Unlike other works or art, which usually remain unknown to the public until they are released, comics published in installments can modify their own narrative development almost in “real time”, sometimes according to readers’ reactions. This gives serialised comics a much more flexible, even interactive characteristic that emphasises the openness of their narrative work.
Art Spiegelman‘s Maus is no exception. Before it was published as a book in two volumes it was serialised in Raw, the avant-garde comix magazine edited by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly. This gave Maus a public exposure even before the whole work was finished, highlighting its “work-in-progressness”:
Spiegelman, Art (1986) Maus: A Survivor's Tale. I: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon, 131,7-8)
In the panels above, Artie expresses the melancholia caused by the double bind in which he is trapped by trying to deal with his father’s story (and, as we know, with his own story with his father) through comics. The ironic effect provoked by the juxtaposition of the word “caricature” in a dialogue uttered by a cartoon character unavoidably indicates an illuminating self-reflexivity.
By blurring (and deliberately confusing) the distinction between empirical author and fictional persona, Spiegelman appears conscious that every representational practice implies a distortion (“caricature” is indeed understood as the graphic distortion of recognisable features, usually to achieve a humorous, ironic or parodic effect) and that this is problematic when one is attempting a narrative which makes “truth claims” (Ricoeur 1988:188-192), like the testimony of a Holocaust survivor.
Mala, Vladek’s present wife, replies in agreement with the idiomatic expression “Ha! You can say that again!” permitting an interesting polysemia that surpasses simplistic humor. Beyond the pun, the everyday normality of Mala’s conversation with Artie in the context of a typical complaint about his father gets complicated into another indicative of artistic self-reflexivity. In the literal sense of the idiom, “it can be said again” because, in Mala’s conception, Vladek is indeed an “old miserly Jew”. But it can be said again because it has been repeated, reproduced from Artie’s and Mala’s “live” speech and transcribed into the comic book; it can be said again because a comic book, heavily based on cartooning and mechanical reproduction, is destined to caricaturise its subjects; it can be said again because a distinct motif in the comic is repetition itself.
At the beginning of the second volume, Mala, tired of Vladek’s obsessive behavior, decides to leave him. Desperate, he calls his son, interrupting Artie and Françoise’s holiday in Vermont to ask them to go and see him in the Catskills. The incident triggers in Artie a reflection on his relationship to his family and the influence of the Holocaust on their past and present life, but above all, on the attempt of representing them in his book:
Spiegelman, Art (1991) Maus: A Survivor's Tale. II: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon, 1:16)
Artie’s self-reflexive speech takes the form of a melancholic soliloquy. This page is an example of how Maus’s self-reflexivity as a comic book can create subtle ironic effects through a series of juxtapositions of seemingly contradictory notions. Linda Hutcheon remarks that “postmodern fiction suggests that to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological” (1987: 209).
This rejection of a “conclusive and teleological” idea of history is exemplified by the self-awareness of this passage as part of a work in progress, making it open to the future. The “presentness” of the comic panel is used in this case to underscore this “work in progress” state of the narrative, even as we read it (when it is supposed to be finished, since it is published and in our hands as a book)[1].
The dramatic, monological characteristic of Artie’s speech in this page is contrasted with the everyday nature of driving. The personal material expressed in the first three panels, referring to Artie’s childhood and early youth, is treated in the same context as Spiegelman’s creative process. The blurry boundaries between private and public are made evident again by their juxtaposition. In Orvell’s words, “Spiegelman […] writes out of compulsion to understand the heavy weight of the past as both a public and a private burden” (1992: 126).
The “borderline discourse” of Maus seems to be partly constructed with the mechanics of irony. Irony (not only linguistic but created by its contrast with the images) works on the basis of a tension between opposites. Artie considers “forgetting the whole thing,” unleashing again a rich polysemy, since it is obvious, in more than one level, that forgetting “the whole thing” is and has been impossible. First of all because the book (“the whole thing”) is in our hands (the bookness of the book is its very thingness); we know Artie/Spiegelman did in the end finish the book. Secondly, because what made Spiegelman (and, with and through Artie) create the book in the first place was the impossibility of forgetting “the whole thing”, i.e., the Holocaust, his mother’s suicide, his “ghost” brother, the troubles with his father and the latter’s death.
Another contrast is highlighted by the last two panels: while Artie accepts that “reality is too complex for comics”, the last panel proves that comics can indeed deal with “real life” by self-reflexively declare its fictive nature as representation. Françoise’s reply, “just keep it honest, honey”, seems belated since apparently that is exactly what Spiegelman did, since we are witnessing this otherwise private conversation. This creates an interesting space-time intertwining that, without the need for a direct address to the reader, displays a profound fictional self-awareness.
By accepting its limitations as a representational practice, Spiegelman’s comic book paradoxically achieves what it acknowledges is beyond its powers. The overall melancholy feeling of the work is emphasised by this paradoxical consciousness of impossibility.
[1] From the perspective of the reader’s refiguration of the work, this posed a different complexity if the passage was read when it was first published in Raw and not in the collected edition published later. Esther Claudio is currently researching metafiction in comics.
REFERENCES
Hutcheon, L. (1987) “The Pastime of Past Time”: Fiction, History, Historiographic Metafiction.” GENRE XX (Fall-Winter)
Orvell, M. (1992) “Writing Posthistorically: Krazy Kat, Maus, and the Contemporary Fiction Cartoon,” American Literary History 4.1 (Spring)
Ricoeur, P. (1988) Time and Narrative. Volume 3 (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press)
Spiegelman, A. (1986) Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. I: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon)
Spiegelman, A. (1991) Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. II: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon)
Great text, Ernesto! You are talking here about a very important subject that is seldom discussed in relation to Maus.When a work of art tries to represent life and factual truth, there are is a certain feeling that only a work-in-progress, and not a one-piece closed text, can produce. Life in itself is a work-in-progress, after all… Maus is maybe the Über-work-in-progress text when it comes to represent life, because few others have gone as far as Spiegelman in that sense. Not only the graphic novel itself was serialised as it was being created by Spiegelman, but later on, he went on writing about the same topic and the effects of Maus success in his very long prologue to Breakdows. And he is going to publish Metamaus in a few months too, which can give us new insights about what you say here. I can only think about another work-in-progress that tried to do something similar, although to much lesser extent, the german TV series Heiman 1, 2 and 3, shoot in a period of 20 years, and dealing with the semi-autobiographic history of a family from the Rhin (when the Wall of Berlin fell in 1989, the director Edgar Reitz had to shoot part 3 to show the effects of all the political changes in his family).
Thank you, Roberto. I did not know of Metamaus or of Heiman, so thanks for the reference as well.
I really liked what a colleague told me today; he said he’d liked the “meta-irony” of this piece being posted on this blog, when it is itself part of a work-in-progress that has been going now for a while… and of course part of this blog, which is itself a work-in-progress, and a collective one at that.
So yeah, I distrust closed narratives, those who present air-tight universes (no matter how complex), with no apparent sign of awareness of their own politics of representation. In this sense I guess there is also a media-specificity of work-in-progressness, i.e. perhaps some media are less closed and teleological than others… or maybe not? ;-)
I agree with you, Ernesto. I think this combination of autobiography and seriality (that seem to be so remarkable in comics) many times contributes to reveal this self-consciousness you point out.
(and I think Roberto was referring to Heimat, before you go looking for Heiman)
I don’t want to be too cranky, but…hasn’t this kind of reflexivity and irony been around since before Tristram Shandy? Except that in Shandy, a couple odd centuries ago, it was seen as a clever gimmick to play virtuoso variations on, and here it’s deployed leadenly to signal its profundity.
It just seems really obvious, deployed mostly in the service of self-pity and the solidification of literary cred. Compared to Sterne, or Borges, or Nabokov, or even Barth it just seems really rudimentary — embarrassingly so. Okay, comics is kind of a debased art, and maybe this shallow parody of real artists is the best we can do. But do we have to applaud ourselves for it?
Thanks for your comment, Noah. I never claimed “this kind of reflexivity and irony” was invented by Spiegelman. Metafictional techniques are indeed as old as storytelling itself. Don Quixote is pure metafictional genius, etc. Interestingly, none of the authors you quote (apart from Nabokov, but I don’t know exactly what specific works by him you mean) were dealing with a work making what Ricoeur calls “truth claims”.
Tristram Shandy is supposed to be about Tristram’s life, not Sterne’s real-life family and/or himself in the context of a historical situation constantly debated and tainted by the politics of representation (like the Holocaust, which is undoubtedly singular in historical terms). Sterne’s novel is so deliciously funny and clever because self-reflexivity is employed in order to emphasise the work’s own fictive nature as a work of art, rather than doing it in order to attempt faithfulness in the narration a historical event.
In spite of the beautiful illustrations George Cruikshank did for TS, as in the case of Borges, Cortázar, Calvino or any other prose writer who has employed metafictional techniques, Sterne’s novel is based on the written word, and the written word represents the world in different ways than the combination of words and images, and particularly cartoon images, do. Therefore, the politics of representation in comics are different. I tried to explain this by referring to the word “caricature.” Spiegelman caricaturises literally, through cartoons, and this as a metafictional resource is very different from the literary caricatures found in comic novels (like TS, or Don Quixote). One of course could claim that self-reflexivity in comics is not unique to Spiegelman either (there are plenty of examples; notorious ones are Crumb and Pekar of course). Nevertheless, this was never my post’s claim.
When Woody Allen talks to the camera directly (i.e., to the spectator) and says “boy, if life were only like this” in Annie Hall (1977), the self-reflexivity of the work as fiction was not there to imply that the scene actually happened, but, precisely, that it didn’t, (in spite of the cameo appearance of the most-cited real-life media scholar of all time), i.e., that the work is fiction. No one left the cinema thinking that that scene had actually happened in real life. (Of course, in the film Woody Allen is also a comedian, Alvy Singer, but he doesn’t play a comedian film-maker struggling to make the film we are watching. In Maus, Art Spiegelman has created Artie, an anthropomorphic cartoon mouse who is struggling to make the comic book which is the comic book we are reading.)
In Maus, self-reflexivity is used to underscore the fictive nature of the representation in order to emphasise the “truth” told in his story. The objective of the work is not merely for us to marvel at the gallery of representational practices employed, but to transmit the story of something that actually happened. If someone finished Maus thinking the Holocaust never happened, the work would be a failure.
Furthermore, the point of my post is the notion of work-in-progressness. Though the authorial persona in TS or in many of Borges’s short stories is very strong, intervening in the narrative etc., what is peculiar about Spiegelman’s work in Maus is the continuous reference to the difficulties in the making of the book. We read the book, we have it with us, we have paid for it, and still what we read, in the present tense, is an acceptance of the difficulty of the process. Because comics are an asynchronous medium (unlike cinema) and because they juxtapose the presentness of the image with the different tenses of verbs in the written words in the present moment of one single visual “blow” at the moment of reading (unlike prose or even illustrated prose), the phenomenon is specific to comics.
No, we definitely don’t need to applaud ourselves for that.
It is true that Sterne already used metafiction centuries ago and that he did it not only masterfully but also with a sense of humor that postmodernist fiction lacks nowadays. Don Quixote is also a great example here, and the way these two masterpieces (among others) used metafiction to subvert, question and mock their own works and reality itself was, most of the times, a means to play with and make the reader laugh. Exactly for this, I don’t think that Maus tries, with metafiction, to signal its profundity. It is simply one of the many devices that are available to the author to deal with the issues that appear in Maus and to successfully intertwine autobiography and biography in the work. Probably, if Maus had been written in another age, Spiegelman would have used other narrative devices because, after all, each author is influenced by his time and by the cultural producation of the moment. In this case, the proliferation of metafiction in current masterpieces like those by Nabokov or Borges is, no doubt, an influence. But, in my opinion, it is no more than that, an influence, not a conscious way to signal its profundity, as neither it is in the works by the authors that you mention.
However, these works (The garden of forking paths, for example, which I love and adore) are also elevated to masterpieces because we consider them so NOW. Like the Quixote or Tristram Shandy in their age were no more than mere popular and funny stories and now they are art works of all time, the contemporary metafictional works are considered as an expression of our time because they subvert our preconceptions, because postmodernism, as Eric Berlatsky explains following Lyotard, “takes place in the realization that Enlightenment rationalism and scientific positivism are not tied to objective truth and reality, but rather are merely “language games,” like narrative itself (101). Maybe two centuries later, tired of metafiction, these masterpieces will becaome less relevant.
And with them, Maus, too, will vanish. I am not gonna question whether Maus is “better” or more “ellaborated” than Sterne’s or Barth’s. But I would like to point out that, at least in my opinion, what makes of Maus an outstanding work are many more things, apart from its metafiction. It is how, by using his father’s memory, it subverts and questions a grand-récit like History and how, at the same time, it also subverts his father’s memory and with that the relation between reality and representation. And this same subversion also serves to portray his work as an honest and upright work, thus manipulating the reader. I especially admire the deconstruction of identity that it carries out. The identity of Spiegelman as a Jew, as member of his family and as an artist, playing with the atropomorphized characters and the masks. The way in which bildungsrroman y künstlerroman intertwine. The visual metaphors, like when Spiegelman “grows up” as he feels better alter leaving the psychiatrist. The intertextuality and the pictorical style he uses, clear and simple for the main plot and gloomy when relating his real trauma, his mother’s death. All these little things and many more make, for me, a great work of Maus. Is it on a par with reknown literary works? I don’t know, but I don’t think either that there must be a “competition” between both media or that they must be compared. They’re different. Borges is one of my favourite authors and Spiegelman too. Do we have to applaud for comics like Maus? Well, let Art Spiegelman do it, if he wants to. I’ll just enjoy reading the comic myself!
Sorry for such a long reply!
References
Berlatsky, Eric (Fall 2003) “Memory as Forgetting: The problem of the postmodern in Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Spiegelman’s Maus”. Cultural Critique, 55, pp. 101-151
The irony in Maus is one of the most outstanding features of this great work. Thank you, Ernesto, for your contribution. I hadn’t realized myself of the implications that the representation of the “work-in-progressness” had. It is simultaneously a finished work, a work-in-progress, and a work in progress of being read when one picks it up! It goes beyond its limits, as you say. And it seems there is even more work in progress going on with the Metamaus, as Roberto said. What a crazy meta-maze…
One of the things I love about Maus is how it undermines its own narrative. The irony of presenting the work as an honest recount of facts, (like in the conversation with his wife) and by doing so making evident that it is manipulating the reader’s opinion of the work is just brilliant. It really breaks boundaries.
“as Eric Berlatsky explains following Lyotard,”
Hey now! Don’t quote my brother at me!
I’ll reply to the rest shortly…thanks for such extended responses!
I didn’t know you were brothers! But yes, your surname made me think of the article…
“The visual metaphors, like when Spiegelman “grows up” as he feels better alter leaving the psychiatrist.”
This is a good example of why I wish Spiegelman just wouldn’t. That’s such an empty-headed, obvious, ham-fisted moment. Therapy has helped me…now I look more mature! Most of Spiegelman’s metafictional gambits are like that. “Here’s me talking about my book atop a heap of corpses! Oh…the distance between fiction and reality! The pathos! The pathos!”
Your point, Ernesto, about the difference between using metafiction to signal reality and using it to signal truth is interesting…but I think the line is less clear than you’d like it to be, and it doesn’t change the fact that Spiegelman deploys his metafiction with little skill and less grace. Quixote (great example!) does precisely what Maus does, doesn’t it? It undermines fictiveness (the stories of chivalry) in order to solidify reality. Same with Maus.
The difference is that Maus keys into lots of narratives about whether or not it’s possible to represent the holocaust, etc. etc. It does this mostly in fairly uninteresting ways, in my view…much less effective or thoughtful than say Paul Celan. Spiegelman’s metaphors are all really straightforward and kind of blockheaded. Hitler called them rodents…we’ll draw them as mice! Oookay. Awesome.
For me, the affecting part of Maus is Spiegelman’s father’s story. It’s a good story, told well. He had an interesting and obviously painful life. The metafictional frills…they seem rudimentary and obvious. How can I possibly represent the horror? Look, look, this isn’t “really” happening! To which one can only reply, you can’t, and we know, get over it already.
I think too much is made of the specialness of the comic medium too. You don’t need caricature to tell you that representation is distortion, surely. That insight is, again, hundreds of years old at least in fiction and visual art. I don’t see Spiegelman bringing any particular insight to the epistemological or ontological dilemmas (as, for example, Tarkovsky does in something like Solaris.) He just retreads fairly obvious points and pastes them onto his father’s story. Is that genius? Well, your mileage will vary I guess.
I hope this is okay; rather than further derail your comments section, I’ve written a longer post about this here. Thanks for the stimulating discussion!
Hi Esther, et. al.
Yeah…there aren’t that many of us Berlatsky’s…If two of us are discussing Maus, we probably grew up in the same house.
Since somebody’s expressing interest—I might as well flog my forthcoming revised reading of Maus— chapter 4 of my book, The Real, The True, and The Told, coming out in April from Ohio State UP…