Maus and Truth

In Maus, Art Spiegelman records the experiences of his father, Vladek, an old man who lived through the Holocaust. This book is regularly referenced as the reason that comic books began to be taken seriously as a medium, instead of being seen as a childish pursuit. The reason for this is obvious- saying that Maus doesn’t mean anything means criticizing the account of a Holocaust survivor, and so even people who loathe comics must change their opinions of them at least slightly to accommodate it.

Holocaust survivor stories are, by their nature, brutally honest, and Spiegelman makes the decision (at least, as far as the reader knows) not to keep anything off of the page. This doesn’t just extend to the account, however- although it first seems to be a framing device, the author and his father continually break immersion into the story to talk about tangential topics or to do other things which they did at the time of the interviews.

This raises the less obvious, but still challenging problem for Spiegelman of portraying his father as he really is. Vladek is prone to complaining and penny-pinching, something both his son and wife acknowledge in the course of the book. More than that, he’s overbearing and, at times, tries to manage his son’s life. People expect a Holocaust account to be full of graphic details and tell a truth they don’t really want to hear, but it’s another level of brutal honesty entirely to show that someone can survive these events and have a story to tell, but may not be a likeable person.

What’s more, Spiegelman shows his own family drama, the sort of things that even a memoir writer might choose to keep quiet, including Vladek’s relationship with his wife, or a comic book Spiegelman wrote following his mother’s death. These are uncomfortable, but not in a way we’ve been primed for. Plus, the controversy so big that it’s mentioned within the story itself:

Maus is a story that cares enough about honesty that it’s willing to seem completely racist in one of the worst possible contexts in order to tell its story properly. At this point the only question of ethics left is the question of whether it’s better to publish all of this or to hold back on some of it and save the risk to one’s reputation, and it’s clearly already been made. The very publication of the book is a serious statement, and as an attempt at getting uncomfortably close to reality, it succeeds all too well.