FEBRUARY 24 • 2022 | 9
MISREPRESENTING MAUS
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matter of days three different volumes of
Maus zoomed up Amazon’s top 10 list —
no one has seemed troubled by the ease
with which media reports consistently
misrepresent Maus as a novel.
I doubt the initial report in the Times,
or of those who took their cues from it,
intended to imply that Spiegelman’s text is
a work of fiction. So why did they? Why
do our professional writers — journalists
and the commentariat — not understand
or seem to care about important
distinctions in our language?
Perhaps the problem is rooted in
the squishy phrase “graphic novel,”
sometimes distinguishing only between
comic books stapled or perfect bound.
Throughout his career, Spiegelman has
always preferred the term “comix” to
describe his medium. When he was once
deemed the father of the graphic novel,
he replied, “Yeah …. and I’ve been asking
for a paternity test ever since.”
There are glimmers of evidence that
the publishing field is giving more careful
thought to naming innovative genres
and practices. Last semester my students
read The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation,
a title which resists the too-easy elision
between fact and fiction that “novel” can
evoke. And Nora Krug’s stunning work
Belonging: A German Reckons with History
and Home has been labeled both a graphic
and an illustrated memoir. Indeed, one
review in the New York Times, the paper
that still struggles with Maus, called
Krug’s work a “visual memoir.”
My frustration about the decades-long
mislabeling of Maus parallels my losing
battles with students. Many, even English
majors, denote all paperback books as
novels. Just last year, some in a class
titled “Studies in Nonfiction: Holocaust
Memoirs” referred to Primo Levi’s “novel”
Survival in Auschwitz. Others, in an
American literature survey, used the same
designation for Tillie Olsen’s collection of
stories Tell Me a Riddle; and several honors
students in an American culture course
wrote about Allen Ginsberg’s scandalous
novel, Howl and other Poems.
MAKING DISTINCTIONS
The distinctions between a novel (or
graphic novel) and a work of nonfiction
should concern not only English
professors. The five-pound Critical Edition
of Anne Frank’s diary can provide a
more comprehensive illustration of the
cultural stakes involved. Prepared by
the Netherlands State Institute for War
Documentation, this 719-page volume
assembles the complex textual history
of the famous diary, including its three
versions — Anne’s original pages, her
transformational rewrites and the final
published text. The editors also provide
an account of how the pages, recovered in
August 1944, were compiled and edited
into the book that has sold many millions
of copies.
Since Holocaust deniers have
consistently exploited the complex textual
evolution in order to challenge the
diary’s authenticity, the editors also felt it
necessary to include a long summary of
a 270-page report on the diary issued by
the State Forensic Science Laboratory of
the Ministry of Justice. The investigators
undertook an extensive analysis of Anne
Frank’s handwriting and examined the
diary’s very materials — not just the
paper and ink of the pages on which it
was composed, but the fibers comprising
the small diary’s boards; indeed, the very
glue, holding them together.
Despite all the Critical Edition’s scholarly
wonders, including its revelation of
how the teen-aged diarist evolved as
a perceptive literary artist, I have to
agree with Cynthia Ozick who called it
“a sorrowful volume.” The 270 pages of
forensic analysis cast a pall over the book,
today a depressing testament that those
assassins of memory remain with us,
nearly four decades after the publications
of both the first volume of Maus and the
Critical Edition.
Deniers and distorters are still at work,
and not just in the darkest recesses of the
internet; authoritarian governments in
Eastern Europe work openly to minimize,
even erase, their historical complicity
in the Nazi genocide. Deeming Maus a
novel, graphic or otherwise, can eventuate
into real consequences.
In fact, the group responsible
for disbursing recompense funds
to Holocaust survivors, the Claims
Conference, issued a report in 2018
indicating that more than half of all
millennials cannot name a concentration
camp and that 41% believe substantially
fewer than 6 million Jews were murdered
during the Holocaust. One of its most
disturbing findings indicates that “11
percent of U.S. Millennial and Gen Z
respondents believe Jews caused the
Holocaust.”
Maus has always had a noteworthy
capacity as an introduction for younger
readers to the Holocaust and its
consequences — only one reason why the
McCinn County school board’s decision
is so wrong-headed. But Spiegelman’s
inventive text also challenges too-
easy taxonomies, as the Pulitzer Prize
committee acknowledged in its special
citation, reading simply “For Maus.” Is it a
comic book? A graphic memoir? Or the
testimony of a Holocaust survivor and his
son? All of these and more, I would say.
Just don’t call it a novel.
Robert Franciosi is a professor in the Department
of English Language and Literature at Grand Valley
State University.