'The Shadow Of A Past Time': History And Graphic .

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"The Shadow of a past Time": History and Graphic Representation in "Maus"Author(s): Hillary ChuteSource: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 199-230Published by: Hofstra UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20479765 .Accessed: 19/06/2011 15:51Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at ms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at erCode hofstra. .Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Hofstra University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Twentieth CenturyLiterature.http://www.jstor.org

"The Shadow of a Past Time":History and Graphic RepresentationinMausHillary ChuteBecause I grew up with parentswho were always ready to seetheworld grid crumble, andwhen it started feeling that thatwashappening here and now, itwasn't a total surprise. I thinkthe one thing I really learned frommy fatherwas how to pack asuitcase.You know? Itwas the one thing he wanted tomake sureI understood, like how to use every availablecentimeter to getasmuch stuff packed into a small space as possible.The icemightbe thinner than one would like to think.-Art Spiegelman (qtd. inD'Arcy 3)In In theShadow of No Towers,his most recent book of comic strips,ArtSpiegelman draws connections between his experience of 9/11 and hissurvivor parents' experience of WorldWar II, suggesting that the horrorsof the Holocaust do not feel far removed from his present-day experience in the twenty-first century.' "The killer apes learned nothing fromthe twin towers of Auschwitz and Hiroshima," Spiegelman writes; 9/11is the "same old deadly business as usual" (n. pag.). Produced serially,Spiegelman's No Towerscomic stripswere too politically incendiary tofindwide release in theUnited States; theywere largelypublished abroadand inNewYork's weekly Jewish newspaper the Forward.In theShadowofNo Towerspowerfully asserts that"the shadow of a past time [interweaves]with a present time," to use Spiegelman's own description of his Pulitzerprize winning two-volume work Maus:A Survivor'sTale (Spiegelman qtd.in Silverblatt 35). In one telling panel there the bodies of four Jewish girlshanged inWorldWar II dangle from trees in the Catskills as the 9

HillaryChutek4VNFigure ,11 79.l.Mausmans' l 'lSI'drivein 1979 (figure 1).'to the supermarketof the past in Maus, of course,does figure gies. ook'sthis, forLaCapra's readingmode of carnivalization"(175), Andreas Huyssen'stheorizing ofAdorneanThepersistenceinMaus, and Alan Rosen'sbrokenstudy of Vladek Spiegelman'sMausofhowrepresentsMosthistory approach the isreadingsEnglish.3in thedebates about Holocaustsue in terms of ongoingrepresentation,mimesiscontext of postmodernism, or in relation to theories of traumaticmemory.But such readingsdo not paymuch attention toMaus's narrative form:4the specificities of readinggraphically,of taking individualpages as crucialunits of comics grammar.The form of Maus, however, is essential to howit representshistory. Indeed,Maus's contribution to thinking about thecrisis in representation,"Iwill argue, isprecisely in how it proposes thatthemedium of comics can approach and express serious, even devastating,histories.5"I'm literallygiving a form tomy father'swords and narrative,"Spiegelmanobservesabout Maus,"and that form for mehas to do withpanelsize, panel rhythms, and visual structures of the page" (Interview withGary Groth105, emphasisin original).AsI hopeto show, to claimthatcomics makes language, ideas,and concepts "literal" is to call attention tohow themedium canmake the twisting lines of history readable throughform.When critics of Maus do examine questions of form, they often focuson the cultural connotations of comics rather than on the form's aestheticcapabilities-its innovationswith space and temporality.6Paul Buhle, for200

Historyand Graphic RepresentationinMausinstance, claims, "More than a few readershave described [Maus] as themost compelling of any [Holocaust] depiction, perhaps because only thecaricatured quality of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of anexperience beyond all reason" (16).Where Michael Rothberg contends,"By situating a nonfictional story in a highly mediated, unreal,'comic'space, Spiegelman captures the hyperintensity of Auschwitz" (206), Stephen Tabachnick suggests thatMaus may work "because it depicts whatwas all too real,however unbelievable, in a tightly controlled and brutallystarkmanner.The black andwhite quality of Maus's graphics reminds oneof newsprint" (155). But all such analyses posit too direct a relationshipbetween form and content (unreal form, unreal content; all too real form,all too real content), a directness that Spiegelman explicitly rejects.7As with all cultural production that faces the issue of genocide,Spiegelman's text turns us to fundamental questions about the functionof art and aesthetics (aswell as to related questions about the knowabilityand the transmissionof history: asHaydenWhite asserts, "Mausmanagesto raise all of the crucial issues regarding the 'limits of representation'in general" [42]).Adorno famously interrogated the fraught relation ofaesthetics and Holocaust representation in two essays from 1949, "CulturalCriticism and Society" and "AfterAuschwitz"-andlater in theenormously valuable "Commitment" (1962), which has been the basisof some recent importantmeditations on form.8 In "CulturalCriticism"Adorno charges, "Towrite poetry afterAuschwitz isbarbaric" (34).9Wemay understandwhat is at stake as a question of betrayal:Adorno worriesabout how suffering can be given a voice in art "without immediatelybeing betrayed by it" ("Commitment" 312); we must recognize "thepossibility of knowing history,"Cathy Caruth writes, "as a deeply ethical dilemma: the unremitting problem of how not to betray thepast" (27,Caruth's italics).I argue thatMaus, far from betraying the past, engages thisethical dilemma through its form.Elaborating tropes like "the presence ofthe past" through the formal complexities of what Spiegelman calls the"stylistic surface"of a page (CompleteMaus),"0 Iwill consider how Mausrepresentshistory through the time and space of the comics page.In the hybrid form of comics, two narrative tracksnever exactly synthesize or fully explain each other."1 In "their essence,"Spiegelman says,comicsare about time being made manifest spatially,in that you've gotall these different chunks of time-each box being a differ201

Hillary Chuteent moment of time-and you see them all at once. As a resultyou're always, in comics, being made aware of different timesinhabiting the same space.(qtd. in Silverblatt 35)Comics are composed in panels-also called frames-and in gutters, therich empty spaces between the selected moments that direct our interpretation.The effect of the gutter lends to comics its"annotation"of timeas space.12"Time as space" is a description we hear again and again fromtheorists of comics. However, it is only when one recognizes how Mausis able to effectively approach history through its spatiality that one appreciates the form's grasp on nuanced political expression. Emphasizinghow comics deals in space, as I do here, highlights how this contemporary,dynamic medium both informs and is informed by postmodern politicsin a productive, dialogical process. Space, Fredric Jameson contends, isthe perceptual modality of postmodernity (Postmodernism154-80); andwhere the dominant rhetoric of modernism is temporal, Susan StanfordFriedman argues,postmodernism adopts a rhetoric of space-of location,multiplicity, borderlands, and, Iwould add, boundary crossings.13In the epigraph to this essay,describing how his father taught himto pack a suitcase to "use every available centimeter to get asmuch stuffpacked into a small space as possible," Spiegelman alludes to his father'sexperiences in wartime Poland. Yet the historical lesson also shapesSpiegelman's formal preoccupations. Throughout Maus he representsthe complicated entwining of the past and the present by "packing" thetight spaces of panels.He found an "architectonic rigor . . .necessary tounderstand to compose the pages of Maus," he explains (qtd. in Silverblatt33), and has commented: "Five or six comics on one piece of paper . [Iam]my father'sson" (Spiegelman,Address).l4 It is to this effect thatMausexploits the spatial form of graphic narrative,with its double-encodingsand visual installment of paradoxes, so compellingly, refusing telos andclosure even as it narrativizeshistory. In this light, Iwill analyze a range ofsections of the book: some that have been treated comparatively little inMaus criticism, such as themultitemporal panel in the embedded comicstrip "Prisoner on theHell Planet" and the double epitaph of the book'slastpage, and some that have not been treated at all, such as the scene thatcenters on a timeline ofAuschwitz.202

Historyand Graphic RepresentationinMausBleeding and rebuildinghistoryThe first volume of Maus is subtitled, significantly,My FatherBleedsHistory.The slow,painful effiAsionof history in this "tale,"the title suggests, isa bloodletting: its enunciation and dissemination are not without cost toVladek Spiegelman (indeed, it is his headstone thatmarks, however unstably,the ending of Maus). In suggesting that the concept of"history" hasbecome and is excruciating forVladek, the title also implies an aspect ofthe testimonial situationwe observe over the course of Maus's pages: thefact that, as Spiegelman reports,his fatherhad "no desire to bearwitness"(Interview with Joey Cavalieri et al. 192). Indeed, throughout much ofthe book,Vladek would clearlyprefer,we see, to complain about his rockysecond marriage. Towards the end of the second volume of Maus,Vladekprotests toArtie, "All such things of thewar, I tried to put out of my mindonce and for all. Until you rebuild me all this from your questions"(98).15Vladek's bleeding is his sonArtie's textual, visual (aswell as emotional) rebuilding. Spiegelman as author is distinctly aware of Artie thecharacter'sshades of vampirism, however well-intentioned. And the ideaof "bleeding"history (at the demand of a son) acquires furtherpoignancywhen one realizes-as transcriptsof the taped interviews betweenVladekandArt Spiegelman on the CD-ROM The CompleteMaus reveal-thatVladek and his wife, Anja Spiegelman, never spoke to each other in detail about their (literally unspeakable) experiences in the camps.16This"bleeding" of history is not an easy process;Anja's diaries, for instance,asVladek explained, were too full of history to remain extant after herdeath: "I had tomake an orderwith everything. These papers had toomany memories.So Iburned them" (Maus I, 158).Art Spiegelman's narrativization of his parents'history, then, asmany critics have pointed out,is also his ownmaking "an order with everything."He reconstructs hisframes and gutters, interpretingtory in his own language-comics-inand interrupting as he rebuilds.17Comics framesprovide psychic order;as Spiegelman recently remarked about 9/11: "If I thought in page units,Imight live long enough to do another page" (Gussow).Maus's chapter 1, "The Sheik," zooms into history. In themiddle ofits second page is a panel packed with signifiers of the past and present,jammed together in a long rectangularframe,only an inch high, that spansthewidth of the page (figure 2). In a space thatwas once Artie's bedroom(apennant proclaiming "Harpur,"Spiegelman's college, is still pinned tothe wall),Vladek, his camp tattoo visible for the first time, pumps on an203

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Historyand Graphic RepresentationinMausExercycle. Not moving forward,he is literally spinning his wheels. Thissuspension is also indicated by the fact that a full view of his body, lockedinto position, appears across frames on the page: his head in panel four,his torso in panel five, his foot in panel seven.The wide berth of his armsframesArtie, who sits and smokes, looking small.A framedphoto-of thedeadAnja Spiegelman, we will later find out-is propped on a desk tothe right of both men, representingboth an object of desire and a rebuke.In a speech balloon on the left that echoes the photograph and tattoo onthe right, as if the past-articulated (spoken), inscribed (tattooed), documented (photographed)-were flanking both men, closing in on them,Vladek proclaims:"Itwould takemany books, my life, and no one wantsanyway to hear such stories" (12).From the start,Spiegelman crams his panelswith markers of the past(the camp tattoo, prewar photographs) and the ultimate marker of thepresent:Artie Spiegelman himself, framedby his father'sbody, his parents'postwar child, born in Sweden after the couple lost their first son to theNazis. And while the horizontally elongated panel implies a stillness-itspage-spanning width eliminates any gutter,where themovement of timein comics happens-it yet registersVladek'sfirstmoments of dipping intothe past.While Vladek verbally refuses to offer "such stories," the panelbelow, an iris diaphragm depicting his dapper young self ("really a nice,handsome boy" [13]) in the early 1930s, pushes up into the rectangularpanel of the present, its curve hitting the handlebars of Vladek's Exercycle between his grasping hands."8This protruding circular frame canbe figured as the wheel toVladek's Exercycle. Spiegelman points out,"You enter into the past for the first time through thatwheel" (CompleteMaus).The visual intersection of past and present appears throughout in thearchitecture of panels. In chapter 3 of Maus I, "Prisoner of War," Artiesprawls across the floor of his father'sRego Park,Queens, home, pencilin hand, notebook open, soliciting stories (45, figure 3).Artie's legs spandecades.Looking up at his sitting father, facing forward toward the direction of the unfolding narrative,Artie's legs areyet mired in the past: theyconspicuously overlap-indeed, unify-the panel depicting 1939 andthe one depicting the conversation in 1978. Artie's body, then-in theact of writing, of recording-is visually figured as the link between pastand present, disrupting any attempt to set apartVladek'shistory from thediscursive situation of the present.205

HillaryChuteThe connection between past and present in this chapter is alsoemphasized by verbal parallels.Vladek, for instance, describes a gruelingPOW work detail, inwhich aGerman soldier demands that a filthy stablebe spotless in an hour. Interrupting his own recollection,Vladek suddenlybursts out, "But look what you do, Artie! You're dropping on the carpet cigaretteashes.Youwant it should be like a stablehere?" (52).JoshuaBrown points out that this incident-which he identifies as one of many"interstices of the testimony"-suggests that "Vladek's account is not achronicle of undefiled fact but a constitutive process, that rememberingis a construction of the past" (95).And theways inwhich the past invadesthe present recollection, or vice versa, gradually grow more ominous: inthe beginning of Maus comparisonsmay involve issues like cleanliness,butby the second volume, Spiegelman will drawArtie's cigarette smoke as thesmoke of human flesh drifting upward from the crematoria of Auschwitz(Maus II 69).i9Inheriting the past, packing a panelThe most striking instance of representing past and present together inMaus I is the inclusion of the autobiographical comic strip "Prisoner onthe Hell Planet:A Case History" (1972) in the text of Maus. Breakingthe narrative flow of Maus, interrupting its pagination, style, and tone,"Prisoner on theHell Planet" enters into the story, itwould seem, frompresenceoutside, registering confrontationally-and materially-thev*Col c JFssw;WA* YVtiDAYJFigure 3.Maus I 45.206 w .INCQR tALSCIO.OKYiws.tTIDsW*141%'T141?0EWAFTM6 AKMI ASW"CMS 1 WT

Historyand Graphic RepresentationinMausof the past. First published in an underground comic book, ShortOrderComix 1, it narrates the immediate aftermath of the 1968 suicide ofSpiegelman'smother, Auschwitz survivorAnja Spiegelman, at his family'shome inQueens.Readers are introduced to the existence of "Prisoner on the HellPlanet" at the same time that a calendar is firstmade conspicuous inMaus, in the panel inwhich his stepmotherMala startlesArtie by mentioning "that comic strip you once made- the one about your mother"(99).This calendar appears in five of eight panels preceding "Prisoner"and in eight out of the nine panels on the page directly following it,butthis representation of the linearmovement of time is disrupted by theintrusion of "Prisoner"which does not seamlessly become part of thefabric of the larger narrative but rathermaintains its alterity. Featuringhuman characters, it is clearly distinct from the rest of Maus in its basicrepresentationalmethodology; its heavy German Expressionist style is anunsubtle analog to the angry emotional content of the strip.Maus's pagenumbers stopwhile "Prisoner"unfolds; and the older strip'spages are setagainst a black, unmarked background, forming what Spiegelman calls a"funereal border" that standsout as a thick black linewhen the book isclosed (CompleteMaus)."Prisoner" isArtie's earliest testament to what Marianne Hirschpersuasively describes as "postmemory"("ProjectedMemory" 8), a now oft-citedterm that she first conceived of in relationto Maus."And whilethis visualand narrative rupture of the text suggests whatand how the past continually means in Ythe present, Iwant to focus in particulariton one packed panel on "Prisoner"'s lastpage (figure 4). Like the volume inwhichit is embedded,multiple"Prisoner"temporalitiesverbal frames. If Spiegelman claims thathe feels very much like his "father's son"when he draws five comics on one page,here we see five different moments inone panel, criss-crossed by text that alternates sentiments corresponding with the207rhspatially depictsin single visual/1 i tFigure4.Maus I 103.

Hillary Chuteframe'saccreted temporalities:We get "Mommy!" (the past) but we alsoget "Bitch" (the present);we get "Hitler Did It!" (the past) but we alsoget "Menopausal Depression" (the present) (103).Approaching the pastand the present together is typical for someone considering narrativesofcausality,but here Spiegelman obsessively layers several temporalities inone tiny frame,understood by the conventions of the comics medium torepresent one moment in time.Artie's childhood bedroom is contiguouswith a concentration camp;Anja's disembodied arm, readying for her suicide, floats out from the body of the youngsterArtie, its thumb just abouttouching the leg of the adultArtie, who sits in despair on what looks likeher casket.This frame, smaller than 2 inches by 2

Spiegelman as author is distinctly aware of Artie the character's shades of vampirism, however well-intentioned. And the idea of "bleeding" history (at the demand of a son) acquires further poignancy when one realizes-as transcripts of the taped interviews betweenVladek and Art Spiegelman on the CD-ROM The Complete Maus reveal-that

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