What sort of evidence that is, I don’t know, but I believe it.
THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW STATESMAN, 13 DECEMBER 2011.
There’s probably a temperamental aspect to the way we believe things, too. Some people are simply inclined to believe things more literally than others do, and no doubt they suffer from continuous disappointment. Others don’t believe anything, and very soon scepticism becomes cynicism, which can never be disappointed. As William Blake pointed out, you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
Maus
BEHIND THE MASKS
On craftsmanship, emotion and truth in Art Spiegelman’s illustrated Holocaust history
Since its first publication in 1987, Maus has achieved a celebrity that few other comics have ever done. And yet it’s an extremely difficult work to talk about. In the first place, what is it? Is it a comic? Is it biography, or fiction? Is it a literary work, or a graphic one, or both? We use the term graphic novel, but can anything that is literary, like a novel, ever really work in graphic form? Words and pictures work differently: can they work together without pulling in different directions?
Page 125 from The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman
In the preface to The Western Canon, his attempt to define “The Books and School of the Ages,” Harold Bloom says: “One mark of an originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is a strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.”
This is an accurate description of my reaction to Maus. In one way the work stands squarely in the comics tradition, observing many of the conventions of the form: a story about anthropomorphically depicted animals, told sequentially in a series of square panels six to a page, containing speech balloons and voice-over captions in which all the lettering is in capitals, with onomatopoeic sound effects to represent rifle-fire, and so on. So it looks very like a comic.
It also refers to earlier forms. The stark black-and-white drawings, the lines so thick in places as almost to seem as if they belong in a woodcut, hark back to the wordless novels of Frans Masereel, with their expressionist woodcut prints; and those in turn take their place in an even older northern European tradition of printmaking that goes back to Holbein and Dürer. In telling a story about Germany, Spiegelman uses a very German technique.
Yet in other ways Maus does have a profound and unfailing “strangeness,” to use Bloom’s term. Part of this is due to the depiction of Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, and so forth. This is what jolts most people who come to it for the first time, and still jolts me after several readings. It is such a risky artistic strategy, because it implies a form of essentialism that many readers will find suspect. Cats kill mice because they are cats, and that’s what cats do. But is it in the nature of Germans, as Germans, to kill Jews?
The question hangs over the whole work, and is never answered directly. Instead we are reminded by the plot itself that this classification into different species was precisely how the human race was then regarded by those who had the power to order things; and the question is finally dispelled by the gradual gentle insistence that these characters might look like mice, or cats, or pigs, but what they are is people. They have the complexity and the surprisingness of human beings, and human beings are capable of anything.
At the heart of the story is the tormented relationship between Art and his father, Vladek, a survivor of Auschwitz, an obsessive, mean, doting, helpless, cantankerous, altogether impossible old man, whom we come to know in two different worlds: the present-day world of penny-pinching retirement in New York and the Catskill Mountains (names signify), and the remembered world of occupied Poland and the extermination camps. The work as a whole takes the form of a memoir by Art in which he tells us of his interviews with his father about Vladek’s experiences under the Nazis. As Vladek tells his story, the first-person-past-tense captions in Art’s voice give way to those in Vladek’s, so the bulk of the narrative is technically a flashback.
Names signify. Is the Art of the story the Art of the title page? Art Spiegelman is a man, but the Art in the story looks like a mouse. In one extraordinary passage about two-thirds of the way through, Art is worrying about art—about his art, and what it’s doing to himself and to its subject matter.
But the Art shown at that point is not a mouse but a man in a mouse mask, and the journalists who come to pester and interview him are people in cat or dog masks, but men and women, not cats and dogs. This Art is the author, as distinct from the Art who is the narrator. So for six pages, as we follow the man-Art’s anxiety about his art, we are in a different kind of world from either of the story-worlds, and in this sequence alone the words are not written in capitals.
What shape things have, and in what kind of letters the words are printed, and how a picture is set against its background, are matters we have to think about when we look at comics. A comic is not exactly a novel in pictures—it’s something else.
But the presence of pictures is not a new thing in printed narrative: William Caxton included woodcuts in the first books he printed in English, and some of the greatest novels in the language were conceived from the beginning as being accompanied by pictures. Vanity Fair is incomplete without Thackeray’s own illustrations, which often extend and comment on the implications of the text; and in a sense the entire career of Dickens as a novelist began when he was commissioned to provide a text for a series of engravings of Cockney sporting life by the artist Robert Seymour. This grew into The Pickwick Papers. Our experience of Dickens is also an experience of “Phiz,” his most prolific illustrator Hablot K. Browne, just as our sense of the world of Sherlock Holmes comes from the drawings by Sidney Paget as much as from the words by Conan Doyle.
So a criticism that was able to deal adequately with comics as a form would have to abandon the unspoken assumption that pictures aren’t quite grown-up, or that they’re only for people who don’t read properly, and that clever and serious people need only consider the words. In order to have anything to say about comics, where the pictures generate a large part of the meaning, it would have to take the shape of things into account. For example, take the full-moon shape against which the characters are silhouetted at important points in the story of Maus, as if on a movie poster.
Page 294 from The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman
This echoes the claim old Vladek makes to young Vladek near the very beginning of the story, that he was romantic and dashing; but we know that movies are make-believe, and so the full-moon shape is bitter as well as sweet. It indicates something wished-for, not something true. There was no happy ever after; Anja was haunted by her experiences, and committed suicide in 1968. The shape carries a charge of irony: we see it and feel it in a glance.
Perhaps the most powerful moment comes very close to the end, and it could only come by means of a picture. Vladek, after Auschwitz, is making his way home to Anja, and one day Anja receives a letter telling her that he’s on his way. And in the envelope there’s a photograph. Old Vladek explains to Art: “I passed once a photo place that had a camp uniform—a new and clean one—to make souvenir photos…”
And there is the photograph. Here on the page is the character we have come, with Art, to hate and love and despair over in his old age—not a mouse any longer, but a man: a handsome man, a strong man, a proud and wary man in the prime of life who has survived appalling suffering, and survived in part because of the very qualities that make him so difficult to like and to live with. In short, a human being in all his urgent and demanding complexity. As Anja says when she opens the letter and finds the photograph, “And here’s a picture of him! My God—Vladek is really alive!”
He’s really alive. This story is really true. The impact of that photograph is astonishing.
Comics are a modern form, but th
is story has ancient echoes. At one point early in the war, the young Vladek, having been drafted into the Polish army and then captured by the Germans, escapes and finds his way home, and when he tries to pick up his young son Richieu, the boy is frightened and cries out.
In the Iliad, Homer relates a little episode on the walls of Troy:
…Shining Hector reached down
for his son—but the boy recoiled
cringing against his nurse’s full breast,
screaming out at the sight of his own father,
terrified by the flashing bronze, the horsehair crest…
(TRANSLATION BY ROBERT FAGLES)
Men in uniform have been terrifying their own children for thousands of years.
At the very end, little Richieu’s name appears again, although he died forty years before. Vladek, ill and near the end of his own life, is talking to Art, and he says: “So…let’s stop, please, your tape recorder…I’m tired from talking, Richieu, and it’s enough stories for now…”
Art stands by the bedside, silent, because art has been subsumed under a larger heading, namely life. There’s nothing more for him to say.
I began with a series of questions, and I’m not sure they can ever be completely answered; Maus is a masterpiece, and it’s in the nature of such things to generate mysteries, and pose more questions than they answer. But if the notion of a canon means anything, Maus is there at the heart of it. Like all great stories, it tells us more about ourselves than we could ever suspect.
THIS ESSAY IS AN EXPANDED VERSION OF PART OF PHILIP PULLMAN’S CHAPTER IN CHILDREN’S BOOK PUBLISHING IN BRITAIN SINCE 1945, EDITED BY REYNOLDS AND TUCKER (SCOLAR PRESS, 1998), WHICH FIRST APPEARED IN THIS FORM IN THE GUARDIAN IN 2003.
Apart from anything else, Maus is a lovely piece of book-making. It sits comfortably in the hand; the paper is heavy and opaque; the printing is strong and clear, with the blacks truly black, and that miraculous photograph sharp and brilliant. All books should be made like that.
Balloon Debate
WHY FICTION IS VALUABLE
An argument for fiction to be kept in the balloon, with special reference to its beguiling aspects
I’m here to talk about fiction, and to try to show how valuable it is, and why it ought to stay in the balloon. And the first thing to say is that I’m rather handicapped here by my own profession, because as a storyteller I don’t set out to persuade; I’m not used to putting forward a case. Novels and stories are not arguments; they set out not to convince, but to beguile. When you write a story you’re not trying to prove anything or demonstrate the merits of this case or the flaws in that. At its simplest, what you’re doing is making up some interesting events, putting them in the best order to show the connections between them, and recounting them as clearly as you can; and your intention is to make the audience sufficiently delighted or moved to buy your next book when that comes out in due course.
But fiction doesn’t merely entertain—as if entertaining were ever mere. Stories also teach. They teach in many ways: in one obvious way, they teach by showing how human character and action are intimately bound up together, and that actions both spring from character and help to shape it. Conrad’s Lord Jim is a good example.
They also teach an attitude—a temperament. One writer’s temperament might embody (for example) a passionate interest in the physical world, so that the narrator of the story notices the colours and smells and sounds of things, and makes them vividly present to the reader; while another writer’s attitude will demonstrate a sort of sharp sardonic worldliness in the way the story describes behaviour, so that we learn what it’s like to see people like that—and so on. I think this is inherent in the very nature of saying “Once upon a time” and then choosing what to write next. It’s the way narrative works.
And stories teach not only attitudes, but beliefs—not that such-and-such a belief is true, but what it feels like to hold it. For example, when we read a novel by G. K. Chesterton we can feel what it’s like to see things from the point of view of someone who believes in God. When we read George Eliot, we can feel ourselves in a universe governed by moral relations but bereft of the certainties of belief.
And, most importantly, fiction can engage with questions of meaning—questions such as: “Is there a purpose to life? Where do we come from? Why do we not feel at ease in the world?” The way it does this is to tell new stories, or re-tell old stories from a new angle, which explore these questions.
These are the sort of questions, of course, which religion claims to have special answers to. When it comes to that last question, “Why don’t we feel at ease in the world?,” which is one that interests me greatly, as it interested that great psychologist William James—when it comes to that question, the answer from Christianity has to do with original sin. Apparently there is a flaw in the relationship between us and the universe, and it’s our fault. We were created to be at one with nature without asking questions, but we were tempted to want more knowledge, and the result of giving in to that temptation is unhappiness, sin, death and so on. It’s the myth of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.
Now I think that’s a very interesting story, but unlike the Church, I strongly approve of original sin. I think that we should be celebrating Eve, not deploring her. What I was trying to do in my trilogy His Dark Materials was roughly that: to tell that story from a different moral angle, as it were—to tell a story in which Eve was the heroine, and to show a way in which it was possible to see that the knowledge that we gained as a result of Eve’s curiosity—and of the generous, wise and selfless behaviour of the serpent, which risked the anger of God by passing on what it knew—was the beginning of all human wisdom.
And it did set us apart from nature: we are self-conscious. The first thing that happened to Adam and Eve was that they felt embarrassed: they noticed that they were naked. In self-consciousness lies the root of our ability to reflect on ourselves, on the shortness of our lives, on the profound mystery and the absolute beauty of the physical universe. And the Fall didn’t take place just once, six thousand years ago, or thirty or forty or fifty thousand years ago when the first human beings thought about death and life and who they were, and made patterns and marks and images to register this thinking—the Fall happens in every human life, at adolescence. We leave the unselfconscious grace of childhood behind and take our first faltering steps through the complexity and mire of life towards whatever we can reach of wisdom, which it is our job to increase and pass on. If there was no purpose in evolution, there is a purpose in our individual lives, and that is it.
But I wouldn’t keep fiction in the balloon myself if all it could do was teach. It’s the way it teaches that reaches our hearts as well as our minds. And the way it works is through projection—we project the story we’re told, the story we read, on to our own experience, our own situation, and understand it in all kinds of different ways. The way a young listener experiences “Little Red Riding Hood,” for example—the excitement, the shock, the dread, the triumph—is not the way that a parent, responds to it. A child thinks, “That could happen to me!” A parent thinks, “That could happen to my child! How can I keep her safe?” And the child thinks, “There probably aren’t any real wolves left, I hope, at least not round here,” and the parent thinks, “That’s not how wolves behave, but it’s certainly how some men behave,” and so on. And the parent thinks, “Perhaps it’s too scary—I better not tell her that story again for a while,” and the child thinks, “I hope they tell me that story again tonight!”
Because, most of all, stories give delight. That’s the point I began with, and I’ll come back to it to finish up: they beguile. They bewitch, they enchant, they cast a spell, they enthral; they hold children from their play, and old men from the chimney corner. The desire to know what happened next, or whodunit, or how Odysseus and his men escaped from the Cyclops’ cave, or
what is the meaning of the enigmatic words “The Speckled Band” or “The Black Spot,” or whether the single man in possession of a good fortune will, as we all hope, succeed in marrying Elizabeth Bennet, or what Mr. Bumble will say when Oliver Twist asks for more, or what Achilles will do now that Hector has killed Patroclus.
The desire to know these things is passionate and universal. It transcends age and youth; it ignores education and the lack of it; it beguiles the simple and enchants the wise. It was as entrancing in the fire-lit cave as it is in the seminar room.
In one way fiction has no more strength than gossamer—it’s only made of words, or the movement of air, of black marks on white paper—and yet it’s immortal. You couldn’t throw it out of the balloon even if you wanted to, because if you did, you’d only turn round to find it still there; you would be telling yourself the story of how it fell to earth, or grew wings and flew away, or got eaten by a bird that laid an egg that hatched and out came…another story. You couldn’t help it. It’s how you’re made.
And finally, if an atheist may call a distinguished witness, I’d like to refer you to the example of Jesus himself, one of the greatest storytellers of all, who knew that if you want your listeners to remember what you say, tell them a story. Thou shalt and Thou shalt not are easily ignored and soon forgotten; but Once upon a time lasts for ever.
I commend the cause of fiction.
THIS BALLOON DEBATE HAPPENED AT THE SEA OF FAITH CONFERENCE IN LEICESTER 2002.
In that debate I was opposed by Don Cupitt. I remember his pointing out that if I had used a slightly different argument I would have won outright and left him defenceless, but I now can’t remember what that was.
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