Vladek's Mental Illness in Art Spiegelman's Maus
In recent years, a lot of comics are very mediocre, quite often they have similar super-heroes and antagonists. Not many comics evoke some powerful emotions, not many of them have a strong sense of compassion for the characters. They shock the readers very rarely. One of the graphic novels, which cause such a feeling, is "Maus." This is a comic of Art Spiegelman. He used the stories of this father. This is the book about the life of one family, about the survival of the mind and body in conditions where the word "destruction" is not an abstraction, but the harsh reality of life. Author and narrator, Arthur Spiegelman, tells the story of his father Vladek. He described how he met his first wife, how to reconfigure life and work, how was born his first child. His father, Vladek Spiegelman is a Jew, which passed the Holocaust, and has lived in German concentration camps, if it could be called life. “By undergoing the process of interviewing and characterizing his father, Spiegelman metaphysically “inhabits” his father’s point of view.” (Stidworthy 76) Many relatives of Art died because of the Holocaust during the World War II. This topic is unusual for a comic book, but it actually hits a nerve. There are the original, but the primitive illustrations which help to understand how the author sees and shows the participants of the events. He depicted every nation as the different animals. The Germans were cats, the Jews were mice, the Poles were pigs and the Americans were dogs. "Maus" is a comic about Nazism and the concentration camps, it is the only graphic novel, which won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Art Spiegelman comprehends the past of Vladek and his father, who was in the Auschwitz death camp, and he enters the best in the modern world, in the prism of a child whose parents have visited the death camp and saw the full horror of the Nazi murder machine. It is very difficult to discuss such book and it is very difficult to write about it. All these horrors are not invented by the author, not exaggerated, they really were. And it seems that the author even somehow ignores the suffering of the Jewish people during the Second World War in this comic book. There is a history in this book which truthfully describes the life of Jewish people of that time for the single-family example. The readers pay attention to the effects of a heavy past, analyzing the behavior of the characters. Depression, fear of the future, the horror of the past, distrust - these are the main problems faced by Jews who survived the war. There are several layers of narrative for the reader, which cover a number of temporary variables and community communication and world order.
The first layer is the here and now for Arthur Spiegelman, where he communicates with his father, writes his stories and tries in every way to get away from pesky father, who, after the concentration camp and all the hardships became stingy, appreciates every crumb, in the current wife sees only the mercantile overtones and generally leads himself not like an angel. It appears the theme of the relationship between fathers and children, when the children are grown up, married, self-reliant and when they are able to live alone. Everyone had a moment when parents irritated by their comments, everyone disliked their picky mood and wanted to flee, not to see them and to live separately. Arthur Spiegelman does not hide that he is such a person and for him it is difficult to communicate with his father. There is a smooth transition to the topic about generations that do not know how to appreciate loved ones, because they have seen the war, they have not undergone all the hardships. There is in this educational spark, but thank the gods that there are generations who do not know what is war, that they live in peace and without deprivation. War is the blood, the death, there's little of grandeur and a lot of suffering. It is a matter of human reason adaptation and survival after the road through hell. Someone breaks itself completely, someone rust inside, someone forgets. And someone just throws all real reminders, but where to throw the memory doesn’t know.
The second layer is a narrative story of Vladek Spiegelman, about his way from the peaceful times through a meat grinder of fascism and back. His story is given in simplified language, with an excellent imitation of the linguistic features of the man who speaks not in his native language. From this story in the "Maus" in some places, of course, reminiscent of a kind of frivolous story, but that rather creepy, because par with panache tough words about the poison, hanging, crematoria chimneys and machine gun fire the entrails give perfectly. That's why the story of the "Maus" in some places reminds a frivolous story, which is possible to read only with a lot of shivers. It has many descriptions about the poison, hanging, crematoria chimneys and machine gun fire on the entrails.
In comparison with the nations and animals there is something grotesque on a par with a simple concept, but it is something that scares simultaneously. There is the simple concept that "mice devour cats, dogs devour cats" and it is a fine idea the Jews are mouse and that is why they could not defend themselves and resist. Vladek Spiegelman loses many people and does it often. "Maus" is a story of survival in a world where every man exists for himself, where it is not possible to trust anyone, where every coughed mouse walks on the verge - to go crazy and throw himself on the wire or to try to survive by all means and any cost. It is survival for the sake of the one who is still out there somewhere, waiting for a person and just tries not to give up and not go over the brink of madness. It is not heroism, beauty and spiritual greatness. It is dirt, blood, sweat, humiliation, break of the pride and the previous world, which no longer exists. Involuntarily it is possible to draw a parallel with the story of Anne Frank, which has not survived, because she thoughts that the concentration camps had already absorbed her relatives. No way to survive. It is difficult to hold on when there is no support for which a person wants to live.
The idea to create a graphic novel about the Holocaust and the concentration camps is a bit seditious, as it has no illustrations. The images on a par with that simple syllable of the narrator create in the mind a picture of what is the world's measure of evil and hatred. Everyone will not feel spiritually after reading "Maus," everyone will not feel anything. Just the first half hour a reader will sit and stay silent. And then they will understand that no one cannot answer hate with hate. The Holocaust, fascism and genocide of the time - it's terrible, unreal evil milestone, but we must not forget that they were Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Gulag and global terrorism, that it is impossible to remember only one sector of the horrors of evil and inhumanity. There is a small disadvantage of "Maus" - it creates around something like a cocoon, leaves just a small space inside. The writer wanted to dip a reader into the atmosphere of the Holocaust, to remind hate and to remember the suffering. But several times during the reading, it is possible to have the feeling that some of the chapters of "Maus" are only for the Jews and about the Jews. But the victims of the war are not only the stars of David on the robes. This is the family tree of other Peoples, nations and nationalities. It is not correct to scream that more people died here and it was much more terrible, than there. It is not correct to chant the great sacrifice at the point of fascism, while for the different people it was easier. War takes everyone and it does not care who this person is and who that is. "Maus" is the story of a family, it is a monument to the family in the graphic novel, the attempt to capture for decades the people who were gone and executed. Art wanted to use the notebooks of his mother to create this comic, but his father destroyed them. “After Anya died I had to make an order with everything These papers had too many memories. So I burned them.” (Spiegelman 159) If a reader views it from a wider perspective - there is another reminder of how important it is to remember the lessons of history. Art, painting the story of his father, disliked at some point himself and his book. He earns fame and popularity due to the tragic fate of his parents. Feeling guilty, he finds the strength to finish the comic. “The relationships that Art has with his father, mother, and dead brother all bear signs of trauma, signs that show how gaps and absences created by extreme events can bleed into the next generation.” (Elmwood 2) Thumbing through the last pages, I feel the pain of the person who has concluded a terrible life of his parents in three hundred pages. I feel his pain from the fact that he will never be better than his brother who died during the war, loved by his mother. His pain from the fact that he cannot understand the pain of his mother and his father, he cannot be close to them, because he has not experienced what they experienced. “The Holocaust has had profound effects on the ways the Jewish people regard themselves and are seen by others.” (Chodoff 147-157) He will always store their memory, and he shares this memory with millions of readers, thus defeating the loneliness and forcing to think about how easy it is to break the lives of many generations of people turning to the components. Memory is the only thing that people can learn from the incident. Memory and pain, to know, to feel, to believe that Nazism never happens again.
References
Chodoff, Paul. "The Holocaust and Its Effects on Survivors: An Overview." Political Psychology. 18.1 (1997): 147-157. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.
Stidworthy, Caroline Mae, et al. Memory and Action: Works Inspired by Art Spiegelman's MAUS. 2013. Print.
Elmwood, Victoria. "Happy, Happy Ever After". Honolulu 27, 2004: 691. Print.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus. Penguin books, 1991. Print.
