Of Mice and Mouths

I read Maus by Art Spiegelman last weekend. This one's a graphic novel, which means it is a comic book meant to be taken seriously. It won the Pulitzer in the early Nineties, and I have some friends who teach it to their literature students, so I thought I'd give it a try. I have read only one other graphic novel before this one, which was Watchmen, and I was a bit disappointed by it (and it was made into a very bad movie, by all accounts), so this was my second attempt at reading the form. Maus is a memoir, to be strict, about the author's father surviving the Nazi Occupation in Poland and eventually surviving Auschwitz as well. Let me quickly recommend it to everyone, as is the obligation when one reads an "important" book about the Holocaust, by saying that I found it thoughtful and very good. It is a quick read (there are two parts that were written about three years apart, strangely like Don Quixote, that are each a good one- or two-hour endeavor) and most of it is taken up with drawings of mice, cats, and hidden swastikas. It is certainly very powerful.

I have now read two of the three "great" graphic novels, one of which was fun but juvenile (Watchmen) and one that was wonderful and, as mentioned earlier, probably important. I don't mean to belittle the Holocaust in any way by suggesting that we are obligated to read about it, but I am suggesting that much of what we are told to read (or see) is belittling itself. Well, I take that back: Much of what we are told to see is belittling, and I am thinking here of the recent The Reader, which was about as important and thoughtful as a hot steamed turd. There is a lot written about the right way to tell a horrible story, all the more because it really happened, and I am convinced that moving pictures probably isn't the way to tell this particular story, although I suppose Schindler's List has made an impact, but Marshall MacLuhan was right about the medium being the message, and movies are too often the message of themselves.

But this is what made Maus so interesting: It was told in words and pictures, and the pictures were of cats doing horrible things to mice. For allegory, the line is fine between parody and illumination, and I often thought Maus was doing both, to varying degrees of success. But there was something really powerful about Spiegelman's graphic choices, besides the self-consciousness and meta- stuff that graphic novels invariably have, and that is this: the mouths of the mice as they are being killed. I can't describe it, and I don't feel like posting a picture of it outside of its original context, but that image alone justified Spiegelman's art in my opinion.

I have been battling the mice in my shed the last week, and I set three traps the other day after my more humane tactics failed with great aplomb. All three traps killed mice, and each time I removed the dead mouse, that steep triangular mouth was there, gaping in horror. This is saying nothing about me and my relationship to real mice outside of an allegorical graphic novel, but I just wanted to mention that, given the precise context, a specific image that one encounters in the everyday can take on terrible significance, which might be a slight justification for a graphic novel, or at least a good piece of art.