not helped him when he
asked for help to fix a drain on the roof. Art starts feeling guilty
because he had not realized that his father’s behavior was completely justified
by the events that he had to go through when in the Nazi concentration camps,
which affected him even more after his wife (Art’s mother) committed suicide.
In 1991, Spiegelman admitted that sympathizing with his father was very
difficult since they were from different generations, but he knew he had to try
to understand what kind of survivor his father was.
But Art is not the only artist whose story about family issues became the
greatest work he had published. O’Neill’s play “Long Day’s Journey into Night”
published post mortem, deals with the ugliest aspects of a dysfunctional family
who do not want to accept that they are a conflicted family, so they perform as
a normal family do. His mother has tried to commit suicide several times as she
cannot get over his son Edmund’s death and a brother who had to live with the
ghost of his dead brother and was killed metaphorically before even having the
chance to live.
O’Neill, as well as Art, found consolation in
writing about their concerns and both changed the view of literary works in
their respective field of work. They changed the cannons of theater and graphic
novels respectively by writing with a realistic style.
There must be an important number of artists
who find shelter in their artworks. It seems to be that literary works that are
based on the author’s real deepest concerns are the ones who get more
recognized by the people since they can actually relate to what is exposed in
those works. Do you think artists base their works on their life because they
know they have success guaranteed?
P.S: Here you have the link to watch the interview where Spiegelman talked about his relationship with his father.
References
Spiegelman, A. (1980) Maus: A
Ssurvivor's Tale. London: Pinguin Books.
Talbot, B. (2012). Book of a lifetime:
Maus by Art Spiegelman.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario