Maus and the cartoonish feel

Art Spiegelman's Maus is a captivating tale about a survivor's efforts during the Holocaust. The story is more than just a survivor's tale, but it also paints a picture of the strained relationship between the survivor and his son(whom is Art Spiegelman himself). One may ask however, what is the significance of Spiegelman's cartoonish style of drawing? Spiegelman's art and style appearance is a more cartoonish format whereas the characters are animals (Jewish people are mice, Germans are cats etc. . .) I meditated on Art Spiegelman's reasoning for using animals as his way to depict characters. I have a hypothesis that wasn't brought up in class that I would like to share.

Spiegelman wants to play with our emotions and distort our sensory ques.

In the movie A Clockwork Orange, Director Stanley Kubrick plays with our sensory ques. He recognizes that we as society repsond to ques in media. When there is sad music, we automatically recognize a scene in a movie to be sad and depressing. Kubrick uses this against us by playing upbeat music to scenes of depravity and horror.

My first thought when reading Maus was "What if Spiegelman was trying to do the same thing?" The Holocaust was dreadful and a downright abomination. The horrors endured during that time were unspeakable and for that period of time, hell was on earth. We recognize the whole cat and mouse schema from our childhood. It's a popular theme in cartoons. One cartoon in general is Tom and Jerry. We as children watched it for pure entertainment, while the cartoon Tom and Jerry didn't have any subtle social commentary. Now, take that cartoon and imagine the character Tom wearing a Nazi officer uniform while poking a bayonet in the back of an emaciated Jerry dressed in Jewish Holocaust work clothes. It loses it's innocence, however we still recognize the cartoon characters as Tom and Jerry so our sensory ques become confused as to what to think of the sight.

Spiegelman possibly could have wanted to skew our visual ques in a sense that while reading the comic we just imagine these things happening to mice yet when reality hits us, we realize that it's an actual occurance in our history.

In relation to Hayden White's writing Spiegelman in a sense takes the form of a historian. In White's writing, he says that historians do not have to report the facts in a fancy narrative, they can be as bland as a bowl of white rice; their job is to file the reports and thats it. However, that is not to say that they can't recapture history in a narrative manner. Spiegelman simply prefers to narrate that particular moment in history, and such a personal one too.

-Chuck Hill- (^_^)