Class Notes: Maus & The Regimes of Difference
In class today, we approached Maus in small groups. We discussed some of the critical themes brought up Monday -- 'women', for instance. We looked at the themes for specific meanings they transmit across multiple locations in the text, as patterns of repeated imagery, emotion, and narrative.
Afterwards, we began to discuss the effect of the "pig-masks" Spiegelman creates for his Jewish characters as they rove through the minefield of Nazi-era Poland. The pig-masks rank the Jews in the heirarchy of allegorical animals Maus employs to symbolize different characteristics of difference within the text: Cats for Germans, Mice for Jews, Pigs for Poles. In this way, the masks signify a kind of easy status for the reader to understand different identity relations. The masks are, of course, only applied in Maus; in reality, the nature of Jewish identity shifted according to who saw Vladek as "passing." (This same reality still exists in different cultures, and has been a regular feature of "outsider" identities and minorities in literature and culture for at least the past several hundred years.)
Identity is unstable, flexible; regimes that enforce identity project stereotypes in order to "master" and order a universe of guarded privilege and advantage. It's important to visibly identify the "other" because they, in turn, serve as bodies that acknowledge the superiority of the master race and its allies. In Nazi Germany, the master race was the Aryan white community promoted by Hitler. Perhaps shockingly, these ideas came to the Nazis from Jim Crow America, where certain versions of white supremacy endorsed and enforced by the federal government, local terrorist militas (the KKK), and state laws asserted the inherent superiority of 'white' Americans over 'black' Americans.
At the heart of Maus, however, lies another indivisible regime of difference: gender. The final panel leaves Spiegelman's character cursing his father as a "murderer" for burning his wife's diaries and letters, which ultimately destroyed the archive of her identity, and the answer to the continous mysteries of her chronic depression and anxiety. Vladek's life after the war remains traumatized by the suicide of his wife. Her death is the shadow hanging over his life. The quiet, intimate, domestic regime of partiarchy -- a real, vivid, on-going mutation of fascism, a precusor of racism and an effect of it -- is the heart of the narrative in Maus. It is the veil and the frame for the rest of the sequences and themes in the story.
Vladek is a complex character: we see up close how patriarchy works less as a magic word, bloated with our own distortions of its meaning, and more as a romantic, sexual, urgent function of everyday life. We see the hiding places of the Jews and the bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens that sent Anja to an asylum, and note that their circumstances are radically different while their effects produce similar kinds of doubt, anguish, and slow, disguised horror. In both spaces, there is no choice. If war produces different versions of the prison -- the camp, the POW tent, the labor line -- in "peace" there remains a gutted terror clicking as a phantom of the oldest "difference". Vladek is probably not aware how destructive his actions are, and how misperceived his concerns might sound from afar.
This is the task of literature. It shows in fragments and in subtle allusions how the truth never produces only innocence and guilt, victim and murderer. The truth is caught between hidden tones inside and outside these terms, and its "fact" only floats behind the concrete words and objects we use to illuminate it: the hoarded cash, the gold watch, the shiny walls of the asylum, the rats in the cellar, the warmth of decaying garbage. These images are functional only because they are less abstract than words like "terror" and "fear" and "safety". But, like the lost letters of Spiegelman's mother, we can never reach them. Our curiousity and our imaginition must sustain us, as the only chances we have to touch, and possibly attempt to sooth, the burdens of the past.
Afterwards, we began to discuss the effect of the "pig-masks" Spiegelman creates for his Jewish characters as they rove through the minefield of Nazi-era Poland. The pig-masks rank the Jews in the heirarchy of allegorical animals Maus employs to symbolize different characteristics of difference within the text: Cats for Germans, Mice for Jews, Pigs for Poles. In this way, the masks signify a kind of easy status for the reader to understand different identity relations. The masks are, of course, only applied in Maus; in reality, the nature of Jewish identity shifted according to who saw Vladek as "passing." (This same reality still exists in different cultures, and has been a regular feature of "outsider" identities and minorities in literature and culture for at least the past several hundred years.)
Identity is unstable, flexible; regimes that enforce identity project stereotypes in order to "master" and order a universe of guarded privilege and advantage. It's important to visibly identify the "other" because they, in turn, serve as bodies that acknowledge the superiority of the master race and its allies. In Nazi Germany, the master race was the Aryan white community promoted by Hitler. Perhaps shockingly, these ideas came to the Nazis from Jim Crow America, where certain versions of white supremacy endorsed and enforced by the federal government, local terrorist militas (the KKK), and state laws asserted the inherent superiority of 'white' Americans over 'black' Americans.
At the heart of Maus, however, lies another indivisible regime of difference: gender. The final panel leaves Spiegelman's character cursing his father as a "murderer" for burning his wife's diaries and letters, which ultimately destroyed the archive of her identity, and the answer to the continous mysteries of her chronic depression and anxiety. Vladek's life after the war remains traumatized by the suicide of his wife. Her death is the shadow hanging over his life. The quiet, intimate, domestic regime of partiarchy -- a real, vivid, on-going mutation of fascism, a precusor of racism and an effect of it -- is the heart of the narrative in Maus. It is the veil and the frame for the rest of the sequences and themes in the story.
Vladek is a complex character: we see up close how patriarchy works less as a magic word, bloated with our own distortions of its meaning, and more as a romantic, sexual, urgent function of everyday life. We see the hiding places of the Jews and the bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens that sent Anja to an asylum, and note that their circumstances are radically different while their effects produce similar kinds of doubt, anguish, and slow, disguised horror. In both spaces, there is no choice. If war produces different versions of the prison -- the camp, the POW tent, the labor line -- in "peace" there remains a gutted terror clicking as a phantom of the oldest "difference". Vladek is probably not aware how destructive his actions are, and how misperceived his concerns might sound from afar.
This is the task of literature. It shows in fragments and in subtle allusions how the truth never produces only innocence and guilt, victim and murderer. The truth is caught between hidden tones inside and outside these terms, and its "fact" only floats behind the concrete words and objects we use to illuminate it: the hoarded cash, the gold watch, the shiny walls of the asylum, the rats in the cellar, the warmth of decaying garbage. These images are functional only because they are less abstract than words like "terror" and "fear" and "safety". But, like the lost letters of Spiegelman's mother, we can never reach them. Our curiousity and our imaginition must sustain us, as the only chances we have to touch, and possibly attempt to sooth, the burdens of the past.
posted by Jrc at 3:10 PM
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