Satirical Irony in Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale
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^ C lick’s rejection o f historical causality is problematic and may be unsettling for some
readers. My own work tends to be historicist in nature, and thus I have difficulty
accepting this line o f thinking wliolesale. However, I find ^izek’s underlying warning
compelling. We must be careful, he insists, not to buy into the notion that history is
simply the past that makes the present. Rather, he argues throughout his many works that
the present always makes the past that, in turn, makes the present.
^ Z i^ k finds it reprehensible that in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler's List the director
ascribes complex psychological motives to the villain in a scene where a Nazi officer has
an affair with a Jewish girl: “The fact [is] that the scene presents a (psychologically)
impossible position o f enunciation o f its subject: it expresses his split attitude towards the
terrified Jewish girl as his direct psychological self-experience.'^ In other words,
Spielberg depicts