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Josh Rainey: His father Vladek talks about his time is Auschwitz about his time with a priest. The priest was not Jewish, but he was trying to help Vladek by using the numbers on his arm to talk about how the number "17" is a good omen. The priest says that he might not survive through this hell where they mercifully killed Jews without mercy. Then Vladek, now in the present talks about his time with his son. Conveying the narrative about what happened to him at the start of his time in Auschwitz trying to survive. Vladek believed that the priest gave him his life so that he would survive. The numbers that the prisoners were given in our mind are to show how the prisoners were taken role of. But it seems that other people had a different perspective of what the numbers actually mean. This describes his story of the holocaust and how he survived it.

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Josh Rainey

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This image of the concentration camps and its layout looks like a map. This is very accurate, so much so he adds the river's name on the top right of the middle panel. This is history, this is the research Artie put into writing Maus. But this is layered underneath Artie's conversations with his father. His father is the one who it was there and described his experiences, all of which is his narrative of the events being depicted. History in general is created by narrative. The history we see in class and in published workbooks are all that specific author, or historian, or professor, or experts' interpretation of what happened. That is their narrative, and this selection from Maus allows us to visualize Vladek's narrative. All of which have merit and all of which prove the point that history is framed, both literally and figuratively, by narrative.  - Reno DiCesare

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Tim Flynn: In this interview Art Spiegelman explains his relationship with his father and the troubles of gathering the details to construct the story of Maus. "Getting the conversation from him came in tidbits that were mosaic that had to be reassembled and worked out later." he said of the interview with his father. This shows how Spiegelman had to reconstruct history with the sporadic historical evidence and stories his father gave him.

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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Last month, a Tennessee school district banned the book "Maus," the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman. We thought we'd listen back to Terry's 1987 interview with Spiegelman in which he talks about drawing and writing that book.

In "Maus," Spiegelman draws the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. He said he found the mouse metaphor appropriate to Hitler's rhetoric of extermination and his references to Jews as vermin. The book tells the story of how his Jewish parents survived the Holocaust in Poland. The comic is like a documentary about the making of the book. It shows Spiegelman in his father's house in Queens, N.Y. He coaxes his father to remember the war years and let him record his stories on tape. He has a difficult relationship with his father, and he hopes these conversations will bring them closer. The book has moving flashback sequences as his father describes passing as a Gentile, hiding out in bunkers, and facing death in a concentration camp. Here's Art Spiegelman talking to Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

ART SPIEGELMAN: People are usually very upset when they first hear that I've done a comic strip about the Holocaust. Like, just too - it's an oxymoron somewhere in there, and people just don't want to hear any more after that.

But it seems to me that comics are, on the one hand, a very direct medium. They come across very viscerally. And on the other hand, they're a very, very abstract medium. You have to do a lot more work to decode a comic strip than you do in understanding a film or even reading a book.

TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: When did you first become aware that your parents were survivors?

SPIEGELMAN: Well, I can't remember not knowing it, but on the other hand, I can't remember it ever being a significant fact. It was just one more thing that I knew about my parents. So that when I was a little kid, my mother had a tattooed number, and every once in a while, friends of mine would ask, Mrs. Spiegelman, why do you have a number tattooed on your - well, not tattooed. Why do you have a number on your arm? And she would say it was a phone number she didn't want to forget or something like that. So it was built into the fabric of our life without it being a specifically pointed one. And on the other hand, a lot of their friends and therefore their friends' children were also involved in the same background. So it wasn't that anomalous.

GROSS: But before you sat down and actually said to your father, tell me the story of how you survived, had he actually told you anecdotes about his survival during the war?

SPIEGELMAN: Oh, yeah, but the same way that some other person my age's parents might have told them about life in the Depression, you know? Oh, it was really hard back then. And the anecdote would just glimmer in and out between talking about taking out the garbage or doing homework.

GROSS: I got the impression that you were frequently taught grim lessons about life based on your parents' experiences during the Holocaust.

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, that was something I didn't know until I left home. It's true. What would happen is these stories, which really haunted me, I didn't know were haunting me because they were what I was breathing. And it was only when I got some other perspective when I went away to college and was surrounded by people who didn't have those ghosts hovering over them that I realized there was something unusual about growing up with parents who survived a form of hell.

GROSS: Did you have Nazi dreams when you were growing up?

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, I - see, one thing - I guess one thing that haunted me when I was growing up was this one blown-up photograph. It was a photograph that was originally just maybe two inches by two inches, but it was a large portrait photograph of what would have been my brother if he had survived the war. So I remember having dreams about him, although I never met him or knew much about him beyond a couple of anecdotes and that photograph. And although I don't remember all of them, I remember one fantasy that was recurrent was being in school and then the principal, instead of just telling everybody good morning on the PA system, would tell all the Jewish students to go out to the school yard, you know, that kind of thing.

GROSS: You didn't have dreams where you were chased by Nazis.

SPIEGELMAN: I think I've probably had many, you know. Any older kid that I was having trouble with would immediately have a swastika on his arm, you know.

GROSS: When you approached your father and sat him down and said, you know, tell me chronologically all the details you can remember from the war and from surviving the Nazis, was it hard for him to talk about it?

SPIEGELMAN: Not especially, although when I was growing up, my mother was more voluble than my father on the subject. And yet when I came back as an adult, he was rather giving of it. It wasn't a problem. And in fact, he didn't even seem to be aware of the fact that I was taping or anything till the very end. Getting it chronologically was impossible. Getting the conversation from him came in tidbits that were mosaic that had to be reassembled and worked out later. And sometimes, I felt like I was playing a pinball machine and trying to avoid those penalty holes because I'd ask a question and it would fall right back into an anecdote I had before. And there's no way to get out of the anecdote till I went through the entire 20-minute sequence, you know?

But the way I got it from him was after I did that comic strip in '71, I went back - and so I'm - actually even before I'd finished the comic strip, while I was two-thirds through. And I showed it to him, and I told him I wanted to tape him then. For the entire three- or four-hour session, which was when I got the bold outlines of what's now the book, he seemed totally oblivious to the tape recorder. We were just sitting on the terrace and talking. And then at the very end, he grabbed the microphone from me and says, and so, ladies and gentlemen, this is how it was and I want - you should know so nothing, God forbid, like this - so many millions were killed and that should never happen again - it was a statement for posterity, but I wasn't - he took me by surprise.

GROSS: One of the things that really struck me in "Maus" was that every time he'd finish telling you this story about narrowly surviving some horrible thing, whether it's at a prisoner of war camp or being hidden away in a bunker in somebody's cellar who was protecting him or, you know, trying to pass for gentile, he'd come out of the story and he'd say something really petty, you know, like, criticize you for smoking or what you were wearing or something. Can you tell the coat story?

SPIEGELMAN: Oh, the coat story. After my father finished telling me the story one day, I just went to get my coat to leave, and I couldn't find it. So I was kind of walking around asking my stepmother if she had seen it, and she hadn't. And my father said, yeah, he knew exactly where it was. He had thrown it out. And at first, I don't believe him, and I asked him to give it back, and he says it's too late. He said, when you were sitting first down to dinner, I threw it outside. By now, the garbage men took it away. Such an old, shabby coat, it's a shame my son should wear such a coat. But I like it. I have for you a warmer one. I got myself at Alexander's a new jacket, and I can give to you my old one. It's still like new. Here, just try on it. Try it on a minute. Oh, great, a Naugahyde windbreaker, and it's too big. It looks on you like a million dollars. Look, Dad, you can't do this to me. I'm over 30 years old. I choose my own clothes. After you wear it a little, you'll see how good it looks. Come. I'll walk you downstairs. And then I went downstairs and kind of looked in the garbage can, and it was just buried under muck and I couldn't believe it. But I walked home in a Naugahyde oversized jacket that I didn't like. But it was typical of what my father would do to try to arrange my life to his liking.

GROSS: I kept thinking that just at the moment when you would be feeling tenderness towards your father and realizing the hell that he had survived, that he'd do something really manipulative like that, like throwing out the coat that you really love so he could give you his Naugahyde parka or something. And, I mean, how would you reconcile that? I mean, what you're supposed to do - like, the way it's supposed to be is that you find out your father's life story, all the hostilities of the past are erased, tenderness takes over, you embrace each other, you understand each other, and you reconcile.

SPIEGELMAN: It actually leads to a larger issue for me, which has to do with sentiment in literature and especially in this kind of literature. It's actually one of the banes of so-called Holocaust literature that when you're reading it, you hear violins in the background, you know, and, like soft, mournful chorus sobbing. And, well, I've met some survivors who work toward that, and I've met other survivors who just are much spunkier than that in a way. And what it is is, I guess, this - the subject matter makes such a large claim on your sympathies to begin with that I don't think it's necessary to, like, underline it and push it any further than that. In fact, it kind of seems trivializing and cheap to do it that way. And my life with my father wasn't tender. My life with my father was, well, probably as ambivalent as everybody's life is with their parents, ultimately, if they dig deep and look at what it is that was going on between them. And I just wanted to make an accurate portrait of that relationship.

GROSS: Your father also always complains about money, that his second wife just wants his money, she wants to rewrite his will, everybody's out to get him. And you write in "Maus" at one point - you write, it's something that worries me about the book I'm doing. In some ways, he's just like the racist caricature of the miserly Jew. Did you ever think, oh, well, maybe I should try to present him in a more positive light.

SPIEGELMAN: Oh, of course. I just would never do it. But of course, I'd think it - not even just portray him but in general, try to tailor the story to my own ideological bent or interests. And I just - it's just too dishonest. I mean, one of the things that was important to me in "Maus" was to make it all true. And that truth wouldn't be served by retouching the portraits. And on the other hand, I found that by working with the things that are actual, the book becomes far more potent so that my father isn't a caricature of a miserly, old Jew. He's a miserly, old Jew. But he's not a caricature of a miserly, old Jew. He happens to be Jewish. There are avaricious people of many different ethnic persuasions that I've met.

And I find that working with everything that seems a problem to me when I'm first approaching it, once it's been kind of looked at from the 15 different angles necessary and assimilated into the story, it becomes a strength of what I'm working on rather than a liability. I find this a lot richer than if I had a far more exemplary father because if I did, then I'd have a book, maybe, whose ultimate moral would be - and if you lead a virtuous, exemplary life, then you, too, can survive the Holocaust. And that's not the point. The point is that everyone should have survived the Holocaust. There should never have been a Holocaust. And that kind of assumption of some kind of supernatural picking of who would survive and who wouldn't wasn't based on ethics. And it wasn't based on goodness, nor was it based on being especially evil, which is, I guess, the flip side of the way one might try to perceive somebody who comes through a situation of extremis.

GROSS: You almost describe yourself as a prisoner in your home in some of your work. Did you ever feel like, oh, it's trivial to feel that you are living as a prisoner or that life is hell when you're not living through the war? This isn't really the Holocaust, you know?

SPIEGELMAN: Yeah.

GROSS: You're living a middle-class life, you know? Is it - (laughter) are you, you know, overexaggerating or, you know, indulging yourself to feel that way?

SPIEGELMAN: Yes.

(LAUGHTER)

SPIEGELMAN: But actually, more than that, I've gotten interested in psychological literature about children of survivors. And one common denominator that cropped up a number of times was children who ended up in mental hospitals or in jails. And I was in the former. And what it is is referred to in the psychological literature as an anniversary reaction. It tends to happen not always, but very often - it didn't for me. According to the literature, at approximately the same age the parents were when they got caught up in the concentration camps, the children would end up in the mental hospitals or jails. And I think that I've found a safer way of dealing with all this stuff by drawing a book. And that - you know, one of the things is you can't live through what your parents lived through. And yet, you've been given this mandate to be happy because you didn't have to. And yet, you're not all that happy. And then there's all kinds of ambivalences that come up from that, including a certain kind of very perverse envy of your parents having lived through something that proved that they could - were strong enough to live.

So it's - I don't think it's a total accident that I ended up really starting work on this very long project at the age of 30, which is about the age my father was when he went into the camps, because in order to draw "Maus," it's necessary for me to reenact every single gesture, as well as every single location, present in these flashbacks. The "Maus" cartoonist has to do that with his "Maus" parents. And the result is the parts of my story - of my father's story that are just on tape or on transcripts, I have a very kind of - I have an overall idea. And eventually, I can fish it out of my head. But the parts that are in the book are now in neat, little boxes, you know? I know what happened by having assimilated it that fully. And that's part of my reason for this project, in fact. And in order to do it, like I said, it's necessary for me to do a certain amount of research - photographic research, looking up drawings of survivors, a lot of readings - in order to get a sense of what it was, in order to put it in some kind of visual order for others to look at. I went back to Poland. I went to Auschwitz to look around, tried to find my parents' hometown - all part of the same kind of trying to understand and understand from the bones out what happened. And I'll say, it's still - not totally understandable. But it's my attempt.

BIANCULLI: Art Spiegelman speaking to Terry Gross in 1987. His graphic novel, "Maus," was published the year before, won the Pulitzer Prize and is now more than 35 years old. Yet very recently, it was banned by a school district in Tennessee. After a break, film critic Justin Chang reviews "Kimi," the new movie by Steven Soderbergh. It begins streaming today on HBO Max. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF RARE EARTH SONG, "HEY BIG BROTHER")

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'Maus' author Art Spiegelman shares the story behind his Pulitzer-winning work

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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. Last month, a Tennessee school district banned the book "Maus," the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman. We thought we'd listen back to Terry's 1987 interview with Spiegelman in which he talks about drawing and writing that book.

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This article talks abut the ethics of this book representing the Holocaust. It also speaks on how and why he chose the animals to represent each ethnicity in Spiegelmans book. (Ryan McMahon)

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By Biz Nijdam

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale by artist Art Spiegelman. Photo: Mark Pilon

A school board in Tennessee voted unanimously in favour of removing the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman from its Grade 8 language arts curriculum in January. Maus is based on interviews with Spiegelman's father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Auschwitz survivor, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for its searing and innovative visual and narrative exploration of the darkest period of German history.

The McMinn County's Board of Education cited "rough, objectionable language" and the cartoon drawing of a nude woman as their primary objections.

However, with editions flying off the shelves and comic book stores giving away copies, the McMinn County school board has, in fact, improved Maus's distribution, getting it into the hands of more readers.

Graphic novel and historical representation

Maus explores Spiegelman's parents' life in Poland and their internment at Auschwitz. Vladek Spiegelman's experience of the Holocaust and its aftermath - including the 1968 suicide of Art Spiegleman's mother, Vladek's wife, Anja - is filtered through cartoonist's narrative and visual account. He portrays the Holocaust as a conflict between cats, mice and pigs where Jews are drawn as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs.

Spiegelman's use of animals met some controversy including among some Polish readers, as well as some in the Jewish community who saw in mice the stereotype of Jews as pathetic and defenseless creatures. Yet Spiegelman noted that his anthropomorphized mice intentionally challenged Nazi propaganda that likened Jews to rats. For example, a teaching guide characterizes Spiegelman's Jewish mice as "a barbed response to Hitler's statement 'The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.'" His mice, Spiegelman wrote, " stand upright and affirm their humanity."

Maus was first published in Françoise Mouly and Spiegelman's comics anthology RAW from 1980 onward, before the first six chapters were published in 1986 as Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and the latter five chapters were published in 1991 as Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles.

The graphic novel's 1992 Pulitzer Prize win (in the "Special Citations and Awards" category) drew academics' attention to the comics medium for the first time.

Now heralded as one of the greatest graphic novels of all time, Maus successfully established comics as an important feature of contemporary culture and historical representation. It opened the floodgates to comics addressing serious subject matter and changed the medium's relationship with history.

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale by artist Art Spiegelman. Photo: Mark Pilon

Ethics of representing the Holocaust

While some may be encountering Maus for the first time in their newsfeeds, comics fans, teachers and literary and cultural studies scholars have known the importance of Maus in teaching and learning for decades.

Maus made comic books visible and legitimate in ways that had been previously inconceivable. As my research has explored, Maus also redefined the medium's potential through its engagement with what is known in Germany as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, overcoming the past or coming to terms with the history of Nazism. At the same time, Maus prompted important popular and scholarly debates on the ethics of representing the Holocaust.

For example, literature professor Marianne Hirsch examined the role of photography in Maus in a 1992 essay, providing the scholarly foundation for her subsequent work on transgenerational trauma.

German and comparative literature professor Andreas Huyssen examined the ethics and esthetics of remembering the Holocaust by looking at Maus's narrative strategies. In particular, Huyssen turned to Maus as an important example of how to move debates on representing the Holocaust beyond a focus on the "proper" depiction of historical trauma. Instead, Huyssen analyzed Maus's ability to shock and jar its reader "through ruptures in narrative." As Huyssen notes:
"[T]he telling of this traumatic past ... is interrupted time and again by banal everyday events in the New York present. This cross-cutting of past and present, by which the frame keeps intruding into the narrative ... points in a variety of ways to how this past holds the present captive, independently of whether this knotting of past into present is being talked about or repressed."
Huyssen found that Maus demonstrated the power of modernist Holocaust commemorations that steer clear of "official Holocaust memory" and its rituals while incorporating a critique of representation itself.

Similarly, historian Hayden White looked to Maus as a case study in his discussion on the relationship between history and narrative.

White questioned the belief that the uniqueness of Nazism and the Nazi "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" - the mass genocide of Jews - might set limits on its portrayal, insisting that there are no unacceptable modes of historical narrative. White argued that the destabilizing of the division between fact and fiction as seen in Maus is well-suited to representing what may otherwise seem "unrepresentable," namely, the Holocaust as well as the experience of it.

Multi-layered process of 'witnessing'

However, with the media attention that the recent ban of Maus is receiving, it's likely that more readers than ever are going to come to regard Spiegelman's graphic art as an essential text in Holocaust education.

Maus's multi-generational memoir laid the groundwork for comics, and graphic memoir in particular, to become an essential form for remembering the Holocaust and communicating its legacy of transgenerational trauma. Even today, 30 years after Maus's Pulitzer award, graphic novelists are turning to comics to explore these issues. For example, German-American illustrator Nora Krug's 2018 Belonging offers new perspectives on German guilt through her graphic novel that is both memoir and scrapbook.

Recently, researchers are looking again to comic art to educate on the Holocaust and genocide more generally. Germanic and Slavic studies professor Charlotte Schallié from the University of Victoria is leading a SSHRC-funded project called Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education.

In an interview, Schallié said this focus was inspired by her son's discovery of Maus as a reluctant reader at age 11. She explained how comics are foundational in Holocaust education and that Maus is an essential piece of graphic literature for both middle- and high-school curricula. According to Schallié, Spiegelman's complex esthetic modes of representation complicate the genre of survivor testimony to draw attention to the multi-layered process of witnessing. "To ban Maus in the middle-school curriculum," she said, "does a great disservice to students."

Biz Nijdam is an assistant professor in German Studies and a lecturer in UBC's Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies. This article was republished from The Conversation on February 16, 2022, under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Banning 'Maus' only exposes the significance of this searing graphic novel about the Holocaust - Beyond

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By Biz Nijdam A school board in Tennessee voted unanimously in favour of removing the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman from its Grade 8 language arts curriculum in January. Maus is based on interviews with Spiegelman's father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Auschwitz survivor, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for its searing and innovative visual and narrative exploration of the darkest period of German history.

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Tim Flynn: This article by Ana Merino analyzes how Spiegelman uses Art as the narrator to recollect and tell his father Vladek's experience in the holocaust through his own testimonies. Merino argues that Maus achieves its maturity as a graphic novel by telling a personal narrative using memory and historical evidence.

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1In Adult Comics: An Introduction Roger Sabin explained how between 1986 and 1987 the term 'graphic novel' became recognized mostly as a result of the success of Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, and Art Spiegelman's MAUS. This type of comic signified a revolutionary evolution towards an elaborate adult perspective. From the lesser and ephemeral space of the children's comic, there was a shift towards the graphic novels for adults, novels which eventually became part of library collections. Sabin explains how this evolution from periodical comic to 'graphic novel', that is, a lasting comic (that remains on the shelf) was intended to 'add prestige to the form and thus to sell more product (as Art Spiegelman pointed out: 'graphics are respectable, novels are respectable, so whammy: double respectability')" (235).

2The Founding Statement of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group declares "in cultural production, the emergence of testimonial and documentary form shifts dramatically the parameters of representation away from the writer and the avant-gardes" (140). This state of urgency so inherent in the testimonial form has developed in the context of Latin America but also globally. Comics, as a cultural space, incorporate both testimonial and documentary forms, offering the possibility of representing subaltern subjects who in and of themselves form a part of the construction of the text. This kind of comic, as in the work of Spiegelman or Joe Sacco (Chute)-both of whom merit a detailed analysis regarding how they show the rapid maturity attained by the testimonial genre within comics, one that is beyond the scope of this article-comes in part as a response to the male-centered meta-narratives of mainstream super-hero comics. They create an alternative space that I would define as the vanguard of the underground comic scene. Testimonial gives emphasis to the concrete, to the personal, focusing on the minuscule details of the lives of women, political prisoners, and other marginalized subjects.

3I will concentrate on MAUS, a comic based on the direct recuperation of the past. The comic initially appeared serialized in the experimental comic magazine RAW edited by Art Spiegelman and wife Françoise Moully. MAUS,as Kim Thompson explained back in 1980 in the review he wrote about RAW premiere, was " a chronicle of the life of Jewish families under the Nazi occupation retold in funny-animal terms, with cats playing the Nazis and mice the Jews" (21). The past and the search for truth through memory are the cornerstones of the narration in this fascinating work defined by a cast of anthropomorphic animals. MAUS exemplifies the theme of memory and the role that individuals play when the time comes to evoke the space of history. Written and drawn by Art Spiegelman over the course of thirteen years, it represents an effort to recuperate his family roots from a variety of perspectives. It is easy to describe this work as simply an autobiographical commentary about the author's father Vladek, in which Vladek tells of his hardships in Auschwitz. But MAUS develops various chronological moments and diverse parallel stories, in which the testimony of the father forms the central axis but depends upon others for its context.

4According to John Beverley, testimonial literature is a narrative told in the first person by a narrator who is the protagonist or a witness of the events he or she is relating. In many cases, this narrator is someone who is illiterate, or simply someone literate who is not a writer. The production of testimony, according to Beverley, "often involves the tape recording and then the transcription and editing of an oral account by an interlocutor who is an intellectual, journalist, or writer" (1993, 70-71). In MAUS we see elements that perfectly fit the definition given by the critic. Furthermore, Beverley points to the importance of remembering that testimony is a narrative of urgency: "a story that needs to be told-involving a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, exploitation, or simply survival" (1993, 73). In its subtitle, MAUS indicates that it is a "survivor's tale" and possesses all of the elements that make up a testimonial. Vladek's narration appears in the first person, as he is the protagonist of his story. Vladek is not the writer or the creator. Spiegelman (who happens to be Vladek's son) is the artist who uses his recorder to transcribe and edit the oral testimony taken down from Vladek, transforming it into a comic strip and balloon dialogue. Furthermore, Vladek's narration as compiled in MAUS is an urgent narration since the memory of these events deserves a space for expression before Vladek's death (he is an older man whose health is failing). Vladek is a survivor of possibly the most terrifying repressive event of the 20 th century, the Holocaust.

5Vladek's first-person narrative can also in turn represent the story of many others who suffered the same situation: "By contrast, in testimonio the 'I' has the grammatical status of what linguists call a 'shifter'-a linguistic function that can be assumed indiscriminately by anyone" (Beverley, 1993 : 83). But his story must be told and collected not only for general societal interest but also because affective familial implications exist within it. Art needs his father's memory in order to construct his own identity in the context of a double urgency, social and familial.

6Art Spiegelman's narrative of his relationship with his father begins in 1958, as he remembers a lesson by his father about friends in need. Young Art is skating with his friends and breaks his skate during a fall. His friends laugh at him and then abandon him. Art comes to his father crying: "I...I fell, and my friends skated away w-without me" (I, 6). His father answers him by questioning friendship in a manner clearly evocative of his past experience on the trains to Auschwitz: "Friends? Your friends? / If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week/THEN you could see what it is, friends!"(I, 6). This point of departure marks the two principal lines of representation in the narrative: Art begins with a childhood memory that marks his relationship with his father Vladek, and through this memory shows how Vladek carries with him his own past experiences in the concentration camps.

1 "And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of Madeleine which on Sun (...)

7Is this a suggestion that Vladek is harvesting the fruit of involuntary memory? Unlike the Madeleine and nostalgia-filled infusion, which characterize Combray's universe of memory in Proust 1, in MAUS, the evocation does not arise from a flavor or smell, but rather from the allusion to the concept of friendship, born of the memory of the terrible days spent in the horror of Nazi camps. The concept of memory here accords with Richard Terdiman's interpretation of Proust: "For Proust the convergence of significance and recollection is [...] fundamental: it is that the meaning of our experience materializes in memory" (346).

8The anecdote featured in the two-page prologue of MAUS materializes more than one level of meaning related to the concept of friendship as experience. On the one hand, there is the meaning of friendship created and interpreted by Art Spiegelman as represented through his drawings: the evocation of a painful moment of his childhood. He draws himself as a child (a baby mouse) and establishes a date for this perceptive moment (at the beginning of 1958). Memory has created this space and the comic strip is the place where it is reproduced. The other level would be the interpretation Art assigns to the meaning of his father's memories. These drawings are capable of reproducing (just as in Proust's prose) the narrative of memory, which has materialized in the present of the adult Art when he constructs his graphic novel. The memories of his father on friendship have for Art a very special meaning because they are associated with a concrete sentimental experience that materialized in his memory. It is the moment at which Art's father articulates his words and suggests to his crying son his past experiences, associating them to the feelings that friendship entails, when memory is transformed into another experience.

9This is an experience of learning for the young boy Art who listens intently. Art's friends made him cry and feel alone. Art looks for familiar affection after the painful moment, and his father gives him a new meaning for the concept of friendship as consolation: only in extreme circumstances is it possible to see if friends are true. If the friend was dependable in certain circumstances, memory materializes into a pleasant image of that person accompanied by feelings of gratitude and affection.

2 "el yo es porque recuerda haber sido." (Matamoro 47)

3 "Lo histórico es temporalidad y continuidad. El pasado no puede desprenderse del presente, ni éste (...)

10Memory is fundamental in the constitution of the ego. For Blas Matamoro "the ego is, because it remembers having been." 2 In the same way, the historicity of the ego is quite important because he who has a history will have memory: "That which is historical is temporality and continuity. The past cannot come from the present, nor the present from the past, without danger of the continuity that binds, historically, one stage with another." 3 Art needs an initial moment of memory recognition, and the concept of friendship will be one of the thematic keys in future conversations between the adult Art and his father. In effect, throughout all of his story, Vladek remembers all those who helped him to survive and performed kind deeds. For example, in 1943 Miloch, a Jew with influence, helped Vladek and Anja to survive in the ghetto of Srodula, Poland (I, 117-125). In Sosnowiec, Mr. Lukowski, a Pole who worked as a janitor for Anja's family, hid them from the Nazis (I, 136-137). Mrs. Motonowa, a Pole who sold food in the black market, hid them temporarily in her house (I, 141-142, 146-151). In the same way Vladek also helped his friends when he could. He obtained shoes, a belt and a spoon for his friend Mandelbaum in Auschwitz (II, 33-34).

11In Auschwitz, a Polish priest who was also a prisoner had a brief conversation with Vladek, which revived his hopes for survival. The priest, while looking at the numbers the Nazis had tattooed on his arm, told him that he would survive: "And LOOK! Added together it totals 18. That's 'chai', the Hebrew number of life./I can't know if I'LL survive this hell, but I'm certain YOU'LL come through all this alive!" (II, 28). The conversation with the Polish priest was fundamental in Vladek's regaining some type of faith. The priest could no longer animate and encourage his inmate companions with his normal religious talk, as the situation was so extreme, insufferable, and absurd. The priest comforted the other prisoners, creating new codes of hope that were associated to the religion and culture of each prisoner. Vladek, after his conversation with the priest, began to see the number tattooed on his arm not as the fatalistic Nazi mark that condemned him to die, but as the secret code of his salvation: "I started to believe. I tell you, he put another life on me. / And whenever it was very bad I looked and said: yes the priest was right! It totals eighteen" (II, 28).

12Analyzed in detail, all the memories of Vladek are associated with people who offer their friendship to him and his wife, and thanks to the intervention of these friends, they are saved. Therefore, the feelings of gratitude for past friends arise as the testimony is forged.

13 MAUS revolves around an already adult Art, reconstructing the memory of his father. The two volumes of the work attempt to represent through drawings and balloon dialogue the experiences of Vladek narrated in memory to Art. However, it is important to recognize that Vladek is not directly narrating these events; the narrator is Art, who remembers and recounts his father's remembering. In Proust's work we find a purifying aesthetic. The French writer articulates his memory with the utmost care. Terdiman, in the end, questions the use of memory in Proust's work: "involuntary memory recovers anguish, misery and disappointment-but more than that, involuntary memory is their product, they determine it. This is the painful side of recollection" (238). Do the margins between involuntary memory and conscious elaboration in narration permit Proust to construct a memory of the past, or is he subject to the involuntary memory mentioned by Terdiman, which is "rather a utopian projection [...] which promises the restoration of the past - better understood as the intimation of an alterity potential in our present" (237)? What happens in the case of MAUS? How does Art Spiegelman represent memory? Does his story suffer the same problems that Terdiman finds in the truthful representation of the past in Proust?

14For Art Spiegelman, his work "was intentionally made for readers", although "the engine in MAUS is [his] father's narrative, a verbal construct" (Interview, The Comics Journal, n.189, p.65). This 'verbal construct' permits truth to be analyzed from another perspective, using testimonial as a literary instrument for representing memory. On the one hand, Art is the narrator, but on the other, his father becomes both protagonist and narrator for a good part of MAUS. Art, in his sketches, represents the orality and the dialogues with his father, but also the tensions and contradictions between the young Vladek of the past, and the Vladek narrating in the present.

15Orality is a key element as a first step in this process of recuperation and representation of memory. In a certain sense Vladek is the Benjaminian storyteller of his own experience, one that Art converts into graphic material. The spontaneity of Vladek's spoken words would at first be annotated by Art, but later on, Art decides to record his father, and the possibility of collecting every word would make the narration much stronger. Art had the opportunity to listen to the words of his father again and again and thus reproduce them more accurately in his panels. Also, it is probable that if Vladek had written the text directly instead of having narrated it to his son, many details would have been changed through the writing process, demanding conciseness, and eliminating the interplay between Art and Vladek. Spiegelman illustrates the process of creating a testimony in the initial phase of collecting the orality of the testimony, first through a block of notes and later with a tape recorder: "Vladek: -What are you holding? / Art: -A new tape recorder- writing things down is just too hard" (I, 73).

16The parts of the story that deal with Spiegelman's father are represented in the first person, and relate how he met his wife Anja, the process of war itself, life in concentration camps, and the end of the war. The story of Art in the present, speaking with his father and gathering his testimony and the information necessary to create his memoirs, is presented in sporadic fashion, mixed with Vladek's reminiscences. MAUS demonstrates the validity of comics as a means of testimonial representation and of expressing memory. In deciding to investigate his father's past, Art becomes his interlocutor: "I still want to draw that book about you/ the one I used to talk to you about/ about your life in Poland and the war"(I, 12). At first his father resists; "It would take MANY books, my life, and no one wants anyway to hear such stories" (I, 12) This initial resistance denies the past a space in the present, not because Vladek has forgotten the past, but rather because he imagines that nobody would care to remember it. Nevertheless, Art insists, moving away from the war to more pleasant memories: "I want to hear it. Start with Mom...tell me how you met"(I, 12). And finally, his father begins to narrate his memories: "But, if you want, I can tell you-I lived then in Czestochowa, a small city not far from the border of Germany"(I, 12). The family ties that bind Art and Vladek allow for the development of a different model of history, in spite of Art trying to establish a conventional chronological rhythm in order to write the comic: "WAIT! Please, dad. If you don't keep your story chronological, I'll never get it straight-tell me more about 1941 and 1942" (I, 82).

17In How Societies Remember Paul Connerton points out that many socialist historians have seen in oral history 'the possibility of rescuing from silence the history and culture of subordinate groups" (18). In this way, "oral histories seek to give voice to what would otherwise remain voiceless even if not traceless, by reconstituting the life histories of individuals" (18). Connerton, however, finds potential problems in this approach, since the question asked by the interviewer can impede the realization of testimonial intentions. Moreover, it often happens that the interviewee offers resistance by pointing out that there is nothing that the interviewer does not already know. If this is so, we add the fact that the interviewer unconsciously adjusts the life history of the interviewee to a preconceived model based on classic memories of 'great men', the possibilities of representation in his oral history are circumscribed by the models created by hegemonic discursive structures (19). In the case of MAUS, Art does not represent his father as a great hero, but rather plays with the present image of the very old manic who his father has become.

18Physical and mental resistance is the key that Vladek gives to survival, along with patience and the capacity to not lose hope. Nevertheless the younger man whom he evokes is full of contradictions as opposed to the older one that lives in the present and is narrating the story of his life. Old Vladek is obsessed with money, perhaps because in so many cases money saved his life. He is obsessed with leftover food: if they cannot eat it, he will take the half-used boxes back to the supermarket because he cannot stand to see it spoil. These things young Art does not understand, and feels ashamed. Vladek replies: "What's to be so ashamed? It's food I can't eat. You wait there in the car while I arrange it."(II, 89). The reader and the owner of the supermarket are affected quite differently. The reader, vividly influenced by the memories of Vladek, is most likely to feel compassion for a man who reacts in the present on the basis of his experiences of the past. This is corroborated by the owner of the supermarket: "He helped me as soon I explained to him my health, how Mala left me, and how it was in the camps"(II, 90).

19Many of the difficult characteristics of Vladek in his old age are justified by the traumatic experience of the concentration camps. Although the comic is centered on Vladek, Mala, Vladek's second wife, questions this justification. Art says to Mala: "I used to think the WAR made him that way!" But Mala is forceful in her response. "FAH! I went through the camps! / ALL our friends went through the camps. NOBODY is like him!"(I, 131) Art does not hesitate to include these other characters who relate to his father, expliciting the difficulty to pin down an individual. Time and life cause any individual to undergo numerous changes depending on the situation in which he finds himself. Vladek represents a perspective of the Holocaust through his individuality and his personal narration. Mala, who has also suffered the same trauma, emphasizes that his character traits cannot be reduced to the events lived in the war.

20Pierre Nora brings another perspective to this idea of the difficult balance between the space of hegemonic history and individual memory. For Nora, "the transition from memory to history requires every social group to redefine its identity by dredging up its past. The resulting obligation to remember makes every man his own historian" (10). Art Spiegelman seeks to redefine his identity by way of his father's memory. This phenomenon of seeking memory is not isolated. According to Nora, "There is hardly a family today which some member has not sought to reconstruct the hidden ancestral past as fully as possible" (10). What is the relationship established between testimonial, memory, and history?

21The representation of memory in MAUS depends upon the testimonial of Vladek. In this case, the harsh events of the past have transformed the voice of Vladek into a testimonial. The relation between memory and history has been so dramatic that neither can remain simply in the annals of history or the tradition of communal memory: "In the Jewish tradition, whose history is its memory, to be Jewish is to remember being Jewish" (Nora, 11). Art individualizes the voice of his father, offering another kind of memory. The concept of truth changes, because we see the truth of an individual in his struggle for survival. Vladek was dehumanized by the terrifying discourse of the Nazis. This period of annihilation that nearly cost him his life and did indeed take the life of more than six million Jews transformed him into a subaltern. He was the 'other' that either did not exist or needed to be destroyed by the Nazi apparatus. Vladek resisted the genocidal machine and saved himself.

22In MAUS, the testimony of the father punctuates the rhythm of the narration. Yet there is a parallel testimony that has disappeared and can only be evoked in its past existence: the diaries that Anja wrote to her son Art. Art looks for these testimonies throughout the first book. "This is where Mon's diaries will be ESPECIALLY useful. They'll give me some idea of what she went through while you were apart"(I, 158). Finally, Art's father confesses that "These notebooks, and other really nice things of mother...one time I had a very bad day...and all of these things I DESTROYED" (I, 158). He justified himself by referring to the weight of memory that those papers carried; as objects of memory, they were highly symbolic: "After Anja died I had to make an order with everything...these papers had too many memories. So I BURNED them" (I, 159).

23Testimonial in comics grants a voice to the subaltern subjects previously ignored and left in anonymity. In the case of MAUS, the voice of Vladek becomes a balloon, and gives us the sensation of being real. However, Anja's voice cannot ever articulate itself, because Vladek destroyed the manuscripts. She is the subaltern of the subaltern, eliminated in spite of her attempts to create a space of resistance by way of her notebooks and souvenirs. All had been saved with the intention of evoking and transmitting her voice to her son. Art desperately asks his father, "Did you ever READ any of them?! Can you remember what she wrote?" (I, 159). Vladek responds, "Only I know that she said 'I wish my son, when he grows up, he will be interested by this...'"(I, 159). But the voice of Anja no longer exists, eliminated because her memories carried a symbolism loaded with truth that Vladek could neither tolerate nor respect. The comic is in part based on the tension between Vladek's story and what cannot be known or said of Anja's story. The son's efforts to recuperate his parents' story will always be frustrated without the mother's version. Art will have to make do with the perspective of his father. He will also have to resolve himself to the fact that it is his father who destroyed the last breath of memory that Anja had created for her son.

24It bears asking why Art uses this instance from his childhood in relation to his father as the starting point of MAUS. Perhaps it is because this conversation entails a first step toward the memory of the Holocaust in the voice of his father. But it is also a scene where we see Art the child share his feelings with his father, feelings which will change notably when Art is an adult. Freud explains that the early expression of emotions plays an important role in the so-called Oedipus complex. When boys are small they show a very special interest in their father, they want to be like their father "and take his place everywhere" (105). For the child, the father represents the ideal model. But as soon as this identification with the father appears, the child begins to develop 'a true object-cathexis toward his mother" (105). In this manner he develops two psychologically differentiated emotional ties: "a straightforward sexual object-cathexis toward his mother and an identification with his father which takes him as a model / which he takes as a model?" (105). These two relationships will subsist for some time without any mutual interference. But when the mental life of the child is unified, the so-called Oedipus complex arises, as the child notices that his father in some fashion interferes with his relationship with the mother. His identification with his father transforms into the desire of replacing his father in relation with the mother: "Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone's removal"(105).

25In a reading of certain episodes of MAUS in which the relationship between Art and Vladek is presented, we can see many interesting points by taking some of Freud's ideas into account. Apparently the relation between Art and Vladek has changed into something remote: "I went out to see my father in Rego Park. I hadn't seen him in a long time-we weren't that close" (I, 11). Nevertheless, as he takes notes about his father's living arrangements, in the pauses between note taking and recording, Art relives transcendent episodes from his childhood. In one of these, he remembers how different his mother and father treated him, her with sweetness, him with excessive sternness: "when I was little if I didn't eat EVERYTHING mom served, pop and I would argue till I ran out to my room crying/ mom would offer to cook something I liked better, but pop just wanted to LEAVE the left-over food around until I ate it/ fortunately for me, mom would eventually feed me something I liked" (I, 43-44). At another moment, he remembers the arguments that his mother would have with Vladek so that he would buy Art school supplies: "whenever I needed school supplies or new clothes mom would have to plead and argue for WEEKS before he'd cough up any dough" (I, 130). Art capitalized certain words to emphasize them in the word balloon.

26Throughout the two volumes of the graphic novel, we see how the relationship between Art and his father is marked by certain traits of the Oedipus complex and the desire to recuperate the memory of his mother, which drove Art to confront his father and call him an assassin when he discovers that he has destroyed the diaries she wrote. In the desire for the recuperation of the familial past and its representation in drawings, does there not exist an attempt to supplant the vivid space of his father in respect to his mother? Art inserts a realistically drawn underground comic of himself as a young boy shortly after his mother committed suicide. Included is a 1958 photo of Art with his mother, the same year of the initial story concerning his father during his childhood.

27From a Lacanian point of view, we can interpret in MAUS a narrative that brings Art to the recovery of moments of his infancy that reproduce the Imaginary as well as the Symbolic Order. The Imaginary would correspond to the pre-Oedipal period, when the child, according to Lacan, believes himself to be a part of the mother and recognizes no separation between himself and the world. Toril Moi defines this argument of Lacan explaining that "in the Imaginary there is no difference and no absence, only identity and presence" (99). And it would be the Oedipal crisis which represents the entrance into the Symbolic Order, a crisis associated with the acquisition of language: "In the Oedipal crisis the father splits up the dyadic unity between mother and child and forbids the child further access to the mother and the mother's body" (99). In the scene where Art discovers that his father has burnt the diaries of his mother, we can recognize a type of "Oedipal crisis". Art's yearning to reconstruct the memory of his mother and to re-live those feelings is destroyed since his father has annihilated the possibility of accessing the thoughts of his mother. The father has made the possible mother-child union through the texts that she left for her child impossible. To enter into the Symbolic Order, Art must accept the Law of the Father.

28Has Art accepted the Law of the Father? The underground comic which Art drew when he was 20 years old, included in MAUS, relates the suicide of his mother: "In 1968, When I was 20, my mother killed herself. She left no note" (I, 100). At that point, Art refuses to enter the Symbolic Order. But as a consequence, to continue in the Imaginary means to become a psychotic incapable of living in society. Those feelings are summarized in the mini story that he initially drew in 1972 entitled "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" where he represents himself mentally disturbed in a jail as the result of his mother suicide. Art explains that everything happened three months after he left the mental hospital: "I was living with my parents, as I agreed to do on my release from the state mental hospital 3 months before" (I, 100). Art feels a terrible guilt for what has happened and is obsessed with the last moments when he spoke with his mother: "I remember the last time I saw her/she came to my room...it was late at night/ Artie [she asks] you...still love me don't you?/ I turned away, resentful of the way she tightened the umbilical cord". Those painful moments coincide with the period when Art fought to fit into society and argued with doctors about his emotional stability, allowing the hospital psychiatrist to send him back home. It was then, which could be considered the transition between the Imaginary and the Symbolic Order for Art, when his mother chose to commit suicide. Art re-enters the Mirror Stage, suffering an absolute emotional crisis in regards to his mother. By committing suicide, she drastically separates herself from him, just as he is acquiring a new consciousness of his duality in relation to his mother. He wants to capture this instant, this relationship with his mother, and for this reason he must narrate it in his comic. The Symbolic Order appears in these panels when his father embraces his son and both confront the social reality of the death of Art's mother. Nevertheless, Art yearns to return to the Imaginary Order and repeats in his memoirs the last moments with his mother. As an expression of his intense desire to return to the Imaginary, and subsequent frustration, he draws himself in a jail cell blaming his mother for his insanity "congratulations! You've committed the perfect crime/ [...]/...you MURDERED me Mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!"(I, 103).

29Graphic novels covering topics that are directly related to their authors, as is the case of MAUS, help question the relation of postmodernity with the past. This work can be associated, by virtue of belonging to the comic genre, with a type of production that has been labeled as impersonal. For many, comics signify a universe of commercially produced superheroes drawn by workshops that lose touch with their individual creators. This vision of disappearance of the individual subject that Jameson announces in dealing with the loss of the personal style and the creation of pastiche, cannot be identified with MAUS. In spite of the multiplicity of elements that it entails, its clear anxious yearning to take a new look at the past is based upon very solid characters. Collective suffering is constructed in Vladek's individuality, as the France of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. In their capacity for recreation of a recognizable whole through a personal style, this type of work acquires a fundamental resonance. Trying to erase traces of the creator in the work he produces confronts deeply rooted narrative traditions. Proust died in 1922 and left a work from which all of modern Literature has learned.

30 MAUS represents to the comic what Proust's work represented to literature, achieving narrative maturity for the present-day comic based on the concept of memory, giving it a multiple content: testimonial, autobiography, history, and personal memoir. In order to achieve this maturity, the comic genre has had to construct complex and inter-connected narrations ideated around individuality. The space of representation in MAUS has portrayed bellicose and ideological tensions akin to those of the bourgeois European universe so well portrayed by Proust. The texts of Proust, Freud or Lacan continue to vitalize critical discourse and allow works from little-recognized genres such as comics to find means of analysis that includes them within the reflexive space of modernity.

31Perhaps MAUS is a key example of the so-called memory crisis alluded to by Terdiman, because it is a narration that reflects the tension between individuals, their culture, and their past. Art no longer belongs to the subordinate space in which his father lives in the present in the United States. His father suffered subalternity when the Nazis came to power. Before, Vladek belonged to the bourgeoisie; afterwards, he became an emigrant victim of the war and the Nazis. It has taken some time, after the Nazi period, for history to fully recognize the Jewish drama and provide compensation to those who suffered. Nevertheless, the memory of Vladek's suffering is multiplied and accompanied by the silenced memory of millions: Jews, Gypsies and dissidents, transformed into a voice that reconstructing that time. Thanks to memory, it is possible to recover and narrate the universal drama generated by Nazi repression and genocide and to share each moment of suffering. But memory also engages in a dialogue with individuals and their perspective of the present.

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Memory in Comics: Testimonial, Autobiographical and Historical Spac...

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Introduction In Adult Comics: An Introduction Roger Sabin explained how between 1986 and 1987 the term 'graphic novel' became recognized mostly as a result of the success of Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, and Art Spiegelman's MAUS.