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Popular Culture Review
genre. Whereas the term comics implies an inherent element of humor and
emphasizes the visual, commix may contain humor but is ultimately defined
neither by it nor by the visual. This new generic form allows Spiegelman to
avoid charges of trivialization insofar as commix have a decidedly different
purpose. Commix “brings together words and pictures to tell a story,” generating
a kind of “‘mental language’ that is closer to actual human thought than either
words or pictures alone” (qtd. in Young 27).
Indeed, Mans is clearly not a comic book in the traditional sense. It is
lengthy, words are essential rather than subordinate, and its use of written and
oral history, ethnography, autobiography, and biography challenges generic
expectations.^ The comic form from which Maus dra>vs its genealogy is, as
Froma Zeitlin notes, an “incongruous genre,” especially so in the case of Maus
with its mixture of “the fantastic and the factual in graphic form” (129). In a
series of deft moves throughout both volumes, Spiegelman shifts the emphasis
away from the drawings to historical documents, photographs, or blocks of
lengthy text and back again. “I wanted [the drawings] to be there,” Spiegelman
explains in an interview, “but the story operates somewhere else. It operates
somewhere between the words and the idea that’s in the pictures” (qtd. in
LaCapra 148). That is, Spiegelman locates the meaning of the text not in words
or in pictures but in the interstices of the two. There is, perhaps, nothing
particularly distinctive in this vision insofar as it is characteristic of all comics in
general. However, using satirical irony as a lens on Spiegelman’s text makes it
possible to recognize that his desire for meaning to arise from the text’s effect
on the reader, rather than from either the text or images alone, resembles the
strategy that the Nazis themselves deployed.
Maus clearly uses such a combination for different ends. One effect of
the satirical-ironic mode is its ability to unsettle complacency. Critics, however,
have often thought otherwise. Adam Gopnick argues that one of the reasons
Maus is so commercially successful is that “it evades the central moral issue of
the Holocaust: How could people do such things to other people?” (qtd. in
LaCapra 160). According to Gopnick, reducing the Holocaust to an animal
kingdom ultimately effaces the specifically human dimension of the horror.
Gopnick is less concerned with the depiction of the victims of the Holocaust
than with its perpetrators. “The problem with the animal metaphor,” he writes,
“is not that it is demeaning to the mice, but that it lets the cats off too easily”
(160). In Gopnick’s reading of Maus, proper responsibility for the horrors
cannot be assigned, because the Germans could only be horrible enough if they
were depicted as human.
Does Maus really allow the reader to forget the human dimension of
the Holocaust, as Gopnick asserts? Dominick LaCapra argues that animal
representations in the text function at a much more complex level than simple
allegorization. In fact, he notes, there are “‘real’ animals that contrast with the
figurative ones” (161). Yet LaCapra does not explicitly state the purpose of this