An Unwanted Audience:
The Problem of Success Represented by Spiegelman’s Maus
In the aftermath of the brutality of World War II, countless survivors of the Holocaust’s ethnic cleansing cathartically shared their experiences in journals, letters, poetry, narratives, and other medium. Decades after the event, children of these survivors persist in sharing their experiences, systematically organizing their memories into tangible forms. In continuing to explore the Holocaust, these second generation witnesses attempt to make sense of the trauma of their own lives, a trauma they inherited from survivor parents. In Maus, one such second generation memoir, Art Spiegelman retells the survivor stories of his family, intertwining past and present to narrate his father’s life in Auschwitz alongside his own life, years later, in America. Art Spiegelman’s continuing trauma in Maus alludes to the ever-present ramifications of the terror of genocide: that while the Holocaust is long over, it is not dead. As with any catastrophic tragedy, the Holocaust lives on in memory. Kept alive by natural human sympathy among survivors and uninvolved parties alike, these survivor and second-generation memoirs have received unprecedented national attention, in many cases unwanted attention. As Maus achieves commercial success, Spiegelman feels that his personal memories are made obscene as he profits off of the death and trauma of others, individuals, who in many cases, will never have their stories told. This dilemma of unwanted audiences remains two-fold, presenting problems for both Spiegelman and his readership alike: first, as author, how can Spiegelman come to terms with the popularization and profitability of his intensely personal and disturbing memoir, and second, as audience, how can a reader appropriately reverence and respect the Holocaust past if lack of involvement in the event makes him or her a spectator to it?
To come to terms with his unwanted audience, Spiegelman must first explore his uneasiness at the audience, or at the commercial success of Maus. Much of his distaste for Maus’s recognition stems from his fear of inadequacy as a writer, especially in portraying so personal a subject. Writing as a second-generation witness, Spiegelman never physically experiences the Holocaust. He experiences it within the confines of his home, growing up with tormented parents, but even with their trauma, he remains displaced from the event. In an interview, Spiegelman recalls finally understanding what it meant when his parents would wake up screaming in the night; he states, “Only after I moved away from home and went to college did I have any distance at all on what had happened to my parents, and I realized then that there was a stress in my household that wasn’t everybody’s experience growing up” (Jacobowitz, 53). In spite of his close connection to the Holocaust, Spiegelman struggles to depict the Holocaust in Maus. Researching endlessly and taking time to travel to the camps, he spends over a decade attempting to visually portray the horrific experiences of his father, experiences that he has inherited. Spiegelman’s intense study bespeaks his dread of inability; his fears seem to mirror the fears of another Holocaust writer, Laura Levitt, who mentions in “Intimate Engagments: A Holocaust Lesson,” that she fears readers will dismiss her words, fears that they will “think that [she] flattened the differences between [her] own experiences and the Holocaust… [fears] that [her] words will be considered too personal, too unprofessional or unscholarly” (195). Embodying Levitt’s fears, Spiegelman, in representing so personal a subject, shies away from large audiences who might find him wanting or worse, miss the message of the narrative.
This notion of misunderstood purpose within text plays into an additional factor affecting unwanted readership; as Maus becomes profitable Spiegelman fears “selling out” artistically, or using his talent to milk money out of a sympathetic story at dead’s expense. He grows weary of his comix’s popularity with an “American audience [who seems] all too willing to commodify the Holocaust for [their] own entertainment” (Levitt, 194). Spiegelman pleads that Maus “really wasn’t done with [an] eye towards major commercial success,” (Jocobowitz, 52). In Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began, Spiegelman displays this sentiment as his panels progressively zoom out on his cartoon figure in a drawing chair. Where initially the cartoon frame shows little more than his face, the audience eventually views Spiegelman in a Nazi camp, desk rising out of dead bodies as media personnel inform him that they ready to shoot… ready to shoot a movie of his popular book (41). Hounded by suggestions of ways to monetarily capitalize on Maus’s success, Spiegelman feels depressed and trapped, much like the Jewish prisoners of which he writes. Where once he found joy in his status as a “cult artist,” an unheard of writer with a loyal following (Jacobowitz, 53), the book’s overwhelming popularity brings Spiegelman to the mainstream, staring down a hoard of praising readers who seek to manipulate his personal history for their own agendas.
In glorifying Maus, members of Spiegelman’s unwanted audience hoist him as the new spokesman for the cause: the cause of Holocaust remembrance. In an essay entitled, “We Were Talking Jewish: Art Spiegelman’s Maus as ‘Holocaust’ Production,” Michael P. Rothberg quotes Art Spiegelman as saying I “[resist] becoming the Elie Wiesel of the comic book” (140). The desire for Spiegelman to distance himself from Wiesel, the renowned author of Night, predicates itself on the fact that the two authors are two drastically different survivors with drastically different views on how best to keep the past sacred. Wiesel stands as a figurehead of Jewish Holocaust survivors; Night continues to be taught in secondary and higher level education classrooms across the country. Wiesel admonishes all who will listen that the traumatic stories of the past must be retold in order to honor the dead and prevent tragic reoccurrences in the future. Where Wiesel utilizes media attention for this specific purpose in efforts to raise awareness and prevent future atrocity, Spiegelman’s narrative purports no such lofty goal. He wishes only to keep sacred his personal trauma and avoid desecrating memories of the past through unwanted spectatorship. Spiegelman presents Maus with no plea for readership; instead, the work comes into existence solely as a cathartic outlet through which he manages to make sense of the traumatic experiences of his family. Through his narrative, Spiegelman comes to terms with his baggage as a second-generation survivor of the Holocaust (Jacobowitz, 58). Unfortunately, with the unexpected commercial success of Maus Spiegelman becomes tagged as the young Elie Wiesel, the new (comic-book) spokesman for the Holocaust, a title he neither desired nor deserved.
Spiegelman’s resistance to becoming the spokesman for the Holocaust grounds itself upon his resistance to Maus becoming “the” representation of the Holocaust. He fails to understand how one narrative among hundreds, how one voice, or just one story, could succinctly represent something as large as the Holocaust’s atrocity? Despite this questioning, Spiegelman admits in an interview that he has to accept the fact that Maus will probably be some people’s only “close up exposure” to Holocaust narratives (Jocobowitz, 54). While Maus tells the poignant story of two Jewish survivors over time, the narrative can in no way stand as an all-encompassing representation of the event because it falls short of perfect truth. With the release of Maus to the public, Spiegelman receives praise for his brilliant narrative and prize fiction; however, few readers or critics feel comfortable calling the work a history or autobiography as both distinctions convey a sense of absolute truth which Spiegelman never intended. Spiegelman later notes, “In spite of the fact that everything’s so concretely portrayed box-by-box, it’s not what happened” (Brown, 98). While he strives to accurately convey the story of his father, Spiegelman must undertake intensive editing in order to fit the story succinctly within a limited narrative. Personal bias and the subjective nature of memory further complicate the story’s accuracy. In sharing his memories with son, Art’s father Vladek plays to his audience: a son with whom he has no real relationship, and a son to whom he feels he needs to prove his good qualities. To do so, in Vladek’s recollection of the past, he casts himself as hero, a glorified survivor who through wit and strength manages to walk away from the impossible survival odds of ethnic cleansing. In the opening pages of Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, as Vladek begins to tell his story, Art Spiegelman draws him as a movie star, riding his exercycle in front of a glamorous motion picture poster (13). In addition to Vladek’s personal bias which affects his recollection and telling of events, the imperfect nature of memory itself contributes to Maus’s inaccuracy. While Vladek repeats his experiences as honestly as he can remember, the very nature of being human vastly limits humanity’s capacity to correctly store and recall details from the past. With the imperfection of memory in mind, it follows that Art Spiegelman reconstructs, and thus “re-presents,” his own construction of the past in Maus (Berlatsky, 110). Maus cannot stand as absolute truth, and as such, Spiegelman rejects the novel’s commercial success along with those undesired readers who would enshrine the story as “the” contemporary representation of the Holocaust.
Though Spiegelman denounces the unexpected and unwanted audience of Maus, inescapable fame forces him to confront his fears, and with them the implications of the readership he never wanted. His distaste for Maus’s success stems from his fears of inadequacy as a writer, “selling out” for profit at the expense of the dead, becoming the contemporary spokesperson of the Holocaust, and having his narrative stand as “the” one representation of the traumatic past. Facing these fears, Spiegelman combats each one by openly addressing it. Spiegelman narrates himself questioning his own fears through a postmodern representation intertwining three narrative or diegetic levels. By addressing his inability to picture the camps (Maus II, 46) and his concern at Maus I’s success, he copes with the existence of the large, invasive audience he never sought to captivate. Announcing his status as second-generation witness, as opposed to a first-hand Holocaust survivor, Spiegelman presents his weaknesses head on, challenging unexpected readers to give credit to his account as they will. Turning down several profitable business offers involving Maus, he again challenges readers, promising that he refuses to capitalize on the book, something that he never intended to do. Further, by unveiling the flaws in his personal philosophies and text, namely that he is not a remembrance advocate like Elie Wiesel and that Maus presents the imperfect screened version of only one survivor’s view of the Holocaust, Spiegelman combats the false and deconstructive ideas of those readers who, left alone, might become part of the text’s unwanted audience.
Many readers of Maus, far distanced from the actual events of the Holocaust, come to question how to appropriately reverence and respect various Holocaust representations without becoming unwanted spectators to them; this may be done by seeking to create personal engagements to each text and approaching each text with the understanding that the act of reading alone makes one complicit in the events depicted. Spiegelman testifies that the Poles were made complicit when they witnessed the ill treatment, deportation, and eventual annihilation of the Jews. He further suggests that “now we’re all complicit. And we live our lives without the suffering going on somewhere to the side being the central event” (Jacobowitz, 54). This problem remains without resolution. Elie Wiesel attempts to attack the apathy of contemporary times by calling generations to remembrance of the bloody past. Spiegelman and others prefer to draw attention to the terror of the present. Spiegelman goes so far as to suggest the inclusion of an exhibition in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. entitled “Genocide Now” (Jacobowitz, 54). Choosing to involve audiences in the responsibility of the present through less aggressive means, Levitt suggests that personal connections to the Holocaust may be made by remembering that “survivors are, despite all that they have been through, very much like us” (200). This understanding, she continues “[allows] people to make connections between Holocaust materials and much less dramatic and traumatic legacies of loss….[opening] eyes to other kinds of open wounds, other kinds of losses and their reverberations” (196). She concludes that “we are [all] implicated in the legacy of the Holocaust….[a legacy that] continues to both haunt and animate our everyday lives in the present” (201). By seeking personal connections to Holocaust narratives and recognizing personal implication to each text, despite our increasing distances from the physical event, readers may appropriately reverence and respect Holocaust remembrances without fear of becoming an unwanted audience.
While Art Spiegelman faces unwanted audiences with the commercial success and popularization of his Holocaust narrative Maus, the problem of an undesired readership, a problem addressed in his text, easily becomes resolved for both author and audience by directly confronting the predicament. Spiegelman accepts the unwelcome spectatorship brought in by Maus as he invents mechanisms to cope with his personal fears, fears that incite his negative feelings on the popularization of the narrative in the first place. Addressing his fears of inadequacy as a writer, “selling out” to monetary success, becoming a spokesperson to Holocaust remembrances, and creating a text thought to be representative of the entire Holocaust, Spiegelman learns to live with his increased readership. This same readership, endowed with new understanding of how to engage personally with each Holocaust text and accept the complicity that accompanies reading such traumatic works, learns to acceptably reverence and respect memoirs in spite of a large distance between themselves and the physical event of the Holocaust. Perhaps Spiegelman’s popular success, the success that produces the unwanted audience of Maus, may become useful as unwanted audiences become wanted thanks to the dissemination of information to audience and author alike.
Works Cited
Berlatsky, Eric. ‘Memory as Forgetting: The Problem of the Postmodern in Kundera’s “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and Spiegelman’s “Maus”.’ Cultural Critique 55 (Autumn, 2003): 101-151.
Brown, Joshua. “Review: Of Mice and Memory.” Oral History Review 16.1 (Spring, 1988): 91-109.
Jacobowitz, Susan. “‘Words and Pictures Together’: An Interview with Art Spiegelman.” Writing on the Edge 6.1 (1994): 49-58.
Levitt, Laura. “Intimate Engagements: A Holocaust Lesson.” NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (2004):190-205.
Rothberg, Michael P. “We Were Talking Jewish: Art Spiegelman’s Maus as ‘Holocaust’ Production.” Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust. ed. Deborah R. Geis. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale I: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
--. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991.
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