Metamaus by Art Spiegelman - Review

Metamaus

One early spread in MetaMaus shows a collage of the rejection letters its author, Art Spiegelman, received when he was seeking publication for Maus, a book-length comic strip about his parents' sufferings in the Holocaust.

The reputable publishers' repertoire of buck-passing, supercilious reproof and pained sense of personal affront at being asked to take on what is patently unacceptable ("I wanted very much to want to do the book") is here in all its scurrying diversity, and most richly enjoyable it is too, when you consider what happened when Maus did find a publisher. It sold in millions all over the world, won a Pulitzer Prize and made its author the most famous strip cartoonist on the planet.

Now the story of Spiegelman's Polish-Jewish parents, Anja and Vladek, has become one of the privileged testimonies of the genre, like Primo Levi's If This Is a Man or the diaries of Anne Frank, raised above other voices and speaking representatively for millions, both dead and surviving. For many young people especially, Maus is all they know of the persecutions and death camps. Twenty-eight years after the rejections rained in, Spiegelman, who understands everything about graphics, has laid out his spread as a cold buffet of revenge, with all the sorrowing editors' names and signatures in plain sight.

The present book is a book about the making of Maus. It comes with a DVD of The Complete Maus, where you can click on each page and hear, if you can bear to, the voice of the now-dead Vladek deposing to his son. It's a series of interviews with the author set among archival visual material such as sketches, layouts, documentary photographs and the comic art of Spiegelman's influences, all presented with the idea of answering what troubleshooting manuals call "frequently asked questions". Why mice? Why comics? Why the Holocaust? These were at the bottom of the publishers' anxieties: how could they justify an account that showed Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs?

Was this not to mock and trivialise? How could Spiegelman have the temerity, also, to set his parents' story within a contemporary framework concerning himself? His conversations with Vladek bleed in and out of a present where the author, himself a character in the story, has to negotiate his mother's suicide and his fraught relationship with his father, now a frankly impossible, distrustful, querulous and miserly old thing living in Rego Park, New York; and all the time overwhelmed with a sense of how puny these misfortunes seem when compared to what happened to his parents.

To some, this smudged the purity of the survivors' tale. But readers immediately saw that this narrative complexity was what raised Maus to the level of greatness, just as they saw that the animal personae were perfect metaphors for the reductive dehumanisation of Hitler's world order.

Spiegelman is a person of intellectual gifts and gives articulate, sympathetic and thoughtful answers to all these questions. He is also someone who thinks in comics, or graphic narratives; so that to read (and look at) his analysis of his own masterpiece is to receive an education in this neglected art. In Britain we have very little sense of cartoons as a medium for the serious or profound, and consistently underestimate our own cartoon geniuses like Raymond Briggs, Ronald Searle or Posy Simmonds. Spiegelman's dissection of the formal elements of his work is therefore particularly enlightening.

Now we can see how some of the most affecting episodes in Maus achieve their power through manipulation of the page space and the comic-book "grid". As, for instance, when the squares of the grid begin to fall down the page as a shower of old, square, white-bordered photographs of the family, floating onto one another like autumn leaves. "ALL what is left, it's the photos," says Vladek. No other medium can do this.