FEBRUARY 24 • 2022 | 9

MISREPRESENTING MAUS
continued from page 6

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.