Satirical Irony in Spicgelman^s Maus: A Survivor
Tale
63
differentiation.® I would contend that one purpose of this differentiation is to
remind the reader of the text’s factuality. Hiding again in Mrs. Motonowa’s
basement, a moment to which I referred earlier, Spiegelman’s mother and father
suddenly become aware that they are not alone: “Th-There are rats down here!”
Anja screams (147). The rat scurrying by them is a sudden eruption of reality fo r
the reader. Confronted with an unanthropomorphized rat, the complacent reader
is reminded that these events actually happened to real people and that the story
being told—despite the form in wliich it is told—is true.^ This is one of the
signal effects of Spiegelman’s satirical-ironic mode. He takes the device that
Nazi’s used to render Jews nonhuman and reverses the effect. Their very
nonhumanness, in being depicted as mice, is refigured as a way of making them
all the more human through the eruptions of reality contained within the text.
Similarly, the reader’s sudden encounter with documentary
photographs and maps unsettles complacency. Marianne Hirsch and Susan
Rubin Suleiman locate the real of the text in the reproduced documentary
evidence while also noting the search for such evidence within the narrative:
Despite the numerous distancing devices that shape
Spiegelman’s book—^the graphic medium and comix form, the
adaptation of the animal fable, and an insistent emphasis on
meta-narrative commentary—there is an equally strong
reliance on documentary connections to the real (88).
This need for documentary evidence emanates, they argue, from the inability of
the children of Holocaust survivors to gain access to the event that constitutes a
vital part of their identity. In Mam, Spiegelman hopes to obtain his mother’s
diaries to shed further light on what she went through wlien she was separated
from his father in the camps. After telling Spiegelman that he does not know
wliere the diaries are, his father reveals that he burned them: “Those notebooks
and other really nice things of mother. . . These papers had too many memories.
So I burned them” (1:158). For Hirsch and Suleiman, the tension between the
documentary evidence and the comic form illustrates the power that such objects
hold for Spieg [X[