Rosemary V.

Hathaway

Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus as

Postmodern Ethnography

Abstract: Critics tend to regard Art Spiegelman’s two-volume graphic

novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale as the text that granted “legitimacy” to the
genre. However, as a generic label, graphic novel does not exactly fit Maus.
Spiegelman’s books are decidedly non-fiction: they retell his father’s
stories about life in Poland and in Auschwitz during World War II. Nor
do the texts function solely as oral history, since they also relate the ex-
periences of other family members, including those of the author himself.
I argue that we can read Maus most accurately as ethnography: like
ethnography, the texts are concerned with depicting the complex rela-
tionships among personal histories and larger “official” histories. And
they do so reflexively: both words and images incorporate Spiegelman’s
thoughts on the process of collecting his father’s stories, and they show
how the project shaped him even as he shaped it. Indeed, Maus literally
illustrates how “power and history work through [ethnographies], in ways
their authors cannot fully control” (Clifford 1986, 7). As a result, I argue
that Maus is best approached as a form of postmodern ethnography.

When A rt Spiegel m an’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale was published in

1986, the work resisted easy generic categorization. What eventually
became a two-volume work (Spiegelman 1986, 1991) was itself a com-
pilation of comics that had been published earlier in serial form, and
the joining of sequential visual and verbal elements in an extended
narrative led many to identify Maus as a graphic novel. In recent years,
as graphic novels have gained legitimacy in commercial and in critical
spheres, Maus has come to occupy a definitional place as the great
graphic novel, one that is guaranteed to vanquish even the most re-
luctant reader’s doubts about the power of this emerging literary form.
But to call Maus a graphic novel is to do it a great disservice, and in

Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2011

Copyright ©  2011 Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University

249
250 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 48, No. 3

1986 Spiegelman himself explicitly requested that the New York Times
Book Review move the first volume of Maus from the fiction to the
non-fiction bestseller list (Miller 2003, 48).
In fact, a number of the most acclaimed and commercially success-
ful “graphic novels” of recent years have not been novels at all, but
non-fiction memoirs in comics form, such as Marjane Satrapi’s Perse-
polis (2003), Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (1986a), and Alison
Bechdel’s Fun Home (2007). I would like to posit, however, that Maus
differs even from works like those by Satrapi, Pekar, and Bechdel,
beside which it is often discussed. While those autobiographical ac-
counts do also attempt to capture a specific sense of place and time,
they are at heart really about how the writer/artist’s own personal
experiences relate to larger historical and cultural contexts. Granted,
Art Spiegelman himself is a central character in Maus: it is his story
that frames and frequently disrupts the tale, and to that degree, Maus
is somewhat autobiographical.1 Many critics have also commented on
the ways in which the Maus books underscore the phenomenon of
postmemory: Art’s own stories often focus on the ways in which his
family’s Holocaust trauma has become his trauma, and the ways in
which he has inherited his parents’ survivor guilt.2 Consequently, Maus
is often framed in terms of historiography.
Because the focus of the story is on Spiegelman’s father, Vladek,
and his memories of the Holocaust, it is tempting to describe Maus
as a graphic oral history or biography—and in fact, the first volume
of Maus was nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle award
for biography in 1987 (Witek 1989, 96). However, just as Maus is not
really autobiography, it also differs significantly from traditional modes
of biography and oral history. To be sure, Vladek’s voice dominates
the text, and (as in any good oral history) it is only through Vladek’s
story that the reader comes to understand the magnitude of the larger
historical events being described in miniature. But Spiegelman’s nar-
rative also pulls away from Vladek’s story, sometimes even challenging
or subverting it. In the process, the text reveals how powerfully the
past influences the present and the future, articulating “a conception
of past historical events that includes the present conditions under
which they are being remembered” (Young 2000, 24).
Where Maus differs from traditional oral histories, however, is in the
ways it exposes and examines its own constructedness and the biases of
its creator. Critic James E. Young characterizes this as “received history,”
Rosemary V. Hathaway     Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus 251

arguing that “in an era when absolute truth claims are under assault,
Spiegelman’s Maus makes a case for an essentially reciprocal relationship
between the truth of what happened and the truth of how it is remem-
bered” (2000, 39). Young’s description, while apt, still couches Maus in
the limiting generic context of historiography; the more crucial point
lies in Young’s use of the word “reciprocal,” and in his larger discussion
of the ways in which narrative and traditional modes of historiography
come into conflict. Insofar as it is useful to find a specific generic lens
through which to read Spiegelman’s texts, I posit that it is perhaps most
productive to classify Maus as an exercise in ethnography. Spiegelman’s
emphasis on the process of textual production, and the ways the pub-
lished volumes deconstruct, reconstruct, and mediate source material,
suggest that Maus is a form of “new” or “reflexive” ethnography.
In this essay, I refer to this type of writing as postmodern ethnography,
because I want to highlight the ways in which Maus resists and actively
challenges notions of objectivity, truth, and authenticity. Furthermore,
the work actively calls attention to itself as an artificial construct and
offers metacriticism about its own manufacture. It is especially useful
to read Maus as postmodern ethnography because doing so can clarify
some critics’ confusion about the work’s structure and also make sense
of the volumes’ frequent concern with issues of representation.
Charles Hatfield describes Maus as “an extended essay on trying to
represent the unrepresentable” (2005, 139), which is a brilliantly succinct
way to define any postmodern ethnography. Though Hatfield is refer-
ring specifically to the difficulty of representing the events of the Holo-
caust, the question of “representing the unrepresentable” is at the heart
of all contemporary ethnographic inquiry, which almost has to start
from a place of defeat: how can a single account convey the dynamic,
multivalent, contested nature of any cultural group or phenomenon
with any accuracy or objectivity? Historian and ethnographer James
Clifford—who, along with Clifford Geertz, George Marcus, and others
pioneered the “new ethnography”—describes ethnographic inquiry as
the presentation of “partial truths,” noting that “[e]ven the best ethno-
graphic texts—serious, true fictions—are systems, or economies, of
truth. Power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot
fully control” (1986, 7). Notably, Spiegelman echoes this precise senti-
ment in MetaMaus, a 2011 multimedia collection that brings together a
range of Maus sources and commentaries. He remarks, “Maus, like all
other narrative work . . . is streamlined and, at least on that level, a
252 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 48, No. 3

fiction. There are fictions that usefully steer you back directly to reality”
(2011, 150). Maus exists in a space between genres, and it is precisely this
interstitial character that makes it such a rich text, one that clearly chan-
nels the kind of “power and history” Clifford describes.
Many critics have noted the ironic self-reflexivity of Maus, and in
fact some early reviewers accused Spiegelman of being too self-ab-
sorbed, too interested in his role as artist and not objective enough
about the history his book was trying to tell. Robert C. Harvey claims
the work is “not so much about the experience[s] of the Auschwitz
survivor as it is about the obsessions of the artistic temperament”
(1996, 243). Harvey Pekar famously lambasted the work in a 1986
Comics Journal review, in which he wrote that “the major defect in
Maus . . . is Spiegelman’s biased, one-sided portrayals of his father,
himself, and their relationship”; further, he “question[s] [Spiegel-
man’s] ability to portray Vladek accurately” (1986b, 56). Certainly, as
Clifford notes, “extreme self-consciousness . . . has its dangers—of
irony, of elitism, of putting the whole world in quotation marks” (1986,
25). But as Clifford also reminds us, philosophers from Dilthey to
Ricoeur to Heidegger acknowledge that even “the simplest cultural
accounts are intentional creations, that interpreters constantly con-
struct themselves through the others they study” (10). At its core,
postmodern ethnography questions whether it is possible for anyone
to portray another accurately; consequently, proponents of “new”
ethnography ask practitioners to “show their work”: to describe their
fieldwork and their interpretive process, thereby allowing readers to
witness, critique, and become part of that process.
One would be hard-pressed to find a text that more clearly shows
us the intentionality of its construction than Maus. Its very nature as
an illustrated text, as well as Spiegelman’s choice to draw animals rather
than human figures, visibly and immediately alerts the reader to the
work’s constructedness. In addition to these obvious methods, Spiegel-
man uses more subtle and provocative forms of reflexivity to remind
us that we are not hearing an unmediated account of the Holocaust;
rather, the story is being filtered through a very specific, partial observer.
In fact, Spiegelman has long been ambivalent when it comes to telling
stories. In the afterword to the 2008 reissue of his early collection
Breakdowns, Spiegelman writes that from the beginning of his work in
comics, he sought to reject the notion of narrative or at least try to
disrupt its unifying tendencies: “I became consumed with finding out
Rosemary V. Hathaway     Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus 253

how narrative comics had to be to be comics at all” (2008, emphasis his).

With regard to the creation of Maus, he has noted,

All kinds of elisions and ellipses and compressions are a part of any
shaped work, and my goal was to not betray what I could find out or what
I had heard or what I knew but to give a shape to it. But giving shape
also involves, by definition, the risk of distorting the underlying reality.
Perhaps the only honest way to present such material is to say: “Here are
all the documents I used . . . and here’s like thousands of hours of tape
recording, and here’s a bunch of photographs to look at. Now, go make
yourself a Maus!” (Spiegelman 2011, 34)

Spiegelman could not align his task more clearly with that of the post-
modern ethnographer: confronted with an assemblage of raw material
and challenged to create a coherent “text” out of it, he wrestled with
“finding what one can tell, and what one can reveal, and what one can
reveal beyond what one knows one is revealing” (73).
This self-reflexivity is evident even in the project’s earliest mani-
festations. In 1974, Spiegelman published a three-page comic entitled
“Maus” in the underground comic Funny Aminals.3 This early version
of his father’s story uses a more traditional and simplistic narrative
technique: Spiegelman frames Vladek’s experiences as a “bedtime
story.” The 1974 text begins, “When I was a young mouse in Rego Park,
New York, my poppa used to tell me bedtime stories about life in the
old country during the war . . . ” (51; ellipses in original, here and
throughout). “Poppa mouse” then takes over the narration, the words
of his bedtime story hovering in quotation marks over frames depict-
ing incidents easily recognizable to readers of the later Maus books.
However, Spiegelman uses several devices to take the short comic out
of the realm of the autobiographical: already he depicts Jews as mice
and their oppressors as cats, and while it is clear that he refers to
Poland and World War II, he never cites these historical places and
events; instead, he uses the more general “old country” and “the war.”
The young mouse hearing the tale is named “Mickey,” and he only
appears three times in the story; in each instance, he is lying in bed,
his head either on his father’s lap or on the pillow as he falls asleep.
The character’s words echo his physical passivity: he speaks only to
respond to part of his father’s story (“Golly!”), or to ask a question to
propel the story along (“But poppa—what happened to the rat that
snitched on you?”). In the final frame, Mickey is half asleep as his
254 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 48, No. 3

father tearfully ends the story by saying, “I can tell you no more now”
(Spiegelman 1974, 53).
We see the germs of the genius of the later, full-length work in this
1974 version, but the differences between the early comic and the
Maus books underscore the deep significance of the dramatic narra-
tive changes Spiegelman made a decade later. In Maus, not only does
Spiegelman clearly name specific places and events, but more impor-
tantly, he names the major characters. Poppa becomes Vladek, and
Mickey becomes Art. Auschwitz is called Auschwitz, not “Mauschwitz”
(though the name “Mauschwitz” does appear on the title page of Maus
II, chapter one). The drawings also take on a sketchier, more realistic
quality in the later work. These changes suggest that Spiegelman
recognized that a distanced, “bedtime story” approach to his father’s
experiences would not be adequate to convey either their horror or
their ongoing effect on Vladek’s life in the United States. Instead of
portraying himself in the full version as passive and able to sleep
through stories about the Holocaust, in Maus Art is a child fully grown,
capable of expressing an incredibly complicated range of responses
that effectively convey an inherited trauma.
There seems to have been a reckoning sometime between the 1974
version and 1980, when Spiegelman began publishing in RAW magazine
the strips that would later comprise Maus I. In the intervening years,
Spiegelman appears to have decided that portraying himself as an in-
nocent child would be not merely disingenuous, but dishonest. This,
too, reflects the ethical rationale behind postmodern ethnography,
which holds that not including oneself in the cultural description one
has overtly and consciously constructed is deeply suspect. Distant “ob-
jectivity” implies that the author is an empty vessel through which other
people’s stories are channeled, rather than a thinking, agenda-ridden
“re-purposer” of other people’s stories. And of course, the “culture”
Spiegelman is reworking in Maus is his own family’s; there is no ethical
way to tell such stories without first declaring his complex and biased
relationship to them. As Spiegelman himself has written, “Telling a
story as if I was the invisible hand that allowed Vladek to make a comic
about Auschwitz would have been so fraudulent. . . . Better to give the
problematics of reconstructing that experience” (2011, 208).
Reading Maus as postmodern ethnography, then, is a way to address
critics’ assertions that the text is narcissistic: to some extent, Spiegel-
man’s narrative has to court self-involvement in order to be a truly
Rosemary V. Hathaway     Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus 255

honest account. Consequently, the most cogent interpretations of self-

reflexivity in Maus focus not on its perceived navel-gazing, but on the
ways the work renders history more truthfully and fully. Charles Hatfield,
for example, argues that many moments in the text “throw into question
the seeming verisimilitude of Maus, while at the same time affirming
its drive for truthfulness” (2005, 144); this process of “ironic authentica-
tion,” he suggests, “makes a show of honesty by denying the very pos-
sibility of being honest” (126). Hatfield’s observation echoes, of course,
the very paradox at the heart of postmodern ethnography: emphasizing
the manufactured nature of a text—a move that would seem to desta-
bilize and undermine the “truth” of that text—in fact functions to
create a sense of authenticity and honesty. Realizing that ethnographers
can only at best create a “partial truth” both in and from their fieldwork,
the most ethical thing to do is to acknowledge and continually point
out the subjectivity of the entire process. The fact that Spiegelman relies
on precisely this methodology as he narrates Maus again suggests that
generic labels like “novel” or “biography” or “autobiography” overlook
both the self-reflexivity and the critique of subjectivity that are as central
to the text as Vladek’s story itself.
Spiegelman places Maus in the realm of postmodern ethnography
on the very first page of Maus I, which begins, “I went out to see my
Father in Rego Park. I hadn’t seen him in a long time—we weren’t
that close” (1986, 11). This sort of opening is deeply traditional in
ethnographic narratives, even prior to the “new” ethnography; as
Mary Louise Pratt notes, such “opening narratives commonly recount
the writer’s arrival at the field site,” and this type of beginning serves
two important functions: it grounds “description in the intense and
authority-giving personal experience of fieldwork,” and it establishes
“the initial positionings of the subjects of the ethnographic text: the
ethnographer, the native, and the reader” (1986, 31–32).
Spiegelman’s opening accomplishes both of these traditional moves,
but it also complicates them in ways that are indicative of postmodern
ethnography. Art’s “field site” is his childhood home; the “other” he has
come to observe and interview is his own father. Immediately, Spiegel-
man reveals the complexity and the dysfunction of his relationship with
his ethnographic “subject.” When Art tells his father that he “still want[s]
to draw that book about [him] . . . about [his] life in Poland, and the
War,” Vladek replies, “It would take many books, my life, and no one
wants anyway to hear such stories” (Spiegelman 1986, 12). Immediately,
256 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 48, No. 3

Spiegelman establishes the central conflict (and paradox) at the heart

of Maus: Art’s belief that Vladek’s story is worth telling, and Vladek’s
difficulty in locating any concrete starting point for talking about those
events. Art helps him out by asking about how Vladek met Anja, Art’s
(now deceased) mother, and the elder Spiegelman launches into a long,
seemingly tangential story about another woman, Lucia, with whom he
had an affair prior to meeting Anja. When he jilts Lucia to get engaged
to Anja, Lucia sends a poison-pen letter to Anja’s family that attempts
to discredit Vladek. Eventually, Anja and her family are convinced that
Vladek’s affair with Lucia is over, and Vladek and Anja marry. But Vladek
is still ashamed of the incident, telling Art: “But this what I just told
you—about Lucia and so—I don’t want you should write this in your
book.” He explains that he doesn’t think it has anything to do with the
Holocaust, that it “isn’t so proper, so respectful”—and that while he’s
willing to tell Art his stories, “such private things, I don’t want you should
mention.” Art replies, “Okay, okay—I promise,” a promise he has, of
course, just flagrantly broken by starting the book with the very story
Vladek told him not to tell (23).
This opening episode brilliantly captures the ethnographer’s di-
lemma: ultimately both Art and Spiegelman want to tell a vibrant and
complete story. Art tells Vladek that his life is full of “great material”
that “makes everything more real—more human” (Spiegelman 1986,
23). But good storytelling—no matter how “real” or “human”—always
reconstructs the identities and the histories of the people involved in
profound ways. As we see in this episode, Vladek is initially the party
most concerned about how the book will portray him; eventually, how-
ever, it is Art who becomes obsessed with how he is representing his father.
Toward the end of Maus I, Art confesses to his stepmother, Mala, that
representational issues are proving to be a real obstacle to his writing.
While Spiegelman-as-artist addresses the issue of visual representation
by drawing historical human groups as animals—Jews as mice, Nazis as
cats, Poles as pigs—Art-as-represented-artist wrestles with the more
abstract issues of representation all ethnographers face. Art tells Mala
he fears that he is presenting his father “ just like the racist caricature of
the miserly old Jew” (131). Art worries that while he’s trying, as he says,
“to portray [his] father accurately” (132), that portrayal may be misread
by his audience and serve to confirm preexisting stereotypes.
In Maus II, Art’s concerns about representation grow: no longer is
he concerned merely with how his work characterizes his father, but also
Rosemary V. Hathaway     Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus 257

with how it characterizes history itself. In what is perhaps the most famous
series of drawings in Maus II, Spiegelman depicts himself wearing a
mouse mask, sitting at his drawing table and describing the writer’s block
he experienced when writing the second volume of his father’s story.
Again he struggles with the reflexive ethnographer’s necessary confusion
about how his authorial subjectivity intersects with that of his subject:
“Vladek started working as a tinman in Auschwitz in the spring of
1944 . . . I started working on this page at the very end of February 1987.
In May 1987, Françoise and I are expecting a baby . . . Between May 16,
1944 and May 24, 1944 over 100,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed in
Auschwitz” (Spiegelman 1991, 41). As Art continues, expressing his guilt
about the critical and commercial success of Maus I, the view pans out
until, at the bottom of the page, the reader sees that Art and his drawing
table are perched atop a pile of naked, dead bodies (41). Issues of guilt
and representation become hopelessly intertwined, and while on some
level Art recognizes that his guilt is the very thing that makes him the
best chronicler of his father’s story, he is also diminished by that guilt.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the scene where, while listening to a
taped interview with his father, Art shrinks with shame at hearing himself
badger his father into staying on-topic (47).
In fact, Spiegelman’s visual depictions of the mechanics of field-
work—interviewing, taping, transcribing, interpreting—offer addi-
tional support for reading Maus as reflexive ethnography. Just prior
to the scene in which Art replays his tapes, Art notes that he is strug-
gling with the tin-shop scene because he “hates to draw machinery”
(Spiegelman 1991, 46); ironically, in the very next panel, the tape-
recording machinery looms large. Over the course of several panels,
Art shrinks down to toddler size as the tape recorder that is playing
his father’s voice gets larger. The “machinery” of fieldwork, in fact,
plays an active role in the narrative. Early scenes depicting Art and
Vladek’s conversations in Maus I clearly show Art taking handwritten
notes; at one point he even says, “My hand is sore from writing this
all down” (Spiegelman 1986, 40). Shortly thereafter, Art turns up at
Vladek’s house with a tape recorder, explaining that “writing things
down is just too hard” (73). However, Art’s transition to available
technology does not make him any less fastidious an ethnographer:
he still takes written notes and continues to seek out additional docu-
mentation, just as in Maus I he seeks out his mother’s wartime diaries
in hopes of adding another dimension to his account.
258 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 48, No. 3

Clearly, Spiegelman—and Art—are striving for the kind of “thick

description” necessary to any thorough ethnography. While audio- and
videotaping are crucial fieldwork techniques, they can only tell a
complete story if they are supplemented with thorough field notes
and whatever additional forms of documentation are available. To
that end, Spiegelman also includes family photographs at strategic
points in both Maus I and Maus II. Both volumes include drawings
that Spiegelman made based on family portraits and snapshots, with
the humans transposed into mice. In Maus II, for example, Vladek
shares a box of old family photos he has found, explaining that they
were saved during the war by a non-Jewish family acquaintance. As
Vladek narrates the photos for his son, the images gradually over-
whelm the story, until they are so numerous that they spill out of the
frame of the panels and bleed to the very edges of the page. Here,
Spiegelman illustrates the indexical power of photographs, which can
turn the key to memories in a way that risks generating so many nar-
ratives that they cannot be contained or completed.
Each of the two volumes also includes a single “authentic” photo-
graph—that is, a reproduction of the actual image, humans and all.
The lone photo in Maus I is a snapshot of Art and his mother at Trojan
Lake, New York, in 1958. The photo embodies the classic family vaca-
tion photo of the era, with Art’s mother in a matronly bathing suit,
her hand on her son’s head. Notably, though, she does not smile, which
contributes to the ironic contrast between the apparent image of a
happy family and the grim story that follows it, about Art’s mother’s
suicide ten years later.
Spiegelman also chooses to include one “real” photograph strategi-
cally in Maus II.4 After Vladek has finished narrating his escape from
the camps and his reunion with his wife, he shows Art a stunning photo:
a snapshot of himself in a striped Auschwitz uniform. As he explains,
“I passed once a photo place what had a camp uniform—a new and
clean one—to make souvenir photos . . . Anja kept this picture always.
I have it still now in my desk” (Spiegelman 1991, 134). Coming, as it
does, two pages before the conclusion of the book, the picture is shock-
ing on several levels: accustomed to seeing Vladek only as a mouse, the
reader is now presented with an image of him as a man, and must sud-
denly reframe the entire narrative in light of this unavoidable evidence
that the story happened not to a mouse, but to a human being. Further-
more, Vladek’s facial expression in the photo is deeply enigmatic: is he
Rosemary V. Hathaway     Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus 259

trying to look proud? Defiant? Somber? It is a look that would have to

be interpreted to be redrawn, and Spiegelman’s choice to leave the
original intact reminds us that in both its structure and its style, Maus
is, at heart, Spiegelman’s interpretation and re-invention of his father’s
story. The picture reminds both Art and the reader that however much
of Vladek’s story we know, that story is heavily mediated: as Spiegelman
puts it, “[T]o be left with a photo that tells you something, but only in
relation to the drawn and written telling around it, informs what you
thought you knew by making you re-examine it” (2011, 222).
In addition to making his data-gathering process fairly transparent
by showing us how he translated his research materials into a coherent
narrative, Spiegelman also includes several scenes in which he depicts
himself struggling with ethnographic concerns about the illustrations,
too, as he decides how to depict particular scenes and characters. Thus,
the constructed and interpretive nature of the illustration process, too,
is made transparent. For example, in a scene toward the end of Maus
I, Art comes to Vladek and Mala’s house to show them some of the
preliminary sketches for the book (Spiegelman 1986, 132–33), and Maus
II begins with Art wondering aloud to his wife, Françoise, how he should
draw her since she is French by birth (Spiegelman 1991, 11). In the latter
scene, Art questions whether Françoise should be depicted as a frog
(like the other French characters) or as a mouse (since she converted
to Judaism when they married). The “debate” the two have about how
Françoise should be represented is, of course, deeply ironic in its place-
ment at the beginning of the second book: Françoise has already ap-
peared as a mouse throughout the first book. Thus, Spiegelman’s
decision to begin the second installment with this scene underscores his
desire to call attention to the work’s constructedness.
The second volume continues and even amplifies the narrative
disruption of Maus I. The title page of the first chapter of Maus II
includes the illustration with the word “Mauschwitz” mentioned above;
however, Vladek’s narration about his experiences in Auschwitz does
not begin until fourteen pages later. The intervening pages focus on
Art’s continued struggles with his father in the present, again remind-
ing us—before Vladek’s narration continues—who is framing Vladek’s
narrative, and how deeply challenged Art feels about the prospect of
representing his father, and his father’s story, fairly.
Perhaps the most moving demonstrations of postmodern ethnog-
raphy in Maus occur when Spiegelman opens up about how his own
260 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 48, No. 3

conflicted subjectivities as son and artist shape the narrative. In par-

ticular, Spiegelman does not hide his own frustration with his father
as an ethnographic subject. Art’s worries about whether he’s depicting
Vladek too harshly are mitigated by the fact that Spiegelman does
little to soften his representation of himself. In many scenes, Art ex-
presses his exasperation with his father’s narrative style, often prod-
ding Vladek to come back from his ostensible tangents, insisting that
he tell his story chronologically. At times, Spiegelman even presents
himself as a near bully. In an especially notable incident, Vladek wants
to tell Art about something that happened years after the story he has
just told. To Vladek, it is all of a piece: the later event is the true con-
clusion of the story he has just told. So he segues to the second part
of the story by beginning, “When we were in the ghetto, in 1943, Tosha
took all the children to—” (Spiegelman 1986, 82). But Art angrily
overrides Vladek’s narrative impulse, telling him: “Please, Dad, if you
don’t keep your story chronological, I’ll never get it straight . . . tell
me more about 1941 and 1942.” Vladek submits, saying, “Okay. I’ll make
it how you want it” (82).
When Vladek does finally conclude the story he started, some thirty
pages later, we see why he thought this episode needed to be narrated
alongside the other one: when Art interrupted him, Vladek had just
finished describing Anja’s refusal to send their infant son, Richieu,
into hiding in 1941. We learn later that in 1942 the family had been
forced to send Richieu into hiding with Anja’s sister Tosha, a decision
that has tragic consequences. When Tosha learns that the Gestapo
are evacuating the ghetto and sending everyone to Auschwitz, she
refuses, saying “NO! I won’t go to their gas chambers! . . . And my
children won’t go to their gas chambers!” (Spiegelman 1986, 109).
Vladek explains what happened next: “Always Tosha carried around
her neck some poison . . . she killed not only herself, but also the 3
children” (109). In forcing Vladek back into a strictly chronological
account, Art preserves his own sense of narrative progression, but he
derails his father’s. Vladek’s narrative choices highlight the brutal
irony and futility of trying to “protect” his first-born son, an idea that
is still conveyed in Spiegelman’s account, but perhaps less poignantly.
It is an instance that illustrates one of the critical pitfalls of the eth-
nographic process: the ways in which the ethnographer’s voice so easily
subsumes and even silences the subject’s. I read Spiegelman’s depiction
of himself bullying his father as an acknowledgement of the
Rosemary V. Hathaway     Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus 261

difficulty—if not the impossibility—of letting fieldwork subjects speak

for themselves.
Notably (and perhaps intentionally), this is one story that is avail-
able to the public to listen to directly. 5 During an interview with
Spiegelman in 2004, National Public Radio aired a ninety-second clip
from Spiegelman’s original interviews; in it, Vladek tells the story of
Tosha’s poisoning.6 The verbatim recording of the story casts interest-
ing light on Spiegelman’s choices in “re-narrating” it in his book. In
Maus, Spiegelman splits up the crucial events in this short clip into at
least two pieces: Vladek’s explanation of Tosha’s actions, and Anja’s
response to the news of Richieu’s death. While these events are treated
separately in the text, the recording illustrates Vladek’s sense that
they are all part of the same story: how can he describe how his son
died without discussing his wife’s reaction to it? Although Art insists
on linearity from Vladek, the differences between the recorded inter-
view and the way the information is “rendered” in the final text remind
us—and, presumably, Spiegelman—of Art’s own willingness to play
with his field materials, to craft them into what he sees as not only a
more logical narrative, but also a more dramatic one. The ethnogra-
pher’s task is, first and foremost, to craft a compelling account of his
or her subject that is both readable and ethically defensible; accuracy
is a handmaiden to those priorities.
Several parallel instances occur throughout Maus, moments in
which Art’s impatience with his father generally (and with his father’s
storytelling technique specifically) disrupts and refigures Vladek’s
narrative. In each case, Art argues that it is “easier” his way. But the
very fact that Spiegelman chooses to depict these moments in the final
text suggests a desire on the author’s part to be honest about how his
needs as a researcher and an artist often overrode his father’s story-
telling choices. This is a hallmark of reflexive ethnography: an ac-
knowledgment of the researcher’s hand in shaping the fieldwork
context itself and, to an even greater degree, the representation of
that fieldwork in the written text.
Spiegelman further exposes and critiques his rage for narrative
order in another episode shortly after the one in which he bullies his
father into telling his story chronologically. When Vladek goes to take
a nap during one of Art’s visits, Art seizes the moment to snoop around
in the den for his mother’s journals. He does not find them, but makes
a mess of the bookshelves in the process. When he starts to leave
262 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 48, No. 3

without cleaning up after himself, Mala yells, “Put everything back

exactly like it was, or I’ll never hear the end of it!” (Spiegelman 1986,
93). This exchange occurs just a few pages after Art has had a similar
argument with his father about narrative orderliness: thus, it under-
scores an image of Art as a greedy opportunist who only wants what
is most useful to his own project. At the same time, this scene aligns
Art with his father, showing how both have a proclivity for messing
up texts while insisting that others keep theirs straight.
While sometimes portraying himself as emotionally volatile, Spiegel-
man also represents the tedious side of ethnographic work, including
the ways that tedium can deaden the ethnographer’s emotional response
to his collected material. In a notable scene in Maus II, Art is listening
to a single section of tape over and over again, presumably to create a
verbatim transcript of the material. It is a scene with which anyone who
has done any transcribing can identify: rewinding and replaying a sec-
tion of tape can render a sentence or story utterly meaningless as the
transcriber focuses on single words, pauses, and inflections. In this
scene, the tediousness of the process stands in stark contrast to the
content: Art is, in fact, listening to the very section of tape that tells the
story of Tosha’s tragic poisoning of herself, her children, and Richieu
in order to escape the gas chambers. Spiegelman’s use of that specific
story in this scene challenges the reader to compare the words emerg-
ing from the tape recorder with those in the text. And it highlights,
again, the constructed nature of Maus: in the middle of the second
book, Art depicts himself listening repeatedly to this story that appeared
in the first. Art’s blasé attitude to hearing the story over and over again
is both funny and shocking, and it is also all too human: even as he
listens repeatedly to this horrifying story, Art chats with Françoise about
making coffee and what they are going to do about Vladek’s living situ-
ation. Tosha’s desperate sacrifice makes Art’s whining about how he
doesn’t want his father to move in with him appear petty and selfish—
another succinct moment of ethnographic reflexivity. The scene neatly
encapsulates the disconnect between subject and object that can grow
as fieldwork gets “processed” into ethnography.
The fact that readers can see the “processed” nature of Maus has
perhaps contributed to its success and encouraged them (however
fallaciously) to seek out the “real story.” Maus has been the subject of
a special exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in late 1991 and of a
1994 PBS special.7 In 1994, the multimedia publisher Voyager released
Rosemary V. Hathaway     Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus 263

a CD-ROM entitled The Complete Maus, which included not only the
full text of Maus I and Maus II, but also early sketches of Spiegelman’s
drafts of Maus, as well as photos, video clips from a trip Art Spiegelman
made to Poland, and—most notably—audio clips from Spiegelman’s
interviews with his father. The very existence of the recordings tanta-
lizes the curious reader with the promise of hearing Vladek’s unvar-
nished, “authentic” account. Voyager effectively dissolved in the
mid-1990s, and rapidly changing technology rendered the CD-ROM
more or less inaccessible for a number of years. However, the 2011
publication MetaMaus includes all of the materials from the CD-ROM,
along with an enormous range of other resources, including digitized
images of Spiegelman’s notebooks, notes from his interviews with
women who were in the camps with Anja, and complete, unedited
transcriptions of his interviews with Vladek in 1972, 1978, and 1979.
Most notably, the DVD includes roughly four hours of unedited, con-
tinuous audio from the 1972 interviews, which Spiegelman says consti-
tute most of the raw material for Maus (2011, 23).
The publication of this material will forever change the face of
Maus criticism. With access to source materials and Spiegelman’s own
extensive printed and audio commentaries, there is very little about
Spiegelman’s process that is left to question. MetaMaus theoretically
delivers on Spiegelman’s suggestion that “the only honest way to pres-
ent such material is to say: ‘Here are all the documents I used . . . and
here’s like thousands of hours of tape recording, and here’s a bunch
of photographs to look at. Now, go make yourself a Maus!’” (2011, 34).
And yet the reality is that even with all of the documents and inter-
views and photos, no one else could “make a Maus,” a point that high-
lights both the utility and the aesthetic qualities of postmodern
ethnography. What makes an ethnographic text speak to readers is,
paradoxically, the very ways in which it “narrativizes” its source mate-
rial—the ways in which it translates and mediates raw data into a com-
plex “fiction” that “usefully steer[s] you back directly to reality,” as
Spiegelman describes the process (2011, 150). Without that kind of
“streamlining” and “shaping” (to borrow Spiegelman’s words again), all
you have is source material—and source material that has already been
shaped both by the person who amassed it and by his or her collabora-
tors: the interviewer and interviewee, the photographer and the pho-
tographic subject. All ethnography is inherently biased; in its very bias,
however, it also carries the capacity to “reveal beyond what one knows
264 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 48, No. 3

one is revealing” (73). The irony of MetaMaus is that for all the informa-
tion it provides about Spiegelman’s choices, his artistic process, and the
“meaning” of the books, having all that information in no way supplants
Maus or diminishes its power. If anything, it reminds us—as good eth-
nographic writing should—that processes of cultural expression are
infinitely complex and depend as much on the interpretive skills of the
reader as they do on those of the composer.
In an essay about the 1994 CD-ROM materials, John C. Anderson
and Bradley Katz suggest that “the ‘uncut’ Maus does not actually offer
a more whole version of the object,” despite being called The Complete
Maus (2003, 159). As they explain, the original work’s “combinations
of personal narrative and historical documentary, comic book form
and survivor testimony, remain fundamentally open-ended and un-
resolvable” (165). MetaMaus, too, meets these aims of postmodern
ethnography: Spiegelman’s original recordings, transcriptions, and
documents remind us that Maus is neither a verbatim transcription
of his interviews nor a mimetic representation of history. It is, rather,
a heavily mediated and self-reflexive ethnographic reconstruction of
the complex culture of one family.
The open-endedness of the text and the lack of resolution that
Anderson and Katz describe continue right through the ending of Maus
II. In the final scene, Vladek is depicted in bed, exhausted, telling Art
about what happened after the war—a scene that neatly inverts Spiegel-
man’s initial depiction of father-to-son tale-telling in the 1974 comic:
now it is Vladek who wants to sleep, and it is his son standing beside his
bed who demands more stories. Perhaps it is Vladek’s desire to shut
down the narrative that compels him to end the story by framing his
postwar reunion with Anja as a fairy tale: “We were both very happy,
and lived happy, happy ever after” (Spiegelman 1991, 136). Art and
readers know, however, that the couple’s post-war life was no fairy tale:
Anja commits suicide twenty years later, Vladek’s second marriage to
another Auschwitz survivor is unhappy in the extreme, and Art and
Vladek’s relationship is contentious at best. Vladek’s inappropriate
evocation of fairy tale rhetoric here calls to mind Mickey’s description
of his father’s accounts as “bedtime stories” in the 1974 comic. Both
generic labels are woefully inadequate and ill-fitting. Spiegelman seems
to sense that there is no extant genre into which either his father’s stories
or his retelling of them can possibly fit. While fairy tales and bedtime
stories often end with a moral—if only an implied one—Maus has no
Rosemary V. Hathaway     Reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus 265

such sense of closure or resolution. As Hillary Chute writes, “As its stun-
ning last page makes apparent, Maus eschews the closure implied by
the concept of a moral text, offering instead multiple layers representing
time as space; an unstable interplay of presence and absence; and pro-
ductive, cross-discursive traditions” (2009, 352).
Even though Vladek’s last words are “it’s enough stories for now”
(Spiegelman 1991, 136), this recursive story cannot ever truly end. Just
as a well-constructed postmodern ethnography often leaves its readers
more intrigued than sated about the subject in question, Maus, too,
leaves readers wondering if they truly got the whole story—and more-
over, what kind of story it was. Ultimately, Maus resists simple generic
categorization; like ethnography, it exists “between powerful systems
of meaning” (Clifford 1986, 2). As Clifford tells us, ethnography—and
by extension, Maus—“poses its questions at the boundaries . . . [it]
decodes and recodes . . . it describes processes of innovation and
structuration, and is itself part of those processes” (2–3). Spiegelman’s
innovative “structuration” of his father’s stories may continue to baffle
those who need to find one generic pigeonhole for it, but that elusive-
ness is also the source of its continued narrative power.
West Virginia University
Morgantown, West Virginia, USA

Notes
1. Throughout this essay, I will refer to Art Spiegelman as “Art” when he appears
as a character in the text and as “Spiegelman” when I refer to him as the author
and artist of the text. That this is necessary underscores the texts’ ethnographic
qualities: here, as in any reflexive ethnography, the author is not passively reflect-
ing the stories he has collected verbatim, but is instead the very visible (in this
case, literally visible) creator of the account as well as one of its central figures.
2. “Postmemory” is a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to describe “the experi-
ence of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth,
whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation
shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (1997,
22). See also James Young’s At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Con-
temporary Art and Architecture (2000).
3. In addition to its appearance in Funny Aminals and Comix Book 2, “Maus” is
reprinted in Spiegelman’s 2008 collection Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a
Young %@&*!.
4. There is a second “real” photo in Maus II: that of Art’s brother Richieu, who
died in the war. However, because this photo appears on the book’s dedication
page, it is not as integral to the text as the photo of Vladek.
266 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 48, No. 3

5. This story is also included in the recordings on the MetaMaus DVD. However,
it is not presented there as an isolated excerpt, as it is in the NPR story.
6. Archived online at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId
=1611731.
7. The MOMA exhibit “Projects: Art Spiegelman” ran from December 1991
until January 1992, and it featured “all the original pages for both parts of Maus,
as well as ancillary sketches, preparatory drawings and layouts of individual sec-
tions, and source materials used by Spiegelman” (Museum of Modern Art 1991,
1). Deborah Geis discusses the PBS special in the introduction to her Considering
Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust (2003).

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Rosemary V. Hathaway is Assistant Professor of English at West

Virginia University. (rosemary.hathaway@mail.wvu.edu)
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.