Maus: a post-modern tale

Maus it’s a Pulitzer winner graphic novel by Art Spiegelman written in two separated parts. It is an alternative comic first published in Raw magazine. The novel shows the author interviewing his father about his experience in the Holocaust and then as he tells the story it shows his experience in images.

I’m not going to go further into the story since the Second World War is a very well-known historic event, instead I will talk about the literary movements that influenced the author when writing and drawing this masterpiece.

For me, the most important and interesting aspect about this graphic novel is the fact that combines important aspects of post modernism and modernism. Post modernism aspects such as feeling of fragmentation and discontinuity in which reality is taken as an imitation of real life, and the reconceptualization of the self-image, the society and the history, the unexisting relations between time and narration, fragmenting the reality with time jumps are found thought the whole novel. However, it also have some aspects of modernism such as genre experimentation, in this case the combination of drawing and narratives; novel and biography; and stories within a story among others narrative devices (Study.com, 2015). Also, it can be either labelled as fiction or non-fiction. In other words, this graphic novel challenge all conventional labels.

This novel not only talks about Jews and the Holocaust, is not a typical tale about the horrors of the Second World War, but is the personal story of Vladek, the author’s father, but more deeply of Art himself. As a second generation of holocaust survivors he didn’t experienced the Holocaust by himself, he only knows what he has been told, however, he has the same expectations of what a holocaust survivor should be and act like,  and his entire life has been influenced by this event whether he likes it or not . 

In this part of the novel Artie is expected to give a critic message about the Holocaust but as a post- modern writer he has a divergence between ideology, what he is expected to answer, and his personal intention since this graphic novel is really about personal experience and not an historical novel, even though the context in which its developed is one of the most famous and controversial events in history.

However his divergence, he still knows that as a second generation he has the duty to show respect toward the Holocaust survivors and toward his family, so he perpetuates their memories through his drawings, 

Postmodernism influences the author imagination, the atrocity of war are seen as bestial acts, however, these bestial acts were carry out by human, by neighbours and people from the same country, not by beasts, so he reconceptualise this  reality, illustrating it in the way it deserve, using animals to tell a story that is fantasy in paper but a horrible true in real life. These animals represent people with different kind of values. Germans are drawn as soulless cats, and we all know how cats are like, they kill for pleasure but first they play with their victims inflicting them as much pain as they can; Jews are represented as helpless mice, a cat favourite prey who were exterminate as a plague; Polish are represented as treacherous dirty pigs; and Allies are represented as dog, a man’s best friend, the one that will always help you and be by your side in case of danger. 

However, even is Spiegelman tells that the story is about a personal story and not a recrimination for what happened, these same representations of people from different nationalities can be seen as a reinforcement of a fatidic stereotype that do no good to the process of reconciliation and forgiveness. 

Sidenote:

This video shows a comparison among the graphic novel and the real  events that took place during the Holocaust. The same pictures that are found in the cartoon can be seen as they really were, 

Study.com, (2015). Postmodernism in Literature: Definition, Lesson & Quiz - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com. [online] Available at: http://study.com/academy/lesson/postmodernism-in-literature-definition-lesson-quiz.html [Accessed 19 Aug. 2015].