Content area
Full Text
They didn't want you to know the past. They were hoping in this way you could escape it.
-Carolyn Forché, "The Notebook of Uprising"
The central problem of identity in Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale is the author's need to write himself into a family from whose founding trauma he was absent. We can look to Maus's multitiered metanarrative structure for evidence of the productive, though not always cooperative, interaction taking place between father and son that allows for a relationship in which Art Spiegelman creates an identity for himself with respect to his parents' experience of the Holocaust. The illustrator's biography of his father's experiences in Auschwitz seeks to narrow the psychological rift between himself and each one of his family members, whether deceased or still alive. Spiegelman is most successful in creating a place for himself in the family by soliciting, shaping, and representing his father's story. In his mediation of Vladek's biographical narrative, Spiegelman develops a balance between his own voice and that of his father. Since the father and son have difficulty getting along in person, the comics medium provides a space in which both men share input in the eventual product. In addition, Spiegelman's role as narrative facilitator provides a means by which he narrates himself into the family legacy without appropriating the experience of the Holocaust as his own. The deceased, however, present a greater challenge to reconciliation via narrative endeavor. While Spiegelman presents a more detailed memory of his mother Anja than of his brother Richieu, who died before his birth, Anja is generally seen through Vladek's eyes, with the noteworthy exception of "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," which depicts the aftermath of his mother's suicide. Spiegelman himself is too traumatized by Anja's suicide to incorporate her voice into Maus. Surprisingly, Art contrives a normative model for a relationship with his ghost-brother, but the posthumous sibling rivalry puts Spiegelman in a no-win situation in which survival of the death camps is prized as the only validating experience available to Spiegelman family members. Of the family members absent at the time of Maus's composition, the mother of whom he possesses knowledge proves more challenging to depict than the older brother whom he has never met. Maus successfully represents...