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Art Spiegelman's two-volume narrative Maus is a Holocaust survivor's tale as told to a son who wants to record his father's story in a book with the hope that this effort will lead to acknowledgement by his father. In the course of the father's, Vladek Spiegelman's narrative, Artie Spiegelman reveals through words and behavior what it means to be a survivor's child. This double autobiography of a son's relation to his father and the father's survival in one of history's most horrendous nightmares is depicted through the unconventional genre of the "commix,"a comic book that is literally a graphic autobiograpy. Here Spiegelman pushes the well established conventions of Holocaust narratives to the limits by incarnating the Nazi use of the rodent metaphor in all his Jewish characters. In Maus the faces of the Jews are those of mice, the Germans are the cats who hunt them and the Poles as victimizers, victims or bystanders are pigs. Nevertheless, the animal imaging, a deadly serious business in history and Maus, intensifies rather than detracts from the horror of the Holocaust and the familial tensions in the Spiegelman family.
In his post-Maus reflections, or "mouse droppings," Art Spiegelman declared in Tikkun: "Maus preserves a certain crystalline ambiguity that doesn't try to simplify the complexities of interpersonal relationships and disastrous history. . .and yet it comes across as an easy-to-take tale"(44-45). With "crystalline ambiguity," the author-artist offers here an oxymoron that privileges, preserves and makes clear an ambiguity that maintains the chaos of human relationships and history in the ordered structure of the text. Frame narrator Artie's relation to his parents is ambiguous because disastrous history has a disastrous effect on interpersonal relationships between parent and child. Artie will re-tell his father's story, but, throughout his telling of the frame narrative, he avoids the direct articulation of his own pain because he must, from the epigraphic episode on, consider his pain and deprivations insignificant in relation to the disastrous history of Auschwitz. As a result, his own maturation is necessarily thwarted.
An "easy-to-take-tale" is a story whose conventions are so predictable and simplify the content to such an extent that the reader or listener neglects to become conscious of the blanks and gaps in the telling. Such reductive simplicity...